Free Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally

slim hips. She knew his labor would earn him a certain number of pounds sterling per month, but the government, not Duncan, paid that. As forDuncan, she knew he got a small extra ration of petrol to take the Italian to Mass on Sundays.
    At last Duncan completed his man-to-man transactions with the sergeant, who said that Duncan should always call the Control Center, not the camp, if there was a problem with the dago. The Swiss doctor made a final explanation of the obligations Duncan took on in employing the Italian. Everyone stood, and Duncan shook hands again with both men. Beyond the garden gate, the elderly doctor spoke earnestly to the prisoner, shook hands with him, went back to his car, and followed the truck out of the farm onto the Gawell Road.
    Alice saw Duncan go out and introduce himself to the prisoner, saying loudly, “Herman. Mr. Herman.” And then in basic and emphatic English, “You work on farm before?”
    She heard the young Italian say, “ Si , I work on farm. But meccanico  . . . mechanic . . . I do it most.”
    â€œMechanic’ll be handy,” said Duncan, and proposed he show him his quarters. “Follow,” Duncan said. The young man, perhaps around the same age as her, Alice could see now by advancing undetected up the hall to the doorway, picked up his knapsack and carried his jacket slung over his shoulder, moving casually behind Duncan in a way that was brisk and yet rhythmic. His gait was in a style somehow removed from Australian modes of walking. She would come to think that he moved as if he were aware of the labor that had been required of his ancestors, and was keeping a private amount of it in store for his successors.
    Duncan meanwhile looked less comfortable about the whole business, and more eager to please, than the prisoner was. But that was Duncan for you. Both men moved towards a screen of lemon-scented gums.
    The absorbing sight of the Italian revived at once the question pushed on her at get-togethers of POWs’ wives, mothers, and fiancées: would there be a swap of prisoners between the enemies? It was a hope raised in occasional circulars she received. There seemedalways, whether at the Gawell meetings or in the circulars, to be Red Cross reports of promising debates between the German and the British governments through what were called “Swiss intermediaries.”
    She had been hearing about it for more than a year now. And if the Swiss were successful, she felt she would need to relearn who her husband was, this enthusiastic boy and returning ghost. She seemed at times to know only a few strands of his nature—the dancer, the tennis player, the man of average, well-meant jokes, and oiler of hair. Sometimes she was more angry than admiring of his sacrifice on Chios—“Listen, mate, put him aboard, and I’ll catch the next one. Come on, I’ll be jake.” She was bound to the man of that gesture by the three-year-old echo of vows she had uttered in the Presbyterian Church in Gawell, in a time when she seemed to herself now to have been vain and shallow, and before there were wars and reckless campaigns, and any Italians and Japanese in the camp near town.
    She returned down the hallway to the kitchen. Since the prisoner did not look like she had assumed he would, she was more stimulated than she expected by the question of who this young man might be, and whether he might be useful or passive, clever or a dullard.
    It was half an hour before Duncan came back from settling his Italian into his accommodation in the shearers’ quarters. For a great deal of that time she had been able to see her father-in-law through the kitchen window, strolling about between the hut and the fruit trees as a kind of unarmed sentry, undecided as to whether to leave the prisoner to his own devices or not. She could not see, of course, if the Italian stayed inside his room or sat on the shearers’ quarters’