Free Camouflage by Murray Bail

ALL THINGS considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession. Working by themselves in rooms filled with other people’s most intimate belongings, piano-tuners give the impression of wanting to be somewhere else. They’re known to jump at unexpected sounds. At the sight of blood they’d run a mile. And yet early in 1943 Eric Banerjee, along with some other able-bodied men, was called up by the army to defend his country. ‘Mr Banerjee wouldn’t hurt a fly’—that came from a widow who lived alone in the Adelaide foothills, where her Beale piano kept going out of tune.
    It followed that, if a man as harmless as Eric Banerjee had been called up, the situation to the north was far more serious than the authorities were letting on.
    For the piano-tuner it could not have come at a worse time. He had a wife, whose name was Lina, and a daughter who was just beginning to talk. It had taken him years to build up a client base, which barely gave them enough to live on. Then almost overnight—when the war broke out— there was a simultaneous lifting of piano lids across the suburb of Adelaide, and suddenly Banerjee found he couldn’t keep up with demand. These were solid inquiries from piano owners he had never heard of before, in suburbs such as Norwood and St Peters, even as far away as Hackney. In times of uncertainty people turn for consolation to music. Apparently the same thing happened in London, Berlin, Leningrad.
    â€˜I’d say it was some sort of clerical mistake.’ He patted his wife on the shoulder. ‘I won’t be gone for long.’ She’d burst into hysterical sobbing. What would happen now to her and their baby daughter?
    Already the city was half empty. Every day the newspapers carried grainy photographs of another explosion or oil refinery in flames, another ship going down and, if that wasn’t alarming enough, maps of Burma and Singapore which had thick black arrows sprouting from the Japanese army, all curving south in an accelerating mass, not only towards Australia basking in the Pacific, but heading for Adelaide, its streets wide open, defenceless. And now it was as if he, and he alone, had been selected to single-handedly stand in front and stop the advancing horde.
    This uncertainty and the vague fear that he might be killed gradually gave way to a curiosity at leaving home and his wife and child, although he was bound in strong intimacy to them, and entering—embarking upon—a series of situations on a large scale, in the company of other men.
    Besides, there was little he could do. The immediate future was out of his hands; he could feel himself carried along by altogether larger forces, a small body in a larger mass, which was a pleasant feeling too.
    Eric Banerjee gave his date of birth and next of kin, and was examined by a doctor. Later he was handed a small piece of paper to exchange for a uniform the colour of fresh cow manure, and a pair of stiff black boots with leather laces. At home he put the uniform on again and gave his wife in the kitchen a snappy salute.
    It was so unusual she began shouting. ‘And now look what you’ve done!’ Their daughter was pointing at him, screwing her face, and crying.
    On the last morning Banerjee finished shaving and looked at himself in the mirror.
    He tried to imagine what other people would make of his face, especially the many different strangers he was about to meet. In the mirror he couldn’t get a clear impression of himself He tried an earnest look, a canny one, then out-and-out gloom and pessimism, all with the help of the uniform. He didn’t bother trying to look fierce. For a moment he wondered how he looked to others—older or younger? He then returned to normal, or what appeared to be normal—he still seemed to be pulling faces.
    â€˜I’ll be off then,’ he said to Lina. ‘I can’t exactly say, of course, when I’ll be back.’
    He