Lizard Brancussi

Lizard Brancussi is a prisoner of war whose effort to remember his wife, Maisie, becomes a private means of enduring captivity and its aftermath. He carries a pencil sketch of her by Rabbit Hendricks through the camps and across the sea to Japan. Yet the image cannot fully protect the memory it represents: as events overwhelm him, Maisie’s face grows harder to recall, and Lizard’s eventual disappearance leaves his comrades with the unresolved question of what became of him.

Identity and the work of remembering

Lizard’s wartime experience is presented through the narrow, intimate focus of his attachment to Maisie. Rabbit’s sketch gives that attachment a concrete form: Lizard looks at it lovingly each day, trying to see beyond the drawing and recover his wife as he remembers her. The distinction matters. The picture remains available to him, while the living person it depicts becomes increasingly difficult to summon in his mind.

As the beating continues, Lizard persists in trying to picture Maisie. His effort is not described as confidence that memory will return; rather, it expresses his understanding that he must believe in something beyond the immediate circumstances around him. The passage thus makes remembering an action he repeatedly undertakes, not a secure possession. His attachment is both sustained by the sketch and threatened by the distance between its fixed image and his fading recollection.

The sketch and the weakening of memory

The drawing has a specific history: Rabbit made it one morning in a Syrian village, before Lizard carried it through the camps and onward to Japan. On the voyage and at the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, the small likeness accompanies him through successive displacements. Its survival gives Lizard a link to a life beyond captivity, but it does not halt the change in his inner image of Maisie.

Instead, the fantasy of Mae West grows stronger as Maisie herself grows fainter in Lizard’s thoughts. The contrast marks a shift in what occupies his imagination: the familiar person he is trying to remember loses definition, while an increasingly powerful fantasy takes her place. The text does not present that fantasy as a replacement relationship or explain it as a deliberate choice. It places the two images in tension, showing how the mind’s capacity to imagine can persist even as a particular memory recedes.

Survival and the journey from Nagasaki

Lizard survives the destruction of the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, where he had been forced to work. He makes his way into the hills and continues past the aftermath of the bombing and the suffering of people fleeing the city. The account connects this passage through devastation to the earlier camps: what he encounters recalls the prisoners he had already seen dying and calling for their mothers. His journey therefore carries not only the immediate consequences of the bombing but also the accumulated memory of wartime loss.

Throughout that passage, Lizard keeps trying to see Maisie as Rabbit had drawn her. He imagines her as the one thing in the world that is not the catastrophe surrounding him, and as long as he can hold on to her, he believes he will neither die nor lose his sanity. His belief that the world remains good while she is present is presented as an intensely personal conviction, not as a description of the world he is passing through. The sketch and the remembered face become a counter-image to the destruction he has survived.

On the way to Manila aboard a United States aircraft carrier, Lizard shows the postcard to American sailors, who regard him as fortunate. He eventually reaches Fremantle on a ship continuing to Melbourne. There, after the long separation from home, he telephones. The account gives no details of the call’s contents or of what was said at the other end; it records only that he later hangs up. That omission keeps the moment’s significance with the act of reaching home and the abruptness of his withdrawal, rather than supplying an explanation the narrative does not provide.

Disappearance and the comrades’ remembrance

When the ship leaves Fremantle, Lizard is seen slipping over the side on its first night. He is never found. The narrative establishes the disappearance but does not state why he went overboard or whether he intended to die. His fate remains unresolved, in keeping with the earlier uncertainty surrounding what captivity and survival have done to him.

Later, Lizard remains present in the memories shared by former prisoners. Sheephead Morton calls his story too sad to repeat, yet recounts the long journey of the sketch: from the camps, through the voyage to Japan, and beyond the destruction of Nagasaki. The men’s remembrance places Lizard among their dead and absent companions, alongside Wat Cooney, Yabby Burrows, Jack Rainbow, and Tiny Middleton. It also includes Rooster MacNeice, whom Morton remembers with complicated affection. Lizard’s story is thus not confined to his own struggle to hold on to Maisie; it becomes part of the group’s effort to recall those who did not return.

Narrative significance

The sketch links two different acts of memory. Lizard looks at Rabbit’s drawing to keep Maisie present to himself; after Lizard disappears, the survivors retell the history of that same drawing as part of remembering him. In both cases, an image serves as a fragile record of attachment, unable to reverse loss but capable of carrying a person into another’s memory.

The narrative also refuses an easy resolution. Lizard survives the shipworks’ destruction and reaches Fremantle, but neither survival nor arrival supplies a clear return to ordinary life. His final appearance is a brief act of departure, followed by the fact that he is never found. His comrades can preserve his story, but they cannot settle its ending. The contrast between the sketch’s enduring physical presence and the uncertainty of Lizard’s fate gives his episode its force: what can be carried and remembered is not the same as what can be recovered.