Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  From the area where the main damage was done they could hear sirens, could see black smoke rising. They were told immediately that the enemy plane had been shot down over open water, that the pilot and bombardier were now dead for what they had done, their bodies floating downward like lazy bombs themselves, toward the bottom of the sea.

  Soon a brigade of firefighters arrived, hurrying to soak the caved-in factory walls, to water down the sides of surrounding buildings. Doctors moved among them asking if anyone was hurt, and the bodies of the fitting changers, all heavy and uncooperative, were picked up by the women from the ambulance corps and taken away. Kazuko had seen one of the fitting changers going into the shop and had spoken mildly to her, saying, “It is nice that you can take our places for a while,” but she had not been able to recognize the woman among the dead. Milo was still acting oddly inside her but she kept her discomfort to herself, though she couldn’t seem to stand again. The bombing, she said, had awakened Milo and he was angry, kicking out at a world that would rock him so harshly as this. While the other women began moving about the charred flag factory, Kazuko remained where she was, her eyes fixed on the light garment that she wore, on the movement that her skin made, now and again, as Milo’s foot tried breaking through her frail body and into the light.

  “Someone is still down over here,” one of the doctors said, standing above her but shouting back to some others.

  Kazuko looked up into the eyes of an old man and saw that he had been crying. Was this his first bombing as well? Tokyo was prepared for what would come, but so far the rescue crews had had little to do.

  Milo stopped kicking when the doctor knelt beside her. When he put his hands on her abdomen Milo seemed to shrink away, to hide in the far corners of her body so that she appeared to be less pregnant than she had been the moment before.

  When the old doctor called again several others came, and by the time her first real labor pain started she was on a stretcher and being carried off the way the corpses went, off toward a long line of buses. Kazuko’s benchmates and some of the others saw her and walked along beside her stretcher, holding her hand and crying, telling the doctor, “It is still too early,” and whimpering. They clung to each other when she was finally loaded onto the bus, falling together in a standing collapse until the doctors and the bus driver laid hands upon their shoulders and guided them back toward the burnt-out building.

  With all the commotion, with all the action around the bus, Kazuko decided that the best thing she could do was to remain quiet, so even when the labor pain returned she did not cry out. Though a few doctors got back on the bus, Kazuko and the corpses of the fitting changers were the only other passengers. When they began their slow movement, their trip off somewhere across Tokyo, Kazuko laid herself long on the stretcher, for the bus was not fitted with the normal seats and there was plenty of room. The doctors had tried to put all the fitting changers toward the back, but one of them was not far from Kazuko and she could see a pale hand as it fell from the blanket and reached toward the floor.

  If Milo Maki was unhappy traveling so far with these quiet companions, he kept his displeasure to himself, and Kazuko began to fear that those first kicks may not have been in anger but in pain. Had he now wrapped his umbilical cord around his neck so that he’d not have to join such a ruined world? Kazuko called out to the doctors once but pain stopped her call just as it started. She was sweating and pressed down on some part of Milo’s poor body with all her weight.

  At first, when they left the factory, Kazuko imagined that they’d be headed for some hospital, but as she leaned up and looked out the bus window she noticed that they were now slowing, coming to a stop near where the main bombs had hit. Other buses were parked here and there and other doctors rushed through the ashes and smoke. Kazuko did not recognize the building, could not remember which direction, from her flattened factory, they had gone. But for as far as she could see the sides of the buildings were cracked open, their contents spilled into the streets. This was no machine shop, but a place where people lived, a human center of some sort. Blankets covered corpses all around the area, and lying among them were the wounded, women with one knee bent up or with a hand waving slowly in the air.

  The doctors from Kazuko’s bus opened the wide front door and began loading the covered bodies in around her. “Just hold tight,” one of them said to her. “You’ve picked an odd time to add to the living.” The dead filled the back of the bus and began building toward the front. Kazuko’s labor pains came and went but Milo still wouldn’t kick again, would not move around within her. From the other side of the bombed building came a parade of uninjured factory workers, two by two, each pair with a poorly postured dead woman slung between them. On most of the dead the black factory shirts were pulled away from their black pants so that a bit of skin was visible, all pale-looking and bloodless. The women who carried them struggled, one pair stopping altogether, abandoning a body for a moment to go and retch where the side of the building should have been, their vomit hitting the air and then falling on the dislodged bricks.

  Even when the bus was full they did not move. The dead women were stacked with care, one on top of another, their palms falling open as if each was asking Kazuko to read her fortune for her. When all the windows of the bus were blacked out by their bodies Kazuko began calling to the doctors as they walked past the open door, but she could get none of them to come to her. “There is a baby coming here,” she said, trying to keep the edge of pain out of her voice, indeed, trying to give her voice an uncomplaining ring, a sound that would so contrast with the awful agony around her that surely someone would hear. She thought that maybe Milo had turned within her, for she could feel the shape of him, his eyes pressed tightly against her spine, his head down. Were the sounds of the world audible to him? Could he take the option, now, before he took a breath of his own, to be stillborn among all this activity? To avoid a world such as this one?

  The doctor who had first ordered her put onto the bus was back and standing in the doorway. His tunic was stained only a little and when he spoke to her he was calm and smiling. “Are you still lying quietly? Are your pains rhythmic now? Shall we get you among living people to have your baby?”

  “My baby will get the wrong idea of the world if he is born here,” Kazuko said. “He would be born now if he thought the place was right.”

  The doctor came all the way into the bus and knelt by her side putting his hands near the round rump of Milo. When he turned and called through the door of the bus, the others, those standing nearby, had no trouble hearing him. “Can you walk?” he asked her. “Can you stand and come with me?”

  Another doctor, younger and sadder than the first, came in and when Kazuko tried to move they both offered her their hands. Milo, as if cooperating, did not bear down, seemed to move higher up in her body to help her.

  “The sight of you walking among the wounded will give them hope,” the old doctor said. But Kazuko couldn’t see any wounded then. Around the outside of the bus there were only stacks of blankets, waiting.

  With the two doctors helping her, they moved around to the side of the building that had been chosen as the congregating point for those who had survived. The building had been a factory after all, and as they walked into the area of the living Kazuko could see, through the great and still standing double doors of the place, the machines that the women had worked. They’d been packing field rations, food for soldiers who could not come in at night, and the gooseflesh texture of cooked rice had broken through the tough sides of a thousand exploded cans and was strewn among the survivors. Some women were sitting among the rice and crying softly, but most were silent, waiting to be cleared by the medical team so that they could go home.

  At a place where the survivors stood most thickly the doctors put Kazuko down. Here all the women were clean and unhurt. When they saw her perfect pregnancy, the fullness of it, many of them came to where she was and sat with their feet tucked beneath them,
just as they would at the tea ceremony. They sat all around her and began to talk.

  “When we heard the bombs coming some of us knew exactly what it was,” one of the women said. “When your baby is born you can tell it the story of its first day. This side of the factory has more survivors. The heavy machinery kept the flying cans and falling ceiling away from us. It was the women on the other side, the packers and crate sealers, who had the worst of it.”

  The voice of the woman was cheerful and as she spoke Milo began to push again, as if he too got some comfort from the sound, some sense of the tragedy winding down. When Kazuko called out at the pain, she felt the women moving in closer, a few more joining the circle, until no one from the outside could have seen her. But as the pain of Milo’s incessant pushing got clearer to her, the facts of the situation began to alter. The doctors who brought her there kept disappearing, the faces of the women who made up the circle changing, yet the order of their sitting became tighter and tighter, each time she looked, more solid. Kazuko was having her baby surrounded by a wall of strangers, all smiling, all chirping softly, like visiting birds.

  When the doctors came back they had clean blankets for Kazuko to lie upon, clean pans with water and soap. One of them came up to her, leaned very close to her head, and began to whisper, saying, “The hospitals around here are full. The emergency rooms have bomb victims in them and the corridors are lined with the dead.” He smiled as he spoke. He asked Kazuko to try to roll over onto her side.

  One of the women had been given a cloth and began to wipe Kazuko’s face and forehead every few seconds. Milo’s pushing was getting stronger, yet her body was gradually being lulled by the pain. The push and effort of Milo was becoming a little bit clinical to her, a matter of interest, but not so painful as before, no longer a trauma that she could physically share with him. In this way Milo, not yet born, was already growing distant from her, growing away, taking his independence as all men do.

  One of the women bent so close to Kazuko’s face that she was startled when her thoughts cleared and she was able to notice her. “Hello,” the woman said. “Is this your first child?”

  Kazuko nodded, so the woman and her companions bent closer. Kazuko could no longer see or feel the doctors, though she was confident that they were near, that Milo would be born into their capable hands. She thought she could feel her legs spreading, but she was not sure. The largeness of her stomach was a tempting place, a table on which she suspected many of the women wanted to rest their arms.

  “Ah ha!” said the woman next to the woman who had been speaking to her. “If the baby is born under such circumstances as these, the baby will most certainly have a charmed and interesting life. It will be a baby of extremes.”

  Kazuko could see the faces of eight women but was sure that there were more, layered thickly behind the eight, like flower petals. She had lost too much of the feeling of what was going on, could tell only that there was movement, and she began to worry at the decreasing pain. Was it true that a mother who does not suffer with her child is a mother who will forever search for the ties which bind them? Kazuko wanted to ask the question of the women around her, but looked at them and asked instead, “Don’t you think that we would all be better able to deal with our lives if we were to keep up the study of tea?”

  The women all had their hands on her abdomen now, not resting, but rubbing lightly. When she spoke of tea, a subject so distant from the one at hand, they looked at each other and smiled.

  Kazuko said, “I know the birth of my baby is soon, but look around you. Buildings are beginning to fall, the enemy aims his bombs at the upturned faces of women. It is at times like these that tea comes to mind. The momentum of our traditions can save us.”

  Most of the women, Kazuko thought, did not look as if they were listening to her. Their heads were turned now toward the odd angle of her legs; each was trying to have a clear view of Milo as he emerged from that world into this. One of the women laughed and pushed the hair that had strayed onto Kazuko’s forehead back away from her eyes.

  Occasionally one of the doctors would ask Kazuko to push and she would try, halfheartedly, to make Milo move out into the air faster, but it did not seem to be helping much. The bulge that was her belly had indeed dropped as it was supposed to, but the staying power of Milo was strong. In a moment she realized that there was but one doctor in attendance, for when one of the women stood to stretch she saw the other doctor walking among the wounded across the pavement from her. Factory workers were still holding their hurt parts and calling out, though for the longest time Kazuko had not heard them at all.

  “Push!” said the doctor. “It is the excess of pain that is making you dreamy. Push or your baby will not be born at all!”

  For the next half hour Kazuko concentrated, the women urging her on, the doctor saying, “Yes, yes.” Milo started moving as soon as Kazuko bore down. He seemed to be pushing when she did, resting too, when she turned her head to the side to look about.

  “There,” said the doctor. “A small cut and he’s coming. What will you call your baby? There are many new names and many good traditional ones as well.” The doctor had stuck his head through the circle of surrounding women and Kazuko began to laugh. “Just another moment,” he said.

  She could feel the turning of her spine and she cried and saw the dramatic drop of her stomach. It fell much as the buildings around her must have, and she felt the body of her baby slide from her ever so smoothly and it was wonderful. Almost immediately her size was normal again.

  Instead of the cry that Kazuko had expected, Milo’s first sound was only a small cough, like the cracking of the seal on a too-tightly closed jar. The doctor held Milo upside down for an instant, his face red and looking like dried rice cake. Kazuko saw his mouth turn from slit to circle, saw the way his lips quivered just before the first real cry struck the population of the bombed zone so ironically. His new chest and arms changed in color as he began to wail and the women and the doctor began to cry and smile and Kazuko did too.

  “It’s a boy,” said the doctor, cutting Milo’s umbilical cord and moving her placenta away.

  “Milo Maki,” she told them all. Kazuko took the baby from the doctor’s heavy hands and tucked him under her shirt. Blood and liquid smeared her rib cage on the side where Milo lay. He would not take her breast for a while, though she pushed it all the way to the edge of those still quivering lips. His eyes were buried in wrinkles and smeared with such a slippery substance that Kazuko wondered what it was that made his birth so hard. He cried twice more, then settled down to breathing the way we all do, one breath at a time, not gulping, no longer worried about this new substance which came into his lungs and was, all of a sudden, so important to him.

  Milo was very small but was healthy, and a few moments after his birth the doctor told Kazuko that there would be someone around soon who would take her, in an automobile, all the way to her home. She was simply to stay where she was, there on the ground. After Milo was out of view, after he had taken the nipple of her still dry breast in his mouth to give it training, the women and the doctor stood and stretched, letting the sun in a little. It was like the blossoming of a flower, the way each of them opened up like that. And when they walked away it was like autumn coming and Kazuko began to feel the chill and could see so clearly once again the devastation. She pulled her body up around Milo’s and watched as the doctors and volunteers tended to the ever-present wounded. They had taken the time that was necessary to assure that at least there would be one new life here today, and now they were back to work. When Kazuko looked in at Milo he was asleep, and when she looked toward the area where her bus had been parked she could no longer see any of the dead, any of the bodies stretched out and waiting to go.

  “May I see your baby?” asked a wounded woman who came up beside her quickly. She had only a slight wound really, a missing finger, the first one on her right hand, and she said she would have escaped injury altogether had she not s
een the shaking of the roof and tried to warn her companions and coworkers by pointing up at it and crying out. A can of soldier’s rice, its sharp tin edge as yet unbent by the creasing pliers, had not been slowed at all by the small resistance that her finger gave. She had found her severed finger in the dust of the machines, a few meters away. “Look,” she said, after she had peered, for a while, into Milo’s sleeping face. And it was as if she wanted to keep them even, showing Kazuko a bit of herself for what Kazuko had given her to see.

  WHAT SAVES A MAN FROM THE DISENGAGEMENT OF HIS spirit is not a woman but a child. A woman can do battle against the forces that wear him down but it is the child who might actually and completely rescue him.

  When Kazuko and Milo entered the house it was still too early in the day for her to be home had she done a full day’s work. I was in the garden sitting upon a low stone bench, bent and staring at my reflection as it lay upon the top of the water, above the spotted carp. Kazuko came directly to me saying, “Master, your son is here,” making me turn quickly out of my introspection. Kazuko looked pale and thin, yet she was so beseeching, and her gift was held out to me in such a delicate and gentle way that I jumped up, taking her into the house to rest and leaving my crimes and my guilt out in the garden.

  I remember feeling a lightness of heart when I looked at my son for the first time, but more than that I felt a devastating hunger. So after I spread the futon and as Kazuko and Milo fell to quick and grateful sleep, I stepped into the kitchen and began to eat. I scraped rice from the sides of an old pot, using a wooden spoon. I lifted the tops off containers and quickly dropped pickled vegetables into my mouth. Kazuko’s mother had bean curd ready and when I saw it I leaned down and bit the top of it, leaving a mark like one a rat might make, a scar across its surface and side. I ravished the bean sprouts, ripped whole strips of salt fish from the bones, and drank the misoshiro from its pot as if it were water. I ate rice cake that Kazuko had been saving for dessert and I found, under the floorboards toward the rear of the kitchen, a bottle of fine Chinese wine. I cracked the seal and put it back half-gone. And when I was spent I fell to sleep with my family, not once thinking of the war, of Major Nakamura, or of Jimmy and his little legacy beside me.