Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  In the beginning Sachiko was just another bar girl in a bar I frequented with my colleagues. She was likable because she was not a talker but aside from that I had not taken any special notice of her. And then one evening she mentioned to me that she was from Hiroshima. When she said it I was struck with a curiosity to know more and when I asked if she had been hurt by the bomb she pulled the sleeves of her kimono back and showed me the beginnings of her scars. How, I asked, had it felt? How clearly, I wanted to know, did she remember it? Her calmness and demure answers only served to awaken in me a deeper urge to see all of what the bomb had done to her body. And soon the soldiers in my dreams gave way to a vision of the war opening up over her city. I saw her running. I heard her cry. I was still awakened in the night, but now, while Kazuko slept so neatly beside me, I began imagining what a sight the girl’s body might be. And slowly it became a compulsion. I felt that I was about to take a step that had awaited me in time and that was inevitable. It was the beginning of a thaw, a moment when the distant events of my youth were about to forgo their dormancy. And Sachiko, somehow, was to be the key. Soon I began to pester her, to wait at the bar until everyone else had left, and to make propositions. Sachiko told me, finally, that she would consider the possibility of a liaison, but never that of a one-night stand. So after more than three decades of my knowing only Kazuko, Sachiko and I left the bar one night and made our way to her room. Like all bar girls Sachiko was in need of a sponsor in order to strike out on her own and I had said I would look into this bar called the Kado, one that she had informed me was for sale.

  When Sachiko brought me home that first night it was not, of course, to talk business, not to go into the terms of our agreement nor to discuss the kind of clientele the Kado would have. What Sachiko had in mind was the consummation. She took my coat and hung it, an intruder among her gowns. She offered me tea and then sweetly (she was always generous in her business dealings) removed her clothes.

  I am sure that Sachiko’s scars would not have seemed unpleasant to another man, but when I touched them that first night I was moved in a peculiar way. It was as if the air in the room held some special gas, some drug with an imperceptibly light touch. I let my hand rest across her middle, not my whole hand, really, but the tips of my five fingers. The surface of her scar gave a little, was not as tight as it looked, not as thick. And though to my eye it was a crust with spurs and sores randomly spotting it, to my hand it was a delicate thing. Sachiko backed away and I could tell by her movement that what I felt she did not feel correspondingly. She did not know whether they touched or not, her wound and those five fingertips of mine.

  For a long time we stood that way but finally Sachiko lay down on her bed while I sat cross-legged beside her, gazing into the pattern that her scars made and deciding what to do. I had been obsessed by the girl, obsessed to the point of agreeing to finance a business for her, yet as she cheerfully prepared to fulfill her end of our bargain I was all aquiver, all reticent and cold-handed with nerves. I wanted to tell her that I was American and that it was the war that joined us but she knew the former and the latter would have left us feeling strange. It was not, after all, her body that I wanted but her closeness, my hands upon her scars, an absence of clothing between us.

  As I look back on it from this distance of nearly three years I realize that Sachiko was a kind girl. I must have looked scandalous, my gooseflesh rising, my chest cavity heaving, my desire so different from her own. Yet all during our time together she never laughed her easy laugh at me. She never, until recently, denied her presence when I knocked so bravely on the Kado’s hard door. Ours was a liaison made of wounds, though hers she wore freely while mine hung like pendants from my old thin neck.

  Have I said it clearly enough? Until I met Sachiko I had been like a man on a rotisserie turning evenly but thoughtlessly through time. Yet when Sachiko told me of her birth place, when I placed my hands upon her scars and sat staring into them, I felt the crystals of some internal hour glass begin to drain. I knew something was about to take place that would let me continue my real life to its conclusion. And that is what I am about to tell. Just as Sachiko tired of my fingers on her wounds, my hourglass ran out, my period of waiting was over. I stayed the entire night on Sachiko’s bed in a state of wakeful rest. I see now that I was preparing myself. In the morning I walked toward the events I am about to describe easily and with calm.

  THE COLD DECEMBER MORNING MADE ME FEEL, FOR A while, as though I had had a good night’s sleep. When I left Sachiko’s room it was very early, yet late enough for light to have swept across the empty streets. It was Sunday and to my surprise it had snowed during the night. Though I had been awake I had not heard the snowflakes fall and as I walked toward a larger street I imagined them landing, one atop the other, in their slow descent. It was as if everything had been prepared as a surprise for me. The marks my shoes made were the only blemish on the fresh new day.

  I was beginning to feel a lightness of heart, beginning to realize once again that often the thoughts a man has at night cannot be supported during the optimistic hours of day, when I arrived home to find my entire family outside, standing in front of our house and pacing about with frowns on their faces. Kazuko was stern-looking at the gate and for a moment I thought I was in America and that she was angry at my late arrival. My son’s big car was there with Milo holding his mother’s elbow and Junichi nervously standing behind him. I thought quickly that someone must have died, but the ancient sensei (Yes, he is still alive!) was sitting on a canvas folding chair, a director’s chair that I had given him and that he liked to have with him if he went too far from the house. There was no one else whose death could cause such posturing. Had the house burned? Had someone been arrested? They all stood around in overcoats, oblivious to the snow. Milo saw me coming and ran my way.

  “Father,” he said, “it is my uncle. He is coming home.”

  But Milo had no uncles. My brothers in America knew nothing of me, could not be coming here. They were dead or lost to us. I looked at Kazuko, but Milo spoke again. “It’s true,” he said. “I got his photo out to remind you of what he looked like.”

  Milo was jumping around in front of me so spastically that I could not get a look, past him, at his mother’s face. It was clear, though, that he was trying to contain himself as he held a silver-framed photograph before my eyes. Ike. It was Ike. It was Kazuko’s brother Ike.

  “Ike is dead,” I said calmly. “I’ve told you the story. I was there when it happened.”

  “We received a call,” said Milo. “If you had been any later we’d have left without you.”

  Gradually it came to me then that my son was serious. He was telling me that Kazuko’s brother was alive and that he was coming home, would be home that day. I felt, as I stood there staring at all of them, a tingling sensation at the back of my neck. It was a slightly painful, not very pleasant, feeling, like the revitalization of a foot after an hour’s dead sleep. This was not what I had expected. I had assumed that any change in my life would come about internally.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, addressing Kazuko past my son’s anxious face. “Ike is dead. I’m sure of it.”

  But Milo was talking again, was in mid-sentence before I began to listen to what he said. “…it came sometime late last night,” he told me. “For some reason there was no advance notice at all. We’ve got to go. It was all I could do to keep them from sending a government car to get us.”

  Milo’s chauffeur, listening more carefully than any of the rest of us, had the sensei in the car and was guiding Kazuko and me toward the back seat before I could protest. The young photograph of Ike was still before my eyes though Milo had already tucked it inside his jacket.

  “There is some mistake,” I told them. “Ike was killed very early in the war. He had been disappointed in life and wished it upon himself.”

  I looked at Kazuko but she wasn’t listening to me. I saw a sternness across her eyes, a certain resolve across
her mouth and chin. When last she’d seen her brother she’d been young and pretty and I wondered if she was worried about what he would think of her now. If Ike were truly alive I imagined that the jungle had left him tough and ageless while the rest of us had grown soft in ordinary time. But surely, if he was alive, he had known that the war was over. What was all the commotion about? He could have walked out anytime and been sent home a hero.

  The four of us sat in the back seat, with loyal Junichi in the front alone. As we rode onto the expressway the tea teacher reached over and took my hand. He was looking out across the rows of busy factories and I wondered if what he saw there was rice. Even I could remember when such long billboards had not streaked the horizon. So what would Ike make of it all? In the stories I’d told of him I’d always pictured a young Ike lying still and lifeless among the jungle leaves. I imagined insects living in him as if he’d been dead only hours. And I had never portrayed him as a conventional man. He had been a jazz fan, a road manager for my band. Why then would he, of all soldiers, if he was truly alive, have stayed for so many years in that distant jungle, away from artificial sound?

  The tea teacher let go of my hand and laughed, bringing everybody out of themselves. “I was nearly sixty when the war began,” he said. “They wouldn’t have taken me even if I’d volunteered.” He leaned up and poked Junichi on the shoulder. “I fought, mind you, but not in that war. I fought against the Russians, who were extremely tough. We beat them but lost to the Americans. That’s the way it was but now it seems as though things should have been reversed.”

  Junichi smiled at him so the sensei kept talking, relieving, for the rest of us, some of the tension of the growing silence. I could tell that among us only my son was not thinking about his uncle for he was looking out the window and bouncing his knee in time with some internal song, some piece of popular music floating through his brain. How had he gotten the news of Ike so early? Kazuko’s message must have awaited him upon his return from the bars.

  “Look!” Kazuko said. “Airplanes are circling. Will my brother be in one of those? Will he arrive first or will we?” Kazuko was all sisterly in the way she tucked the folds of her kimono into the tight band of her obi and when I rolled down my window I could see an airplane coming low out of the southern sky. Indeed, like returning bombers, there were several other airplanes moving around above us. So much had changed since the war. It was impossible that Ike could be alive. Whoever had started the story had perpetrated a cruel hoax. How long, I wondered, would it take us to get back to normal?

  When we stopped in front of the international arrival section there were newspapermen and there was television. I got out of the car first and the crowd parted to allow my entry to the building. I could not help imagining Ike sitting above us somewhere, perhaps trying to make small talk with the person next to him. I wondered, had he spoken during the last thirty years? Did he have friends in the jungle? People he was leaving behind?

  The television crew was made up of men that Milo knew and one of them asked him if he and I would do an interview before the plane arrived. I had gone immediately to the desk of the airline and when they entered the building was checking on the time of the flight, checking the passenger manifest to see if I could find Ike’s name. Milo walked up behind me.

  “They’d like a word with us,” he said. “One of the crews from the station.”

  “No,” I answered.

  Well, the crew had followed Milo to the desk so there was no getting out of it, nothing I could do. They had turned on their lights and we were live, the nation was catching me turning around.

  “It is incredible,” said the announcer, “that this latest of wartime stragglers should be of the Maki family, so much in the entertainment news these days.”

  I looked at Milo in a disgusted way, but put a slight smile on my face and said, “He’s not of the Maki family, really, but of a family of his own.”

  I saw myself in the monitor and as I was speaking I looked very tired, as if it were I who had just returned from the war. The reporter turned the microphone to my son.

  “Milo Maki?” he asked.

  “I’ve never known the man,” Milo told him. He frowned in his public way and tried to brush the hair from his eyes. But though the cameras were running it was clear that Milo could think of nothing more to say. When the pause grew too long the announcer began speaking, describing the scene at the airport, the government people, the family. And while he spoke the tea teacher came up behind him. Junichi and a member of the television crew stood with him, one to each side. The lights were bright in his eyes.

  “Here’s a man,” one of the crew members whispered to the announcer. “Lives with the Makis, remembers everything.”

  The television announcer turned toward them and then back to his audience. Milo and I were still standing at his side but in a moment our images were replaced by that of the teacher on the monitor.

  “After all, Milo,” I said. “Don’t you think I have things to think about now? Why did you have to put me on TV?” But even in my obvious dismay it was a reproach much unlike anything I would have said in the past. I could not muster the energy for it. I had not slept, my neck was hurting, and I was worried about what the plane might bring.

  The announcer was baffled by the quick presence of an old man on the tiny screen, but the teacher could see himself and was excited. “Teddy and Milo are on television all the time,” he said. “This is a first for me.”

  “Did you know the man who is about to come back after all these years?” he was asked. “Do you remember him?”

  “Either I don’t remember him or he came to my house a time or two,” the teacher said. “He may have come to fetch his sister home.”

  The teacher smoothed the edges of his kimono and continued. “Whether I knew him or not isn’t the point, though. This man’s return should make us pause in our daily affairs to reflect upon what we have become.”

  The airport crowd, which held a carnival air, hardly noticed the element of seriousness introduced by the old man. My brother-in-law’s plane was due any moment. People were getting ready to cheer.

  “Do you think the returning soldier will find Tokyo changed beyond recognition?” asked the announcer.

  “He will find it so on the surface,” said the teacher. “But if he’d come back immediately after the fighting he’d have found it even more changed. Remember? Everything was knocked to the ground by the bombs.”

  The announcer and the cameraman were both about Milo’s age, younger than the aging memory of war. Junichi, who’d helped put the teacher on the air, still stood beside him and glared into the camera himself. The confusion of airport waiting had died down some.

  “Have you been living with the Makis for a long time?” the announcer asked.

  “Since the war,” said the teacher. “Since about the time this returning man died. Every time a soldier returns we tell ourselves that there can be no more, that this one must be the last. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them all come back, one at a time, out of the jungles.”

  The sensei was having such a fine time that it was a shame to have him cut off as abruptly as he was. But just as he spoke the airline announced that the flight had arrived and all cameras switched immediately to the runway. We could see the cool smiles of some official greeters; we saw the wet surface of the runway with the airliner’s wheels upon it. The sensei looked at me and shrugged.

  When we left the building Kazuko and I, bent to the winter breeze, walked before the teacher and my son. There were police cars around an area cordoned off by rope and there was more commotion, more activity over this thing, than I had expected. I watched the changing expressions on Kazuko’s face, watched the seriousness of Milo. Such a short time had passed between our gaining knowledge of Ike’s existence and his return. How had all these people found out about it? Was this the natural airport crowd on a Sunday morning?

  We got to the arrival zone just as the p
lane came to a steady stop and its wheels were blocked. It took a few more moments for the workmen to push a staircase up to the opening door, but once everything was secure the door was braced and all of the other passengers were brought off first. Most of them were Japanese or Filipino businessmen, and some were reluctant to move too far away from the airplane after they’d got their feet on the ground. “What’s up?” we could hear them asking each other.

  When everyone else was off the plane the pilot gave us a sign and an odd-looking man walked over to the foot of the stairs. He was wearing an old soldier’s uniform and I suddenly found myself wishing that all of this was not happening. The man carried a boxy hat in his hands and had, on a small shaft, an old Japanese battle flag. The pain I had been bothered by moved quickly out of my neck and down my arms. It was Nakamura! The man standing there was Major Nakamura himself! A television announcer waiting near us confirmed it for me. He was a retired elementary school principal, a pharmacist named Nakamura. It was he who had given the order which kept Ike bottled up all those years.