At the Break of Day

by Margaret Graham

  CHAPTER 16

  The hospital was clean and white and light. And so cool. Jack was eased on to the bed. The pain was all over him now, sweeping, cutting, and he groaned, turned his head, watched the naval nurse as she smiled. Looked at the bag on top of his locker which contained toilet necessities, playing cards, cigarettes and sweets. There was writing paper too.

  He looked away. He wouldn’t need that. Not to write to Rosie. Not now, not ever. He wouldn’t write to Ollie either. Why tell him?

  ‘You’ll be going up to theatre soon. There’ll just be a small prick now.’ The nurse smiled at him again but his lips wouldn’t work to smile back.

  It was two weeks before the pain left him and then only in snatches in which he watched the ward, heard the clatter of trolleys, the murmur of voices. But then it claimed him again so that he didn’t know which was morning, which was afternoon. He didn’t know which was night, which was day.

  All he knew was that Korea seemed further away than a three-day boat trip. There were no flares, no bugles. There were no screams. There was no Tom. There was no American dying of burns. No American he had to shoot.

  But there was the smell of disinfectant, the gentle hands of the nurses who soothed the boy across the way when he groaned, who soothed Jack when he woke screaming from dreams in which he shot the American, again and again, but the flames kept burning, the hand kept reaching out and the face which called to him was Ed’s. Yes, Korea was far away and England even further.

  But now the times without pain were longer. He watched the clock move round and the nurses with charts, and smiles, and soft voices, and it was all so clean, so ordered. There were no decisions to be made, no questions to be asked except, ‘What day is it?’

  ‘It is December eleventh. Now rest.’

  Each morning he was a little stronger and each day and night the dreams faded until at last he did not sleep in the day, or cry out at night.

  That morning he ate breakfast, biting into crisp toast, and smiled at the boy opposite who smiled back. There had been no groans from him either.

  He watched as the doctor did the rounds, first one bed, then the other. The sheets were starched and correctly turned, the pillowcases too. The Sister coughed, the doctor nodded and then they came to him and he felt the tension rise in him. He was better. He knew that. The doctor would know too. He would send him back, into the battle.

  The doctor checked his bandage, talked to the Sister, laughed when Jack said he would be ready to do the town by the evening.

  ‘Maybe next month. Maybe,’ the doctor said.

  Jack touched the bandage, feeling the tension relax, feeling his face smile. Thank God, he would be here for that long at least. He wouldn’t be returning to the snow, the cold, the fear. He could stay here where there was no life outside the ward, outside the cool drinks, and the kind nurses, and the ache of his arm.

  The Staff Nurse smoothed his sheets as the doctor moved on. ‘A little bit longer then,’ she said.

  ‘You knew I was frightened?’

  ‘You all feel the same. Why not? I would.’

  ‘Each day,’ the boy across the ward shouted, ‘there are letters delivered. I bet my girl sends me one.’ Jack had written none. He would receive none and so he turned from the Sister who stopped at each bed but his. Everywhere there were letters, three for the boy across the ward. All his had SWALK written round the flap.

  Now there was silence as they read them and further silence as the letters were replaced in the envelopes and visions of home came too close.

  He had none of that. He had none of their pain. The ache that he felt deep inside wasn’t love. He had told himself that. It was anger. There was no love any more. He knew that. He remembered Tom. His wife must know by now.

  He watched instead the Japanese flower girl who came to the ward with a trolley heaped with flowers and foliage. She wore bobby sox, and a skirt and blouse, and she almost looked American, but not quite. There was the golden skin, the lowered eyes, the small steps.

  He wished that she wore a kimono like the girls he had seen on the way to the hospital. He didn’t want anything American in here.

  She took flowers and leaves to the central table. Her hands were small and quick. She undid the copper pulley, and lowered the existing arrangement which hung above the ward’s central light. He hadn’t noticed it before.

  She tipped the faded blooms into a basket, emptied the water into a bucket on the trolley, refilled the vase, arranged the flowers, slowly now, and the foliage, then raised the arrangement back up above the light. That night, a small blue spotlight illuminated the flowers and he dreamed of the hop-yards and heard the bees, smelt the hops. Then the scent of roses, the scent of the past, filled the air and he woke crying, but he told the Sister it was the pain.

  With each day he grew stronger and the nurses began to decorate the wards as Christmas approached. He and Bill from the bed across the way held the ladders while the nurses climbed and pinned streamers and foliage and the other men whistled and cheered.

  That night he dreamed of Rosie making streamers because it was 20 December and in the morning he was running a fever and his wound had become infected. He was too ill to notice Christmas, too ill to open the presents forwarded from Ollie; the tie from Maisie, the letter from Lee, the shirt with no card, which he knew was from Rosie.

  ‘I’m too ill,’ he shouted to the nurse and pushed them all from the bed, making her take them from the ward, but keeping Ollie’s card and the money he sent and looking up at the flowers which glowed throughout the night.

  It wasn’t until the middle of February that he was able to move to the convalescent ward and now he knew, they all knew, that though the Communists were pushing them back in the centre, the Chinese supply lines were in doubt.

  In the west of Korea US and British troops had recaptured the port of Inchon which had been taken when the Communists carried forward their attack. UN troops were also shelling Seoul which was yet again in the hands of the Communists. On the east coast the South Koreans, supported by naval bombardment, had driven up the coastal highway to the 38th parallel.

  They all knew this, but they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t want to remember, nor did they want to go back.

  The next week they had a private in who had been injured when the Allied forces took up positions in a twenty-five-mile arc to the south of Seoul. He told them that Communist resistance had stiffened. That the fourth battle for Seoul was about to begin. That he hoped it would be over before he was returned as fit for active service. He was a conscript. He was nineteen. Jack felt old at nearly twenty-one. He didn’t want to go back either, but neither did he want to go to England.

  The flower girl came to this ward too while letters were delivered and so Jack heaved at the pulley for her with his right hand. His left was still bandaged, still in a sling which dragged at his neck. Each day he pulled it and smiled and they spoke of the coldness of the weather, the beauty of the flowers, and her voice was sometimes harsh as voices were in the Japanese tongue she told him. But her lips were shaped and gentle, her eyes demure and black. And he didn’t have to look at the men opening their mail.

  They talked of the summer and the sun that would come and she told him of the giant fish fashioned from bamboo and covered with painted cloth which is launched each July by Toyahama fishermen in honour of the ocean gods. She told him how the Japanese people bore gifts of rice to the dead in the graveyards and he thought of Rosie taking roses to her grandpa, but he didn’t want to think of her. She was the past. She was where the pain was.

  So he listened again to the flower girl, whose name was Suko, and she told him that their language could mean different things, that their symbols had many meanings. How the white dots of flowering plum and the red dots of camellia keep the Japanese winter from ever being quite dead. He should travel to one of the unbombed cities, she said, when he was more able, and search for the outward signs of the Japanese spirit which had survi
ved defeat and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The spirit which had sought and found peace.

  ‘For, Jack-san, you have need of that spirit,’ she said as she lifted each leaf, each petal, and put them into the bag before pushing the trolley from the ward.

  Jack did not help her again. He walked down the corridors, into other wards, talking to the men, looking out at the deep snow, sensing the cold which crackled in the air. He had no need of peace. It was the others who struggled and lashed and betrayed.

  In March he took a small Japanese cab into the town and the cold was still sharp in the air. He had three weeks’ Rest and Recuperation and would return to a hostel each night, the Sister had said, smiling, unless, of course, he found something more pleasurable to do.

  ‘Sort yourself out, soldier,’ she said as he stopped and looked back at her. She was Australian, big and kind, but Jack walked away from her and did not look back. There was no room for that sort of pleasure in his life now.

  He looked out from the cab windows at the snow which had been pushed from the road and the pavements. He saw the street walkers, the Cadillacs, the Buicks, the American enlisted men who stood in groups on the street corners, chatting to the Japanese girls, kissing them, linking arms. He turned from them.

  He paid the cab driver as they pulled up outside the hotel where he was to meet Bill, and was glad that Tom wasn’t here to see this wealth amongst the people who had imprisoned him. Glad that Ollie wasn’t here because there were no new cars available in England.

  He climbed the marble steps, nodded to the Japanese bellhop, walked through to the bar. Bill was there, he was drunk, and there was beer on the counter where he had slopped it. There was a glass chandelier above them, soft music playing, nuts and crisps in bowls on the bar. Whisky lined the wall behind the barmen. There was no hint of a war being played out on their doorstep. Was there any hint in England?

  ‘Let’s eat,’ Jack said, taking Bill’s arm, steering him through the tables where beautiful people sat, staring.

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on?’ Jack said to one girl with blonde hair and a wide mouth sitting with an American Captain. Their hands were linked. They both wore wedding rings.

  ‘Sure, honey, but not in here,’ she drawled and laughed. ‘And not back in Iowa either.’

  Bill lurched and Jack steadied him, walking him through, past the Japanese head waiter towards a spare table. There were flowers on the thick white tablecloth. There was an arrangement carved out of ice up near the stage. A band played a selection of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

  They ate a steak which was tender and rare and rice cooked in saffron and Jack didn’t order wine, only water, and watched as Bill ate and then drank, slowly, carefully, and only when his plate was empty did they leave.

  Jack drove him back to his room. Put him to bed, sat with him because the boy was laughing, then crying, and it was only when he slept that he returned to his own bed.

  The next day he drank beer in the town with Bill, but not much, and then they walked past underwear shops full of GIs buying lingerie for the Japanese girls on their arms. They stopped at a restaurant which smelt of beer and fried fish.

  They climbed narrow stairs and sat on large cushions, cross-legged. There were other soldiers there, laughing, drinking. There were geishas with white corn-starched faces and sticky hair who danced with them when they had eaten the fish which the chef had cooked in a deep pan of oil, swishing it round with long chopsticks.

  The Sergeant who sat at the end told them that these girls were ‘after the war’ geishas who were not trained but who bought a kimono and pretended for the Americans.

  Jack left then. He wanted nothing that the Americans sought or had possessed.

  He borrowed a jeep the next afternoon and drove to the address that the Australian sister had given him when he called on her first thing that morning. She had kissed him on the cheek too, saying again, ‘Just sort yourself out.’

  As he drove he looked at the paddy fields pressed up against the tarmac, seeing through the thawed and muddy snow that every space had been cultivated, even the tiny gap between the ditch and a filling station where GIs were buying petrol for their jeep which was full of Japanese girls. He remembered Suko saying that there were too many people and not enough land.

  There were no straggling copses, no hedges. In Japan, Suko had said, there were only disciplined, trained trees. There was no space for wanton growth. He passed small paper-windowed houses which soon became jammed together as he approached a village which was more like a town. They were jammed too tightly for fields, too tightly even to breathe it seemed. There were people walking, so many people. As the road narrowed and the houses took the light from the street he looked at the piece of paper in his hand. He stopped the jeep. He asked directions of an old man dressed in black, slowly, in English.

  The man pointed. ‘Leave jeep. Walk. Ask. Police.’

  Jack did, passing tiny shops with paper doors, all with lights which shone through the paper, out into the street. There was a police box on the corner. Jack asked again.

  ‘Keep on. Don’t turn. It on right.’

  Children ran past in quilted coats, shrieking, laughing. Was Lee doing that in the cold of America?

  There were restaurants on either side of the narrow alleys he walked along. One opened on to the street, revealing people eating fish at small tables. So many people and they were all so small, like Suko.

  He was there now. He stopped but the door was paper. How did he knock? He couldn’t so he called out instead, ‘Suko, it’s Jack.’ He waited, then called again. ‘Suko. It’s Jack. I’ve been rude. I ran away from you. In the ward. I’m sorry. I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’

  The door slid back, and Suko was standing there in a kimono, not bobby sox. Her blue-black hair was pulled back. She bowed, three times.

  ‘Jack-san, this is an honour.’ She stood to one side. ‘Please put your shoes here.’ She pointed to the left of the door.

  Jack stopped, looked at her. She wore no shoes. There was a Shinto shrine in the room. He stooped, unlaced his boots, placed them next to hers and entered.

  He felt too big, too white. He nodded at the old lady who came forward and bowed. He bowed too. Christ, he was so big.

  They sat on tatami cushions and his ankles hurt as he crossed his legs. Suko laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘You will eat with us?’

  Jack nodded and watched the old woman cut each item carefully. The brazier exuded heat, the charcoal had a sweet smell. She tossed and turned the fish and the vegetables, and Jack could find little to say, but Suko didn’t speak either. They both watched her grandmother.

  They ate with chopsticks and Jack was awkward and clumsy but no one laughed and so he tried again and it was good.

  ‘Perhaps you would come with me tomorrow to find that unbombed town?’ Jack said, but Suko shook her head.

  ‘No, Jack-san, that is for you alone. But I take you to see Japan. I take you to puppets, to Osaka with its canals. I take you to the theatre.’

  Her voice was soft but the harshness was still there. It always would be. Was there still that faint drawl in Rosie’s voice? But what did it matter? She meant nothing to him now.

  The next day they drove to Osaka and then along the roads where the piled up snow was melting. Men trudged up and down alleys with wicker baskets on their back. Women passed with babies strapped to their backs. An old battered car passed with Japanese bobbysoxers singing.

  What would Tom think?

  The next day they watched a puppet show where the Punch and Judy he had remembered from Southend paled into insignificance. These puppets were life-size with their puppeteers alongside, visible. There was no laughter, only tears. No farce, only tragedy, and Jack sat back and waited to be bored. But Suko sat still beside him, her golden skin smooth and pure, and soon the puppets took over the puppeteers and became savage, harsh, too strong, and Jack clenched his hands and believed.
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  They ate at a restaurant and Suko smiled and nodded and her hands were as delicate with the chopsticks as they had been with the flowers.

  As they drove back alongside the fields she told him that in the spring the farmers would pull harrows and the women would dig, then sow. She told him how the farmers had always sold their daughters, in order to have fewer mouths to feed, in order to survive.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ he asked.

  ‘They were in Nagasaki,’ she said. ‘They did not survive.’

  Jack didn’t visit Suko for a week. He didn’t know what to say, what to do, but when he called outside her house again she slid back the door and smiled, took him in, gave him green tea. As they sat cross-legged on the floor he said, ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t come. I didn’t know what to say about your parents.’

  Suko nodded. ‘I know. One day you will be able to face pain, even that of others. For now you cannot. You must wait.’ That was all.

  They drove to the theatre, where actors took over the role of the puppets, and Jack listened to Suko explaining as they roared and laughed and cried that the message of this play was blind loyalty, whatever cruel and bloody acts this might require.

  Jack watched the disembowelling and could not understand the pleasure it gave the audience, the pleasure it gave Suko. He watched the dancing and was glad when they returned to her small house, away from the colour of the pageant, away from the turbulence, and as he drew up to her house he turned and kissed her mouth. It was soft, small, and so was the body he held and stroked, and so was the hand which smoothed his hair and touched his lips and brought feeling back into his life.

  ‘I’ve only one week left,’ he breathed into her hair.

  ‘You will come tomorrow and we will love,’ she said.

  Suko’s grandmother was not there in the house when he arrived and Suko led him into the room, holding his hand in hers, not kissing him, not allowing him to kiss her.

  ‘Not yet, Jack-san. You are in Nippon now. You must be slow. You must take time.’