The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  Never talk sex with a nonagenarian, Lily.

  She nods, gets into a second cup of coffee.

  I do like him, though.

  Still got fire.

  Still burning bright.

  Lily clears her throat, realizes she hasn’t yet spoken this morning.

  We screwed?

  He eyes her.

  We’re dead-ended, she says.

  He took us as far as he could.

  Bruce nods probably so.

  Finally pushes his bagel away.

  Game I’ve been playing in my head is running on two tracks.

  You know, paper-trail-wise, I keep trying to see how you track a guy who goes into Japanese custody without any tags.

  There shouldn’t be a paper trail and isn’t.

  So, then I try to get at it a different way, because, you know, I’ve got to act like I’m actually good at my job, like I’ve got skills that no one else does.

  So I put myself in the Japanese guys’ heads.

  And think, what would I do if I took possession of a guy with a captain’s helmet, but no tags.

  I’d pump him for information.

  And being the type of guy we think Gray is—and maybe we’re just creating this heroic version of him because we’ve been fixating on him for so long—that guy doesn’t tell the J’s a damn thing.

  Truth is, he can’t.

  Because he’s not a captain.

  He doesn’t have information.

  He’s a grunt.

  So whether he doesn’t tell them what they want to hear because he’s a hero, or because he just doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter.

  If I’m the J’s, and I don’t get any information out of him—and ultimately, I can’t, because he doesn’t have any—

  —I put a bullet in him.

  Maybe not even that, if ammo is too expensive at that point of the war.

  They were having POWs strangle each other, I heard.

  But one way or another, I put him in a ditch.

  Because the J’s are in serious retreat.

  And toting along an anonymous POW without any information is the last thing I want to do.

  They decide to spend one more day on the island before they fly out.

  They go to Pearl Harbor, take the shuttle to the Arizona Memorial.

  Maybe it’s because it’s on topic.

  Maybe it’s because it’s the coolest thing to do on Oahu.

  It’s, of course, almost exclusively Japanese tourists that visit the site.

  Bruce notes the irony.

  She, though, is idly absorbing the Japanese faces in the eighty-degree sunshine.

  She’s never really looked at Japanese-Japanese.

  Only Japanese-Americans.

  There is a difference.

  It is the clothes and the hair and the rest of it, but it is maybe also the comparative stillness.

  These Japanese, and maybe it is because they are at a war shrine, are quiet, contained in their gestures.

  Their faces are manifold: some regal-skinned, like they have spent a lifetime behind palace walls, their flesh porcelain to the point of translucence; some dark, sun-blasted, like fishermen or goatherds.

  She thinks this is funny, goatherds.

  Do they have goatherds in Japan?

  Goatherds are from the Middle East or the Middle Ages.

  Japan is the land of Panasonic, Fuji, Sony.

  If they had goatherds it would be a small robotic thing named Sadie that you could sync with your iPhone.

  But these people before her, these Japanese, they really do run a range.

  Some really do look like emperors, some really do look like goatherds.

  Is it regional, familial?

  Of course it must be.

  Where then do the goatherds come from, with their craggy faces, their smooth, hooded low-lidded eyes, their comparatively brutish-looking features?

  She asks this of Bruce.

  Just because.

  Just because nothing has been said between them for a while and she doesn’t want him to think something’s wrong.

  He says he doesn’t know, maybe the southern islands?

  He thinks it’s more agrarian down there.

  Or could be from the mainland.

  Chinese descent, Mongolian.

  They’ve got a distinct look out that way, farther west you get.

  Elements beat the hell out of them, gets passed through the generations.

  She nods, absorbs this.

  And as they later head back on the shuttle toward shore, she realizes the entire time they were out there, she never looked down into the water where the great shadowy expanse of the Arizona lay.

  It takes a while for it to suffuse properly through her subconscious.

  She doesn’t know that this is happening.

  Not until it does.

  Not until it percolates to the surface, and suddenly becomes known to her.

  She has a way out of the dead end.

  Can they change the plane tickets, she wants to know.

  Can they stay another night or two at the hotel?

  Why?

  Because of the Mongolian, she says.

  Her logic is this, and it is not much of a logic: that maybe there was a paper trail for Gray once the Japanese took him into custody.

  He did not carry his dog tags with him, but perhaps he carried someone else’s.

  The hundemarken he took off the sniper he killed on the Aachen rooftop.

  By late afternoon they are back meeting with Bradley, this time at JPAC.

  He is glad to see them.

  Particularly because they’ve brought this name to him, this shot in the dark:

  Ganzorig Mönkhbat.

  Seventy years ago, he had not thought to read and register the name on the worn dog tags Gray had shown him on that midnight beach.

  Why would he?

  It was another man’s burden, stamped in another language, another assignation on steel in a sea of assignations on steel.

  But today it is something.

  It is definitely something.

  Bradley churns it through onsite databases.

  And comes back with nothing.

  He is not done, though.

  He is feeling cocksure, excited.

  There has not been a genuine new possibility like this in Gray’s case in decades.

  He calls Japan.

  He has people there, he says.

  People on that side doing what we’re doing on this side.

  Trying to repatriate bodies.

  Free up ghosts long awander.

  The best part of it for Lily is watching the man speak Japanese once he’s got someone on the phone.

  The old drunken Mormon lecher’s got quite a tongue for it.

  A few decades of diligence has given him surprising facility.

  His version, though, is this high, almost feminine thing.

  It does not fit his body.

  Gives the appearance he is channeling a long-dead geisha or some such.

  It’s so incongruous, she thinks—what is seen and what is heard—you could throw a tent around it, take tickets.

  Right up there with the Bearded Lady and the Two-Headed Man would be this Don Ho-shirted old badger with a face like bad gin-blossomed putty, effortless volleying konnichiwas and yoroshiku onegaishimasus and arigatos back and forth into the phone.

  You just don’t see things like this.

  And by the end of it, he is getting all that much more whipped up, the language coming high and shrill.

  Whatever’s being relayed to him from the other side of the phone is eliciting from his this:

  Arigato…

  Hai, Arigato, Hai Hai Hai, Arigato, Arigato, Arigato!

  ARIGATO!

  Then, in a fit of enthusiasm worthy of a four-year-old, he throws the phone across the room.

  It breaks.

  Or breaks something.

  Bruce and Lily don’t know ho
w to react.

  Bradley is red-faced, as embarrassed as he is excited.

  His smile is so wide it looks painful.

  The name came up, he finally says.

  XVII

  Japan is like the rest of the world.

  Except that the volume has been turned halfway down.

  There is laughter and traffic and cell phone conversations and car horns honking just like everywhere else.

  But the air doesn’t hold them in the same way, Lily thinks.

  Doesn’t belabor them.

  Instead, it lets them sink away into the earth so that they will not long interrupt the preferred calm.

  She is on the bullet train, a silent rocket splitting the stillness of the Japanese countryside.

  They are three.

  Bradley has come.

  There is no way he is missing this.

  A regional train and a taxi and a twenty-minute walk finish the journey.

  Whatever muted noise there was before is utterly gone now, up here in the mountains, swept clean from the sky by the tufts and wafts and wisps of fog beswirling the alpine forests.

  The air is so crisp, so pristine, it feels a sin to fill it with words, if even only a few.

  Which is, of course, hard for Bradley.

  Because in some ways, he is the most excited of the bunch.

  They are close to new things.

  New truths.

  Or maybe, better put, old truths that have always been there, just hidden by circumstance.

  The monastery is not a monastery.

  Not in the conventional sense one has of monasteries.

  You’d anticipate all sorts of exotica, esoterica—all the stuff you see in the movies—the candles and the huge mysterious paintings of the Buddha, the Nirvana-eyed monks, the great dark spaces filled with relics and disembodied chants.

  There is none of that.

  More than anything else, it is just a house in the mountains.

  A very clean house, but just a house.

  In fact, Lily thinks, the only thing monastery about this monastery is the fog.

  When Kesuke greets them, he is not wearing monk’s robes.

  He is in a t-shirt and shorts and rubber flip-flops.

  The flip-flops: ancient, cracked, well past their appointment with the garbage can.

  Like the man before them, really.

  She wonders briefly if he is in fact a Buddhist monk, as he has been described.

  Because nothing in him or his surroundings outwardly suggests as much.

  There is no phone here, no connection with the outside world.

  Which is precisely the point.

  It is why Kesuke has spent the past half-century in seclusion here.

  Chopping wood, drinking tea, and staring into infinity.

  Infinity is apparently out there somewhere in those sheets of fog.

  At least that is the gist she gets from the interpreter, who has separately made her own trek out to the monastery to assist with the conversation.

  The interpreter: assigned to them by Bradley’s colleagues in Tokyo.

  The ones that, like him, are still rectifying the transgressions of World War Two.

  The name—that decidedly non-Nazi name of Ganzorig Mönkhbat—found on German dog tags in the possession of an American GI, of all people—had long been a curiosity to the people at JPAC’s Japanese liaison and partner, the Royal Office of Wartime Reclamation.

  They’d directed Bradley here.

  To this man.

  Who apparently is the last and best source of information on the story of the American soldier with the German Wehrmacht tags.

  XVIII

  INTERPRETER: He says you cannot tell now—because he is so strong from all these years of walking these mountains—that he was a weak in his youth. His legs were so undeveloped that when he closed his legs too tight and the insides of his knees touched, you could hear a click. A click! Like two dominos touching. There was no muscle there. Just bone to bone, with a little flesh in between.

  This is a joke, by the way, he says. The idea that he thinks of himself as strong today at age eighty-seven. He is just kidding. Kesuke likes to joke. He likes to joke a lot. Visitors give him a chance to joke. Because being alone all the time, it’s not so easy to joke.

  Anyhow, he will try to stay on point, tell you the story as you wish. If he jokes, he says, please forgive him. It’s just enthusiasm for company.

  KESUKE (via interpreter): I was, as I say, weak as a youth. And in some ways it saved me from being sent to the front lines during the War. Instead, the Imperial Army assigned me to the prison camp Fukuoka-17. Fukuoka had been built on the site of the old laborers’ quarters built by the Mitsui Coal Mining Company. It was expanded, designed to hold as many as one hundred thousand Allied prisoners of war. The idea was to use them as slave labor in the coal mines.

  I didn’t much like the idea of working with prisoners of war. I had heard stories, as all Japanese youth had, of American and British soldiers. They were rapists, not much more than Neanderthals. Couple that with the fact that you had to be in the mines to oversee them, as much as twelve hours a day, and you would think it would be the last place I would want to be. But, believe it or not…I loved it!

  Because, you have to remember, this was 1945. The Americans were flying bombing missions over Japan with impunity. Everything was being bombed. Everything. And the Americans had resorted to using incendiary bombs, designed specifically to burn anything made of wood. Which, of course, was all of Japan. All that wartime architecture, like matchsticks for the B-25s…

  Anyhow. One thing that does not burn, if you think about it, is the earth. Maybe the grass and the trees and the stuff atop it, but if you’re working in a mine, you’re a half mile underground, and that’s about the best bomb shelter a man can find!

  So for me, what you’d think was a horrible assignment turned out to be just fine. It might just let me survive the War.

  The funny thing, too, was at night, there was actually more light down in the mines than there was on the surface, due to all the blackout rules in effect because of the bombers. You felt it was still sort of civilized down there, believe it or not, compared to the Stone Age world above, which was how some of the soldiers had started calling it. There was light, electricity. Even the occasional gramophone. As guards, we’d listen to whatever American records we could get our hands on. It was one of the fringe benefits of the war—you got to take everything from your captured enemy, but as it turned out, the guns, the plans, none of that compared to getting a copy of the latest Frank Sinatra record! At least to the common soldier.

  I can remember it, the song “I’ll Be Seeing You,” which I and the other young soldiers would play again and again when the commander was topside and asleep. It was a foolish thing to do—you could get shot for that sort of insubordination—but when you’re young, you’re invincible, and when you’re spending most of your waking hours working in the darkness underground, you’ll do anything for color, even if it’s not real color, not color your eyes can see anyhow, but instead second-hand color, from the lips of the Enemy.

  (Here she stops translating, because the monk has surprisingly lapsed into long dormant English; in a charming, halting, very quiet sing-song voice, full of bemused nostalgia:

  I’ll be seeing you

  In every lovely, summer’s day

  And everything that’s bright and gay

  I’ll always think of you that way

  I’ll find you in the morning sun

  And when the night is new

  I’ll be looking at the moon

  But I’ll be seeing you.)

  The colors we could see when we heard that! It painted the coal-black walls of that mine. With the green of the grass and the blue of the moon and the soft yellow promise of the sun. Maybe that was why the Emperor had gone and done something as stupid as attack the United States. To the eighteen-year-old soldier at the tail end of the War, no othe
r reason made sense. But if this was all about Sinatra records, then maybe you could understand why the Emperor had moved heaven and earth.

  Those, incidentally, were—and remain to this day—the only English words I know. English by Sinatra. I can think of no finer method of learning!

  I can say up front I knew nothing of Gray Allen’s backstory. Knew nothing of what befell the man before he showed up in the mine. He was for a number of weeks just another of the hundreds of sickly prisoners of war that had been tasked to the condemned lateral of the Fukuoka mine I was assigned to oversee. If you think of the entire mine as a kind of prison, the condemned lateral was solitary confinement. The worst of the worst prisoners tended to get assigned there, men that had in one way or another run afoul of the command staff.

  Gray was in particularly bad shape when I first saw him. He stood out as one who had definitely had a hard time with the Kempeitai before arriving here. His swollen face bore the telltale bruising and lacerations one gets when they’re on the wrong end of a beating with the metal buckle of a leather belt. His eyes were nearly swollen shut like a boxer’s, though one who had been denied corner treatment; the scabs were black and oozing with puss. More telltale, though, were his mangled hands; one of them had been so badly damaged it appeared permanently clawed—the fingers drawn together as a single unit, curved immobile over the palm. You have to understand, the Kempeitai were good at what they did—they knew how to extract information from people. They’d break a man’s thumbs, then proceed to hang him by those same thumbs, usually by cranking the arms up behind the man’s back and hoisting him ceiling-ward that way. And men who’d spent a lot of time with the Kempeitai usually wore it in their faces and hands afterward. Both Gray’s clawed hand and the other were a sickly, rotten purple beneath the skin, like the blood had gone bad in those areas, and were more likely, in conditions like the mine, to deteriorate toward blackness rather than heal. Because he was shirtless like most of the prisoners, clad only in his soiled tank top, you could see how the intense bruising rose from his hands to his wrists to the distended tendons of his forearms. It meant that he’d been strung up there for a while. My fellow guards and I were familiar with the dynamics of such trauma, if informally. It’s the whole car-wreck thing. We are drawn to the macabre, despite ourselves. Especially if we are eighteen-year-old boys in the testosterone-addled swirl of soldierhood. We can ask the dark, fascinating questions. We’re allowed to ask what happens to a man who is hung by his broken thumbs. We’re allowed to find out that a body has physical levels of resistance, which successively break down under the twin pressures of pain and time in captivity. You hang a man by his thumbs, and, at first, he can bear all that weight in the structures of his hands, even if the thumbs are broken. Then over time, the hands go entirely lax—they literally quit—then the burden is shifted to the tendons of the forearms, which hurts even more, then in time those go and the burden narrows in on the shoulders, which in some ways is the most painful of all. Break a man’s hand, and the strong men will still be able to trust in the cohesion of the rest of the body; when his shoulders are failing though, it starts to feel as if his arms will be ripped off. Even the strong ones at that point usually break.