by Lee Langley
‘The Japs are finished,’ one guard called to another, pitching his voice louder than necessary. ‘Finished!’
Wrapped in barbed wire, powerless and voiceless, the internees hung in the balance, losers whatever happened.
Shikata ga na. Nothing to be done about it.
38
Nancy celebrated her birthday by packing bandages. At forty-one she felt too old for a party. And who would she invite? From office desk to Red Cross station to volunteer counter at the military coffee shop, she was running as hard as she could, getting nowhere, but there was nowhere she wanted to be. She felt useful. She was exhausted, but that had its advantages: a tired mind in a tired body; a way to keep thought at bay.
War brought gloom and fear. Uncertainty. She became adept at deciphering the news. From what the government allowed its people to hear she could infer considerably more; it was not always encouraging.
Closer to home, reading between the lines in his letters, she feared for Joey: withdrawing from all he had considered himself a part of, he seemed at the same time to be rejecting a past that was not his, but might have been. Had she been wrong to bring him up the American way? Maybe she should have shown him more of that other world, introduced him to what was, after all, a part of his past, a culture that had survived a sea-crossing and flourished here in its own quiet way. But she had been afraid. Ah, there it was again, lurking; that weasel word. Fear.
Increasingly, she felt an unfocused sense of dissatisfaction. She could recall how, long ago, she had looked forward to being ‘grown up’, mature; to resembling the older women with their style and confidence. Now she was an older woman and it was the young who called the tune. Surely there should have been a point when she was grown up and confident, before the downward spiral, the sense of defeat? She must have been too busy to notice.
Filling the hours seemed the easiest way to fill the days, the weeks, months. Life became a jigsaw, one piece of her schedule slotting into the next, leaving her no time for anxiety, and not much time to dwell on thoughts of other possibilities. Had Ben lived . . . Had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor . . . Had she met and married someone else, would she once more be alone, the imagined man whose body had warmed hers now swept into the conflict?
She was busy stacking dishes in the coffee shop when a man on the other side of the counter said ruefully, ‘You don’t recognise me.’
She glanced at him: tall, thin, a touch of grey in the dark hair, face an anonymous oval, like a cartoon character with sketched-in features – two dots for eyes, a vertical stroke, a horizontal dash.
‘Should I?’
‘Well. We had a rather jolly conversation last week while you made me a cup of something you described as tea.’
‘Oh, right. The Englishman.’
‘Defined by my accent. Rather depressing, that.’
‘Not your accent. Your perfect manners,’ Nancy said, stating a fact, unflirtatious.
‘Ah!’
She glanced at the sky as a grumble of thunder came and went. A sudden sweep of rain hit the windows.
‘You’ve brought us English weather; I’m sure our climate used to be better behaved.’
‘You could be right. But I’m not sure the meteorology of nostalgia can be trusted: those endless golden summers, snowball fights at Christmas – was it really like that?’
For a moment she was disconcerted: surely her memories of lost innocence must be true? Sun on the seashore, beach parties with toasted marshmallows, a swimmer waving from beyond the surf . . .
Charles considered the woman at the coffee dispenser. Dark blonde hair, cut unflatteringly short. Dress a practical brown, its shape unbecoming. Make-up confined to a dash of lipstick. This was a woman who gave no thought to her appearance.
He noted the downward droop of her mouth, the shadowed eyes. The wedding ring. Charles was not given to small talk, but this woman with her abstracted air, her neglected hands, her stillness, drew him. To hold her attention he asked her, conversationally, if her husband was with the American forces in Europe.
She stared at him, shocked by the unexpectedness of the question.
‘My husband has been dead for ten years.’
He groaned. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry.’
‘Why? How were you to know?’
About to move off, back to clearing cups and plates, she gave him a quick, forgiving smile. For a moment her drooping mouth curved upwards, other muscles lifted; her nose wrinkled sweetly. Fleetingly, her face was transformed.
Charles had the strongest sensation that if she took even one step away from him he would lose her for ever, and he could not allow that to happen. He must keep her talking, however creakily he engineered it.
‘Look. My name is Charles. Charles Bowman, I’m over here working with your people for a while.’
‘Uh-huh. Is that Bowman as in bows and arrows? Were your ancestors archers, fighting for Henry the Fifth at the battle of Agincourt?’
‘Actually,’ Charles said, ‘they were in the wool trade. In a particularly flat bit of south-east England.’
He saw her pause, watched the muscles in her face relax; she was almost smiling. He considered his options and dived. ‘The name was given to the man who untangled the wool. He used a bow – seriously, he did. It was the Italians who thought up the process but then we pinched the idea.’
‘When did all this go on?’
‘Oh, quite late . . . thirteenth century?’
And at that she laughed out loud. ‘Right. Really late.’
He added, encouragingly, ‘I could tell you all sorts of exciting stuff, about my good old ancestors vibrating the string of the bow in a pile of tangled wool to separate the fibres –’
‘You’re putting me on.’
‘I’m deadly serious. It got us the finest, softest thread you can imagine.’
She was stacking plates again; he was losing her. He began to gabble.
‘The old methods produced yarn that was so resilient it could be bent thirty thousand times without breaking or fraying.’ Desperation dried his mouth. Words, words, words; he was on a slippery slope to oblivion – what woman would want to talk to a one-track wool-twit? He felt like an old buffer addressing a Women’s Institute knitting circle.
‘We exported the stuff. Look what wool did for Florence, the most beautiful city in the world, the art, the treasures, but then the Black Death . . .’
He took a deep breath and risked a change of tack: on his last visit he had noticed her, off duty, absorbed in an old, fragile book. ‘Dante said a few things about the city.’ She glanced up. ‘Would you like to know more?’ he asked. ‘Over dinner?’ he added. ‘I promise not to say another word about wool.’ Cautiously, ‘How do you feel about poetry?’
When Nancy next wrote to Joey she mentioned she had met an Englishman, doing some kind of liaison work in the US.
‘He’s funny,’ she wrote: ‘funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar. It’s a while since I laughed.’ She needed cheering up, with Mary gone. All that time never moving out of her bedroom. Yet, since her mother’s death the house seemed empty; Louis was shrinking, growing ever more silent.
She asked about Joey’s health, and the food, on which subject she was sending him another parcel; she had baked him a cake . . . As always, the letter was firmly optimistic. Dark thoughts were excised, and in any case she often wondered whether anything controversial would get past the censors. What was the reality of their communication? Of his state of mind?
No more was said about her own activities, but in her next letter she sent him a new poem. She said she had ‘come upon it’. No mention of the Englishman who made her laugh.
Joey put her letter with the others, in the bag beneath his bed, tucked between the pages of Boas’s History of the American Race. He put the poem aside, to look at later.
39
He had given up making drawings. He had given up reading. Anthropologists who travelled to faraway places for their encounters with s
trangeness offered no insights on internal exile. He avoided participant observation; shunned the festivals and took no part in the communal gardening, all the complex patterns of giving and receiving that the South Sea villagers would have recognised and approved of. Between voluntary work shifts he lay on the narrow iron bed and stared at the wall. He watched a fly, or studied a shaft of sunlight as it moved across the wall and floor of the hut, saw how its heat had bleached the raw wood, day after day, into a sunbeam pattern, the fibres of the planks drying into something resembling crushed straw.
He had arrived at a point of suspended animation that got him through the day. Curb your imagination, he had decided. Far away the war went on; battles were won or lost, people killed and got killed. Among those who got killed – bombed or blasted – was there a woman in a wood and paper room who wore a kimono, who fed chickens and ran laughing into rainstorms?
Immobilised and powerless, he had no part in life as it now was. Learn to love your blinkers. Sufficient unto the day.
Every morning, early, the trucks arrived to take workers to the beet fields, dropping them back at the gates at the end of the day. Joey was aware he would have made a poor beetfarmer: soft hands, a spine inconveniently long for crouching over low-growing plants, untutored in the ways of this curious and valuable crop. Ichir, Taro and Kazuo, urban boys without farming experience, quickly demonstrated an acceptable level of dexterity, moving along the lines of bunched green leaves, weeding, checking for disease; thinning the tightly packed rows, plucking out young plants to leave room for the rest to grow. The skill, speed and energy of the internees were saving the harvest.
Ichir was realistic about the exercise – ‘The farm boys are all GIs now, serving overseas. They’ll take anyone with the usual number of arms and legs; they’d even use you, Joey. You could earn a dollar or two. Why not come along for the ride?’
Through the window Joey watched them assembling by the trucks as the early sun cast long, attenuated shadows on to the dusty compound. They climbed aboard, voices and laughter drifting back to the hut. Engines coughed into life, grumbled, dissolved into distance and silence. He lay curled, too big for the undersized bed. Inert. He had become a rare breed of sloth, with a slowed rate of metabolism thwarting movement. Unlike the sloth, he could not rely on camouflage to protect him; no algae grew on his body, no protective disguise; he still stood out in the crowd, sore thumb, square peg, all that jazz. Everyone knows what a sloth is, what it looks like. But how does it feel? That almost immobile existence, that upside-down view of the world, how was the sloth feeling? Did it feel stranded, cut off from everything moving so fast around it, the rustling leaves, the spinning globe, the speeding birds, the racing ants, the wind that shakes the branches. Did a sloth, lost and alone, howl silently? Feel pain?
An hour passed. The sun moved across the floor. He began to re-count nails in planks.
When Mrs Tanaka knocked at the half-open door he offered a listless invitation to enter and regarded her without interest as she bowed and stood calmly waiting. After a few moments Joey cracked: he slowly got off the bed and managed a vestigial bow to the elderly woman. Through observation he was aware that this was the correct thing to do.
He took her in, the body taut as wire, the steel-grey hair, the face ageless as an ivory carving.
‘Did you want to speak to one of the boys?’
‘I wanted to speak to you, Mr Pinkerton.’
‘You can call me Joey.’
‘But we are not friends.’
‘We’re fellow internees. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Enough for propinquity. Not for intimacy.’
Quiet, unnervingly confident, a trace of East Coast vowels in the wholly American delivery. Central Casting would have her down for an Ivy League academic. Or possibly a scary grandma.
Clearly she had something she wanted from him now. Tiny, she seemed to grow taller as she returned his gaze.
‘Mr Pinkerton. I have observed you.’
Again a woman watching him. Again he felt irritated.
‘I have observed you observing others.’
‘It passes the time.’
‘There are perhaps better ways of passing the time. You could become involved—’
He broke in. ‘I have no wish to become involved. I am here because of a bureaucratic detail. I have nothing in common with these people, I feel nothing—’
‘You know nothing. Why should you feel? You need to learn a little about . . .’ Pause. ‘These people.’
Her tone, her expression, were benign. The eyes behind their small glass shields were not.
He felt increasingly provoked. What did this woman want from him? Was she simply here to lecture him, to tell him to pull himself together? Acting the mother? Well he had two of those already, more than enough.
She said, ‘We have many children in Tule Lake and it is essential to keep them occupied. Also to extend their education.’
‘There are teachers.’
‘I was not thinking of formal lessons. There are children here who are falling between two languages. Lost between tongues, they grow mute. The right person could reach them, give them back a voice.’
‘I don’t speak much Japanese.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘You will.’
There were ways to deal with pushy old ladies: he could say, politely but firmly, that he was not interested; he could give her the silent treatment and then forget the whole thing. He could be actively rude and tell her to get lost.
She said, ‘It must be a consolation, Mr Pinkerton, to know you are superior to your fellow internees.’
‘I don’t regard myself as superior.’
‘But different?’
He waited.
‘And that gives you the freedom to behave impolitely.’
‘I can’t begin to fathom,’ Joey said savagely, ‘what the Japanese would regard as impolite.’
‘I think the way I am behaving now would be considered extremely impolite, Mr Pinkerton. I think I am behaving with quite American manners. That should make you feel at home. But whether or not you feel anything is of no interest to me. I want to do something about these children.’
Joey had heard of Chinese water torture. He thought this could be a matronly Japanese version.
‘Mrs Tanaka, you’re bullying me,’ he said.
They regarded one another for a moment.
‘If so, I must apologise; it would mean I was behaving very badly. But there are more ways than one of doing that.’
Joey decided that her eyes were indeed sharp, but not as sharp as her tongue.
She raised her eyebrows enquiringly. ‘Shall we talk?’
40
He walked into the classroom expecting trouble: inattention, a degree of fidgeting, possibly some impudence; the sort of brawling misbehaviour he recalled from his own schooldays. Instead he faced silence. Seated cross-legged on the floor – no chairs or desks were available – children of varying ages stared up at him impassively. He felt a flutter of panic in his guts: this could be even worse than he had thought.
Greeting them, to his own ears he sounded hearty, phoney. In their place he would mistrust a pink-faced jerk who spoke no Japanese, who didn’t even wear glasses: how clever could he be?
He decided to dip a toe, go slowly, work the room. There were kids here who, like him, spoke virtually no Japanese, alongside others for whom English was a second language. He would approach this thing from the other angle.
‘Ohay gozaimasu!’ he called out, cheerfully, using one of the phrases he knew.
They erupted in giggles, rocking in delight. His attempt to greet them in Japanese may not have been accurately pitched but it had certainly broken the ice.
He held up a hand. Instant silence.
‘You will now show me how it should be said. I want to hear from each of you, right?’
He stood over them, encouraging, and in turn they re
peated the phrase, some fluently, others as haltingly as Joey. When everyone had spoken, he repeated it. This time no one laughed.
Joey set a lazy pace. How many spoke English? Hands up. And how many spoke Japanese as well? And who spoke no Japanese? Okay. He picked a noun, an absurd adjective, an unlikely verb, and asked for Japanese equivalents. At first they remained silent, unwilling to expose themselves to this childish game. Slowly he drew them in, easing his way to Japanese phrases where he was the useless one, where they could help him out.
He moved them around, pairing up the English-speakers with the Japanese-only. Varying the pattern. He began to ask questions, keeping it simple, repetitious. Did they notice that he too was repeating the Japanese, noting down each word? This was indeed learning by heart. A syllable, a sound, a gradual understanding; ritualistic, the naming of parts.
They listened, repeated. Began to ask questions. He had them locate and name objects in the classroom. Sometimes he made them laugh.
By the end of the lesson Joey was exhausted; the children bubbling.
Each day he moved them on a little. From nursery rhymes for the youngest, he took them to a verse or two of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’; he even risked ‘archy & mehitabel’ – ‘Okay, there’s this cat, this neko, and this cockroach – cockroach? Gokiburi? Right. And they’re buddies . . .’
Meanwhile, he did his homework: in his hut he copied out words, marked vocal inflexions, checked nuances.
One day he introduced a new ingredient: personal possessions. He explained the concept of Show and Tell. Next lesson, one child brought a signed picture of Bing Crosby, another unrolled a piece of embroidered green silk that belonged to her grandmother. A harmonica sat beside an object resembling a small piece of candy which turned out to be a seal: ‘hanko – for stamping your name, like a signature.’
