by Lee Langley
‘Oh.’ Ichir looked amused. ‘That means she likes you.’
‘So what does she do if she doesn’t like you?’
‘She ignores you, of course.’
Joey said sarcastically, ‘I guess that’s the Japanese way.’
‘It’s certainly Yasuko’s way. She’s picky. There are guys all over camp still feel the pain of Yasuko’s freeze.’
Yasuko. Now he knew her name.
Before leaving he had searched for her all over the camp, and catching sight of a slim figure in the distance with shiny, square-cut hair, he had called out, ‘Hey, wait!’ and turning, Iris had smiled at him, surprised.
He stopped. ‘Oh! I thought you were – someone else. Your hair . . .’
‘I stopped curling it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did you think I was?’
‘Someone.’ Oddly reluctant to spill the name, he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
He moved off, then turned and called, ‘The hair. It’s nice, suits you.’
The train rattled on, the wheels and the track creating their own music, laying down the beat: Oh the Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line, escaping slaves sang the words, and in its own way the army, too, was a slave master. The army gave orders and insisted on obedience, punished those who went AWOL, but he had volunteered, hadn’t he? No one was making him do this. Surely that made a difference.
46
She sat at her table by the window, a brilliant square of ice-blue winter sky like a blank canvas. Around her, walls of fine reeds embedded in dried pulp conveyed a sense of a room wrapped in grass. Skilled decorators had achieved artful simplicity here, though the marks of time and use had darkened the once pale walls.
Long ago, Suzuki had been impatient with Cho-Cho, urging her to move to something more spacious, a bigger house, set in a garden, at the better end of town.
‘You could be closer to us.’
Cho-Cho had the money then; the restaurant was flourishing. But she stayed where she was, like a sea creature safe inside the shell of her little house overlooking the harbour. Later, when the bad times came, when the customers could no longer afford the restaurant and she could no longer afford the staff, and then when the long, drawn-out war was no longer a Chinese affair, but suddenly became World War Two, the little house was once again appropriate. In the fat years she had mocked Henry for his love of tradition – ‘Why don’t you put in modern heating?’ – and he had given his slow, infuriating smile. Now she appreciated the irony of her own situation as she warmed her feet on an old charcoal heater tucked under her desk.
On the desk was a typewriter, and curling out of it a page half covered with neat black marks. She typed a few words, and paused to look out at the sea, a darker blue beneath the sky. She had been writing these letters for years, all the fleeting thoughts that she might have put into words; love visible. As the page clicked slowly up from the platen, she tapped on. One day, she told herself, he will read this, will perhaps reply.
Kanashimi, Trouble meaning its opposite –
He was never any trouble of course, that was their tender joke. He was Sachio, her joy; it was his father who misheard the word and called him Joey.
She plucked the page from the typewriter and laid it with others in the metal box on the desk.
She could see the waterfront, and the road that curved up the hill, going out of sight, then reappearing. Her hands rested in her lap, the wrists thin as a young girl’s but at thirty-eight she accepted the finely wrinkled skin, the dark patches on the pale surface, the knuckles large against bony fingers. Her rings had gone long ago; how little a diamond fetches when the market tilts the wrong way. Now her hands were bare of jewels, as they were when she was young. Young. She touched the faint scar on her throat.
She recalled standing by this window as a sailor in a white uniform walked up the hill to the house. Where once she watched, waiting for the unknown in fear, now she dared to dream of a future, unknown; a hope deferred for a lifetime. When the war was over, perhaps, whoever won, the victors and the humbled would come to an arrangement, they always did, and maybe another Pinkerton would find his way to her. She would place the metal box of letters on the low table where once a spinning top had flashed its red and yellow rings, and leave him to read his way through her life.
47
Living through hell was not the worst part; that came later, with recollection. Nobody warned him about the persistence of memory as battle injury.
At the beginning Joey thought of himself as a civilian in uniform. He felt he was an imperfect specimen but somehow doubted that the concept of wabi-sabi could be stretched to encompass a flawed warrior.
Gradually he adjusted, was transformed, became a hybrid organism: the soldier, a science fiction creature, part man, part machine. The machine obeyed orders, killed without feeling, fought on even when damaged. The man felt fear, remorse, pain. The man bled. Often he died. But before all that he travelled, crossing the ocean with his regiment, packed tight in an oversized can, from one continent to another.
Like new cars off a conveyor belt, men in uniform seem to resemble one another. No longer Tom, Dick or Harry, they are now part of a regiment; they have a rank, a number. The consequence, intended or not, is loss of personal identity, loss of difference. The helmet, the khaki combat gear, the backpack, the boots, blur physical differences to create a unifying portrait: GI Joe. But this particular batch of soldiers had more in common than the uniform. At embarkation a tired sergeant waved them on board without lifting eyes from clipboard: ‘Jap battalion, right?’
Joe had a fleeting urge to disagree; make irritating, hair-splitting, city-boy corrections: wrong, we’re Nisei, okay, sarge? He could guess the response: ‘What the fuck is that? Some kinda fancy name for Nips?’ Anyway, the sergeant was right: non-white, segregated, they were ‘the Jap battalion’. The melding had taken time. He had seen mainlanders and Hawaiians, thrust together, bristle with suspicions: the Hawaiians smarting at perceived snubs from the assimilated mainlanders; the reserved, urban mainlanders resentful of the boisterous islanders who spoke their own pidgin American, laughed a lot, sang songs, played the ukulele and defiantly donned their old grass skirts for fun. To the mainlanders, under the circumstances, fun was not an option.
The battalion filed on board, trim, compact. Many wore glasses. His chosen brothers, although he was the only one who stood out, once again the square peg. Among the others, a familiar figure from Tule Lake: a boy Joe had often seen hunched in a corner, pencil in hand, reading and annotating, lost to his surroundings.
‘It’s . . . Otishi, right? You always had your head in a book.’
‘Yeah. I’d planned to finish my Ph.D.’
How do you make God laugh . . .
Otishi glanced around. ‘I guess we’ve been promoted. From Yellow Peril to soldiers in the service of Uncle Sam: Japs, but our Japs.’
There were moments at sea, leaning on the rail of the boat, watching dark water foam into a wake of moonlit lace, when Joe recalled another boat journey, a child peering through the rail at dolphins and a magical green light that danced on the water. America, Joey! It’ll be fun!
The ship’s captain, passing, exchanged a mechanical greeting and, misled by the blond naval haircut, asked Joe where he was from.
‘Portland, Oregon, sir.’
The captain nodded. ‘Rose festival, right? I hear it used to be quite a sight.’
If Joe had added that he was born in Japan, in Nagasaki, Captain Jensen could have told him, in his soft Southern drawl, that he had spent a few days in the town many years before. But Joe was Government Issue now, bound for Italy; the long cluster of linked islands he once studied on the map were on another page of his life, and he said nothing, so he missed hearing the captain’s story about the day he climbed a path high above the harbour in Nagasaki with his senior officer to a house with paper walls and met a woman called Butterfly and a small boy with blond curls.
‘Good luck, soldier,’ he said and moved on.
To Joe every new place provided an opportunity for distraction, for escape. Escaping from what, he had not yet worked out. Exploration was what lay ahead, an activity that filled him with elation, even if Africa had seemed an odd destination for a regiment bound for Europe.
Algeria was not an unfamiliar name: it came into a chapter or two of the textbooks, its aboriginal people hammered by waves of invaders, clinging stubbornly to their culture. Did it all come down to culture in the end, the trading of symbols and exchanging of gifts, language, mode of worship; village elders versus incomers?
Below him, watching the regiment disembark, were the locals, who were both Arab and French. Possibly Arab or French?
American and Japanese . . . American or Japanese: how do you plead?
Down the gangplank from the old boat that had earlier carried cargoes of bananas and today brought young men in khaki to a war zone, Joey, now GI Joe, found himself marching into Oran, where the ramparts of a Spanish fort loomed over sun-baked, sandy chaos.
From behind him Otishi attempted a gangplank lecture – ‘Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals –’ the noise of the docks drowned out the rest.
They stepped ashore, disembarking into hostility of various kinds. This was the very edge of Africa, a final step on the way to the war in Europe. But Algeria was part of France, allegiances muddled, death a bullet’s range away. Were the Arabs friendly?
‘How do they feel about us?’ Joe wondered aloud.
‘We’ll find out!’ Eager as a beagle, Otishi was peering about him, matching the past against the present, catching history on the hoof.
But the new soldiers, plucked out of confinement and away from watchtowers and armed guards to flourish their crusading credentials, were not here to learn. Before the friendliness of the Algerians could be tested, there were fresh orders: another boat, another sea voyage, another country.
The pep talks made it clear: they were offering their bodies to defend the free world from the Fascist threat. This fight – they knew because they were repeatedly so informed – was all about democracy and freedom; about the crime of people being deported to concentration camps simply for a word on their papers. How much irony could one situation take?
Otishi, by Joe’s side as they tramped from one dockside to another, bemoaned the lack of any marching songs for Nisei:
‘Normal GIs get to sing as they go; swinging rhythm, great tunes . . .’
Back home, Caruso’s sweet tones filled the airwaves – ‘Over There!’ with the boys roaring back, open-throated, to reassure the world that the Yanks were indeed coming, the boys were on their way, to do the job, to win the war.
Joe sang out, tentatively: ‘The half-Japs, half-Yanks are coming!’ He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t quite have the ring of the original, does it?’
48
In four months Joe aged a decade, the compacted time weighing him down like armour: heavy but not always protective. The bright new soldiers who had sailed from Oran to step ashore in Italy were worn and battered now; uniforms filthy, faces changed, stubble sprouting, eyes dulled, lips dried and cracked. They staggered under the weight of backpacks and weapons, the heavy passing of days, weeks, months.
The first engagement, shocking in its suddenness, lay far behind them. They lived with the knowledge that the closeness of bullets whining and whistling past was not fortuitous, they themselves were the targets.
Earlier on, Nancy had written him letters about Italy. Her friend the Englishman had told her stories about Florence and Pompeii, about the past, about art and music and – bafflingly – wool. Joey had read the letters in what he now saw as the idyll of Tule Lake. None of those pages that spoke of Renaissance frescoes and the Medici, of beauty and elegant intrigue, seemed to play any part in the Italy he saw: a place of shattered trees and bomb craters, ruined villages and dead men; the swollen corpses of horses and cattle sweeping past on a raging, flooded river that rose eighteen feet in ten hours. A river to be crossed, under German fire.
At night, collapsing, they leaned against one another, sharing shelter, a waterproof sheet only partially deflecting the endless rain. Individual foxholes resembled graves: they buried themselves beneath camouflage, a fragile roofing of branches and uprooted undergrowth. Occasionally they enjoyed the luxury of a base in an abandoned farmhouse, huddled round a rough table, candle-ends sending wavering shadows on to the walls as they boiled up powdered coffee with powdered milk. ‘Real luxury,’ Otishi muttered into his tin mug. ‘At least it’s not powdered water. Yet.’
The men soon lost their fear of shadowy figures moving around them, not enemy scouts but locals: Italian partisans stealthily passing, or women and children scavenging the military garbage for food.
Scraping cold K-rations from a tin plate one night, Joe saw a small, barefoot girl on the edge of the clearing, watching the scraps of food drop to the ground. He slipped a chocolate Hershey bar into her outstretched, grubby hand. He did not feel generous.
By day, jittery, wrenched from uneasy sleep, they plodded on, surrounded by the percussion of bombs, the whine and screech of artillery barrage. The orchestra of war in action. Their thoughts went no further than the next assault, the bullet, the shell, the mortar that could make it their last. There was no context to this, no ‘bigger picture’. Survival shrank to the size of a man, the soldier ahead of Joe, crawling ant-like, prodding the ground with his bayonet, checking for mines. So far, they were surviving.
The convoy of armoured trucks and jeeps juddered along rural roads turned to mud and marshland. Bogged down in the slurry, the men found ingenious ways to corduroy the mud-swamped roadway, packing logs and roof tiles, crushed containers and debris crossways to create a solid base for churning wheels. Reaching a crossroads they saw what had been a fine villa behind high gates that were now hanging loose. Ahead lay an impassable bog, surface water shivering in the vibration of the tracks and wheels. From the once-graceful mansion they hauled out a broken bathtub, the remains of some Louis XV chairs, their upholstery shredded; a carved table, fragments of marble statues – all useful for creating a firm surface for military wheels to grip.
Bumping, bouncing, they trundled on. At one village, whose houses were strung out along the route like a broken wall, they slowed down, paused for a few minutes. The place was deserted, but by the roadside, at the village trough, a group of women stood washing clothes. With impassive, peasant endurance, stooped over the trough, grimly dunking and scrubbing, they ignored the looming vehicles and the soldiers. One, straightening up to ease her back, caught Joe’s eye and he sketched a salute, attempted a gesture of generalised goodwill.
Up front the first truck coughed into life. As the convoy moved on, liquid mud flung up by the churning wheels splashed the women and their clothes and they cursed, quietly.
Joe wanted to call out, apologise. But he was learning that soldiers were trained to reverse the evolutionary process: to forget the rules of civilised behaviour, falling back into savagery to protect their minds from the dangers of feeling; just as in other ways they protected their bodies from attack. In war there was no time to apologise.
Here and there were glimpses of what this country had been before the war arrived: stone farmhouses sitting on hilltops, pale oxen grazing in grassland, the spears of cypress trees dark against a blue sky. Wheat fields fat with grain. Olive groves where silver leaves – coins minted by sunlight – hung in the branches. The calm south. In that moment of indrawn breath before an attack, the only noise was the twittering of birds and the sound of a stream as it bounced over smooth boulders; a green and yellow landscape where poppies fluttered scarlet among long grass. Then, shattering the silence, tanks and guns crested the horizon and the sky was blotted out by sulphurous fog, the greens and yellows savagely whipped into a palette of mud, and farmhouses reconstructed, as ruins.
Across the open terrain between the woods and the water, they run crablike, in zigzags, knees b
ent, leaping, crouching, dropping when a shell explodes, locating the source, firing back. Stumbling on, through air filled with gunfire, confusion, the brief scream of a man as he dies. Close at hand Joe hears the muffled crump of a mortar; and for a fraction of time there is a sense of suspended action, as in a car crash, a slow motion collision, before the hit: the thunder, the metallic crunch, the smell and sound of battle.
49
No one had told him it wasn’t the enemy you should be afraid of, it was the generals. Your own high command. You could kill the enemy. The generals tell you what to do and you obey them. The generals send you off to die.
And here’s where it happens.
The orders are clear: secure the next stretch of ground, the next hill; silence the artillery, cross the river. Silence the artillery? The river is fast-moving, treacherous. The Germans are on the high ground, concealed, perfectly placed to pick off men up to their armpits in icy water, attempting the insanity of crossing. Blinded with spray, slithering down the banks, fighting the current, he entrusts himself to the churning flood.
How can something as soft, as formless as water hit you with the force of a blow? Water fights dirty, spiteful, no rules. He loses the contest.
The green fills his lungs; the river engulfs him, the fight is over and he sinks into darkness, the chill dulling all pain. He is aware of a vast sorrowful regret. Then he is dragged from the blackness, hauled from the sucking mouth of the riverbed, is face down on the bank, choking, retching, water streaming off him, an unseen figure punching him repeatedly between the shoulders, screaming, ‘Cough, damn you, cough!’
Spewing river water, blinded by mud, Joe is hauled to his feet. He tries to wipe mud from his eyes with mud-caked hands. All around, men are running, yelling, falling, cursing. Smoke envelopes him like a shroud.
He peers, blinking, at his shadowy saviour. ‘Otishi?’
