Butterfly's Shadow
Page 25
‘Christ, man, you took your time with the breathing!’
Water dribbles from Joe’s mouth and nostrils. His lungs stab and he doubles over, coughing liquid mud, tries to draw breath.
‘What happened?’
‘Shell. Too close.’
They stagger together up the slope towards the trees, Otishi hauling Joe with him. They are clumsy, climbing with absurdly slow, exaggerated care; boots weighed down with a cladding of yellow mud that covers them head to foot; life-size clay maquettes, only eyes and dark, stretched mouths revealing their humanity.
Later, after dark, they slump alongside the others, waiting for the next morning’s push.
Joe says, blearily, ‘Otishi, you don’t do action stuff. You can’t even swim. You just read fucking history. How come—’
‘Don’t knock history. It teaches you things.’
‘How to save a drowning man?’
‘Right. Bonaparte’s men bent bayonets into hooks to fish enemy bodies out of the Nile—’
‘You reckoned if the French could fish—’
‘Listen, it worked. To a point. I couldn’t bend the goddam bayonet, I kind of harpooned you. So did your life pass before your eyes like they say?’
‘Just water.’
For a moment Joe feels again the force of it crushing his lungs. The huge sadness.
‘My father drowned.’
He wants to say ‘You saved my life’, which would sound corny. Moreover it is obvious.
‘You were pretty quick there.’
‘Just practical. There’s nothing theoretical about war; you do what you have to do. And you do it. Fast. That’s Napoleon again.’ Through the mud spattering his face, Otishi’s eyes gleam dark, his teeth white.
In training camp they were taught the nine principles of war: objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, manoeuvre, unity of command, security, surprise and simplicity.
Okay in theory. But as Joe was learning, war is not theoretical. War is a bullet that tears through your arm, the shriek of gunfire blasting your ears, the smell of rotting flesh. Trench foot.
Through the fog, the unrelenting rain, men screamed aloud with the agony of every step. Ankle-deep in quagmire in boots that leaked and split, there was no way to protect infected feet. The burning, the swelling were warnings that came too late: first the deadly numbing, then the real pain, feet turning blue, toes weeping like burst blisters. With luck and dry socks, the swelling subsided. If not, toes twisted like evil growths, spongy and leprous, came away as a man wrenched off his boot. There were amputations. Joe’s toes were now stabbing, burning. The swelling would follow. Government-issue combat boots were not made for this bone-chilling, amphibious world.
When Joe stumbled over the dead German soldier half buried in a crater, what he saw first was the dark blood, the tumble of guts. Then he saw the boots. Strong leather. Hobnailed soles. Waterproof. Joe measured his foot against the dead man’s, squatted and fumbled at laces strong as twine. Inside the boots the dead man’s socks were dry; an impossible luxury. Off with his soaking footwear; on with the German’s socks and boots, enclosing his feet like a thick skin, supporting, protecting. Unashamed, he felt grateful to the body he had robbed.
He scrambled to his feet, quickening his pace to catch up with the others. Within the boots, he flexed his dry toes.
To Nancy he wrote, I can’t tell you where we are; actually I don’t know where we are. Unfortunately, the enemy knows . . . It’s raining. It’s always raining . . .’
*
Afterwards he does the calculations: how much time to obliterate a town; how many bombs to smash a monastery; how long it takes to lose fifty thousand men and at the end gain nothing but the knowledge that it was never necessary? At the time, there is no time, just the blind reflex to obey the order. Cassino is pounded into ruin, and high above him Joe sees people fleeing as the monastery dissolves into a torrent of crumbling walls, a stone cascade showering the troops below. Only later, as German paratroopers float down to occupy the shell, does the full irony become clear: they have succeeded in turning a place of sanctuary shielding a couple of hundred civilians into the impregnable fortress the generals had believed it to be.
‘Whoever wins,’ Otishi commented, ‘this will be in a history book one day.’
‘You could write it.’
‘You kidding? That’s for the generals.’
The generals give orders. Dog-face soldiers obey, hurling themselves into wall after wall of fire. Acronyms multiply; each day a new SNAFU. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Plus FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. Cassino was a FUBAR. The generals themselves inspire a rich, multilingual litany of curses. Gurkhas, Poles, Anzacs, Tommies, Yanks – all have a special word for the gold-braid assholes, the guys who write the memoirs, the bastards.
The Nisei’s bastard – kisama – was Mark Clark, who sent men to their deaths; the kisama who chose the wrong river to cross and the wrong day to cross it.
‘What did we do?’ Joe hears a mutter from the GI next to him, face down in a foxhole, ‘to deserve this shit-head?’
Half blinded by mud, they crawl from the foxhole and press on. Jogging clumsily over unexpectedly soft turf, Joe stumbles and glances down: he is trampling the prostrate bodies of dead GIs from the line ahead of him. This is the first time, though not the last, that he throws up. Doubled over, the bile filling his mouth, he retches and runs on, knees bent, dead men underfoot.
Spilled from ripped knapsacks, strewn around the dead like sacrificial offerings, are snapshots, odd socks, bibles, razors, letters from home, all beaten into the ground by the remorseless rain.
How much ground did they cover? A mile? A few yards? Inches? How long would it take to cross the next river, advancing, retreating, aiming and ducking fire as they waded through the swollen water? Nobody knew or cared how far the next hill was – only how long it cost to take it.
In this often perpendicular landscape, wheels were useless. Mules were brought in to carry food, water, guns, ammunition, the wounded. The dead. While the generals gave orders, the officers took their chances with the men, and there came a day when every commander but one of the regiment was dead or injured.
At sunset, following a day of doomed sorties, Joe saw, far off, a line of mules plodding back to mountain base with what appeared to be sacks of grain strung across the saddles. As they came nearer, he saw the mules were laden with bodies. The mules waited, rain dripping off lowered heads, while dead officers were hauled off the saddles and laid out side by side, a human raft floating on the waterlogged earth. Tired men stood silently by the bodies as though waiting for a service to begin. In due course there would be official recognition; pomp and ceremony. This was the real thing.
One GI crouched awkwardly to pat a sodden shoulder, another touched a dead officer’s sleeve. There were muttered obscenities: inarticulate farewells. Joe bent to straighten the torn jacket of a young lieutenant, a Bostonian who had told him yesterday that he planned to come back one day, to see this country properly.
*
It was August when they crossed the Arno, not far from Florence, and coming up over a rise Otishi slapped Joe’s sleeve and pointed out a distant shaft of pale stone, slender arches catching the sun: the leaning tower of Pisa. Nobody slackened pace: Pisa, like Florence, was just another dot on the map.
On the outskirts of town villas sheltered, secluded behind walls and iron gates, some set in stone-flagged courtyards. The path of war had swerved here and the street was undamaged. The houses stood shabby and neglected, stucco flaking, shutters hanging crooked from broken hinges. A terracotta urn on a gatepost was cracked, spilling dried earth, dead roots. Evidence of diminished splendour and privilege.
As the convoy penetrated further into the narrow streets, the urban terracing, the damage was all around them: entire houses crushed to rubble, women in dusty black silently picking over the debris, lining up at a wrecked shopfront for bread. Massive walls that had resisted dest
ruction for centuries lay crumbled into chunks of stone. A landscape of defeat.
Occasionally they paused at a town where sunshine and Italian girls in summer frocks offered a brief reunion with what seemed like ordinary life. Starving, selling anything that might buy food, survivors welcomed the uniforms, high-born matrons grimly moonlighting as tarts, with a pre-penetration aperitivo for officers. GIs got young girls who smiled, offering rounded bodies, a momentary forgetting, a quick fuck in a back room or the park in return for nylons, spare rations, cigarettes and gratitude. Sometimes they got dollars.
There were promises: ‘When this is over, Rosina, I’m coming back to find you.’
The definition of comfort can change with circumstances: a flimsy metal seat on the pavement, a rusty café table and a glass of sour wine could feel like luxury.
Joe closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun sink into his bones. His ribs ached, his feet hurt and there was an unspecific soreness in his guts. He flexed unwilling muscles and stretched out his legs across the pavement, allowed himself to let go, to drift for a moment; but drifting was bad, it allowed unwelcome thoughts to surface. Passing a once-elegant villa earlier, Joe had glimpsed a room empty of furniture, an electric cable hanging from the ceiling where a chandelier had spread its crystal wings. At the window a woman stared, unseeing, into the street. A bare room, a woman alone, waiting. Elsewhere, in another place, were waiting women being ordered to defend their country against the approaching Americans? Arming themselves, barricading their homes – vulnerable structures built not of stone and brick, but of more fragile materials. How do you barricade a structure of paper and wood?
He took another gulp of wine. Not far from vinegar, it still warmed his guts; it gave comfort.
50
Cho-Cho is often hungry, but she is also grateful: at least she is not in Tokyo, where American B-29s have efficiently fire-bombed the city to rubble. Here plants grow and birds sing. But she is hungry, a constant condition.
There is a haiku she recalls with wry nostalgia, written by a woman nearly two hundred years before, but some things don’t change – for example, yearnings in a time of shortage.
Once again to be in a world
of white rice.
The fragrance of the plums.
White rice! A memory. These days they get by on barley and potatoes; weeds. They gather and grind acorns.
Official bulletins told them sawdust could usefully supplement flour in a proportion of one to four when making dumplings. Once again they were eating silkworms, harvesting nourishment from sea grasses, trapping snails, frogs, grasshoppers. Fish had vanished. Eggs were but a memory, the hens too scrawny and listless to lay, until they went under the knife, giving up flesh, blood, gizzards, bones. Some said feathers could be stewed.
The government had been bullying them for years. Ministerial orders littered the landscape the way over-ripe fruit had once dropped from trees: one edict prohibited the production and sale of luxury goods, and overnight a whole range of what made life bearable for the well-to-do vanished from the shelves. Cho-Cho folded up her fine silk garments, stroking each one gently as if soothing a child before turning out the light. Then she put them away in a trunk, along with her glove-soft shoes, wrapped in tissue.
‘Oh, Suzuki,’ she sighed, ‘my beautiful French shoes!’
How could she continue to wear them now? Clogs had been designated ‘patriotic’; nothing else was seen on the street as people patriotically clacked their way to work on wooden platforms.
She missed her elegant footwear, the sensuous pleasure of fine fabric touching her skin; she felt that in some way she was being punished. Her sense of despondency shocked her: was she then so trivial, so frivolous, that mere lack of luxury was so important? She saw that Suzuki did not grumble; she had not complained even when widowed, but then Suzuki was always so busy, finding creative ways to extend the life of clothes, mending, patching, passing down garments from older to younger siblings; cooking or cleaning or worrying about one or other of her children. Without such distractions, Cho-Cho had only herself to think about, and she saw that solipsism was not comforting at a time like this.
Worse was to come. Offering restaurant menus above a strictly fixed price could land you in jail; it now cost her more to provide a meal than she could charge a customer. She closed the restaurant.
As the weather sharpened into wintry cold the Nagasaki black market cost of coal rose to almost 50 per cent above the official price. ‘And the problem,’ as Suzuki pointed out, ‘is that you can’t find any at the official price.’
Above all, Cho-Cho missed Henry, missed their talks, their arguments, the letters he received from America that had linked her vicariously to her child. After Henry died, Oregon had drifted away like a floating island, not quite real. There had been a note from the American woman, the blonde wife, widow, stepmother. She seemed friendly and Cho-Cho had replied, but then came Pearl Harbor, and information vanished into a void – personal information, anyway. Official information was plentiful: official broadcasts celebrating victories by the Imperial forces and exhorting the populace to work harder, sacrifice more for the glory of the Emperor. There were also detailed accounts of terrible losses by the Americans, and although Cho-Cho knew that America was far from the war zone, she also knew that armies swallowed up young men from farms and peaceful cities and spat them out on to the battlefield. She found herself praying to the Methodist God as well as to Shinto Kami without much faith in either.
She was teaching again, instructing the young, running air raid drills, she was a shis, a woman getting by in a man’s world, but a man’s world was for getting killed in: a boy was safe only until the qualifying birthday, then came military service. She had become one of a grim sisterhood of women whose sons were of an age to take their place in the firing line.
She knew what an American soldier looked like: steel helmet, gun and bayonet, the snarling caricature of the propaganda posters. But she had not learned to hate the enemy: behind the gun, beneath the helmet what she saw was a child with blue eyes. She told herself he would be safer as an American soldier; Henry’s books had taught her how the West valued human life; the army would care about its men. A Japanese soldier did not exist as an individual, simply as part of a patriotic force. But any soldier’s fate was finely balanced: death or survival, the choice not his to make.
Where would he be sent to face warfare? If he survived, would she see him one day, walking up the path from the harbour, golden and American, like his father?
51
Trundled in boxcars from one combat zone to another, expendable pawns, with new recruits arriving daily to step into dead men’s shoes, Nisei GIs were not long-lived.
Now, heading north-west on foot, they seemed always to be climbing, clawing their way through a landscape rising before them like an endless cliff, slogging through France.
He was learning that maps are instruments of time. It took three days to cross a river, storm a hill. It took a week to battle their way to and claim the dot on the map which was once a town and was now a place of ruins.
They took La Bruyères, street by street, house by house, room by room. Booby-trapped doors, snipers, mines, the smoke and screech of mortars, crack of gunfire. Men fell as they advanced, gaining a yard, losing it . . . When at nightfall they collapsed, exhausted, Joe saw how many had been lost; some who had become friends lying in the mud alongside fallen Germans, uniforms indistinguishable, caked with clay, dark with blood.
They squatted and slumped, the limping remnants of the 100th and the 442nd snatching a breathing space. The hutmates of Tule were scattered: Kazuo could be at the bottom of a ditch somewhere along the way; Ichir was in a field hospital the last time Joe heard.
Pausing to gulp water or chew a soggy chocolate bar, the men swapped bleak jokes, checking the current acceptable level of ‘vacation wound’, an injury bad enough to get a man away from the front.
‘How about death?’
But the gold braid had ways of trumping the blackest joke. Dragging themselves to attention, the men got the message: a battalion of Texas Guard was trapped in the forest nine miles to the east, without food and water, surrounded by Germans.
The general’s words were read out, loud and clear.
‘Two previous rescue attempts have failed.’ Then the punch-line. The battalion was to be rescued, ‘at all costs’.
At all costs?
Otishi murmured, ‘When a Spartan soldier was issued with a shield he was ordered to come back with it or on it.’
Joe glanced around. ‘No shields.’
‘Same order.’
It took five days and eight hundred casualties to rescue two hundred and eleven men.
The Germans were dug in, camouflaged, waiting. The 442nd hacked its way through frozen undergrowth thick as jungle; machine-gun fire burned through the yellow haze. Progress was yard by yard, snaking forward, belly in the mud. Cresting a low ridge they were exposed for a fatal moment and the mortars erupted. Joe was sent flying by the blast. He rolled, grabbing at exposed roots, undergrowth. Up ahead, through the swirling dust of the explosion, a bloody uniform sprawled, twisted. He crawled closer, chanting the front-line mantra, ‘You’re okay kid, you’ll be okay.’ Crouching to drag the wounded man out of the line of fire, he peered into the unconscious, dirt-caked face and saw it was Otishi.
Hold on, you’ll be okay kid, hold on; shielding the shattered body with his own, yelling for a stretcher.
He tries to lift the sodden body and Jesus Christ, oh Christ – Otishi’s helmet tilts and his brains spill down his face and over Joe’s hands.
52
Before the war Cho-Cho had cajoled and bullied girls to emerge from their invisibility, take charge of their own lives. She was aware that today’s women, sweating in coal mines, steel mills and factories to support the war, looked back yearningly to those inactive years.