by Lee Langley
She and Suzuki too found comfort in looking back, to the days when Cho-Cho and Henry sparred light-heartedly about tradition and women’s rights; when all three lived at ease in the glow of affection, even if Suzuki gave more than she received. Now they were equals, two women alone in different ways, warming hands and feet at a tiny charcoal burner.
They had been lucky, so far, in Nagasaki. While other cities large and small were bombed and burned, they had remained virtually untouched. A recent raid on the shipyards and Mitsubishi works had caused alarm: some of the bombs had hit the hospital and medical school.
A few days later Suzuki trotted up the hill to Cho-Cho. Parents were worried: there might be more raids. They were evacuating children, ‘Just in case. Making up groups. I’m taking the girls. Come with us.’
‘I’d rather stay here.’
Cho-Cho’s small, wood-framed house was across the harbour, further away from the docks, and long ago she had constructed a cellar. She promised to use it. If the planes came, she would be safe in her cellar.
There was an odd sense of waiting: perhaps more raids were on the way. Or perhaps talks were going on, somewhere at the centre of power, and decisions were being weighed. Perhaps – a tentative thought – despite the martial exhortations, peace was being sought. How long could they hold out? How many more would be sacrificed?
Meanwhile, she rolled another sheet of paper into her typewriter and began another letter, to join the rest in the embossed metal box on the desk.
‘My dear Sachio . . .’
On 6 August something unimaginable occurred in Hiroshima. She listened, incredulous, to the reports: this was not an air raid, it was an apocalypse. People began arriving in Nagasaki, fleeing the nightmare, their bodies hideously burned, some blinded, others maimed, barely alive. All over the country leaflets, not bombs, fell from the skies: the American president warned the Japanese people, ‘if they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on earth’.
No leaflets were dropped over Nagasaki. Through some bureaucratic error they were not warned. In Nagasaki life went on as usual.
On the morning of 9 August, shortly before 8 a.m., an airraid warning sounded. Cho-Cho prepared to honour her promise to Suzuki and go down to the cellar, but no planes appeared and half an hour later she heard the siren. All Clear.
She watered plants wilting in the intense heat. She tapped out the last page of a letter to Joey and placed it in the metal storage box. Then she washed some clothes, wrung them out and dropped them into an enamel bowl. Outside the house, even with an overcast sky, they would soon dry.
The time was just coming up to eleven. She stood on the threshold for a moment, watching a bird searching without success for worms. Even worms were in short supply now, put to good use in kitchens. She was preparing to hang up a towel when she heard the sound of an approaching plane. Looking up, she saw two bombers – by now everyone could recognise a B-29. They were some way off, and high, possibly on a reconnaissance flight. As a small statement of defiance she decided she would continue to hang up the clothes. If the planes came lower, she would retreat to the cellar.
She threw the towel over the line and glanced back over her shoulder as a dark, bulky shape dropped from the plane like an egg from a hen. There was thunder. A flash that cracked open the sky. The world roared. Went white.
53
One night when they still had the house and the electric kitchen; when they were doing all right, but doubts of another sort encroached, and she and Ben sat talking, Nancy had said, ‘We did the right thing,’ touching his hand, ‘didn’t we, Ben? Joey’s happy here. What sort of life would he have had in that place?’
But Ben’s reply seemed to be part of a different conversation: ‘What must it have been like, for her, knowing nothing of him?’
At the time Nancy had closed her mind to the question. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she knows better. How would it have been for her, knowing Joey was out there in the world, growing up, being changed by it, and knowing nothing of him?
He calls himself Joe now, but to her he is still Joey; when she dreams of him, he is the child she remembers – brighthaired, running across a park or splashing towards her through a puddle, after rain, the sun catching the spray.
She cannot control her dreams, just as she cannot control the spasm of her heart as he comes towards her now off the train, a train disgorging soldiers, the platform crowded with mothers and wives, sweethearts and sisters.
His golden curls have gone, brutally shorn; a fine stubble veils his skull and his frame is thin and hard in the military uniform. She can discern scars, scatterings of imperfection: she is aware that the skin of his face is no longer smooth as a peeled egg, the way she remembers it. There is puckering at his eyes, and marks here and there, the aftermath of the lacerations and random injuries of warfare.
She watched the official homecoming on the newsreel in the local cinema: the music playing and flags flying, the President there in the rain to welcome the boys to Washington as heroes, though Nancy wished it could have been not Truman but Roosevelt, her old fallen idol, who had put boys like these – whole families – behind barbed wire at a time of paranoia. That would have had a satisfying irony.
But it’s over and here he is, with his unit, so few survivors, so many lost comrades, Japanese American bones sown in foreign fields where death and victory were harvested. The depleted 100th and 442nd, two regiments combined, much decorated, renamed the Purple Heart Battalion now, but she sees no pride in his face; only a long tiredness.
He reaches her and they hug, laughing, the way people do when words seem insufficient. She has to rise on tiptoe, stretch her neck to reach his face, and as she holds him close, another moment brushes her, his arms tight around her neck, a small body clinging – ‘This is my mom!’ A moment of frozen time.
Then he releases her, with a grin. ‘Hi, Nance.’ Ben’s name for her. She must stop thinking of him as a child.
She recalls words, heard often at services in church: ‘For with much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ They both have increased knowledge, and in Joey’s face she sees the loss of innocence.
And Joe, too, sees the sorrow that comes with knowledge, in the face she lifts to his.
When they reached the street, he stood on the sidewalk and stared at Louis and Mary’s old house, looked it over, smiling, surprised. In his absence it seemed to have acquired a pleasingly old-fashioned charm.
A passing couple, middle-aged, waved to Nancy from across the street and she waved back, calling out to them that this was her son, Joey, back from the war in Europe. The woman beamed and the man raised his hat, noted the decoration on Joe’s breast and called back what a great job the boys had done.
‘We’re proud of you, son. Welcome home.’
Joe went ahead of Nancy up the stairs – the fifth tread still creaked with that sound like a parrot’s squawk, the banister was ridged with wood-grain under his fingertips the way he remembered. He opened the door to his room: it was dustfree and smelled of wax polish and lavender; all his things in place, smooth white sheets on the bed. He felt a squeezing sensation in his chest, an unaccustomed pricking behind his eyes.
‘You didn’t change a thing.’
He threw his bag on the bed and looked around.
‘Funny, I remember it smaller. I’ve slept in some pretty cramped places since I left here.’
He stretched out on the bed and said again, wonderingly, ‘Nothing’s changed.’
‘You’ve changed,’ she said.
She remembered when he left for the internment camp they embraced and he touched her cheek in a brief gesture of goodbye; smooth fingers, the hand of a boy who spent his days in the classroom or the sunshine, nails clean, skin lightly tanned, faint golden hairs on the back of his wrist. The hand she held in hers now was hard, seemed bigger, the nails ragged, fingers rough. A jagg
ed line like a badly stitched repair ran across the back of his hand, up his arm, a scar where shrapnel had torn the flesh. He too was scarred. For a moment she was unable to speak, swallowing, patting his damaged hand. Finally she asked about France . . .
In the Vosges, he said, like a lecturer offering a statistic, life expectancy was seventeen days . . .
He’s screaming for a stretcher for Otishi, man here needs a stretcher. Through the cacophony of guns and obscenities, shouted commands order him on: dead men don’t get stretchers. The attack continues. Men stumble as they run, treading the pulpy bodies of the fallen underfoot. And the Texans are rescued; the mission is pronounced a success.
‘Tell me about France,’ Nancy said, again. He shook his head. He brushed his hand along the line of books above the bed. ‘Nance, you remember Whitman: “I play not marches for accepted victors only—”.’ She joined in, her voice chiming with his, ‘“I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons”.’
‘Right. But then he says he plays also for the generals. The generals? Assholes like Dahlquist and Mark Clark and MacArthur, who sent men to die while they made notes for their memoirs? March for the generals? Shit.’
He had not intended to burden her with these thoughts.
‘You know what we dreamed of ? Over there? A good cup of coffee.’
‘Coming up,’ she said.
As he released her hand, he saw she was wearing a ring: a broad band of gold delicately chased and enamelled with dark blue. He touched it lightly.
‘I never saw this before.’
‘It was a goodbye present. From a friend.’
‘Nice.’
She went carefully down the steep staircase. When he had rested, returned to normal life, there would be time to talk about his future: the GI Bill gave men the chance to plan, make choices – a privilege the vets never had.
In the kitchen she slipped the ring from her finger and studied the words engraved on the inside: Il buon tempo verrà. The good time will come.
‘The ring is old,’ Charles had told her. ‘I had the words engraved. It’s what Shelley had on his Italian ring.’
She had only once broken their pact of inhabiting a bubble sealed from the world’s woes: when she received the letter from Joey telling her he had enlisted, was on his way to the Front. She was in tears when Charles arrived and he had comforted her, listening while she wept and talked, not only of Joey in the war zone, but of Ben, the beautiful swimmer who drowned in the scummy waters of the Anacostia.
He produced a folded handkerchief, carefully wiping away her tears.
‘We had a march in England a few years ago. Two thousand miles, Jarrow to London; men demanding work. The younger ones are probably at the Front now.’
Charles was rarely direct; his job not spelled out, his explanations oblique, hazy. Things were ‘complicated’ or ‘difficult’ in his life, even his departure to do with ‘things’ that involved the Embassy. Not for discussion. But that day he was different, guiding Nancy through her fears for Joey, reflecting on the problems of a family.
‘When they’re small, you have small worries – scraped knees, bullying at school. When they grow up . . .’ a vague gesture of helpless anxiety.
He had two daughters. ‘One’s a Land Girl – helping with the war effort. The other’s a nurse. Nice girls.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘I don’t think I know them very well.’ A longer silence.
‘Their mother . . .’ Nancy noted it was ‘their mother’ rather than ‘my wife’. ‘I don’t think I know her very well either. It didn’t seem to matter too much; we jog along – jogged along, pretty well. I’d say a lot of marriages are like that, a case of jogging along.’
If she were truthful, she and Ben had pretty much jogged along, the brightness of young love tarnished by events.
Charles handed her the tiny box the day he left. He said, ‘Read the words. Trust the words.’
Il buon tempo verrà. He could have meant the good times would come when Joey was home from the war. Or he could have meant something quite different.
She made coffee and carried it up the stairs.
Next morning, early, Joe walked down the street and retraced the neighbourhood of his memories. The shadow of a tree that fell across the sidewalk, where as a boy he had jumped the phantom log. The corner where two houses met, their rooftops jostling in ungainly angles, unplanned rivalry. He used to imagine them quarrelling, like Disney cartoon houses, in high, sharp voices, all scowls and sharp elbows.
People passed him, on their way to work, preoccupied, hurrying. The number of cars surprised him, all so shiny. This was a place where the earth was masked by tarmac and concrete. No mud here; even the flower beds looked sifted and clean, composed of some salubrious material. In the morning sunlight plants glowed, washed down by yesterday’s rain. Everything looked fresh, unbroken, new. He walked on, easy-paced.
Now and then he came to a halt, stared at a shopfront or a house window, frowning. At an intersection he passed a news-stand and a front-page story caught his eye. He paused to read a few lines before buying the paper. Then he stood by the door and read the story, slowly, to the end. When he finished, he turned back, away from home, heading for the old town.
The slam of the front door shook the building. He strode into the kitchen, startling Nancy.
‘Joey?’
He flung down the newspaper with a force that sent it sliding across the tabletop to land on the floor at her feet. She stooped and picked it up.
‘What the flaming fuck—’ He took a deep breath.
‘Sorry.’
His face was pale, the bones standing out sharply.
‘What in hell is going on here? There are signs in shops – “No Japs served” and rooming-house windows with “Move on Japs”. The newspaper says State House representatives are trying to stop Japanese Americans from returning to Oregon.’ He paused; slowed down.
‘I took a walk to the river, to Japan town—’
‘Oh!’ Nancy broke in, ‘it’s not—’
‘I know: it has a different name now. I called on a couple of families I knew from Tule. One of the sons was with me in France. Their homes had been vandalised, their stuff stolen, smashed up. One of them found their cat hanging from a tree by the front door. Neighbours asked when they planned to move on.’
Distraught, Nancy said, ‘It’s not just this town, Joey. People read the stories – the papers were full of how the Japanese treated their prisoners of war: the torture, the brutality, death marches, executions. There were pictures of a Japanese soldier about to cut off an American boy’s head with a Samurai sword. That’s what being Japanese means to Americans.’
‘But not these Japanese; they’d spent their lives here. Why do you think the boys from the camps volunteered? To defend an America that says “No Japs served?”’
‘I promise you it’s only a few people who feel like that. A minority.’
‘But not an alien minority.’
He had reflected more than once on why his battalion had been chosen to rescue the trapped Texans in France.
‘I thought, maybe they sent us in because they knew we wouldn’t let anything stop us. They were betting on the banzai crap. But now I’m thinking maybe we were sent in because if we failed, if we all bit the dust, well, hell, it’s just a bunch of Japs, right . . .’
His head was throbbing, his mouth was dry. He filled a glass with water and drank thirstily. He put down the empty glass and looked around the kitchen as though taking an inventory, touching a mug, a cooking pan, ordinary objects that offered the safety of familiarity. A fork was a fork; these things did not change.
‘I didn’t know I was Japanese until Roosevelt told me I was. But in Italy I felt things were different: we were all GIs. together, no them and us. We were part of the whole.’
‘You’re heroes.’
‘But they don’t serve us in the corner store. Forget the Purple Hearts. What’s a hero? Someone who goes in even if he kn
ows he’ll be killed? Isn’t that a bit Japanese? A bit kamikaze?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s courage. Don’t put yourself down.’
She noticed he was washing his hands, vigorously, under the running tap, rubbing hard, as though to scrub off the skin. He reached for a kitchen knife, tested the sharp tip against the flesh of his hand, pressing it till the blood welled. He dropped the knife on the worktop and let cold water run over his hand, dripping red into the white sink.
‘My guts are twisting up, Nance, I get the feeling I’m being pulled apart. There was a time in history when men were disembowelled, hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, horses dragged bits of their bodies in different directions . . .
‘I’m an American, right? I’m also one of those who won’t be served in the hardware store down the street; there’s no room for my sort in those rooming houses with the sign in the window.’
He opened the refrigerator door. The brightly lit interior was filled with food: meat, tomatoes, bread, a jar of jelly, peanut butter. Shelves of plenty. Distractedly he opened and closed the door several times.
‘Remember when I was a kid I used to ask: does the light go out when you close the door? You used to tell me it did, but I was never sure. People smile at you but when they close their doors do they switch off the smile? You can never know.
‘I should never have volunteered. The Stars and Stripes crap? I should’ve stuck in Tule, behind the barbed wire. Where aliens belong. Some of the guys in the battalion who came home early, they couldn’t see their folks right away, you know why? Because their parents were still in detention.’
In the silence he listened to the sound of car wheels going past, the swishing of tyres on wet tarmac.
They had not spoken of Cho-Cho, skirting the subject as though avoiding an open wound. Now he was casting about for words.
‘Nagasaki,’ he began. When the troops first heard about Hiroshima they were puzzled. A bomb. One bomb? They had dropped thousands on Tokyo. Then it became clear that this was not just a bomb, it was a weapon like no other. The statistics were presented reassuringly: they spoke of factories flattened, steelworks, railroads destroyed; the enemy’s war machine obliterated.
