End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  Several Japanese soldiers—a patrol—came up the street toward him. He bowed, holding the canvas sack he carried under his left arm. The soldiers didn’t acknowledge him, though they might have beaten him up if he hadn’t bowed. They chattered among themselves in Hiroshima dialect much like the Japanese his father spoke. His and Hiroshi’s were a little purer, because they’d studied with a sensei from Tokyo after American school was done.

  Kenzo went past a couple of informal and not quite legal markets in the Oriental part of Honolulu. When the official ration meant hunger and a slow slide toward starvation, people with extra money or things to trade supplemented it when and as they could. Japanese soldiers and sailors sometimes traded in the markets, too. They got better food than civilians, but not a whole lot better. And their higher-ups no doubt got paid under the table to look the other way.

  Once Kenzo got some little distance east of Nuuanu Avenue, there were no more markets. Chinese and Koreans and Japanese ran them. Haoles went to them, but didn’t set up any in their own part of town. Kenzo didn’t understand that, but he’d seen it was true.

  Haoles in Honolulu mostly did their best to pretend nothing had changed since December 7. Houses were still well tended; the white clapboard ones, and the churches built in the same style, seemed more likely to belong to a New England small town than to the tropical Pacific. Lawns were bright green and for the most part short and neat.

  Here and there, vacant lots reminded a passerby that war had touched this place. Almost all the houses that had stood on those lots were gone, scavenged for wood and anything else people thought they could use. More often than not, neighbors to either side kept grass and shrubbery from running wild.

  Mynah birds eyed Kenzo suspiciously as he turned up a curving street not much different from others in the neighborhood. Before December 7, zebra doves would have puttered along the sidewalk, but people were eating them even faster than they bred. Mynahs, at least, had the sense to be suspicious.

  Kenzo walked up a neatly kept entryway to a clapboard house much like its neighbors—a palace compared to the cramped flat where he’d grown up. He knocked on the door. A middle-aged blond woman opened it. “Hello, Mrs. Sundberg,” he said.

  She smiled at him—a slightly nervous smile, but a smile even so. “Hello, Ken,” she answered. “Come on in.” Everyone in school had called him Ken. All haoles everywhere did. His older brother was Hank to them, not Hiroshi. Most Hawaii-born Japanese had an American name to go with the one they’d been given at birth. Except when he was with his father, Kenzo still thought of himself as Ken more often than not. Some local Japanese, though, had dropped those American names like live grenades after Hawaii changed hands.

  When Kenzo did walk inside, the New England feel only got stronger. The overstuffed furniture, the Currier and Ives prints on the walls, and the bricabrac everywhere didn’t go with the palm trees and balmy breezes outside. He handed Mrs. Sundberg the sack. “I brought you this,” he said, as casually as he could.

  She hefted it, then looked inside. Plainly, she didn’t want to, not right there in front of him. Just as plainly, she couldn’t help herself. She was smiling even before she closed the sack. “Thank you very much, Ken,” she said. “That’s one of the nicest dolphins I’ve seen in a long time.”

  Kenzo thought the name a lot of haoles used for mahi-mahi was dumb. It confused the fish with porpoises’ cousins. Telling that to Mrs. Sundberg would have been wasting his breath. He just said, “I hope you like it when you cook it up.”

  “I’m sure we will.” Mrs. Sundberg sounded as if she meant every word of that. No wonder—people who weren’t fishermen or didn’t know fishermen never got fish like that, not these days. She went on, “Let me go put it in the icebox. Elsie will be out in a minute.”

  “Sure,” Kenzo said, and he didn’t smile till Mrs. Sundberg had turned her back. Bringing a good-sized fish every time he came to call on Elsie wasn’t quite a bribe, but it did go a long way toward making her folks happier to see him. The way to their hearts is through their stomachs, he thought. It was no joke, either, not when so many stomachs in Hawaii were growling so loud these days.

  Mrs. Sundberg came out with a glass it her hand. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Ken said again. “Thanks.” He sipped. It was good. Lemonade persisted where so many things had vanished. Hawaii still grew sugar, even if a lot of the cane fields had been turned into rice paddies since the occupation. And the Sundbergs had a lemon tree in their back yard. What else could you do with lemons but fix lemonade?

  “Hi, Ken.” Elsie walked into the living room from the back of the house.

  “Hi.” He could feel his face lighting up when he smiled. He’d known Elsie since they were in elementary school together. They’d been friends and helped each other with homework in high school. She was a nice-looking blonde—not gorgeous, but nice. (She looked a lot like her mother, in fact, though Kenzo never noticed that.) Before the war, she’d been a tiny bit plump. Hardly anybody was plump any more. A double chin now marked not just a collaborator but an important collaborator.

  “I’ll be right back,” Elsie’s mom said. And she was, too, before Kenzo and Elsie could do anything more than smile at each other. “Here you are, sweetie.” She gave Elsie a glass of lemonade, too.

  The longer Elsie and Kenzo stood around drinking lemonade and gabbing with Mrs. Sundberg, the less time they would have by themselves. Elsie’s mother didn’t say that was what she had in mind, but she didn’t have to. Calling her on it would have been rude. Instead, Kenzo and Elsie just drank fast. Elsie handed back her empty glass in nothing flat. “We’ll be off now, Mom.”

  “Have a nice time,” Mrs. Sundberg said gamely.

  Elsie didn’t giggle till they were out of the house. She reached for Kenzo’s hand before he would have reached for hers, before they’d even got to the sidewalk. “My mother,” she said, exasperation and affection mingling in her voice.

  “She’s very nice.” Kenzo knew better than to criticize Mrs. Sundberg. That was Elsie’s job. If he did it, he might make Elsie stick up for her, which was the last thing he wanted. He picked something safer to say: “How have you been?”

  “We’re . . . getting along, one day at a time.” Elsie disappointed him by taking that as a question about her whole family, but he couldn’t do anything except squeeze her hand a little. She went on, “We trade lemons and avocados for whatever we can get to add to the ration. Mom’s always glad when you bring a fish.”

  “I knew that. It’s not like she doesn’t show it,” Kenzo said. Yes, for him praise was safer than blame. If he didn’t bring something good whenever he called on Elsie, how would Mrs. Sundberg look at him? As nothing but a damn Jap? That was his bet.

  They walked to the park at the corner of Wilder and Keeaumoku. It hadn’t been maintained the way most of the lawns had. The grass was tall and shaggy. Weeds and shrubs sprouted here and there. The seat had come off one of the swings; only slightly rusty chains hung down from the bar.

  But it was peaceful and quiet, and a place where Japanese soldiers were unlikely to come. Elsie didn’t like being around them, and Kenzo didn’t see how he could blame her. Some of the things he’d heard . . . He didn’t want to think about that, or about not being able to protect her if trouble started.

  White paint was starting to peel off the benches in the park. In peacetime, somebody would have fixed that up quick as you please. These days, the Honolulu city government, or what was left of it, had more urgent things to worry about. Most of them revolved around trying to persuade the occupiers to be a little less savage, a little less ruthless, than they might have been otherwise.

  A bench creaked when Kenzo and Elsie sat down on it. That wouldn’t have been allowed to happen in better times, either. One of these days, if things didn’t get better, somebody would sit down on it and fall right through when rotting wood gave way. It might not take that long, either. Hawaii was tropi
cal. If things weren’t tended, they went to pieces pretty damn quick.

  “How are you?” Kenzo asked again, this time bearing down on the last word.

  “I don’t even know any more,” Elsie answered. “I was so disappointed when we lost those carriers, I don’t know how to tell you.”

  “You don’t need to. So was I,” Kenzo said.

  “I know. But . . .” Elsie paused, figuring out how to say what she wanted to say without getting him mad. She was considerate enough to do that, which was one of the reasons he liked her. Finally, she said, “Nobody can tell by looking that you don’t like the people who’re in charge now. With me, it’s different.” She patted her short blond hair.

  Kenzo’s laugh was as sour as the lemonade would have been without sugar. “Anybody who looks like me would have said the same thing before December 7.”

  “I didn’t really understand it then. Now I do.” Elsie’s smile only lifted one corner of her mouth. “Nothing like wearing the shoe to show how much it pinches, I guess.”

  “No.” Now Kenzo hesitated for a moment before he decided to add, “There are haole collaborators, too, you know.”

  “Oh, sure. They’re worse than the Japanese ones, if you ask me.” Elsie didn’t even try to hide her venom. “At least people who were born in Japan can think it’s their own country in charge now.” That covered people like Kenzo’s father. It didn’t cover the Hawaii-born Japanese who also backed the occupiers. There were some. But Elsie didn’t mention them, instead returning to whites who kowtowed to the Japanese authorities: “Haoles who suck up like that are just a bunch of traitors. When the Americans do come back, they ought to string ’em up.”

  Such talk might have been easier before the war. Now Kenzo asked, “You’ve seen dead people, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” She nodded and shuddered. Few people on Oahu hadn’t, these days. “Even so, though. They deserve it.”

  “I guess so.” Kenzo wondered how he’d got to talking about killing people with a pretty girl. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he called on Elsie.

  A white-haired lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat against the sun walked slowly through the shabby park. She looked at Elsie and Kenzo, sniffed, and stuck her nose in the air as she walked on.

  “Sour old biddy,” Elsie said.

  “You know her?” Kenzo asked.

  “I’ve seen her. She doesn’t live too far from us.” Elsie’s sniff was a nasty imitation of the old woman’s. “The next thing she likes after the turn of the century will be the first.”

  “Oh. One of those. There are lots of older Japanese people like that, too,” Kenzo said.

  Elsie started to say something. He thought he could guess what it was: that even old Japanese in Hawaii could like the way the war had gone. He would have had a hard time disagreeing with her, too. But she didn’t say it. Instead, very quietly, she started to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said. Kenzo wondered what she meant by it. Everything, probably. “It wasn’t!”

  “I know,” he said. “Hey, I know.” He slipped an arm around her. She clung to him as if he were a life preserver and sobbed into the hollow of his shoulder. “Hey,” Kenzo repeated. “Hey.” It wasn’t really a word, just a noise to show he was there.

  After a while, Elsie gulped a couple of times and raised her head. Her eyes were red. The tears had made her mascara run and scored lines through the powder and rouge on her cheeks. She stared at Kenzo from a distance of about six inches. “Oh, hell,” she said. It was, as far as he could remember, the first time he’d ever heard her swear. She went on, “I must look like a raccoon.”

  He’d only seen pictures of raccoons, and he didn’t care about them one way or the other. “You always look good to me,” he said seriously.

  It was easy enough to say. To say seriously . . . That was something else. She noticed, too—he could tell. Her eyes widened. Then, careless of smeared makeup and runny mascara, she let her eyelids fall. “Ken . . .” she whispered.

  He kissed her. They’d kissed before, but never like this. Her arms were still around him. Now she squeezed him, too. Her lips tasted of salt. That only made them seem sweeter to him. Somewhere up in a tree, a Chinese thrush was singing. For a moment, Kenzo thought it was his own heart.

  The kiss went on and on. Elsie made a little noise, half a purr, half a growl, down deep in her throat. Kenzo opened his eyes. The old haole lady was gone. Nobody seemed to be in the park but the two of them. Emboldened, he squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her sun dress. She made that noise again, louder this time. Her hand came down on his, not to pull it away but to press him to her.

  He set his other hand on her knee, just below the hem of her dress. Her legs drifted apart. But when he started to slide up the warm smoothness of her inner thigh, she gasped and twisted away. “No,” she said. “I mean, we shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Kenzo panted. “Who’s gonna know?”

  “Somebody might nine months from now,” Elsie said. Kenzo didn’t worry about nine months from now. He didn’t worry about nine minutes from now, except about his chances of getting her down on the long grass. But she shook her head. “No,” she repeated. “It wouldn’t be right, and you wouldn’t respect me afterwards.”

  “Sure I would.” Kenzo heard the whine in his own voice. How many men had said the same thing to women over the years? Millions—it had to be millions. How many had meant it? Maybe a few. Do I? he wondered. He wasn’t sure.

  Elsie must have seen as much on his face. Tartly, she said, “If that’s all you want, you can probably get it for a fish down on Hotel Street.”

  Kenzo’s ears heated. “It’s not all I want,” he mumbled, though he couldn’t deny he did want it. If he’d tried, the bulge in his trousers would have given him away.

  He saw her eyeing the bulge, which only made his ears hotter still. But she let him down easy, saying, “Okay, Ken. I believe you. You’re a good friend, too.”

  Too? he wondered. What was that supposed to mean? Did she mostly care about him as a friend? Or, besides caring for him as a friend, did part of her want to lie down on the grass with him? There was a lot of difference between the two—all the difference in the world. And he couldn’t ask. If you had to ask, the answer was always the one you least wanted to hear.

  There were ways to find out besides asking, though. He kissed her again, and she didn’t pull away. But the kiss, while sweet, didn’t feel like bombs going off inside his head. “I wish—” he said, and then stopped.

  “What?” Elsie asked.

  “I wish none of this stuff had happened, but we were going together anyhow,” Kenzo said.

  “That would be pretty good,” Elsie agreed.

  Kenzo wondered if her folks would have let her go out with him if the Japanese hadn’t occupied Hawaii. But he had to admit to himself that maybe he wasn’t being fair. Elsie’s mom and dad had never had any trouble about the two of them studying together. On the other hand, studying and dating were two different things.

  Now he was the one who kissed her with something close to desperation. Elsie gave back what he needed. It wasn’t fire, or not quite. It was fun, but it was reassuring, too.

  He looked at her. “You’re something, you know that?” he said, and then, “I’m glad we’re friends, too.”

  Her face lit up. At least half by accident, he’d said the right thing. “You’re all right, Ken,” she told him.

  “Am I?” he said. But, coming from her, he believed it. From anybody else, he wouldn’t have. He knew that. He grinned—grinned like a fool, probably. “This is an awful nice park, you know that?” he blurted. Elsie nodded, much more seriously than the foolish thought deserved. Then they looked at each other and both started to laugh.

  MINORU GENDA HAD HAD A COT INSTALLED in his office, not far from Iolani Palace. Before he took it over, it had belonged to a U.S. Navy officer. In Japan, it would have been large and luxurious even for a man of flag ran
k. Genda believed the previous occupant was a USN lieutenant. That spoke volumes about the wealth each country enjoyed.

  The cot was U.S. issue, and considerably more comfortable than anything the Japanese military used. Genda smiled to himself. Quite a few Japanese recruits had never slept in a bed with legs till they joined the Army or Navy. He’d come from a good family. He hadn’t had that embarrassment, anyway.

  Thanks to the cot, and to food he had sent in, he didn’t have to go back to his quarters nearly so often as he would have otherwise. That meant he could use the time he would have spent going back and forth for work. If he woke up in the middle of the night—and he often did—he didn’t have to lie there uselessly staring up at the ceiling. He could turn on a lamp and attack the paperwork that never stopped piling up or pore over a map, wondering how the Americans would try to be difficult next.

  At the moment, the Yankees were doing what they could with submarines. They seemed to have stolen an idea from the U-boats that harried shipping in the Atlantic. If they could cut Hawaii off from resupply from Japan, the islands would be much easier to take back.

  They weren’t as good at the job as the Germans. They didn’t have enough boats to send out wolf packs, and their torpedoes left a lot to be desired. But they were doing what they could, and it was plenty to pinch if not to strangle. Sending a few of their subs to the bottom would work wonders for Japanese morale.

  It would—if anyone could figure out how to do it. So far, the Navy hadn’t had much luck, and the Army was starting to grumble. Petty Officer Mizuki’s idea of sending H8Ks up the track of an escaping enemy sub had produced an attack, but no oil slick or wreckage on the surface the next morning. Either the enemy boat got away clean or the anxious pilot had attacked something that wasn’t there. The Americans usually talked too much about their losses, but they weren’t admitting they’d had any lately.

  Genda had been puzzling till nearly midnight over what Japan could do to protect her ships. When he lay down, he looked forward to getting up before sunrise and getting right back to work. No one had ever accused him of not doing everything in his power, and no one ever would.