The sake bar was empty but for the waitress. I took a seat and gave her my order and watched the boys on the street. The tallest one brought a fist up to his mouth and moved his lips. I thought it looked like he was singing, the fist holding an imaginary microphone. He was maybe twelve, thirteen years old. The others were laughing at him—appreciatively, it seemed. The waitress returned with a katakuchi of sake, and I downed a cup fast enough that I could feel the heat of it in my stomach, then another, then a third. I left a handful of scrip on the counter and walked back outside. The tallest kid, the singer, stepped away from the others at my approach.
“How come you never ask me to meet your sister anymore?” I said.
“I ask you hundred times.”
“What about tonight?”
“You meet my sister?”
“Which one’s your sister?”
“Which you want?”
I looked over at the girls. There was one with marcel waves in her hair, holding a cigarette with her wrist cocked. She seemed apart from the others, knees together in a prim and proper way, free hand in her lap.
I pointed and he said, “That my sister.”
He called to her in Japanese. The girl hung the cigarette between her lips and ticked toward us on her heels.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“What name you like?”
I thought about it for a second.
“Fumiko,” I said.
The singer hitched his eyebrows as if surprised that I’d requested a Japanese name, but then he shrugged—he’d heard stranger things—and said, “This lucky day, GI. Her name Fumiko.”
The girl popped a button on her blouse, third from the top, took my hand, and guided it under her shirt, cupped my palm over her breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She closed her eyes, shuddered. She dragged on her cigarette. Her breast was small, her nipple hard in the cold. I could feel her heartbeat, the goosebumps on her skin. We stayed like that for twelve beats of her heart; then I said, “Happy Thanksgiving,” and withdrew my hand and walked away. The singer started in on me in an extravagant mix of English and Japanese, cursing me, telling me he knew I was a waste of time, knew I only buggered other men. I’d gone half a block when he came trotting up behind me.
“You got gum?” he said. “You got chocolate?”
He was all smiles now.
“Not tonight,” I said.
In December, Bunny commenced the preparations for his football game. He transferred three dozen soldiers, all with college football experience, from various assignments in the Pacific to the Special Services branch of his command, divided them into teams, and set them to practicing. He wasn’t after some sandlot deal. He wanted something inspiring, something symbolic. To this end, he chose Hiroshima for the site. “Here occurred the single greatest act of destruction in the history of man,” he said, in one of many press releases on the subject, “and now it will showcase man’s infinite capacity for healing.” The paperwork was a landslide and every page had to be completed on the double, so the OPS was buried. A full company of engineers was assigned to shore up the old stone grandstand at a former equestrian center, to build a scoreboard, bleachers, goalposts. Local children were enlisted to crawl on their hands and knees, picking shards of glass and rubble from the field. Uniforms were designed. Equipment flown in from the states. The Marine Brass Band dispatched. Not a detail overlooked by Bunny. If everything went according to plan, the Tokyo Giants would kick off to the Hiroshima Bears at precisely noon on New Year’s Day, 1947, in the Atom Bowl—so dubbed by Bunny himself.
As a reward for our hard work, all the typists in the OPS were issued a pair of tickets to the game, and because I didn’t want to go alone, because I felt cast off by everything that had happened, I decided to invite Fumiko. As on those other mornings, I lingered in the barracks until the rest of the men were gone, until I saw Fumiko rolling up the street, hair breezing out behind her like a cape. I wasn’t concerned about Captain Embry. Maybe he’d write me up, but that was no big deal.
Two weeks had passed since I last greeted Fumiko on the stairs and I worried, at the sight of her, that invititing her might be a mistake. I slipped by along the railing, intending to let her go about her business, then my heart started pounding and I changed my mind again a few steps farther down. I stopped, blurted, “Have you ever heard of football?” and Fumiko frowned at me over her shoulder. Of course she hadn’t heard of football. It took a few minutes and a muddle of English and Japanese, but I managed to convey the notion that I planned to attend an American sporting event and would be pleased if she would join me. She dropped her eyes, studied her feet. She nodded, just once, crisply, and we arranged to meet at Ueno Station on the morning of the game.
I waited for her in the predawn dark, my thoughts still murky with sleep, the platform teeming with GIs, their voices too loud, too jovial at that hour. I recognized some of the men but didn’t feel like speaking, and everybody kept their distance. It was cold and all the lights were ringed with yellow haze. Bunny had arranged a series of direct trains to Hiroshima for the purpose of shuttling spectators to the game. He wanted to be sure there was a crowd, plenty of witnesses. I’d typed several memos on the subject. The first train had left the night before and ours was to be the last. I was beginning to think Fumiko would stand me up when she appeared in the doorway between the station house and the platform. The first thing I noticed was her coat, heavy wool, motley with patches, but as my eyes traveled the length of her, I saw a few inches of dress below the hem. Red with white polka dots. Nylons smoothing her shins. Namiki’s hand-me-downs.
“Fumiko!”
I waved and pressed toward her through the crowd and she bowed with her hands tucked into her sleeves.
“Thank you very much for this gracious invitation.”
Her English sounded memorized, like she’d been practicing the line.
We found our seats, waited for the ticket agent to come around. Fumiko had the window. With dawn nudging the sky, the city gave way to open fields, a ridge of mountains on the horizon. We trestled over a river, then over it again an hour down the line. This was beautiful country, even dulled by winter. I wanted to give Fumiko a sense of what we were about to see but my Japanese was too rudimentary and her English even worse and there exists no translation for words like quarterback and touchdown. We lapsed into silence while all around us men were jawing and roughhousing and roaming the aisles. Behind me, I heard someone say, “Pass me that there hooch,” and someone else said, “But if you had a thousand dollars?” and up ahead of me, I heard, “Bill Bertelli scored five touchdowns against Syracuse in ’39.”
Just after Kyoto it started snowing, flakes darting like schools of fish outside the windows. We passed through a village untouched by war. Little houses. Chimney smoke. A dog chasing the train. Skinny enough that you could make out his ribs and hipbones and the knobs of his spine, but even so he was really getting after it, tongue hanging out, ears pinned back, his whole body in the chase.
“Fast,” I said, and Fumiko smiled.
“Thank you very much,” she said, “for this gracious invitation.”
Eventually, the train passed into a wintry forest and then out onto the plain around Hiroshima. Fumiko leaned her brow against the window, her breath misting the glass. I took in the scene over her shoulder. The world bulldozed. A scrap of metal. A hunk of concrete. A man alone. Difficult to imagine that anything had ever existed in this place until you noticed the scorched and gutted hulks of buildings big enough to survive the blast rising like weird barnacles on the landscape. Until you noticed that the man was walking on a road, wind lifting snow from the pavement and setting it to dance, and the road he was on linked up with other roads, leading nowhere now. The view was deceptive. The bomb hadn’t done all that damage. Heavy machinery had helped. An effort had been made to scrape away the evidence of destruction, to make way for something new. The bomb got the ball rolling. The wheels of progress had done the rest.
But in that first moment, a hush descended on the train and everybody held their breath.
The silence began to lift as we came into the station. Here was the Red Cross hospital. The noodle shop. Yami-ichi vendors lined up on the street despite the cold. Panpan girls. The buildings were new, wood-frame, temporary-looking. All around us men hooted with laughter and swigged from whiskey-filled canteens and bumped shoulders as they walked. Everybody was trying hard to shake off that first impression. I steered Fumiko along in the stream of bodies, trusting the momentum of the crowd to lead us, and she huddled close against my side.
As we entered the stadium, a soldier manning the gate asked where I was stationed, then handed me a program and a Tokyo Giants pennant. Turned out the teams had been divided between those men assigned to units in and around Tokyo, where the Occupation was concentrated, and those out in the provinces or at sea. The grandstand was full, but we hunted up seats in the bleachers across the field. The crowd was mostly GIs, but there were a fair number of locals present as well, most of them standing in the open spaces beyond either endzone but a few, like Fumiko, were scattered in the stands. Women. The guests of soldiers. Down on the field, the players were stretching, passing the ball around. Calvin Thomas had been selected captain of the Bears, Bill Bertelli of the Giants, and both were allowed to fill out their rosters with players from among the ranks of regular GIs, guys who’d played a little ball in high school, enough of them that the scene had the look of an honest-to-God pregame warm-up. I spotted Bill Bertelli on the bench, smoking a cigarette, wrapped in an army-issue blanket. I started to point him out for Fumiko, but I knew it was no use. Snow wisped down and melted in her hair. The sky was like an old white bowl turned upside down over our heads. We were sitting on the second row from the top of the bleachers and I counted down fourteen rows to the sideline then started to count the heads across the row in front of us, trying to estimate how many people were in the stands, but I was distracted by a murmur running through the crowd. The MacArthurs were making their entrance at the gate, surrounded by officers, dignitaries, the whole entourage ringed with MPs, Bunny in the middle of it all with his pipe clenched between his teeth. I could just make out the top of Arthur’s head. Bunny accompanied his family into the grandstand, kissed his wife, tousled Arthur’s hair, then descended to a podium on the sideline. His speech was later reprinted in half the newspapers in the world.
“I address you today on behalf of those voices forever silenced in the jungles and on the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific and on behalf of the thousands upon thousands who perished in an instant in this place. Make no mistake that a terrible thing happened here—at once the pinnacle of man’s intellectual achievement and his capacity for self-annihilation. The forces of democracy were called upon to make an appalling choice but, in making that choice, obliterated the edifice of tyranny, leaving the world unshadowed, the sun no longer dimmed by oppression. Today, unshackled peoples are tasting the sweetness of freedom, the relief from fear. We stand on the threshold of a new life. What vast panoramas will open before us none can say. They are there, just beyond the horizon, just there, and they are of a magnificence and diversity far beyond the comprehension of anyone present on this occasion. Together, we celebrate not only the dawning of a new year but of a new world, a world without boundaries, a world whose limits will be as broad as the spirit and the imagination of man himself. Of all men. I thank merciful God for giving us the faith and courage to achieve victory and for turning our minds toward lasting peace. I ask Him to watch over those who take the field today, to keep them safe from injury, and to grace this remarkable event with His presence.”
He paused, one beat, two. I glanced at Arthur. Even from this distance, I could see how he was looking at his father, and I thought it must have seemed like all of this had been organized just for him.
In a casual, almost confidential voice, Bunny added, “We all know the Lord loves football. I expect He’s found Himself a seat. If not, somebody please make room.”
Then he saluted the crowd and the Marine Band launched into “Glory Hallelujah” and the players trotted out and suddenly the ball was in the air, the Giants kicking to the Bears in the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, in the occupied nation of Japan.
The game itself went back and forth. Tokyo moved into the lead behind the running of Bill Bertelli. The man was a mule. Most plays it took three or four tacklers to bring him down. In the early going, despite the speech and the pageantry and the frills, the game felt exactly like what it was, an exhibition, the players showing off and having fun, the crowd responding with whistles and applause, but it was obvious Bill Bertelli wanted to win. He lowered his shoulder every time he had the ball and beat a path through the snow, and gradually something began to change. Hiroshima was trailing by two touchdowns at the end of the first quarter but scored on a reverse early in the second, Calvin Thomas arching around behind the line and racing fifty-odd yards to the end zone. They scored again, two possessions later, on a long pass from Dante Pasquali, who’d backed up a Heisman Trophy winner at Notre Dame. And as the clock ticked down the second quarter, I had the sense that each toss sweep was half a step faster than before, the tackles more reckless, the crowd growing more frantic and intense. The bleachers trembled beneath our feet. Late in the half, when Bill Bertelli was upended on a dive over the middle, when he landed on his back just shy of a first down, I found myself leaping from my seat with everybody else and letting loose a howl.
At halftime, the Marine Band marched out onto the field playing “On Wisconsin.” I guess they figured any fight song would do. When they were finished, a chorus of local children sang “God Bless America” in English. Their voices were so sweet, so high and awkward and pure. Fumiko brought a hand up to wipe her eyes and I could see that she’d been crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “Thank you very much for this gracious invitation,” then pushed to her feet and picked her way through the stands, headed for the exit. I started to follow but the second half was about to begin and the game was tied and I didn’t want to miss anything. I told myself that maybe she wanted to be alone.
The GI on my left tapped my ankle with his boot and said, “That’s too bad, buddy.” He’d been tapping my ankle all day long, saying things like, “Get a load of that, buddy,” or “How bout that, buddy,” drawing my attention to certain plays like I wasn’t sitting beside him watching the game myself. He had a stocking cap pulled down low over his brow. The cap made his head look too small for his shoulders.
“What’s too bad?” I said.
“Your girl there.”
“What about her?”
“Well, she left, didn’t she?”
“She’s not my girl,” I said.
“She’s not your girl? Then what’d you bring her for?”
I could feel the pulse thumping in my neck.
“She’s a student of the game,” I said.
The GI coughed up a laugh.
“I’ll bet, buddy. I’ll bet she’s a student of the game.”
When the third quarter ended—Tokyo 21, Hiroshima 14—and Fumiko still hadn’t returned, I trudged off to find her. Through the window of the noodle shop, I could see panpan girls eating and yawning and smoking, gathering themselves, I supposed, for what they hoped would be a post-game rush. Bits of gristle and scraps of paper ticked down the street as if borne along by the roar of the crowd. A few days later, I would read an article about the Atom Bowl in Star & Stripes. The writer described a private named William Wall coming off the bench and scampering for two long touchdown runs to give Hiroshima the victory, and I would wonder if this was the same Willie Wall I’d met so many months before, the one who’d tried to dance with Namiki but was refused. I like to think so but never did find out for sure. I missed the fourth quarter altogether. Fumiko was sitting on a bench outside the train station, lips pale, teeth chattering, eyes red-rimmed. From that distance, the crowd noise was muffled but persistent, like th
e steady murmur of rain. This time, when I asked what was the matter, she leaned into my arms and started crying again, talking fast through her sobs, repeating the word mittomonai, mittomonai, mittomonai, but I didn’t know what that meant so I just held her and told her everything would be all right. Our train was waiting empty at the platform, and I led her on board to get her out of the cold. As soon as we found our seats, Fumiko reached for my zipper. I brushed her hand away but she said, “Thank you very much for this gracious invitation,” and she reached for me a second time and I wasn’t man enough to make her stop. She hiked up her dress, still crying, and I lowered my fly and pushed her back across the row of seats and sank myself between her legs. It didn’t take long. By the time the first few soldiers came trickling back from the game, we were dressed and composed, sitting side by side like nothing at all had happened, neither speaking a word.
Mittomonai translates roughly as indecent or shameful. I looked it up when I got back to the barracks. But I don’t think I understood what Fumiko meant, not right away at least, not until some time had passed. At first and for a long while afterward, I thought she meant the idea of such a celebration at the scene of such a tragedy, but now I think her meaning was more complicated than that.
We returned to Tokyo just after midnight, said our goodbyes on the platform. We hadn’t spoken for hours. I think we understood that this was not the beginning of something but the end.
The following week, she came around to clean the barracks like nothing had changed, and I was glad. One evening, I returned from the OPS to find Clifford’s seppuku sword waiting on my bed, and I knew Fumiko had left it there. A strange alchemy of emotion went surging through me—part sorrow, part guilt, part envy, part gratitude to Fumiko. I began to think that what had happened between us was one of those moments in life that has no explanation whatsoever and would fade into nothing after enough time had passed. Maybe I would remember those few minutes sometimes in the middle of the night, or maybe it would become a story I would tell in some future version of life that I couldn’t begin to imagine now, a war story or the nearest I had to such a thing. But it turned out that I was wrong about all that. What happened on the train had an effect I could never have anticipated.
The Typist Page 10
