by Dennis Bock
*
I found out about your mother at the hotel bar in New York. I’ve been trying to think of a better way of telling you about this, but have not been able to, and I’m sorry that I have to tell you now. I think I’ve been trying to protect you. Though you have every right to know the circumstances, it seems I have only been picking away at subtleties, stalling, hoping to wake up and find all of this nothing more than a terrible dream. It is proper and respectful, then, at this point, to be as forthright as possible. All my life revolves in a mysterious circle. At the beginning and the end and in the centre is the story that begins now.
I recall distinctly how my arms and fingers began to tingle and the room shifted slightly forward when I learned of your mother’s death. As a boy I used to love walking through grass tall enough to reach over my head. It was the sensation of being hidden from the world, yet so thoroughly immersed in it. No one for miles around could see me, even from a high point on a hill or rooftop, so connected was I to the earth and its elements. That’s something like the sensation of losing someone. You are never in your life so alive, and so aware of being alive, yet so isolated and abandoned, as when a loved one is taken from you. The planet will move right through you like wind through stalks of grass.
*
There are so many unexplored shadows.
In New York, Pitcairn leaned into the table and said, “Get in touch with the FAI, with the Mujeres Libres, Norman. The war won’t go on forever. Wait till the war is over, then go back there. Go to the orphanage where Kajsa got work for those street girls.” He paused. “They waited.”
I said, “For what?”
“They waited until your daughter was born.”
*
Today I remembered Genesis. I stood in the footprints of Abraham and understood the brutality of the world. It is man’s first and last state. “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” Say what you will, they knew what they were talking about. I marvel sometimes at how spot-on the Good Book really is. The only instinct that rivals our urge to scour this planet with its own blood is this urge to weep.
*
We, too, are eating dog now. I suppose enemies in all the wars of all the ages have shared one another’s basic miseries. It tastes the same in my mouth as it does in theirs. Certainly more binds us together than separates us, isn’t that the point? Isn’t it a fact that it’s only the strength of ideas that wrenches us worlds apart? Yet how strange it is that we’re willing to kill for ideas. In peace-time an idea can be bought and sold with money, argument, dismissal. It can be ignored outright and no one bats an eye. Not in war. How undervalued life becomes out here, and how precious the idea.
Ho has just now presented himself and sits on the upturned trunk, waiting. I have pulled out a couple of new drawings. He seems impressed.
You know, I think he’s beginning to learn something from these drawings. This pleases me.
I am pleased, too, when the peasant farmer turned training nurse learns quickly and asks intelligent questions. Such are my accomplishments now. I am pleased when Ho sits with me, watching me write or flipping through these drawings of mine. I am pleased when only one arm and not two must be amputated, when there are only three deaths and not sixteen. Beyond my most basic needs, I enjoy little physical comfort. I don’t mind this so much, though I am lonely. It seems I have been in training for this life for a long time.
*
It strikes me with brutal force that I don’t know myself nearly as well as a man my age should, especially considering how close I am to death on any given day. I’m forty-nine years old. Isn’t that old enough? How long is a man supposed to wait before he knows for certain that no ray of light will shine from above, that no eternal rest or emptiness will come, that his life was well spent or wasted?
I can say with confidence that my life here is spent well. At least I know that. But on balance? What about everything that preceded my work here? Can one good year make up for so much lost time? I am happy. Is that good enough? I am happy and lonely and not convinced either that I will return to you or that I will not.
Will I have the strength to see that you receive this story?
My physical presence has been diminished somewhat. If you’d known the before and after versions of your father you would be quite shocked, I am sure. I’m very near skeletal and half-deaf and always chilled. These clothes I have brought from home, I noticed just this morning, are now baggy beyond recognition. My teeth ache, my energy’s low and I’ve been battling a deep, persistent cough. Yet on occasion I feel a sense of destiny waiting for me here, though I cannot account for it. If I have time in the mornings I go walking. I enjoy watching the sun come up, and when its orange and yellow light touches the mountains I feel as blessed with purpose as this planet is with beauty. Make some good use of your life, I was told. Well, here I am. In these moments I’m confident that this is what I was born to do, to stand here at the edge of existence in the light of a new day and heal with these hands those who can be healed and commit to the unknown those who cannot. It is as if it’s no longer up to me. My mother, in the end, was probably right. These talents of mine are only on loan.
I think you know Spain was my great disappointment, the death of my idealism and of part of me. But I can assure you there will be no second failure. I have learned my lesson. There are rumours that things again are teetering on the edge in Europe. Will there soon be a time when only the dead enjoy their peace, when one war will follow another, with another after that, and so on, with no end in sight? War might be for your generation as it was for mine, but I certainly hope that is not the case.
Please do not misunderstand. Does it sound as if I’ve given up? I have not. Remember what I said: We do not go down without a fight, we Bethunes. What I see here gives me reason to hope. I am not planning on dying a martyr’s death in China or anywhere else. I’m deeply committed to this struggle, nothing more. I would give my life for it, and might end up doing just that, but I will take no joy in it. I am, I think, too in love with all this Creation out here.
Despite the lice and hunger and the ignorance and poverty and withering solitude, I confess to a devotion stronger than anything I’ve ever known. I even feel privileged for it. I hope you understand what I’m trying to say. Perhaps you think less of me for this life I have taken on. Surely you will feel some resentment. But you can see the good in it, too, can’t you? There isn’t a bone of common sense left unbroken in my body; you’d be right on the money about that, if it’s crossed your mind. But do you remember what I said to your mother that day, that common sense and ideals don’t often go hand in hand? Well, I think that just about sums up my life.
*
This morning Ho came to me with my favourite breakfast. He has finally perfected the boiled egg! The poor boy, how I ride him. How he wants to please me! And the abuse I dole out in return! I made such a fuss when I saw that egg. I suppose I was trying to make it up to him. He was very proud. After a hundred attempts here it was. For six months he has, when in possession of an egg, slaughtered it, so to speak, with his overzealous ways. Perhaps he is a poet, after all. Hapless in the domestic arena, prone to episodes of daydream, lost in those hot-water bubbles.
We commemorated the occasion with a photograph. Before the doorway of my mud-brick house we set up a small knee-high table and my straw-backed chair. I sat and leaned into my egg like a king over his banquet. Ho stood to my left, holding a magazine that had been sitting on the chair I now occupied. Why he picked up a year-old English-language magazine I cannot say. Perhaps this was some small bridge into my life. Perhaps there was more relief on his face than pride.
“This is a memento,” I said. “There, translate. Please tell him this is a perfect egg.” The man with the camera, Mr. Tung, addressed the boy holding the magazine.
&nbs
p; I said, “Tell him I’m leaving. Tell him I’m leaving but that I’ll be back. I’ll be back in six months.”
“Will he go with you?” he said.
“He will not,” I said. “He stays. Let him go back to his village if he likes.”
*
September. I have taken some time off from writing. You will forgive me, I hope. Over the last month we have toured the aid stations in the surrounding villages and instructed the local staff. We travelled by horse and mule, and there was a fair bit of walking, too. My old Japanese animal came in handy, though his torn and battered hooves have seen better days. The poor beast isn’t quite cut out for this terrain of mountain trail and rock slides, and I almost think a lowly burro might be better suited for my purposes.
Yes, of late I have been occupied, mind, spirit and body. There is no rest to be had here. Along with my travels I have also just completed the final draft of a book that will not, alas, provoke literary controversy. It’s called Organization and Technique for Division Field Hospitals in Guerrilla Warfare, and the good Mr. Tung is now working on the translation full bore. When he’s finished it will be printed and widely distributed in under a month by the Regional Government. So you see, busy in body and mind. There simply hasn’t been time. My writing, my surgeries, my teaching at the hospital that was once, not so long ago, the Buddhist temple of this polite and desecrated village, threatened to consume me entirely. (We have displaced a large number of hapless monks, by the way—obsequious, soft and annoying men who are certainly not lacking in time, a remarkably aimless lot.)
But now there is at least a break in my routine, and I can return to these pages. Here I sit in this small grey mud-and-brick town of Shin Pei, so similar to the other villages I’ve occupied over these last twelve or fourteen months, again back at this account of life, war and memory. Patience, please. But the war, the deprivation, the heat, these are factors that send my imagination in all directions. I would be a different man strolling along the Champs-Elysées, with bowler hat and cane. Or bathing at Sunnyside Beach in Toronto. Or boating on that small lake in the Retiro Park. Perhaps one day you will jump into the great Lake Ontario from your father’s shoulders. You, a pink little thing, shrieking with all the world’s delight. How my heart explodes at the thought! The month is September, somewhere around the sixteenth or seventeenth, I think. With the completion of that witless textbook, basic illustrations included, a space now opens before me at this typewriter, a space I may now fill with thoughts of you, and all I can think about is going home, of meeting you, holding your wiggling body up to the sun.
What is happening back there? I am desperate for news. All I see are San Francisco papers and magazines, a year or two old, used by merchants as wrapping for sugar, tea and cakes. And not even political pages but reviews of Frances Farmer and Cary Grant in The Toast of New York and the new Terraplane Coupe automobile. Perhaps one day we shall have such an automobile, you and I, and I shall spirit you about grandly, blowing the horn to the wind.
*
Tonight the world is consumed by these ravenous mountains. So many are waiting to die. The Japanese noose tightens. Colours drain from the courtyard, from these flowers in their clay pots. The night in her mercy erases all evidence of men. Only voices carry through the dark, but now, hushed, they seem more animal than human. Staring at this page, lost in thought, it’s as if I’m looking through my one last window to the world.
*
Last night, Mr. Tung appeared at my door and said, “If you release the boy from your service he will die.”
I stood. “Why do you think that?”
“If he returns to his village, he will die there. Do you know what a House of Consolation is?”
“No,” I said. “Not precisely.”
“One of these places was set up in his town after the Japanese came. The rest of his family was captured, his mother and two sisters. He lived in the hills outside his town for months, waiting for the Japanese to leave, but sneaked back in at night. He knew it well. It was not so difficult. The Japanese soldiers were easy to fool. He knew enough not to venture out under a moonlit sky. By then the enemy believed they owned the town and had grown complacent. Often the boy went to his house. His father was dead, taken away by the Nationalists years before. He never saw any sign that his mother and sisters had been there looking for him, as he was looking for them, but he left notes in case they came, saying that he was safe and not to worry.
“One night he slipped past a store where an old man had sold goods from faraway cities like Shanghai and Sian. Teas and herbs and medicines. But the storefront had been altered. It had been taken over by the Japanese, like everything else in the village. He did not know its purpose. The sign, in Chinese, said: HALL FOR JAPAN-CHINA FRIENDSHIP. He told me he looked in the window. It was very late at night, almost morning, in fact. But if the hall required guards, none were stationed here. He imagined it could not be such an important place. And why would a Friendship Hall require guards? He climbed through a window.
“At first he heard nothing. Then the sound of weeping drew him through two rooms to a large warehouse without windows where the old man was said to have stored a car, but the boy had never seen it. It was very dark in the warehouse and he waited for his eyes to adjust. Before long he could see many women tied to their beds, simple boards covered in straw. The women stretched out on them were of different ages, but mostly young, some younger than the boy. There were twenty-two women in all. The boy’s mother and two sisters occupied the last three beds to the right. He ran to them and kneeled at his mother’s bedside. ‘I am here, I can take you away,’ he said, ‘all of you.’ His mother kissed him and began to weep. She told her son to leave. ‘They will come soon, at first light,’ she said. ‘Any minute now. Go quickly.’ The men would come with red ticket stubs, she told her son, checked for each visit, allowing them to enter here and choose anyone of them. ‘Go, please. You cannot see this.’”
Mr. Tung paused.
“He tried to free her. He struggled with the ropes lashing her wrists, but it was no use. He was too frightened and so young. He was fifteen years old. His younger sister began to cry. His mother shushed her. The other women were quiet. They were straining their heads, watching to see what the boy would do. His mother said, ‘Listen to me. Go now. Go as far away from this war as you can. Do not return for us. They will capture you. They will think nothing of killing you. Go away from this place.’
“He heard the first men enter the front room of the old man’s store. Everyone’s head turned. Their loud boots stomped against the wooden floor. Their two voices were businesslike and unrushed. These were the military keepers of the Friendship Hall preparing for a new day. Soon after the morning meal the soldiers bearing their red tickets would stroll over and strip down to their loincloths and wait patiently for the administrators to take their tickets, check the small box that indicated another visit had been made and then admit them through the last door into the warehouse of women.
“The boy begged his mother to let him help her and his sisters, but she said, ‘You cannot help us. We are already dead.’
“The sound of soldiers walking and talking began to fill the streets. The occupied town was awake now. The loud voices of the men approached. As the door to the warehouse opened, the boy slipped under his mother’s bed and the men began their selection. He remained frozen under his mother’s bed until night fell.”
We sat quietly for some time. Afterward, I let Mr. Tung out the door, then lay down on my cot and stared out into the night.
I will come to you. You shall see.
Envelope Seven
I have just now been studying my hands, which scarcely resemble the ones I started this journey with. They are more skilled, yes, and as steady as they have always been. Determined, yes. But even if they’ve aged into the claws of a monster, how could they send this boy back to certain death?
/> I am exhausted. Sick. My teeth rotten. My eyesight blurred and uncertain. I’m skin and bone, my ribs showing through as clearly as if in an anatomical drawing. If the left ear isn’t ringing with the sound of distant artillery, it is completely silent.
I have been thinking about the boy.
Why am I going back? To find out what is happening. To investigate the dithering and procrastinating ways of spineless bureaucrats in New York and Toronto. To rip off some heads, if I must. I was promised funding that is nowhere to be seen. I have received no word from the China Aid Councilor the American League for Peace and Democracy. Resolutely, I am off to whip up some trouble and give them a piece of my mind. Despite my bony chest I am ready for a fight. In response to my repeated requests for updates on the absent funding I have received not a word, not a postcard, not a kiss blown to the wind. So I mean to go and find out myself. I shall cross to the other side of Shensi and go down on foot to Yan’an, some five hundred miles. I estimate it will take six weeks; then I’ll go on to Chungking and Yunan by way of French Indochina, jump a boat for Hong Kong and buy my way onto a freighter laden with tea and rice bound for Hawaii, the land of my father’s timid embrace. Two weeks later, sometime in late February 1940, I will make landfall in San Francisco. A triumphant return. A walk along the beach, perhaps, a bottle and a pretty girl. All innocent, nothing untoward. That is the least they can afford me, an hour or two to gaze back over the bay at sunset. Perhaps I’ll become drunk on champagne and sleep till noon in clean sheets up to my chin, smothered by a harem of pillows, and enjoy a three o’clock luncheon at the bar in the near presence of beautiful women and their enterprising young men.
