At the Break of Day (31 page)

So he listened again to the flower girl, whose name was Suko, and she told him that their language could mean different things, that their symbols had many meanings. How the white dots of flowering plum and the red dots of camellia keep the Japanese winter from ever being quite dead. He should travel to one of the unbombed cities, she said, when he was more able, and search for the outward signs of the Japanese spirit which had survived defeat and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The spirit which had sought and found peace.

‘For, Jack-san, you have need of that spirit,’ she said as she lifted each leaf, each petal, and put them into the bag before pushing the trolley from the ward.

Jack did not help her again. He walked down the corridors, into other wards, talking to the men, looking out at the deep snow, sensing the cold which crackled in the air. He had no need of peace. It was the others who struggled and lashed and betrayed.

In March he took a small Japanese cab into the town and the cold was still sharp in the air. He had three weeks’ Rest and Recuperation and would return to a hostel each night, the Sister had said, smiling, unless, of course, he found something more pleasurable to do.

‘Sort yourself out, soldier,’ she said as he stopped and looked back at her. She was Australian, big and kind, but Jack walked away from her and did not look back. There was no room for that sort of pleasure in his life now.

He looked out from the cab windows at the snow which had been pushed from the road and the pavements. He saw the street walkers, the Cadillacs, the Buicks, the American enlisted men who stood in groups on the street corners, chatting to the Japanese girls, kissing them, linking arms. He turned from them.

He paid the cab driver as they pulled up outside the hotel where he was to meet Bill, and was glad that Tom wasn’t here to see this wealth amongst the people who had imprisoned him. Glad that Ollie wasn’t here because there were no new cars available in England.

He climbed the marble steps, nodded to the Japanese bellhop, walked through to the bar. Bill was there, he was drunk, and there was beer on the counter where he had slopped it. There was a glass chandelier above them, soft music playing, nuts and crisps in bowls on the bar. Whisky lined the wall behind the barmen. There was no hint of a war being played out on their doorstep. Was there any hint in England?

‘Let’s eat,’ Jack said, taking Bill’s arm, steering him through the tables where beautiful people sat, staring.

‘Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on?’ Jack said to one girl with blonde hair and a wide mouth sitting with an American Captain. Their hands were linked. They both wore wedding rings.

‘Sure, honey, but not in here,’ she drawled and laughed. ‘And not back in Iowa either.’

Bill lurched and Jack steadied him, walking him through, past the Japanese head waiter towards a spare table. There were flowers on the thick white tablecloth. There was an arrangement carved out of ice up near the stage. A band played a selection of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

They ate a steak which was tender and rare and rice cooked in saffron and Jack didn’t order wine, only water, and watched as Bill ate and then drank, slowly, carefully, and only when his plate was empty did they leave.

Jack drove him back to his room. Put him to bed, sat with him because the boy was laughing, then crying, and it was only when he slept that he returned to his own bed.

The next day he drank beer in the town with Bill, but not much, and then they walked past underwear shops full of GIs buying lingerie for the Japanese girls on their arms. They stopped at a restaurant which smelt of beer and fried fish.

They climbed narrow stairs and sat on large cushions, cross-legged. There were other soldiers there, laughing, drinking. There were geishas with white corn-starched faces and sticky hair who danced with them when they had eaten the fish which the chef had cooked in a deep pan of oil, swishing it round with long chopsticks.

The Sergeant who sat at the end told them that these girls were ‘after the war’ geishas who were not trained but who bought a kimono and pretended for the Americans.

Jack left then. He wanted nothing that the Americans sought or had possessed.

He borrowed a jeep the next afternoon and drove to the address that the Australian sister had given him when he called on her first thing that morning. She had kissed him on the cheek too, saying again, ‘Just sort yourself out.’

As he drove he looked at the paddy fields pressed up against the tarmac, seeing through the thawed and muddy snow that every space had been cultivated, even the tiny gap between the ditch and a filling station where GIs were buying petrol for their jeep which was full of Japanese girls. He remembered Suko saying that there were too many people and not enough land.

There were no straggling copses, no hedges. In Japan, Suko had said, there were only disciplined, trained trees. There was no space for wanton growth. He passed small paper-windowed houses which soon became jammed together as he approached a village which was more like a town. They were jammed too tightly for fields, too tightly even to breathe it seemed. There were people walking, so many people. As the road narrowed and the houses took the light from the street he looked at the piece of paper in his hand. He stopped the jeep. He asked directions of an old man dressed in black, slowly, in English.

The man pointed. ‘Leave jeep. Walk. Ask. Police.’

Jack did, passing tiny shops with paper doors, all with lights which shone through the paper, out into the street. There was a police box on the corner. Jack asked again.

‘Keep on. Don’t turn. It on right.’

Children ran past in quilted coats, shrieking, laughing. Was Lee doing that in the cold of America?

There were restaurants on either side of the narrow alleys he walked along. One opened on to the street, revealing people eating fish at small tables. So many people and they were all so small, like Suko.

He was there now. He stopped but the door was paper. How did he knock? He couldn’t so he called out instead, ‘Suko, it’s Jack.’ He waited, then called again. ‘Suko. It’s Jack. I’ve been rude. I ran away from you. In the ward. I’m sorry. I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’

The door slid back, and Suko was standing there in a kimono, not bobby sox. Her blue-black hair was pulled back. She bowed, three times.

‘Jack-san, this is an honour.’ She stood to one side. ‘Please put your shoes here.’ She pointed to the left of the door.

Jack stopped, looked at her. She wore no shoes. There was a Shinto shrine in the room. He stooped, unlaced his boots, placed them next to hers and entered.

He felt too big, too white. He nodded at the old lady who came forward and bowed. He bowed too. Christ, he was so
big.

They sat on tatami cushions and his ankles hurt as he crossed his legs. Suko laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand.

‘You will eat with us?’

Jack nodded and watched the old woman cut each item carefully. The brazier exuded heat, the charcoal had a sweet smell. She tossed and turned the fish and the vegetables, and Jack could find little to say, but Suko didn’t speak either. They both watched her grandmother.

They ate with chopsticks and Jack was awkward and clumsy but no one laughed and so he tried again and it was good.

‘Perhaps you would come with me tomorrow to find that unbombed town?’ Jack said, but Suko shook her head.

‘No, Jack-san, that is for you alone. But I take you to see Japan. I take you to puppets, to Osaka with its canals. I take you to the theatre.’

Her voice was soft but the harshness was still there. It always would be. Was there still that faint drawl in Rosie’s voice? But what did it matter? She meant nothing to him now.

The next day they drove to Osaka and then along the roads where the piled up snow was melting. Men trudged up and down alleys with wicker baskets on their back. Women passed with babies strapped to their backs. An old battered car passed with Japanese bobbysoxers singing.

What would Tom think?

The next day they watched a puppet show where the Punch and Judy he had remembered from Southend paled into insignificance. These puppets were life-size with their puppeteers alongside, visible. There was no laughter, only tears. No farce, only tragedy, and Jack sat back and waited to be bored. But Suko sat still beside him, her golden skin smooth and pure, and soon the puppets took over the puppeteers and became savage, harsh, too strong, and Jack clenched his hands and believed.

They ate at a restaurant and Suko smiled and nodded and her hands were as delicate with the chopsticks as they had been with the flowers.

As they drove back alongside the fields she told him that in the spring the farmers would pull harrows and the women would dig, then sow. She told him how the farmers had always sold their daughters, in order to have fewer mouths to feed, in order to survive.

‘Where are
your
parents?’ he asked.

‘They were in Nagasaki,’ she said. ‘They did not survive.’

Jack didn’t visit Suko for a week. He didn’t know what to say, what to do, but when he called outside her house again she slid back the door and smiled, took him in, gave him green tea. As they sat cross-legged on the floor he said, ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t come. I didn’t know what to say about your parents.’

Suko nodded. ‘I know. One day you will be able to face pain, even that of others. For now you cannot. You must wait.’ That was all.

They drove to the theatre, where actors took over the role of the puppets, and Jack listened to Suko explaining as they roared and laughed and cried that the message of this play was blind loyalty, whatever cruel and bloody acts this might require.

Jack watched the disembowelling and could not understand the pleasure it gave the audience, the pleasure it gave Suko. He watched the dancing and was glad when they returned to her small house, away from the colour of the pageant, away from the turbulence, and as he drew up to her house he turned and kissed her mouth. It was soft, small, and so was the body he held and stroked, and so was the hand which smoothed his hair and touched his lips and brought feeling back into his life.

‘I’ve only one week left,’ he breathed into her hair.

‘You will come tomorrow and we will love,’ she said.

Suko’s grandmother was not there in the house when he arrived and Suko led him into the room, holding his hand in hers, not kissing him, not allowing him to kiss her.

‘Not yet, Jack-san. You are in Nippon now. You must be slow. You must take time.’

He sat down on the cushions and she smiled and bowed, then left the room, and he watched her move with her short steps, one in front of the other. He watched the neatness of her body and wouldn’t think of Rosie. She was dead to him now. The ache in his heart was anger, not love.

He drank the saki that Suko had left, first one glass and then another, and then another until there was softness in the room and an easing of his body.

It was then she called.

‘Jack-san.’

He rose, his mouth dry, and walked into a small room which was filled with steam from a bath in the centre and the damp heat smothered him, but she was there too, in a white bathrobe, beads of sweat on her face, on her neck, beads which ran down on to her breasts.

She undid his buttons, slipped his clothes from his body, washed him down with soap, her hands gentle, probing, and he wanted her but she kissed his mouth, then pointed towards the bath. He climbed into the water which was almost scalding.

She rubbed his back with soft bark and it was as though there had been no past, there would be no future. There was only the present.

He rose from the water and slid her bathrobe from her shoulders, letting it fall from her body, and the heat he felt was not from the steam, but from within. She was golden, soft and smooth. So small. So very small.

He held her to him, wetting her, kissing her, tasting her sweat, tasting his on her. Then he carried her out into the room where the futon was already laid on the floor, and there, in the heat and smell and the light of the charcoal fire, he made love to her, gently, softly and then with a passion which swept him from the paper house to the cold hillside in Yorkshire, and when he cried he knew why, but he pushed his knowledge away.

He was to spend his last days at Suko’s house, she told him. Her grandmother was not there. She had left because Suko asked her to, she told Jack at dawn as they sipped tea from the cups without handles.

‘For us to be together, Jack-san,’ she said, then set her cup down, took his from him, and they made love again, and again.

Suko worked each morning and wouldn’t stay in the village with him.

‘I make the flowers bring joy. It is my peace, Jack-san,’ she said, her eyes lowered as she stood before him. ‘You go to your friends. You return at night.’

Jack drove again to the theatre, walking over the bridge, looking down into a stream with ice clusters at the edge. He looked back down the path. There were cherry trees.

An old man stopped. ‘In the spring the blossom blooms. Life begins again.’

Jack nodded and made himself walk into the theatre. He sat and listened and shrank from this culture which was Suko’s.

They made love that night and the next and there was nothing that was savage, only everything that was gentle. They had four nights left and he whispered that he would come back when the war was over. He would never leave her.

‘You’re so beautiful.’

Jack held her, feeling her slightness against him, seeing the blackness of her hair against the pillow. She shook her head, then told him of her childhood, of her life with her grandmother as the bombs rained down. She told him of the American who had come with the occupying forces and he stiffened. He could smell the charcoal, feel its heat.

She kissed his mouth. ‘I loved him. He loved me. He went back. He died on a plane which crashed as he landed. I loved him. I will always love him. You love someone. You will always love them. We find comfort with each other, that is all, Jacksan. You will not come back to me.’

He was standing now, standing over her, seeing her golden skin against the futon. Had her American seen her like this?