Soldiers in Hiding (16 page)

I went back into the foyer and asked the cashier if she had something that would work for stubborn knots. But by this time Kazuko and her mother and several others were there so we all went back in, the owner of the bath leading us and carrying a small nutpick in her hands. When she looked at the teacher standing there she seemed surprised. “This is not one of our regular customers,” she said. “ He laid his money on the counter when I was out of the room.”

“This is my wife's tea teacher,” I told her, and Kazuko, looking surprised herself, gave the man a quick bow.

“ I live toward Otori shrine but I have somehow extended my evening walk and now feel the need for a bath,” the teacher told us.

Kazuko's mother bowed to the teacher and took the nutpick from the bath owner. “ Really,” she said, “a knot is a knot.” The teacher bowed to the group and when Kazuko's mother came forward with the pick he thrust his abdomen out again, the knot riding on the sharp edge of his bony hip. “This always happens to me,” he said.

When Kazuko's mother went to work on the knot, the rest of us came close to see what success she was having. The teacher had his elbows pointed out, his old hands turned at angles on his hips. The nutpick kissed the edges of the knot for a while, searching for a place to enter, but being careful not to pull at the threads of the material itself.

“Really,” the teacher said, once or twice.

It is my opinion that Kazuko's mother would have opened the knot, though, of course, the point is academic now, for as she picked so softly the sky was full of sound. There was a roar, like a freight train coming quickly past, and then there was an explosion. We all froze in our positions there. I remember believing that as long as there was no whistle, no bomb would come sliding down its musical scale to harm us. Nevertheless, there was a terrific shaking of the earth that had been quiet for so long. I closed my eyes and waited, but the bath still stood.

“Oh,” said the
sensei
. “ Have you cut it? Will I be forced, from now on, to wear western clothes?”

As he spoke the electricity went out and the women around me started to cry. Through the frosted windows of the bath we could see the patient orange lapping of flames and we could quickly see each other, a little, in its light. During the awful moaning of the women, Milo began to perk up and giggle once again. His hands flapped about in the dark air and he jumped up and down beside me like a happy frog.

The women and the teacher formed a single line and, controlling panic, began to walk slowly out, with me and Milo taking up the rear. We went through the bathhouse and out the double front doors. Though the noise had been deafening, none of the stores around us seemed to have been hit and the orange glow that we'd seen through the window was considerably farther off than we'd first imagined. Though the lights had gone out it was not very dark on the street. People stood in front of their stores, some with buckets in their hands, some pulling their hair and crying. “The bath! The bath water!” they called. “ We must wet down the sides of the buildings!”

It was true; the newspapers had printed a set of rules for dealing with the possibility of fire, and one of them had been to take water from the tubs of the neighborhood baths, to douse the sides of the wooden homes and buildings. The owner of the bath took a step farther forward and said, “ Please. Do not worry about the softness of my
tatami
. Help yourselves. Please.”

Buckets appeared. Neighbors, their faces dark, marched through the bath's light entrance and across the heavy tiles to the tubs. At first the water was too hot and they tried to fill their buckets too full, so there were shouts of pain. And quickly the
tatami
was soaked and torn, the heels of street shoes turning its straight straw lines into twisted sores, like the blooms of an awful flower.

“ Help yourselves,” the bath woman kept saying. “Welcome. Welcome.”

There were a dozen stores on either side of the bath, on either side of the street, and all were wooden. The owner of the bath ran to the back of the building to turn off the fire that heated the water. The store owners and their families were taking the water that they got from the tubs and throwing it as high up the walls of their buildings as they could. Some of the women standing with us began to try to help, bringing the smaller bath buckets out and heaving water all around. Milo and I stood for a moment, in the middle of everything, and then we walked away, down the street toward the oranging sky.

The glow of a fire from a distance does not show the sharpness of its flames. Other people were walking the way we were but they had about them an awkward sense of cheerfulness, not angry that it was Kazuko's spider-faced enemy who'd done this, but rather seeing it as a break in the routine, as something to do in the evening. It was, after all, a neighborhood first.

The bomb had landed only two streets away and when we got to the edge of Meguro-dori, the wide boulevard that cut our section of Tokyo into halves, Kazuko and her mother caught up with us. Her mother's hand was still wrapped tightly around the
sensei
's stubborn
obi
and she was pulling him along, his angle of walking unchanged, his abdomen still forward. We could see the fire plainly now; it was centered in the Buddhist temple on the other side of the street. The teacher took my arm. “ I know that temple,” he said. “ I have done tea there.”

Across the street there were fire fighters positioned everywhere, but they handled the hoses poorly and did not try to keep the crowd back. We crossed quickly and entered the temple garden as casually as we had on our Sunday outing, Kazuko's mother and the
sensei
walking a few meters ahead of Kazuko, Milo, and me. There were many small fires, much of the foliage was burning, but the main building itself was being watered so that the flames on its walls might not reach the roof.

“ Wooden Tokyo has always invited fire,” the
sensei
said. “ It is one of the dilemmas of our way of life.”

Most of the others in the crowd had contented themselves with watching from the safety of the street, and as soon as we were within the temple grounds I began to wish we had done the same. I was hot and perspiring, worried that some accident might befall us. Kazuko's mother and the
sensei
had run to the center of the little bridge that spanned one of the carp ponds and were looking about like tourists, nudging each other and pointing off at parts of the spectacular destruction. By the time we caught up with them dozens of spotted carp were gathered beneath the
bridge, their stupid mouths wide and hungry at the surface of the pond.

“ We should go back,” I said. “ We are getting too close.” But Kazuko's mother was on the tips of her toes, pointing to an area off” the temple grounds, on the temple's far side, where we could see the sway of the flames in the rising wind.

The bridge we stood upon was one of several in the large temple yard, and, as the small fires multiplied around us, we began to lose our sense of direction. Had we stepped upon the bridge from this side or from that? The gathered carp below us looked like lepers and when a bit of fire slid into the pond on the far side they all turned to the hissing.

“Let's go,” I said, but as we stepped from the bridge fire leaped from one to another of a line of ginkgo trees that stretched in front of us. Kazuko took my arm. The trees burned quickly, their orange skirts dancing brightly before falling quietly down. “ Help,” said the
sensei
, surprised and jumping a little. He and Kazuko's mother were both ready to leave then, but each was sure of a different direction.

We could see the great main hall in front of us, so I stopped a moment and tried to concentrate, to discover once again, in which part of the yard we stood. Small fires wandered up the sides of the big building and the smoke pouring through the roof was as thick as velvet. I looked at Milo and saw that he was lulled by the fire, the brightness of it making him hold his eyes nearly closed. I had just come to a decision as to which way we should turn when Kazuko screamed and released the grip she had on my arm. She pointed the fingers of both hands at the temple roof, making me look there just in time to see it blow. Parts of the roof rose like projectiles, and it was as if they were trying to strike back at the Americans, so high into the sky did some parts go. Individual boards turned in the air above us like stiff acrobats, their long wigs waving to the crowd. We were so close we might have been killed by their return to earth, but something in the air made them drop straight back down, landing like deadweights to push
the remaining timbers in on the poor Buddha, whom we could see then, still otherworldly, through the disintegrating walls.

Kazuko moaned beside me, her fingers now pointing at the ground, her body so stiff that I thought she would fall. The
sensei
had his thumbs hooked in his
obi
, but stepped behind Kazuko and began shouting in her ear. “Calm yourself! Calm yourself! The fire is dying!”

Indeed, though the fire was raging, with the bulk of the temple no longer blocking our view, we could see clearly which way we had to go. We could see the patrons of the fire standing all along Meguro-dori, swaying in their summer
yukata
, and we were able to step away from the menacing trees.

With the roof missing even the firemen seemed to have given up, for there was nothing specific left for them to fight. They stood in circles, agreeing among themselves that the fire would not leap, this evening, to some unscorched portion of their shrinking city.

In a moment the
sensei
and I were able to get everyone moving again, slowly back to safety. We took the long way, giving the angry building a wide berth, but when I looked, one last time, in at the Buddha, I saw a little of the color of the fire across its forehead, a little change in its fine expression. The essence of the temple building, bits and pieces of its walls and roof, still stood, and it reminded me of a potter's kiln, so hot did it look in there. Was I mistaken or were the Buddha's lips losing some of their fine pursed quality? Was the Buddha's mouth opening slowly? To form a small circle, a look of slight surprise?

I stopped again and pointed for the others, so that they also could see their Buddha melt, but they were beyond me and had fixed their mad expressions on something more substantial. There before them, on a piece of garden where stones had recently been raked into meditative swirls, the bodies of some of the temple monks were gathered. That they were monks I understood from the remnants of cloth that had been singed to the arms and legs of some, like extra layers of thick protective skin. Kazuko's
mother and the tea teacher stood quietly, their own mouths opened like the Buddha's, their hands moving slowly in the air like deaf-mutes speaking. Surely the monks could have saved themselves, I thought, by running from the fire as they'd recently run from Kazuko's mother and her plaintive shouts. Among the monks the rounder body of the temple master drew me, for he alone was still sitting up. His fat legs were forever crossed, and beside him he held, in one of his charcoal hands, the merest shell of his
shamisen
, its three strings sprung skyward then burned back down, like fuses. There were no expressions on the faces of any of the monks. The fire had given them hideous burns, their noses snipped from them, their mouths gone, no surprise at all on their uniform faces.

Kazuko put her hands to my cheeks, pulled me toward her, and whispered. “Could we go home now? If we stay longer we will lose what ability we have left to understand what is happening to us.”

The firemen had turned their hoses on once again and were running high streams of water onto our Buddha, fixing his new expression for us all to see. His lips, always before so prim, appeared now to be drooling, his jaw, always before so firm, was now slightly askew. It was as if this fire had given him real life and then quickly singed his heart. It was as if he had altered his expression of his own free will.

As we turned to leave, others began streaming across Meguro-dori, for the danger of the fire was less. Around the dead monks the air seemed cooler. Behind us the burnt ginkgo trees were spent and slump-shouldered, heads hung like beggars', thin and ashamed. Kazuko's mother and the tea teacher held hands and walked slowly, and when we got to a certain street we took a shortcut, one we always used when coming from that direction. The shortcut was so nice and familiar that I regained, a little, my feeling of the permanence of things. People were sleeping here, under the cool light of the moon. When we got to our gate we waited for Kazuko's mother and the
sensei
. The night was actually
mild. Across my arms Milo was quiet and smiling. He had opened his eyes again and I could see the fire still burning in them.

 

KAZUKO'S
SENSEI
STAYED AT OUR HOUSE THAT NIGHT and for many nights thereafter. In the morning, when dawn crept in so normally, he told us that he'd had a bomb too, landing somewhere near his home, and that his
obi
knot had been pulled tight by his wandering hands as he walked the streets in search of a place to get clean. When he left his house, he told us, the flames were licking its back side, his storage shed was already gone, and the acrid smell of burning tea was in the air. “ It was not unpleasant,” he said. “The odor of my life was everywhere. All of the neighbors took a moment in their fleeing to put their noses to the wind and remember me.”

During the next weeks the constant humming engines of the enemy planes gave Tokyo its rhythm. When our house was finally burned we were away at the bath, just as Kazuko's mother had always predicted. We had packed a few valuables, Kazuko's tea bowls, a little money, and had buried them in a safe place, under the loose earth at the foot of our fig tree, so we had more than many of the others did, should we ever get back home again. The sky was orange above our house when we left the bath but we'd lost interest in looking at fire and did not return. Instead we headed, without comment, toward where we knew government resettlement buses, sooner or later, would come to take us away.