Soldiers in Hiding (18 page)

Have I mentioned that twice in the nineteen-fifties and once in the sixties I was voted Entertainer of the Year? My mind was on it then, my whole being aimed at it. Kazuko and I were happy, we were sane and quiet with each other, at least, and we made strides. All during those years, more than thirty of them, we were involved with accumulation. Kazuko maintained a sense of order about our lives while I moved up and down on the popularity polls. And though as a girl Kazuko had been interested in western things, as we grew older she began to change. As if to honor her mother she started wearing kimonos much of the time. Indeed, after her mother's death she made her mother's closet her own, her mother's wardrobe her preferred attire. Yet unlike her mother's, Kazuko's was not the voice of criticism but that of consideration,
of high regard. She has never mentioned the past, not once, after Milo's birth, mentioned his other father. And if Kazuko and I do not speak often, at least we speak well, our conversation free of platitudes. About Kazuko I can say that ever since I became her husband she has been my wife. It is not so much that she loves me, you understand, but that she is simply of me, a part of the whole. It isn't happiness which Kazuko chases but a sense of rhythm, a motion that flows with the rest of her world.

Why then, it must be asked, have I come, alone, to the empty room of my mistress? Surely I knew that she was hiding, waiting within the dark confines of the bar for my passing. Why could I not have stayed with my son or ridden home safely in his limousine? The answer is that some time ago, from below the placid surface of my middle age, I began to anticipate a change. At first it was a remembrance, the floating up of random visions of war, but later it took on more concrete tones. Occasionally I would wake, after initially sleeping soundly, only to find myself unable to return to sleep. And my dreams began to take on a certain cadence. In one, which recurred, I was a small boy hiding in an apple crate at the side of the road. I had a hammer with me in the crate and I would reach out and pound the hammer down upon the toes of passing soldiers, wounding them all. I was terrified that they would catch me but I kept my hammer moving just the same. And yet, as I have said, all during that time I was not an unhappy man. I knew my show was poor but I had not focused, greatly, upon why I wanted it so. And misleading Americans was a mere hobby. No, my real life, up until the time I met Sachiko, was simply this: I worked, I saw my son, I went home to my wife and the accumulations which surrounded us.

In the beginning Sachiko was just another bar girl in a bar I frequented with my colleagues. She was likable because she was not a talker but aside from that I had not taken any special notice of her. And then one evening she mentioned to me that she was from Hiroshima. When she said it I was struck with a curiosity to know more and when I asked if she had been hurt by the
bomb she pulled the sleeves of her kimono back and showed me the beginnings of her scars. How, I asked, had it felt? How clearly, I wanted to know, did she remember it? Her calmness and demure answers only served to awaken in me a deeper urge to see all of what the bomb had done to her body. And soon the soldiers in my dreams gave way to a vision of the war opening up over her city. I saw her running. I heard her cry. I was still awakened in the night, but now, while Kazuko slept so neatly beside me, I began imagining what a sight the girl's body might be. And slowly it became a compulsion. I felt that I was about to take a step that had awaited me in time and that was inevitable. It was the beginning of a thaw, a moment when the distant events of my youth were about to forgo their dormancy. And Sachiko, somehow, was to be the key. Soon I began to pester her, to wait at the bar until everyone else had left, and to make propositions. Sachiko told me, finally, that she would consider the possibility of a liaison, but never that of a one-night stand. So after more than three decades of my knowing only Kazuko, Sachiko and I left the bar one night and made our way to her room. Like all bar girls Sachiko was in need of a sponsor in order to strike out on her own and I had said I would look into this bar called the Kado, one that she had informed me was for sale.

When Sachiko brought me home that first night it was not, of course, to talk business, not to go into the terms of our agreement nor to discuss the kind of clientele the Kado would have. What Sachiko had in mind was the consummation. She took my coat and hung it, an intruder among her gowns. She offered me tea and then sweetly (she was always generous in her business dealings) removed her clothes.

I am sure that Sachiko's scars would not have seemed unpleasant to another man, but when I touched them that first night I was moved in a peculiar way. It was as if the air in the room held some special gas, some drug with an imperceptibly light touch. I let my hand rest across her middle, not my whole hand, really, but the tips of my five fingers. The surface of her scar gave a little,
was not as tight as it looked, not as thick. And though to my eye it was a crust with spurs and sores randomly spotting it, to my hand it was a delicate thing. Sachiko backed away and I could tell by her movement that what I felt she did not feel correspondingly. She did not know whether they touched or not, her wound and those five fingertips of mine.

For a long time we stood that way but finally Sachiko lay down on her bed while I sat cross-legged beside her, gazing into the pattern that her scars made and deciding what to do. I had been obsessed by the girl, obsessed to the point of agreeing to finance a business for her, yet as she cheerfully prepared to fulfill her end of our bargain I was all aquiver, all reticent and cold-handed with nerves. I wanted to tell her that I was American and that it was the war that joined us but she knew the former and the latter would have left us feeling strange. It was not, after all, her body that I wanted but her closeness, my hands upon her scars, an absence of clothing between us.

As I look back on it from this distance of nearly three years I realize that Sachiko was a kind girl. I must have looked scandalous, my gooseflesh rising, my chest cavity heaving, my desire so different from her own. Yet all during our time together she never laughed her easy laugh at me. She never, until recently, denied her presence when I knocked so bravely on the Kado's hard door. Ours was a liaison made of wounds, though hers she wore freely while mine hung like pendants from my old thin neck.

 

Have I said it clearly enough? Until I met Sachiko I had been like a man on a rotisserie turning evenly but thoughtlessly through time. Yet when Sachiko told me of her birth place, when I placed my hands upon her scars and sat staring into them, I felt the crystals of some internal hour glass begin to drain. I knew something was about to take place that would let me continue my real life to its conclusion. And that is what I am about to tell. Just as Sachiko tired of my fingers on her wounds, my hourglass ran out, my period of waiting was over. I stayed the entire night
on Sachiko's bed in a state of wakeful rest. I see now that I was preparing myself. In the morning I walked toward the events I am about to describe easily and with calm.

 

THE COLD DECEMBER MORNING MADE ME FEEL, FOR A while, as though I had had a good night's sleep. When I left Sachiko's room it was very early, yet late enough for light to have swept across the empty streets. It was Sunday and to my surprise it had snowed during the night. Though I had been awake I had not heard the snowflakes fall and as I walked toward a larger street I imagined them landing, one atop the other, in their slow descent. It was as if everything had been prepared as a surprise for me. The marks my shoes made were the only blemish on the fresh new day.

I was beginning to feel a lightness of heart, beginning to realize once again that often the thoughts a man has at night cannot be supported during the optimistic hours of day, when I arrived home to find my entire family outside, standing in front of our house and pacing about with frowns on their faces. Kazuko was stern-looking at the gate and for a moment I thought I was in America and that she was angry at my late arrival. My son's big car was there with Milo holding his mother's elbow and Junichi nervously standing behind him. I thought quickly that someone must have died, but the ancient
sensei
(Yes, he is still alive!) was sitting on a canvas folding chair, a director's chair that I had given him and that he liked to have with him if he went too far from the house. There was no one else whose death could cause such posturing. Had the house burned? Had someone been arrested? They all stood around in overcoats, oblivious to the snow. Milo saw me coming and ran my way.

“Father,” he said, “it is my uncle. He is coming home.”

But Milo had no uncles. My brothers in America knew nothing of me, could not be coming here. They were dead or lost to us. I looked at Kazuko, but Milo spoke again. “It's true,” he said. “I got his photo out to remind you of what he looked like.”

Milo was jumping around in front of me so spastically that I could not get a look, past him, at his mother's face. It was clear, though, that he was trying to contain himself as he held a silver-framed photograph before my eyes. Ike. It was Ike. It was Kazuko's brother Ike.

“Ike is dead,” I said calmly. “I've told you the story. I was there when it happened.”

“We received a call,” said Milo. “If you had been any later we'd have left without you.”

Gradually it came to me then that my son was serious. He was telling me that Kazuko's brother was alive and that he was coming home, would be home that day. I felt, as I stood there staring at all of them, a tingling sensation at the back of my neck. It was a slightly painful, not very pleasant, feeling, like the revitalization of a foot after an hour's dead sleep. This was not what I had expected. I had assumed that any change in my life would come about internally.

“Don't worry,” I said, addressing Kazuko past my son's anxious face. “Ike is dead. I'm sure of it.”

But Milo was talking again, was in mid-sentence before I began to listen to what he said. “…it came sometime late last night,” he told me. “For some reason there was no advance notice at all. We've got to go. It was all I could do to keep them from sending a government car to get us.”

Milo's chauffeur, listening more carefully than any of the rest of us, had the
sensei
in the car and was guiding Kazuko and me toward the back seat before I could protest. The young photograph of Ike was still before my eyes though Milo had already tucked it inside his jacket.

“There is some mistake,” I told them. “Ike was killed very early in the war. He had been disappointed in life and wished it upon himself.”

I looked at Kazuko but she wasn't listening to me. I saw a sternness across her eyes, a certain resolve across her mouth and chin. When last she'd seen her brother she'd been young and
pretty and I wondered if she was worried about what he would think of her now. If Ike were truly alive I imagined that the jungle had left him tough and ageless while the rest of us had grown soft in ordinary time. But surely, if he was alive, he had known that the war was over. What was all the commotion about? He could have walked out anytime and been sent home a hero.

The four of us sat in the back seat, with loyal Junichi in the front alone. As we rode onto the expressway the tea teacher reached over and took my hand. He was looking out across the rows of busy factories and I wondered if what he saw there was rice. Even I could remember when such long billboards had not streaked the horizon. So what would Ike make of it all? In the stories I'd told of him I'd always pictured a young Ike lying still and lifeless among the jungle leaves. I imagined insects living in him as if he'd been dead only hours. And I had never portrayed him as a conventional man. He had been a jazz fan, a road manager for my band. Why then would he, of all soldiers, if he was truly alive, have stayed for so many years in that distant jungle, away from artificial sound?

The tea teacher let go of my hand and laughed, bringing everybody out of themselves. “I was nearly sixty when the war began,” he said. “They wouldn't have taken me even if I'd volunteered.” He leaned up and poked Junichi on the shoulder. “I fought, mind you, but not in that war. I fought against the Russians, who were extremely tough. We beat them but lost to the Americans. That's the way it was but now it seems as though things should have been reversed.”

Junichi smiled at him so the
sensei
kept talking, relieving, for the rest of us, some of the tension of the growing silence. I could tell that among us only my son was not thinking about his uncle for he was looking out the window and bouncing his knee in time with some internal song, some piece of popular music floating through his brain. How had he gotten the news of Ike so early? Kazuko's message must have awaited him upon his return from the bars.

“Look!” Kazuko said. “Airplanes are circling. Will my brother be in one of those? Will he arrive first or will we?” Kazuko was all sisterly in the way she tucked the folds of her kimono into the tight band of her
obi
and when I rolled down my window I could see an airplane coming low out of the southern sky. Indeed, like returning bombers, there were several other airplanes moving around above us. So much had changed since the war. It was impossible that Ike could be alive. Whoever had started the story had perpetrated a cruel hoax. How long, I wondered, would it take us to get back to normal?

When we stopped in front of the international arrival section there were newspapermen and there was television. I got out of the car first and the crowd parted to allow my entry to the building. I could not help imagining Ike sitting above us somewhere, perhaps trying to make small talk with the person next to him. I wondered, had he spoken during the last thirty years? Did he have friends in the jungle? People he was leaving behind?