Soldiers in Hiding (24 page)

Now it was my turn to pause. I regretted the call but I had needed to know that the man would be home. His voice had thus far remained even and calm.

“Major Nakamura,” I said. “This is Maki and I am coming to give you the gift of a Christmas goose, the finest I could find.”

There was silence again so I very quickly and lightly let the phone slip back onto its cradle. I had planned the day carefully and knew then that the major would be waiting. I had given him a warning, something that I realized I had wanted to do all along. There had been no fear in the major's voice, no apprehension. When I came out of the bedroom Kazuko was there and told me that the others had already gone outside, were waiting in Milo's car. She had wrapped the goose for me in bright red and green gift paper and had placed it in a large basket that rested at my feet.

 

MILO'S CAR HELD US LIGHTLY, BETTER THAN IT HAD WHEN, so recently, we all drove back to town from the airport. It was not my idea that Ike's entire family, people I had yet to really speak to, should be going, but neither did I feel a need to force them to stay at home. Kazuko, I think, had arranged it all. Though Kazuko spoke no English, in the short time since her brother's arrival, she had managed to befriend her brother's wife, to teach his children the words of endearment she wanted them to use when calling her. This time Junichi and my son and I sat in the front seat of the car. But though there were seven of them in the back they seemed spread out, casual in the postures they chose. There was not the confinement of a first meeting.

When we got to the major's town, one of those small subsections of Tokyo in which many people live, Junichi found the studio van and truck and pulled directly in behind them. The drugstore, Milo told me, was close by, out of sight but just around a corner.

“The men have business in the van for a while,” I said. “Women and children can wait on the sidewalk, but please, not near the entrance to the store.”

Although it was early, townspeople were on the streets. There were no shops opened but there were walkers, and Kazuko and Ike's family had no trouble joining in. They turned away and began a leisurely stroll down toward a Shinto shrine on the corner. They weren't nervous about the show. I was sure they didn't realize what it all might mean.

Once inside the van the men chuckled at each other much as men have always done when women leave them in charge of the hunt. Electronic equipment filled nearly half the van and Junichi's clothing rack, one he'd lined with old studio uniforms, took up much of the rest of the space. Now we were crowded, stood too close to each other, found, with the departure of one half our group, that we could not turn about freely, could not talk in the unrestrained manner that I had been anticipating. Through the van's front window I could see that the cameramen were dressed and ready to go. They looked odd in the uniforms they wore. I hadn't realized that Junichi would designate the cameramen as soldiers too but I understood that my son's chauffeur, like Milo himself, was of an unthreatened age, one for which war was not a possibility. Perhaps this exercise, then, was his chance to imagine what it had all been like, to remember, in a way, the glory of it.

“Each has his own uniform,” Junichi said. “Never mind the rank, they were chosen according to size.”

Junichi was slow and gentle in the way he took the uniforms down and passed them to us, and I could see a certain light shining in his eyes. These uniforms had been washed and pressed
by him, yet they were the uniforms of television soldiers, not of real ones. Where buttons and belts should have been, on these uniforms there were only Velcro strips. One folded one's uniform around oneself and then firmly pressed it into place. It was more like being wrapped up than like putting something on, and I remembered the Christmas goose which we had left in the trunk of Milo's car.

Though there was little space we dressed quickly, letting our morning clothes fall to the floor of the van in a heap. Junichi had said that rank was not of any consequence in this army, but I could not help noticing that both Ike and I, the primary actors, were privates (indeed, that is all we had ever been), while Junichi and Milo were military police. My son's uniform even had a microphone placed in a Velcro band around his waist. The shoulder pads of his uniform were extra large, making him look athletic, and each contained a loudspeaker. Presumably this policeman could be called out during situations where magnification of voice was paramount; when asking television criminals to come out of buildings or when negotiating with the enemy across an expanse of open and hostile land. The
sensei
, alone among us, wore the insignia of an officer. Junichi helped him put them on cor - rectly and the old man smiled. “I won't disappoint you,” he said.

We were dressed, caps in hands, and about to step from the van, when I decided that I should say something about how we would proceed. I didn't want to inhibit my friends but we were not all professionals. I had never seen Ike act (had I?) and I was worried about what things, unexpected, the
sensei
might say.

“We will enter the store with our cameras running,” I told them. “Let us take our lead from what the pharmacist says. If he is hostile we will respond kindly; if he is kind we will raise our questions bluntly.”

No one appeared to be about to comment so I shrugged and passed around a small hand mirror so that they might all look at themselves. When Ike put his cap on his head I felt like greeting him. This was the man I had expected at the airport, the soldier
hidden for so long. The door to the van was opened, but before we stepped to the street, my son twisted the many strands of his long hair under the cap he wore. The effect was phenomenal, but the change did not seem to draw the attention of any of the others. Milo had become my garden visitor of a few nights before. I looked carefully at my son and, though he was unaware of his new role, his young face brought my heart to my throat, my pulse to the very threshold of my eyes. Something was afoot in the outside world, the one not under my control. With his jaw set the way it was, Milo was Jimmy's double and I began to worry a little about what was in store.

Those of us in uniform looked odd on the street but we practiced control, pushing ourselves into the roles of soldiers. The women and children were back and waiting, and when the cameramen saw us they stepped down from the back of the truck, holding their cameras at odd angles, like machine guns. We had decided ahead of time that Ike's children would wait for us outside, either on the street or in the back of the van where they could see and hear everything that would go on. As for Ike's wife, she could do as she pleased. Kazuko had given her a kimono to wear and she looked fine, younger and more reasonable than had been my earlier impression of her.

Ike said something to his children and they quickly went through the van door and closed it behind them. They were well-behaved children and for them, I thought, this new world must be something unfathomable. They had been the children of an ordinary man only a few weeks before. And now they could, no doubt, see us moving across the television monitor. Would their father seem foreign to them as he marched so resolutely away?

“All right,” I said. “Follow the lead of good show business but do not let the man coax you from the point of our visit.”

One of the cameramen moved around the corner in order to take our picture as we approached. Already a small crowd had formed. Onlookers. An audience. The front of Nakamura's drugstore was in worse condition than I had imagined from Milo's
earlier description of it. It was narrow and dark, the sign bearing his name hanging loose and in need of repair. When we arrived at the front door I knocked immediately and then called out. The store, of course, might be closed all day, but I could see lights through the frosted glass. I was about to call again when the door slid away from my hand. An old woman was standing before me. She was dressed very finely, as if about to go out, as if the day were New Year 's Day, not Christmas at all.

“He is not here,” she said. “He told me to greet you and to tell you that he is in the warehouse at the back. If you like I can take you there.”

The old woman spoke passively, so as not to jar the perfect arrangement of her hair. She did not shy from the camera's red eye, nor did she say anything about the clothes we wore. She merely moved to let us know that we were to follow her through the drugstore and toward the back.

Along the aisle of the store were the advertisements Milo had mentioned, but to my eyes they were cracked and faded, many of them out of place or falling down behind the shelves. Nakamura's store was very poorly kept. There was dust on all the bottles, and along the counter top at the back I could see heavy streaks in the uneven light. I could see the imprints of Nakamura's hands where he'd placed them while leaning there over the years. This was a store that had not changed since before the war; it had an old-fashioned layout, a dark and medicinal feel.

We followed the old woman past the counter and through the curtains that separated the store from the living quarters at the back. We walked past the tatami room where the Nakamuras slept, stepping lightly over the small squalor that spilled out into the hallway. We passed a dingy kitchen where they made their food and heated water for tea. Brown, crusted rice lay on the small kitchen table. Bits of it had fallen to the floor and stuck to the soles of our shoes as we passed by. Somehow I had supposed that Nakamura had been successful, that he was affluent. After all, forty years had passed and he had been a school principal
before that. I'd thought of him as successful during a time when Ike and Jimmy and I had still been boys.

As we approached the end of the building, the old lady turned and spoke. “He stays in the warehouse on holidays,” she said. “He doesn't like the inactivity of a day to ourselves.”

Out the back door of the building was a surprisingly large garden which was, in contrast to the rooms we'd just passed through, neat and well manicured. The path we stood upon was made up of hundreds of small round stones and the garden itself contained many shades of fine and cultivated moss. We wanted to fan out, once we had the space, but we stayed on the path. We were soldiers who respected the traditional landscaping of Japan and Nakamura, if in fact he had done the work himself, was truly an expert. His trees were trimmed perfectly and he had devoted a small portion of the garden to a few fine large boulders in a sea of raked gravel. Here was the energy that I had expected would go into his store.

“Father is expecting you,” said the woman. “There. In our warehouse.”

She pointed as she spoke, out the back gate, at a huge building which stood in a field across the narrow alley. What would a pharmacy of such derelict quality need with a warehouse so large? We bowed to the woman and thanked her, but one of the cameramen had knelt by the side of the garden and was focusing his lens deeply into a bed of moss, so we had to wait. Though it was still early in the morning the winter chill had left the air and the sun had risen over the fence that surrounded us. Kazuko and Ike's wife had moved toward the front of our group, letting the soldiers fall in behind them. Kazuko looked at the woman. “A garden such as yours is so rare these days,” she said. “Who took the time to work at it so finely?”

The woman blushed when Kazuko spoke but said, “My husband and I work at it together. Often we kneel beside each other looking for weeds, for the undesirables that might ruin a garden like our own.”

The soldiers kept nonspecific looks on their faces while the women spoke, but the second cameraman let his camera run, taking in everything the women said or did. The warehouse loomed above us, making me feel small. Finally Nakamura's wife said, “Please, he will be growing impatient.” She pulled the thin rope that opened the latch on the back gate and we all stepped through into the alley. The warehouse had previously been used for the storage of sake. There were various markings on the walls and there was an old, crippled wagon in the tall grass beside the door. Nakamura's acumen for gardening did not extend, I could see, so far as the edges of his warehouse. The building itself was made of stone and had a new wooden roof where, cer - tainly, straw had once kept things dry.

“It is a family warehouse,” said Nakamura's wife. “His grandfather used it long before the war. Of course we don't need so much space to store our meager drugs. Father uses it as his retreat now. He has it fixed up just the way he likes it and comes here often to relax and meditate.”

Ike and Milo and the others had been suspended in silence all during our walk through the building and out the back and I remembered regular military patrols. Though we expected action at any time it always came as a surprise. The major's wife pulled a heavy chain on the front of the door, allowing it to swing out until it blocked, partially, the alley between the warehouse and the gate leading to their home. She stood back and bowed in a formal way and spoke once more. “Go now,” she said. “Step inside.”

I had only called the man to insure that he would be home, to insure that he would be present for our questions if not agreeable to answering them. Yet it appeared as though I had given him time to set something up. Was this to be an ambush? Had he his own private army ready to attack us from the rafters?

We passed through the entrance then quickly moved into a crescent, fanning out and crouching. Nakamura's wife closed the big door. “Father,” she said. “You were right. Guests have arrived.”

The entire warehouse, ceiling, walls, and floor, had been painted stark white and there were dozens of high-wattage light bulbs hanging down on six-foot cords from the thirty-foot-high ceiling. The place was built like a theater. There were crates standing freely here and there, and there was a high platform at the back of the building, a stage on which several chairs had been placed.