The Souvenir (19 page)

A nine-year-old in rags, his scrawny brother on his back, darted among the cars with his hand outstretched. Lloyd pressed a twentypeso bill into it, and the boy retreated to the shade of the crosswalk. Maybe it bought him a few minutes' rest. Another boy working the intersection dragged his withered leg. A third beggar had no legs at all, just a crumbled stump of a torso. Acupuncture needles adorned his ears. Manila was a carnival of pain.

On the bay side of the boulevard, families rested under the scraggly coconut palms. People were swimming in the murky water. We passed several horse-drawn carriages, intended for tourists. The ponies looked half-dead. They shifted their weight from front foot to back, their shaggy heads held low. The driver ran after us: Did we want a ride? No? Maybe later? No? How long were we staying? At what hotel?

We wandered into the old Malate cathedral, a colonial leftover, just before Sunday morning mass. Portable fans purred away, stirring the air around the parishioners. Doleful statues of suffering Christ watched over them. I was relieved to sit down and rest on a hard wooden pew in the peaceful sanctuary. Sparrows flitted through the interior, perching on the unlit chandeliers. A plastic bag floated down the aisle, propelled by the breeze. I watched the neatly dressed families: young mothers and fathers with four, five
young children each, each child's hair combed and braided. The priest announced in an Irish accent, “Christ is alive and Christ loves us.” A neon sign by the altar—“Jesus Loves You”—blinked on and off.

In Japan, after Lloyd became ill, I had taken the lead, making sure he got sleep, procuring hot drinks, coercing him into seeing the sights, making sure we got to our trains and got off them at the right time. Here, light-headed from the heat, I was the more fragile one. Lloyd, beginning to feel normal, took over the practical details: He navigated, checked timetables, consulted maps, paid taxi drivers. I sat in the pew and concentrated my thoughts on the story Masako's husband told me.

After leaving Suibara, Lloyd and I had stayed overnight at their home. On the train ride there, Masako had mentioned that her husband, Norio, an engineering professor, had an unusual war story. “But he never talks about it,” she said.

When we got to her house, Norio met us at the door. He had a boyish grin and wore at-home clothes—jeans and a comfy sweater. After a spaghetti dinner, we settled into conversation. Norio was listening intently to the story of the flag and our visit with the Shimizu family. At one point he excused himself and returned with a tattered photo album. He set it down on the coffee table, then lifted out a photo of a young couple and their infant son.

The couple was strikingly handsome. The husband had a crisp part in his hair. He wore an elegant suit. His delicate wife wore a traditional silk kimono. Norio stared at it before handing it to me. “These are my parents,” he explained.

The photo was taken in 1939, three years after his parents had been posted to Manchuria. His young father was an official of the Manchuko (puppet) government, established by the Japanese to rule over China. Settling in Manchuria was considered both a patriotic duty and an adventurous opportunity.

Norio was born there. He was six when, just before the war officially ended, the Russians invaded. His father was arrested, one of an estimated 1.3 million Japanese who fell into Soviet hands. He was taken to a Siberian concentration camp and never heard from again, along with three hundred thousand Japanese never accounted for after the war. His mother died in China a year later, during a cholera epidemic. A great-uncle brought Norio back to Japan along with his own children, and another uncle raised him.

Over the past decade, academic conferences and engineering consultations had taken Norio to China on several occasions. On a recent trip, he'd decided to find the apartment where, as he put it, “I lost my mother.” He only had a vague memory of the place where the sick woman bade her son farewell, but with the help of Chinese friends who knew the town, he somehow found it. “Were you flooded with memories?” I asked him. He sighed. “That only happens in novels.”

His success in finding his mother's last resting place released something in him. He then decided to go to Siberia to find his father's grave. He'd always assumed his father had died in the camp. “I really didn't want to go,” he told me, “but I felt I had to.”

In order to find the place where the camp had once been located, Norio first took a train across the Siberian taiga, then a boat ride along the Amur River, then a bus ride along a wooded area to a small village. From that village a small, hired bus took him to a forested hill a few miles away, where he waited for a rendezvous with a logging truck. When it showed up, he clambered aboard and they rolled through the rutted and muddy woods to a murky, deserted lake surrounded by straggly conifers. It was so quiet. This place was generally acknowledged as the site where the prison camp had been in the forties and fifties. The rig pulled off the muddy road and the trucker turned off the motor, lit a cigarette, and grunted, “Over there.” Norio climbed out of the truck and walked into the
thicket of pines. There, the son finally saw with his own eyes what passed for his father's grave: three foot by three foot pits here and there where, fifty years ago, according to the local villagers, the bodies of ninety Japanese prisoners had been unceremoniously dumped.

There was a long awkward silence after Norio had told me this, the kind that comes after someone has revealed something intimate to a stranger. Norio stared at the photo of his parents. I could think of no way to call him back out of his painful reverie. We simply sat there, listening to the clock ticking until we said our goodnights and then went to bed.

In the middle of the night, I woke up and slid open the wooden door to the darkened living room. There on the coffee table was the tattered photo of the young couple and their beautiful infant son. I sat down, picked up the photo and studied it. I wondered if Norio, while standing in that muddy spot in the Siberian woods, had conducted some kind of religious service. Did he pray or did he curse? Or was it enough that he was simply
there
?

T
HE MASS AT
Malate was over; the warm air was sweet with the smell of incense. The parishioners filed outside and the pink-cheeked priest smiled at each of them as they left. Outside the cathedral, Lloyd hailed a cab and three came screeching to a halt. “For American Cemetery. Fort Bonifacio,” he said.

The driver immediately turned up the volume on his radio and began singing along with the American pop songs about lost love. At breakneck speed, he drove us through the crowded barrios. One slum was adorned with a huge billboard showing the Pope kissing a baby and admonishing everyone to “Honor Life.” Hollow-eyed children hawked strings of white flower blossoms to the honking drivers stalled at intersections. We drove past a statue of Senator Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, Filipino patriot and opposition leader, who was shown with a dove on his shoulder and his hand
extended in a handshake—frozen in the moment he returned to Manila from exile in the United States on August 21, 1983. On that clear Sunday afternoon with thousands of supporters waiting, he was gunned down on the airport tarmac. The dictator Marcos was universally assumed to be the one who ordered his rival's assassination.

We passed huge department stores and a nearly empty downtown. We skirted a neighborhood of garish mansions behind electric gates. The cab carried us into Fort Bonifacio, the former military camp (where Ninoy Aquino had spent eight years in solitary confinement) that was decommissioned and is now a golf course and country club, and finally through the gates of the American Cemetery.

It was a lush, green world far from the bleak density of Manila's slums. Here, 17,206 Americans—the largest number of our World War II military dead—rested on 152 acres landscaped with massive carob trees, flame trees, and coral trees from India. Mahogany trees from Madagascar shaded lawns as immaculate as putting greens. Unlike the rest of Manila, the cemetery had its own water purification system; mourners are provided with potable water.

Lloyd and I walked across the vast arrangement of graves. There was an immaculate order to the place, the headstones arranged in concentric circular rows. The guidebook said that of the total, “13,434 headstones marked the graves of single identified remains; 6 marked the graves of 28 identified remains that could not be separated individually; 3,644 marked the graves of single unidentified remains (Unknowns) and 16 marked the graves of 100 unidentified remains that could not be separated individually.” Remains. All that was left of humans who were sons and brothers, fathers and grandfathers, uncles and nephews, friends and neighbors. Every hour the carillon tolled, followed by two military songs—familiar but unidentifiable.

In my knapsack were several photographs my father had taken on that September day in 1945, when he visited the cemetery in the barrio of Santa Barbara, where his friends had been hastily buried. Before we'd left L.A., Lloyd had printed and enlarged some of the negatives so that we could read the names on the headstones. In the photos, the graves looked achingly raw.

We walked through the acres of grave markers, examining as many with Stars of David on them as we could, hoping against hope to find the grave of one of the buddies my father had mentioned in his letters or whose name was in one of the headstone photos.

We passed headstones with Stars of David that belonged to Milton Tepper; Harry Fineman; Sol Margolis; Max Biederman, but no one whose name my father had mentioned. We walked by many blank markers that said, simply, “Here Rests in Honored Glory / A Comrade in Arms / Known but to God.”

At the visitors' center, a groundskeeper noticed us and asked if he could help. He pulled out a huge three-ring binder and asked us what names we were hoping to find. He ran his callused finger down a long list and stopped in the W section. “I will take you there,” he offered. He motioned to a motorcycle with a sidecar. We motored through the cemetery, agog at the sheer size of the place. There were headstones as far as the eye could see.

Mr. Rocaberte stopped the motorcycle and pointed. Lloyd and I stepped out of the sidecar and walked toward the Jewish star with “Sam Wengrow” carved on it. I was surprised at the amount of emotion this grave brought up in me. I'd never known Sam Wengrow.

When he returned home from the war, my father wanted to “bury” his memories. But when he stood in front Sam's grave, as an expression of respect, he vowed to keep that visit “always with him.” His desires were irreconcilable: He wanted to never forget and he needed to never remember.

I'd asked my war veteran mentor Baldwin Eckel why he never talked about his war experiences to his family, or to anyone:

Had my father been able to share his grief for Sam? Had he
ever
been able to weep? His closest buddies in combat were like family. He had lost family before. The pain of his childhood loss reverberated with each friend's death in combat.

Mr. Rocaberte stepped back by his motorcycle to wait while I pulled out a prayer book and murmured the kaddish. Lloyd said out loud, “Sam, I don't think anyone has visited you in a long time, but we're here now.” I wondered if Sam Wengrow's family had been to Manila. I thought of my aunt Ruth's grave somewhere in Queens, and vowed to make a visit there. Lloyd bent down and ran his hands over the marble headstone, “See ya later, Sam,” he whispered.

The gently sloping lawns led to a memorial hall at the top of the hill. In each room of the hall was a mural map of the various campaigns of the Pacific War, and a list of those who died in each. In the room that included the map of the Luzon Campaign, I examined the guest book. I read the following entries, made that same day:

A Japanese family, two young parents and their sons, were visiting the memorial hall at the same time. I wondered if they felt as strange here as I'd felt at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima.

I opened the guest book to a blank page and wrote, “We are here to honor my father and his comrades from the 25th Infantry ‘Tropic Lightning' Division, 27th Regiment, who fought in the battle for Balete Pass.”