Please Enjoy Your Happiness (6 page)

Soon we were standing in front of the Daibutsu, side by side, our heads bowed. You prayed for your daughter and your lost family and the snow country in Manchuria where your childhood was obliterated by war.

‘What did your father do there?’ I asked, trying to visualize a place I would never see. You shook your head, reluctant at first. You said, ‘He played piano.’

I said, ‘I mean, what about his work?’

I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask. Kamakura probably now has a McDonald’s, and people undoubtedly use smartphones to communicate instead of gossiping in sake bars and greeting each other in the street with a quick bow and a
stream of exquisite pleasantries. Am I correct, Yuki? But I remember Kamakura in those days as a small town by the ocean, where muffled temple bells could be heard, not like pealing church bells, but booming slowly, majestically, as if they were heartbeats, as if every day had a funeral. We were walking to the Engaku-ji Zen Buddhist temple, and you were trying to explain to me the significance of the massive
sanmon
gate, which I now know represents the three gates to spiritual emancipation. You told me you often came to Engaku-ji because it was built to honour those who lost their lives in war. ‘It is said,’ you began, ‘that this gate frees one of various obsessions and brings about enlightenment . . . Pass through the gate with a pure mind, Paul. Come with me, and I will tell you another secret.’

So, I stepped through the gate, puzzled. You looked at me intently and you said, ‘My father was an executioner. He was a policeman. I am afraid to say this because I know he would be sad to hear the truth, but he was not a good man. He killed many Chinese. Bang, bang, bang.’ I looked at you and I could tell that this was such a burden, still, even though a dozen years had passed since your family was forced to start walking south, through the ice, hundreds of miles to the Chinese port of Dairen.

‘He was a really talented pianist. He played the piano because his life was so brutal, so terrible. He was so strict. He hurt my mother. His favourite pieces were by Satie. Do you know his
Vexations
, his six
Gnossiennes
, his
Trois Gymnopédies
? I know them all, by heart. In a way, they are like bells ringing for those who are in mourning. When I dream, they are the rhythm of my heart. But when I wake up, my face is wet and I know I have been crying in my sleep. I remember that none of us was
allowed to move – not even a little bit – while he played. He would not open his eyes. It was as if he was living in another land. This was his ecstasy.’

You were sobbing into the sleeve of your gorgeous kimono, silk the colour of slate, with its undergarments in three different shades of grey. In Japan, grey in all its shades – from charcoal to silver – is one of three colours that express sadness, especially in kimonos. White is the second colour. Black is the third. A single tear mixed with mascara, so that it looked as if black lacquer cut a line down one side of your face to the corner of your lips. You pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a match, something you never did at the White Rose bar. You inhaled deeply, as if you were a very tough woman, a gangster’s woman maybe.

‘Look, Paul,’ you said, your voice brittle and harsh, ‘you probably hate me now.’ You looked up at me as if I was going to walk away, forever. But I was young enough during an age when empathy was still possible. I was no cynic. I had not yet lived and lost, loved and lost, as you had. I gulped and choked. ‘Yuki,’ I said, ‘you were just a little girl. And now . . .’

I could not finish the sentence. What were you now? I did not know. You poured drinks at a bar where the music was country and western, and then . . . ?

I reached out. It seemed as if I were reaching across time, and I pulled you so close to me that you gasped, and the crowd of sightseers and pilgrims stopped in its tracks and stared at us.

You said, ‘All my life I have been waiting for that embrace.’

On the way back to Yokosuka, you sang and hummed those moody
enka
songs that Japanese loved to sing when they were drinking sake. Both of us loved the songs of the singer Misora
Hibari. The ‘Little Lark’, you called her. You probably remember that the following week we took the train north to Tokyo to hear Misora Hibari sing at the Nichigeki Theatre. You gripped my hand. People were whispering about us. I felt uncomfortable. I did not want you to be hurt; I didn’t think you could take it. But I was wrong. As the looks grew more intense, you held my hand even tighter and pulled me towards you so our bodies were touching, and you told me – you whispered to me, and I remember your lips were wet against my ear – ‘You are my love, and I am your love. I don’t care if they look.’

We sat that way for the entire performance. I looked down at your wrists. The scars were there, white, like cords of cotton lain across your skin. And when Misora Hibari had finished singing ‘Ringo oiwake’ [‘Apple Folksong’], and the crowd, which was almost entirely women, was on its feet shouting her name and pleading for autographs, do you remember how she came down from the stage and looked at you with an appreciative smile? Now that I think about it, it was as if she could sense the bond between us. She was already famous, already bruised by her affairs, already capable of singing about the sorrows of a woman in a way that moved you and millions of other women to joy and to tears.

I remember saying, ‘Yuki. Did you see that? She noticed.’

And you said, ‘It was a blessing. Things are changing. I feel as if I am drunk with happiness.’ There was a tear running down your cheek and you brushed away an identical tear next to my nose with the back of your finger and said, ‘Thank you so much for allowing me to feel your love and friendship.’

Your fourth letter came when I was in Manila. I can’t remember what I did there. My sailor friends got drunk and paid for tattoos – that I know. I did not do any of that because
I am me. I am not a member of the herd. You taught me that. You said, ‘Be yourself. Be strong, no matter what. There is no other way. In my country there is a saying: “When a nail sticks up, it must be hammered down.” It means you must be part of a group. You must not be different. You must conform. I don’t like that saying. Don’t ever let it happen to you. Do not let them hammer you.’ You also said, ‘Remember this: in this life, all men reach and fall. It is not so true about women, Paul. When women fall it is not because they have reached. Why do you think that is, Paul? You should know. Or maybe you do not know, because you are so young. I will let you think about it. When you become older, you will know.’

5

Time of the Typewriter

Hummingbirds are sipping sweet red nectar out of a feeder hanging in front of the window through which I can see my garden. It is the mature garden of a man who is seventy-five. The garden is his creation. I am he. Roses, figs, bamboo, ginger, banana, papaya, white grapes, red grapes, mango, guava, pomelo, red hibiscus, pink hibiscus, white hibiscus, lemons, lemongrass, limes, tangerines, calamansi, pink grapefruit, white grapefruit, jujube, oranges. The cuts on my hand and the calluses are from digging, cutting, and pruning. It is dignified work. If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need, Cicero said, and I think he meant men too old and too lacking in idealism to go to war again. It is also the garden, full of fecundity and delicate perfumes and dazzling colours, of a man without a woman.

Every year these hummingbirds come and then they go. They are easy to forget, but I never forget them. Every year they are the same: ruby-red throat, shimmering green back, tan underside. They have no fear of me. In fact, they zoom right up
and stare me in the face, hovering there like little incandescent gifts from God. Sometimes I even think they are carrying messages from you. They are here in the summer. In the winter, they fly to Central America without so much as a goodbye. They know when to leave. They don’t have to think about it. They just go. But in the spring they always remember to come back.

I look back on 1959 now, and I try to imagine myself. I am accustomed to old age. I feel comfortable with the impact of time on my mind and my body. I have no idea where I am going – except occasionally I do go to Costa Rica in Central America.

In San José, Costa Rica’s small capital, I have a circle of male friends all roughly my age: a former Marine with a combat grip who taught economics; a retired physician who suffers from a rare optical disease but still rides mountain bikes on wilderness trails; an itinerant musician who plays keyboards and composes unadulterated lounge music; a tough guy from South Central Los Angeles who mentors even tougher teens; a painter who is perpetually on the run from US tax authorities and exults in every day he is a free man; and a barely literate used-car dealer who had a stroke that slowed him but is still searching for a ‘perfect love’. The fact is, they are all in search of the perfect love, except me. I am still the outsider, just as I was in 1959 when I glimpsed perfection.

At this point in my life, I am searching for Shangri-La. It does not exist, I know. I am looking, but for the time being my house is a kind of paradise full of boxes packed tight with memories: newspaper clippings; airline tickets from years of travel; a Vietcong booby trap I stepped on but that did not explode; and receipts from old hotels in Phnom Penh, Manila,
Buenos Aires, Havana, Hanoi, Mexico City, where deep shadows helped me doze in the afternoons. Books line the walls from floor to ceiling, and an array of antique paintings from Bali, showing maidens in sarongs, is clustered by the front door. There are a lot of photographs in my house too, including some never published that remain hidden because they show shattered bodies in painful detail; these photographs were taken in Cambodia in the final week of the war.