Silent Honor (41 page)

And as Hiroko looked down at the pier, holding him, she saw her, still standing there, still as beautiful as she had been the day she had first seen her, getting out of the limousine at St. Andrew's, and then discovered that they were roommates. She had thought they would be friends then, and for a time she had been wrong, but finally, she wasn't. Hiroko raised a hand and waved, and pointed her out to Toyo. And he wa'ed and blew her a kiss and Hiroko and Anne laughed and waved harder.

“Good-bye,” Anne called up to her as the ship pulled away slowly, and Toyo watched all of it with fascination.

‘Thank you!” Hiroko mouthed again, and the two women waved at each other as the tugboats pulled them away from the dock.

They could not hear the words anymore. But she could still see her, standing there, waving, as the ship turned, and sailed slowly out through the harbor.

“Where are we going, Mama?” Toyo asked for the thousandth time that day as she set him down with a sad expression.

“Home,” was all she answered this time. It was all they had left now.

Chapter 18

T
HE U.S.S.
General W. P. Richardson
took two weeks and a day to sail across the Pacific Ocean. And right on schedule, it docked in Kobe in the morning. It had seemed like an endless trip to her, and just as they had when she came, they had bypassed Hawaii. And she didn't mind it. Toyo had loved the trip, and everyone had been wonderful to him. He was the only child on the ship, and he had become everyone's playmate and mascot.

But on the morning they arrived, Hiroko was oddly silent. It was a strange feeling for her, remembering what it had been like for her when she left, and the terrifying symphony of emotions. She had ached at leaving her parents, but she had gone so as not to disappoint her father …just for a year, she said …just one, he promised …and it had been almost four and a half, and so much had happened.

She watched the activity on the dock when they arrived, and listened silently to the dock workers, the birds, the people calling to each other and shouting. There was confusion in the port, and still the vestiges of wartime. But all over the pier she saw American soldiers, which even in her homeland she found oddly reassuring. She was no longer sure who were the enemies and who the friends. For four years, life had been too confusing.

She held Toyo's hand carefully as they got off, and she carried her own bags. There were taxis along the dock, and she asked one of them to take her to the train, and he asked her where she was going. When she said Kyoto, he offered to drive her there for fifty U.S. dollars. And given the state the country was in, the offer was appealing, and she accepted.

“How long have you been gone?” he asked as they drove along roads she had either never seen before, or no longer remembered. They were all in poor repair, and deeply rutted.

“More than four years,” Four years and three months exactly.

“You're lucky,” he said. “The war was hard here. It must have been good in the States.” She couldn't explain to him about the camps, but he was probably right. It was probably worse here.

“How bad is it now?” she asked bluntly, holding tightly to Toyo. He was listening to them speak Japanese. He had heard plenty of it in the camps, but he had forgotten most of it in the past year. And Hiroko always spoke to him in English, so he didn't understand what they were saying.

“It's rough in places, terrible in others. Some places it's not so bad. Kyoto is so-so. There was some damage there, but none of the temples.” It wasn't the temples she was worrying about, it was her parents. She had had no news of them at all, since the message about her brother's death, since Pearl Harbor. ‘The Americans are all over the place. You have to watch put for them. They think all Japanese women are geishas.” She laughed at what he said, but just as he said, she noticed them everywhere, and many of them seemed to be eyeing the women. “Be careful,” he said, warning her, and then they drove quietly through the countryside. It took him two hours to get to Kyoto. Normally, it should have been faster, but there were obstructions on the road, potholes, and a lot of traffic.

And her breath caught as she saw the familiar address. It looked as though nothing had changed. It was all so exactly the way she remembered that it felt like a dream, or a memory, to be there. She thanked the driver and paid him with money Charles Spencer had given her, and then holding Toyo's hand, she took her suitcase, and stood there.

“Do you want me to wait?” the driver asked kindly, but she shook her head, mesmerized by the house she had dreamed of a thousand times and longed for so often. The house she had grown up in.

“No, we're fine.” She waved bravely, and he drove off, back to Kobe. And for a long time, she just stood there as Toyo watched her.

And then, carefully, she opened the gate. It squeaked exactly as it had before, and the grass around it looked a little overgrown, but nothing seemed destroyed or damaged, and as she walked slowly to the house, she rang the wind chimes. But nothing moved and no one answered. She walked closer and tapped on the shoji screens, but no one came, and she wondered if they were out. She had wanted to warn them she was coming, but there was still no way to reach them.

And cautiously, she opened the shojis, and what she saw took her breath away. Not one single thing had changed in their house. Even the scroll in the tokonoma was still there, placed exactly where it had been when she was a child, and her grandmother taught her how to arrange the flowers for it. And there were flowers there now, but they were dry and long since wilted. They had obviously gone away, for safety, somewhere.

“Who lives here, Mommy?”

“Your grandparents, Toyo. They will be very happy to see you.”

“Who are they?”

“My mommy and daddy,” she explained, and he looked intrigued, surprised that she had them.

She walked slowly around the house with him. Her mother's clothes were there, all their furniture and cooking utensils. There were several photographs of her, and of Yuji, and she stood staring at them, wanting to reach out and touch them. And then they walked out into the garden. She stopped at the little shrine, and bowed to it, and it felt odd to be doing it again. She hadn't bowed in so long now.

“What are you doing, Mommy?”

“Bowing to our shrine, to honor your grandpar-ents.” He had seen old people in the camps bow, but he had been too young to remember.

“Where are your mommy and daddy?” he asked with interest.

“I think they went away,” she explained, and then slowly she walked next door to their neighbors' house. They were at home, and they looked very surprised to see her, and even more so to see Toyo. She bowed to them formally, and they told her that her parents had gone to the mountains for safety before the summer. They weren't sure where, but they thought to their old buraku near Ayabe.

It was the farming community where Hidemi was from originally, and it made perfect sense. They had probably been afraid that Kyoto would be bombed, to make an example of it, like Dresden. But she knew it would take them days to get to Ayabe. It was inaccessible normally, but with conditions such as they were, it would be nearly impossible. And then she decided to ask her neighbors if they had a car she could rent or borrow. They said they didn't, and suggested she take the train, which was a reasonable solution. And a little while later, she walked to the train station with Toyo. She took their suitcase, just in case, and she bought some fruit from a child selling apples on the way, and she and Toyo were happy to get them.

But then they told them there was no train till the next morning. She stopped with Toyo after that, and bought some food for them, and then they went back to her parents' house, and they moved into the second bedroom. It was the room where she had been born, and she remembered her father's story, about how she had been born there and not at the hospital because her mother was so stubborn. It made her smile, and she told Toyo that she had been born in that room, and that intrigued him. And that night, while he slept, she wandered from room to room, feeling the warmth of being near them.

There were soldiers patrolling the street outside, but they didn't bother them. And the next morning at seven, she and Toyo went to the train. And because of delays, and debris on the tracks that had to be removed, it took them fourteen hours to get to Ayabe. They didn't arrive until nine o'clock that night, and she had no idea where the house was. So she and Toyo curled up in the train station, under a small blanket she'd brought with them, but Toyo said he didn't like it.

“I don't either, sweetheart, but we can't find the house till tomorrow.” And at dawn, she woke up, and got some food for him again from a street vendor, and then paid a man with a car to take them to her grandparents' house out
in
the country. Her grandparents were long gone, but her mother had kept the house to go to in the summer.

And the man with the car took a thousand detours to get there. It took them well over an hour, and when they arrived, she could see why. The house, and a number like it, had been leveled.

“What happened?” she asked, looking horrified, and afraid that Toyo would be frightened. It looked as though the whole mountainside had caught fire, and it had. In August.

“A bomb,” he said sadly. “There were a lot of them. Just before Hiroshima.” There weren't even any neighbors to talk to about it, and he took her finally to a small Shinto shrine that she remembered going to once with her grandmother years before. And there was a priest there.

He looked at her like a ghost when she said who she was, and he shook his head. Yes, he knew her parents.

Did he know where they'd gone? He hesitated for a long time before he answered.

‘To heaven, with their ancestors,” he said, looking apologetic but holy. Both of her parents had apparently been killed in the bombing, along with several friends, some relatives, and all their neighbors. It had happened three months before. Three months before, they'd been alive, while she had been at Lake Tahoe, but there was no way she could have come then.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and she gave him some money and walked back outside with Toyo, feeling dead inside. Everyone was gone. She had no one left…. Yuji, her parents …Ken …Takeo …even poor Peter … It wasn't fair. They were all such decent people.

“Where do you want to go now?” the man with the car asked her, and for a minute, she just stood there. There was nowhere to go. Except back to Kyoto. But after that, she had no idea. She had traveled four thousand miles to find no one, for nothing.

She got back in the car, and they drove slowly back to the train station, but there was no train for the next two days, and there was nowhere for them to stay in Ayabe, and now that she knew what had happened, she didn't want to. She just wanted to go home again, wherever that was. And sensing her mood, Toyo started to cry, and the driver looked unhappy.

In
the end, Hiroko offered him a hundred dollars to take them back to Kyoto. He accepted gratefully, but the trip back was a nightmare. There were obstacles, and bombed-out areas, and detours, and dead animals on the road. There were soldiers and roadblocks, and people milling everywhere, some with nowhere to go, and some obviously crazy from what had happened to them. It took them almost two days to get back and she gave him another fifty dollars when he dropped them at the house in Kyoto. She brought him inside, and gave him some food and water, and then he went on his way again, and she and Toyo stood there, alone at last. And all Hiroko could think of was that they had come all this way for nothing.

“Where are they, Mommy?” he asked insistently. “They're still not here.” He looked disappointed, but not as much as she was. She fought back tears as she explained it.

“They're not coming back, Toyo,” she said sadly.

“Don't they want to see us?” He looked crestfallen.

“Very much,” she said, as the tears spilled onto her cheeks, “but they had to go to heaven, to be with all the other people we love.” But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't bring herself to say “like your daddy.” She just couldn't say it. But when he saw her face, he cried with her anyway. He hated it when his mother was unhappy. And she sat on the floor holding him as they both cried, and she heard a knock at the gate and wondered who it was. She hesitated, and then went out to see an M.P. at her parents' front gate. He said he was the new sentry for their street, and he wanted to know if they needed any assistance. He had been told the house was empty, and he had seen her and Toyo go into it, but she said they were fine, and explained that it was the house of her parents.

He was a nice man, with kind eyes, and he handed Toyo a chocolate bar, which delighted him, but Hiroko was very cool with him. She remembered what everyone had said. They had all warned her about the soldiers.

“Are you alone here?” he asked, looking at her with interest. He was a handsome boy, with a Southern drawl, but she didn't want any soldiers bothering them. She wasn't sure what to answer.

“I …yes …no …my husband will be back later.”

The soldier glanced at Toyo then. It was easy to figure out the rest. And here, the implications were even worse than they were in San Francisco. It made it look like she'd been sleeping with enemy soldiers.

“Let us know if there's anything we can do for you, ma'am,” he said, and for the next several days she and Toyo hid in the house and the garden. She let the neighbors know that they were back so they wouldn't be frightened if they saw activity in the house, and she told them what had happened to her parents, and they were desolate for her. They even invited her and Toyo to dinner. And the night they went, the sentry spotted them again, and he came to chat with Toyo. He gave him another chocolate bar, and Hiroko thanked him coolly.

“You speak very good English. Where did you learn?” he asked, trying to be friendly. She was one of the prettiest women he'd seen, and he had not seen her husband. He doubted there even was one.