Soldiers in Hiding (11 page)

When we heard what the major was saying we looked at one another. “Get your guns and let's go,” the major whispered, so we stepped behind him, silent as snakes, and wound around the side of the barracks until we were gathered in the gray courtyard a few meters away from them. I could hear English spoken softly, just a word or two, before the major stepped forward and shouted, before a switch was thrown that flooded the entire area with light.

The major marched forward and slapped Jimmy as hard as he could across the face. “Scoundrel!” he shouted. “Traitor!”

Jimmy fell down, but got up immediately, blood coming a little from his lower lip. Everyone's eyes were still trying to adjust to the light.

“Empty your pockets!” the major ordered, but Jimmy stood swaying a moment, so the major hit him again. The American officer looked on. His face had changed in the five days since I'd seen him closely.

“You,” shouted the major, “will be shot! And you,” he said, turning to Jimmy, “will do the shooting!”

The major pushed his own hand into Jimmy's pocket and
then carefully smoothed out the creases in the crumpled candy wrapper.

“Where were you born?” the major screamed, looking straight at Jimmy.

Jimmy paused, then said, “Los Angeles.” He spoke in English and silenced the already dead-quiet crowd.

The major looked from one to the other of them. The American inside the circle was skinnier than he had been in the office the week before. If Jimmy'd given him candy he couldn't have given him much.

The major turned to all of us, the candy wrapper held up above his head. “We have a traitor in our midst,” he said. “Yamamoto even speaks English when he is asked a question in Japanese.” He stood a moment until his hands began to shake. His fury had forced his thoughts from him, but finally he shook his head and said, “In all my years as a school principal I never ran up against anything as awful as this.”

The major was in charge but was out of control. The American officer had been crouching when we'd approached him but was able to stand, his long legs bringing him high above the rest of us. Jimmy still held his rifle on the man, trying to act the part of the proper guard. When the major regained himself he looked a long moment at Jimmy. He raised a short finger and pointed at the prisoner.

“Shoot this man, Yamamoto,” he said. “Shoot him now.”

The American seemed to know what was happening for all of a sudden he backed out of the major's circle and took a step or two to his right.

“Wait,” he said.

The major's finger followed the man a moment, then he lowered it and called my name. I had been standing in the very back of the group of newly awakened soldiers. When he called me I felt a chill, though I was sweating and though the night was hot.

“Yes, sir,” I said, softly beside him.

“Go to the barracks and bring a blindfold. Bring something with which to pin it behind this man's head.”

“Wouldn't it be better to wait, major?” I asked. “In the morning perhaps all this will seem less serious.”

“We will resolve it now,” the major said. “You Americans really stick together, don't you?”

“Yamamoto merely felt sorry for the man, I'm sure. Really, he's as Japanese as…”

“Go!” the major said, swinging around, red-eyed again. “Or maybe, Maki, I'll find myself another aide as well.”

I jumped a little when he shouted at me, but stepped away quickly while he turned his attention back to the two Americans. In his office it was easy to find the blindfolds, but I held back a little, hoping that time would cool the major off and maybe save the life of the man from Los Angeles. I could see them standing, waiting for me, through the window. Jimmy had been so stupid. In another day the major might have let the man slink back with the others, and that would have been the end of it. Now he was decisive, had locked us all on his course. As the men were waking up, they began to chatter and he didn't stop them. The American in the center of the circle was gauging his chances as slim, I'm sure. Even from the window I could see him bobbing about, his feet nervously scraping back and forth across Nakamura's old line.

“Maki!” the major shouted, so I went back fast, the whole box of blindfolds in my hands.

“Surely sir…”

“Tie the blindfold quickly.”

I walked up to the shaking soldier and held a blindfold up to his eyes.

“Wait,” he said. “I'll be good.”

He tried to turn his head away from me so the major had a couple of the others hold him until I could secure the thing tightly behind his neck. “Try not to worry,” I whispered.

Before the major turned to poor Jimmy again, he had another idea. He called to the guards who walked the ground
around the American barracks, and told them to bring all the prisoners out.

“We'll let them watch,” he said. “One lesson and we won't have a bit of trouble for weeks.”

The guards were afraid to go inside the building where all the Americans were sleeping, so they shouted first, ordering those on the inside to turn on the lights. It took nearly ten minutes for the prisoners to be brought, single file, out into the courtyard, but when they were lined across from us the major seemed satisfied and drew another circle around the poor man, using the tip of his boot. All the Americans watched in sullen silence.

“Yamamoto,” said the major.

Poor Jimmy had been standing there all this time, weakly holding his rifle. He was such a silent man, such a private one, that even during this moment, even when the essence of confrontation was upon him, he remained within himself. He had his rifle and it struck me that he might murder the major instead. He might turn the thing on us all.

“Yamamoto,” the major said once more.

Jimmy walked a ways toward the major, then back near where I was standing with the wilting prisoner.

“It was only a candy bar,” he said. “An extra one. Nobody wanted it.”

The major walked to the prisoner and turned him around so that he was facing the others of his kind, all of them standing there in their drab Japanese issue, their poor pants all high water, the sleeves of their shirts too short.

When the major touched him the American said, “Ahh.” Then with all the timbre gone out of his voice, all of its character missing, he said, “Please…”

There was no noise now, no talking. All eyes, those of the Japanese soldiers and of the American prisoners, were on Jimmy. The major made all of us stand at attention, then he backed away from the prisoner and waited.

Jimmy walked up to the man and said, “I 'm going to have
to shoot you now.” He held his rifle to the man's head, its barrel just touching his clumsily cropped hair. Time passed. The American shook. I, in my position at the edge of the platoon, was holding my breath. The major did not move. Only Jimmy, absurdly, seemed calm. When he put the rifle down he turned back toward us and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt at the same instant.

“No,” he said, very calmly and in English.

When the prisoner heard him he jumped a little and all of the other Americans began to talk.

I remember Jimmy had a slight smile on his face. When he spoke he broke the tension so completely for the Americans that their words came out harshly at us, like taunts. Major Nakamura stood still as the noise slapped against his ears: His face was red again, but this time he was not locked in indecision. He pulled his side arm from its holster and, walking over to where Jimmy was, put the barrel of it to Jimmy's temple and fired. Jimmy's smile did not leave his face as the small-caliber bullet passed through his brain. He seemed to stand an instant longer than he should have, then he fell at the feet of the blindfolded soldier, who, when he'd heard the shot, had nearly fallen himself.

No one moved. I remember thinking at the precise moment of Jimmy's death how hot it was and how odd the events had been that led him to the end of his life, here in the Philippines, far from the streets of Los Angeles, far from increasingly evil Japan. We were all frozen into the postures that the sound of the shot had put us in. The major held his handgun in the air where Jimmy's head had been. The voices of the Americans sank into the walls of the jungle and the prisoner stood, knees locked, in the center of that awful circle. Perhaps Nakamura was mad then, for he moved before any of the others did. He picked up the rifle that Jimmy had let tumble when he died and held it up to the stone-still troops. His handgun still hung from his limp other wrist and he waited, looking right at me.

“Maki,” he said, finally. The awful rifle blurred to my vision but nevertheless danced before me, like a cobra.

I didn't move, so he walked over to where I stood and placed the rifle gently in my hands. “Your turn,” he said. “Save yourself. Shoot him.”

He was coaxing in the way he spoke to me and I could detect no anger in his voice. Jimmy's body lay before the American he was to have shot. His mouth was pursed as it was when he played his trumpet. I was walking, before I realized it, up to where the soldier stood, his back to me. The rifle's chamber was full but there had not been time for the tension of an execution to build once more. I raised the gun when the major took a step backward, away from me. It had a hair trigger, not connected to the weight of the moment. The man seemed relaxed before me and the Americans on the far side did not seem hostile to my action. There was a languid sense of levitation in me and I closed my eyes. I seemed to float. And I did not come back down to earth immediately. Not even with the sound of the report.

Two

THE OLD TEA TEACHER, THE ONE IN ATTENDANCE AT Kazuko's wedding, found me wandering the side streets of a section of Tokyo not far from where she lived. I was wearing my soldier's uniform and walking slowly, circling, trying to let chance decide whether or not I would ever see her again. Would she welcome firsthand information concerning the death of her husband? Would her mother want to know exactly how her son had died?

I don't know what decisions were made which allowed my return from the war so early, discharged and with no punishment pending, but it happened, and barely a month after the awful events of the evening I have just described. How old was the war then? Not a year certainly, for it was summer and I remember wiping perspiration from my forehead, upon my return to Tokyo, quite as often as I did in the war zone. Soon my uniform took on the darker circles of excess sweat, and soon, with my money gone and only memories to accompany me, my thin exuberance for life began to show signs of exhaustion. I was having trouble with my senses. Rather than the war-ready city, which everyone saw, I began to see before me the dead and hollow mouth of my endless future. Rather than the driving sounds of Tokyo, I began to hear the shots and shouts of the jungle guerrillas ringing in my ears.

I'm not sure how long I traveled, sleeping, when I could, down under Meguro bridge, but I like to think that even if the teacher had not found me I would have come to, of my own
volition, and begun my life once again. It is true that there were others like myself, under all the bridges of the city, but they were the broken, not the injured. They were the vagrants of the war and I was not like them. They had lost their minds while I was merely escaping the ghosts of my immediate past. I had discovered that visions of my dead friends would not venture down the embankments and under the bridges with me. Images of Jimmy and Ike, like those of the
sari-sari
store woman, waited up on the real street where real people lived.

But one day I found myself talking to the old man who was Kazuko's tea teacher, found him questioning me about the condition of my person, found myself letting him lead me away to his narrow house and letting him bathe me among the tea bowls and tools of his art. I did not speak much then but I remember that he burned my uniform for me and in that ritual took away my credit under the bridge, my familiarity, my face. He shaved the beard from my chin and wrapped me in a summer
yukata
and fed me lightly before taking me to Kazuko's gate and making me knock. When Kazuko's mother answered the door he was gone, I am sure, but my calico cat stood at her side. It gave a silent meow and stepped down between my legs.

When Kazuko's mother saw me it was early August, three years before the Americans perfected their Manhattan Project and ended the war. She wept and called her daughter, who came from the inner chambers of the house. They had got word of the two deaths in their family and had lost their old grandfather with the news. I looked thin and tired, I know, yet I was clean and quiet when they pulled me from the empty street and into their lives once more. They did not, immediately, ask me questions about the details of their losses. Photographs of Ike and Jimmy stood on the altar in the far corner of the room, but my photograph was gone. Kazuko's mother, from the beginning, chattered on about tea and
sembei
and moved about the house as if at the edge of her dotage. Kazuko, though, sat staring at me and I at her. In me she must have seen the truth of my experience, for her
eyes held the sadness I reflected. In her I saw the same beauty I had known, the same magnetic skin and face, but I also saw, alas, that she was full with child. Jimmy and I had been gone since late in the month of January and Kazuko had lived, most of that time, in the belief that her young husband could not die while she carried his child within her, his legacy, his thread to the continuing world. Had she, I wonder, told him of the slow expansion that her body was making for him?

There was no question that I would take up residence among them once more. It did not occur to either of them to ask about my early dismissal from the insane activities of the war. Kazuko's mother seemed absentminded about the loss of her son, and Kazuko took Jimmy's death with the forbearance and stoicism by which she was bred. Her pregnancy was the point around which they both lived, and each evening, when we sat listening to the war news or reading of Japanese victories at sea, Kazuko's mother would knit. She made small sweaters and boots and jackets that were gradual in expanding size so that when she held them up to us we were able to laugh at how quickly the child would grow, we were able to imagine him and find his progress noteworthy.