Soldiers in Hiding (15 page)

Kazuko had bared a breast and I was looking down at the bluish veins that ran out of her upper chest and down its slope. She found a small bench and sat with perfect posture, turning just a little away from the Buddha's cool eyes. She held out both her hands with enough authority so that her mother let Milo go to her. We watched as Milo's mouth let a seal of Kazuko's milk run around its edges, we listened to his lovely clucking. “He will be safe with his mother, I suppose,” said Kazuko's mother, finally sitting down softly beside them.

While we waited there, Kazuko's mother and I watching the
wonderful lightening of Kazuko's breasts, a line of seven Buddhist acolytes came in through the huge front door of the temple and began walking around toward the side. They were bald young men and walked single file, in identical formation. There was humor in their seriousness and Kazuko and I began to laugh. Each of the young men carried a hoe or a rake across his shoulder, as the soldiers did their rifles.

“Young priests, young priests,” Kazuko's mother called.

The young men stopped. They had not noticed us sitting there and as they turned about, each just missed the one behind him with the dangerous tip of the tool he carried.

“We would like to have a word with you,” said Kazuko's mother. “About the war. What are you doing here? Why don't you all go out and fight?”

The young men looked at each other, but then turned back and hurried away, so Kazuko's mother stood and called, “Come closer and look at my grandson. The Americans will bomb your temple and might kill us all. The blue veins of my daughter's breasts will be torn from her skin, spilling her milk onto the dirty streets. What good does it do, then, to merely tend to your gardens? There will be big holes where you have tried to rake so nicely.”

By the time she finished speaking the monks were gone, of course, but Milo had separated himself from Kazuko's breast and was looking up at his grandmother politely, smiling.

“I do not think they are allowed, right now, to speak to us,” I said, but Kazuko's mother had lost herself in the images she had created. She had spoken too harshly, too vividly, for the teasing she had intended.

When we stood to leave, walking through the lovely gardens, perfectly raked, as she had said, Milo tried to hold his grandmother's hand. The trees and gravel paths were unchanged and the great boulders of the rock garden were immovable.

Kazuko's mother walked a little ahead of us, the tightness of her
obi
showing the smallness of her waist. It was warm and clear by then and the sky was empty. Milo tilted his head a little,
but all he could hear was the sound of birds, so he quickly lost interest and bent to pick up some of the stones that the Buddhists had raked, to turn them in his hands as he toddled on.

 

KAZUKO RETURNED TO WORK, AND AS MILO GREW AND the war wound on, I fashioned for myself a way of living. All during the time between our visit to the temple and Milo's second birthday I became the central raiser of my child. Kazuko and her mother gave me the duties easily, each going off quite early to her respective factory and both expecting dinner or a clean house when they returned. I didn't mind. I dusted the altar photographs of Jimmy and Ike and cooked with as much dedication as either of them would have had. I let Milo help me and let him call both of the men whose photos he saw “uncle.” I told him stories of their bravery without the slightest irony, without the slightest indication in my voice that I had participated in their fall. The question I asked myself earlier—Why am I living while they are not?—had gone forever, I thought, from my mind.

Milo was a little Japanese boy and we were at war with America, but during those days when cleanliness and dinner were our only concerns, I taught him English. Though Milo didn't look the part I had decided that, whoever his father, he was half the offspring of America. I worked diligently to increase his vocabulary, to build his syntax, to let him see reality through both grammars. He called me only “father” then, never the diminutive, never the cute or coy. And whether we were busy with our daily work or walking the side streets of the section of Tokyo in which we lived, we spoke the language of the enemy. I guess I thought that if my son could speak my language, if he could speak English, he might be able to free me from the prison in which Japanese held me. When we spoke English it was Teddy who felt free, not necessarily Milo. In English I became a full person again. In English I could easily escape the rigorous life of wartime Japan. Though my little boy did not speak well or often, I spoke with the fluency and speed of an expert. I told him stories of life in Los
Angeles and of the days before the war when the band was making its way. Milo always stopped what he was doing whenever I felt the need to speak to him. He always cocked his head and looked into my eyes and listened. And although now, alas, Milo is nearly monolingual, I hold the belief that if he ever sees America, the tracks that that country's language have made in his brain will reassert themselves. His given name is not Japanese, nor is his father's name nor those of either of his “uncles.”

Milo, during the wartime, was always with me, and though he would never believe it now, that was a time when he preferred, clearly, over the coos and voices of his mother and grandmother, the singular and sterile company of a man.

 

ASIDE FROM THE JOY SHE TOOK IN HER GRANDSON, Kazuko's mother's only pleasure, during the war, was her nightly selection of a public bath. There were a half-dozen baths reasonably close to our house, and it was her job, each evening, to decide where it was that we would go. She carefully described, to Milo and Kazuko and me, the best qualities of each bath, speaking slowly and expertly, and it was our job to be attentive, to insist as much as she did upon the importance of the ritual.

One evening, during the early spring weeks of the war's final year, she chose a bath some distance from our house and we set out in clean kimonos, Milo holding my hand and stepping along between his mother and me. Kazuko's mother was talking cheerfully, anticipating the bath for us all, when we turned a normal corner and discovered before us a part of the city that had been bombed. We slowed when we saw it, standing tentatively at its edge. It was not a large area, but there had been houses there only a few days before, and we'd been unaware of any such nearby bombing. The ground in front of us was cold gray and had been burned so evenly that there were few mounds of ash. It looked like a field in preparation for some kind of devilish crop, and we were afraid to cross it, afraid to step, with our clean
zori
, onto its awful crust.

It was odd to be walking in urban Tokyo and to suddenly find a newly made and open field. There was a warm wind about and as we stood there, hoping not to see a sight worse than that silent field itself, Milo began to laugh. He had been a docile child, a slow responder, but now he began pointing at the rubble, laughing, and even clapping his hands. “Ha ha,” he said, in one of his languages, and I was forced to hold on tightly to his hand for fear that he might slip from my grip and go walking off into the ruins.

“Milo!” said his grandmother.” Stop it. People died here and we must be sad.” But we could not control his joy. He smiled with such obvious delight that Kazuko and I looked quickly to see if any of the lucky neighbors, any of those whose homes were bordered by the burn, might be watching. We nodded our apologies to the sides of their houses and turned back the way we came.

“We'll go to another bath,” said Kazuko's mother, using her body, as we retreated, to block Milo's view.

 

HAD WE SEEN THE BOMBED AREA A FEW WEEKS EARLIER than we did, I think we would have been more distressed. By spring, however, the people in our neighborhood had adjusted to the probability of seeing such sights. They had prepared for them in conversation, they had heard descriptions of them from others, and, in a certain way, they had been looking forward to them.

By the time we reached the second of Kazuko's mother's baths Milo had turned inward again, but when we stepped inside the building he woke to the smell of the steam and the sound of the water. The woman who ran the bath sat high up in her cashier's box, just between the two doors leading to the two bathing areas. I could see that the men's side was empty and hoped, since male customers were few, that Milo and I would have it to ourselves the entire time. When Milo smiled at her the woman came down off her high stool and went in search of something for him, a candy or a treat of some kind. The women went ahead of us and, once inside the dressing room, undressed and stood with some
other ladies, all of them waiting so that they could go into the bath together.

One of the rituals of my closeness with my son then was, of course, the public bath. And when Milo and I finally entered our section he had been given a sugar lump and I a large wooden box, a special tub in which I might place Milo, in which I might temper the heat of the water to suit his tender skin. Upon occasion Milo would go with his mother to the other side, but he did not like the constant clucking of the old ladies, the way his grandmother would hold him up for their fine inspection. When he was with me Milo knew that, though I bathed him well, he would soon be free to roam the tiled room as he might, to stay in the cloudy corners where I could barely see him, to imagine himself the child of those wastelands he seemed so attracted to, to think in English or Japanese and to try to understand why those languages, within him, were at war.

Yet though I bathed my son well it was the cleansing of myself that was paramount. I sat on the low stool and took a porous stone to the bottoms of my feet, so thoroughly scrubbing away the calluses there that I knew I would walk gingerly for an hour or two thereafter. I soaped my body in a way that made Milo laugh, and when I rinsed the soap away I quickly repeated the process, making Milo shriek with joy at the sudsy crown upon my head.

When finally I stepped carefully into the tub my body turned slowly red and for a moment I forgot Milo, abandoning him to his slippery play. I was lulled by the bath and thought, for a while, of home. I wondered what it was that would make whole families of good Japanese want to move, as my family had, to a country such as America. It had seemed at times, when I was there, that half of Los Angeles was made up of people like me and when I asked myself what they would be doing about the war I had to answer that surely they would fight, that their loyalties and patriotic feelings were with America and that Japan meant nothing. But how could that really be? Was it possible that some of my very neighbors sat in the cockpits of the warplanes that came in
over our city each evening? Was it possible even that those pilot's goggles that Kazuko had seen had hidden a pair of Japanese eyes?

Milo began splashing, sitting at the edge of the tub I was in, and I remembered what Kazuko had said once, of people who emigrated as we had. She had said that real Americans were so tall and odd looking that to live among them would take an act of extraordinary courage. My people were farmers, and Kazuko had said that she could only imagine them always on the lookout for intruding Americans, living like that in a land of giants. Surely, she said, if they had farms bordered by the enemy they were always in great danger of having those farms swept away, of simply having a wide-eyed neighbor come in and claim the land as his own. She also thought that perhaps the Japanese were considered valuable as food growers or worked so well that the job of dirt farmer no longer had to be done by white men.

Milo was lying on his side, his eyes searching my face from the edge of the tub, so I stood quickly and lifted him into my arms. We went to the corner of the room and called over the wall to his mother, telling her that we would wait for her outside, and I could hear the women's voices starting up again as we stepped back into the dressing room.

Milo was happy as I dried him and slipped his clean clothes on over his head. My own
yukata
seemed too heavy and hot now, so I tied it together quickly and was about to carry Milo into the cooler foyer when I noticed a man fumbling with the knot of his
obi
, just inside the door of the men's section. We could hear the familiar droning, high above us, of the enemy planes, but I went over and offered to help the man with his knot. Milo smiled at him as the sound of the engines disappeared.

“Sir, let me help you,” I said. “ You are lucky, for the bath water is hot and you will have the place to yourself.”

The man turned slowly to look at me, his age encasing him, and it took me a moment to understand that this, again, was Kazuko's old tea teacher.

“The knot of my
obi
has tightened itself,” he said. “ I always
try to tie it loosely but it has a mind of its own. Several times lately I have had to cut myself out of my own kimono. An
obi
should encircle a man but not contain him.”

The
sensei
thrust his belly forward and raised his hands so that I could get at his knot more easily.

“ I have never known an
obi
to be so independent before,” he said. “ Perhaps I am contributing to its tightening by the way I walk. I lean back farther than I used to. I try to compensate for a tendency I have toward bending so far forward that my eyes always search the ground.”

The knot on the teacher's
obi
was impossible. He peered at it along with me, his wrinkled face clearly worried about it.

“ What can I do?” he asked. “All of my
obi
are now cut across the middle and strewn about my house, their knots still clutching at them. They remind me of those animals that will not release the awful grip of their jaws, even in death. What are those animals called? I forgot.”

Though my fingers were strong, the knot was such that I could not even find an edge at which to work. “ I will have to get a tool or something,” I told him. “Something to insert into the knot, something with which to work it loose.” I didn't know whether the teacher recognized me or not, so changed was I from the day he found me, but he called after me saying, “ Don't get scissors. That is all I ask. The
obi
I am wearing is the last that I own. Cut it and I will not again be able to close my kimono. I would be arrested for walking the streets the way that I would.”