Soldiers in Hiding (20 page)

If I had not been so uncomfortable, so out of sorts, I might have laughed. But while her brother had been speaking, Kazuko had been crying, and both of my legs were hurting from the weight of the woman. The tea teacher seemed happy enough to have two of the children on his lap, though. His voice came from
somewhere to my right asking, “What happened next? What happened during the six years? What happened after?”

“I had no idea,” said Ike, “that so much time had passed. I found a cave to live in and I camped, often, at the edges of villages, so that I could go in at night to hunt chickens, to lift garden vegetables from the soil. For months I tried to keep track of time by counting, but soon everything ran together. I would find myself standing on a path somewhere, not knowing whether one night or two had passed since last I stood there. I became accustomed to the sound and shape of the jungle but I rarely saw the moon—the canopy above was as thick as the soil beneath.

“For the first months I kept a vow of total silence, never uttering a syllable, never forgetting how I had come to be there. But later it became my purpose to lurk at the outskirts of the villages, often crouching at the backs of huts, listening to families speaking to each other. I memorized intonations, replaced my dormant Japanese grammar with bits of their own. And by the time I had sense and security enough to come out of the jungle and into their midst I had stolen clothes and had learned a few words and phrases, enough of their language for me to fool them, if I was careful, into thinking that I was a simple man from somewhere nearby.”

Well, I thought, if he'd taken a total vow of silence in the jungle he was certainly making up for it now. I couldn't see Junichi but I could tell from the way the car slowed that he was lost in the story. It was just the kind of thing that he would find fascinating. Milo's new uncle took a breath and continued.

“I stayed in the village for a short time, working for pennies, slaughtering and cleaning hogs. I saved my money, slipping back into the jungle at night to eat what was free and to rethink my strategy. When I had enough saved for bus fare, when I had enough for a few days' lodging, I waved good-bye to my employer and boarded a bus for Manila. And once there I immediately found a job. A small theater near where the bus stopped was in need of a janitor. When I saw the advertisement I began to
remember my days as manager of a jazz band and wondered if entertainment there would be anything like it had been in Japan. And after that things just happened naturally. From working as a janitor I got to know actors and soon I began to act and soon after that I began to teach the acting methods I had perfected while developing my disguise as a Filipino. In truth I may never have returned to Japan, but I fell ill and even a fine actor cannot fight disease. When I was sick, they tell me, I did nothing but shout and rant, all in Japanese. My wife and children prayed so hard for my survival that when they heard my strange babbling they thought I was speaking in tongues. But when they sent for the priest the priest said, ‘Wait a minute.' He had had some wartime experiences of his own, I guess, and recognized the language for what it was. And so I was found out. My wife was angry for weeks after my recovery but my children took it with a shrug. ‘Daddy's Japanese,' they told each other. I could hear them practicing saying it in the hallway outside my sickroom. ‘Daddy's Japanese.' There are only so many ways to say that, you know. If you don't believe me try it sometime. Acting is hard. Vocal range is everything.”

I laughed once and Ike reached over and put his hand on the cheek of the woman on my lap. The woman held back. She pushed a wisp of hair from her face, but she held back, and I could tell quickly that she was far from being adjusted to the idea that all these years she had been married to a Japanese, no matter what her husband said.

“Anyway it took me a while to convince my wife that what I did was in no way intended as a ruse against her. Many sections of the Filipino population are still strict in their hatred of Japan. Yet after she found out she insisted that she had known all along. Something about the way I walked, she told me. Something about the way I brought food to my mouth.

“You know,” said Ike, “when those other two lost soldiers came back to Japan before me I read about them in the Manila papers and shared in many discussions about what fools they had
been. My friends and I laughed at them. We looked closely at groups of Japanese tourists with their cameras and flags. ‘Could these be the same people who once so easily conquered us?' we asked each other. I wonder what my friends thought when they read about me.”

I was about to respond, to say something nice to him, when Junichi did something unprecedented. He turned halfway around in his seat and spoke. “I am sure it made them think twice about the nature of Japanese people,” he said. His voice was clear and strong but deeper than it was in private, and I suspected that he was lowering it to try to impress my brother-in-law. The car didn't waver on the road when he spoke, but for the first time my resolve did, my ability to view the situation lightly. Where was I to find a constant if not in Junichi's demeanor?

“Well,” said Ike, “I don't know why those others stayed away as long as they did, but for me it was accidental.” He swept his hands around the car at the tinted windows, but I knew what he meant. “My first and clearest memory,” he said, “was that of burying myself in the foliage of the jungle and weeping. I am sure the guerrillas who hunted me could hear my sobs. But sound, in the jungle, is odd. It is not always possible to discern the direction from which it comes.”

Ike put his hand on Kazuko's shoulder. “And when I came out of the jungle I was at my wits' end,” he said. “I could not have gone on. When I tell the story now I make it sound easy, but it was not. The villagers nearby built a superstition around me. Because they had heard my wails coming across the trees they called me the sobbing ghost, the night crier. Once, for a short time, some of them built a small altar where they would leave food and spare pieces of clothing. I don't think they ever knew I was Japanese. They thought I was touched and they felt that if they took some slight care of me, the fine fortune and good crops of the previous years would continue. Sometimes they caught glimpses of me, I am sure, but they never gave chase. It would have been so easy for them to catch me if they had.”

Junichi had been driving slowly, but he had apparently timed it just right, because just as this man finished his story we turned off the main road and stopped in front of our house. The car was quiet, everyone either lost in some corner of the story or too uncomfortable to speak.

“Is this the spot where the old house was?” Ike asked his sister when we finally did move ourselves out of the car. When he spoke to her he put his hand under her chin and turned her face so that he could see her better, and I didn't like that. Nevertheless I stepped carefully over to his wife and said, “I am your husband's brother-in-law. My name is Teddy.” But the poor woman only nodded, and I could see in her eyes some of the same discomfort I felt, so I moved away. I remembered from the war that most Filipinos spoke English so I knew that later I would be able to make her feel at home. Far be it from me to pressure, to try to make a woman talk if she didn't want to. I had learned that lesson.

Milo stood close to his uncle and Junichi did too. I was about to open my mouth, to make some kind of welcoming speech, but I was stopped by the sound of voices coming from the way we had come. The reporters had arrived just behind us and came around the corner, their sharp questions a meter or two in front of them. They had been speeding, I was sure, and Junichi had slowed way down, had forgotten his driving, had lost himself in the drama of this new man's story.

 

WHEN A MAN BUILDS AROUND HIMSELF THE FRAGILE cocoon of ordinary life, he is inclined to work toward its protection, even if he's been expecting a change. Yet by the time our visitors entered the house the pain and discomfort I had been feeling in my arms and neck had extended into my lower back and legs; it was so pronounced that I could not even pretend to normalcy. I have often been prone to tucking a leg or an arm under me in just the wrong way. Yet it is not the sleeping limb which one dreads, but the awakening, the pain of that limb coming back to life. And the limb in question this time was me,
my body, my self. I was awakening and I feared that I might pass away in the process. Death by waking up! Death by the past revisited! My wife's old brother. Who would have thought him alive?

For a day and a half after Ike's miraculous return I tried staying with him, but it was impossible. I couldn't talk to the man, could not bring myself to look upon him as the Ike of my youth, the Ike of thin exuberance and half-made plans. This man was a success, and he was Filipino, not Japanese. The idea of taking up some other national identity as an occupation, a professional practice, was not exactly new to me, but in my own case, at least my hard exterior had maintained itself, at least my basic melancholic self-disdain had survived intact. What was I to do? What was I to say to this foreigner?

I found places in our vast house that I had forgotten, alcoves and cubbyholes that were the outcome of poor design but the vestibules of solitary thought. I could hear the others dancing tentatively at the edges of reunion, but I went to them only when directly called, spoke only when directly spoken to. I was sore of body and spirit, but most of all I was surprised. Throughout my period of self-examination there had been no augury of Ike's return, no thoughts of him floating by with any particular regularity during the past months. True, I had fashioned a solitary life around the semisordid, but I was living my life through, I was law-abiding. Yet now this returner, this foolish parody of MacArthur, this little fat Ulysses, was making my body ache and would make me act. All those years, I began to realize, it was the weight of my failure in the Philippines that I had felt. Yet even now, after everything, I cannot say precisely what my failure was, what my correct action should have been. I had been a victim, like Jimmy Yamamoto, of the situation and of the times. But Jimmy had betrayed me when he died. He had somehow done his duty and I had been left behind, had turned from victim to victimizer with his death. It was all accidental, everything was. Everything that happened to me could have been turned to my advantage by the random altering of events. If Jimmy had not
had chocolate to give, if the woman of that small store had not screamed so in the night, if war had not come upon the world, if Los Angeles had contained me, not given me the need to find home elsewhere…

But my brother-in-law was in the other room speaking quietly to his sister, my wife. And the probability of an event means nothing after its occurrence. So in my alcove all bundled and hiding I finally decided that the real question, the real concern for me, was this: if Ike, the spirit of a whole generation of Japanese youth, could have changed so completely, then what about Teddy? What about me? Was I such an actor as Ike? What was I, when I left Los Angeles, compared to what I am now? Indeed, my hour glass had run its course. These were profound questions. The first I had had.

The
sensei
came to me often, but when he walked into these dead-end alcoves it was because he had taken a genuinely wrong turn, because he had lost the stairwell or thought he could find some shortcut, some fine passage to new ground. He would sit with me and would gesture, as if about to begin some inescapable line of reasoning, and then the gesture would fall flat and unvoiced into his lap. Once though, just before he was about to return to the living room I decided that I would speak of myself to him. What harm could it do? Though he was a man who spoke constantly, his voice always fell unheeded upon the deaf ears of his adopted family. He could tell my deepest secrets and no one would be able to listen.

“I don't know,” I told him. “I could have lived my life so differently. I should have…”

“A life comes in stages, Teddy. It is not a whole.”

“I, though, have been responsible for the actual deaths of others. In the war…”

“Yes,” he said. “War is irresponsible. In tea we are never irresponsible as in war.”

“I wish he had not come back,” I said. “I could have gone on in relative peace, as always.”

The
sensei
turned to look at me and said, “Though it was fun going to the airport I've got the feeling he is going to overstay his welcome. It takes too much energy to have to be polite all the time.”

The
sensei
was conspiratorial so I said, “I got a double shock at the airport. Not only Ike but that major, the man who brought him off the plane. He was terrible during the war, unreasonable and coercive. I'm sure he sleeps well now, though, his conscience clean.”

“It would be something you could ask him,” the
sensei
said, “the next time you meet.”

I smiled and put my hand on the fabric that covered the
sensei
's arm but he got up quickly then, and went off in the direction he had come.

It amazed me to think that in all the years since the war I could not remember having thought of Major Nakamura even once. Though I had lived with the deaths of Ike and Jimmy I had not thought at all of the possibility that the major could be alive somewhere; worse, that he could be well. Major Nakamura had been such an essential man during those years. He had been all wrong for the job but he had survived it. Perhaps in much the same manner as me.

Suddenly I was visited, there in the alcove of my postwar house, by a strong and a welcome conviction. I was sitting, after the
sensei
left, all slump-shouldered and unhappy, when my mind was swept by a cool breeze that lifted the images of Ike and Jimmy off my agenda and replaced them by a flood of thought about Nakamura. During the war, indeed after it, I had not taken anything to heart, had not done my duty to any country, to any idea, or to any person. But it had not been entirely my fault. At least in part it had been because of him! And what swept through me then was a clear sense of what duty there was left in life for me to do. I would bring my brother-in-law before the cameras to tell the country his story on my show. I would take responsibility for anything that happened, for any turn the show
might take, but no matter what the truth about Ike turned out to be, there would also be an unexpected guest of honor. Major Nakamura, not Ike, would be the amateur of that particular hour. In the moments after the
sensei
left, you see, I had been able to focus on what it was I thought my duty should be. For the first time I had been able to name it. And the name that kept resounding in my ears was Revenge.