The China Lover (39 page)

   11   

M
Y DAY DID
indeed come. But first I should relate an extraordinary event that came as a complete surprise to me. In the late summer of 1972, I received a letter from Okuni. It was written in his typically feverish style, coming straight to the point, dispensing with mention of the weather in Tokyo or other pleasantries. While reading his letter, I could picture his face in my mind, his eyes blazing. He was ready to come to Beirut, he wrote, with Yo and the others. They would perform
The Ri Koran Story
in a Palestinian refugee camp. Would I quickly prepare the way and organize a proper venue? The play had been rewritten somewhat, he explained, and was translated into Arabic. A team of language coaches was already teaching the actors to speak their lines phonetically. With luck and application, they should be ready in another month.

The idea sounded so absurd that at first I didn’t know how to respond. What was he thinking? Didn’t he realize how serious the situation was in the camps? These weren’t playgrounds for theatrical experiments. We were at war.

Still, I felt duty-bound, for the sake of our friendship, to at least put Okuni’s proposal to Abu Wahid. We had a meeting in an office at the Shatila camp in central Beirut. Hanako was with us. I tried not to notice Wahid’s dark hairy arm brushing her left thigh. They had coffee. I had mint tea. I told him of Okuni’s plan, and tried to describe the
play, which, in Tokyo, was unusual enough, but sounded utterly preposterous in Beirut. A Manchurian movie star trying to find herself in the lower depths of Tokyo. What could this possibly mean to an Arab people fighting for their lives? There was a painful silence. Hanako looked at Abu Wahid, shaking her head in disbelief. Feeling embarrassed and a little guilty, I looked out the window at a bunch of children in dirty T-shirts playing in the street. One tiny boy was aiming a sling at something. Another was shooting off a plastic gun. I was fully expecting Abu Wahid to say no. Then I heard a slow chuckle, which quickly grew into bellows of laughter. Wahid’s outburst of honking, hooting, hiccuping mirth gathered such steam that the children stopped playing and looked in our direction. Hanako, clearly relieved, started giggling as well. “Why not?” he shouted between spasms of coughing and knee-slapping. “God knows our people need entertainment. A Japanese theater! About a movie star in China! Why not? Why the hell not?”

And I must confess, on second thoughts, that even though I failed to see what was quite so hilarious, the idea of Okuni’s theater in a Palestinian refugee camp did have a certain surrealistic appeal. The question was where to stage it. There were few open spaces in the camp, and they were vulnerable to Israeli attacks. Their Phantoms were constantly streaking over Beirut, like little silver birds of death. Nothing escaped from their prying eyes.

Various spots were considered—a disused cinema in West Beirut, a marketplace in Sabra—and rejected as too impractical. It would have to be outside Beirut, thought Abu Wahid. Then he hit on an idea. Why not go where the enemy would least expect such a thing? There was a camp near the front lines in southern Lebanon which had an abandoned school playground in a fairly secluded place. The Israelis had bombed the camp several times, but the rubble had been cleared, and there had been no attacks for almost a year now. If the Japanese actors
didn’t mind taking the risk of dying in a bombing raid, they were most welcome to set up their stage in there. This thought, too, filled him with helpless mirth. The hand that had been squeezing Hanako’s thigh was slapping the wooden table with merriment.

When I saw my old university friend emerge from the Customs Hall at Beirut International, with his beady eyes and his broad grin, I thought I would cry with happiness. This was only his second trip outside Japan. He had visited Taiwan once with Yo. And I must say, even in cosmopolitan Beirut, Okuni and his actors, with Nagasaki in a purple woman’s kimono, and Shina Tora wearing high Japanese clogs, like a sushi chef, looked like a very odd bunch indeed.

As we sat around in his room, drinking Suntory Whiskey, eating Japanese rice crackers (I hadn’t realized how much I had missed those), and gossiping about old friends, even I felt a wave of nostalgia for the world I had left behind. In the thick blue smoke of their duty-free Seven Stars cigarettes it was as if a little part of Tokyo had come to life in a dreary business hotel in West Beirut.

Even though it was his first time in the Middle East, Okuni had no desire to be shown around our splendid city, which he treated with an air of total indifference. When I suggested a tour, he said: “If Tennessee Williams came to Tokyo, do you think he’d go sightseeing?” The analogy struck me as far-fetched, but still, Okuni wouldn’t be persuaded. When he wasn’t drinking with his actors, he was working on his next play, alone in his hotel room. Still living in his own head, I thought, not without a twinge of envy for a man who could be so self-contained. I had always admired his intensity, the way he concentrated on his actors during rehearsals, silently mouthing every word of the lines he had written, his eyes locked onto the stage. I wondered whether I would ever be capable of such absorption.

The trip south, in a hired bus, through some of the most stunning scenery in the world, left him equally cold. Okuni barely even glanced
at the lush green vineyards and ochre-colored hills. Only Nagasaki peered out the window from time to time. Okuni, Yo, and the others talked about the play, and rehearsed their lines in an Arabic that made Khalid, our driver, laugh out loud. And after this improvised rehearsal in the bus, Okuni strummed his guitar and sang songs from his older plays, while the others sang along with him. We might as well have been traveling from Osaka to Fukuoka, for all they cared.

And yet there was not much that escaped Okuni’s attention. He observed, without appearing to be looking, and what he saw was not usually what others would have seen. The public toilets, for example, held a peculiar fascination for him. He came up to me, soon after we had arrived in the camp, to comment in his high-pitched giggle on the interesting differences between Arab and Japanese shit. “Our turds,” he pointed out, “are small and hard, whereas theirs are softer but with more body. Do you think we’re different inside? Or is it just the food we eat?” I honestly told him that I had never given this any thought. He walked off, unsatisfied, sniffing his finger, the question still very much on his mind.

He insisted on shooting a Kalashnikov. The Palestinians were amused by Okuni and happy to take him to the shooting range. He was like a child with a new toy. I warned him not to burn his fingers on the barrel, and watch for the kick. “Fantastic!” he shouted to Yo, as he took aim at a target marked with the star of David. “Fantastic! Do you think we can smuggle one of these through Haneda? Ban-chan would love it! What do you think, Yo?” Yo told him not to be ridiculous. He pursed his mouth, a child deprived of his new toy.

Meanwhile, the stage was set up on the abandoned playground. The actors were followed by hundreds of wide, hungry eyes of children in rags, who stood there watching their every move as the yellow tent took shape. Old people, too, observed the proceedings, looking tired and uncomprehending. There was a small concrete building that had
somehow survived the Israeli attacks, which the actors used as a dressing room. We had to start at four, because it would be too risky to perform at night; the lights would attract too much attention. Besides, electricity was at a premium in the camp, and blackouts were a constant nuisance.

A slight afternoon breeze took the edge off the daytime heat when the play began inside the tent, which was packed with people of all ages, people who had never seen a play before, let alone a Japanese one. They seemed to enjoy the music, and the lighting effects. At least some of the words must have got through, and even if they didn’t, the actors hammed it up so much that they made the Palestinians laugh anyway. They laughed and they laughed, more than I’d ever seen a Japanese audience laugh, as though these Arabs had been starved of laughter, and their natural joy came gushing back through a broken dam.

I didn’t recognize much from the original
Ri Koran Story
. The play had been changed almost beyond recognition. Ri Koran went looking for the key to unlock her amnesia in a Palestinian refugee camp, instead of Asakusa. The evil puppetmaster, Amakasu, played by Shina Tora, wore an eyepatch, like Moshe Dayan’s, and a star of David was pinned to his chest. When the evil puppetmaster is overthrown, the actors sing the Palestinian guerrilla anthem, with Ri in the middle, dressed as a Palestinian commando, brandishing a gun.

All went well until about halfway through the last act. No one who was there will ever forget it. Okuni couldn’t have staged a more dramatic effect if he had tried. The stage went dark. A sinister blue spotlight was switched on to the tune of the Israeli anthem; Shina Tora, as Moshe Dayan, stepped onto the stage holding Ri as a puppet on his string. The arch enemy had entered the camp. First the children screamed, then they pelted poor Shina Tora with gravel and stones picked up from the ground. Yo, as Ri, tried her best to stay cool, but I could see panic in her eyes. Shina Tora ducked, while pulling evil faces
at the audience, which agitated them even more. Near the edge of the stage was Abu Wahid, waving his big hairy arms, trying to calm people down, telling them it was just a play. But the crowd was far too excited for such niceties. They were ready to lynch the Jewish villain with the David star. This was the moment when Okuni showed his genius for improvisation. Standing behind Shina Tora, as one of his henchmen, he ordered the actors to duck behind the scenery. The stage went dark once more, and a minute or two later Yo reappeared, dressed as a Palestinian commando, holding the villain’s star in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other, while the cast sang the Palestinian anthem.

It was a master stroke. Every man, woman, and child in the tent joined in, some of them crying their hearts out. A few of the younger guys blasted a few rounds with their guns. I had learned the song too, during my training, and could hear myself screaming the words: “Howling storms and roaring guns, our home soil soaked with martyrs’ blood, Palestine, oh Palestine, my land of revenge and resistance.” Tears were streaming down Abu Wahid’s face. I had never experienced anything like it: theater had broken through into real life at last. Yamaguchisan would surely have loved it. I filmed the whole thing, but the movie stock got lost in an air raid. Most of the Palestinians who were there that night are dead.

   12   

G
OOD NEWS USUALLY
comes when you least expect it. Perhaps I should have known something was up when Hanako spent a whole night with me without a moment’s sleep. Always a passionate woman, on this particular occasion she just couldn’t stop. She was like a love demon. I was totally exhausted, and she was still begging for more. When I asked her what had got into her, whether she had been drinking some love potion, she just tightened her legs around me and whispered that she loved me, that she was mine, all mine. When I asked her about Abu Wahid, she put her finger to her lips and went: “Shhh.”

I felt as though I had suddenly grown a few inches. Beirut never looked more beautiful—the sky a glorious Kodachrome blue; smiling faces everywhere; the smell of kebabs. I didn’t even mind when the taxi driver asked me about China, as we wound our way through the streets of West Beirut to the Abi Nasr café, where I would be picked up by another driver who would take me to a rendezvous with Georges Jabara and Abu Wahid.

Jabara was a shadowy figure, whom I seldom saw, and even when I did, it was hard to make out exactly what he looked like, since he was always sitting in the darkest corner, behind a screen of smoke from the pungent French cigarettes that he favored. Since he never took off his sunglasses, I don’t recall ever seeing his eyes. Jabara was the only person
to whom Abu Wahid was abjectly, even slavishly, deferential. I could smell his fear as he groveled to his master. I know it was unworthy of me, but I wished Hanako had been there to see it.

I was shown into a private room at the back of a small, dingy café. There were a few old men silently smoking their waterpipes, making soft bubbling noises. The backroom was dimly lit with one desk lamp. Abu Wahid offered to bring coffee and sweet snacks for Jabara, who waved him away as though he were an annoying fly. Jabara, dressed in a black leather jacket, spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him. Since he also spoke slowly, in perfect grammatical sentences, I had no trouble understanding him, however.

“Comrade,” he said, “do you know the story of Lydda?” I said I did not. “Then let me tell you, my friend. Lydda was a beautiful Palestinian town, between Yafa and Al Quds. The first settlement was built by the ancient Greeks. They called it Lydda. We Arabs call it al-Lud. It was occupied for a time by the Crusaders because they believed it was the birthplace of St. George. My name was chosen by my parents for that reason. Our family lived in Lydda as Christians for many centuries. As you know, comrade, we Arabs are hospitable people and we made no distinction between Muslims, Christians, or Jews. All lived in peace in al-Lud. Until that day of catastrophe which no true Arab will ever forget, April 11, 1948.

“I was a young medical student, visiting my parents on that day of catastrophe. We were sitting in the garden of the house of my birth, eating figs, and enjoying the quiet beauty of the olive trees that my father had planted with his own hands. We were proud of our olive oil, famous all over Palestine for its subtle flavor and heavenly fragrance. Many tried to imitate it, none succeeded. Anyway, comrade, it was around two or three o’clock in the afternoon when I heard the first screams of terror, which came ever closer to our house, like a rolling tide. I rushed to our front gate and saw a cloud of dust at the end of our
street. The screaming was joined by the sharp cracks of gunfire and the roar of engines. The youngest child of our neighbors rushed into the street, followed by her mother, who shouted for her to come back. I heard the stuttering noise of a machine gun and the little girl dropped like a floppy doll caught in a gust of wind. Her mother, howling like an animal, tried to reach her child, when another shot cut her down as well. A pool of blood spread like a fan around her covered head.

“Then I saw the column of armored vehicles speeding in the direction of our gate. In the front car stood a man, whose cold killer’s countenance I shall not forget until my last day on earth. He wore an eyepatch. I did not know it then, but this was Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dayan. As they raced through our town, the soldiers fired their guns at innocent people, as though they were on a hunting expedition. In the wake of this caravan of death, comrade, lay the first martyrs of Lydda, like beasts of prey. We were not even allowed to gather our martyrs and give them a dignified burial. The men were rounded up and sent to camps, and the women and children were herded into churches and mosques, assured that they would be safe there, while the Jews stripped our town of everything that took their fancy.

“The women and children suffered, but at least their lives were spared. Until July 12. Two Jews were shot in a firefight by our Jordanian comrades. That is when the monster bared its fangs once more and the Zionists demonstrated to the world that they could be worse than the Nazis. Like killer rats, their soldiers entered the churches and mosques and murdered the women and children in cold blood. Some of us, including me and my parents, who survived the massacre, were forced to march across the fields for many miles in the blinding sun, until we got to the nearest Arab town. Children were the first to die, of thirst and exhaustion. I saw one child drowning in a fetid well, while others tried to lick the slimy moisture off the inside wall. Stragglers were shot or beaten to death. My dear friend, Salim, was carrying a
pillow. It was the only thing he had been able to salvage from his home. The soldiers, thinking perhaps that he was hiding money from them, shot him in the head. Right where I was standing, comrade. He slumped to the ground with a sigh, his eyes rolling in his head, like a slaughtered animal. I tried to hold my friend, but the butt of a rifle crashed into the small of my back, and I was forced to leave him, to rot in the sun.

“There were foreign witnesses to these atrocities. One was an American reporter. He described the ‘Death March of Lydda’ as a wave of humanity leaving a long trail of detritus: first the pathetic bundles of abandoned possessions, then the corpses of children, then of old women and men, and finally of the younger people who had been murdered simply because the soldiers were annoyed with them, or bored, or drunk with the feeling of their own power.”

Abu Wahid was in tears as Jabara related these sickening events. Jabara himself seemed strangely unmoved. The words were vivid, but he spoke them softly, rhythmically, as though reciting a poem. Myself, I felt a deep anger welling up inside me, an anger that only needed focusing on a clear target for it to explode.

“Now for the good news,” said Jabara, in the same low voice. “We are ready at last to pay the murderers back for what they have done. The ancient Arab town of al-Lud, known to the Greeks as Lydda, is now the site of an international airport which the Zionists call Lod. On May 30, a Jewish scientist will be arriving there, with plans to build a Jewish bomb that will threaten the lives of all the Arabs. We will have to stop him for the sake not just of the Arab people but of humanity. And you, Comrade Sato, have been chosen for this sacred task. You, and Comrade Yasuda, and Comrade Okudaira.

“You will arrive from Paris on an Air France flight, dressed as Japanese businessmen. They will not suspect you of anything. You will carry attaché cases, which will contain hand grenades and light automatic
weapons. You will have a few minutes to assemble them in the restroom. You will then walk over to the Customs area, where the Jewish scientist, Aharon Katzir, will be picking up his luggage from his El Al flight. You will know where to find him and eliminate him and anyone who stands in your way. Remember that in this war all Zionists are enemy combatants. Armed struggle is the only humanistic way to advance the cause of all the oppressed peoples.”

I knew we would almost certainly die, but death was not real to me, even when we disembarked at the enemy airport, from which there could be no escape for us. Even at this moment of supreme peril, I found my own death unimaginable. It was as if I were a spectator in my own movie, deeply involved yet strangely detached. I wonder if it had been like this for our kamikaze pilots? They were so young when they died. What went through their heads, as they drank their farewell saké with their comrades? Much the same things, I guess, that went through mine. That is to say, very little, except for the task at hand. The future is a blank. I have heard it said that the proprietress of a well-known bar near a wartime kamikaze base would sleep with the young pilots on their last night. I have even heard it said that this last favor was sometimes granted by the pilots’ own mothers. Hanako performed this service for me, in Paris, in a hotel room near the airport. I remember thinking that I would never forget it, and then realizing that I would, for there would be no memory to remember. I would be gone. My time would be up. Extinguished. But others would remember me, as one who had helped to blaze the trail of freedom. As long as my name was remembered, something of me would survive.

It all happened so quickly that my memory of the battle itself is a blur. I remembered what Ban-chan had once said to me: when the moment comes, don’t think, just act. I can’t recall who first began the shooting. Okudaira, perhaps. Or it could have been me. The noise was deafening. I saw people falling all over the place. I felt a rush of excitement
, so powerful that it is beyond my ability to express in words. People have compared the thrill of combat to sex, but that doesn’t quite describe it. It’s more intense, better than sex. In those few moments of total power, you lose all sense of fear. In a way, you lose yourself, you merge with the universe. Maybe it is like dying, except that I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t die.

I didn’t see Yasuda die, but can remember him shouting that he had no more bullets left. He died a soldier’s death at the hands of the enemy. Okudaira—again I didn’t see this—ran out of the building onto the tarmac and managed to kill a few enemies coming off an El Al flight before dying a warrior’s death by holding his hand grenade to his chest and pulling the pin. He was the bravest of us all. I don’t know whether I would have had the courage. I often think about whether I would have passed the ultimate test. It tormented me for some years after, the fear that I might not have passed. Would I blow myself up rather than surrender? Would I lead a suicidal charge? If I saw armed men about to rape Hanako, and they hadn’t spotted me, would I hide, slink off, run away, or risk getting cut to pieces?

In any case, I fell into enemy hands. When the battle was over, we had killed twenty-six people. My only regret is that not all of them were Jews. A number of Christian pilgrims got caught in the crossfire. This was regrettable, but in war the innocent suffer along with the guilty. That’s just the way it is. We can regret this, but that doesn’t change anything. In prison, the Zionists did everything they could to break me. I won’t dwell on this, except to say that on many occasions I was close to losing my mind. For three days and three nights they tied me to a chair in a dark room, pumping terrible noise into my ears, shaking me until I thought my head would explode. I was put in the “refrigerator cell,” after being made to stand naked in a barrel of ice-cold water. They shackled me to the wall and blasted me with freezing air. They made me squat on my toes—the “frog position”—until I
passed out, and they revived me with more icy water. They forced me to lick up my own mess after I had vomited or shitted myself. I had lost all sense of time. Sleep was rare and always short, and made a torment by nightmares. Not that I always knew whether I was awake or not; delirium was an almost constant state. I had visions of Hanako being ravished by a huge Arab male, while I was tied to a chair. She was screaming with obscene pleasure, a helpless tool in his thick hairy arms. I tried to escape from my bonds, but couldn’t move. Hanako turned her face toward me, laughing at my impotence, but it wasn’t Hanako. It was Yamaguchi-san, whose laughter still rang in my ears, as I woke bathed in sweat in a cold, stinking cell.

I came close to dying, but I didn’t break. Even in the worst moments, I still felt I was holding on to a fragment of myself, just large enough to survive. I don’t want to sound mystical, or sentimental, but there was another image of Yamaguchi-san that played through my head, over and over, like a cinematic loop, an image that was the opposite of the Satanic one in my nightmare, telling me that I was making up for the errors of her generation. My resistance was a way to redeem the honor of the Japanese people. She was proud of me. She was my guardian angel. We modern Japanese don’t have gods anymore. Unlike the ancient Greeks, we don’t believe in divine intervention. Yet she was there, when I needed her most. Her spirit surely saved my life.