by Mark Tiro
Each day after breakfast, I made the walk down to David’s office to continue with our “interrogation.” By this time though, the base was down to a skeleton staff of guards, and there was no one to accompany me. Still, I didn’t want to be rude, and so I tried my best not to be late to my interrogation sessions. The rest of the Australians, together with the commonwealth auxiliaries, had been evacuated so they could train for what they thought was going to be a major assault. Probably on our home island, though I tried not to think about that any more than I had to.
As the days I spent talking with David melded, one into the other, I started to feel a familiar, swirling sort of attraction. It started one day when he was talking about something I can’t remember now. That swirling, excited feeling seemed to always cloud my mind, and I pictured David touching me, just as sensei had touched me before. As soon as David mentioned Kazuo’s name though, I snapped out of it.
I started to worry as well, thinking that once I got back to the barracks, Kazuo would immediately know I’d been fantasizing about sleeping with another man. This made me uncomfortable, and I slunk down where I was sitting, trying to get away from the thought in my mind.
David must have noticed, because whatever it was he’d been talking about—he stopped. Then he looked at me, quite seriously. I became worried about why he was so serious. It never once occurred to me that maybe the change in David’s demeanor was simply a result of my own change in demeanor. I suppose my own lusting for him must’ve been writ all over my face. I felt sheepish, and a little embarrassed.
Certainly David must have noticed this.
But my thought about sleeping with him mostly disappeared from my mind, and only occasionally returned.
“Listen, Yoshio-kun,” he said during one of our sessions, looking at me with a directness that I couldn’t remember ever seeing in him before.
He had never called me this before, although I would not have been offended if he had. Over our time together, I had gone from being wary of him, guarded even, to where I was now.
Now, I had begun to trust him implicitly.
“Finding you again here—it had not been something I was expecting,” he said. “Not this lifetime at least. I’m glad you weren’t a better soldier, or we might not have succeeded in capturing you.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t a better soldier too,” I quipped, “or I might be dead.”
“Can I make you some tea?” I asked him later after he’d woken up.
Earlier that afternoon, David had sat down on the small couch there, where he’d promptly fallen asleep and started snoring.
It was the loudest snoring I’d ever heard in my life.
If I was with you, I thought, I’d sleep on the couch—in another room—every night. That’s when I realized, I didn’t even know if David liked men or women. Usually I could tell these things within seconds of meeting a man. But here I was, spending hours with him every day, and I didn’t have a clue either way. I mean, it wasn’t that I thought he might like women either. It was that I think he was so full of love that he didn’t need to make love with anyone anymore at all.
Thinking about this reminded me of something else I’d heard. Back in university, I’d been forced to take a class about world history. Apparently there was an American president once. He was the one who’d fought some war and freed some slaves. I’ve never liked history much. It usually puts me to sleep, and so I’d forgotten most everything I’d learned in that class the second the test was over. But there was this one story that, for some reason, had always stuck with me. It was this: someone once had said about this American president, that he was so religious, he was beyond religion.
That’s exactly David, I thought. He was so loving, it was like he was beyond sex.
I had looked around his office for a clue, before I’d given up. There were no pictures I could see except one. It was on his desk, and in it, he looked like he was four or five. It was just him, together with a Japanese girl. I figured she must’ve been Fumiko, the girl he’d told me about from Hokkaido who’d taken care of him and taught him Japanese growing up .
“So can I make you some tea then?” I asked again. “It’s the least I can do, after all your… hospitality…”
“Yoshio-kun,” he grinned, “if you can find tea on this island anywhere, I’ll drink as many cups as you can make.”
Tea. I started daydreaming. I could almost smell the freshly roasted hojicha coming from the tea shops in the train station we’d pass through when I was a little boy and my mom would take me up to visit my grandparents in Nagoya. I’d always thought it was a funny thing that the man who sold mom the tea at the station had a name almost like mine. What was his name? I thought a second, but couldn’t quite remember. There was no way I was going to think of it here, and so I drifted over into thinking about Kazuo first, and then sensei.
David kept talking, even after I’d sat down on the couch. He went back to sit at his desk and now, I’d started drifting in and out of sleep myself. Because of this, I didn’t hear much of what he was saying, and I’d forgotten what I’d been thinking.
“You may not remember, and sometimes you will actively try to forget,” he said, with an authoritative tone now. I don’t know how much of it he actually said, and how much I might just have dreamed there, half-asleep. “This war will be over soon enough. But other battles and other wars will come along to take its place. They always do. But from here Yoshio-kun, you will not go on alone.”
I didn’t say anything. Truthfully, I’m not sure I knew then what he meant. Had I known what was to come, I probably would have run the other way screaming. But I didn’t, and so I just sat there, half-asleep in quiet, restful bliss.
At some point I got up. I looked around his office and saw that the overhead fan was still spinning slowly. The fading afternoon light was now streaming in through half closed shutters. I tried to memorize all of this, to etch it deep into my memory. I was blissfully comfortable here in my tropical island war-vacation. As long as the food was okay, and I didn’t get sick of the taste of powdered eggs—and as long as I didn’t catch malaria—I’d be happy if this went on forever.
Maybe I should have argued with David.
Maybe I should have told him no. Or yes.
Maybe I should have flung myself over the desk and started unbuttoning my shirt.
I don’t know, but I didn’t do any of these things.
Looking back, I can say this one thing though: other than my father, David was the one man I loved with all my being, who I was almost certain now I would never sleep with.
“Everything is alright Yoshio-chan. Everything is alright. Don’t worry.”
“Is something happening David?” I asked, snapping back to the present. “Is something wrong? Are we being evacuated? Are you? What is it?”
“I didn’t say anything. You must’ve fallen asleep.” he said. There was a defenselessness in his eyes, and I couldn’t help but believe him. “The war seems to have passed us by. Completely forgotten us, leaving us here on our little patch of coconuts and sand.”
“And our mosquitoes, David,” I added trying to sound cheerful. “Don’t forget our mosquitoes.”
He smiled slightly, but didn’t say anything.
“What then?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence.
“I don’t know. I had a dream last night and I wasn’t in it. Have you ever had a dream like that Yoshio-san? Your own dream, and you weren’t a part of it?”
“I don’t think that’s even possible. After all, aren’t we all the hero of our own dream?”
“Yes. Yes we are.”
But his eyes were distant now, and he looked very tired.
That night, and the night that followed, I had restless sleep at best. If you could call it sleep at all.
It wasn’t until the morning after that I was finally feeling better. We’d received Red Cross shipments, and that night, we expected to enjoy a party of that un-meltable American chocolate, tog
ether with cigarettes. And there were the lucky few who received letters from their family with their package.
So it was a good day.
Until of course, it wasn’t.
As I rounded the corner walking from our barracks to David’s office, it felt like something was off. It took me a minute, until I realized what it was.
It was silence.
I couldn’t hear the usual banter of the guards, although this happened from time to time now. None of us really needed to be guarded anymore anyway—who on earth would try to escape our tropical Shangri-La? To do what? Go back to the war? And so the guards had begun spending more time out of the guard post, doing things other than guarding us.
Something here was definitely not right.
“Ssshhhh.”
Someone jumped out from behind the building. I felt someone reach around and grab me from behind. A hand slipped quickly over my mouth, and I heard a voice.
It was a Japanese voice, and it said, “Sssshhh. We don’t want the enemy to know we’re here. We’ve come to liberate you.”
“What?” was the only word I managed to slip out of my mouth before he put his hand back over it, to keep me from saying another word.
“We are getting all of you out of this prison. Please don’t talk or the enemy will hear us.”
It’d been a while, but I recognized the voices. These were soldiers from our positions on the Northern flank. These must be the ones, I thought, who had evaded capture and escaped into the jungle.
The soldier who was ‘liberating’ me had mostly dragged me out past where the guards would usually have been. But I didn’t see any guards.
That’s when I saw an explosion go off. It echoed in a thunderous crash. From the silence that had preceded it, I hoped the guards hadn’t been at their post. That they were okay.
Because after this, there was no more guard post.
Three more explosions followed. I could make out other Japanese prisoners being led out just like I had been—some still with a hand gagging their mouths—past the camp perimeter and into the jungle beyond.
Our soldiers were attacking the camp. My ‘liberator’ shoved me forward, and I heard one last explosion. I felt heat on my back. By then, I had the good sense not to turn around to look. I was certain that if I had, I’d be just as likely to see a rifle or sword or bayonet pointed at me as I would to see David, or Kazuo—or whatever else was left of our camp.
We pushed on, into the jungle, until nightfall. Or at least, I was pushed on. When we were a fair distance from the camp, it became obvious from the fireball that loomed on the horizon that, even if I’d been able to get away—to ‘unliberate’ myself so to speak—there was no camp left to return to.
Just as it was starting to get dark, we came to a rock outcropping. It hid a natural opening that was covered by a pair of overgrown trees. The soldier who’d ‘liberated’ me pushed the brush aside, and we walked in.
Once my eyes adjusted, I saw Kazuo and the other soldiers who’d been prisoners at the camp huddled around a small fire. Apparently, we had all been jailbroken together.
Past them, at the edge where the light fell off, I saw a shadow figure.
I could just barely make him out in the light, but—even after my time away in the camp, even in this near total darkness—he was unmistakable.
Koga.
9
Nine
Everything was quiet, and later that night, we shared coconut fish soup with the other prisoners we had been with in the camp.
“Welcome back, to the survivors, to our heroes who braved the tortures and the anguish of the uncivilized barbarousness of being so long in the throes of the enemy.”
Koga had kept these men alive in the jungle, alone, hiding and isolated. And then, after all that, he had still been able to lead them on a successful attack to free their imprisoned comrades.
By the time of the operation that freed us, his hold over his men was nothing less than absolute. I cringed with every word Koga said, but I knew enough to force myself to smile as he said them.
Kazuo was there with me though, and that in itself was comfort enough—although we dared not touch each other while Koga was there to see.
I chafed under the weight of breathing the same air as Koga. Kazuo though—and this surprised me, even though I guess it shouldn’t have because it’s who he always was—didn’t seem phased in the least at having to live in Koga’s shadow.
Kazuo would nudge me about this too. Every so often when Koga was out of ear-shot, Kazuo would start talking about forgiving Koga, of all people. He’d get the most serious look in his eye. “Oh Yoshio-kun, why don’t you try to look past all that stuff,” Kazuo would say. “Those grievances of yours are toxic. They’re hurting you more than him. It hurts me to see the toll this list of yours—these things you want to get even for—is taking on you.”
In any event, and given our current situation, there was absolutely nothing I could do about Koga… other than possibly what Kazuo was telling me, which was to forgive him.
When Koga was out, we talked, or touched, or hugged.
And when the prying eyes of Koga made it so that it wasn’t safe for us to even whisper to each other, Kazuo would simply make eye contact with me. It was in those times most of all, as Koga ranted about one thing or another to the loyal troops who’d followed him into the jungle, that I fell in love with Kazuo, all over again. To me, Kazuo’s eyes were infinitely kind, and they pulled me deep into his gentle soul—or at least out from my own seething anger.
“Did I ever tell you about my uncle?” Kazuo asked me one day when Koga was gone and it seemed safe to talk openly.
“No Kazuo-san. I don’t think you ever did.”
“He was a monk. Are you sure I never told you this?”
“I think I would remember if your cousin was a monk. I guess none of his piousness rubbed off on you,” I joked.
“It was my uncle, not my cousin. And you’re wrong Yoshio-kun. Not only did it rub off—it infused me.”
“Infused you? Like tea?”
We both laughed.
But his eyes were quiet, and I think he just might have meant it seriously.
“So you know, he had gone on a journey—”
“Your uncle?”
“My uncle. He had gone on this journey, over the course of many years. It was his life’s quest, I think. He had a dream of going to India, of sitting and praying under the one true Bodhi tree.”
“I know this!” I said. “This isn’t your uncle Kazuo. We learned this story in school. This is the whole ‘Siddhartha sat down to meditate under a tree one day’ story, right?”
“Yoshio, you’re—”
“Oh yeah,” I interrupted, as the quote popped into my mind. “‘When it was done, the illusion that had been Siddhartha was gone, and under that tree—only the enlightened Buddha remained.’ Kazuo-kun, I didn’t think you even had an uncle—”
“Yoshio-san,” he said firmly, “Please.”
I stopped talking.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Can I go on?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“So… my uncle, many years later, had acquired much wisdom and compassion. He was returning home with a younger monk he had met in India. One day they reached a muddy little stream with a strong current. Next to this stream, holding up her dress so it wouldn’t get wet, there was this beautiful young woman.”
“And she asked them for help crossing the stream, didn’t she?” I knew she did. I’d heard this story before too. I knew this wasn’t his uncle. I thought again about saying something to him about that, but in the end I thought better of it.
“Yoshio-san!”
“Sorry.”
“So my uncle,” Kazuo went on, emphasizing the word, “he swoops this beautiful girl up into his arms and carries her across the water. And then he puts her down on the other side. The girl goes on her way, and his monk friend and him go on their way. Neither one of
them says anything about it until later that night. They’d stopped and were sitting there eating, and the other monk—he was just like you Yoshio-kun. He just couldn’t keep quiet.”
“He must’ve been eating tempura then,” I quipped.
“Yoshio! I think it’s you who’s been eating tempura! Sshhhh.”
We both laughed and he went on.
“So this young monk, he says, ‘That girl—why did you carry her like that in your arms? What about your sacred vows—you know, after you became a monk? Not to touch a woman? What about that? And she was a very beautiful woman.’ Well my uncle—he just kind of chuckles. Then says to the guy, ‘Oh, wait, you mean her? I put her down all the way back there at the stream. Why on earth are you still carrying her?’”
I smiled at the story. I’d heard it before, but it was still funny. Especially the part about his uncle eating tempura, I thought. That part’s funny.
“Yoshio-kun, did you even hear a word I said?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then stop it,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop it! Stop carrying her!” he said. I don’t think he was exasperated, but maybe he was. “You’re still carrying the girl—you’re carrying around all these grievances about Koga, all these things you want to get revenge for. It’s like you’re keeping a list on him.”
“That might help keep me organized? Maybe I should consider something like that?”
The thought of an actual list of things that pissed me off did hold a certain appeal.
“Yoshio! Stop it! Stop it, please? You’re hurting yourself carrying these grudges. All this judgment is weighing you down. And I love you so so much…”
I sat silently, thinking, remembering.
I didn’t say a word.
“He had you beaten within an inch of your life!” I finally burst out, emerging from my silence. “Why should I forgive him? After what he did to you? After he ordered my command sergeant to blow up the tunnel, to kill us all? I should let it go? Like it was nothing? Why should I? No, he’ll pay—I’ll make him pay for what he did to them—and to you!”