You used an old bellows camera to take my picture once on an outing to somewhere quiet and dark and green, a place of shadows now unknown to me.
The shutter went click. You laughed and you said, ‘There is no escape. There! I have you now.’
I asked, not realizing that you meant you would possess me forever, ‘When we are old, will we also be young when we think about each other?’
And you said, ‘That is a very strange question. Do you mean when we think about each other will we see each other the way we are now? We will have to see if the life you live allows you to be forever young.’
If you still have that photo, that will be your memory of me. I will be forever young. Until recently, I have been able to permit myself to say that I am becoming older much more quickly than I did ten years ago. Age is stripping away what remains of my youth with a cruelty that no young person, even my children, can understand. When they visit me they look, they nod, they smile, but what do they see? They see their ‘old man’, Paul. That is the way I was with my dad. Towards the end of his life he was inside, looking out. I saw no further than what I gleaned from a glance. What would I see if I could see you now? Of course, I have not been able to watch you grow old. Every time I see a photo of a Japanese woman in her seventies or eighties I look, I peer. I study the face, the hair, the hands, and especially the eyes. I am searching for that woman’s youth. Somewhere in the interior, behind those wrinkles and the shy smile, I know that you are still there. If we listened again to Puccini’s ‘Un Bel Dì’ we would both weep a tear or two to celebrate a memory of us that never died. What a gift that was. What a gift that has been!
I am sometimes astonished when I wake up in the morning and discover that I am still alive. I am pretty sure this happens to you too because so many of my friends of a similar age say they experience this same shock. Yes, I am alive. It is still dark outside and the local mockingbird, having now built his nest, is in full chorus deep inside the dense stand of giant timber bamboo that serves as a battlement along the white stucco wall of my garden. That bird singing at four a.m. is evidence I am alive. I turn on the light and look in the mirror. This is the young man you knew? Not exactly. But I have the memory. I was too young when I knew you to be able to quote Thoreau. But here is how he saw it. Please enjoy his happiness:
Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are true singers. Any man can write verses in the love season. I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade . . . and listen to a wood-thrush now, just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds that sing for the love of the music and not of their mates . . . The wood-thrush’s is no opera music, it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone that interests us, cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning and evening. It is the quality of the sound, not the sequence. In the pewee’s note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush’s, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush’s alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told. Whenever a man hears it, he is young and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.
SUMMER: FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, VOLUME 6
I would much prefer to die in my sleep, even though there will be no weeping partner to find me. Some of us never wake up. Where do we go? If you can shed light on this, Yukiko, please let me know. Recently I have become preoccupied with accepting the fact that I will not be able to witness my own funeral. I resent that. As a chronicler of human behaviour for half a century I have been to many funerals. I remember details from most of them: who turned up to mourn and who did not. What was said and what was not said. The blanched faces, the sidelong glances, the winces, the air heavy with the inevitability of decay, the small room in which the family members gather awkwardly around the open casket, not knowing whether they should shake my hand or embrace me, the surprising things said among those who have dressed up for the service as if they were at a wedding and not at a funeral, the priest or minister reciting a dirge with rehearsed sincerity that reverberates off the stark, bleak Sheetrock walls.
Six years ago, Yuki, I joined a ‘closed’ internet group called Vietnam Old Hacks. This site is moderated by the genial Carl Robinson, an American who married a Vietnamese woman and became an Australian after running the Associated Press photo desk in Saigon during the Vietnam War. It is an international online watering hole for reporters, photographers, TV crew, stringers, spies, operatives, actors (including the alluring Kieu Chinh and the dapper George Hamilton), former military advisors, ex-mercenaries, and various retired ambassadors and embassy personnel, plus a smattering of academics with an interest in the thirty years of combat in Indochina and, of course, veterans of the US State Department with intimate, unpublished memoirs of backroom deals and other skullduggery of the type beloved by John le Carré. Some Old Hacks have a futile and tiresome hatred for Jane Fonda because she visited North Vietnam in 1972, met there with American POWs, and posed for photos with an anti-aircraft gunnery crew in Hanoi. She apologized. But even in old age, when it seems to me all should be forgiven, these Old Hacks need to hate.
The daily chatter among group members is entertaining at times but the group’s most useful function is letting its members know who among them has dropped dead or is seriously ill. These men and women, who witnessed combat and survived that and all the associated drama of covering war non-stop, once regarded themselves as indestructible. ‘Who will be the last man standing?’ I have asked a couple of close friends.
Within three weeks of my writing this chapter the illnesses or deaths of four Old Hacks had been announced and discussed.
They included Jacques Tonnaire, a.k.a. Jacques Thunder, former French paratrooper and freelance photographer who did courageous work along the DMZ in the early 1970s. ‘Gutsy guy to the end, Jacques Thunder.’ Carl said a French friend told him, ‘I hate that doc who promised him [Jacques], and more than once, that he would have “quite a few years of good quality life” ahead. Normally this is the type of lie you get from politicians. Since when do docs behave like that? Today we learn that all his suffering, physical and moral, was useless. The chemo did not stop or contain his cancer.’
Jacques died at the beginning of May 2014. The week before his death, his son, Chuong Duy, sent this email:
Good morning,
I’m Chuong, the son of Jacques.
Jacques is dying: I’ll get on the train in an hour, to see and visit him in Figanières, South of France.
Please could you write him a message? I’ll read it to him if he’s alive. Thank you in advance.
Chuong
It is difficult for me to talk about war experiences with someone who was not there. Some people I’ve come to know have told me that when they met me for the first time they sensed I had ‘hidden history’, and it made them feel uncomfortable. But when I meet up with those who were there, there is no stopping the memory surges and the sudden infusion of youth – as if youth were a serum and not an intangible.
Last week Van Thanh Lim, the former UPI combat photographer, suddenly called me from Los Angeles. I had heard that he had had major heart surgery. We had not spoken since 1975 in Saigon, when the war was shuddering to a close and I had had an encounter with a desperate upper-class Vietnamese woman at the venerable Continental Palace Hotel, who was trying to sell an exquisite necklace of emeralds and diamonds so she and her family could escape Saigon and flee overseas. Fear on the face of such a woman is truly frightening. It is an indication that the end is near.
‘This is Van,’ my friend said when he called me, as if I would know who he was, as if we had just spoken yesterday. His voice was full of joy and excitement. ‘How are you, Paul? We are not getting any younger. Please have lunch or dinner with me sometime. Please try your best to visit me. Are you OK?’ He talked about
wanting to have dinner with me and Nick Ut, the AP photographer, also Vietnamese, who shot the photo of the burning girl running down a road away from her village just after it had been hit by napalm. ‘We should have dinner in Little Saigon,’ Van said. He meant Little Saigon in Orange County, California. A Little Saigon that did not exist in 1975.
Am I OK?
I notice that I make more errors than ever when typing, Yukiko. I sleep in two- or three-hour fits and starts. My eyes fill with tears a lot more frequently now. This happens, strangely, when I am confronted by beauty and kindness. For example, my joy early in the light of day comes from noting that everything in my garden is in bloom: roses and ginger and citrus and apples. In the morning, before dawn, when it is cool and tropical birds continue the loud songs they learned in the jungle, a layer of absurdly perfumed mist coats all those flowers and me in the nectar of youth. The other day I watched the recent Japanese film Ame agaru [After the Rain], made from a screenplay Kurosawa wrote before his death. I started choking up when the good-natured samurai Ihei and his sweet wife Tayo did their best to bring happiness to other guests at a country inn where they were all trapped by heavy summer rains. That would not have been my reaction in my younger years. The truth is that old age is duplicitous. It is the age of death. But it also is the age of rebirth. I am sure you understand, Yuki. Spring will soon be here and everything, including myself, will be in renewal. I sense it. For a few days, or maybe for a few weeks, I will be young again. I will pull out your letters once more. I have the moment planned for that. I have a chair set up among the roses, and on a certain hour of the day I am going to read your letters one last time. I am going to hold the paper in my hands, and then I am going to put it all away in a place known only to me.
For one enchanting second I feel that if I extended my hand I could take the hand of the other Paul you knew, the seaman, sailing from Hong Kong to Yokosuka with nothing more on his mind than how he will say goodbye. He has only a child’s comprehension of that moment and how it will impact each stage of development throughout his life. He has only very limited understanding of what has happened during that summer. Watching the waves, he pictures your face and he smiles because he is happy. He is not wrestling with the puzzle of who you are, or what you were. For him, everything is simple. He is simply the virgin lover returning to the woman he barely knows, the woman he must leave, the love that can never be. He is thinking that the last goodbye will be one of many thousands of goodbyes and kisses and embraces and, yes, promises and declarations of love. The Shangri-La cuts open the ocean as if the ship were a knife made of jade and the ocean the enemy. Orders go out from the bridge. The men do their tasks with a shrug, and the young Paul watches the rise and fall of his world and he thinks of you, Yukiko, somewhere out there thinking about him. In a moment of fantasy he thinks that if he called out to you, you would hear him. But what would he say?
I have been wondering about that for many, many, many years. I don’t have a ready answer. I probably never will have an answer. The old Paul cannot speak for the young Paul. So I will go on wondering and not knowing.
I have been asked, always by men friends and never by women friends, if I was really as ‘green’ as I have portrayed myself. Green, yes. I am not so jaded that I cannot happily admit that my green innocence was reality. It was the way things were in the late 1950s for many young men and women. It was in many ways, I believe, the last age of innocence. Sex was a mystery known to me only by rumour. Women feigned fainting when men touched their hands, or when they wrote sweet nothings in their high-school yearbooks that sound now as if they were written by children. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had not yet been published; it did not appear until 1963. The Beatles did not record their first hit – ‘Love Me Do’ – until 1962, the year I got out of the navy, the year young women and men went collectively and joyfully insane.
In 1962, one night in a bar in Tokyo, I had a conversation with a young businessman named Nishida. I don’t recall being astonished when he told me he had trained in 1945 at the age of nineteen to be a ‘divine wind’ pilot – a kamikaze. The war had ended before he flew his mission. It did not strike me as odd when he described his teenage self as ‘sweet and innocent’. He talked about the farewell letter he had written to his parents. I took some notes when he was talking: ‘I told them I would always remember their shining love for me. I understood that their love would vanish when I vanished. I told them I would regret not having their love but I had to do my duty. I told them to please give my thanks to everyone who had given me friendship. I told my sisters to take care of my parents and to always be worthy of being a Japanese woman. In that way, I said goodbye.’ He looked at me as if a chasm stretched between us that would not allow me to understand. Yes, I would have written that kind of letter, I told him. We drank sake. He filled my cup. I filled his cup. That was the custom.
The other day I came across an item at that great storehouse of video nostalgia, YouTube. It is a recording of ‘Barbara’, a poem written by the French writer Jacques Prévert and adapted and sung by a very young Yves Montand, who was not much older than I was in 1959. In the song, Montand cherishes a memory of a woman he knew briefly long ago, a memory of just a look, just a smile, a single embrace that can never be forgotten. This poem was translated by the American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who is now ninety-five years old.
[. . .] And you ran to him in the rain
Streaming-wet enraptured flushed
And you threw yourself in his arms.
Remember that Barbara
And don’t be mad if I speak familiarly.
I speak familiarly to everyone I love
Even if I’ve seen them only once
I speak familiarly to all who are in love . . .
This afternoon, Yuki, the old Paul was watching for the eighth time the Italian film, from 2013, La Grande Bellezza [The Great Beauty], in which a sixty-five-year-old journalist whose past is riddled with rich experiences begins confronting the unpleasant truth that everything must change. The only woman he ever loved left him long ago without an explanation. Does this ring true? The journalist is a celebrated chronicler of bon vivant culture and excess. He has been to one too many parties. He has been celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday with characteristic decadence. He suddenly discovers that the woman has died. Her tearful and grieving husband, who he has not met before, comes to tell him that he has just read her private journals. She had written, the husband says, that the journalist – the seventeen-year-old boy she knew when she was nineteen, and who she never kissed – was the only man she ever loved. He becomes more aware than ever that beauty exists as he wanders through the film. All around him are friends and acquaintances whose lives are in disarray, whose loves and their urge to live are coming to an end. He thinks back to when he was seventeen and innocent, and his world is knocked off its axis. My sister Mary, quoting Oscar Wilde, told me recently that my life – my wanderings – has been ‘crowded with incident’. She is correct. My life has not been a tranquil river flowing to the sea. It has been a cataract. There have been whirlpools and waterfalls. As the film images flickered and I knew the narrative was taking turns that even on the first viewing were strangely familiar, I started to become despondent. I was on the verge of saying, ‘That man is me.’
But then there was proof that the Great God of Surprises has not forgotten me. This is the same God who, just like that, created the universe, I suppose, and then left everything else up to us.
Ring. Ring. The phone was ringing. ‘Hello?’
A laugh. A young woman’s voice, its accent from somewhere in Asia but also somewhere in Europe: ‘Do you know who this is, Paul?’
‘Ummm. No. I’m sorry. No.’
Another laugh. ‘It’s Flor.’
‘What? Flor! You are calling me from Paris?’ I imagined Flor – who is from the Philippines and is studying at a French university and is always asking funny questions about French men and whether the
y can be trusted – eating a doughnut and drinking coffee in front of the Paris branch of Tiffany & Co. Flor’s command of spoken English and French has become exceptionally good in the four years since I have known her. She has a French Riviera sophistication to her now.
‘Do you know Audrey Hepburn?’ I asked.
‘Who? You know, I may be too young to know who Audrey Hepburn is.’
‘Flor. Try to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was living the life you are living right now, but that film was made in the early 1960s.’
‘Oh,’ Flor said. ‘When you were young.’ That gave me something to think about.
Yes, the Great God of Surprises has been busy, Yuki. I became more aware, as I was writing this book, that my knowledge of spoken Japanese and of Japan itself had become embarrassingly dated. I would be a Rip Van Winkle if I went back to Tokyo, I realized. Curious about what I would find, I had turned up at the 2013 Matsuri, a festival held annually in Phoenix that is America’s second largest celebration of Japanese food, drink, music, dance, and various arcane ceremonies. The experience was both familiar and – because of the enthusiastic presence of hundreds of American teens wearing the weird garb of Japanese anime (comic book) characters – unfamiliar to me. But while I was there, I was persuaded by one of its members to join the Japanese Culture Club of Arizona. It is a small organization that, I soon discovered, is dominated by women devoted to chanoyu, the severely formal Japanese tea ceremony, and to ikebana, the equally severe art of flower arranging. The club is led by Maejima Harumi, a woman in her fifties, who was dressed in a sleek kimono the colour of mulberry leaves with hints of violet when I met her. For me, struggling with images from circa 1959 of a Japan that I know has undergone several transformations, many of which I have been told have obliterated the past, this was reassuring affirmation that in the new Japan not all is forgotten.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 21