Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  No one moved. I remember thinking at the precise moment of Jimmy’s death how hot it was and how odd the events had been that led him to the end of his life, here in the Philippines, far from the streets of Los Angeles, far from increasingly evil Japan. We were all frozen into the postures that the sound of the shot had put us in. The major held his handgun in the air where Jimmy’s head had been. The voices of the Americans sank into the walls of the jungle and the prisoner stood, knees locked, in the center of that awful circle. Perhaps Nakamura was mad then, for he moved before any of the others did. He picked up the rifle that Jimmy had let tumble when he died and held it up to the stone-still troops. His handgun still hung from his limp other wrist and he waited, looking right at me.

  “Maki,” he said, finally. The awful rifle blurred to my vision but nevertheless danced before me, like a cobra.

  I didn’t move, so he walked over to where I stood and placed the rifle gently in my hands. “Your turn,” he said. “Save yourself. Shoot him.”

  He was coaxing in the way he spoke to me and I could detect no anger in his voice. Jimmy’s body lay before the American he was to have shot. His mouth was pursed as it was when he played his trumpet. I was walking, before I realized it, up to where the soldier stood, his back to me. The rifle’s chamber was full but there had not been time for the tension of an execution to build once more. I raised the gun when the major took a step backward, away from me. It had a hair trigger, not connected to the weight of the moment. The man seemed relaxed before me and the Americans on the far side did not seem hostile to my action. There was a languid sense of levitation in me and I closed my eyes. I seemed to float. And I did not come back down to earth immediately. Not even with the sound of the report.

  Two

  THE OLD TEA TEACHER, THE ONE IN ATTENDANCE AT Kazuko’s wedding, found me wandering the side streets of a section of Tokyo not far from where she lived. I was wearing my soldier’s uniform and walking slowly, circling, trying to let chance decide whether or not I would ever see her again. Would she welcome firsthand information concerning the death of her husband? Would her mother want to know exactly how her son had died?

  I don’t know what decisions were made which allowed my return from the war so early, discharged and with no punishment pending, but it happened, and barely a month after the awful events of the evening I have just described. How old was the war then? Not a year certainly, for it was summer and I remember wiping perspiration from my forehead, upon my return to Tokyo, quite as often as I did in the war zone. Soon my uniform took on the darker circles of excess sweat, and soon, with my money gone and only memories to accompany me, my thin exuberance for life began to show signs of exhaustion. I was having trouble with my senses. Rather than the war-ready city, which everyone saw, I began to see before me the dead and hollow mouth of my endless future. Rather than the driving sounds of Tokyo, I began to hear the shots and shouts of the jungle guerrillas ringing in my ears.

  I’m not sure how long I traveled, sleeping, when I could, down under Meguro bridge, but I like to think that even if the teacher had not found me I would have come to, of my own volition, and begun my life once again. It is true that there were others like myself, under all the bridges of the city, but they were the broken, not the injured. They were the vagrants of the war and I was not like them. They had lost their minds while I was merely escaping the ghosts of my immediate past. I had discovered that visions of my dead friends would not venture down the embankments and under the bridges with me. Images of Jimmy and Ike, like those of the sari-sari store woman, waited up on the real street where real people lived.

  But one day I found myself talking to the old man who was Kazuko’s tea teacher, found him questioning me about the condition of my person, found myself letting him lead me away to his narrow house and letting him bathe me among the tea bowls and tools of his art. I did not speak much then but I remember that he burned my uniform for me and in that ritual took away my credit under the bridge, my familiarity, my face. He shaved the beard from my chin and wrapped me in a summer yukata and fed me lightly before taking me to Kazuko’s gate and making me knock. When Kazuko’s mother answered the door he was gone, I am sure, but my calico cat stood at her side. It gave a silent meow and stepped down between my legs.

  When Kazuko’s mother saw me it was early August, three years before the Americans perfected their Manhattan Project and ended the war. She wept and called her daughter, who came from the inner chambers of the house. They had got word of the two deaths in their family and had lost their old grandfather with the news. I looked thin and tired, I know, yet I was clean and quiet when they pulled me from the empty street and into their lives once more. They did not, immediately, ask me questions about the details of their losses. Photographs of Ike and Jimmy stood on the altar in the far corner of the room, but my photograph was gone. Kazuko’s mother, from the beginning, chattered on about tea and sembei and moved about the house as if at the edge of her dotage. Kazuko, though, sat staring at me and I at her. In me she must have seen the truth of my experience, for her eyes held the sadness I reflected. In her I saw the same beauty I had known, the same magnetic skin and face, but I also saw, alas, that she was full with child. Jimmy and I had been gone since late in the month of January and Kazuko had lived, most of that time, in the belief that her young husband could not die while she carried his child within her, his legacy, his thread to the continuing world. Had she, I wonder, told him of the slow expansion that her body was making for him?

  There was no question that I would take up residence among them once more. It did not occur to either of them to ask about my early dismissal from the insane activities of the war. Kazuko’s mother seemed absentminded about the loss of her son, and Kazuko took Jimmy’s death with the forbearance and stoicism by which she was bred. Her pregnancy was the point around which they both lived, and each evening, when we sat listening to the war news or reading of Japanese victories at sea, Kazuko’s mother would knit. She made small sweaters and boots and jackets that were gradual in expanding size so that when she held them up to us we were able to laugh at how quickly the child would grow, we were able to imagine him and find his progress noteworthy.

  Kazuko was widowed and I had been sent away from the war so early, don’t you see? It was no violation of friendship, no infidelity. Kazuko and her mother worked in war factories and were gone from the house each day, leaving me alone among Kazuko’s things, among the accessories of her normal life. I used to stand at the altar, when they were away, holding some article of hers and staring into the two young faces in the photographs, the ones that I was so quickly outdistancing. I existed and they did not. I had grieved too much to feel any more guilt or to wonder if what I was about to do was wrong.

  I had taken to holding the calico cat tightly, each day, so the night I finally went to Kazuko, it should come as no surprise that I carried my cat as protection against her sending me away. Kazuko’s head was on a hard sand pillow, her arms straight at her sides under the thin blanket. The tatami that I walked upon gave quietly under my feet but the floor was not depressed by me, did not sink deeply in that part of the house, making each foot the center of pools as the tired tatami in the front room did. I had cleaned the cat for the occasion, had washed it on the cool back step and spent an hour with it on my lap, drying it under the warm shade of the small fig tree. Though the cat’s three-colored fur made it oddly visible in the dark room, it looked at first incomplete, as if I held in my hands the roundish pieces of a difficult puzzle.

  Kazuko was awake when I knelt beside her, but she did not turn her head toward me, so I began squeezing the cat a little, to make it purr louder, the surrogate voice of my passion. Kazuko was covered by the thinnest of sheets and when finally I lifted it away, I was forced to release the cat and the cat immediately went in where I would have gone, next to her oddly shaped body. The cat’s head was up across her belly, its feet and stub tail right where I wished to sit, and even after I l
ifted the cat away, it stood, still purring, at her head. I could hear the cat clearly and I could hear Kazuko’s mother sleeping in the far corner of the room. Her mother’s feet were visible to me but her head passed through the door and into an antechamber, a warmer, smaller room, which she entered so oddly in order to gain a sense of privacy.

  Discretion keeps me from mentioning too closely the particulars of our encounter, but I undid the loose knot of her obi and I remember noticing how wonderful the feeling of her flesh was against my own. Kazuko’s breasts touched my hands timidly, but after that her abdomen rose like a fine round hill in some peaceful land. Momentarily I decided that what I was doing was wrong and I would have moved to leave if she had not said, “None of the women in my family have been large or difficult while bearing children. We have always been discreet of body,” and so I stayed, and while Jimmy lay in the dust of my memory his living child moved a little under my hand.

  “Come,” said Kazuko. “I cannot be hurt by you. Nothing is wrong.”

  I think a normal man, one not injured as I had been, might have stayed his hand, but I did not. I moved across the vastness without hesitation, taking no time. I was not concerned that the noise we made might wake her mother or that my blind proboscis might bump the child, hurting some part of it. Rather I came to her as I might have had we truly been alone. The calico cat had quieted but still stood, sentrylike, at our heads. It watched us through its empty eyes, not purring now, not holding any thought, and from its blank reflection I took my rhythm. We were quiet, a little, and we were not untender with each other. Kazuko’s eyes were open like the cat’s and as I held myself above her I was able to look, for a while, at both pairs of eyes watching me. Kazuko was watching the contours of my face with such passive beauty that I knew that she was accepting everything she saw there. She would not judge me, would not question my survival. As I held myself above her I did not notice the awful August heat, but just at the end, when moistness was everywhere and her mother was turning in her sleep, what I did notice, what I did feel, was the conception of my own child. Minuscule though it was, I felt the bump of it, the linkage, the awakening.

  I realize the risk I am taking by telling all of this. A pregnant woman, though she may have many fears, should be free, at least, from the fear of impregnation. Nevertheless, there are things a man can know without any proof at all. And as my seed set sail on its miraculous voyage I saw, in the cat’s cold eye, that I was bathing the growing baby with the ingredients of myself and that he would be a mutation, a hybrid; Jimmy’s boy but Teddy Maki’s too.

  There, it is said. And my sanity is still intact. We were all half-people in the room that night. Kazuko and I had suffered losses, great parts of us dead with the deaths of those we had loved. Kazuko’s mother, though her legs and torso were with us, kept her mind locked privately away in a room of its own. And Jimmy was half there, together with me in shared fatherhood. I had bombarded his baby with a million versions of myself and I could imagine, there in the dead quiet room, all of Milo’s little half-brothers and-sisters missing their mark, falling and falling through the muddy universe and finally dying out, unnoticed, like thousands of insignificant little stars.

  KAZUKO’S MOOD WITH ME WAS FINE, CHEERFUL AND natural, from the morning after the night I have just described. For my part, I pretended normalcy, I spent my days, while they were away at their factories, summoning up a kind of controlled cheerfulness which I dished out with supper and which seemed to fool them. My days, my times alone, were still full of the wolves of the past but I kept them at bay. The punctual return of my loved one, each evening, created an impasse. My darker mood was waiting, biding its time.

  I had formed the habit of leaving the house shortly before Kazuko’s return, each day, of timing my walks so that I met her at certain corners. And one night, though I had never mentioned him to her or told her that he had led me to her house, she suggested that we visit her old tea teacher.

  “The war has turned him strange,” she said, “but though he is funny he is still great. You might begin patching the holes in your education. A Japanese boy should not be so ignorant as you.” Kazuko enjoyed teasing me, for she knew it made me feel at home.

  The sensei’s house formed a triangle with Kazuko’s home and with our meeting place, and when we got there I could see perspiration at the edges of Kazuko’s lips, on her temples and across her brow.

  “Sensei, Sensei,” Kazuko called, softly and on tiptoes, looking over his fence and into his garden.

  I could see a dark figure through the glass, could see it move across the room behind the door.

  “Sensei, it is I,” Kazuko said, “come to pay my respects. Let me in. I too will be a teacher someday!”

  In a moment the teacher’s muffled voice came through the glass to us. “Go away!” it said. “I am busy! If anyone wants to study tea they can come back after the war. I am closed!”

  Kazuko stood quietly for a moment but did not call out again. And before long she motioned me back away from the door. We could see his dark figure moving back deeper into the house but we walked completely around the corner before speaking.

  “I would have shown him the progress of my baby,” Kazuko said. “I would have introduced you to him as its father.”

  THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE, THIS LITTLE STORY OF THE teacher, is evidence that Kazuko and I did our best to act the parts we played, to treat Tokyo as if she were a willing host. But though she tried to get me out each day, though her energy and cheerfulness knew no bounds, I found that more and more I wanted to stay within the confines of the house. There were no other young men for me to be with, unless I chose the dangerous spectrum of those under the bridge, and I had begun to encounter, occasionally, the stares of strangers. Why, I read in their looks, are you here? I ap-peared able-bodied, strong and young. Why then, they seemed to ask, was I not at war?

  Kazuko and her mother were up easily each day, off to work while I was still dreaming, and soon I began, once again, retracing the accidents and events that had altered my life. With each passing week I grew more catatonic and thus the cheerfulness I pretended, when Kazuko and her mother were home, must have seemed all the more difficult to muster, all the more transparent to them. I grinned fiercely and laughed, but I was unable to modulate my voice when speaking. I never knew whether tears might stream when laughter was intended. I could not eat, so pounds dropped from me and my mobility, when I was alone, became greatly impaired. My mind had no traction, no grip. Days, weeks, were pushed together like bodies in a modern Tokyo train. I was sick and I might have died had it not been for an event which pulled me back up among the living for a little while longer.

  Kazuko had been working in a factory that manufactured flags, and on the day of the event I will describe she and the other workers were told that the vaults were full and that they had nothing to do but wait while the specifications of the machines were changed. Clouds hung low over the city that day. The workers stood on the small street in front of the factory like prewar workers out for tea. They were engaging each other in a guessing game, wondering what next they would make, when a small air raid, so far as I know unknown to historians, began above them. Because of the low cloud cover the plane came into view only a few minutes before it unzipped its belly and laid its stillbirth into the gray sky. Kazuko said that when they first saw it they all thought it was one of ours. The pilot cut his engines and came in quietly, letting the high complaint that his motor made start again only when he was visible from the ground. And when they all looked up, their hands shielding their eyes from the glare, he was so close that they could actually see his face, his black goggles looking down at them.

  One woman near Kazuko began to scream, but the rest of them just watched. The pilot seemed to move away when he saw them. He dropped his bombs on some buildings a kilometer away and then tipped his wings and turned. Kazuko thought at first that he’d seen they were civilians and had gone far enough off course to let them live, but that
was not the case. He floated through the air awhile then made a wide arc and came back out of the clouds, releasing one last bomb when he was directly over their heads. While they watched, the awful wound in the belly of the airplane healed itself. This bomb did not fall so magically as the others had. It wobbled. Its nose seemed already to have pinned them to the ground for they could only look, none of them running, none crying out. The black-rimmed eyes of the pilot, the goggles round and reflecting, made it seem as though they were being attacked by an insect, not by a man. Kazuko had even seen the hand that shoved the bomb. She saw adept fingers pushing at the unwilling object and she thought she could see the extra white area around knuckles hard at work. She described the fingers that pushed the bomb as albino spider’s legs, all evil and hairless. The bomb took forever to reach them, letting them know, in its quiet competence, that the airplane was higher than it seemed. They would all have died had it hit them directly where they were, but instead it was the roof of the factory and then the poor women who were busy altering the fittings on their machines, who perished. The rest of them simply stood still. Even when the thing hit, even when its awful explosion cracked their concentration and hurled them to the ground, they were catatonic. Debris floated through the air in slow motion, like flotsam. Pieces of wood and brick tore into the path around Kazuko, pinning her to the spinning earth. And Milo, deep within his own world, gave a kick that made her add her voice to the sound that seemed to be tearing the sky apart. And all the while those puffy cumulus clouds moved about them in their slow conceit. Kazuko watched the small airplane disappear into them, its wings wobbling once, like a wave.

  The bodies of the fitting changers were brought into the afternoon light and laid on the street for everyone to see. They didn’t know any of them and someone counted heads twice to make sure that all the regular workers were unharmed, that no one had sneaked back into the factory to see what work the fitters actually did, to try to learn the inner workings of her machine.