Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  “Milo!” said his grandmother.” Stop it. People died here and we must be sad.” But we could not control his joy. He smiled with such obvious delight that Kazuko and I looked quickly to see if any of the lucky neighbors, any of those whose homes were bordered by the burn, might be watching. We nodded our apologies to the sides of their houses and turned back the way we came.

  “We’ll go to another bath,” said Kazuko’s mother, using her body, as we retreated, to block Milo’s view.

  HAD WE SEEN THE BOMBED AREA A FEW WEEKS EARLIER than we did, I think we would have been more distressed. By spring, however, the people in our neighborhood had adjusted to the probability of seeing such sights. They had prepared for them in conversation, they had heard descriptions of them from others, and, in a certain way, they had been looking forward to them.

  By the time we reached the second of Kazuko’s mother’s baths Milo had turned inward again, but when we stepped inside the building he woke to the smell of the steam and the sound of the water. The woman who ran the bath sat high up in her cashier’s box, just between the two doors leading to the two bathing areas. I could see that the men’s side was empty and hoped, since male customers were few, that Milo and I would have it to ourselves the entire time. When Milo smiled at her the woman came down off her high stool and went in search of something for him, a candy or a treat of some kind. The women went ahead of us and, once inside the dressing room, undressed and stood with some other ladies, all of them waiting so that they could go into the bath together.

  One of the rituals of my closeness with my son then was, of course, the public bath. And when Milo and I finally entered our section he had been given a sugar lump and I a large wooden box, a special tub in which I might place Milo, in which I might temper the heat of the water to suit his tender skin. Upon occasion Milo would go with his mother to the other side, but he did not like the constant clucking of the old ladies, the way his grandmother would hold him up for their fine inspection. When he was with me Milo knew that, though I bathed him well, he would soon be free to roam the tiled room as he might, to stay in the cloudy corners where I could barely see him, to imagine himself the child of those wastelands he seemed so attracted to, to think in English or Japanese and to try to understand why those languages, within him, were at war.

  Yet though I bathed my son well it was the cleansing of myself that was paramount. I sat on the low stool and took a porous stone to the bottoms of my feet, so thoroughly scrubbing away the calluses there that I knew I would walk gingerly for an hour or two thereafter. I soaped my body in a way that made Milo laugh, and when I rinsed the soap away I quickly repeated the process, making Milo shriek with joy at the sudsy crown upon my head.

  When finally I stepped carefully into the tub my body turned slowly red and for a moment I forgot Milo, abandoning him to his slippery play. I was lulled by the bath and thought, for a while, of home. I wondered what it was that would make whole families of good Japanese want to move, as my family had, to a country such as America. It had seemed at times, when I was there, that half of Los Angeles was made up of people like me and when I asked myself what they would be doing about the war I had to answer that surely they would fight, that their loyalties and patriotic feelings were with America and that Japan meant nothing. But how could that really be? Was it possible that some of my very neighbors sat in the cockpits of the warplanes that came in over our city each evening? Was it possible even that those pilot’s goggles that Kazuko had seen had hidden a pair of Japanese eyes?

  Milo began splashing, sitting at the edge of the tub I was in, and I remembered what Kazuko had said once, of people who emigrated as we had. She had said that real Americans were so tall and odd looking that to live among them would take an act of extraordinary courage. My people were farmers, and Kazuko had said that she could only imagine them always on the lookout for intruding Americans, living like that in a land of giants. Surely, she said, if they had farms bordered by the enemy they were always in great danger of having those farms swept away, of simply having a wide-eyed neighbor come in and claim the land as his own. She also thought that perhaps the Japanese were considered valuable as food growers or worked so well that the job of dirt farmer no longer had to be done by white men.

  Milo was lying on his side, his eyes searching my face from the edge of the tub, so I stood quickly and lifted him into my arms. We went to the corner of the room and called over the wall to his mother, telling her that we would wait for her outside, and I could hear the women’s voices starting up again as we stepped back into the dressing room.

  Milo was happy as I dried him and slipped his clean clothes on over his head. My own yukata seemed too heavy and hot now, so I tied it together quickly and was about to carry Milo into the cooler foyer when I noticed a man fumbling with the knot of his obi, just inside the door of the men’s section. We could hear the familiar droning, high above us, of the enemy planes, but I went over and offered to help the man with his knot. Milo smiled at him as the sound of the engines disappeared.

  “Sir, let me help you,” I said. “ You are lucky, for the bath water is hot and you will have the place to yourself.”

  The man turned slowly to look at me, his age encasing him, and it took me a moment to understand that this, again, was Kazuko’s old tea teacher.

  “The knot of my obi has tightened itself,” he said. “ I always try to tie it loosely but it has a mind of its own. Several times lately I have had to cut myself out of my own kimono. An obi should encircle a man but not contain him.”

  The sensei thrust his belly forward and raised his hands so that I could get at his knot more easily.

  “ I have never known an obi to be so independent before,” he said. “ Perhaps I am contributing to its tightening by the way I walk. I lean back farther than I used to. I try to compensate for a tendency I have toward bending so far forward that my eyes always search the ground.”

  The knot on the teacher’s obi was impossible. He peered at it along with me, his wrinkled face clearly worried about it.

  “ What can I do?” he asked. “All of my obi are now cut across the middle and strewn about my house, their knots still clutching at them. They remind me of those animals that will not release the awful grip of their jaws, even in death. What are those animals called? I forgot.”

  Though my fingers were strong, the knot was such that I could not even find an edge at which to work. “ I will have to get a tool or something,” I told him. “Something to insert into the knot, something with which to work it loose.” I didn’t know whether the teacher recognized me or not, so changed was I from the day he found me, but he called after me saying, “ Don’t get scissors. That is all I ask. The obi I am wearing is the last that I own. Cut it and I will not again be able to close my kimono. I would be arrested for walking the streets the way that I would.”

  I went back into the foyer and asked the cashier if she had something that would work for stubborn knots. But by this time Kazuko and her mother and several others were there so we all went back in, the owner of the bath leading us and carrying a small nutpick in her hands. When she looked at the teacher standing there she seemed surprised. “This is not one of our regular customers,” she said. “ He laid his money on the counter when I was out of the room.”

  “This is my wife’s tea teacher,” I told her, and Kazuko, looking surprised herself, gave the man a quick bow.

  “ I live toward Otori shrine but I have somehow extended my evening walk and now feel the need for a bath,” the teacher told us.

  Kazuko’s mother bowed to the teacher and took the nutpick from the bath owner. “ Really,” she said, “a knot is a knot.” The teacher bowed to the group and when Kazuko’s mother came forward with the pick he thrust his abdomen out again, the knot riding on the sharp edge of his bony hip. “This always happens to me,” he said.

  When Kazuko’s mother went to work on the knot, the rest of us came close to see what success she was having. The tea
cher had his elbows pointed out, his old hands turned at angles on his hips. The nutpick kissed the edges of the knot for a while, searching for a place to enter, but being careful not to pull at the threads of the material itself.

  “Really,” the teacher said, once or twice.

  It is my opinion that Kazuko’s mother would have opened the knot, though, of course, the point is academic now, for as she picked so softly the sky was full of sound. There was a roar, like a freight train coming quickly past, and then there was an explosion. We all froze in our positions there. I remember believing that as long as there was no whistle, no bomb would come sliding down its musical scale to harm us. Nevertheless, there was a terrific shaking of the earth that had been quiet for so long. I closed my eyes and waited, but the bath still stood.

  “Oh,” said the sensei. “ Have you cut it? Will I be forced, from now on, to wear western clothes?”

  As he spoke the electricity went out and the women around me started to cry. Through the frosted windows of the bath we could see the patient orange lapping of flames and we could quickly see each other, a little, in its light. During the awful moaning of the women, Milo began to perk up and giggle once again. His hands flapped about in the dark air and he jumped up and down beside me like a happy frog.

  The women and the teacher formed a single line and, controlling panic, began to walk slowly out, with me and Milo taking up the rear. We went through the bathhouse and out the double front doors. Though the noise had been deafening, none of the stores around us seemed to have been hit and the orange glow that we’d seen through the window was considerably farther off than we’d first imagined. Though the lights had gone out it was not very dark on the street. People stood in front of their stores, some with buckets in their hands, some pulling their hair and crying. “The bath! The bath water!” they called. “ We must wet down the sides of the buildings!”

  It was true; the newspapers had printed a set of rules for dealing with the possibility of fire, and one of them had been to take water from the tubs of the neighborhood baths, to douse the sides of the wooden homes and buildings. The owner of the bath took a step farther forward and said, “ Please. Do not worry about the softness of my tatami. Help yourselves. Please.”

  Buckets appeared. Neighbors, their faces dark, marched through the bath’s light entrance and across the heavy tiles to the tubs. At first the water was too hot and they tried to fill their buckets too full, so there were shouts of pain. And quickly the tatami was soaked and torn, the heels of street shoes turning its straight straw lines into twisted sores, like the blooms of an awful flower.

  “ Help yourselves,” the bath woman kept saying. “Welcome. Welcome.”

  There were a dozen stores on either side of the bath, on either side of the street, and all were wooden. The owner of the bath ran to the back of the building to turn off the fire that heated the water. The store owners and their families were taking the water that they got from the tubs and throwing it as high up the walls of their buildings as they could. Some of the women standing with us began to try to help, bringing the smaller bath buckets out and heaving water all around. Milo and I stood for a moment, in the middle of everything, and then we walked away, down the street toward the oranging sky.

  The glow of a fire from a distance does not show the sharpness of its flames. Other people were walking the way we were but they had about them an awkward sense of cheerfulness, not angry that it was Kazuko’s spider-faced enemy who’d done this, but rather seeing it as a break in the routine, as something to do in the evening. It was, after all, a neighborhood first.

  The bomb had landed only two streets away and when we got to the edge of Meguro-dori, the wide boulevard that cut our section of Tokyo into halves, Kazuko and her mother caught up with us. Her mother’s hand was still wrapped tightly around the sensei’s stubborn obi and she was pulling him along, his angle of walking unchanged, his abdomen still forward. We could see the fire plainly now; it was centered in the Buddhist temple on the other side of the street. The teacher took my arm. “ I know that temple,” he said. “ I have done tea there.”

  Across the street there were fire fighters positioned everywhere, but they handled the hoses poorly and did not try to keep the crowd back. We crossed quickly and entered the temple garden as casually as we had on our Sunday outing, Kazuko’s mother and the sensei walking a few meters ahead of Kazuko, Milo, and me. There were many small fires, much of the foliage was burning, but the main building itself was being watered so that the flames on its walls might not reach the roof.

  “ Wooden Tokyo has always invited fire,” the sensei said. “ It is one of the dilemmas of our way of life.”

  Most of the others in the crowd had contented themselves with watching from the safety of the street, and as soon as we were within the temple grounds I began to wish we had done the same. I was hot and perspiring, worried that some accident might befall us. Kazuko’s mother and the sensei had run to the center of the little bridge that spanned one of the carp ponds and were looking about like tourists, nudging each other and pointing off at parts of the spectacular destruction. By the time we caught up with them dozens of spotted carp were gathered beneath the bridge, their stupid mouths wide and hungry at the surface of the pond.

  “ We should go back,” I said. “ We are getting too close.” But Kazuko’s mother was on the tips of her toes, pointing to an area off” the temple grounds, on the temple’s far side, where we could see the sway of the flames in the rising wind.

  The bridge we stood upon was one of several in the large temple yard, and, as the small fires multiplied around us, we began to lose our sense of direction. Had we stepped upon the bridge from this side or from that? The gathered carp below us looked like lepers and when a bit of fire slid into the pond on the far side they all turned to the hissing.

  “Let’s go,” I said, but as we stepped from the bridge fire leaped from one to another of a line of ginkgo trees that stretched in front of us. Kazuko took my arm. The trees burned quickly, their orange skirts dancing brightly before falling quietly down. “ Help,” said the sensei, surprised and jumping a little. He and Kazuko’s mother were both ready to leave then, but each was sure of a different direction.

  We could see the great main hall in front of us, so I stopped a moment and tried to concentrate, to discover once again, in which part of the yard we stood. Small fires wandered up the sides of the big building and the smoke pouring through the roof was as thick as velvet. I looked at Milo and saw that he was lulled by the fire, the brightness of it making him hold his eyes nearly closed. I had just come to a decision as to which way we should turn when Kazuko screamed and released the grip she had on my arm. She pointed the fingers of both hands at the temple roof, making me look there just in time to see it blow. Parts of the roof rose like projectiles, and it was as if they were trying to strike back at the Americans, so high into the sky did some parts go. Individual boards turned in the air above us like stiff acrobats, their long wigs waving to the crowd. We were so close we might have been killed by their return to earth, but something in the air made them drop straight back down, landing like deadweights to push the remaining timbers in on the poor Buddha, whom we could see then, still otherworldly, through the disintegrating walls.

  Kazuko moaned beside me, her fingers now pointing at the ground, her body so stiff that I thought she would fall. The sensei had his thumbs hooked in his obi, but stepped behind Kazuko and began shouting in her ear. “Calm yourself! Calm yourself! The fire is dying!”

  Indeed, though the fire was raging, with the bulk of the temple no longer blocking our view, we could see clearly which way we had to go. We could see the patrons of the fire standing all along Meguro-dori, swaying in their summer yukata, and we were able to step away from the menacing trees.

  With the roof missing even the firemen seemed to have given up, for there was nothing specific left for them to fight. They stood in circles, agreeing among themselves that the fire w
ould not leap, this evening, to some unscorched portion of their shrinking city.

  In a moment the sensei and I were able to get everyone moving again, slowly back to safety. We took the long way, giving the angry building a wide berth, but when I looked, one last time, in at the Buddha, I saw a little of the color of the fire across its forehead, a little change in its fine expression. The essence of the temple building, bits and pieces of its walls and roof, still stood, and it reminded me of a potter’s kiln, so hot did it look in there. Was I mistaken or were the Buddha’s lips losing some of their fine pursed quality? Was the Buddha’s mouth opening slowly? To form a small circle, a look of slight surprise?

  I stopped again and pointed for the others, so that they also could see their Buddha melt, but they were beyond me and had fixed their mad expressions on something more substantial. There before them, on a piece of garden where stones had recently been raked into meditative swirls, the bodies of some of the temple monks were gathered. That they were monks I understood from the remnants of cloth that had been singed to the arms and legs of some, like extra layers of thick protective skin. Kazuko’s mother and the tea teacher stood quietly, their own mouths opened like the Buddha’s, their hands moving slowly in the air like deaf-mutes speaking. Surely the monks could have saved themselves, I thought, by running from the fire as they’d recently run from Kazuko’s mother and her plaintive shouts. Among the monks the rounder body of the temple master drew me, for he alone was still sitting up. His fat legs were forever crossed, and beside him he held, in one of his charcoal hands, the merest shell of his shamisen, its three strings sprung skyward then burned back down, like fuses. There were no expressions on the faces of any of the monks. The fire had given them hideous burns, their noses snipped from them, their mouths gone, no surprise at all on their uniform faces.