Soldiers in Hiding

by Richard Wiley

  But my brother-in-law was in the other room speaking quietly to his sister, my wife. And the probability of an event means nothing after its occurrence. So in my alcove all bundled and hiding I finally decided that the real question, the real concern for me, was this: if Ike, the spirit of a whole generation of Japanese youth, could have changed so completely, then what about Teddy? What about me? Was I such an actor as Ike? What was I, when I left Los Angeles, compared to what I am now? Indeed, my hour glass had run its course. These were profound questions. The first I had had.

  The sensei came to me often, but when he walked into these dead-end alcoves it was because he had taken a genuinely wrong turn, because he had lost the stairwell or thought he could find some shortcut, some fine passage to new ground. He would sit with me and would gesture, as if about to begin some inescapable line of reasoning, and then the gesture would fall flat and unvoiced into his lap. Once though, just before he was about to return to the living room I decided that I would speak of myself to him. What harm could it do? Though he was a man who spoke constantly, his voice always fell unheeded upon the deaf ears of his adopted family. He could tell my deepest secrets and no one would be able to listen.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I could have lived my life so differently. I should have…”

  “A life comes in stages, Teddy. It is not a whole.”

  “I, though, have been responsible for the actual deaths of others. In the war…”

  “Yes,” he said. “War is irresponsible. In tea we are never irresponsible as in war.”

  “I wish he had not come back,” I said. “I could have gone on in relative peace, as always.”

  The sensei turned to look at me and said, “Though it was fun going to the airport I’ve got the feeling he is going to overstay his welcome. It takes too much energy to have to be polite all the time.”

  The sensei was conspiratorial so I said, “I got a double shock at the airport. Not only Ike but that major, the man who brought him off the plane. He was terrible during the war, unreasonable and coercive. I’m sure he sleeps well now, though, his conscience clean.”

  “It would be something you could ask him,” the sensei said, “the next time you meet.”

  I smiled and put my hand on the fabric that covered the sensei’s arm but he got up quickly then, and went off in the direction he had come.

  It amazed me to think that in all the years since the war I could not remember having thought of Major Nakamura even once. Though I had lived with the deaths of Ike and Jimmy I had not thought at all of the possibility that the major could be alive somewhere; worse, that he could be well. Major Nakamura had been such an essential man during those years. He had been all wrong for the job but he had survived it. Perhaps in much the same manner as me.

  Suddenly I was visited, there in the alcove of my postwar house, by a strong and a welcome conviction. I was sitting, after the sensei left, all slump-shouldered and unhappy, when my mind was swept by a cool breeze that lifted the images of Ike and Jimmy off my agenda and replaced them by a flood of thought about Nakamura. During the war, indeed after it, I had not taken anything to heart, had not done my duty to any country, to any idea, or to any person. But it had not been entirely my fault. At least in part it had been because of him! And what swept through me then was a clear sense of what duty there was left in life for me to do. I would bring my brother-in-law before the cameras to tell the country his story on my show. I would take responsibility for anything that happened, for any turn the show might take, but no matter what the truth about Ike turned out to be, there would also be an unexpected guest of honor. Major Nakamura, not Ike, would be the amateur of that particular hour. In the moments after the sensei left, you see, I had been able to focus on what it was I thought my duty should be. For the first time I had been able to name it. And the name that kept resounding in my ears was Revenge.

  IT HAD BEEN THE PARTICULAR CRIMES OF MAJOR NAKAMURA that had caused me my years of listless remorse, yet I swear that the truth of it, the fact of his importance in my life, had not occurred to me until the moment I saw him at the airport that day. And even then it had taken some time to distill, some time for me to refine my slow realization. But now I had it firmly in mind. I could have survived the war, not only physically, but with the spirit of my youth intact, had I been subject to the commands of a man with less random brutalization in his policies, with less evil in his dealings with other human beings. And for my pains I wanted nothing more than for him to accept an invitation to be a guest on my show. I would not hurt the man, would give him none of what he had given me. I only wanted to talk to him, to ask him questions, to clear the air.

  And so I returned to the living room, where Ike and Kazuko and Milo had been speaking calmly, patiently waiting for me to get my courage up. I found quickly the warmth, the brotherly tones that had been lacking on our ride in from the airport, lacking in the last two days. I sat down and pulled the blanket over my lap, letting the kotatsu warm my aching legs. They had been eating mikan, so I let my fingers take one from the bowl on the table and practiced a quick removal of its skin. I noticed, because I faced it, that the tokonoma had freshly arranged flowers in it, our best daruma scroll hanging behind them. This was my favorite room, the most traditional of the house. Its walls had recently been retextured in the old Kyoto style and the tatami was all fine, strong and new. Still, Ike did not look very Japanese sitting there. His wife and children had retired early. They were not comfortable in these new surroundings and if they saw comfort in the eyes of their husband and father it made them bitter, reminded them of the trick he had played.

  I smiled, hoping someone else would speak first, and Milo said, “I was telling uncle that if Junichi were here we could take an evening drive, see the lights of Roppongi and other sections.”

  “That would be fine,” I said.

  Kazuko realized, in a quick start that reminded me of her mother, that I had no teacup, that the water in the pot on the table was tepid. “Ahra” she said. She pulled her legs out from under the kotatsu and crawled away before standing. This was like her mother too. “Conversation should be light and easy,” her mother used to say. “It should be an exercise in helping everyone relax.”

  Kazuko left quickly and I said, “While it is true, Ike, that I have not thought of you in years, there are some things that do not dim to my memory with time. Since you are here there are things I must tell you.”

  Milo shifted his weight, uncomfortable with my opening remark, but though I too wanted everyone to relax, though I had nothing against my brother-in-law, I did not want to lose the momentum I had gathered, did not want to become less single-minded once again.

  “Please,” said Ike. “I thought you were dead. You thought I was dead. It is over long ago now. Do you realize how far that war is from the minds of most people? If we must talk about war we’d better talk about the next one. Undoing the past is no solution.”

  I wanted to argue with him when he said that, for if the solution to the way we are does not lie in our pasts then what is the value of trying to change, of trying to remedy what we have done? But Ike was sitting straighter and had undone a notch or two of his belt, so I held up my hands. “What did you find to say to Major Nakamura when you arrived?” I asked. “I had somehow assumed that he was long dead.”

  Ike was immediately more comfortable. He smiled and said, “I told him ‘mabuhay.’ That’s a Filipino greeting.”

  “Nakamura shot Jimmy,” I said. “He murdered him.”

  I spoke slowly and very clearly, and I kept my voice light. But Ike’s little foreign-looking smile turned to wax on his lips and he responded stupidly. “I know,” he said. “I should not have greeted him so warmly.”

  Just then Kazuko came back carrying the ingredients for tea on a flat wooden tray. She pushed the tray into the room as a woman in a restaurant might and then slid in after it. When she stood up she stayed away from us for a while, sensing the returned tension
. But though Ike’s face was serious he waved his hands across the table as if to discount the possibility of any truth in my words. He became strategic. “I want to talk about you for a while, Teddy,” he said. “How did you survive? How did you get out of the jungle?” He slumped a little forward, staring through his smile.

  Milo was like a man watching a slow and liquid tennis match. He knew his mother wanted him to interrupt but he could not think of a way of doing so. Now Kazuko brought the tea forward tentatively. When she sat back down she began the preparation of the tea without speaking and we all seemed to sense the necessity of waiting as we were until she finished.

  “Dozo” she said to her brother. “Please,” to her son and second husband.

  I wrapped my aching hands around the warm teacup and smiled slightly. “It was a handgun, Ike. A small-caliber handgun. The firing point was a centimeter away from Jimmy’s head.

  “But why?” he asked. “What did Jimmy do?”

  “He provided solace to the enemy. He gave candy to an American. He spoke English and was not a strong carrier of the major’s convictions.”

  Ike nodded, almost satisfied, as if the reasons I had given were enough. “He was always like that,” he said, and I sneaked a glance at Kazuko before pushing on.

  “Therefore,” I said, “I had wondered what it was that you and the major found to say to each other. You and he have grown in such different directions. I had hoped to take the occasion of your return to question him a little, to make him sweat.”

  Had Kazuko been truly like her mother she would have interrupted then, would have introduced some aspect of social grace, making us watchful. But she had just learned, as far as I could remember, for the first time the details of the death of her first husband, the man she had so decisively preferred over me. I picked up my cooling cup and looked at her. “It is Major Nakamura we are discussing,” I said. “He has no remorse. Do you remember? We saw him at the airport and he was remorseless.”

  “Ah,” said Ike, “but he could have been acting. He could feel shame under his calm exterior.”

  “Jimmy would have survived the war if not for him,” I said. “He would have been the first to survive.”

  I was still watching Kazuko but Ike’s comment had ignited in me a new strategy and I changed tone. “Yes, Ike,” I said. “The major may be as miserable about the war as I have been, if he is acting. And he has had forty years to perfect the role. You might even be able to discern it if you were to see him again.”

  I waited a moment, hoping that Ike would bring himself farther in. With us at the table were the two other people in the world who had been profoundly connected to Jimmy, profoundly affected by what the major had done. Kazuko’s sense of what was happening was evident in the way the muscles at the back of her neck pulled at her downcast head. Why had I not told her before? If she had asked I would have. Perhaps I had relied too strongly, all these years, on my sure knowledge that she would never ask.

  Ike laughed and said, “It was unfair of you, Teddy, to have put everything on hold like this until I got back. Since you have, though, we will find out what goes on. Let’s pursue it. Let’s ask him point-blank.”

  Ike was tired of the utter seriousness of our conversation and was making an attempt to ease up. Perhaps he thought that by agreeing with me our little problem would be defused. But at my request Milo hurried into the other room and brought back whiskey and glasses. While Milo was pouring I told Ike about my idea for the television show and secured his agreement to appear. His strategy now was to agree with everything, for if he saw the road ahead as rough he also saw it as short. I knew, of course, even after our brief reacquaintance, that Ike would not have pursued the remnants of war if I had not. His wife and children, asleep in the depths of my house, had no false father, no mere image of a husband in the man. They had the genuine article. It was in his Japanese guise that Ike was most false. Though Ike’s English was sharpened by a strict interpretation of vowels, as most Filipino English is, it was his Japanese that let him down. When he spoke Japanese I was embarrassed for him, for he had maintained much of the slang and many of the elements and style that our language took from war. I could even hear, if I listened, the hint of impending victory in his voice. When he spoke of confronting the major he carried a boastful, disquieting quality, which, frankly, I had forgotten.

  Nevertheless, we drank well and celebrated our reunion with as much enthusiasm as we could bear. Milo did his best to assist me in maintaining the mood that night. He offered to appear on the show without my having to ask and he led his uncle toward the kinds of conversation that he thought I wanted to pursue. Kazuko stood and brought food and then remained standing, arms folded across her breasts. Ike said he didn’t disbelieve what I had said about Nakamura, but how could the man have murdered Jimmy and gotten away with it? The army had been strict and thorough in the discipline of officers as well as men, he assured me, and if Major Nakamura agreed to appear on television Ike would clear the air. He would ask the major what the matter had been, why he had taken the law into his own hands.

  And so it was that I learned another of life’s little lessons. I did not know, quite, what I had planned for the major were he to appear on my show, but I agreed, in the semilight spirit of the moment, to let Ike approach the major with the invitation. Ike had wanted to go immediately but the cooler mind of Milo convinced him to wait, at least, until morning. The major lived in a town that, though a part of Tokyo, was a long way out, and Ike made me promise that I would awaken him, so that he would be able to get there and back before his wife and children knew even that he had gone. It was a mistake, of course I knew it, but Ike’s wartime rhetoric was too tiring to argue down. He felt he had found a way of showing me where he stood. He invited Milo to go with him and poured whiskey, happily, into everyone’s glass. Kazuko, by this time, was even farther away from us, on the other side of the room. She was leaning against a wall but was watching her brother, observing the coming action unfold.

  BUT THOUGH WE PARTED IN AWKWARD FRIENDLINESS, though I had made many big decisions, I couldn’t sleep, had not, I believe, for days. The muscles of my body ached as if I had recently exercised them and my mind traveled, casting itself upon scene after scene from the near and distant past. I saw Ike’s body under the rich jungle topsoil and I heard him using his wartime Japanese to tell me things. “People change,” he said. “Don’t be so suspicious. It is merely the illusion that they do not that misleads you.”

  I rose from my futon and stood looking out the window of my room at the pale and bluish night. Though it had begun to snow again Kazuko, unconcerned, slept as she always did, her head and neck rising up out of her blankets, balanced upon the little sand-filled pillow that she loved. I bent over, holding my hand above her face, feeling the steady breath of her. Had she changed greatly over the years? She had lost, somewhere, that streak of rebellion that had drawn Jimmy and me to her, that had made her seem different, somehow, from her ancient family.

  I did not want to wake my wife so I stepped from the room and slid the door shut behind me. In the hallway I felt a chill from the smooth floorboards beneath my socks, but the winter moon had sneaked in somehow and lit the scene before me, making movement easy. As I progressed along the hall I stood in front of each bedroom door, thinking about the people within, trying to feel the ease with which they slept. In front of Ike’s door I felt more anxiety than in other places in the house. The sounds of fitful sleep reached me, the tensions of people at odds. As I stood there I felt sorry for Ike and wondered what greater successes he might have had had he lived his life on familiar ground. His life had mirrored mine, in a way. He too had hidden within the walls of another culture, had married there, had fathered his children, and failed or succeeded all in a country not of his making, not his own. I wonder, would America greet me were I to go back? Did Ike feel welcome here?

  In the next room, next to where his uncle slept, was my son. Milo, of course, has a house of hi
s own, but this is his room when he comes home. When our house was newly built and Milo was king, his room was closer to our own, but now it is this larger one that he prefers. I slid the door open slightly and stepped in to watch him sleep, and as I did so Milo pushed his long singer’s hair from his eyes. I could see that his mouth was open slightly and that the regular breath that came from it was not bringing him dreams. Milo knows nothing of Jimmy’s connection to him. Would Ike’s return, I wondered, mean that he would have to know more? It had not been difficult for Kazuko and me to keep Milo’s father from him. After all, we ourselves had never discussed it. I think in America such a thing would not be possible but here it did not seem odd. We had not discussed anything but had relied instead on intuition for understanding. And that I am Milo’s father is as much a part of Kazuko’s mythology as my own.

  As I stood there staring I was taken with an impulse to awaken Milo, to talk to him in some deep way, but I did not. Rather I walked quickly from the room and closed the door behind me. Milo said something then, from deep in his sleep, but I could not make out what it was.

  In the hallway again I passed quickly by the sensei’s room and stood at the top of the stairs. Sleep touches the sensei so lightly as not to be called sleep at all. At his age, he has said, sleep is only a kind of restful watch, a lookout for whatever messenger death might send. And if he heard me moving by he would want to hover, to plant the awkward seeds of his reasoning in my fruitless mind. So I took care to pass by lightly, and to descend the stairs more with quiet than with speed.

  In the room where Ike and I had talked so recently I felt a little better than I had above. This room with its doors to the garden and its tokonoma was my favorite. It was the first built of our house, one that copied the rooms we had lived in before the war. It was the best room, the safest, the kindest of all. In this room I could ask myself questions and know, at least, that the ambience meant me no harm. Though it had been only a few days it seemed far longer since I’d spent my wakeful night alone among Sachiko’s trappings. I had known then that something was about to happen, but still I had not been prepared.