Waddy’s mood had changed. No longer mellow, he was attacking what he imagined were Wolkowicz’s soft spots—his Ohio origins, his immigrant family, his ridiculous college. What could Wolkowicz possibly know? Waddy said none of this aloud; he could convey it in the way he shaded the pronunciation of the word Japanese, making his tone even plummier than it usually was.
“Well, look, what does it matter?” Waddy said, changing his tone again and speaking to Wolkowicz as an equal. “What I want you to do, just before the final moment, is to shout the word Bones.”
“Bones? What for?”
“I can’t tell you why. It has to do with a secret Yale thing called Skull and Bones; I shouldn’t have told you that much, even. No outsider is supposed to know.”
“What happens after I yell Bones?”
“I go. You see, if anyone says the word Bones, I am required by the rules of this Yale thing I belong to, to leave the room at once. You see? It’s what I want; it’s a way to die—a game to play on the Jap.”
“A game?” Wolkowicz said.
“You’ll do it?”
Wolkowicz nodded.
“Good,” Waddy said. He sat down again; he seemed content. Wolkowicz thought that he might begin to sing once more.
Wolkowicz searched in the ammunition pack; only one magazine, twenty rounds of .30 caliber ammunition, remained for the BAR, which fired six rounds per second. There was plenty of ammunition for the Thompson, Waddy’s weapon. Waddy had not taken part in the firefight; instead, he had sat on the ground with his back against the elephant, toying with his Baby Nambu pistol. The submachine gun was propped against the elephant.
“Tell me something, Barnabas,” Waddy said. “Does death hurt?”
Wolkowicz, leaving the BAR balanced atop the elephant, checked the action of the Thompson. His lack of response did not disturb Waddy, who went on with the conversation.
“My wound didn’t hurt at all,” Waddy said. “Was that because my mind was elsewhere, or do bullets just not hurt?”
“I don’t know, Waddy.” Wolkowicz’s eyes were not on Waddy; he was searching the approaches to the hill. The Japanese were trying to encircle the position, trying to get behind them. They would succeed. They never gave up. Wolkowicz knew that the Japanese were not drugged or mad or gripped by a religious ecstasy. They fought as they did, caring nothing about dying, because it seemed obvious to them that dying was the natural consequence of charging a machine-gun position. Their bravery was an alien form of intelligence, dazzling but incomprehensible.
Wolkowicz heard a weak gunshot, a Japanese sound, very close at hand. Whirling, ready to fire with the Thompson, he saw Waddy with the Baby Nambu in his right hand. Waddy was looking at his left hand, upraised at arm’s length with the fingers spread. A dribble of blood ran over his wrist from the tiny hole made by the bullet he had fired into his own hand with the little Japanese pistol.
“Jesus!” Waddy said, his lower lip trembling. “It does hurt.”
At that moment, there was a tremendous explosion in the tree above their heads, a bloom of red flame and yellow smoke. Shrapnel rained down on them. The Japanese had brought up a mortar. Three more shells burst in the branches, then the rounds began to walk up the hill toward their position as the Japanese mortar crew shortened the range. Wolkowicz had been wounded in half a dozen places by the ricocheting shrapnel. Nausea flooded his body. Waddy, pressed against the elephant with his wounded hand clutched in his armpit and his other forearm thrown across his eyes, had no visible new injuries.
A mortar shell exploded within six feet of the elephant, opening a long oozing slash in its hide. At last the elephant sprang to its feet, trumpeting. It looked around, still remarkably calm, and ran its snuffling trunk over the corpse of the mahout. Wolkowicz dragged his weapons out of the way and threw himself to the ground as more mortar rounds exploded, scattering dirt.
Waddy ran to the elephant’s head and seized its trunk. He uttered an excellent imitation of the deep-throated command, half threat and half song, that the mahout had used to mount the elephant. The elephant obediently curved its trunk. Waddy put a foot on it. The elephant lifted him onto his head. Waddy had taken possession at last of the Thompson submachine gun and he held it aloft in a gesture of romantic defiance.
Wolkowicz lifted his bleeding face out of the dirt. The elephant towered above him like an idol carved from stone. Waddy sat easily just behind the ears, and Wolkowicz realized—a dreamlike thought—that Waddy Jessup really had been riding all his life. He imagined him as a child, mounted on a Thoroughbred as it moved from a walk to a trot, wearing a polo helmet on his head, learning how to post.
“Say it!” Waddy called.
“Bones!” Wolkowicz shouted.
Waddy Jessup kicked the elephant. Moving at great speed, it crashed into a bamboo thicket, striding away from the exploding mortar rounds, away from the valiant murderous Japanese, abandoning Wolkowicz, who knew that Wadsworth Jessup was going to live and he was going to die.
The mortar barrage ceased. Wolkowicz heard the exuberant shouts of the enemy as the attack resumed. He put the scorched muzzle of the BAR into his mouth and felt a horrifying pain, filled with flame and noise, inside his skull.
— 4 —
The Japanese interrogator could not understand Wolkowicz’s name.
“Say your name!” he shouted.
“Wolkowicz.”
The interrogator drove a fist, surprisingly hard and sharp-knuckled, into Wolkowicz’s naked stomach.
“Say your name!”
Wolkowicz had never for a moment been blessed with the illusion that he was dead. He had known, touching the muzzle of the BAR with his swollen tongue, that he had not pulled the trigger. He realized, at the moment in which he felt the pain of the blow, that a Japanese soldier had crept up behind him and smashed a rifle butt against the back of his head. He had known in that instant, before he lost consciousness, that what was now happening to him was surely going to happen to him: if the Japanese had not wanted to question him, they would have bayoneted him or shot him.
His captors had cleaned his wounds and given him rice and water. Now, even as they beat him and shouted at him, Wolkowicz could not suppress his admiration for them. They seemed to think well of him, too, in their way; the interrogator had told him, grunting out the English words in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that he had killed twenty-eight Japanese soldiers and wounded fifteen others with his BAR. The Japanese giggled; laughing at death seemed to be their way of displaying emotion.
The interrogator, after two days of blows and questioning, had got Wolkowicz’s name, rank, and serial number written down in English and Japanese on a sheet of crumbling rice paper. Now he proceeded to more important questions.
“Where is your base?”
Wolkowicz did not answer. He was thrown to the floor and kicked repeatedly in the stomach and kidneys. The pain was so great that Wolkowicz once again began to believe that the body that was being tortured was not really his own. This was a body he would leave behind in Burma; his own original flesh was somewhere else. He would not answer the questions.
“Why do you not speak?” the interrogator demanded, face contorted like a theatrical mask, after Wolkowicz had regained consciousness.
Wolkowicz could not speak. He did not know why. He knew no secrets that would be of the slightest use to the Japanese. Yet his mind refused to send his larynx, tongue, and lips the necessary signals. Wolkowicz did not leave his body, as people are supposed to do when on the threshold of death. He flew back into himself, into his family. He tried to remember the long journey across Asia. In some village where he had been caught digging turnips out of the earth, his father had been whipped. Wolkowicz saw the bloody stripes on his dead-white back. Later, he had lost his shoes and left bloody footprints in the snow. In spite of all this blood, Wolkowicz’s father had gone on loving Russia. He had bribed Wolkowicz in his childhood to speak Russian—a penny for a new word, a nickel for a sentence, a
quarter for a memorized stanza of poetry.
Now, as the blows of the Japanese interrogators rained down on him, Wolkowicz began to speak to them in Russian: noble resonant words, majestic sentences. Ah, the language was as beautiful as music!
The interrogators seized Wolkowicz’s jaw and thrust a piece of wood between his teeth. He gagged. One of the interrogators drew a bayonet; it was much longer than an American bayonet, it might have been twenty inches long. The Japanese set his feet and squinted his eyes in concentration. Then, uttering a bloodcurdling samurai war cry, he placed the point of the bayonet against the root of Wolkowicz’s left incisor and drove it up under the gum. With a quick, expert turn of the wrist, using the block of wood as a fulcrum, he pried the tooth out of Wolkowicz’s jaw.
Wolkowicz screamed, gagging on the blood that spurted into his throat. The tooth had seemed to be attached to the roof of his skull and he believed, during the long-drawn-out agony as it was pulled, that it was bringing a jagged bit of skull with it, dragging this sharpened fragment of bone down through his brain. The Japanese asked him no questions. Before he could forget how it had felt, his tormentor pried out another tooth.
With each twist of the bayonet, the torturer uttered his horrible shout. Then Wolkowicz screamed. Time after time, their voices merged in this shrill diphthong of cruelty and agony.
Wolkowicz never knew how long they worked on him with the bayonet or what he had told them. To keep his sanity, he counted the teeth as they came out. He had a few seconds of consciousness between each extraction in which to remember the number that had already been pried out of his jaw, and to add another. He had begun with thirty-four teeth—yellowish crooked teeth, not straight flashing ones like Waddy Jessup’s. When his interrogators were finished, he had twelve teeth left, six molars on each side. When he lost consciousness, he was convinced that his eyes had been pulled out too, because the world was black.
— 5 —
But when Wolkowicz awoke, his mouth tasting of salt and his skull still throbbing with pain, he realized that he had not been blinded. The reflection of flames danced on the wall of the room where he lay. He knew exactly where he was: in his cage, a bottomless box, covered by a grating that let the sun beat on him. He was chained to a post driven into the ground.
When, however, he lifted his arm and shook it, there was no rattle. His captors had forgotten to chain him. That was odd. Wolkowicz saw that the door of the cage was open. He got to his hands and knees and crawled out, thinking that he might find some water to drink; he knew he could not escape in his condition. The Japanese must know this too, if they had not bothered to lock him up.
A disorderly crowd of soldiers milled around in the encampment. Several huge fires had been lit. The soldiers were shouting and laughing. Their babble had a different sound from the noise usually made by Japanese troops. Wolkowicz wondered if the war was over, if the enemy had won and were celebrating their victory. He could think of no other explanation for this raffish atmosphere.
Wolkowicz got to his feet and staggered toward the nearest fire. A row of stakes had been driven into the ground. He drew closer and focused his eyes on one of the stakes. The severed head of a Japanese soldier stared back at him. Each of the other stakes, perhaps twenty of them, had a head driven onto its sharpened point. One of the soldiers ran up and grasped a head by the ears, twisted it, wrenched it off the post, and offered it to Wolkowicz. Wolkowicz, opening his mouth in a black ruined grin, accepted the gift.
The soldier, laughing, hooked arms with Wolkowicz and led him to a fire. Several other soldiers crouched around the fire, toasting gobs of meat on the end of long sticks. They were wild-looking youngsters, round-faced and dark-skinned, with black bristly hair that looked as if it had been trimmed with a bayonet. Only a few wore uniforms, shoddy soiled clothes that did not fit.
Realizing that he was holding a human head by the hair, Wolkowicz gave it back to the soldier. The soldier took it and made a face that said, “You really don’t want it?” and punched Wolkowicz in a friendly way on the chest. Wolkowicz shook his head. The soldier threw the head into the fire. It lay with its ear pillowed on a burning brand, gazing resentfully out of the flames at Wolkowicz.
A hand fell on his shoulder. Wolkowicz paid no attention. He was hypnotized by the face in the fire. Wolkowicz looked closely at the soldiers who were cooking their dinner like boy scouts around a campfire and realized that they were Chinese.
The hand turned him around, firmly. “Well, mate,” said a voice speaking English, “up and about, are you?”
Wolkowicz found himself looking into the bearded face of an Englishman. The man wore khaki shorts, knee socks, and a green turban. Wolkowicz himself was stark naked; the hair on his chest was filled with his own clotted blood.
“Come along,” the Englishman said. “I’ll give you a cup of tea. Unless you fancy a bit of broiled liver.”
Wolkowicz looked again at the jovial Chinese soldiers. They were chewing happily on the charred livers of the Japanese they had just slaughtered.
Wolkowicz remained with his rescuers for six months. This was in many respects the happiest time in his life. The guerrilla band led by the Englishman was a mixture of Chinese and Kachin fighters. These courageous, merry young men were in action almost constantly, falling on Japanese patrols on forest trails, blowing up Japanese bridges and ammunition dumps. The Chinese invariably decapitated the Japanese dead and opened them up for their livers. The Englishman did not know why.
“They seem to thrive on human flesh,’ he said, “and it must have a hell of a psychological effect on the Nips. It’ll be interesting to see if they eat Trotskyites when they get back to killing them after the war. Burmese are much more appetizing than Japs.”
“Trotskyites?”
“Yes, the Burmese can hardly wait to have at each other again. You see, these chaps are White Flag—Stalinists. There are other bands of them, also fighting the Japanese during this temporary truce, composed of Red Flag chappies—Trotskyites.”
“What about the Chinese?”
“Stalinists too. They’re just lending a hand.”
“There’s a Communist civil war going on in this godforsaken place?”
“Oh, yes. Jolly important to the world struggle for social justice, this bit of bush.”
The White Flag camp was located in a village that lay at the head of a high valley framed by crags. Here Wolkowicz and the Englishman lived, in the ruins of a bell-shaped pagoda with a huge pipal tree in the dooryard. Between cannibal feasts, the guerrillas went to English classes conducted by the Englishman and gathered flowers for him; he was cataloging the flora of the region. On the roof of the pagoda, hundreds of tiny wind-bells tinkled in the night. The bamboo, which grew to a height of sixty feet, burst into flower while Wolkowicz was in the village, smearing color over the steep mountainsides.
“The bamboo only blooms every forty years or so,” said the Englishman, “so no one in this camp is likely to see this again.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Wolkowicz asked.
“I’m a student of Asiatic trivia. Fascinated by flora and fauna.”
A Burmese doctor treated Wolkowicz’s ruined mouth with sulfa and surgery. The camp abounded with pretty young Burmese women, and one of them moved into Wolkowicz’s bed. The Englishman, who spoke fluent Chinese in several dialects as well as Kachin, did not report Wolkowicz’s rescue to his headquarters for a long time.
“I enjoy the company, it’s rather nice to jaw in our native tongue,” he said. “Sooner or later, of course, we’ll have to reveal your presence to headquarters. We’ll say you had amnesia and babbled in Russian for ages before crying, ‘I remember! I’m a Yank!’ Meantime, since you’re such a handy sort of chap with guns, you can lead the odd sortie, if you don’t mind.”
Wolkowicz, using a Sten gun instead of a BAR, killed many more Japanese. Twice he saw wild elephants in the forest. Once a tiger came into a Japanese outpost after a fight, ignoring the
fires and the noisy victory celebration, and fed on a headless body, like a dog lying under the table at a drunken banquet. Wolkowicz’s wounds healed. There were no mirrors in the camp in which he might have seen his sunken mouth.
“It is wonderful, that,” the Burmese girl giggled, stroking his quivering penis with hands dipped in sandalwood oil.
Finally, an Anglo-American army penetrated to the Shweli River, and Wolkowicz, dressed in British shorts and a turban that had been wound by his Burmese girl, walked into an encampment of Merrill’s Marauders and identified himself as a member of the Outfit.
“What the fuck is the Outfit?” asked the major in charge.
— 6 —
In Ceylon, Wadsworth Jessup, impeccably turned out in a khaki uniform that still smelled of the hot iron, smiled at Wolkowicz. He had come into his room at six in the morning to wake him. Wolkowicz sat up in bed; the sheets were as thick as sailcloth. Waddy had lifted the mosquito netting and stuck his head inside. He was wearing Air Force sunglasses. Brilliant sunshine fell through the windows onto a polished teak floor; through the window Wolkowicz could see a man in knickerbockers swinging a golf club. He heard the head of the club hit the ball.
“Barnabas,” said Waddy Jessup. “It is you. Thank God.”
Beaming with good fellowship, Waddy took off his aviator’s sunglasses for a moment so that he could look directly into Wolkowicz’s eyes.
“Thank God for what?” Wolkowicz asked.
“For your deliverance.”
Waddy had abandoned his British accent and spoke again in his normal prep school drawl. He wore a major’s gold oak leaves on his collar and a row of ribbons, surmounted by his paratrooper badge, over his shirt pocket. Among his decorations was the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest medal for bravery awarded by the United States Army.
“I mean, my God, Barney,” Waddy continued, “when that elephant stampeded away with me, leaving you to the mercy of the Jap, I really thought I’d seen the last of you.”
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