Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  Emmett was shocked to see so much of the city still in ruins from the American firebombing, and he asked himself if he really had been living in solitary confinement for the last five years — he should have anticipated this much devastation. A million and a half people had lived in the wood-and-paper city firebombed by B-29s in 1945. No one knew how many had been killed; their ashes lingered in the scorched city.

  Overhead remained the shell of a brick office building with its windows blown out. Emmett walked in its shade, then turned a corner and was blasted by sun. An entire block on the western side of the street was a bomb crater filled with rubble even now, more than five years later, being pulverized under the treads of a yellow Caterpillar. The city had an ersatz frontier feel, like a movie set, with American jeeps and Cadillacs driven by steel-jawed chauffeurs transporting American army uniforms and the black suits of the non-Asian financiers.

  He made his way through the ruins toward the Canadian Liaison Mission, sickened by the soot on his clothes, oily grime that collected on his socks and pant legs. The journey to Tokyo had taken five days, the North Star landing to refuel on five airstrips en route, and in that time he’d barely eaten or slept. He’d comforted himself with nostalgia on that long journey, imagined arriving to his lost past, to a pre-war Tokyo of grilled mackerel, salty miso, black cherries, the taste of the sea and blossom, the special occasions for a little boy who would come to this city with his mother and father, to take holiday pleasures, to eat in restaurants and go to museums.

  Emmett picked up a newspaper and sat with it on a park bench while he tried to get his bearings. He fell asleep every time he blinked. He felt unwell, he had that taste in his mouth again, the taste of wild meat, and he finally went into the bushes that circled the park and vomited. When he returned to the bench he lay down and fell asleep. And dreamed of burning cities, saw the flames from the cockpit of his airplane, felt turbulence, dreamed of fighting his way up and out of a firestorm and being sucked into the fires he’d lit himself. When a Japanese man in a clean black uniform poked him awake, Emmett realized he’d been shouting. A small Japanese boy wearing an oversized New York Giants baseball shirt was watching him thoughtfully with his fingers in his mouth.

  An hour later, he was at the Canadian Liaison Mission, in an inconspicuous building with an ultra-modern reception room furnished in teak and presided over by a sleek woman wearing a black shift and a string of white beads. He gave her his name, and she pinched a file between blood-red nails, scrolled a list, gave him a nod, her smile curt and quick as if she’d typed it, tipped her head toward the corridor while tucking yet another file under her shapely white arm.

  “I just came to check in,” he said. He was a mess, he smelled sour and unclean. “I’ve been travelling,” he told her.

  The receptionist marched forward, indicating he was to follow, her black heels tapping on the parquet. Coming to a halt at a closed door, she leaned her bare shoulder against it and swung into a square box, her hand on the doorknob. Then she waved, swanlike, Enter.

  There were two desks with chairs, an empty bookcase, an empty filing cabinet with its drawers open. The receptionist finally spoke. “Looks like you’ll be all on your lonesome here, honey.”

  He was disappointed by her voice, which was reedy, tourist-town Ontario. She perched on a desk, “Take a load off, might as well,” and indicated that Emmett was to occupy the other desk beneath a map of Japan and the Korean peninsula. She sighed with peevish boredom. “I guess they only hired the one of yous.”

  “I just came to check in,” he said again. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

  She gave a little burp. “That’s the Pepsi talking back.”

  “I have to find a place I can lease for six months.”

  “Yeah, get yourself settled. Well, any-who.” He wasn’t her type. She started out to the hallway, then turned, “Be a doll and do me a favour? Take a file over to Dai-Ichi?”

  She thought he was hesitating so she patiently explained, “His nibs’ office? The general? It’s a secret report and he’s gotta give his royal assent.”

  Dai-Ichi, the headquarters for General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the American Occupation, SCAP. Emmett agreed, he’d deliver the report to his nibs.

  “Swell,” she said. “See? I’m putting your name on it. Jones, Emmett, Canada. That way, he’ll make your acquaintance.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Dai-Ichi was a six-storey building that had housed an insurance company before the war, near the moat surrounding the emperor’s estate, a solid building somehow spared, though bombs had struck the imperial palace. Emmett showed his new papers identifying him as a member of the Canadian staff. A starched MP shouldered a rifle and escorted him to the sixth floor, to a warren populated by uniforms running from one desk to another. He followed the rifle to a large office and saw through its open door a well-built man in khaki appear then disappear, a long-stemmed pipe gripped between his teeth while he paced, apparently dictating.

  The MP stopped at the door, and Emmett entered, bringing the oratory to a halt. “General MacArthur, sir,” he said. “I’ve come from the Canadian Liaison Mission.” He offered the file marked “Top Secret.”

  With graceful discourtesy, General Douglas MacArthur turned his back on him and said, “Put it on the desk.”

  Emmett took a look around the room. An ugly onyx clock stood on the mantle. To one side was a worn leather divan and a gentleman seated there. This gentleman, too, had a pipe between his teeth, but he removed it and warmly observed, “I’ll bet you’re Emmett Jones.”

  Emmett admitted that he was.

  “I’m Herbert Norman,” said the man and stood to offer his hand. “I’ve been expecting you.” He was as tall as Emmett and was perhaps only ten or fifteen years older, but he demonstrated the debonair formality of another generation. It was the analyst who wrote for Amerasia, the man whose reports from Japan had so filled Emmett with admiration, the man whom Bill Masters had warned him against because he’d attracted the attention of the FBI.

  General MacArthur waved a patrician hand, taking in Emmett’s rumpled clothing. “You may as well stay, now you’ve interrupted,” resuming his monologue.

  Emmett was flattered for the first ten minutes and then, gradually, horrified. After twenty minutes, he glanced at Herbert Norman seated beside him on the divan. Herbert met his eye with a look that managed to convey, It is amazing but do not be amazed.

  “Lucius Aemilius Paulus,” the general was saying. “Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. These are my advisers. I look into their lives, and there I find almost all the answers. They are my source, my lodestone.” He evoked Napoleon Bonaparte too and named each famous battle. Friedland, Jena, Eylau, Ulm, Marengo, and Bassano. But he qualified his admiration of Bonaparte, adding that his first inspiration in manoeuvres against the enemy’s flanks was Genghis Khan.

  Several fighter jets flew over, low, rattling the windows, but MacArthur went on, his granitic face entirely unfazed, effortlessly raising his voice. Emmett could see the tightening muscles under the khaki shirt. General Douglas MacArthur was not insane by wartime standards. Even President Truman, at this juncture, was satisfied, even happy with the general’s abilities in occupying Japan.

  From war, MacArthur moved to economics. Emmett guessed that he was practising a speech, in his strange broad accent, oratory that he intended to deploy in more significant arenas but that was all out of proportion for an audience of Canadians. “The best men in America,” he intoned, “our great nation’s key industrialists, will be stultified, will grow inert under the burden of socialism.” Another squadron, or the same one returning to salute on its way to Korea, zoomed overhead, closer, louder. MacArthur fumed steadily, implacable. The bombers flew off, the clacking of desk officers resumed.

  “A Marxist philosophy of financing the defence of other nations will lead directly to the path of communistic slavery.” The general finally stopped to light his pipe.

/>   In this respite, Herbert Norman idly commented, “Japan excepted.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The United States is financing Japan,” Herbert observed.

  MacArthur didn’t miss a beat. “We do as God instructs us to do. When Japanese guns were silenced, it was my sacred duty to carry to the land of the vanquished foe, solace, hope, and faith.” In a low voice, he added, “I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.”

  Emmett choked. A loud bark, a startled, horrified laugh erupted from his gut.

  The general strode close and gazed down on Emmett Jones, as if from afar. His pose, shaken but indomitable, was contrived to suggest a statesman’s sorrow over the vulgarity of the common man; he was sad but not for himself. Emmett saw shyness even in the general’s imperial attitude — shyness and megalomania. MacArthur was embarrassed, and this increased Emmett’s dread because it indicated how invincible the man believed himself to be; his pride was fragile and titanic. MacArthur swung back toward his desk, where he lifted and weighed the top-secret report that Emmett had delivered, but now he was evidently self-conscious, acting.

  “Well,” Herbert Norman said softly, “I believe we’ll leave you to your work, General.” Emmett followed Herbert’s cue and stood to leave.

  MacArthur was studying the report and he gave a dramatic are-you-still-here wince. By the time they were at the door, the general appeared to have regained his composure. Emmett heard him speak — privately memorizing — “Jones. Emmett. Canada.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The road to the James-yama Estate in Shioya was steeper than the one in Emmett’s memory, its surface more broken, riven by mud flushed out by the rains. Shioya hadn’t been firebombed as completely as nearby Kobe had been, but still, he didn’t recognize the few houses he passed.

  The sky cleared and Emmett remembered that mink smell, that fecund stink in the summer wind blowing from the Inland Sea. A fresher east wind kicked up; the sunlight seemed stained, saturated with the red leaves of the sumac that grew beside the mountain road where he climbed. When the road curved north, the wind failed. In the shady forest, holly fern grew beneath the maples and red pine. He turned his back on the mountain to look down at the distant, silent sea.

  From a blind curve, an army jeep hurtled toward him. Emmett heard it, and felt the gravel scattered by its front tires, before he flung himself off the road. The jeep passed so close he saw the sun flicker on the driver’s brush-cut as the vehicle raced away. An American army uniform. Emmett stood carefully and spit on his hands to remove the dirt embedded in his skin. He caught his breath and resumed his climb when the birds began to sing again.

  Around the next curve the road ascended more steeply. The wind blew once more, and then he saw the granite lion that marked the entrance to the estate. The sight was so familiar it was as if he were seeing himself. Here he used to play with his friends after school. The lion’s stone mane furled down its chest, its jaws opened in a grimace big enough for a boy’s head.

  His parents had sent him to a private school called Canadian Academy, with kids from the US, Europe, and Australia. Japanese children from Kobe went there too. A pretty teacher would take them all down to the seashore, the boys in short pants, the little girls in printed kilts that they held above the waves. He’d been compelled by the decisive, delicate way his Japanese friends moved, like a habit of flight. Now most of those schoolmates were dead. Five years ago, in 1945, more than eight thousand people were incinerated in Kobe, in twenty-three thousand tonnes of magnesium thermite. All the supplies of napalm had been used up on Tokyo. Emmett knew it to be true. He had searched out this information within days of his arrival in Japan.

  He had searched through the names of the dead. He had found Sachiko. She must have been evacuated out of the estate, to Kobe, where she’d been killed in the firebombing.

  Thinking now about Sachiko’s death, Emmett felt a rush of high-voltage fear in his body. As if he didn’t exist but was a play of light, a staged illusion. From the cockpit of a Lancaster, in the name of glory, he’d rained fire, just like the airmen who’d dropped the firebombs on Japan. The terror remained in him and he tried to calm down, but he felt like he was evaporating, sizzling into nothingness. He was not loved, he hadn’t been touched in too long, he needed more than sex, he needed someone to gather him in.

  He came to the withered row of plum trees that hedged the lawn surrounding Sachiko’s long, low clapboard house with its bronze roof. The peaty soil had washed away, exposing the trees’ tough ochre roots. The lawn was overcome by weeds, but the house seemed in fair shape; its plaster needed whitewash, the cypress shutters needed oil, but it was intact, unscathed.

  The shutters were open, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was living there now. If Sachiko hadn’t been evacuated, she might still have been living in this house; the place quite accidentally would have turned out to be his father’s parting gift, a refuge for the woman who destroyed his family. Emmett rephrased that. The woman who defined his family.

  He stood at the plum trees to watch the house for signs of life while he walked his mind through its rooms; the entrance with its umbrella stand (his father’s hat on the umbrella stand, a telling clue for him as a boy as to whether his father was here); the elegant dining room with its portraits of English gentlemen; the sunroom where Sachiko sat and where Emmett’s father would sit with her while he had a whisky and soda.

  There might have been some time, months, maybe even years, when Emmett and his mother didn’t know of Sachiko’s existence. It was eventual as dawn, his father’s lies giving way, not to truth but to a double world where he could let his wife and son know with a nod, with wincing disapproval as if at their bad manners, what was to be acknowledged and what was to be ignored, until Sachiko became an aspect of his father, a necessity, in such a way as to make Emmett and his mother feel complicit, almost responsible, being inadequate to capture his father’s full attention. Gradually, imperceptibly, Emmett’s mother acknowledged Sachiko, though never face to face; his mother had behaved helplessly, with pathetic righteousness. Emmett loved her resentfully, despising her weakness, angry that it might reflect his own.

  For about three years, mother and son, father and mistress, had formed a louche club. During this interlude, Emmett grew tall, grew at least four inches every year. He was a wiry kid in tennis sneakers, wearing a white sweater over his shoulders, knotting its sleeves at his chest.

  Now he stood beneath the plum trees and watched the house, wondering how he should approach when he heard a man call out in a loud voice. “You looking for the girl?”

  A westerner, his enormous size exaggerated by a blue kimono, was striding toward him from a footpath that Emmett remembered having taken as a shortcut through the estate. “The girl,” the man repeated, approaching, “you looking for Aoi?” He had a mid-west American drawl.

  Emmett couldn’t immediately frame what he’d come looking for. (My father loved a Japanese woman who sat in the sunroom that looks toward the mountain.)

  The American brought all of his own horsepower to a standstill; Emmett could hear the machinery of that body seize and tick. He had a thick, sunburned face and neck, the red flesh scored by white seams, and he bore the attitude of a man who considered himself of great good nature that nobody should take for granted. He waited for a reply, his firm mouth opened a little, lightly panting. The kimono must have been specially made: no Japanese kimono would have fit him, and the blue was too artificial for Japanese taste.

  “I used to live here, in a house nearby.”

  “Where’d you spend the war, friend?” the American asked with abrupt suspicion.

  “Air force. England. Germany.”

  “You a Canadian fella?”

  When Emmett said that he was, the man didn’t try to hide his disappointment but looked up at the house, seeming to weigh the worthiness of a Canadian against whoever lived there now. He scratched a sunburned cheek, giving off a sagey male scent. Some kin
d of darkness rushed over him, and he shrugged it off and walked away, his blue kimono billowing in his wake.

  A moment later Emmett was ringing the bell, hearing the door chimes inside play “Waltzing Matilda,” a detail he’d forgotten.

  The young Japanese woman who answered wore baggy wartime trousers and a man’s white dress shirt. She looked like a southerner, solidly built with a big face that barely accommodated a mouthful of oversized teeth that she showed in a confident smile. He was drawn to the way her lips parted, and to her eyes, which seemed capable of genuine surprise. She pressed the open door between her breasts. In English, “Yes?”

  He told her his name. He said he used to live here at the estate, he said that this house, too, had once been leased to his father, for his father’s friend. “I was curious to see it again.” He peered around her, as if Sachiko would appear. “My father’s friend was killed in the war.”

  The young woman seemed bemused. So he had lost a house, a friend. War took nearly everything. “The Americans gave the house to me,” she said with pride. She was in her early twenties, maybe a little older. She surveyed him, taking in the pressed pants, the polished shoes, and said, “Would you like to see?”

  Inside, he saw an unsubstantial smattering of cheap furniture; only a few pieces of the heavy Edwardian stuff remained. The umbrella stand was still there, as was the sideboard, and Emmett remembered that at either end of the sideboard was a drawer: one that had contained silver cutlery displayed in crinolines of black velvet, the other containing liquor. His father would come in, remove his hat and place it on the umbrella stand, take off his coat and hand it to the Japanese butler, then pour himself a drink.

  The sideboard stood in a dining room with lead-paned windows too high up to permit a view. The dining room table was gone, as was the Indian rug that he used to lay on, tracing the mandala. Somebody had covered the cypress floor with linoleum. It looked like a boarding house.