Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Most of the crew spoke Malay and broken English, chattering about girlfriends, families, kampongs. Notorious gamblers, they flouted the rules, rattling mah-jongg tiles, playing fan-tan in the shadows. The food was execrable, tasting like garbage the ship had picked up in its travels—rancid oxtails from Penang, cabbage dredged up from a Bangkok klong, Kowloon pigeon drowned in motor oil. He gagged his way through meals, staring across the table at his cabin mates.

  A wiry Tamil who trained slender snakes to slide into his mouth and out of his ear. A pink-eyed Javanese, pale as a candle, who claimed to have wings enabling him to fly forwards and backwards. Tattooed Brit, tattooed Australian, both silent and menacing. A tiny Hawai‘ian-Chinese named Hugh—pronounced Oogh—a human whirlwind of a dwarf who spoke a skewered island Pidgin/English/French and claimed to be clairvoyant. He told Keo he had seen him in a dream, in a city where pig-footed women with blue faces rode the backs of greyhounds.

  Keo laughed, while Oogh continued. “Yes, mon ami. One day you will wake in such a godless place. You will wear a tuxedo and play roulette, and fondle a stranger’s broken heart.”

  “And where is this godless place?”

  “Ahh . . . Shanghai.”

  Keo had stepped off his island, stepped out of his life. Now the ocean was his home, it was all he was sure of. At night, legs spread on deck fighting for balance on the churning sea, Keo wiped his lips, lifted his trumpet, and blew. He played without hearing, feeling only vibrations in his fingers. Whales heard his cries and swam in close, responding, coursing alongside for miles. When they were gone—shadows diminishing like great thoughts dispelled—he felt an emptiness, a caving in.

  Drenched from blowing in a storm, one night he stumbled into the cabin. In the dimness Oogh opened his left eye.

  “Hula Man. I hear you playing in my sleep.”

  “No one can hear me playing. I can’t even hear myself.”

  “I hear. I see.”

  Keo moved closer. “What do you see?”

  “Life, anew.”

  He knelt, so they were eye to eye. “Do you see me playing? Do you see success?”

  “In time. One day you will blow and it will be the sound of diamonds.”

  “If only . . .” Keo held his head between his hands.

  “But you will pay. There will be grief. Ah, well—what is happiness? A coma.”

  “Tell me, how should I prepare?”

  Oogh turned his head, so large it overwhelmed his body, yet his face was perfectly symmetrical, an Oriental coin.

  “Allow time’s passing. This is your rebirth. Everything began at sea, and so must you.”

  After that, Keo blew his trumpet relentlessly, pouring out all he knew and felt, all he remembered and imagined. He played in honor of a deaf Filipino at Kamaka ‘Ukulele and Guitar Works, the man who had taught him how to hold each instrument like a human, to feel each tremor in the wood as it inhaled and exhaled. Now he held his horn that way, as if it were a child, a favorite pet. Weeks passed, he began to feel impatience, a longing to hear his horn, not just feel it in his nerve ends.

  He was unclear about their course across the Pacific, and how they would finally reach New Orleans. One night while the Tamil lay in his bunk, a small emerald snake sliding into his mouth, then flicking its tongue and peeping from his ear, and while the albino from Java hung in the doorway flexing its furry shoulder blades that somewhat resembled a drake’s wings, Oogh sat down with Keo and pointed to a map.

  “When you are old and looking back, you must know where you have been. You see, we are sliding down the coast of Mexico, stopping here in Manzanillo for supplies. Then on to ports of call in Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica. Then, we will pass through the great Panama Canal.”

  Keo stared at the map. The world was so large, so many weeks to reach one destination. And Panama. Here, it looked slender as the stem of a vanda orchid, yet it separated the great oceans of the Pacific and the Atlantic. What held those oceans back? What kept them from crushing Panama in their rush to flood into each other? He could not sleep, afraid he would miss the passage out of his birth-seas, afraid it would all pass in a dream. Yet his greatest fear was of arriving.

  On cloudless nights he stood on deck wondering what lay ahead, how much it would change him. Longing washed over him. He thought of Sunny, hours melding their breath in sleep. He thought of his big handsome mother, arms damp from wrestling hairy tubers of taro. And younger brother Jonah, rubbing his surfboard with paraffin sealing wax from his mama’s jelly jars. And DeSoto, smelling of the sea, bringing Waitaki tongues from Auckland, a jaguar tooth from Davao. And Malia, with her English airs, her clothes of false labels.

  He thought of his childhood, kids calling him hh, coward, because he couldn’t swim, and keiki make, corpse-boy, because his father was a mortuary man. He remembered deep shame for his fear of the sea, and for his father, who smelled of formaldehyde. For years Keo wouldn’t kiss or hug him. Sometimes the man stared at him, a look so sad, Keo did not think he could bear to go on living. He thought if he did not hug his father, he would die. This man he did not want as a father touched something deep inside him. Yet there was the awful smell.

  One night when he was ten, something woke him, took him by the throat. Keo rose and stood beside his sleeping father.

  “Papa,” shaking him awake. “Teach me to swim.”

  They walked down midnight lanes until they reached the sea. His father floated facedown, put Keo’s hands on either shoulder, and struck out for the deep. He was so powerful a swimmer, Keo felt the bulging of his muscles. They swam through shallow blue, then black waters, out and out beyond the reef. Waves pummeled them, mammals brushed against their thighs.

  Keo held on, gulping seawater. “Papa! No need fo’ swim fo’ China!”

  Timoteo laughed so hard, he took them under. The boy sank, and his father sank with him, patting his chest, relaxing him. In time, air in their lungs took them slowly to the surface. His father held him for a while, so he could gather strength.

  “No need fear nutting, son. De ocean yo’ muddah. Listen what she say. Now . . . try move yo’ arms, like dis.”

  And so they swam, side by side in darkness in a giving sea. They swam toward the beach and out again, waves smacking them, stunning their cheeks. There was moonlight. And meteors. They swam in circles, then floated on their backs. When Keo showed fatigue, his father took his small hand in a powerful one, squeezing it, pulling his body close so he rested his head on his father’s chest. Hearing the thunder of the man’s heart, Keo looked into his father’s face. And it was his face. The hand holding him was his hand. It was his very heart he heard. He felt then that they could die out there, they were the only two who mattered.

  In that moment Keo felt himself dive out of the world of the cowardly schoolboy, out of the world in which he felt shame for his father. They swam in secret every night for weeks. Keo would become a powerful swimmer, a man whose great escape would be the sea. And the sea would always bring him back to this night when he came to love his father wholly and completely, the two of them walking home hand in hand, the flap and drag of his father’s rubber slippers echoing his own.

  Again he thought of Sunny, who had never deep-dived with her father, never held her head against his chest to hear his beating heart. He thought of a young girl lying in the dark, waiting for her father to come and hand her to a stranger. He thought of their future, how she would lie beside him, how he would turn her on her side, and hold her, and hold her.

  RABAUL

  NEW BRITAIN, 1943

  SHE SITS STROKING THIS BROWN, HARD THING, ALL JAGGED EDGES and corners like broken pottery.

  Kim lifts her net, crawling in beside her. “What is it?”

  Sunny holds it in her cupped hands like a prize. Then slowly presses it into a cup of filthy water. As it begins to soften, its half-rotten scent enters the air. Their mouths water. They bend their heads down, breathing in. When it is soft enough, Sunny tears it in two, gives
half to Kim. Kim puts it to her nose, and moans with pleasure. Then, very carefully, they slide it between their broken teeth, and chew. They chew for hours, remembering. They chew until there is only saliva. Then they sit smelling their fingers, the half-forgotten scent of orange peel. For days they will not wash their hands.

  Two Quonsets over are six English and Dutch women, taken when Japan captured Hong Kong. One woman, crazed from torture, bit a Japanese officer. At dawn, before the assembled women’s camp, she was beheaded.

  Now Sunny recalls wet, heavy air, flies lining her lids like sequins. She recalls the officer with the bandaged hand, Lieutenant Matsuharu, his uniform immaculate. She recalls the Englishwoman on her knees, arms tied behind her. Mad, half blind, she lifted her battered head and laughed. Life had already passed out of her, all that was left was a shell breathing out of habit. Sunny saw the lieutenant foaming at the mouth. It wasn’t her body he wanted to destroy, but her superior laugh.

  He looked near Sunny’s age. There were rumors he was university-educated, a gentleman. But he had seen too much combat. He was believed insane. In one year he had already cut off the heads of nineteen girls. Guards said he was addicted. When too many weeks went by without taking a head, he grew depressed. Sometimes, strolling through Quonsets in the women’s compound, he saw a certain neck and paused. Even when addressing superiors, it was said, he studied the slope and thickness of a neck.

  Sunny remembers his eyes, the ebony gleam of their facets as he bent toward the neck of the mad Englishwoman. She remembers him pulling his sword from its scabbard almost casually, never quite raising or swinging it. He seemed to merely draw it across her shoulders.

  Now, three weeks later, Matsuharu summons Sunny to his quarters. She sponges herself, combs thin hair, smooths her pathetic, ragged dress. She will go to her end with dignity. Girls sob, embracing her.

  Kim doesn’t cry, she hugs her almost formally. “If you go, I will follow.”

  Palms rustle in sunlight, she feels blinded by the sudden clarity of things. Escorted by guards, she walks out of the compound of Quonsets toward the lieutenant’s quarters.

  “I shall not beg. Above all, I shall be hanohano.” Dignified.

  Matsuharu greets her with lethal politeness. She looks left and right for the sword. There, in its scabbard. He seats her, offers tea, never looking at her neck.

  She jumps to her feet, crying, “Gomen nasai! Gomen nasai!” I’m sorry!

  On entering, she has forgotten the ritual bow. Now she goes through the formalities, head bowed, counting slowly one to five. He snaps his fingers, impatient. She sits again, as he passes a tray of porcelain bowls—tapioca chips, sago biscuits, sliced pineapple. Her tongue becomes her heart, taking up her whole mouth so she cannot swallow.

  “What is your given name?” he asks. All girls are given Japanese names.

  “Moriko.”

  “You are—?”

  “. . . father Korean . . . mother Hawai‘ian . . .”

  She is terrified, but also distracted. This is the first time she has seen him up close, without his military cap. Something about him is eerily familiar.

  Matsuharu speaks softly in a cultured voice. He has heard she is educated and once lived in Paris.

  “I myself attended the Sorbonne.” He smiles, begins to reminisce—Montmartre, surrealism, Dada. Bateaux mouches on the Seine at dusk. A strange dance called the Java. Foreign women, foreign tongues. The vaunted rudeness of Frenchmen.

  He shakes his head. “And what is left of such faubourg tyranny and pride?”

  While he talks, he tenderly pats his bandaged hand where the Englishwoman bit him. Then he brushes invisible dandruff from his shoulders. Patting, brushing, hands never still. She suspects he is nearing a breakdown. Night falls, he closes blackout curtains. He lights candles, staring into corners.

  “. . . Fernet Branca in French cafés . . . debating Trotsky, Freud, Ciné Liberté . . .”

  He forgets she is there, drones on and on for hours. Hearing bombs, he goes to a window, pinches back a curtain. Suddenly he turns to her.

  “Why did you leave Paris? Were you called home as I was? Were you forced into combat, into filth, human carnage? Well?!”

  She stutters, explaining how she left Paris to find her sister in Shanghai, to take her home to Honolulu.

  “I wanted to know her. To reunite her with our father. I wanted to give her a decent life. . . .”

  Matsuharu leans forward, slaps her hard across the face.

  “You wanted. You wanted. You Western women. So free, so indulged.”

  He slaps her again, knocking her backward from her chair. He leans down, slapping her and slapping her until she is unconscious. He sits in his chair, floats off again, remembering. French girls in Bugattis. Chestnuts marbled amber in the Tuileries at dusk. Then one day his uncle Yasunari Seiko telling him he must go home to Tokyo and fight for the emperor.

  At dawn sirens wail. Allied planes, the whistling down of bombs. She has stayed on the floor all night, watching him, listening to his ramblings. Now he counts explosions. He strokes his sword. After a while he points her toward the door. Guards prod her with rifles, taking her back to her compound. Her face is ballooned with bruises, eyes almost swollen shut. Yet her mind is inflamed, her body sings. She’s still alive.

  Crossing the base, she sees giant plows leveling bombed installations, POWs shoveling dead bodies. In the distance, steel jaws gouge earth in the hills round Rabaul. Soon underground hospitals, bunkers, and barracks will form a huge subterranean fortress.

  At night girls whisper back and forth. “It means the tide is turning! Guards say there will be miles of underground tunnels. Japs will hole up there for years, they’ll never surrender.”

  In the dark Kim asks, “What of us? Will they take us into the tunnels? Will they set us free?”

  The question haunts them, haunts their sleep and consciousness. Eating weeds, searching dead girls’ mattresses for carrot skins, they wonder: What of us?

  And always there is thirst, terrible thirst. Pipes are bombed, cutting off fresh water from mountain streams. Wells are guarded. One night in a thirst dream, Sunny moans. In the dream, Lieutenant Matsuharu slaps her face, then brings her water in a crystal glass. They are in a terraced park, and there is music. She wakes up haunted.

  Still, at night girls emerge from behind mosquito nets, fluttering like half-dead moths round Sunny’s bed.

  “Please, Sunny—tell us again about your sweetheart. Why did he leave you behind?”

  “And did you suffer?”

  “And how, oh, how did you find him again, so very far from home?”

  She shakes her head, wanting silence, to be left alone. But three of these girls will soon die, she hears the water in their lungs. Illusions, dreams, are all that is left them.

  She turns on her side, facing them. She sighs. And, in a soft, mothering voice, begins.

  “At home in Honolulu, I was hungry for a larger, richer life. But I was cowardly. That’s why I loved Keo. He was brave. One day he picked up his horn and walked into the world, like a scout, easing my way. Eventually I would follow. But first he went to a city that is sacred to musicians. He was poor, he went with very little, earning his passage on a ship. Through many weeks, stopping at many ports, he finally reached New Orleans. Imagine his terror! An island man, crossing the great Pacific. Entering his first real city . . .”

  KNONI

  To Progress Slowly

  WHAT WOULD HE REMEMBER OF HIS ENTRY? DELTA MIST. SUNLIGHT on the heads of racing water moccasins. The smell of creosote and bait. Where the great Mississippi narrowed, from the levee dark bouquets of Negro children waved. Behind them mudflats, lopsided shanties on spidery stilts.

  Then, the port of New Orleans—freighters suckling a vast harbor, Cajuns and Creoles hoisting cargo with savage-looking crate hooks. Beyond teeming docks he imagined the deception and glamour of a big city. But more forbidding, music halls full of jazzmen waiting to test him. Men wh
o had altered the history of this place, whose lungs blew genius. Men who were born, and belonged, here. He picked up his battered bag and trumpet case and walked down the gangway.

  Negroes washing down a shrimp boat pointed the way to Storyville, heart of jazzland. One of them called after him.

  “Say, Jim, ’fore ya jazz it, or rag it, or any damn thing, better get some new threads! They’ll laugh ya outta town.”

  He wore a flowered aloha shirt under a navy blue suit that, after weeks at sea, had turned a rusty, iridescent purple. Walking up Canal Street, he saw whites staring at his brown, damp face, his iridescent suit. He ducked down narrow streets overhung with iron balconies like black crochet, where folks bartered for crawfish and oysters and chicory. Scenes so familiar he stood paralyzed and homesick.

  Through French doors he glimpsed rooms with wedding-cake ceilings. In choked jungle gardens moss hung like terrible blue hair. The lusty scent of jasmine, gardenia. He kept walking, afraid to stop. In alley shacks, walls were papered with ads for JAX. DR PEPPER. In every other window, hand-printed signs: HEXES. REMOVAL OF HEXES. Honey-colored whores with Spanish cheekbones beckoned.

  What Keo wanted wasn’t sex. He wanted to sit in someone’s parlor, telling where he’d traveled, what he’d seen. He wanted to hold a cup of something warm, and say how lonely he was, and that he had fifteen dollars to his name. A handsome quadroon playing the combs told him he was in the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter. This was “front o’town,” near the river. Storyville was north of Rampart, “back o’town.”

  “Watch it! Devil live up there. After dark, he cut you wif a knife.”

  The sun slid into the Mississippi, turning alleys a rosy hue, and somewhere a woman spoke in soft patois. The smell of oysters frying. He walked in circles while neon signs lit up the dusk, then curled up on a bench and slept. At dawn he walked the streets of Storyville, remembering its history, sons it had spawned—Buddy Bolden, King Oliver. He stood in front of places Dew had named as legends. Tuxedo Dance Hall, the Frenchman’s. Look! Mahogany Hall and Lulu White’s Bordello side by side on Basin Street. He sat down on a curb, taking it in.