Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Another military truck sped up behind them, full of soldiers firing guns. In the chaos of tumbling bodies, a Dutch woman shrieked as her infant was wrenched from her arms. She kept shrieking as refugees melted back across the land, dragging rice and potatoes, waving bats and clubs. Machine guns sprayed dozens to the ground, missing the skinny yellow form clutching the infant like a succulent white puppy.

  Would her shrieking never stop? A soldier crawled into the truck and hit the woman in the face. In the silence, Keo thought of the fate of her infant, but something in him turned away. The man beside him gurgled. He spat on his hand, moistening the man’s lips, lips so foul with fungus Keo gagged. He wiped himself with a rag, the pain of his bayonet cuts intense. He felt such thirst, he bit down on the inside of his cheek, sucking blood.

  Under the tarpaulin cover, heat was stifling. People packed so close, they sobbed trying to breathe. A man with broken glasses viciously scratched his arms and chest. People backed away. Body lice, carrier of typhus. They knew it would come. It would all come. Keo looked down at his body, his skin white-gray from dust. Cuts throbbing, infection setting in. He knew they had reached Woosung Camp by the smell of sewage.

  Gates opened. Guards literally threw them from the truck. On his knees, he looked up, astonished. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand, Allied nationals already interned. Some looked relatively healthy, others near death. Japanese guards yanked him to his feet, threw a filthy shirt and pants at him reeking of stale urine.

  One of them spoke broken English. “You dress. Commandant want see you.”

  They pushed him up flights of steps to an office overlooking the camp.

  Lieutenant Tokugawa was young, sporting a mustache. He looked up cordially and smiled.

  “Ah. Hula Man. Yes, word travels fast.” He pointed to a chair. “Please. Sit?”

  He paced the room importantly, then frowned. “You no like homosexual. Good punch! Ha ha. Next time . . . ‘Feint East, Strike West. Hide Sword Within Deep Smile.’ ”

  Keo shook his head, understanding nothing.

  The man’s voice softened, becoming almost fluid. “Art of the Advantage, old Japanese text. Many strategies more subtle than smashing nose.”

  Keo mumbled, “I guess I lost my head.”

  “For sure, almost lost your head!” Tokugawa laughed. “I no like homosexual, too. But right now Nazis much like anus-plug for corpse. Japan need them for holding insides in.”

  He spread his legs, stood with hands on hips in front of Keo. “Listen. You behave. I behave to you. I know Benny Goodman, Count Basie. . . .”

  He pulled out dusty record albums stolen from plundered houses. “Before war, I know tango, fox-trot. Real swing-kid jazz fiend.”

  Keo swayed, on the verge of fainting. “I think . . . I need to lie down.”

  “Okay. Be patient. This German chase many boys. Embarrassment to Nazis. Soon he smothered in his sleep. You have big fans. Can go back Club Argentina. If behave.”

  Two husky Dutchmen half carried him down a cinder path to makeshift barracks. Inside, beds were curtained off for privacy with hanging cloths, patched linens. Within each space a human moved, the brackish odor of unwashed flesh, clothes stained from dysentery. He passed a weeping group covering a child’s face with a sheet.

  Arms were still supporting him, as Keo shouted, “Don’t give up! Never give up.”

  They laid him on a cot, partitioned from his neighbors by dirty rags on one side, a bloodstained sheet on the other. The stain seemed to spread before his eyes, forming a huge five-petaled flower. He thought he even smelled hibiscus giving off its scent. Sweat poured down his face. Delirium. And he was home in Honolulu. Good grease of laulau dripping down his chin. Smell of limu and ‘opihi. Starch of sea salt on his legs, hands blistered from paddling canoe.

  “Mama.” He sat up crying, reaching out.

  A murmuring, and she was there. Golden, sweet-smelling, touching his cheeks with Chinese parsley–scented hands.

  “Pehea ‘oe, pehea ‘oe?” she whispered. “How you doing, son?”

  She waved flies from his face. Spooned seawater and fresh kelp between his lips.

  “Swallow. Swallow. Seawater same as human blood. Ninety-seven elements. Kelp give you iron. You grow strong bumbye. Sleep now . . . Mama going sing down yo’ fevah.”

  While his body rattled with escalating fever, Leilani bathed his limbs, rubbed them with oil of kukui. She sang. Her voice so soft, so lilting, inmates in the barracks turned and listened, seeing no one but the feverish brown man.

  RABAUL

  NEW BRITAIN, 1944–45

  HAIR A MATTED WOOLLY RUSH, SKIN LIKE BARK. HOW LONG SINCE she has bathed? Sometimes she rears up from her cot, glimpsing something. Something she should remember. Life. Youth.

  Each day the gravelly roar as Allied planes rush in, emptying bomb bays over Rabaul. Airfields are reduced to dust. Ships in the harbor obliterated. Wounded soldiers mount up so fast, surgical theatres resemble slaughterhouses. As military nurses die from typhoid, girls from the Quonsets are forced to replace them. Mouths covered with rags, they stitch up limbs and stomachs while guards stand behind them with fixed bayonets.

  After victories at Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Buna, Allied forces bypass Rabaul, their sights now set on Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa. Instead of landing troops, they bomb Rabaul’s harbor and airfields, “softening” the base for Australia’s mop-up forces. Still, Rabaul’s commander in chief orders its air force and navy to persevere. In the evenings after rice, young pilots studiously discuss collision tactics and Kaiten, the suicide submarine corps.

  Knowing all is lost, that there is only honorable death, officers begin to show a human side, sharing food with favorite girls, those not yet wasted by disease. Lieutenant Matsuharu summons Sunny to his quarters, commanding that first she bathe. Sometimes he talks again of student days in Paris. Or, he falls silent, staring at her neck.

  He forgets she’s starving, that only officers eat decently. He plays with his food. He sees how she watches him eat, by not watching, not begging. One night he offers her steamed eel. The first mouthful is so succulent, so shocking, she almost loses consciousness. She steadies herself, inhales deeply, chews so slowly there is nothing left to swallow. As hunger is appeased, she takes the time to savor. The eel tastes so fresh, she imagines the moment it was killed, how it must have screamed. She remembers how long-beaked eelfish go awww, awww, awwww when speared, as if crying. She remembers spearfishing with her brother, and in a dreamy way begins to tell.

  “. . . Once my brother speared a great moray eel. The spear lodged in one eye. Trying to thrash free of it, the moray half crushed itself against a rock. Its lower jaw was torn off, its flesh hung in shreds. Yet it was indestructible, its muscles locked in a horrible spasm, its good eye fixed on my brother, the enemy. It got away. For years spearfishers came across it, darting in and out of reefs, the spear like a stalk growing from its eye. . . .”

  Matsuharu studies her. “Where is your brother now?”

  “He was at Stanford University, when I . . . left home.”

  Sometimes it’s safe to talk. Sometimes dangerous. He might begin to rave. He might begin to slap her. Until he cannot stop. He has never molested her. Others girls, yes, even rape. But he wants something else from Sunny. He’s saving her for something.

  Another night he sends for her, and faces her, bewildered. “Minister Tojo has resigned. Now your planes bomb Tokyo. How is it we miscalculated?” He shakes his head. “Our emperors were descended from gods. We are much cleaner than Chinese. Much wiser. We have accomplished more. Our cities, our warships. Why does your government defend China? What can China give you?”

  He looks right through her.

  “Yes, we are diffident, proud to the verge of hysteria. Bound by a thousand laws and conventions. Do you know . . . a man who commits hara-kiri is not permitted to fall sideways. He is bound by rule to fall on his face.”

  Each visit he seems more insane, yet st
ill comports himself as an officer, immaculate, boots highly polished. He speaks perfect English, quietly, with courtesy, never displaying the crudeness of other officers. When they part, he always bows, even after he has slapped her to unconsciousness. Now he stands, civilized and deadly, dreamily examining his sword.

  “No one understands. Japan meant to win back Asia. To free millions of peasants in China and India from slavery under colonialist whites . . .”

  Somehow, she summons the courage to ask him, “If you love Asians, how can you continue slaughtering millions of Chinese?”

  He strokes the sword absentmindedly.

  “We had great respect for Old China. What exists now is appalling. Beyond the Great Wall only famine, corruption.”

  Sunny thinks of her father, of his homeland, Korea. “And so, you exterminate whole villages. Wipe them from history . . .”

  “It is war. We need land. Our islands are so small. Even Communists do not love China. They want to make it a second Russia! Nothing there but starving millions.”

  “To starve is a tragedy, not a sin,” she whispers. “My father is Korean, a people descended from Chinese. I have been taught they were worshiped for their wisdom. An ancient and inventive people.”

  Matsuharu turns to her as if to a child. “What do they do with their inventions? They invented gunpowder—and? Made little rockets! Shot off fireworks for thousands of years. Never dreaming it was useful for conquering people. The invention of printing. For generations they printed nothing but poems. Sentimental discourse. They failed to use the printed word for propaganda. Look at Shanghai—four million Chinese, opium-addicted whores, rickshaw coolies living in filth. Only a few thousand whites there, and yet they live in mansions, skyscrapers. Tell me, which of these people is superior?”

  He points to a Japanese landscape on the wall.

  “And Japan. Our land is beautiful. Our people industrious. We have no debts, beg of no one. We are tolerant of all religions. We are honorable. What has the world against us?”

  Sunny thinks again of her father, what his homeland suffered under Japan. Not caring if she lives or dies, she speaks with anger.

  “The sword is your religion. You are invaders, barbarians. You would wipe out whole countries. You train your young men to die before they’ve even lived.”

  He waves his arms like a madman. “If you’re looking for evil, look to the white man first!”

  He sits down again, eyes rolling, out of control.

  “What can you know, what can anyone know of us? We have too much feeling. We are people of the soul. Yes, Japan lives by Bushido, the samurai code of honor. Yes, we are complex. The fear of life and the courage to die dwell side by side in our hearts. Yet there is also love of beauty. Nature.”

  His voice grows distant, a young boy calling from a dream.

  “. . . Ah, September. I hear the threshing of rice sheaves. Fields are flooded with water preparing the soil for plowing. Pine trees rise sharply through mist, and I hear temple bells across the hills where shaven-headed monks meditate in Buddhist monasteries. Carp swim in sun-dappled ponds. Girls stand in tea fields in large bonnets. My father writes proverbs in the last rays of sunset. Such bold sweeps of his brush. O Father!”

  Sunny reels. She closes her eyes. She has finally recognized him. Endo Matsuharu, the young man who played such sweet saxophone with Keo in Montmartre. The student who argued Schopenhauer and Poin-caré, who wept over Albinoni and Bach. Now he rapes. Decapitates. Who did this to him? Was the evil always there?

  This night before he dismisses her, Matsuharu steps close, strokes her cheek, slowly unbuttons her tattered dress. She knows by the agility of his eyes, the speed of his lowering gaze, it is not her breasts he seeks. His fingers touch her glowing ribs. He seems to count them.

  BOMBS DEVASTATE JAPAN. NAPALM FIRES CAUGHT BY HIGH WINDS roll like carpets through entire cities. Tokyo gutted, two hundred thousand people dead. Nagoya, ash. Osaka. Kobe.

  One night Kim crawls into Sunny’s bed, cheeks so bony, her eyes appear to grow on stalks.

  “They say the streets of Tokyo are impassable because of human corpses.” She weeps with so little energy it comes out as barks. “Why doesn’t such news make me happy? Why?”

  Sunny holds her in her arms. “Because you are still human, you still have a conscience.”

  “I want to hate. I need to hate. I need to feel something!”

  Spring 1945. Allies reclaim the Philippines, they win at Iwo Jima. Okinawa. One night there is shouting in the men’s POW compound. Germany has surrendered. By now, three hundred miles of tunnels surrounding Rabaul are completed, making it an almost impregnable underground fortress: barracks, hospitals, bunkers, antiaircraft guns.

  Summer heat unbearable, a furnace door flung wide. Dust coats their faces like white masks. Salt becomes precious as water. It must be replaced in the body; in the tropics, its absence means death. In the officers’ mess, girls watch men grow drunk on sake. They serve them meals, wash their dishes, are forced into their beds. When the officers have finally passed out, girls swarm through the kitchen, stealing scraps and salt, as much salt as they can carry.

  Knowing Allies are approaching through the jungle, girls fight over bits of metal used as mirrors. Some see their reflections for the first time in months. They stare. How, after this, can they return to ordinary humans? The sickest, the near insane, talk of tomorrow, after Rabaul—parties, flirtations, marriage—as if they will scream normalcy back into their lives. Sunny watches them mend ragged dresses, rouge scabby lips with plant roots. They haven’t bathed in more than a year. They cannot grasp their squalor, that youth and health are finished.

  After three years, Sunny’s clothes have worn to yeasty rags. Her leather shoes are green with fungus, crumbling with decay. When she walks, they feel like dank mushrooms. A bit of shrapnel lodged in her leg has worked its way out after months. It leaves a large infected hole which maggots feed on. She grows used to the sensation, her body as a living host.

  She suspects they will all die before the Allies arrive. Girls weakened by disease are marched outside and shot, or herded into boats blown up in the harbor. Yet something in her won’t give up. With a pointed bamboo pole flung over the fence by Papuan natives, she walks through her Quonset, smacking the sides of beds, threatening girls who use drains outside the hut as toilets. At each new outbreak of dysentery, she makes girls dig pits in which contaminated rags and refuse are buried. She begs guards for quicklime.

  Finding lice matted in someone’s hair, Sunny shaves the girl’s head, then shaves her own, forcing others to do likewise, knowing how fast body lice spread typhus. She nurses girls dying of beriberi, and one whose infected gums have poisoned her starved body.

  One night Sunny approaches a doctor injecting a girl with steroids meant to treat syphilis. It also affects their minds, turning them to zombies. She has sharpened her pole to a brutal point and lifts it, aiming at his back. He turns, offering her a cup of clear water. Pipes have been bombed. She has drunk polluted water for so long her tongue is cracked and swollen. If she contracts cholera again, there is no hope for surviving. She takes the cup from the doctor, forgetting to kill him.

  Now, each time she is summoned by Matsuharu, Sunny remembers her father, why he was so full of hate. In that way, her father gives her strength; hate usurps her crippling fear. Some nights the lieutenant is kind, rather vague and distant. Other nights he slaps her, as if trying to forget. That there is a war, and he has lost it. That he has lost all innocence, and honor. One night he takes her in his arms. He sobs against her bony shoulder. She holds her breath, held by the executioner.

  POWs in the military compound pass word to the women. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Gone. Hysteria mounts amongst commanding officers. More girls are marched out to their deaths. Sunny vows if soldiers come for her, she will go down fighting and screaming, until their cartridges are finished, until their swords are bent. They pass her by. At night she shows girls how to sharpen ends
of sugarcane, how to roast them in fires until the tips are spearlike, hard as flint. The sticks are hidden beneath their beds. She makes each girl vow to die ripping and slashing, not mewling and bowing her head.

  Now all underground tunnels are reinforced. All food is gathered and transported. Soldiers are prepared for hand-to-hand combat with the Allies. One night soldiers march through the Quonset. One of them drags Kim from her bed. She is so weak, she merely moans.

  Sunny wrestles with the soldier, begging him, “Take me. Take me! I’m older.”

  He hits her with his rifle. “You! You saved for Matsuharu.” He mimics the slash of a sword across a neck.

  Kim calls back almost dreamily. “Sunny, it is over. Now only . . . blessed death . . .”

  Things rise up inside her. The mother she can never be, the soon-dead girl she has mothered. They take up residence along her spine, little skulls that will never stop screaming.

  One day, rumors. A murmuration. The war in the Pacific is over. The silence of sixty thousand men. Refusing to surrender, some rebel officers begin moving troops underground to wait for the enemy. Fewer than ten girls are left in Sunny’s Quonset.

  That night Matsuharu summons her. She prepares herself, washing her neck. Pushed from behind by a bayonet, she crosses the base to his quarters. She sits in a corner of the room. He strokes his sword, studies his reflection in the blade. His flat, rather handsome face is gone. Defeat, horror have left his face eerily lean and frontal. His eyes are vacant. His head swivels like a bat.

  “ ‘The potter takes clay to make a pitcher / Whose usefulness lies in the hollow where the clay is not . . .’

  “A quote from Lao Tzu,” he whispers. “Do you understand it?”