Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “ ’Ey!” Tokugawa smacked his arm. “Even U.S. guilty of invasion. Look your islands. They knock down your queen, make you colony so can own Pearl Harbor. Same thing!”

  Keo sighed. “Yeah. Same thing. But, tell me, Lieutenant. If Japan won the war tomorrow, what would victory mean to you?”

  Tokugawa smiled and looked out at the boy. “. . . Wife. Child. Garden. Full meal. Good sleep.” He paused, thinking what more he could want. “Few jazz records . . . Koichi Okawa, Benny Goodman of Tokyo. Funny. Same things I had before.”

  REENTERING THE CITY, HE SAW THE HYSTERICAL ENERGY OF Shanghai still thrived, people continuing to deny a world at war. Whole blocks had been obliterated by bombs. Yet in the old Chinese section dentists still pulled teeth in the streets, nightingales still sang in bamboo cages. Wealthy brides still passed concealed in red lacquer sedan chairs. On side streets, bamboo poles still leaned out of eaves, dripping diapers and foot-binding bandages. Professional letter writers still sat with brushes and rice paper, their chattering monkeys still grinding ink with tiny ebony fingers.

  Refusing to see the city sinking beneath them, folks still thronged Blood Alley bars and brothels. Restaurants thrived, and Chinese opera. Jai alai matches continued on Bubbling Well Road. Axis powers and neutrals—Swiss and Dutch—still fox-trotted at the Majestic, drank absinthe at the French Club. Jazz lovers still crowded Club Argentina.

  Laughter, the scent of healthy people in clean clothes talking in horizontal languages, seemed to him a miracle. A bath at Hunan Mansions, a bed with clean linens, sleep lasting for days. He spent his first week bent solemnly over plates of food, then joined a group at the Argentina, wearing his “A,” for American, armband. The other musicians were strangers, two “J” armbands, and two “I’s.” At first he played cautiously; touching the new trumpet made him shy. But soon he was blowing with the same breathless drive, though he noticed he tired faster.

  He began again searching for Sunny and the child. He questioned people in the streets, in dance halls, even gangsters in bulletproof sedans. He queried pederasts in shantung suits entering the House of Small Boys on Avenue Edward VII, and patrons of the Blind Executioner where naked men were pilloried and whipped with wire brushes by nude little blind girls with sequined eyes. He even queried bystanders as the Guild for Night-Soil Coolie Carriers marched for higher wages, shorter hours, honey carts that didn’t tip.

  He asked creatures passing in fog, “Have you heard of Sunny Sung from Honolulu?”

  After a few weeks the guttural sounds of German accents began grating on his spine. The laughter of White Russian whores fox-trotting with Japanese generals. He listened to Frenchmen discussing ten-year-old “pig-footed” Chinese girls, how the more bound and broken and twisted their feet, the more folds in their vagina. Which made them more pleasurable. Such words struck Keo in the face.

  His playing slowed. He turned crude and ugly, cursing couples on the dance floor, loosing aeolian belches in their faces. Crowds laughed, amused by his dark, sweaty perversity. Watching well-fed people drinking Scotch, sliding round the floor like skaters, he thought of the horrors at Woosung. At such times he would go back to Hunan Mansions and tear his room apart. Then he behaved for a while, holding everything in.

  One night a Frenchman asked for Louis Armstrong, “. . . his scat vocal on ‘Tiger Rag.’ ”

  A German shouted up at him, “Yah! Give us real nigger music!”

  Something deep within him turned. Keo leapt from the stage, landing with both feet on the German’s chest, trying to flatten the man’s head with his trumpet. Felled by the club of a bouncer, when he came to, they were dragging him out of the Argentina.

  Keo’s head dripped blood, he shouted at the crowd. “You whores—don’t you know you’ve lost the war!”

  AT WOOSUNG CAMP THEY HUDDLED IN WINTRY CEMENT BARRACKS. Bare walls, bare floors, dim electric bulbs. Ragged sheets originally hung to separate them were now used as blankets or shrouds. People simply ceased to see each other. Nudity now passed unremarked, so that in some perverse way they achieved privacy. The only thing that bound them together was knowledge that they would probably die.

  That year, typhoons never ceased. Rain fell in sheets, flooding the makeshift hospital where patients floated from their beds. A barracks collapsed, killing six. Electricity failed. Finally, cesspools over-flowed. Stalled in filth, people surrendered. They stopped dodging it, stopped holding their breath, they slept and lived with it. And typhus spread.

  One day the sickly camp doctor weighed Keo’s neighbor. In the morning he was 130 pounds. Midday he weighed close to 150. By evening, horribly bloated, he weighed 187. “Wet” beriberi. His yellow-gray face so blown up he could not look down the mountains of his cheeks. Each night as the doctor tapped him, drawing off fluids, folks watched horrified as this human balloon deflated to nothing.

  Starvation brought incipient madness. Men knocked each other down in fistfights. Women went at each other with ragged nails, rusty hairpins. Children bit each other like dogs. Yet somehow they understood fighting was good, distracting them from the horror and, for a moment, from hunger. By March, even guards began to starve. Who was winning the war no longer seemed to matter.

  One day Simmons, a big Canadian working for the Germans, was struck down by malaria. Parasites in his red blood cells multiplied. Fever rampaged, bathing him in cold tremors, then heat, delirium. Ravaged cells clogged the lining of his arteries. His urine turned brown from the broken cells. If his urine turned black, he was finished.

  People lingered near his cot. “Let the bastard die.”

  For the past eight months the man had hung round torture cells in a special compound at Woosung where Japs kept downed Allied pilots, most of them injured and half dead. Simmons prodded them for military information, offering morphine, cigarettes. When they refused to talk, he beat them. He had kicked a burned American pilot to death while guards laughed, egging him on.

  Now, with fever rampant, Simmons’s face was almost unrecognizable, like raw animal skin stretched over sticks and left in the sun. His whole body looked like that. Keo stared at his shrunken head. His eyes stuck out of it, enormous.

  He grabbed Keo’s arm. “Water. Help me. They’re sending quinine from Shanghai. . . .”

  Keo heard his chest bones rattle. He leaned down, shaking his head. “No one’s sending you shit.”

  Simmons tried to sit up. “I’ll pay you. Get you out . . .”

  Afraid they were indeed sending quinine, and that he might pull through, Keo viciously pushed him down, yanking a filthy pillow from beneath his head.

  “You bastard. This is for the air boys you murdered.”

  He shoved the pillow over his face, then sat down on it, watching Simmons’s hands claw air. He felt the tremor of the man’s muscles pass through his haunches. He clenched his teeth until the tremors stopped. Folks watched from the doorway. That night he shoveled the body into a pit of excrement, then crossed himself, praying for the air boys. He found gifts on his cot—a new potato, four cigarettes, clean socks.

  One night after curfew, a pale blond woman stood beside him. “Please. Let me lie here. I’m so cold.”

  She had a distinctly pungent, female smell. Most of the women had it from their monthly bleeding. He wondered when she had last bathed, when she had held a piece of soap. He pulled her to the cot, put his arms round her. She began to cry.

  “Simmons was my husband. . . .”

  When Keo tried to respond, she covered his mouth.

  “We met in Shanghai. He married me because he needed a cover. I didn’t know. When I found out he worked for the Germans, I cursed him, wished him dead. He said he would kill me if I told.” She found Keo’s hand in the dark. “I moved to the single women’s barracks.”

  Her name was Ruth. She was irredeemably thin and plain, her fingers constantly rubbing bleeding gums. But she was a woman, and she was warm. He found himself terrified, wanting to drop his head between her breasts and sob. They
slept like children, side by side. Warmth seemed to be all they were after. Then one night she told him:

  “The guard, Suga—he forces me. When he finishes, he sticks a sweet potato in my mouth. I’m too weak to fight him.”

  Suga was a big, husky guard who had gone a little crazy. Keo could tell when he was near because he smelled so bad. The man boasted how he hated whites, hated Chinese, even hated his superiors. Since being conscripted for war, he’d come to hate everything. He had killed two Brits with his fists, then stolen their shoes and bartered them. He stalked women in the dark.

  “When a woman’s starving,” Ruth asked, “is rape so bad if afterwards she’s fed? If I accept food in return, is it rape? Or barter?”

  Keo sat up slowly. “How often does he do this?”

  “Several times a week. I don’t scream because he’ll strangle me. And . . . I’m so hungry I think of the potato. Am I a whore?”

  He held her like a child. “No. You’re just trying not to die.”

  One night Suga heaved himself upon her, knocking her down, smacking her legs apart. Keo came up from behind holding a length of wire. Wrapping it round his neck, he yanked with such ferocity he heard something crack. Suga rolled off her, gasping and blinking, his penis hanging from his pants. Furious that it wasn’t over, Keo cursed, condensed everything inside him, and threw his body forward, slamming a rock down on the guard’s head. He died clutching his penis. It was still erect when they slung him into a mudhole.

  Keo led Ruth back to his cot, both of them shuddering and dumb. At dawn she was gone, but the next night she came with a sliver of bartered soap. Behind the makeshift camp kitchen they boiled water, bathing each other, laughing and crying while their lashes froze. That night they became lovers, half starved, half mad.

  “Don’t mention love,” she begged. “Or God, or any of it.”

  After that, whenever possible, they were at each other’s side. He told her everything—his music, his travels, the search for Sunny and their child. They never talked of Simmons or the guard. Death was an everyday occurrence, and now so was killing. Keo would do it again in a minute. And in a minute it could be done to him. There were rumors that all camp prisoners would soon be marched farther into China’s interior. As Allied forces defeated the Japanese, prisoners would be mass-executed.

  They ignored the future, making sure each day had its errand, that there was a point to every day. And each night they held each other, not out of love, but out of a need to signify they were alive, of human flesh, connecting the way humans did. One morning during muster, Ruth bent over, sick. Her legs became swollen, so she couldn’t walk. Her lungs wheezed, full of water.

  He buried her in her own small grave, feeling immense fatigue, so immense that nothing mattered. Everything was far away. He hung his tattered sheets again for privacy, staring at the mildewed wall, Malia’s letter damp and ragged on his chest. He knew it by heart, its contents mattered less and less. Nothing moved, not in his head and not in his body. He couldn’t think of a reason for moving.

  By then he was down to skin and bones, his color a sickly, scaly gray. He woke feverish, fluid round his joints had turned to needles. Horrendous pain, then chills and shivers. Neighbors examined his urine, relieved when they saw it was still yellow—low-grade malaria, not yet advanced to blackwater fever. Quinine was smuggled in.

  One day guards stormed the barracks, punching men with rifle butts, ripping at hanging sheets. They headed for Keo. One of them stood over him yelling outlandishly, slapping his head like a bully. Then he leaned down and spat on him, great gobs of mucus. Dazed, Keo watched them kick his piss-bucket down the aisle as they left. Neighbors came with a rag, wiping the filth from his chest. That was when they discovered, in a gob of mucus, a small pellet-size vial of white powder.

  “Heroin! Just enough for a good night’s sleep.”

  And buried in the powder, a tiny rag of silk upon which miniature words were printed. COURAGE. OOGH.

  Keo found the strength to smile.

  HE BEGAN TO RALLY. HEARING FOOD CARTS CLATTER ALONG cinder paths—a litany of pots of rotting rice—he sat up feeling suddenly charged. He caught a whiff of something, not rice but the wheels of the carts as they struck sparks from flinty stones. The sparks gave off the smell of firecrackers, the same smell given off when phaku, stones, were filed to make old-time Hawai‘ian bowling balls. His papa had shown him how. For the first time in weeks, Keo dragged himself outside and stood in line, just to smell the sparks that momentarily flew him home.

  One day the tempo changed, the camp was swept and set in order. Guards brushed their uniforms. A black Mercedes entered the gates, flanked by trucks with soldiers pointing machine guns from the running boards. Tokugawa bowed repeatedly as a Japanese colonel stepped from the car, consulting a list with his aide. Soldiers marched into a barracks, dragged out an American mother, father, and child. Others pushed two American women and two men from the singles barracks. The colonel frowned and tapped his list, grunting at Tokugawa.

  “One more from this camp—Meahuna, Keo.”

  Soldiers dragged him from his barracks and pushed him to a truck. The whole camp stared, no one brave enough to wave. For the next three hours Keo studied the barrel of a machine gun, knowing he would soon be dead. They were taking him to Shanghai where he would be shot for smothering Simmons, the informer. Or beheaded for killing the guard. Or for beating up the Nazi homosexual.

  A curious gnawing in his gut, terror snapping his senses alive. The guard sitting nearest him stank. The man’s breath, his sweat, even his clothes smelled of stale, pungent grease like pork. For months Keo had not let himself think of food, afraid it would drive him completely mad. Now, believing he was about to die, he allowed himself that luxury.

  Roasted, dripping hunks of pork. Succulent klua pig. Thick strips of crisp-fried bacon. He could taste it, feel it crackling between his teeth, drawing saliva from his cheeks. He began to chew, his chewing like praying, like prayers answered. He drooled on himself, and on the soldier. He drooled on the barrel of the machine gun. Guards backed away laughing, thinking he had gone insane.

  He would not remember arriving in Shanghai. Red Cross nurses helped him to his feet. And he stood ready for the bullet, the truncheon, the bayonet. An Indian-looking doctor came toward him, brandishing a syringe, and wiped his skinny arm with alcohol.

  “This is glucose. Nourishment. Just now, solid food would lacerate your stomach.”

  “Am I going to be shot?”

  The doctor stepped back, then sighed and patted his shoulder. “Dear man. You’re being repatriated.”

  Keo shook his head, confused.

  “Do you understand? You’re going home.”

  White sheets. Beds full of humans so skeletal he seemed robust beside them. He thought of those left behind at Woosung, at camps all over Asia—typhus children, men weighing eighty pounds. Why me? Why was I chosen to go free? Riven with guilt and great fatigue, thinking of Sunny and the child, he wept. Red Cross people asked his name and nationality, asked about his time in camp. He wept. A glass of water, the cool, clean bedpan, made him weep.

  “Yes, cry,” they said. “It will help you heal.”

  Doctors gave him sedatives so his body could relax, begin to mend itself. Malaria fevers returned, then slowly dissipated. Ulcers on arms and legs began to heal. The horrible pain from salt deprivation gradually subsided from bones and muscles. He hadn’t understood what a broken mess he was. He gained a pound. Then another. The man beside him died from overeating. After two weeks he was moved to the ambulatory ward. He now digested solid food. He smoked a cigarette. His skin turned from gray to dullish brown.

  He compared his sores, his digestion, his bony behind with other men’s. He took three-hour baths, and had a haircut. He watched movies, tried to read Life magazine. War raging all over the world, millions massacred. He learned of the aftermath of Bataan, seven thousand Allied soldiers marched to death. Volunteers brought him civilian cloth
es but he refused. Until he could get into uniform and serve his country, he would wear GI fatigues.

  He searched for her name on internee lists, repatriation lists. Not finding her name meant she had fled, she and their child had gotten out. He couldn’t face the possibility that they were dead. Negotiations for exchange of captured Japanese soldiers and Allied prisoners took weeks. Then, one night, military officials stood before them.

  “You’re no longer prisoners. Now, you’re evacuees. You’ll wear life jackets at all times.”

  At dawn, nearly twelve hundred people were ferried from the docks to a huge steamer waiting in the harbor to take them to Tokyo. There a converted troopship would transport them to Honolulu. Slowly, laboriously, they climbed its gangways, and stood at the rail as Shanghai receded. Within hours of sailing down the Whangpoo into the great Yangtze River, dozens were in sick bay, too weak to stand or hold down food. Others sobbed because they’d forgotten how to use plumbing and utensils.

  Sailors gently assisted them, picking them up when they collapsed. Some people were hysterical, afraid it was a joke: at any minute a Jap ship would bear down on them, forcing them back to the camps. Or they imagined the steamer hitting a mine, being blown to splinters.

  “That’s why families are assigned to cabins, so they can die together when we’re hit.”

  Singles were issued mattresses or hammocks up on deck.

  Keo sat for hours catching up on the news: attempted assassination of Hitler, Admiral Yamamoto shot down in the Pacific. Camp stories—sadistic commandants, atrocities. Some days he sat on a toilet just to be alone. Nights were best, lying wrapped in army blankets, the ocean foaming at his side.

  One night while he dozed, something tapped his cheek ever so lightly. He smiled, knowing it was Oogh.

  “So, Hula Man. You have had enough adventure?”

  “I should have known. How did you get me out of Woosung?”

  Oogh snapped open a gold cigarette lighter, lit it with cavalier flourish. “Observe.”