Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Keo didn’t know what to ask. He was afraid to ask.

  “It was war. There were times I was kind. Times I was sadistic, I suppose. Long periods I can’t recall. We had a large POW camp. An Australian captain said I gave him food, saved his life. I don’t remember. A Yank soldier said I kicked him in the head. I have no memory. Usually when other officers turned cruel, I walked away. That, too, is a crime against humanity.”

  “When did you know you were losing the war?”

  Matsuharu closed his eyes. “Midway . . . maybe Guadalcanal. After that, no one was really sane. Officers went berserk, committed terrible atrocities, even on our own conscripts. At the war trials, many were sentenced to death and executed. I was convicted only of small brutalities. Yet I remember blood, my sword. . . .”

  He sat up and audibly sighed. “After Japan surrendered, Allies swept our base, pulling us from underground tunnels that went on for miles. They say we lived hidden and submerged down there for fourteen months! I remember nothing. Somewhere in my head, in 1942, everything closed down.”

  Keo leaned forward, asking softly, “Endo, do you know how your skin turned blue?”

  He smiled faintly. “Extreme hunger. And madness, I suppose. In prison, I began eating paint from the walls. In time I ate my way around my cell. They made me repaint it. Then I would eat it off again completely. I did that for six long years. Guards used to watch and laugh, I was their entertainment. No one told me what lead paint could do to a human body.”

  He touched his cheek, and then his forehead. “My nervous system’s damaged. Medics say my brain cells are galloping to extinction. I forget what simple words mean. Map. Sock. Fork. Sometimes there are seizures.”

  “. . . What happened to your eyes?”

  “After a while, guards grew bored. They used our faces as punching bags. Probably they had seen too much war. For months my eyes were cut and swollen. The eyelids closed and festered. Finally they took me to a military surgeon, who did a lot of cutting and patching. He said I was a phenomenon. By rights, I should be blind.”

  Keo looked away, remembering Woosung, the many kinds of dying. Lights played on Endo’s jacaranda hues. Even his black hair had a bluish, lunar glow.

  “Who would ever believe, after the Pacific, there could be another war? Now, three million dead in Korea. Tell me, Keo. After all, what do you believe in?”

  He thought for a long time. “Maybe . . . only music.”

  They began jamming together at night in a small studio Keo rented off Hotel Street. It had been fifteen years since Paris, when Endo was just a student warming up on tenor sax. Now they strolled cautiously through arrangements with record backup, Keo listening as Endo sailed into delicate, stiletto-sharp arpeggios. Then unaccountably he swerved into wailing contradictions.

  He would start out clean and elegant with almost no vibrato. Even the way he held his saxophone was elegant, his blue fingers barely touching valves, merely hovering, it seemed, as if the instrument were all he had left in the world. But invariably he would lose his sense of timing, nearly lose control. His entrance into every song was like a prayer that suddenly combusted.

  He put his horn down. “I start out OK, then something goes haywire.”

  “Nerves,” Keo said. “You just need practise.”

  “I practise every day.”

  “Listen. After prison camp, I didn’t touch a trumpet for a year. It was like putting the barrel of a rifle to my mouth.”

  Endo smiled. “You recovered. I won’t have that luxury.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Organic deterioration. Like I said, even my brain cells are dying off.”

  Keo tossed it aside. “We’re going to practise till you’re genius on sax.”

  But something was missing from Endo’s playing, an intuitive reckoning so vital to jazz. The naked ache and wonder. When he blew his horn, what Keo heard was someone fighting for control, someone beating back frenzy.

  Keo slowly gathered a new bass player, a drummer, pianist, and saxophonist, using Endo as occasional relief man. Endo changed his name to Arito, honoring his dead father, and Keo called his new quintet Hana Hou! One More Time! They opened at the Swing Club, to standing room only. Apart from the band, Keo and Endo practised daily, Keo watching him struggle for precision, but hearing mostly infinite regress.

  HONOLULU

  Sheltered Harbor

  HONOLULU, 1956

  AZURE PEAKS OF HOME, INEFFABLE AND TENDER. AIR A BALM. Folks carry luggage down gangplanks where small herds of families wave from the docks, chattering like monkeys. She stands still, observing. Just now, it is all she has strength for. She limps slightly, leaning on a cane, her pace so measured, she seems not so much a woman passing as a shadow following the cane’s progress. There is about her a serenity, the otherworldliness of one who lives with constant pain.

  She stares out at the harbor, the waves going makai and makai and makai. She gazes inland at the Ko‘olaus in the distance, with the blank detachment of one who is not sure where she is, or, knowing where she is, is not sure it matters. That anything matters. Except that, breathing in soft, floral scents, something frenzied tumbles down. Echo of innocence, youth, bright random laughter.

  She carries her solitary suitcase down the dock, crosses a street, and sits on a bench. Seventeen years. She cannot comprehend the changes. So many tourists, blistered and peeling, like refugees from torched cities. Tall, parched buildings inching their way up to the light, like strange gigantic growths trying to connect. Yet somewhere, she knows, in dark humid valleys, in moist green groves, things remain primordial. Somewhere things still drip and sprout from mist and mold. She smells it in dank soil, in water-haunted air. There is so much wet, sunlight will always be defeated. This mildly excites her.

  After the tunnels of Rabaul, all that was left of her was thirst. Through weeks of quarantine, all she wanted was water. Then priests came with Holy Water, asking for confessions. She confessed her sin—surviving—grabbed a vial of Holy Water and drank it down.

  Crowds slowly pass, men glance fleetingly at her. She looks down, terrified. As if they will swallow her raw heart. Even now, she still feels sacrificial. Something to be sacrificed. When men pass too close, her spine hums, a string of little skulls bite down. She moans and people move away.

  Somewhere in the long-lost past a U.S. Army officer, an interrogator, had asked her to talk about Rabaul, and what was done to them. He was white, well fed. He had spent the war behind a desk. She told what she could bear to tell, and when she finished, the man quietly suggested that P-girls had been too passive, too accepting. Sunny shook with rage.

  “We were never meek, or passive! We were women with bamboo sticks. They were soldiers with machine guns.”

  She never spoke of it again. After that, she was still. She was no one. Between that past and the present, a crevice opened, she stepped in. Now life is no longer living. Time is no longer time.

  Some days it’s possible to recover for an hour. Part the curtains at the window. Anoint arthritic knobs with oils. Indulge in the harmless ecstasy of root of morning-glory tea. Or ‘awa, the tea for curing grief, which she takes in measured sips. For several years now, days when she is strong enough, she has walked to the ocean wherever she is, slowly submerging herself, letting the sea sluice its way through her mortal threads. Sometimes intelligence of that great, wet mind addresses her.

  “E hulihuli ho‘i mai.” Turn around, come back.

  At such times, for fleeting moments, she is whole. She curls up like a child and thinks of home, archipelago of her beginnings. For an instant, she believes what doctors said.

  “The worst is over.”

  Yet even as they said that, women had shed infected organs, shed gangrened fingers and toes. She gave up her womb. The hearts of some girls, grown huge in their emaciation, had burst, like overgrown babies bursting from cribs.

  “The worst is over.”

  The human heart does not have bones. />
  Now she sits in Honolulu, wondering what she is doing here. What is the point. She sits for hours, wondering if she will just die here on a bench. Some wet intelligence had said “come home.” Now she waits for further instructions. A paper on the bench beside her flutters. STATEHOOD: THOUSANDS MASS IN FAVOR. The words mean nothing. She has done away with printed words. Books, newspapers, are to her like medieval documents, belonging to a world long past.

  She dozes, imagines she is a figure embroidered on an old kimono that has been sewn the ancient way, with the splintered breastbone of a crane. On the ship headed home to Honolulu, she dreamed she was part of someone else’s dream, in which she was inching, like slow embroidery, toward a place from which all would be understood. She wakes sitting on this bench, in this sheltered harbor, Honolulu.

  She stands, picks up her suitcase, her lips moving slowly. She always practises before she speaks.

  “How much is a comb? A slip? How far is the clinic?”

  Because she looks old and frail, folks assume she’s deaf, and answer her by yelling back. Their words like bullets. All that shelters her from other humans is her skin. She flags a cab, and then a bus. They pass as if she is transparent. She walks with her head truantly bent, so thin that sunlight seems to knock her sideways. She finds herself in Chinatown, the lobby of Jade Hare Hotel, its furnishings neat but maculate and greasy. In a bleak, monastic room she opens creaking shutters.

  It is almost twilight, time of heavy draperies an unseen hand will draw out of the depths of the east. Day is always repulsive to her—the knife of waking, the chasm of high noon, hours repeating and repeating like broken glass. She prefers night, a dark promontory where she stands calling out to armies of dead women.

  Yet sometimes at dusk she becomes ill. Twilight excites madmen. The hour when they appeared at the Quonset huts in droves. Now she lies down, walled by the lunar green of jade hares. Her spine hums and buzzes, the tiny skulls a chorus. The past curls in and out of her, she drifts. Girls starving, strung up by their ankles. Girls shot for sport. Breasts lopped off. A grenade shoved into a vagina.

  She remembers that even as Allies advanced on Rabaul, even as he dragged her to the tunnels, that honeycomb of nightmares, Matsuharu promised, “All will pass. This will be a dream, not dreamed.”

  _______

  . . . AND IN THE TUNNELS OF RED CLAY, HE FINALLY TOOK HER, opened her like a tired eye. He wasn’t harsh or brutal, by then she didn’t exist for him. Nothing existed. He passed right through her. Only his sword existed, always near, gleaming in the background. Matsuharu mistook her terror for passion, and matched her, insanely riding her day and night, trying to kill both of them with exhaustion.

  She grew used to him. Ceased to flinch or feel defiled. She only dreamed of killing him.

  Sometimes he went away, deeper into the tunnels, into larger, more elaborate clay chambers reinforced with sandbags, walls lined with parachute silk, where demented officers gathered, drunk on sake, planning their suicides. For days she lay in dimness in a chamber like a red clay cell. Hearing cries of hunger. The smell of fungus.

  Up and down zigzag passages, the smell of air exhausted from gas lamps, cooking stoves, human waste. Air exhausted from smoke-filled ducts. Gas leaked regularly in the caves, soldiers and P-girls were asphyxiated, blown up. Matsuharu brought her delicacies, grilled rat from the officers’ quarters where they ate by generator-powered lights. Where they watched films, read poetry like scholars. Where they prepared for seppuku . . .

  In that subterranean nightmare there were hospital chambers, kitchen chambers, barracklike chambers holding thousands of men. Chambers the size of playing fields for tanks, planes, antiaircraft guns. Chambers for P-girls, for latrines. Even temporary graveyards. When chambers of the dead grew full, they buried them upright in fetuslike positions along tunnel walls, covering them with clay or wattle. When waste jars were exhausted, full of excrement and plugged, people began to squat, dig holes with their hands, kick clay over their filth like animals.

  Allied bombings increased, tunnel sections collapsed, soldiers and women buried alive. Incessant bombing overhead rained down debris that slowly blocked their air vents. People began to suffocate in droves. And in underground dampness, the drawn-out triumph of infection. P-girls died and died. . . .

  He always returned, taking her like a madman, drunk on sake or drugs. But in times of fever, when she begged him to kill her, Do it, with the sword! he nursed her, fed her, shot her with stolen morphine.

  One night he planted his seed in her. A warped thing, budding and tenacious. He went away again. There was no keeping track of time, they lived by oil lamps, matches, body rhythms. Months passed, maybe years? She thought she was dying, bloated with rot. Then something fell out of her, half formed, soft-skulled and blind. She spat upon it, then held it close.

  “Anahola? Little Anahola.”

  When Matsuharu saw her stomach flat, he lifted filthy mats, looking for their child. She held her hands out, as if from deep within the muddy seams and creases, he could retrieve the infant’s breath. She wiped her neck, waiting for the sword. He sat down and studied her.

  “Moriko”—for that was the Japanese name he had given her—“perhaps you did not smother our child? Perhaps it is lost in a tunnel, taking its first steps alone.”

  She lunged at him. “You are insane!”

  “It was our child. Born of love. Of passion.” His body shook constantly. His eyes no longer focused.

  “Why would you want a child? For sport?” She gestured to his sword, its shining tip. “It wasn’t human. It was something else. Why don’t you kill me now? I am so tired.”

  With great effort to be calm, he put his arms round her. “Take me to our child. Then, we shall sleep. Everything will be a dream.”

  Grateful that she would finally be allowed to die, she showed him the place along the tunnel wall. With bare hands, once again she clawed hard clay, sharp splinters ripping her fingers, until she unearthed the child-sized niche. It stood in its grave wrapped in filthy cloth, a little icon.

  Matsuharu unwrapped the thing and held it to his chest, laughing and weeping, seeing it as dear and perfect, except for blind eyes, unformed limbs, a soft, pepper-shaped head. He returned it gently to its niche, repacked the clay, pressed his lips against the wall. Then he took Sunny’s arm like a cavalier, walking her back to their chamber. He laid her down. She waited. The chamber seemed to wait. . . .

  He moved inside her on the filthy mat, laughing without sound. When he finished he collapsed, exhausted. She took his sword, rattling out of its scabbard. She wanted so badly to be dead. She didn’t have the strength to lift it. In the distance, up and down zigzag tunnels, echoes of mercy killings. Suicides. Allied forces pressing in . . .

  Something stank, a new, heavy foulness, numbing her, turning her matchstick limbs to stone. Soldiers crawled past their chamber, rags soaked in urine pressed against their noses. Bombs had hit a pipe, gas was flooding the tunnels. Their shouts awakened Matsuharu. He had the strength to draw her close, making her breathe very slowly, sucking in air remaining in a shallow layer on the floor beneath the creeping gas.

  “Death will be slow”—his voice was very far away—“. . . asphyxiation.”

  Far in the distance, she heard men retching. Then there was only the stinking blackness of damp clay. . . .

  By the time Allies penetrated the deepest tunnels, moving inch by cautious inch—setting off mines, chain explosions—they were both unconscious. A Papuan native in a fruit-dyed sarong, wearing a gas mask, tapped her shoulder with a spear. An Australian soldier in a mask waved a rifle.

  “Bloody ’ell! Is she alive? She don’t look human. Hey, you speakee English?”

  Just bones and bound dust, so scabbed and filthy she was black. She crossed over then, from death to life, stumbling down passages whose clay walls were deeply licked with bayonets. MOTHER, I AM HUNGRY. MOTHER, PRAY FOR ME. I DIED WITH HONOR FOR THE EMPEROR. Epitaphs for silent sons. So
me chambers had become starvation rooms. Defecation rooms. A room of gnawed corpses with human teeth marks. Australian soldiers removed their masks, leaned against the walls, and puked.

  They inched along for miles, negotiating that fetid vastness at a snail’s pace—native guides, Allied soldiers carrying rags of half-dead girls. Behind them, more soldiers prodding Japs with bayonets. When she could no longer walk, a native lifted her, not even flexing his muscles. She would always remember his healthy panther smell, sweat on kinky hair standing up like pearls, a diadem dripping down her shoulders. . . .

  For hours, tunnels wound and climbed and circled, like cure-chants repeated and repeated. Then she felt wind, the sacrament of air. Then broken poles of moonlight. Magnificent and ruined stars. When she woke—sky red, runny in the east—rubber-gloved hands were cutting her lice-ridden hair. Masked nurses scraping at scabbed flesh. Masked doctors inspecting their microbes, their parasites. As if they were cattle.

  X rays, injections, vaccinations. Periods of numbness, then violence, rage. Because she had lived enough. Because she wanted it over, and they would not listen. One day someone handed her a mirror. Eyes lashless, teeth decayed. Her facial bones like glowing knobs breaking yellow parchment. Childlike arms peppered with syringe marks. Bruises as if she’d been slapped. Her wrists red rings, a trace of straps. They had had to restrain her. They could not understand why grief was flooding out in madness. Stabbings in the wards. Suicides.

  “One day,” a doctor promised, “the scars will heal. You will forget.”

  Why did they think she wanted to forget? That any P-girl wanted to forget?

  Afterwards, after what doctors called “recovery,” all she learned was this. It was all the same. Only different faces. Now it was occupying forces of Allied troops who needed dance halls, nightclubs, sex. . . .