Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  He chanted it over and over until the spirits retreated, the road ahead grew visible.

  “Kala mai,” Endo said. “What does it mean?”

  “To beg forgiveness.”

  NOW HEADLESS FIGURES IN RANDOM DRIFT HAUNTED ENDO’S dreams. Papuans in native garb, P-girls in filthy rags. His jackboots stippled. His sword stained red. He began to dread sleep, even twilight.

  Sometimes he woke on his feet, poised in the coup de grâce behind a kneeling victim. He steadied himself, legs spread wide. He raised his sword. The graceful arc, the almost . . . ecstasy. But sometimes there was loss of face. A miss. Shoulder blade carved out like a quarter moon. Lung floating like a cloud. Now long-lost heads came bouncing back. A grinning mouth. A winking eye. He sat up in the dark, screaming. Even the full moon grinned.

  Hotels evicted him. Each time a manager stood shouting in some distempered hallway under dingy light, Endo studied the man’s neck. He started lingering in crowds, contemplating the space between a stranger’s hairline and his shoulders.

  . . . That neck would be easy. Pah! Pah! So little effort. That neck too thin, real shakuhachi, bamboo clarinet, neck. That neck zenzen dame, really terrible, much too fat. Would not be a clean cut, would get caught up in double chins . . .

  Some nights he crouched at his window, hearing Allied bombers approach Rabaul. He hid himself in a closet. When he stepped out, he stood in a military courtroom on trial for war crimes. Lost years, lost transitions. One night he woke scraping on his hands and knees. He had dreamed of the tunnels. A time he had never been able to recall.

  . . . BODIES CARVED BY SHRAPNEL. NOWHERE TO PUT THEM, TO bury them. Hollows scooped from clay walls. Niches of the living dead. Officers planning their suicides. Frenzied sex with crouching girls kept like animals. Conscripts sodomizing other conscripts . . .

  And all the while, beside me, tied to me, a talisman, a ragged girl. Softness, stench, disease. Who was that, tethered to me? Like two piles of dust enjoined. Maybe that is the way to come out of war. Someone to hold, to grasp, even though she’s bone. Bones can be so clean, specific.

  And deep inside me, always that morse of instruction. Lay my gleaming sword against her neck. But both so weak from leaking gas we simply lay there, unimpeachable. Yet, how hard she tried to die. To lift my sword in bird-bone hands. Who? Who was it? Name. She had a name. . . .

  ALL THESE YEARS, HE HAD HOPED DEATH WOULD OUTRUN THE mad remembering. Now each day he woke from dreams like something skinned, muscles and tendons quivering, nerve ends alert and aglow. His skin deepened in jacaranda hues.

  He walked the streets of Honolulu sideways, keeping his back against the walls. One day outside a barbershop, he went into convulsions. He thrashed about wildly, making funny sounds, then stiffened, losing consciousness. Strangers laid him on the grass, thinking he was epileptic. He woke exhausted, deeply confused.

  After a while, he walked home slowly. A sense of being followed. He thought he heard a tapping cane. He thought he recognized a smell. He turned, but there was no one. Only the smell—extreme, abnormal, like wet rust. Like reservoirs of clay.

  HO ‘OIKAIKA

  To Gather Strength

  SHE STOOD IN MORNING PALLOR, THEN JERKED THE BLINDS, AND in one blow the room was stunned with light. It always thrilled her, this ability to transform things. Materials. Environments. She plugged in the Singer, felt it come alive. Soon it would be chattering, connecting stitches like running fire.

  Lately she and the machine seemed huddled in competitive seething. Her mind, its hum. Sometimes it stabbed her finger, drawing blood. A little juice in the fire, so the fabric seemed to sizzle. Now Malia reared back, grabbing its neck as if reining in a beast. The needle had taken off, stitching a word inside a seam. KAPAKAHI.

  “I know his name. I won’t forget that.”

  Osborn Kuahi “Krash” Kapakahi. She remembered how he had come home from war so full of plans. He was going to earn a degree. He was going to study law. He was going to be thus and such. He. He. He. His words had made her blood laugh. So male. So he-full. Well, she had accomplished something, too. Kept the best of him, the child. And not given back an inch.

  So what if, for months and years, her bed had been weighed down with no one and nothing but his ribs, wrapped in soft white linen? And so what if sometimes loneliness impelled her to caress those ribs, rub them with kukui oil and oil of night jasmine, stroking them across her hips? And furthermore, so what if desire sometimes drove her fingers deep inside herself, holding the ribs against subsiding spasms of her body? Sobbing as she came. Ribs were bones, and bones stayed home. They could be counted on.

  Now, some nights she felt yanked awake, felt Krash was dreaming of her, pulling her into his sleep. She sat up in the dark smelling his salty, oceanic skin, feeling his lips wet her thighs, fingers spreading on her like starfish. She held a mango, remembering the way he peeled them, viscous skin growing into one long, slippery coil, like a finger beckoning come here. The way he had slid his fingers into her mouth, feeding her two-finger poi. How ripe, succulent plums recalled the deep plum color of his sex. Even books slowed her down. The sigh of turning pages, the way he had let her watch him read. A thing so private.

  When he went off to law school on the mainland, Malia had shut down like an eye. And when word came he had married a haole, she stood in the dark, in pieces. Only Keo knew her pain: one day he saw her downtown, all dressed up, in mismatched shoes. Years passed. Her daughter grew up, and she grew older, one half-living, the other half-watching. Now Krash was back, and Malia vowed he would not stroll into their lives at his leisure.

  Then an old woman with a cane stepped from the ashes and stood beside Leilani’s bed. What Malia had seen and heard that night haunted her. She convinced herself she had dreamed it, but the old woman’s image stood coughing in the shadows. At night she watched Keo sleep, wanting to wake him and tell. Each time she knelt beside him, trying to begin, her tongue thickened, she could not speak.

  She went to a store and studied maps. There, deep in the Pacific, north of Guadalcanal: RABAUL. Her back felt chilled. Tiny hairs stood up on her neck. One day the Singer took off on its own, inscribing inside a dart the name. SUNNY SUNG. Malia shuddered, remembering the delicate antique kimono she had presented to Pono as a gift. She remembered the old, eerily familiar face embroidered on the back. It was the face of SUNNY SUNG.

  That night in Leilani’s death room, Sunny had talked for hours. What Malia learned in that terrible night was what life could do to a woman, even a sheltered, privileged woman. She saw how badly a female needed guardians, protectors. She saw how desperately Baby Jonah needed her father.

  She sat listening to her young-girl snores. She smiled. Her little kanaka, whose menstrual blood was already rinsing her into womanhood. Now she touched her daughter’s foot, tracing the meticulous arch of one who could destroy her. She was still awkward, somewhat chubby, yet even in sleep her mouth was set, defiant. Malia squeezed her daughter’s toe.

  “What is . . . ?” Baby Jonah sat up, half alarmed.

  “Listen, Baby Jo.” Malia began to weep. “You are going to hate me. Maybe one day you will love me, too.”

  Frightened, the girl pulled the sheet up round her shoulders.

  “I am . . . your mother. Yes. I birthed you. Now I claim you. Punish me a little, not too much. Life has taken care of that.”

  Across the hall Keo turned, moaning in his sleep. He frowned, dreaming of Baby Jonah.

  He dreamed she sobbed out in the dark, “Tell me who my father is!”

  He dreamed the dark responded, “Time . . . I need a little time.”

  KEO WATCHED HIS OLD FRIEND KRASH TRAVEL ROUND THE ISLAND addressing thousands of folks waiting to reclaim their lands. Lands that were stolen when the islands were seized and annexed in the 1890s. At such times Keo thought of Baby Jonah, wondering when Krash would claim the daughter that was his. They had never really discussed it, always talked round it until his marriage ended.

/>   “When you going to face that girl?” Keo asked. “Like the man I know you are.”

  Krash’s eyes were prideful. “You ever seen me beg?”

  “Dammit. I’m the one who’s begging. You and Malia, you folks are real mkon. Cruel! Playing these ego games while your daughter grows up fatherless.”

  “What can I do? That wahine is too damned proud. She stills wants to marry haole.”

  “Nah. Nah,” Keo cried. “She could have done that twenty times. A haole real-estate tycoon tried to court her, all real proper. She told him get lost, said she would marry him when he gave Hawai‘ians back their land.”

  Krash smiled. “Still got her ways. But, don’t tell me she’s stayed alone.”

  “There’s no one. I swear. She’s watched Baby Jo grow up, and realized what she had with you was probably the best. It only happens once a life. Believe me.”

  Krash felt the sting of old resentments. “I came home from war, and was told that girl was Malia’s hnai sister. Ho, man! How you think that made me feel? My features are written all over her. She even walks like me. Fact is, Malia didn’t want to admit she had a kanaka’s kid.”

  “So you went off and married a haole.”

  “I did what I did.”

  Keo shook his head. “Funny thing, you’re probably the only guy who could make my sister happy. You always kept her on her toes.” “Some women don’t want happiness, Keo. They’re after something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure. You take a man with pride, he wants to build things, control things. You take a real proud woman, she wants to get under the skin of things. Find out what works, what doesn’t, what she needs to keep the generations going.”

  “All I know is, together, you could give that girl a life. This pride thing . . . you folks make me sick.”

  Some nights Krash sat alone, wondering how much pride was enough. How much was too much. Fighting overseas, he had seen white soldiers bloated with arrogance and pride. And he had seen whites with no pride at all. They did menial jobs, kowtowed to higher-ups. In that way he had learned they weren’t always superior. He was just as fearful and brave as they. Just as smart, often smarter.

  In the late 1940s, while earning an undergraduate degree, he had applied to law schools on the mainland, one after the next, until he was accepted at the University of Chicago under a foreign student quota, even though Hawai‘i was a territory of the U.S. and not “foreign.” Studies were exhausting; some nights he thought he couldn’t make it, he was up against superior minds. Then he thought, Superior to me? Why? It made him push harder, for himself, his race.

  He was encouraged by professors who had been labor lawyers, aware of escalating labor disputes in Hawai‘i, the coming of unions to sugar and pineapple plantations. These men taught him how to arm himself against sharp minds, when to advance, when to retreat. Amongst brilliant students, he learned to be quiet, listening and absorbing.

  The sister of a classmate fell in love with him, attracted by his athletic body, his rough, handsome Polynesian face, and something deeper, more compelling—his sheer will to achieve. Liquid brown eyes, full, pouting lips, her languid movements drew him, reminding him of Malia Meahuna. Her name was Vivian. She was even wearing a gardenia when they met.

  They married and lived in comfortable squalor while he finished law school. Looking back, Krash felt the whole marriage took place in the dark. He couldn’t remember what they did, what they said. The sheer enormity of his ambitions overshadowed everything. By 1953, when he returned to Honolulu, they were already fighting, drinking, driving off in different directions. The marriage dipped and soared until it dawned on them it was over.

  Admitted to the Hawai‘i bar, Krash started his own practise, Osborn Kuahi Kapakahi, Attorney-at-Law, in a closet-size room in downtown Honolulu, augmenting his meager income by taking court-appointed cases other firms avoided. Criminal, divorce. Here he saw how his people had turned on themselves. He saw it in crowded courtrooms on Paternity Day, Juvenile Delinquent Day, the Day for Child-Abuse Cases. Native Hawai‘ians beating themselves and their children down, on liquor, on welfare, on the run.

  He took on suits to recover property, representing small landowners against plantations. In that way he learned the rules of law governing partition of real estate. Law was unique in Hawai‘i: there were Hawai‘ian, Pidgin, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, and half a dozen other languages to contend with. It was also unique because, in less than seventy years, Hawai‘i had gone from a monarchy to a republic to a U.S. Territory. Now it was on the brink of statehood.

  Krash joined the Young Democrats Club along with a lot of returning war vets. Running for a seat in the Territorial House of Representatives, he was defeated. Even amongst the Young Democrats, he was considered “not electable.” A Hawai‘ian, with no political connections. The opposition called him the L‘au Lawyer. Still, by 1956, he had begun to draw attention as a dramatic orator who commanded a courtroom.

  He moved to a larger office and hired a secretary and law clerk, representing the elderly, war vets, plantation laborers arrested for supporting the ILWU. Not even the poorest were turned away. For the first time in Hawai‘i’s history, indentured workers had a voice.

  “All these charity cases. You’ll never get rich,” Keo warned him.

  “I’m not trying to get rich.”

  “Then how you going to set an example? A poor kanaka lawyer is just another poor kanaka, right?” Krash studied him, his voice extremely calm and quiet. “Keo. We both went out into the world. You saw more than me.

  All I saw was combat. For years I’ve listened to you talk about Louisiana, Alabama—Negroes hanging from trees. Hell, you were beaten with a baseball bat. You’ve talked about Gypsies in France, exterminated by the Nazis. Sometimes when we’re drunk you cry, remembering coolies in Shanghai, kids eating garbage. . . .”

  Keo’s eyes shifted, not sure what was coming.

  “You’ve been home a long time. Do you ever look around?” Krash leaned forward. “Man, the tragedy is here. Our people are being erased. It’s done by stealing land, then wiping out culture, and Mother Tongue.”

  “I see it. I’m not blind—”

  “But you never say, you never do. What did you learn in your travels? How do you apply that to Hawai‘ians?”

  “Hell, Krash, I’m not articulate like you.”

  “ ’Ey! Trumpets talk, they cry. You know, I used to wonder why you weren’t great. I mean, why you weren’t recognized as great. Finally I figured it out. Keo, your music never represented your race.”

  He looked up, slowly. “Man, jazz is personal—not racial.”

  “Bullshit. Jazz is everything. It’s slavery. It’s massacres. It’s black skin, red skin. It’s crying for your mother. Your motherland.” He shook his head, his voice grew soft. “I just never heard you crying for your people.”

  In the silence, Keo touched a cheek to see if it was there. He felt like something with its face cut off. After a while—because he loved him—Krash spoke out again.

  “You were born with this freaky genius. Only I never saw you use it for anyone but you. Always searching. Jazzing. Sure, you’ve stretched the boundaries, broken new ground. When you’re dead, folks will say, ‘Hula Man! A genius on horn.’ The real question is, how did you use that genius? Who did you help?”

  In that second silence, they looked out at the sea, its movements so rhythmical, so intelligent, it seemed a huge impatient brain. When Krash finally turned to him, Keo was gone. He watched his dark form sucked into a wave, watched him carried almost to the reef. After a dozen waves had tossed him like a root, the ocean brought him back, gave him up so easily he strolled out of the water like a man strolling across a lawn. Skin wet bronze, he shook himself dry.

  Then he sat down and squeezed his friend’s arm.

  IN THE HEADINESS OF THOSE YEARS, KRASH NEVER STOPPED thinking of his daughter, Baby Jonah. Mostly he kept his distance, knowing from Ke
o she went to Sacred Heart, knowing what her grades were, who her friends were. Occasionally he parked near the school just to see her coming and going. A sophomore now, plump and lovely, sloe-eyed like her mother. With school friends she spoke perfect English, but at the entrance to her lane, off came the shoes, and she was just “Baby Jo” slamming around with big l‘au feet, cussing and yelling in Pidgin.

  He never went near Malia’s shop. She never ventured within three blocks of his office. They knew their boundaries. But sometimes Krash drove slowly past Kalihi Lane. Late at night he walked up the lane, passed into the yard, and stood outside her window. I want my daughter. I want you.

  And some nights in her sleep, Malia half woke, running her hands over her breasts, pretending they were his hands. Remembering her hands on him, his harsh and diffident erection, the physical gallantry with which he entered her. So slowly, so thoughtfully. How many years now? Could desire last that long? Maybe it had aged to something else. Maybe what she desired was to crawl into his bed and ask forgiveness.

  KA ‘INA HNAU

  Land of One’s Birth

  DAYS WERE SO HUMID, THEY SAW REFLECTIONS OF THEIR FACES in their forearms. Barefoot, they encamped in Krash’s hallway—big, sweet-smelling Hawai‘ians, leaving sweat stains on his floor, ghostly sweat shadows of heads and shoulders on the walls. Whispering in Pidgin and Mother Tongue, they leaned damp cheeks against a door, just for the cold kiss of the doorknob. For days, sometimes weeks, they waited their turn.

  In Krash’s office, they stood tongue-tied, observing rows of thick, distempered law books, walls of yellow files. They stared at ceiling fans that echoed and echoed their unschooled tongues as they tried to explain how things were breaking down, how life was harsh, unsolvable.

  Having no money, they brought him koa bowls, half a pig. Once, a whole barracuda. He sat cross-legged with them on lau hala mats, drinking guava from paper cups. Airing their grievances, their anger, their deep humiliation, Hawai‘ian voices dipped and soared. Arms floated rhythmically like dancers, then a fist slammed down emphatically. They used their heads, their legs, their feet, ribald and agile in their telling, so Krash was caught up in their drama.