Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “And . . . what of the girl you were trying to find?”

  “A wise friend told me life would find her. Now, when I think of her, I feel the memory but not the pain.” He watched the ocean for a while. “Sometime, she’s so vivid, I think I hear her heartbeat.”

  “I once knew such love. Well, passion. A little Mongolian named Udbal.” Endo smiled. “She taught me concupiscence. I was a virgin till I met her.”

  Keo frowned. “You were no virgin. After all those girls in Paris?”

  “Child’s play. I was a boy, really, until the war. Udbal took my cherry, as they say. She introduced me to a . . . particular addiction.”

  He closed his eyes, remembering his first brief tour in occupied Manchuria.

  . . . winter so cold his teeth cracked. Wolves fighting over corpses. The little Mongol beauty Udbal. Captured at fourteen, when his soldiers massacred her village. Each time before he raped her, he had made her sing. It was said music was born in Mongolia. Sometimes, while inside her, he heard screams. Prisoners of war being used for live experiments—their bodies sliced open, injected with bacillus of cholera, bubonic plague.

  One day he found sores on her of syphilis. He looked down at his penis, imagined it covered with pustules. He wept, loving her a little. Then took her outside, making her kneel in the snow. The arc of his sword. Her young head soaring. After, there was nothing but wolfprints. They came like silver flashes.

  Udbal, his first ecstasy. In two months he took down five more syphilitic girls. He began to study necks, even those of fellow officers, their heads bent meditatively at chess. A captain grew uneasy. Endo’s eyes had too keen an edge. He was transferred to Rabaul, deep in the Pacific. . . .

  Now he opened his eyes. “I suppose, remembering our first love is a way to keep innocence safe from decay. It is not allowed to rot before we do.”

  Keo had trouble imagining Endo driven by passion or addiction. A man so damaged, his exhalations smelled like burning metal.

  “What happened to the girl, Udbal?”

  Endo looked away, lips moving in small whispers. “Gomen nasai. Gomen nasai.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “A simple phrase. It means the same as your kala mai. Forgive.”

  Keo patted Endo’s arm, and sighed. “That war will never leave us. But seems to me you’ve suffered enough. Soon as this statehood thing is over, we’ll get you to a specialist. Maybe all you need are vitamins.”

  Endo threw his head back, laughing hysterically. “Vitamins! Ah, my friend—you are original.”

  Then his expression changed. He leaned closer.

  “You should begin to think of my remains. Cremate them. Then, if you will, bury my ashes in the Ko‘olaus, where the soil is calm. Keo, I beg you! Don’t throw them in the ocean. I have such a horror of that place, such ghastly memories. Even my ashes would know. It would be like boiling forever in a red, wet hell.”

  HNAU HOU

  Rebirth

  ONE BALMY MARCH DAY, MALIA HEARD SIRENS OUT ON MERCHANT Street. She saw women with their hands reaching toward the sky. The radio announcer seemed to be laughing and crying. Both houses of Congress had voted in favor: the Hawai‘i Statehood Bill was passed.

  Moments later, church bells sounded across the city, a tolling that would last twenty-four hours. Traffic stopped as folks jumped from their cars, cheering and embracing. Men ran through the streets, tearing their shirts off. She stared at the Singer, imagining crowded tenements and Homestead shacks where Hawai‘ians sat silent.

  She patted the machine, wishing it could tell her what was coming. She sighed, looking round her shop. Sometimes she grew weary, nothing in life but work. Yet work relieved her of freedom she would not know how to use. It kept her from admitting there was nothing else to yield to.

  She thought of Sunny Sung, wondering where she was, wishing she could go to her. She thought of Leilani who had said if statehood came, the U.S. would swallow their islands. Mama. Who never learned to read or write. Who poured pride into me, and arrogance, so no one could break my back. Mama. What now? What now? . . .

  She closed her shop and started for home. Streets were rivers of people, cars and buses abandoned. It took four hours to reach Kalihi, only a mile west of downtown Honolulu. The lane was one big celebration, folks hugging and dancing. The Silvas and the Changs. The Manlapits. Rosie Perez and her brood. Mr. Kimuro who had sold his bed. Fourteen years after World War II, he still slept on his knees, praying for his boy’s return from battle. Only the Palamas, against statehood, drew their shades and stayed inside.

  “Come, come celebrate,” neighbors called. “Plenny fo’ eat and drink.”

  Even a small band was set up in the lane. Malia kicked off her shoes and drank a beer with her father. Split in his views on statehood, he looked euphoric in a lost way.

  “If only yo’ mama be here. Wondah what she say. So many years running from haole, now dey got us by da t’roat.”

  Malia patted his back. “Papa, statehood will bring good things, too. I just don’t like the way white folks treat it like a victory.”

  She kept looking down the road for Baby Jo. It could be hours. She slipped into the house and showered. She washed her hair, scrubbed her nails, everything so gritty. Then she slid into a long lime-colored sheath, padding around barefoot.

  Hours passed. She brushed her hair, turned up the radio, bands broadcasting from Waikiki. She danced alone. Late afternoon now, her father and neighbors in the garage harmonizing over Keo’s old piano. In the lane, rich smells of barbecue, chow fun, pungence of bagoong.

  Out beyond King Street, beyond Kalihi, the sky turned flamboyant reds and purples. Soon dusk, real celebrations, fireworks and cannons. Malia thought of Baby Jonah somewhere in those mobs. She began to perspire. Her daughter moving at a motherless gait, a stranger following. She perspired so profusely, a breeze dried her sweat to salt tattoos. She looked round for a weapon.

  . . . Needles. Scissors. What a woman needs . . .

  She had not taught her daughter these vital things. Baby Jo was out there unprepared. She thought of all that could happen to her. She was soaked, as if she’d sprung a leak. She drank another beer, trying to calm down. She looked in the mirror. Glowing skin, thick, dark hair held back on one side with plumeria. Her not quite slender body poured into the long green sheath.

  I have never looked so good. While my daughter is somewhere being mutilated . . .

  She ran to the window, calling to her father. “Papa! She’s not safe. Not safe!”

  He waved, mishearing her in the growing din. She moved out to the steps, searching the crowded lane, then went back inside to her nightmares.

  . . . His hand stroking his penis. Stalking her. The way snakes hunt by smell. Her virgin smell. She pictured her daughter’s bright white panties tied round her neck. . . . With which she has been strangled.

  Malia screamed. Folks in the lane screamed back, thinking it was singing.

  Maybe it was the crowds, the chaos—something had reared up in her. Fear, conjuring the history of Sunny Sung.

  “Where is her father? Please. Let him reach her in time.”

  She thought of him then, without letting herself think his name. Right now he would be out there in the thick of it, being a sensation. Utterly useless. Malia grabbed up a large, lethal pair of scissors. She would rescue her daughter herself. She would slash her way through crowds, roam the earth to find her, to avenge her. She would be a walking blade.

  She called out again through the window. “Papa. I’m going out! To find her.”

  That’s how she would recall the moment. She would recall her father in the garage, suddenly staring down the lane. Her father rising, moving forward. She would remember turning, going to the screen door, would remember them walking up the crowded lane. Baby Jonah and her father. They walked slowly as if treading glass, saw her standing at the door. She heard blood lapping in her veins. She stepped outside, and felt her father move beside her. She hea
rd his heart, or was it hers?

  Folks went on singing, celebrating, but much attention was paid. Faces turned toward Malia, waiting to see if she would yield. Baby Jo looked terrified, eyes like cocoa saucers. She seemed to be pulling Krash, but then he saw Malia in the light of the doorway. Her lush black hair and glowing skin, the lushness of her naked arms. Halfway up the lane, he and his daughter stopped, and waited.

  “No be proud,” Timoteo whispered in Malia’s hair. “Go, meet dem halfway.”

  It seemed the whole lane waited.

  Timoteo pinched her arm. “In da name of yo’ mama. Go!”

  She hesitated, then moved like a woman trollied, flowing across the green lawn in her lime green dress, seeing nothing but her daughter’s eyes. The man beside her daughter slightly rumpled, but alert, like someone hungry but extremely proud. She moved down the lane, clutching the scissors in her fist.

  Folks stood back on either side, staring. She walked up to the father. He was watching what was in her hand. She gazed at her daughter, touched her face and shoulder, everything intact. She flung the scissors to the grass, then turned to Krash. She would not remember if they spoke. They must have. She would remember only Baby Jonah walking between them, holding their hands like children as they passed down the lane.

  Miles of moving humans. They floated through them, and over them, as if the three of them were winged. Ships in the harbor shot off cannons, making the ground beneath them shudder. Malia would remember looking down, laughing at her bare feet, and pausing somewhere, drinking something cold.

  Years hence, in between rushing out to see the world, then rushing home, then rushing off again—a woman forever going makai and makai and makai—Baby Jo would tell the story. She would begin by saying how there were, in each life, certain moments that are pure. Moments sculpted so precisely they are fitted to one’s hand, so one carries them always. She would say that such moments were like a first glimpse of something extraordinary when a veil is thrust aside.

  The moment she first realized her sister was her mother. The first time she looked into her father’s face, understanding who he was. The pads and creases of her father’s hand. The actualness of him, never quite describable. She would carry these moments like rare jewels.

  With them she would carry that statehood night, when she walked between her parents, holding their hands. Her father’s labored breathing, her mother‘s needle-scarred fingers. She would recall it as holding tight to her two children, so they would not evaporate.

  As they pushed on toward Waikiki, police, recognizing Krash, gave them a lift in a squad car. Siren wailing, folks throwing flowers thinking they were famous. Although the Statehood Bill was passed in Congress, people of Hawai‘i still had to vote in favor, or against.

  One of the cops now turned and asked, “’Ey, Krash. Hawai‘ians going lose on statehood. Most folks voting YES. What we do now?”

  His voice was deep and clear. “We keep marching. Keep shouting. Ha‘ina mai ka puana!” Let the story be told.

  Just after McCully Bridge, they entered Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, the street sealed off to traffic. By midnight more than a hundred thousand people would be gathered, turning the avenue into a spinning ballroom where couples danced straight into morning.

  Taking their hands again, walking between them, Baby Jo looked up at the face of her golden, full-lipped mother, hair going wiry and electric in humid air, and her big, bronzed, rough-skinned father, perspiring profusely so his skin seemed a suit of mirrors. Dusk made them both a little darker. In torchlight and Chinese lanterns lining Waikiki, in moonlight and spotlights from a dozen bandstands, through streamers and confetti, their teeth and eyes jumped out, the two of them so tall and regal, people stared.

  They found Keo on a bandstand in front of the Royal. He was up there leading Hana Hou!, snapping fingers while a sax and clarinet went crazy. Baby Jonah closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, took her mother’s hand, and carefully placed it in her father’s. Then she climbed up on the stage. They were alternating island songs with rock and roll, World War II, anything the crowd yelled out. Just then they struck up “Moonlight Serenade.”

  She slid into her uncle’s arms, then pointed down at the crowd, her parents there, together. They weren’t talking, they were looking in opposite directions. But they were holding each other, dancing. Keo looked at them amazed, then turned his back to the crowds, to Baby Jo, his hands busy at his eyes. After a while he turned back to his niece, watching her parents together.

  “Remember this,” he said. “Remember.”

  All night, Chinese dragons would leap and slide down Kalakaua Avenue. Ten thousand firecrackers would be ignited. Every half hour, navy destroyers would split the night with rocket fire and thundering cannons, so buildings seemed to sway. An army artillery division would fire cannons in fifty-round salutes. On Sand Island, across Honolulu Harbor, a mammoth Victory Torch was lit, a bonfire sending flames one hundred feet high, visible from miles at sea. Each hour, army helicopters would add firewood sent from countries round the world.

  BABY JONAH WOULD REMEMBER ALL THESE THINGS. SHE WOULD remember her parents dancing, her uncle watching them. Years later, in a lover’s arms, she would tell how her mother and father never married. Her mother refused, knowing if they married, they would be competing to outshine. And maybe she refused because she could never forgive him for the haole wife.

  Yet they would be more than man and wife. They would be each other’s passion and devotion. They would be each other’s conscience and raw heart. And so it would transpire that several nights a week, Baby Jo’s father would tiptoe up the lane and slip into her mother’s room. She would hear him rushing down the hall, closing the door, as she lay smiling in the dark.

  Through the years, she would continue the saga of her parents, telling how one night her mother came to her with her piko, her umbilical cord, looking like a dried-up pig’s tail, explaining how, though Baby Jo had been given several names, until her mother swam her piko to the reef, she was not condoned or blessed by ‘aumkua, ancestor gods.

  One day Malia would swim out to their resting place, chanting aloud, asking if Anahola would be a fitting name for Baby Jo. Her father desired this, honoring the sixteen years she never knew him, years of life set aside, waiting to be lived. And Malia desired this, in honor of the child of Keo and Sunny Sung. Baby Jo would tell of watching her mother swim, holding the piko between her teeth, her father paddling a canoe, watching over her. And how in that moment—her cord between her mother’s teeth—Baby Jo felt a painful tugging on her navel, pangs of rebirth.

  She would tell how her mother called out to ‘aumkua, releasing her birth-cord to waves which took it down, its blood and cells flowing into theirs. She would remember her parents waiting for a sign, the sun beating on her father’s back, making his bullet scar grow tender. Then the sound of ‘aumkua chanting from beyond the reef, their sacred mana flowing back to Baby Jo.

  And she would tell how her father half adopted her, because she was half his. And how her name officially became Anahola Meahuna Kapakahi, which roughly translated as Time in a Glass–Hidden in Secret–All Askew. Which might explain why her life would be spent restless and wandering, seeming to some folks nonsensical and all askew.

  And through the years Anahola would continue telling how she heard her father, just before dawn, slipping out of the house. And how, if she was quick, she could dart across the hall and watch him through a window, her big, handsome father running down the lane, trying to outrun the dawn. He was in politics, she said, and cared about his reputation.

  She would remember how sometimes he woke up late, light already pouring over the Ko‘olaus, and how he dashed down the lane, struggling with his trousers while workers passed with lunch pails. She would remember a particular dawn, when she was still at university, how she tiptoed to Malia’s room, put her arm round her mother, and together they leaned laughing at the window, as her father ran down the lane with half-buttoned pants.


  She would tell how, for years, her father campaigned for office, defeated as the L‘au Lawyer, until a new generation of Hawai‘ians rose up, helping elect him to county office, and then to the state supreme court—young attorneys he had inspired and apprenticed. He would bring radical reforms to state government and land allocation. But he would be best remembered as the orator who ignited courtrooms, defending his people.

  In time, Anahola would tell how her parents celebrated their tenth, and then their twentieth un-anniversary. And then their silver, with a l‘au in Kalihi Lane. Both still so in love, so wary, her mother smelled his clothes for the scent of other women, and he searched her body for the imprints of strange hands.

  And somewhere in Hong Kong, Sydney, or New Delhi, still going makai and makai and makai, Anahola would continue their story as they approached their forty-fifth, and then their fiftieth un-anniversary. There would be many storms, breakups, and heartaches between them, because they were both of the same strong kapa cloth, both proud knaka.

  In time, she would turn her lovers into listeners. She would captivate with words the way her uncle had with trumpet. Men would lie beside her like children, beguiled. They would recall her as a “talking story” woman. But sometimes her tales would grow dark, her eyes would narrow. By then she was already leaving them. And when she left, their beds would resonate with stories.

  Her lovers would sleep, dreaming of her islands. Of blue cliffs called Pali of the Ko‘olaus, and giant ti leaves dripping dew on sleeping boar. They would dream, too, of taro fields thirsting to extinction, of pure streams bubbling to sludge. Of children sleeping in exploding houses, people growing old in packing crates. People who, in time, would rise up prideful and outraged, in towns named Wai‘anae, Nanakuli, Lualualei, Makaha, Mkua, Papakolea.