The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  When he left British Columbia, Nishino’s intention had been to wipe the place from his mind. A scorched-earth program, slash and burn. He joined the Imperial Army in a northern country district where his mother’s people originated, claiming he had spent his years away in Taiwan. The soldiers in his unit had coarse accents and rougher manners. They were fervently nationalistic, fatalist, brawling, and he aspired to the same conditions for himself. He tried to bury every conscious verbal and social tic that would mark him as an outsider, but he was often taunted for his city-fied accent, for his barely definable but undeniable separateness. Found a level of acceptance among the other soldiers finally by enduring a drunken company beating without uttering a sound. Kept their trust with a vicious disregard for his own safety in combat. He fully expected to be killed during the war to liberate Asia and wanted nothing more for himself than that.

  And still Kitsilano surfaced in his sleep, in moments of near delirium brought on by exhaustion and lack of food. Summer days on the farm where they grew strawberries and tomatoes to sell to the canneries in New Westminster and to stalls in the market along the river. The long seasons of public school with its mix of whites and Japanese, Chinese and Sikhs, Jews, Portuguese, Scots. The afternoon Japanese-language school where Mr. Yawata taught them about the samurai and the old wars against China and Russia. On special occasions the students saluted the Japanese flag and Mr. Yawata led them in singing the kimiga yo. Most of the other students were Nissei, born in Canada, and they knew only rudimentary Japanese. They ridiculed Mr. Yawata, who was in his fifties, absent-minded and partly deaf and spoke no English at all. He lifted his eyeglasses to his forehead to write on the chalkboard and minutes later was rifling through his pockets and desk drawers, muttering to himself, trying to find them. He had to cup a hand behind his good ear to hear his students and they tormented him by speaking in whispers or simply mouthing words. The one obligation trumping all others in their lives, Mr. Yawata insisted, was their obligation to the emperor.

  In Vancouver and Steveston and Kitsilano there were restaurants that would not serve Japanese. Most movie theatres required they sit in the balcony. On Alexander Street in Vancouver white men handed out leaflets that said “Get Rid of the Japs” and “The Rising Sun Must Set,” accusing the teachers in the language schools of being navy reservists sent to teach naval tactics or to spy.

  Mr. Yawata read aloud to them from the League of the Divine Wind, a book about an uprising during the Meiji era when two hundred patriots attacked a garrison of two thousand soldiers. The kamikaze rebels wore short hakama over their everyday dress with two swords held in their sashes. They wore headbands of white cloth and bound up their sleeves with strips of white cotton, and every man wore a white shoulder strap bearing the word “Victory.” Mr. Yawata walked as he read, stumbling into his desk, the trash can. The rebels were adherents of the Ukei shrine, of the gods of Japan before the invasion of Buddhism and the Christian missionaries from the West. “How did the men of the League prepare for combat?” Mr. Yawata read. “Most of all, night and day alike, by imploring the blessing of Heaven.” They fought to return Japan to the rule of His Glorious Majesty with only swords and spears and halberds. After their defeat, the survivors of the league committed the ritual disembowelment of seppuku in fidelity to the emperor. Mr. Yawata leaned over to grab awkwardly at the fallen trash can without taking his eyes from the book in his hand.

  A handful of boys in Nishino’s class could pass gas at will and they formed their own League of the Divine Wind, belching and farting through the halls of the school, shouting “Kamikaze!” as they went. They sat outside the classroom and performed mock seppuku with their pencils. It was all a bizarre joke to them. Two of the boys slipped into the classroom early one afternoon and removed the screws from Mr. Yawata’s chair and it collapsed underneath his weight the moment he sat down. He lay there, sputtering among the wreckage, his glasses fallen across his face. And Nishino felt as if the fate of all things Japanese in the new world lay there with him.

  Lieutenant Kurakake sat with his arms folded. They had finished most of the bottle of sake as Nishino spoke through the worst heat of the afternoon. He had never talked of these experiences to anyone before. As soldiers they were required to ignore the protocol of hints and innuendo and formal politeness that otherwise governed interactions between people of such different station. But more than this, Kurakake clearly felt he owed Nishino something. Something unspoken between them, something related to Chozo Ogawa allowed Nishino to talk as freely as he did.

  He was fighting the drowse of the late afternoon and for a few moments he thought the officer might have drifted off. But Kurakake looked up suddenly, as if someone had shaken him by the shoulder. “Your father,” he said.

  Nishino looked away. He said, “Words are the root of all evil.”

  Kurakake smiled, acknowledging the proverb, and they were silent a long time afterwards as if to honour it. Finally the officer said, “You left your family in Canada, Nishino? No one returned with you?”

  “I came alone.”

  “You have no contact with them?”

  “I have no one now but Japan.”

  The officer poured the last of the sake into their cups and lifted his. “Then we will drink to what you have,” he said.

  He slept a drunken sleep after Kurakake left him and woke in the early evening with a fierce headache. He got out of bed and made his slow way to the latrines behind the ward. He was unable to piss when he got there, breathing hard against the tide of pain that ran the length of his back, waiting for it to subside.

  He didn’t know what he would have said to Kurakake if there had been more questions about his parents. He would have lied or simply refused to answer, he was certain of that. Once he made it back to his cot he sipped at the sake to deaden the throb in his back and to fog the memory of his mother that Kurakake’s interrogation provoked. But she stayed with him all evening.

  He had never witnessed a single instance of physical affection between his parents. There was no meanness or cruelty, just a constant remoteness that he took to be the natural state of affairs between a man and a woman. They spoke to each other only of practical matters. Nishino never heard his mother talk about the future beyond what the next morning held. She bore five other children after arriving in Canada, a girl who died at three weeks old, then two sons and another daughter. She travelled to the Japanese consul in Vancouver to register the name of each child after they were born.

  She was a remarkably tiny woman, and her stature made her steadfastness seem more heroic to Nishino. She rose each morning at five and bathed outside in all weather, soaking her naked torso with dippers of cold water to “harden” herself. Her attention was absorbed by each successive task she undertook, and there was something in her diligence and single-minded concentration that made her seem smaller still. As if she was disappearing in whatever work she was doing at the time. She smiled only in those moments after she had completed a job, putting the kitchen to rights before going to bed, setting the last basket of strawberries onto the truck. The only affectation of luxury she allowed herself was to serve even ordinary meals in bowls of Ninsei porcelain that she’d received as a wedding gift.

  She had no interest in the world outside the family home and nothing of the new country touched or stained the woman she was when she arrived. She was all he had of the real Japan they’d left behind. And while she was alive, that was almost enough for him.

  The last time Kurakake came to see him, Nishino was sitting in a wooden chair beside the bed. The officer opened the first of the two bottles of sake. “We have much to celebrate,” he said. “The company will be moving back to the front very soon.”

  “I will be ready.”

  Kurakake said, “You will never be a field soldier again, Private.”

  And nothing more was spoken between them for a while.

  “I have been thinking about Chozo Ogawa,” the officer said finally. “He was
not meant to be a soldier, that boy. Do you agree?”

  Nishino looked away down the aisle. He didn’t understand what the officer was looking for and didn’t know how to answer.

  “He was refused by the army when he first tried to enlist,” Kurakake went on. “Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said defensively. “I did not know that.”

  “Unfit for duty, is what they said. You noticed of course, not right in the head somehow. His father was a friend of mine, an officer from the service who died a number of years ago. His oldest son contacted me and asked if I could help find a place for Chozo. And, naturally, I did what I could. I saw it immediately after he came into the ranks. He wasn’t fit. And yet I couldn’t be seen to be favouring him.” Kurakake raised and lowered his hands in a helpless gesture. He took a sheet of paper from an inside pocket of his uniform coat and turned it over without unfolding it. “What I am trying to say,” he said. “I think his father would have been thankful for the way you watched out for him. He would have wanted to show his appreciation.”

  “We helped one another,” Nishino said.

  “Yes,” Kurakake said. “I have your orders, Private Nishino.” He raised the sheet of paper. “You will be transferred back to Japan, to Kumamoto. There is a camp being constructed there.”

  “A guard for prisoners?”

  Kurakake smiled at the look of disgust on the young man’s face. “Not a guard exactly. You will act as an interpreter for the camp commandant, Lieutenant Sakamoto. We served two years together in Manchuria. I have already written to let him know you will be joining his staff.”

  Kurakake stood and handed the folded sheet of paper to Nishino.

  Nishino looked away from the officer to hide the tears in his eyes, recognizing that the war was over for him and he had no choice now but to submit. He stood and bowed.

  “Good luck to you, Private Nishino.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  1945

  WISH

  THE THREE PRISONERS CLIMBED into the back of the open truck and sat awkwardly, all of them out of breath from the exertion. They were wearing standard prison-issue uniforms, short-sleeved shirts and shorts, though the April weather still edged toward a chill. Wish turned his face to the sky, white stars pinging in his peripheral vision.

  The guard slapped his palm against the cab of the truck and they lurched up out of the valley. They drove past Nagasaki Station, the surface of the harbour on their left salted with sunlight. The water was a dark blue but for a line of black at mid-strait where a tidal current ran. Past the long dock of the shipyard they turned away from the city centre that lay out of sight among the maze of hills, travelling toward the outskirts. Wish closed his eyes, letting his head rock with the movement. Twice a month he accompanied Major McCarthy and a Dutch officer on this excursion. They were transporting the cremated ashes of POWs from the scatter of camps in the area to the French Temple, where the urns were stored in a crypt beneath the church. Wish looked forward to these trips. It was a rare pleasure to be stationary and in motion at the same time. It was almost hallucinatory, like a dream of flying.

  He turned to the civilian guard who was standing against the cab and solemnly watching the road behind them. “Mr. Osano.” He patted the floor of the truck bed. “Chakuseki,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  The guard smiled briefly and raised his hand. The same offer and refusal every time.

  “You work too hard, Mr. Osano,” Wish told him. Knowing the man understood little or nothing of what he said.

  “They all work too hard for my liking,” McCarthy whispered. He was an Irishman but had finished his education in England, where the sharpest crags of his accent had been ground down. He nodded toward the box of urns. “Who have we got here today?” he asked.

  There were four, each marked by the name, rank and serial number of the dead. Wish lifted them out in turn. “Australian. Australian. American,” he said. He looked across at Captain van der Meulen, holding the last urn. “Dutch,” he said.

  The captain spoke English but not fluently and he said very little on these trips. He came with them largely because he was Catholic and it was a chance to spend a few minutes inside a sanctuary, among the candles and stained glass and the saints. It was being Catholic himself that had gotten Wish the assignment from Major McCarthy shortly after their arrival in the camp.

  The French Temple was an ornate wooden building with two slope-roofed wings framing the main hall where portal doors stood below three large stained-glass windows. It had been constructed by European missionaries centuries before. A marble statue of the Blessed Virgin stood on a pedestal in the central entrance, a high narrow steeple above it topped with a cross.

  The first time Wish had come to the church he stood outside a long time. “Who does it belong to?” he asked. “I mean, who goes to it?”

  “Japs, I expect,” McCarthy said.

  The Blessed Virgin looked out over the square with the same blank, beatific expression as the Ocean Star at her grotto in Renews. Wish was amazed to find her here, in the heart of Japan. He’d have been less surprised to hear an animal speak.

  McCarthy crossed himself and whispered, “Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.”

  Wish looked at the officer. “What did you say?”

  “It’s Spanish. Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.”

  “Mercedes?”

  “It means compassion or tender mercy. The Spaniards call Mary Our Lady of Mercies.”

  Wish watched him until McCarthy said, “One of the Sisters at school was from Salamanca. Sister Concepcion.”

  Not Portuguese after all. He came to think of the statue of Mary as Mercedes and every time he came to the French Temple he crossed himself before her and touched her marble feet for luck, bringing his hand to his lips.

  They carried the four urns past her into the cool air of the church, up the central aisle. There was no one else in the sanctuary, but votive candles and a red oil lamp were burning near the altar, where they placed the ashes. They knelt at the rail and McCarthy and Wish led the rosary in English, van der Meulen responding in Dutch. Then Wish recited the Pater Noster in Latin, McCarthy and the Dutch officer joining in on the phrases they remembered.

  “I love hearing those old words,” McCarthy said.

  The soldiers left the urns at the altar to be moved into the crypt by a prelate or a priest and they started back down the aisle.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it,” McCarthy said, “how there’s never a soul about when we’re here?”

  It had never really occurred to Wish there might be people in the building to see, priests or nuns or parishioners. And he realized he was happy to have it empty, that it made the place seem completely theirs somehow. Sacrosanct. Unspoiled.

  Osano never stepped inside the sanctuary, waited for them at the open doorway. All three soldiers bowed as they filed past him into the sunlight and he bowed in return. At the truck Osano took a lighter from his pocket and lit cigarettes for them. Then they hoisted themselves into the truck bed for the trip home to the camp.

  When he finished his smoke, Wish took a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. It was the first letter he had received from her in England and the one letter from Mercedes he had carried with him through all his time in the Pacific. He unfolded it carefully, taking out the black-and-white picture that had come with it. The photograph was taken in the shop in Georgestown, Hiram’s name and address stamped on the grey backing. It had taken him a moment to recognize her, Mercedes standing in a black dress, her once straight brown hair sporting tight curls. He had no idea how she’d managed to do that. She was wearing makeup as well, lipstick and dark eye shadow, and she looked like someone out of the movies. She seemed much older than he remembered, more a woman. As if she’d made up her mind to put away childish things. His bunk-mate, Anstey, peeking over his shoulder to get a look at her the afternoon the letter arrived. “How come you’ve never mentioned her befo
re?” he asked.

  After Earle’s coaster docked in St. John’s that morning, Wish had picked his way up the steep streets from the harbour to Georgestown. Hammered hard at the door of the shop to wake Hiram and nearly knocked the man over in his rush to get in.

  He’d said, “I killed him, Hiram.”

  Hiram took Wish by the arm and led him into the office at the back of the shop, settled him into a chair. Coaxed the story from him.

  “What happened after you fell?”

  “I backed off till I come to the wall and waited for him, couldn’t see a thing in the black. By and by, I went into the kitchen and found a candle.” Wish’s face screwed tight and he bent over his lap, rocking and moaning. “He had blood coming out his mouth. And his head gone sideways against the wall.”

  “It was an accident,” Hiram told him. “It was self-defence.” And he stopped in mid-thought, leaning back in his chair. “Wish,” he said. “How did you get back to St. John’s?”

  “I took the Parsonses’ trap skiff over to Fogo, caught the coaster from there.”

  “You stole their boat?”

  “I sent it right back with a couple of youngsters.”

  “You oughtn’t to have run, Wish. It doesn’t look good.”

  He sat silent a moment, his mouth half open.

  “What is it?”

  “There was some money, Hiram. He’d brought some money with him to send me on my way. To bribe me into leaving.”

  “Jesus, Wish, you didn’t take it off him?”

  “I had hardly a cent left.”

  “You stole money off a corpse?”

  “I didn’t know how else I was going to get on a coaster. Or get the skiff back to the Cove.”

  Hiram stood up out of his seat and turned his back. He was barefoot and his suspenders hung loose at his sides. He took a deep breath and touched his head delicately with both hands, thinking. He said, “We’ll have to get you out of the country.”