by James Webb
“Then being on the other side of the river from them will be perfect! You can watch them and remember but you won’t have to go on them. I’ll come see you. We can drink wine and smoke cigars. Then we can stare across the river at the ships and talk about the way things used to be.”
He chuckled softly. “And how will you do that, Jay, living in Manila?”
“It’s not like I won’t come back every now and then. Or you can come and visit me when your retreat is finished.”
“That would indeed be the ultimate test, wouldn’t it?”
A bottle of good whiskey stood on his tiny bedstand, opened and one-third gone. The Irish mistress, that was what many soldiers laughingly called hard liquor. But in Father Garvey’s case the thought seemed so true that it was cruel. He was struggling to remain in God’s service, and who could blame him for a drink or two? Especially I, Jay Marsh, whose autumn nights had been filled with warm sake and hot-water furos and a giggling, sweet-mouthed geisha while my pregnant fiancée patiently awaited my return and my good friend Father Garvey lay in his dismal army-issue cot and struggled with memories so sweet that he felt compelled to confess them and ask for forgiveness.
“Father,” I said, picking up the whiskey. “Let’s kill this bottle.”
“Speak to me while you’re sober, Jay.”
I poured myself a drink. “I don’t think I want to.”
Father Garvey stopped packing and sat on the bed. He pointed to a nearby hard-back chair. “She’s found you out, hasn’t she?”
I obediently took the chair, not answering him. He shook his head, smiling with commiseration. “That’s harder than telling the church, I think. For me it was weakness, an act of love. What was it for you?”
“I haven’t told her, Father. She asked me and I lied.”
“But she knows. I can see it in your face.”
“Yes,” I said. I took another swallow of his whiskey. “So let me ask you this, Father. If she knows, why do I still have to tell her?”
“Well, aren’t you rationalizing, then? How can you move forward in your life together if you carry this transgression in your heart?”
“I think it would only punish her to tell her if she already knows.”
“You’re just afraid. Because, Jay, you cannot have love without honesty,” said Father Garvey.
I laughed involuntarily, caught off guard. “Do you know that’s almost exactly what she said to me? Not about being afraid, but about honesty.”
“Then she’s braver than you think, Jay.”
“She’s the bravest person I’ve ever met. I knew that the first time I ever saw her, sitting next to the road in a caratela as the bombs went off all around us.”
“Ah, yes, the war again,” said Father Garvey. “I feel guilty to have loved it. But where else in our lives could we ever have learned such things?”
He had almost finished packing, three years in Asia stuffed into two army footlockers. He grew sad, staring over at the footlockers as if he had neatly boxed up his entire past. “Sometimes at night I lay alone here in my cot and look up at the dark ceiling where I know only a few months ago some Japanese officer was also peering, trying to go to sleep as he waited for the end, whatever the end would be for him, a bomb on top of him or a fire that burned him up or maybe just a surrender, and then I ask myself, did all that ever really happen? And then sometimes I become filled with regret, wondering why it had to end.”
Near the footlockers a cricket began to chirp. Father Garvey chuckled. “I’ve never been able to catch that little fellow. He’s kept me awake for weeks. With my luck he’ll jump into my footlocker and follow me back to Manresa. He’ll have plenty to eat with my clothes in there.”
He was watching after the cricket, but looking at his craggy face I knew his mind was neither in Japan nor Manresa. I took another drink.
“I have to admit something, Father. The greatest moment of my life was watching the rain come down on General MacArthur’s face as we took the landing craft back to the Nashville that night after we landed at Tacloban and he made his radio address to the nation. We had finally done it. We had returned, and the only thing left was to win the war, and everything that was wrong in the world would turn around and suddenly be right. Do you know what I mean? He was so happy. I don’t know why, but I’ve never felt so pure.”
“Purity is a delicate thing. You cannot stay long in Asia and still keep your innocence. It is not really a Christian place.”
“I wasn’t talking about her, Father. She’s a better Christian than I will ever be, you know.”
“And neither was I,” said Father Garvey.
“Then what do you mean?”
He shrugged. “And why do I always have to explain what I mean?”
I had downed several shots. My stomach burned and my fingers tingled, but my mind was still aching with the clarity I was trying to avoid. I suddenly felt bad about everything, all the loose ends of both of our lives, including now having taken half of Father Garvey’s whiskey.
“I’ll buy you another bottle tomorrow.”
“Can’t you see? I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“Then I’ll buy you one tonight.”
“That won’t be necessary, Jay. I’m all right, really. It was only a moment of weakness, the whiskey.”
“She’s going to have a baby.”
“Somehow I knew that.” He looked at me with such powerful directness that his soft words were almost a command. “God is talking to you, Jay. You must get beyond your fear and find a way to listen.”
“I’ll try, Father. I really will.” I checked my watch. “I have to go. I have work to finish. I just wanted to say good-bye.”
He stood and I rose with him. He looked shyly at me for a moment and then grasped my hand, holding it firmly in both of his for a long time, looking up into my eyes. “It’s over! I just don’t know what to think about that.” There was a mystery in the way he said it, and suddenly I felt his sadness. “War is such a terrible thing, but it does focus the emotions. I had no idea I would love it all so much.”
“Will you write to me, Father?”
“You will always be in my prayers, Jay Marsh. I’m counting on you to do great things.”
I knew I was not supposed to say it but a fathomless regret hung between us like a thick, unctuous incense. We were at a secret wake, just the two of us, standing before an invisible tomb. And finally I could not remain silent. “You’re in love, Father. Can’t you do anything about it?”
He pinched his eyes again, now looking away from me. “I suppose I will always be in love. But I am a priest. That is my calling. I could never be anything else. When I am in my vestments I feel God’s pleasure. So there is only one thing I can do, and that is to thank God for allowing me to understand how powerful this kind of love really is. I’d never known before. He punished me with its beauty, but He has made me a better priest. I now know how completely passion can take hold of someone, and how horribly it hurts to be alone. One has to be with someone before he can truly understand what it means to be by himself. So it will help me as I minister to others. Although it is my penance that others must never know.”
He’d grown embarrassed as he talked, and now he looked away from me, obviously feeling he had said too much. I wanted to help him in some way, but I sensed that I had been out of place even mentioning it.
“You seem to love her so much, Father. Isn’t there any other way to resolve this?”
“No,” he said, now stiffening and regaining his composure. “I am at peace now. I am one small spirit in the universe, but each of us has our duties, and I know mine. This is how dreams die, Jay. And this is how sacrifices are made.”
I could stay no longer. As I closed the door behind me I could hear the cricket again serenading Father Garvey in the echoing emptiness of his barren room. And I knew that for as long as I lived, I would never know a greater friend, or a more honest man.
CHAPTER 23
It to
ok me more than two hours to find Lord Privy Seal Kido. It had begun to rain, cold sheets of it blown by the wind, cluttering the dark streets with vast puddles and inches of mud. I traced his evening’s meanderings in my jeep, asking for him as I moved through restaurants and clubs that had become familiar haunts over the past two months, then finally catching up with him at a villa in the suburb of Roppongi. It seemed that Koichi Kido was always on the move. The electric, shock-eyed marquis cut quite a swath through the upper echelons of Tokyo’s after-hours society.
I had been to this villa once before, for a private dinner at which Kido introduced me to a man he had identified only as Colonel Tsuji, who said he had served under General Yamashita during the famous attack on Singapore. As Kido nodded his concurrence, Colonel Tsuji told me that before the war he had become close to the throne while serving as a tutor for the emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Mikasa. He filled me with stories of how he had used his influence with the imperial family to garner Japan’s finest military units for the invasion itself, and how he, not Yamashita, had led the key attacks that forced the hand of the British. According to Tsuji, Yamashita had resented him because of his closeness to the imperial court and eventually disciplined him out of spite for the deaths of innocent civilians as he overran a hospital. Tsuji said he had retaliated by reporting Yamashita’s many disloyalties to the imperial court.
Tsuji was bright, mysterious, much younger than Yamashita, and still deeply resentful of him. It became clear by the end of the dinner that Kido was subtly trying to reinforce the imperial court’s message to MacArthur that Yamashita had been disloyal and thus was expendable. When I briefed the supreme commander on the conversation he chose to interpret Tsuji’s comments as evidence that Yamashita’s military reputation as the Tiger of Malaya was inflated. But to me, Tsuji’s boasts were proof that Yamashita had indeed disciplined his own officers for atrocities, further evidence of the unfairness of his trial. And then when I met with Yamashita in his prison barracks at Muntinglupa, he himself had mentioned Tsuji as the officer who had caused him to be censured by the imperial court.
And so Tsuji’s claims became a Rorschach test for our own inner thoughts, conjuring images based on what each of us wanted to believe. And the colonel himself remained a shadow figure, a symbol of that part of the Japanese system which no one from the outside has ever penetrated, even to this day. Indeed, when MacArthur asked me to meet once again with Tsuji, Kido informed me that the mysterious colonel had somehow become “unavailable.” And years later, during the Vietnam war, I read a diplomatic cable indicating that one “Colonel Masanobu Tsuji” had disappeared while on a secret mission to Hanoi on behalf of the emperor, never to be found again.
But if no one from the outside has ever penetrated that last hard kernel from which the true soul of Japan still emanates, through Koichi Kido’s indulgence I had come very, very close.
I parked on a narrow street, just outside the villa’s walls. The rain had stopped. The air smelled of charcoal fires and cook pots, coming from the nearby homes. A large dog barked angrily at me from the other side of the wall as I opened the gate. I entered the outer garden anyway, remembering that the dog would be locked inside a cage, and walked along a path of tiny stone steps until I reached the front door.
During my earlier visit, Kido had explained to me that the villa was home to the mistress of a friend. He had not named the friend, and I had left believing that Kido’s disclaimer was actually belly talk, his own way of boasting that the villa and the mistress were his own.
The long-limbed, porcelain-skinned woman who lived in the villa gave me a secret smile as she slid open the doors of the villa’s central building. She was wearing a bulky, long-sleeved housecoat that fell just below her hips, and matching striped pants. She was much older than I but had an ageless, happy face. As I entered she bowed very low. She had recognized me immediately. I returned her bow and then took her hand respectfully, for despite the question of just whose mistress she might have been, I was entering her home.
“Good evening, little sister,” I said. “I am sorry to disturb you but it is very important that I see the lord privy seal tonight. Is he here?”
She squeezed my hand once, welcoming me, then knelt at my feet, starting to remove my shoes. “Oh, Mister Jay Marsh, you do me great honor by visiting my home again! The lord privy seal saw you walking from your car. He is very happy to see you. He is putting on a robe.”
Kido suddenly appeared behind her, wearing a black silk robe that covered flowing blue pajamas. He bowed slightly and then laughed.
“Captain Jay Marsh, I think you are an excellent detective. Either that or I am being provided an unseen American escort wherever I travel in my own city?”
“It is possible that you are being followed.” I grinned. “But your own secret police would be able to tell you far better than I myself.”
Kido gestured toward the house’s center room. He teased me as I walked behind him. “Ah, but as you know, the supreme commander has done away with our secret police.”
“Yes,” I answered, entering the center room. “And by what name do you call them now?”
He laughed delightedly, accepting my compliment without answering me. The woman was as silent as the wind as she whisked about the room, ceremoniously arranging our visit. By the time we reached the alcove area in the middle of the room she had placed two futon cushions in front of a low table. A glowing porcelain hibachi brazier was on the table, providing the only heat in the room. As we knelt on the cushions she quietly slid several wooden shoji doors along the floor behind us until our meeting place was closed off from the rest of the house. Then she knelt, putting her nose onto the floor, and backed out of the room.
Kido seemed enormously relaxed. He picked up a small kiseru pipe from the neatly arranged smoking tray that she had left in front of his cushion and sparked a long wooden match, lighting it. As he worked on his pipe I looked about the room. A tasteful kakemono landscape painting hung from one wall. In the alcove itself was a delicately beautiful ikebana flower arrangement. The paper windows were decorated with fine wooden grillwork. My eyes finally rested on the large, splashy kanji that spelled out the gaku above the main entrance to the room. The gaku that a Japanese chose for his home was very important. Often it was the subtlest way he might articulate his most strongly held passions.
“I am admiring your gaku,” I said as the lord privy seal puffed on his pipe. “It is different than when I was here before, is it not?”
“You are most observant, Captain Jay Marsh. But I will remind you that it is not my gaku, because it is not my house.”
“What does it say?”
The pipe was now fully lit. Kido eased back on his haunches. From his mischievous smile I could tell he was again teasing me. “But I should not read my friend’s gaku aloud. We are both visitors here.”
“I have not heard of that custom,” I answered.
Kido eyed me carefully. “My friend is sometimes a very angry man. He lost a great deal in the war.”
“I can understand that, Lord Privy Seal.”
“Can you?” He puffed slowly on his pipe. The woman silently reentered the room, kneeling before us and setting a tray on the small, low table, and then quickly departed. The tray held a teapot, two cups, and two small bowls of arare appetizers. “May I pour you some tea?”
“If you allow me to pour yours, Lord Privy Seal.”
“Ah, you learn so quickly,” he said, pouring my tea. “But I am your host, so I will pour my own tea.”
I smiled. I had caught him. “But it is not your house, so you cannot be my host. We should pour each other’s tea.”
He smiled back, his eyes bright and shocked behind the thick-lensed glasses, and began pouring my tea. “But for now I am the occupant of the house. And so you are right. I will also read the gaku for you.”
I took the tea, sipping it, and nodded to him, a gesture of thanks. “That’s all right, Lord Privy Seal. I’ve
been rude. And I’ve lost my curiosity.”
“I could lie to you anyway,” he said. “You are very bad with kanji.”
“I am terrible with kanji,” I answered. “But I would not want you to shame yourself by lying on such a simple matter, Lord Privy Seal.”
“Ah, so.” We grinned at each other for several seconds, reading the messages in each other’s faces and sipping our tea. Kido puffed again on his pipe. “My friend is an admirer of Sun-tzu. Do you know Sun-tzu?”
“I know him,” I answered. “He was a great philosopher of war who lived more than two thousand years ago. But he was Chinese.”
“Yes,” sighed the lord privy seal. “Always it goes back two thousand years, and always we end up with the Chinese, do we not?” He eyed the gaku on the wall. “I don’t mean to be mysterious. It is a simple quote.”
“But if it is on your wall it must be profound.”
“I told you it’s not my wall!” Kido grinned. “But I will read it anyway. ‘All strategy is based on deception. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.’ ”
I smiled back. Kido had thought he might shock or even anger me with the quote. But I knew him too well. “Why should your friend quote Sun-tzu? He should simply listen to you, Lord Privy Seal.”
“Perhaps,” shrugged Kido. “But a gaku must be inspirational, taken from a famous man. Me, I am only a humble gate-keeper.”
“Quite the contrary, Lord Privy Seal. Except for the emperor, you are the most powerful man in Japan. I have no doubt of this anymore.”
He eyed me carefully now, knowing that such direct flattery was in fact an allegation, and knowing also that I would not make this allegation so bluntly without a reason. A palpable tension crept between us, instantly changing the mood of our visit.
“You are forgetting MacArthur.”
“The spring will come. The snow will melt from the branches of the pines. And someday MacArthur will go home.”
“And then there will be a new MacArthur.”