When the Elephants Dance

by Tess Uriza Holthe

  “You frightened your mother,” my mother’s friend Aling Anna says, but she bows her head and looks away quickly before I can respond.

  Our neighbor Mrs. Yoshi pats my hair gently. “You boys must not go out again. It is too dangerous,” she says. “One of the grown-ups should go next. Me, I will go next time.” A few of the men protest the idea of sending a woman out. She ignores them and comes to me with a damp rag and pats my neck gingerly to clean the blood. “You are a brave boy.” She holds my face. Before the war she used to wear a special powder on her face that made her skin appear paler. I remember the sweet chalky scent of it as she stands near. “He will be fine, Louisa,” she tells my mother. She puts her arm around Mama and holds her close for a moment.

  Mama places a hand to her chest as she reaches out to touch me. Papa takes my hands and looks at my thumbs. He breathes heavily and stares at them quietly. He says nothing for a long time. He swallows with difficulty and avoids our eyes. Then finally he says, “Salamat sa Dios.” Thank God. “You are home safe.”

  “I cannot move my thumbs,” I tell Papa.

  Mama falls to her knees and kisses my hands. She holds them to her face and sobs into them. The others watch quietly.

  Papa rests his palm on my back. “I will clean and wrap them. Then we will pray for God to heal your hands.”

  “They killed Nesto Aguinaldo,” I tell them. They nod solemnly without asking how. “They almost killed me.” My legs shake beneath me and I sit.

  “But you are here now, with us,” Papa says. “That is all that matters.”

  “Your sister has not yet come home,” Mama tells me.

  My sister, Isabelle, is seventeen and my mother’s pride. She was to study medicine at Santo Tomas University before the war broke out and the university was made into a prison for the Amerikanos. My mother and Isabelle fight a lot.

  “Ate is not home yet?” I ask, using the term for “big sister.” I look to my father. “Should we not send someone to find her?”

  Everyone looks around nervously when I say this. I tell Papa of the tanks we saw earlier this morning, and he nods quietly. I remind him how Domingo told us we must help the Amerikanos when they arrive.

  “Domingo is a reckless fool,” Mang Selso, my father’s friend, chides. “He cares nothing of his own life. We would all be killed. How can we fight without guns?”

  “I will take my chances in this cellar,” Aling Anna declares. “Why look for trouble? As long as we stay out of the Japanese’s way. They will have no reason to harm us.”

  “We cannot hide forever. We must find food,” Papa tells them. “Domingo is right. We must band together and help the Amerikanos. It is our only hope.”

  “If only we could be assured the Amerikanos will win this one. But how can we have faith when they did not win the first time?” Aling Anna asks. “They failed in their defense of our islands. They let those savages in.”

  Our basement is filled with our neighbors. This is the way it has become. The Japanese have commandeered the nicer houses for themselves. It is common to have four to five families crowded into one house. Our house has four families, and a few without families, thirteen people and two small children. We have been together now for two years. It was not so bad when we slept upstairs in the house. But the bombings and Japanese accusations against the citizens have driven us down to the cellar to hide. Most of the houses in our area are too small and unwanted by the Japanese. Half are deserted. We make ours look abandoned. In the beginning of the Japanese occupation, many people fled to the countryside, but we had no second home to run to. And now we are too weak to move very far. Tempers are hot here in our basement.

  We are all shoulder to shoulder in our small cellar, and the air is thick and stale. If someone lets out a bad smell, it soaks into your clothing for a long time. I wish we could go upstairs so that I could lie in my cool room with the thin mosquito nets. The cellar is small. It would fit six coffins. When we sit we try to pull our knees close, so we do not kick one another. The floor of our cellar is dirt. We have sticks and stones where we build a small fire to cook. We open the top latch to let out the air when we do this. When it is time to sleep, some of the others go back into the house. Since the gunfire and Amerikano tanks rumbled the ground twenty days ago, more people have been sleeping in the cellar with us.

  We sleep side by side, and often in the night someone rolls off to the side and takes my blanket by mistake. Roderick likes having all the people here. He used to go from person to person to see if they would play cards. He stopped doing that after Tay Fredrico, the old Spaniard, shouted at him and shook him until Papa came and pulled Roderick away.

  Domingo’s wife, Lorna, looks at me. She clutches their infant daughter, Alma, and their six-year-old son, Taba. “Alejandro,” she says, and I can hear the shaking in her voice, “did you see Domingo?”

  I nod at her.

  She will not let me look away. “What did he say?”

  “He said that we must all stand together and fight the Japanese. We must not let them divide us against one another.”

  “Easy for him to say,” Mang Selso grumbles. “He is a guerrilla commander. He can perform his hit-and-run missions while we civilians must bear the retaliation from the Japanese. We have no place to hide.”

  Mang Selso is my father’s best friend; they worked together before the war, making rattan chairs. His wife and father, Tay Fredrico, are here with him. His father is very old and rarely speaks.

  Ate Lorna ignores Mang Selso’s comments. “Is he on his way home?”

  I cannot answer her.

  Aling Anna brings a wrinkled hand to her brow. Her gold rings catch my eye.

  “Please, Lorna, do not invite him back here. Your husband will bring danger to this household. If they find we are harboring a guerrilla, they will chop our heads.”

  Mang Selso nods at this. “Yes, Lorna. You must warn him not to return here.”

  Ate Lorna ignores him. “Alejandro, is Domingo on his way back?”

  “Shh, all of you.” Papa reaches for a bowl with a small portion of rice and fish. “Let Alejandro eat. There will be time for questions later.” He hands the bowl to me. “Jando, itó anák, kain na.” Here, son, he says in Tagalog, eat now.

  “Here, Alejandro, Roderick. You boys add this to your bowls.” Mrs. Yoshi breaks her fish into two portions and gives each of us a piece. “I am full. Go on. You boys need it for your strength. Eat.”

  I sit down slowly. My body is so tired, so sore. I cannot even lift the bowl.

  My father takes my hands; again he is silenced by the sight of them.

  “Manga hayop,” he curses. Animals.

  There are tears in his voice. I pull my hands away instantly. The cuts are deep, I can see my bone in several places, and my skin hangs off my right thumb. The moment Papa touches the skin to pull it back over the bone, I shout.

  He prepares a heated cloth and splashes alcohol onto the rag. I begin to sweat and I want to run from the room. He splashes rubbing alcohol on one hand and I grit my teeth, then shout. He wraps the wounds with clean strips of cloth. He takes my other hand and I pull away. I cannot stop crying. His face is the last thing I remember.

  WHEN I WAKE a few hours later, there is a loud roaring outside. We crowd together.

  “Oh no,” Ate Lorna says.

  “Airplanes.” Roman, the newspaperman, comes down the ladder with an excited face. “The Americans will finish them off.” He talks like an Amerikano, this Filipino newspaperman. He says the letter g when he is amazed at something and “shoot” when something does not go right. He has studied abroad, in the United States. He said if I studied hard enough, he would help me go to the United States. He did not say if he would help me pay for it. He is another of our neighbors. My father took him in when the Japanese confiscated his family home.

  “We have almost used our entire supply of rice,” my mother whispers to Papa as she spoons a second small serving into my bowl.

 
; My father’s friend Mang Selso hears this and looks to Aling Anna. “Aling Anna, everyone has contributed. It is time we trade your jewelry, the ones your sister left you. We must sell those.”

  “Those are not for selling,” Aling Anna snaps, pulling her velvet blanket close.

  “Of course.” Mang Selso looks away with disgust. “What did I expect?”

  Mang Selso likes to tease all the time. Before the Japanese arrived, he was a heavy man and shaped like a pear. Now he has a skinny neck and a saggy belly. My mother calls him “Gung-gong,” which is like when the Amerikanos say “Dumb-dumb.” He likes to pull candy from behind our ears or tie strings to paper money. When you go to pick it up, the money runs away from you. Roderick always falls for that trick.

  Mama has promised to ask Aling Anna to trade a few of her belongings for rice. She says that Aling Anna just likes to do things in her own time. Papa said that if Aling Anna does not share, he will put her out on her backside “in her own time.”

  Aling Anna is a very rich woman who owns the biggest house on the hill. Of course, the Japanese took that house first. Most of the neighbors will not speak to her. They call her cheap and stingy. She always speaks loudly, as if she is angry with you. She never says hello in church, and she gives only one or two coins for prayer indulgence. She gives less than the peasants.

  My father once joked that Aling Anna would need all of her money to make it into heaven, and Mama became very angry with him. She does not like jokes that sound as if they are making fun of God or any of the saints. Mama pities Aling Anna. She believes that Aling Anna has great hurts inside. She thinks Aling Anna is like a wounded animal that growls so that no one will hurt her. I do not like her. One time, when Mama and I visited her house, I broke a small music box and she pinched me so hard that I bled. She is here only because of Mama. Aling Anna came with two suitcases of clothing, two large bags of sugar, and a blue canister of tea. We had to leave it all upstairs because her belongings took the space of two people, and the others began to complain.

  Papa tells us that the guerrillas have been attacking the food supplies again on the way to Manila. He says that many of the Amerikano internees at Santo Tomas and Bilibid prisons have died from hunger. My cousin Esteban claims that the Amerikanos rescued the internees yesterday, with great big tanks. One tank, he claims, had the words Georgia Peach written on the front, and Battlin’ Betty. Esteban says the tanks crashed through the walls, but he likes to tell big stories. Papa says he will wait for a more trustworthy person to tell us the story before he believes it.

  Esteban keeps looking up toward the ladder.

  “You shall stay here tonight,” my father tells him.

  “But Tito …,” Esteban protests to my father, his uncle.

  “Esteban, hah, it is too dangerous to be alone. They could mark you as a guerrilla. You have already seen what happened to Jando.”

  I watch Esteban. He sits twisting the clasp of his sandals. He has to run out to use the bathroom many times. Esteban has dysentery. He has been eating grass again. Papa says that Esteban’s rear end now runs as much as his mouth.

  My father tries to hide his coughing. Mama is very worried that he also has typhus fever, which is very common, because of his red rashes and bad headaches. The flies and mosquitoes carry the diseases.

  “Tay ka muna,” Father says thoughtfully. Wait a minute. “Tomorrow I shall go to see that warehouse I heard the others talking about a few days ago. The Japanese are giving away two bags of rice to each family, for an hour’s worth of work.”

  “It may be a trick,” Mama protests. There have been rumors that people do not return from these places.

  “Let me go instead,” I offer. Papa does not look well enough yet.

  “No, the head of the family should go. Are you the head of the family now, Jando?” Papa teases.

  “No.” I grin.

  “I thank you for your help, anák, but you must rest.”

  Mang Selso and his wife are angry at Aling Anna because she will not share her belongings to trade for food; they keep making snorting noises and mumbling to each other about her.

  “Oh, see? Now Carlito is going to find rice, and he is sick,” Mang Selso sputters.

  Aling Anna glares at Mang Selso. “Why don’t you go? You are not sick.”

  “Huy, huy.” Mang Selso’s wife rolls her sleeves and points to Aling Anna. “He remains to protect us.”

  “He remains so that we can protect him,” Aling Anna snaps. “Coward.”

  Mang Selso stands at her words. His face is tight, and redness pours through his cheeks. “If you were a man, I would hit you,” he hisses.

  “Hunh!” Aling Anna’s lip curls. “And if you were a man, I would hit you back.”

  “Tigil na. Tamà na,” Mama says softly. Stop it. Enough now. The sadness in her voice has the effect of a loud explosion.

  “Duwág. Tamád.” Aling Anna sneaks in a couple of words as she fluffs her red blanket around her, calling Mang Selso a coward and a lazy man.

  “I can go in the morning,” Roman, the journalist, tells my father. “I should have gone today instead of the boys, but I wanted to see if I could hear more on the radio.”

  I like Roman. Yesterday he went out alone and found a small pheasant for us to cook and an old bag of rice. The rice had maggots and larva, and we began to pick them out, but Roman said that it was a good source of vitamins, so we cooked them in the rice and ate them. They were salty at first, but if you pretended they were pieces of steak tapa, it was not so bad. They helped to ease the hunger pains.

  “Oh, okay. We shall go.” Father is happy for the offer and claps Roman on the back. “See? I have someone to assist me. Rest now, everyone. There is no need to fight. We are all friends here.”

  Roman’s full name is Roman Flores; he is twenty-three years old and already taller than my father. I asked him how tall he is, and he said six feet. I have trouble making kilometers into feet. I picture six shoes, lined up one on top of the other, and this does not seem very tall. His job is to write stories for the Manila Herald. My mother wonders why he works because he comes from a rich family.

  Roman showed me how to work his radios. He calls one a short-wave. It speaks in codes and helps him to find places where things are happening. Of course, he has no job at the present, only his radios. The box is very big, with different knobs. He also has a smaller radio where sometimes we hear the Japanese speak and sometimes the Amerikanos. Most of the time we hear loud crunching that Roman calls static.

  “I will go, too,” Mang Pedro announces. He studies the ground when he says this.

  “Good, Ped. That will be good.” Father nods, pleased.

  Mang Pedro is a quiet man. He worked in the same factory with Father and Mang Selso. He wears small glasses, and he rarely speaks. Sometimes he claims to have visions that Papa calls premonitions. Like when he dreamed two days in a row that my sister, Isabelle, had disappeared. He even warned her not to leave the other day, but she did not listen, claiming that she was going to be a doctor and that doctors do not believe in superstitions. As always, Mama was angry at her. When she did not come home, Mang Pedro was upset. He told Papa to look for a white deer and he would find her, but even I must admit that sounded silly. Deers are not white!

  Papa said Mang Pedro once owned the factory himself, but he gave it up; now he spends all his time helping with the church, although he refuses to enter. He meets the priests on the church steps to give his donation money. Once, when Mama insisted he come in for mass, Mang Pedro joked that lightning would strike the church if he entered. Sometimes he can touch a personal belonging and gain an image. So when Roderick has done something bad, he stays away from Mang Ped’s touch.

  Mrs. Yoshi and her daughter watch from their corner. Mrs. Yoshi and her daughter are Japanese, but Filipino citizens. The daughter, Mica, is Isabelle’s best friend. Mica was born in the Philippines and can speak full Tagalog. It is the most common language of Luzon, our main island
, and our official national language among the eighty-seven different dialects. She knows it better than her native Japanese, which she can understand but not speak.

  Mr. Yoshi was taken away to an internment camp by the Amerikanos when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then, when the Japanese arrived and his camp was liberated, he was killed in the crossfire.

  “Ate, take this brooch.” Mrs. Yoshi holds out a pin to my mother, calling her “big sister.” It is a gift her husband gave her a long time ago. This is the second time she has offered. “I have no use for it. I cannot keep it while we are hungry.”

  “Mama,” Mica protests, and buries her face against Mrs. Yoshi’s shoulder.

  My mother shakes her head. “Yukino, put that away. That is all Mica has left of her father. We have other things we can sell before that.”

  Mang Selso makes a face. I can see he is getting ready to throw another tantrum. “That is what I am saying. Aling Anna, you must sell something. This blanket here. You are obligated to this family. They have given you shelter. You must give back something in return. We have all contributed. We are all starving.” He makes a grab for Aling Anna’s blanket, and she kicks his hand away.

  “Why don’t we send Yukino out? She is Japanese, they will not hurt her. Perhaps she can find us something to eat,” Mang Selso’s wife insists. “Yukino is the one who is obligated to us all. She must atone for her country’s wrongs.”

  From the start, Mang Selso’s wife has not liked the idea of sharing our house with Mrs. Yoshi because she is Japanese.

  “What a thing to say!” Ate Lorna frowns angrily at Mang Selso’s wife, forcing her to be silent. “Yukino has a right to be here.”

  “Yes, you should be ashamed.” My mother clucks her tongue at Mang Selso’s wife. “Sending a woman out alone. I should not have let my Isabelle leave. Now look.” Mama’s voice cracks. “Maybe they will torture her, as they have done to my Jando. Look at his hands.”

  I study my broken hands. I hold them out before me, wrapped in thick bandages. I try to bend my thumbs, but the pain shoots through me. Papa sees me and urges me to come close. He takes my hands and places them on my lap and holds them there. My nose begins to run. I think of old Mang Leo, whose toes rotted, forcing the doctors to cut them off.