Within a month, General Tomkins had been recalled by the Pentagon to be replaced by a distinguished American marine who had been decorated in combat during the First World War.
In the weeks that followed the new appointment the death sentences of two hundred and twenty-nine Japanese prisoners of war were commuted.
Colonel Moore returned to Lincolnshire on November 11, 1948, having had enough of the realities of war and the hypocrisies of peace.
Just under two years later Richard Moore took holy orders and became a parish priest in the sleepy hamlet of Weddlebeach, in Suffolk. He enjoyed his calling and although he rarely mentioned his wartime experiences to his parishioners he often thought of his days in Japan.
“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall …” the vicar began his sermon from the pulpit one Palm Sunday morning in the early 1960s, but he failed to complete the sentence.
His parishioners looked up anxiously only to see that a broad smile had spread across the vicar’s face as he gazed down at someone seated in the third row.
The man he was staring at bowed his head in embarrassment and the vicar quickly continued with his sermon.
When the service was over Richard Moore waited by the west door to be sure his eyes had not deceived him. When they met face to face for the first time in fifteen years both men bowed and then shook hands.
The priest was delighted to learn over lunch that day back at the vicarage that Chopsticks Sakata had been released from prison after only five years, following the Allies’ agreement with the newly installed Japanese government to release all prisoners who had not committed capital crimes. When the Colonel enquired after “Sweet and Sour Pork” the Major admitted that he had lost touch with Sergeant Akida (Sweet) but that Corporal Sushi (Sour) and he were working for the same electronics company. “And whenever we meet,” he assured the priest, “we talk of the honourable man who saved our lives, ‘the British Bullfrog.’”
Over the years, the priest and his Japanese friend progressed in their chosen professions and regularly corresponded with each other. In 1971 Ari Sakata was put in charge of a large electronics factory in Osaka while eighteen months later Richard Moore became the Very Reverend Richard Moore, Dean of Lincoln Cathedral.
“I read in The Times that your cathedral is appealing for a new roof,” wrote Sakata from his homeland in 1975.
“Nothing unusual about that,” the Dean explained in his letter of reply. “There isn’t a cathedral in England that doesn’t suffer from dry rot or bomb damage. The former I fear is terminal; the latter at least has the chance of a cure.”
A few weeks later the Dean received a check for ten thousand pounds from a not-unknown Japanese electronics company.
When in 1979 the Very Reverend Richard Moore was appointed to the bishopric of Taunton, the new managing director of the largest electronics company in Japan flew over to attend his enthronement.
“I see you have another roof problem,” commented Ari Sakata as he gazed up at the scaffolding surrounding the pulpit. “How much will it cost this time?”
“At least twenty-five thousand pounds a year,” replied the bishop without thought. “Just to make sure the roof doesn’t fall in on the congregation during my sterner sermons.” He sighed as he passed the evidence of reconstruction all around him. “As soon as I’ve settled into my new job I intend to launch a proper appeal to ensure my successor doesn’t have to worry about the roof ever again.”
The managing director nodded his understanding. A week later a check for twenty-five thousand pounds arrived on the churchman’s desk.
The bishop tried hard to express his grateful thanks. He knew he must never allow Chopsticks to feel that by his generosity he might have done the wrong thing as this would only insult his friend and undoubtedly end their relationship. Rewrite after rewrite was drafted to ensure that the final version of the long handwritten letter would have passed muster with the Foreign Office mandarin in charge of the Japanese desk. Finally the letter was posted.
As the years passed Richard Moore became fearful of writing to his old friend more than once a year as each letter elicited an even larger check. And, when toward the end of 1986 he did write, he made no reference to the dean and chapter’s decision to designate 1988 as the cathedral’s appeal year. Nor did he mention his own failing health, lest the old Japanese gentleman should feel in some way responsible, as his doctor had warned him that he could never expect to recover fully from those experiences at Tonchan.
The bishop set about forming his appeal committee in January 1987. The Prince of Wales became the patron and the lord lieutenant of the county its chairman. In his opening address to the members of the appeal committee the bishop instructed them that it was their duty to raise not less than three million pounds during 1988. Some apprehensive looks appeared on the faces around the table.
On August 11, 1987, the bishop of Taunton was umpiring a village cricket match when he suddenly collapsed from a heart attack. “See that the appeal brochures are printed in time for the next meeting,” were his final words to the captain of the local team.
Bishop Moore’s memorial service was held in Taunton Cathedral and conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury. Not a seat could be found in the cathedral that day, and so many crowded into every pew that the west door was left open. Those who arrived late had to listen to the archbishop’s address relayed over loudspeakers placed around the market square.
Casual onlookers must have been puzzled by the presence of several elderly Japanese gentlemen dotted around the congregation.
When the service came to an end the archbishop held a private meeting in the vestry of the cathedral with the chairman of the largest electronics company in the world.
“You must be Mr. Sakata,” said the archbishop, warmly shaking the hand of a man who stepped forward from the small cluster of Japanese who were in attendance. “Thank you for taking the trouble to write and let me know that you would be coming. I am delighted to meet you at last. The bishop always spoke of you with great affection and as a close friend—‘Chopsticks,’ if I remember.”
Mr. Sakata bowed low.
“And I also know that he always considered himself in your personal debt for such generosity over so many years.”
“No, no, not me,” replied the former major. “I, like my dear friend the late bishop, am representative of higher authority.”
The archbishop looked puzzled.
“You see, sir,” continued Mr. Sakata, “I am only the chairman of the company. May I have the honor of introducing my president?”
Mr. Sakata took a pace backward to allow an even smaller figure, whom the archbishop had originally assumed to be part of Mr. Sakata’s entourage, to step forward.
The president bowed low and, still without speaking, passed an envelope to the archbishop.
“May I be allowed to open it?” the church leader asked, unaware of the Japanese custom of waiting until the giver has departed.
The little man bowed again.
The archbishop slit open the envelope and removed a check for three million pounds.
“The late bishop must have been a very close friend,” was all he could think of saying.
“No, sir,” the president replied. “I did not have that privilege.”
“Then he must have done something incredible to be deserving of such a munificent gesture.”
“He performed an act of honor over forty years ago and now I try inadequately to repay it.”
“Then he would surely have remembered you,” said the archbishop.
“Is possible he would remember me but if so only as the sour half of Sweet and Sour Pork.”
There is one cathedral in England that has never found it necessary to launch a national appeal.
DO NOT PASS GO
MAY 1986
Hamid Zebari smiled at the thought of his wife, Shereen, driving him to the airport. Neither of them would have believed it possible five years before, when the
y had first arrived in America as. political refugees. But since he had begun a new life in the States, Hamid was beginning to think anything might be possible.
“When will you be coming home, Papa?” asked Nadim, who was strapped safely in the back seat next to his sister, May. She was too young to understand why Papa was going away.
“Just two weeks, I promise. No more,” their father replied. “And when I get back, we’ll all go on vacation.”
“How long is two weeks?” his son demanded.
“Fourteen days,” Hamid told him with a laugh.
“And fourteen nights,” said his wife as she pulled up to the curb below the sign for Turkish Airways. She touched a button on the dashboard and the trunk opened. Hamid jumped out of the car, grabbed his luggage from the trunk, and put it on the sidewalk before climbing into the back of the car. He hugged his daughter first, and then his son. May was crying—not because he was going away, but because she always cried when the car came to a sudden halt. He allowed her to stroke his bushy mustache, which usually stopped the flow of tears.
“Fourteen days,” repeated his son. Hamid hugged his wife and felt the small swelling of a third child between them.
“We’ll be here waiting to pick you up,” Shereen called out as her husband tipped the skycap on the curb.
Once his six empty suitcases had been checked in, Hamid disappeared into. the terminal and made his way to the Turkish Airlines desk. Since he took the same flight twice a year, he didn’t need to ask the girl at the ticket counter for directions.
After he had checked in and been* presented with his boarding pass, Hamid still had an hour to wait before they would call his flight. He began the slow trek to Gate B27. It was always the same—the Turkish Airlines plane would be parked halfway back to Manhattan. As he passed the Pan Am check-in desk on B5, he observed that they would be taking off an hour earlier than him, a privilege for those who were willing to pay an extra sixty-three dollars.
When he reached the check-in area, a Turkish Airlines stewardess was slipping the sign for Flight 014, New York-London-Istanbul, onto a board. Estimated time of departure, 10:10.
The seats were beginning to fill up with the usual cosmopolitan group of passengers: Turks going home to visit their families, those Americans taking a vacation who cared about saving sixty-three dollars, and businessmen whose bottom line was closely watched by tight-fisted accountants.
Hamid strolled over to the restaurant bar and ordered coffee and two eggs sunny-side up, with a side order of hash browns. It was the little things that reminded him daily of his newfound freedom, and of just how much he owed to the United States.
“Would those passengers traveling to Istanbul with young children please board the plane now?” said the stewardess over the loudspeaker.
Hamid swallowed the last mouthful of his hash browns—he hadn’t yet become accustomed to the American habit of covering almost everything in ketchup—and took a final swig of the weak, tasteless coffee. He couldn’t wait to be reunited with the thick Turkish coffee served in small bone china cups. But that was a tiny sacrifice when weighed against the privilege of living in a free land. He paid his bill and left a dollar on the little metal tray.
“Would those passengers seated in rows thirty-five to forty-one please board the aircraft now?”
Hamid picked up his briefcase and headed for the passageway that led to Flight 014. An official from Turkish Airlines checked his boarding pass and ushered him through.
He had been allocated an aisle seat near the back of economy. Ten more trips, he told himself, and he would fly Pan Am business class. By then he would be able to afford it.
Whenever the wheels of his plane left the ground, Hamid would look out of the little window and watch his adopted country as it disappeared out of sight, the same thoughts always going through his mind.
It had been nearly five years since Saddam Hussein had dismissed him from the Iraqi cabinet, after he had held the post of minister of agriculture for only two years. The wheat crops had been poor that autumn, and after the People’s Army had taken its share, and the middlemen their cut, the Iraqi people ended up with short rations. Someone had to take the blame, and the obvious scapegoat was the minister of agriculture. Hamid’s father, a carpet dealer, had always wanted him to join the family business, and had even warned him before he died not to accept agriculture—the last three holders of that office, having first been fired, later disappeared—and everyone in Iraq knew what “disappeared” meant. But Hamid did accept the job. The first year’s crop had been abundant, and after all, he convinced himself, agriculture was only a stepping stone to greater things. In any case, had not Saddam described him in front of the whole Revolutionary Command Council as “my good and close friend”? At thirty-two you still believe you are immortal.
Hamid’s father was proved right, and Hamid’s only real friend—friends melted away like snow in the morning sun when this particular president fired you—helped him to escape.
The only precaution Hamid had taken during his days as a cabinet minister was to withdraw from his bank account each week a little more cash than he actually needed. He would then change the extra money into American dollars with a street trader, using a different dealer each time, and never exchanging enough to arouse suspicion. In Iraq everyone is a spy.
The day he was fired, he checked how much was hidden under his mattress. It amounted to $11,221.
The following Thursday, the day on which the weekend begins in Baghdad, he and his pregnant wife took the bus to. Erbil. He left his Mercedes conspicuously parked in the front drive of his large home in the suburbs, and they carried no luggage with them—just two passports, the roll of dollars secreted in his wife’s baggy clothing, and some Iraqi dinars to get them as far as the border.
No one would be looking for them on a bus to Erbil.
Once they arrived in Erbil, Hamid and his wife took a taxi to Sulaimania, using most of the remaining dinars to pay the driver. They spent the night in a small hotel far from the city center. Neither slept as they waited for the morning sun to come shining through the curtainless window.
The next day, another bus took them high into the hills of Kurdistan, arriving in Zakho in the early evening.
The final part of the journey was the slowest of all. They were taken up through the hills on mules, at a cost of two hundred dollars—the young Kurdish smuggler showed no interest in Iraqi dinars. He delivered the former cabinet minister and his wife safely over the border in the early hours of the morning, leaving them to make their way on foot to the nearest village on Turkish soil. They reached Kirmizi Renga that evening and spent another sleepless night at the local station, waiting for the first train for Istanbul.
Hamid and Shereen slept all the way through the long train journey to the Turkish capital, and woke up the following morning as refugees. The first visit Hamid made in the city was to the Iz Bank, where he deposited $10,800. The next was to the American Embassy, where he produced his diplomatic passport and requested political asylum. His father had once told him that a recently fired cabinet minister from Iraq was always a good catch for the Americans.
The embassy arranged accommodation for Hamid and his wife in a first-class hotel, and immediately informed Washington of their little coup. They promised Hamid that they would get back to him as quickly as possible, but gave him no clue as to how long that might take. He decided to use the time to visit the carpet bazaars on the south side of the city, so often frequented by his father.
Many of the dealers remembered Hamid’s father—an honest man who liked to bargain and drink gallons of coffee, and who had often talked about his son going into politics. They were pleased to make his acquaintance, especially when they learned what he planned to do once he had settled in the States.
The Zebaris were granted American visas within the week and flown to Washington at the government’s expense, which included a charge for excess baggage of twenty-three Turkish carpets.
After five days of intensive questioning by the CIA, Hamid was thanked for his cooperation and the useful information he had supplied. He was then released to begin his new life in the United States. He, his pregnant wife, and the twenty-three carpets boarded a train for New York.
It took Hamid six weeks to find the right shop, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, from which to sell his carpets. Once he had signed the five-year lease, Shereen immediately set about painting their new Americanized name above the door.
Hamid didn’t sell his first carpet for nearly three months, by which time his meager savings had all but disappeared. But by the end of the first year, sixteen of the twenty-three carpets had been sold, and he realized he would soon have to travel back to Istanbul to buy more stock.
Four years had passed since then, and the Zebaris had recently moved to a larger establishment on the West Side, with a small apartment above the shop. Hamid kept telling his wife that this was only the beginning, that anything was possible in the United States. He now considered himself a fully-fledged American citizen, and not just because of the treasured blue passport that confirmed his status. He accepted that he could never return to his birthplace while Saddam remained its ruler. His home and possessions had long ago been confiscated by the Iraqi state, and the death sentence had been passed on him in his absence. He doubted if he would ever see Baghdad again.
After the stopover in London, the plane landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport a few minutes ahead of schedule. Hamid booked into his usual small hotel, and planned how best to allocate his time over the next two weeks. He was happy to be back among the hustle and bustle of the Turkish capital.
There were thirty-one dealers he wanted to visit, because this time he hoped to return to New York with at least sixty carpets. That would require fourteen days of drinking thick Turkish coffee, and many hours of bargaining, as a dealer’s opening price would be three times as much as Hamid was willing to pay—or what the dealer really expected to receive. But there was no short cut in the bartering process, which—like his father—Hamid secretly enjoyed.
The Collected Short Stories Page 28