Fireflies (3 page)

6

STARS & STRIPES

(HAL LYNCH)

I hitched a ride from Yokohama to Tokyo in a jeep with two lieutenants from the 5th Cavalry. Eyes front, they chewed gum rhythmically as they drove. They'd been first into Tokyo, they said, and things were already improving.

Through the rangefinder of my camera, the city seemed utterly obliterated. Fields of rubble sprouted with tall weeds; ruined factories held from collapse by mangled girders; abandoned trucks on bricks, lichened with orange rust. All the way to Tokyo, along the dirt road, men and women in rags heaved handcarts piled with refuse, swallowing our dust.

The road grew wider as we entered the centre of the city and we veered around deep potholes as edifices rose on each side. Grand once, now licked black, their windows were boarded up, great chunks of masonry torn from their structures. Crowds swarmed the avenue: Japanese women in baggy pants with bundles on their back; men in battered fedoras and grubby summer shirts. Tall GIs strolled along like stately giants; others laughed as Japanese men in split-toe shoes tugged them along in rickshaws. At an intersection of curving streetcar lines, an old man haltered an ox, his cart laden with steaming churns, surrounded by fat flies.

I hopped down beneath the cobweb of overhead electrics and unfolded my map. This, then, was the Ginza — once the grandest avenue in the Orient, its Fifth Avenue, its Champs-Élysées. I drew in a great breath of Tokyo air: smoke and fish guts and sewerage. I wiped the filthy perspiration from my brow.

The
Stars and Stripes
office was housed in a grand old embassy building. Wide concrete steps led up to the doorway, and inside, acres of wooden panelling covered the walls of a high-ceilinged newsroom. Desks were laid out in neat rows, each with a telephone and a gleaming Smith-Corona or Remington. Young men in uniform were typing away and glanced up at me as I entered. They grinned, as if welcoming me to some private member's club.

At the back of the room I spotted a familiar face: Eugene, my old college roommate, the myopic show-off who'd encouraged me to apply to the newspaper in the first place. Skinny as a rake, his curly hair now officially out of control, Eugene leaned back on his chair, an affected green visor shielding his eyes as he spiked stories from a big pile. He whooped when he saw me, leaped up, and proceeded to perform some kind of Indian war dance before bounding over and seizing my arm.

“This — is — it, Hal!” he hollered, hopping back and forth. “The place where we will make our names!”

Oh, boy. He still wore the same round wire spectacles I remembered from Columbia, six years ago, when this “making our names” business had been his obsession. He'd drawn up strategies for us — writing for the
Spectator
, acting in amateur theatricals. Finally, under the spell of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose portrait he'd plastered above the desk in our dorm room, he had decided that we would become photographers. For weeks we'd roamed the docks at Red Hook and the tenements of the Lower East Side with our Box Brownies in dogged pursuit of the “decisive moment.” Eugene had even gone as far as setting up a darkroom in a storage cupboard beneath the faculty buildings, before he'd become distracted by a book on how to draw for the funny papers. He'd ditched his camera soon after that. I'd kept hold of mine.

“Hello, Gene. Looks like you're all settled in.”

“Sure I am,” he said, leading me to a door affixed with a scrawled card. “John Van Buren,” it read. “Editor-in-Chief.”

“Okay, let's take you to meet Dutch. He's going to give you your press pass. That's your golden ticket, see. Your get-out-of-jail-free card. It's signed by MacArthur himself. It means you can go anywhere you want and talk to anyone you want.”

He knocked briefly on the door and we bustled into an office, disturbing the balding NCO who was rubbing his head as he frowned over a typed article. His desk was cluttered with sheets of copy and framed photographs of plump, corn-fed children.

“Hal. This is Dutch Van Buren, Editor-in-Chief of
Pacific Stars and Stripes
. Dutch, this is Harold Lynch. Hal's the best photographer in the Third Army. And he can write too — you just wait until you read what he can write . . . ”

“Okay, enough,” Van Buren said, holding up his hands. “I've got things to deal with. Lynch, you're very welcome. Sit down. Eugene, why don't you give me a break and get out of here?”

“He's thrilled to be here, Dutch!” sang Eugene in falsetto, skipping out the door. “The crucible of change!”

Van Buren rolled his eyes as he shook my hand. “Oh, my aching back. You know that guy? You've got my sympathies. Well, I guess you're here now anyway. You know much about
Stars and Stripes
?”

“I read the sheet on Guam. We all did.”

“Sure you did. Well, as you know, the
Stars and Stripes
has been in circulation all the way back to the Civil War. We're here to inform — just as any of the big papers are.” His voice took on the tone of a prepared speech. “But in contrast to them, Lynch, we have a very specific audience — the average GI. Doesn't mean we don't go after the big stories. He's interested in the big stories. He understands the political angles. But he also wants to be entertained. He likes to see how the big stories affect the little man.”

“Human interest, you might say?”

“Exactly,” Dutch said, pointing at me. “You've got it right there.”

“Fine. That suits me fine.”

“But in addition to that,” he said, picking up his pen, and waving it at me, “we've got to produce stories that the Japs'll understand. So that they'll see what we're doing here. What we're trying to build. We've got a duty to do that too.”

I had a mental image of the devastation I'd seen on the long ride in from Yokohama that morning. Dutch noticed my expression and gave a sheepish smile.

“Well, heck, of course, we had to take a wrecking ball to the place first. Only stands to reason. But the next trick is to build something up. A peace-loving, democratic country.”

“‘The Switzerland of Asia'?” I suggested, quoting MacArthur.

“That's right,” he said, pointing at me again. He stood up, gesticulating in the manner of a Roman senator. “Elected representatives. Votes for women. A free press. Yes, it's a fine experiment we've got going here, Lynch.”

He turned to a filing cabinet against the wall. I glanced down at the typed article on his desk. A bureaucratic report, I saw, something about land reform. Big swathes of blue pencil had been drawn through it, initials and letters circled in the margin. Further down, blocks of text had been struck through with black ink.

“The crucible of change, Lynch,” Dutch was saying, as he rummaged about in a file. “It's our privilege to have front-row seats.” He turned, smiling, and handed me a small square of paper: “Don't lose it.”

My press pass. The scrawled signature of the supreme commander himself graced the back. I was impressed.

Dutch held out his hand. “Welcome to
Stars and Stripes
, Lynch. I think you're going to fit right in with this bunch of nuts. A man like you could really make a name for himself here.”

“Thanks, Dutch,” I said, shaking his hand. “I'll see what I can do.”

~ ~ ~

I'd been billeted to the old Continental Hotel, not far from the red brick ruins of Tokyo Station. When I arrived I was astonished and delighted to find that I'd been given a small room of my own. For the first time in years, I wouldn't be bunking down with a dozen other men, surrounded by unceasing locker-room jaw about pin-ups and football and the Brass. The carpet was worn down almost to the board, and an ancient black ribbon of flypaper hung from the ceiling. I unpacked my kit and set up my handful of books on the chipped table by the window.

The view outside was uninspiring. A gravel road bisected by a streetcar line; a row of ruined buildings on the other side. I poured myself a drink, and as the alcohol began to glow in my stomach, I sat on my cot and picked away the epaulettes from my jackets, along with the insignia of 3rd Recon Squadron. I patiently sewed my woven
Stars and Stripes
badge in its place.

A clang came from the road and I glanced out. A streetcar was crawling valiantly along the track, so dilapidated that I felt like applauding in sympathy. The windows were cracked, the sides all dented. Expressionless passengers squeezed up against each other on the deck, spilling precariously over the guardrails.

~ ~ ~

It didn't take me long to find a “human interest” piece. The following week, while out exploring the neighbourhood down by the banks of the river, I discovered an old man living under a jerry-rigged tarpaulin strung between two poles. He was naked but for shorts and an old raincoat, and he held a bamboo fishing rod, the float bobbing out in the river. I took Eugene and a Japanese-American translator named Roy down there one afternoon. We tapped on the tarpaulin, and after a moment the man emerged from his shelter. He stared at us, his old face lined like a boxer's, his beard as coarse as a brush.

He squinted as Roy explained that we'd like him to tell us his tale. After stroking his beard and looking up the river for a while, he gestured at his scatter of belongings on the ground. We sat down cross-legged as he filled a bent jerry can with river water and put it on a little hibachi grill to boil for tea.

I'd expected him to be half crazy, but, in fact, he was the model of eloquence. He'd been a bargeman once, he said, waving at the water, but over the years he'd managed to save enough money to buy a boat of his own. After that, he and his two sons made a living ferrying coal and timber from the factories and yards out to the big ships in Tokyo Bay.

I remembered the picture postcards I'd seen of old Tokyo: the waterways bristling with skiffs and wherries, ferrymen carrying drunken revellers up and down the lantern-lit canals as fireworks burst in the summer sky. The river was almost silent now, with long strands of weed floating around the mooring posts.

After the fire raids had begun, the man said, he and his sons had taken to sleeping on the boat, thinking they'd be safer out on the water. One night, as he had been sleeping on deck, his sons in the cabin, the sirens had sounded and the planes had started to float in.

I had a sudden premonition of what he was about to describe. I saw the flash of spinning propellers as our F-13 lurched into the sky. Eugene was scribbling away in his notebook, smiling encouragingly.

Mis-tah B
— this was what the man called the B-29s, waggling his flat palm toward the horizon in demonstration — drifted in very low that night. In wave after wave they came, clouds of bombs tumbling from their bellies. From the river, it soon seemed that the whole city was ablaze, red and orange flames dancing across the sky. From somewhere, what he called a “firework” landed on the boat. To his amazement, it squirted fire all over the deck, fire that stuck to the water and blazed away in the blackness. He shook his head at the memory.
Napalm
, I thought, picturing the dewy blue flame I'd once seen spurting from a cylinder that had gone crazy after falling loose from a bomb bay.

The deck of his boat, piled high with coal, quickly caught on fire. The old man leaped into the water, shouting for his sons to come out of the cabin. But just then another white incendiary whistled down and squirted fire all over him, and he swam desperately to the bank, struggling to escape the flames.

Like an accusing ghost, he opened his coat to show us his torso — a marbled mass of pink welts and sinewy grey tissue.

From the bank, the man had stared out at the blazing hulk of his boat, its glowing heart of coal, pleading for his sons to emerge.

He closed his eyes. He shook his head. The barge had swiftly disintegrated into a mass of ash and cinder. By the next day it had dissolved away entirely.

The smoke from the brazier fluttered in the wind, the water in the can still tepid. A sheen of perspiration covered my forehead. A vein pulsed in my temple. The old man looked upstream, as if he expected to see his boat come floating down the river at any moment.

I took off the lens cap of my camera and asked him if I could take some photographs. With a noble bow, he agreed.

While I was taking the pictures, Eugene asked how he was now surviving. The man pointed at the river and made a hurling gesture as if casting a line, then an eating motion with his hands.

“He catches fish?” Eugene said. “Well, how about that.”

I could see the story typing itself out in his head — “The Lonely Fisherman,” perhaps — accompanied by a photograph of the old man proudly holding up his day's catch.

But the old man was running his fingers through the air with a repetitive gesture and Roy was frowning. He shook his head: “No, he means rats.”

“Rats?” Eugene said. “Don't tell me he eats rats.”

The old man ducked his head into his chest, clearly embarrassed.

Roy explained that rats — big bloated ones — often came floating down the river. The old man fished them out and barbecued them on his hibachi.

So there it was. Our first story. We thanked the man and presented him with a packet of cigarettes, which he tucked into his raincoat pocket before touching pressed palms to his forehead.

“Is there anything else he needs?” I asked.

The old man cocked his blunt head for a second. He knelt down, hands on his knees. Would it be possible to bring him a package of soy sauce? I promised that it most certainly would. The old man touched his forehead to the ground.

We clambered up the slippery bank to the main road. When I looked back, the old man had already disappeared back into his shelter.

~ ~ ~

That afternoon I processed the prints in the darkroom in the basement while Eugene typed the story in the newsroom upstairs. I knew the picture I wanted as soon as it emerged in the developing tray. The old man, cross-legged like a ragged Buddha, looking out at the lonely river, his carved face and wild fisherman's beard silhouetted against a sky piled with grey cloud. A certain “enigmatical quality,” as Eugene later put it.