Soldiers in Hiding (12 page)

Kazuko was widowed and I had been sent away from the war so early, don't you see? It was no violation of friendship, no infidelity. Kazuko and her mother worked in war factories and were gone from the house each day, leaving me alone among Kazuko's things, among the accessories of her normal life. I used to stand at the altar, when they were away, holding some article of hers and staring into the two young faces in the photographs, the ones that I was so quickly outdistancing. I existed and they did not. I had grieved too much to feel any more guilt or to wonder if what I was about to do was wrong.

I had taken to holding the calico cat tightly, each day, so the night I finally went to Kazuko, it should come as no surprise that I carried my cat as protection against her sending me away. Kazuko's head was on a hard sand pillow, her arms straight at her
sides under the thin blanket. The tatami that I walked upon gave quietly under my feet but the floor was not depressed by me, did not sink deeply in that part of the house, making each foot the center of pools as the tired tatami in the front room did. I had cleaned the cat for the occasion, had washed it on the cool back step and spent an hour with it on my lap, drying it under the warm shade of the small fig tree. Though the cat's three-colored fur made it oddly visible in the dark room, it looked at first incomplete, as if I held in my hands the roundish pieces of a difficult puzzle.

Kazuko was awake when I knelt beside her, but she did not turn her head toward me, so I began squeezing the cat a little, to make it purr louder, the surrogate voice of my passion. Kazuko was covered by the thinnest of sheets and when finally I lifted it away, I was forced to release the cat and the cat immediately went in where I would have gone, next to her oddly shaped body. The cat's head was up across her belly, its feet and stub tail right where I wished to sit, and even after I lifted the cat away, it stood, still purring, at her head. I could hear the cat clearly and I could hear Kazuko's mother sleeping in the far corner of the room. Her mother's feet were visible to me but her head passed through the door and into an antechamber, a warmer, smaller room, which she entered so oddly in order to gain a sense of privacy.

Discretion keeps me from mentioning too closely the particulars of our encounter, but I undid the loose knot of her
obi
and I remember noticing how wonderful the feeling of her flesh was against my own. Kazuko's breasts touched my hands timidly, but after that her abdomen rose like a fine round hill in some peaceful land. Momentarily I decided that what I was doing was wrong and I would have moved to leave if she had not said, “None of the women in my family have been large or difficult while bearing children. We have always been discreet of body,” and so I stayed, and while Jimmy lay in the dust of my memory his living child moved a little under my hand.

“Come,” said Kazuko. “I cannot be hurt by you. Nothing is wrong.”

I think a normal man, one not injured as I had been, might have stayed his hand, but I did not. I moved across the vastness without hesitation, taking no time. I was not concerned that the noise we made might wake her mother or that my blind proboscis might bump the child, hurting some part of it. Rather I came to her as I might have had we truly been alone. The calico cat had quieted but still stood, sentrylike, at our heads. It watched us through its empty eyes, not purring now, not holding any thought, and from its blank reflection I took my rhythm. We were quiet, a little, and we were not untender with each other. Kazuko's eyes were open like the cat's and as I held myself above her I was able to look, for a while, at both pairs of eyes watching me. Kazuko was watching the contours of my face with such passive beauty that I knew that she was accepting everything she saw there. She would not judge me, would not question my survival. As I held myself above her I did not notice the awful August heat, but just at the end, when moistness was everywhere and her mother was turning in her sleep, what I did notice, what I did feel, was the conception of my own child. Minuscule though it was, I felt the bump of it, the linkage, the awakening.

I realize the risk I am taking by telling all of this. A pregnant woman, though she may have many fears, should be free, at least, from the fear of impregnation. Nevertheless, there are things a man can know without any proof at all. And as my seed set sail on its miraculous voyage I saw, in the cat's cold eye, that I was bathing the growing baby with the ingredients of myself and that he would be a mutation, a hybrid; Jimmy's boy but Teddy Maki's too.

There, it is said. And my sanity is still intact. We were all half-people in the room that night. Kazuko and I had suffered losses, great parts of us dead with the deaths of those we had loved. Kazuko's mother, though her legs and torso were with us, kept her mind locked privately away in a room of its own. And Jimmy was half there, together with me in shared fatherhood. I
had bombarded his baby with a million versions of myself and I could imagine, there in the dead quiet room, all of Milo's little half-brothers and-sisters missing their mark, falling and falling through the muddy universe and finally dying out, unnoticed, like thousands of insignificant little stars.

 

KAZUKO'S MOOD WITH ME WAS FINE, CHEERFUL AND natural, from the morning after the night I have just described. For my part, I pretended normalcy, I spent my days, while they were away at their factories, summoning up a kind of controlled cheerfulness which I dished out with supper and which seemed to fool them. My days, my times alone, were still full of the wolves of the past but I kept them at bay. The punctual return of my loved one, each evening, created an impasse. My darker mood was waiting, biding its time.

I had formed the habit of leaving the house shortly before Kazuko's return, each day, of timing my walks so that I met her at certain corners. And one night, though I had never mentioned him to her or told her that he had led me to her house, she suggested that we visit her old tea teacher.

“The war has turned him strange,” she said, “but though he is funny he is still great. You might begin patching the holes in your education. A Japanese boy should not be so ignorant as you.” Kazuko enjoyed teasing me, for she knew it made me feel at home.

The
sensei
's house formed a triangle with Kazuko's home and with our meeting place, and when we got there I could see perspiration at the edges of Kazuko's lips, on her temples and across her brow.

“
Sensei
,
Sensei
,” Kazuko called, softly and on tiptoes, looking over his fence and into his garden.

I could see a dark figure through the glass, could see it move across the room behind the door.

“
Sensei
, it is I,” Kazuko said, “come to pay my respects. Let me in. I too will be a teacher someday!”

In a moment the teacher's muffled voice came through the
glass to us. “Go away!” it said. “I am busy! If anyone wants to study tea they can come back after the war. I am closed!”

Kazuko stood quietly for a moment but did not call out again. And before long she motioned me back away from the door. We could see his dark figure moving back deeper into the house but we walked completely around the corner before speaking.

“I would have shown him the progress of my baby,” Kazuko said. “I would have introduced you to him as its father.”

 

THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE, THIS LITTLE STORY OF THE teacher, is evidence that Kazuko and I did our best to act the parts we played, to treat Tokyo as if she were a willing host. But though she tried to get me out each day, though her energy and cheerfulness knew no bounds, I found that more and more I wanted to stay within the confines of the house. There were no other young men for me to be with, unless I chose the dangerous spectrum of those under the bridge, and I had begun to encounter, occasionally, the stares of strangers. Why, I read in their looks, are you here? I ap-peared able-bodied, strong and young. Why then, they seemed to ask, was I not at war?

Kazuko and her mother were up easily each day, off to work while I was still dreaming, and soon I began, once again, retracing the accidents and events that had altered my life. With each passing week I grew more catatonic and thus the cheerfulness I pretended, when Kazuko and her mother were home, must have seemed all the more difficult to muster, all the more transparent to them. I grinned fiercely and laughed, but I was unable to modulate my voice when speaking. I never knew whether tears might stream when laughter was intended. I could not eat, so pounds dropped from me and my mobility, when I was alone, became greatly impaired. My mind had no traction, no grip. Days, weeks, were pushed together like bodies in a modern Tokyo train. I was sick and I might have died had it not been for an event which pulled me back up among the living for a little while longer.

Kazuko had been working in a factory that manufactured flags, and on the day of the event I will describe she and the other workers were told that the vaults were full and that they had nothing to do but wait while the specifications of the machines were changed. Clouds hung low over the city that day. The workers stood on the small street in front of the factory like prewar workers out for tea. They were engaging each other in a guessing game, wondering what next they would make, when a small air raid, so far as I know unknown to historians, began above them. Because of the low cloud cover the plane came into view only a few minutes before it unzipped its belly and laid its stillbirth into the gray sky. Kazuko said that when they first saw it they all thought it was one of ours. The pilot cut his engines and came in quietly, letting the high complaint that his motor made start again only when he was visible from the ground. And when they all looked up, their hands shielding their eyes from the glare, he was so close that they could actually see his face, his black goggles looking down at them.

One woman near Kazuko began to scream, but the rest of them just watched. The pilot seemed to move away when he saw them. He dropped his bombs on some buildings a kilometer away and then tipped his wings and turned. Kazuko thought at first that he'd seen they were civilians and had gone far enough off course to let them live, but that was not the case. He floated through the air awhile then made a wide arc and came back out of the clouds, releasing one last bomb when he was directly over their heads. While they watched, the awful wound in the belly of the airplane healed itself. This bomb did not fall so magically as the others had. It wobbled. Its nose seemed already to have pinned them to the ground for they could only look, none of them running, none crying out. The black-rimmed eyes of the pilot, the goggles round and reflecting, made it seem as though they were being attacked by an insect, not by a man. Kazuko had even seen the hand that shoved the bomb. She saw adept fingers pushing at the unwilling object and she thought she could see the
extra white area around knuckles hard at work. She described the fingers that pushed the bomb as albino spider's legs, all evil and hairless. The bomb took forever to reach them, letting them know, in its quiet competence, that the airplane was higher than it seemed. They would all have died had it hit them directly where they were, but instead it was the roof of the factory and then the poor women who were busy altering the fittings on their machines, who perished. The rest of them simply stood still. Even when the thing hit, even when its awful explosion cracked their concentration and hurled them to the ground, they were catatonic. Debris floated through the air in slow motion, like flotsam. Pieces of wood and brick tore into the path around Kazuko, pinning her to the spinning earth. And Milo, deep within his own world, gave a kick that made her add her voice to the sound that seemed to be tearing the sky apart. And all the while those puffy cumulus clouds moved about them in their slow conceit. Kazuko watched the small airplane disappear into them, its wings wobbling once, like a wave.

The bodies of the fitting changers were brought into the afternoon light and laid on the street for everyone to see. They didn't know any of them and someone counted heads twice to make sure that all the regular workers were unharmed, that no one had sneaked back into the factory to see what work the fitters actually did, to try to learn the inner workings of her machine.

From the area where the main damage was done they could hear sirens, could see black smoke rising. They were told immediately that the enemy plane had been shot down over open water, that the pilot and bombardier were now dead for what they had done, their bodies floating downward like lazy bombs themselves, toward the bottom of the sea.

Soon a brigade of firefighters arrived, hurrying to soak the caved-in factory walls, to water down the sides of surrounding buildings. Doctors moved among them asking if anyone was hurt, and the bodies of the fitting changers, all heavy and uncooperative, were picked up by the women from the ambulance corps
and taken away. Kazuko had seen one of the fitting changers going into the shop and had spoken mildly to her, saying, “It is nice that you can take our places for a while,” but she had not been able to recognize the woman among the dead. Milo was still acting oddly inside her but she kept her discomfort to herself, though she couldn't seem to stand again. The bombing, she said, had awakened Milo and he was angry, kicking out at a world that would rock him so harshly as this. While the other women began moving about the charred flag factory, Kazuko remained where she was, her eyes fixed on the light garment that she wore, on the movement that her skin made, now and again, as Milo's foot tried breaking through her frail body and into the light.

“Someone is still down over here,” one of the doctors said, standing above her but shouting back to some others.

Kazuko looked up into the eyes of an old man and saw that he had been crying. Was this his first bombing as well? Tokyo was prepared for what would come, but so far the rescue crews had had little to do.