Soldiers in Hiding (14 page)

“May I see your baby?” asked a wounded woman who came up beside her quickly. She had only a slight wound really, a missing finger, the first one on her right hand, and she said she would have escaped injury altogether had she not seen the shaking of the roof and tried to warn her companions and coworkers by pointing up at it and crying out. A can of soldier's rice, its sharp tin edge as yet unbent by the creasing pliers, had not been slowed at all by the small resistance that her finger gave.
She had found her severed finger in the dust of the machines, a few meters away. “Look,” she said, after she had peered, for a while, into Milo's sleeping face. And it was as if she wanted to keep them even, showing Kazuko a bit of herself for what Kazuko had given her to see.

 

WHAT SAVES A MAN FROM THE DISENGAGEMENT OF HIS spirit is not a woman but a child. A woman can do battle against the forces that wear him down but it is the child who might actually and completely rescue him.

When Kazuko and Milo entered the house it was still too early in the day for her to be home had she done a full day's work. I was in the garden sitting upon a low stone bench, bent and staring at my reflection as it lay upon the top of the water, above the spotted carp. Kazuko came directly to me saying, “Master, your son is here,” making me turn quickly out of my introspection. Kazuko looked pale and thin, yet she was so beseeching, and her gift was held out to me in such a delicate and gentle way that I jumped up, taking her into the house to rest and leaving my crimes and my guilt out in the garden.

I remember feeling a lightness of heart when I looked at my son for the first time, but more than that I felt a devastating hunger. So after I spread the
futon
and as Kazuko and Milo fell to quick and grateful sleep, I stepped into the kitchen and began to eat. I scraped rice from the sides of an old pot, using a wooden spoon. I lifted the tops off containers and quickly dropped pickled vegetables into my mouth. Kazuko's mother had bean curd ready and when I saw it I leaned down and bit the top of it, leaving a mark like one a rat might make, a scar across its surface and side. I ravished the bean sprouts, ripped whole strips of salt fish from the bones, and drank the
misoshiro
from its pot as if it were water. I ate rice cake that Kazuko had been saving for dessert and I found, under the floorboards toward the rear of the kitchen, a bottle of fine Chinese wine. I cracked the seal and put it back half-gone. And when I was spent I fell to sleep with my family, not
once thinking of the war, of Major Nakamura, or of Jimmy and his little legacy beside me.

When we woke we realized that we had only a few moments to prepare ourselves for the return of Kazuko's mother. We seemed to wake all of an instant, and Milo, though he did not cry out, was busy working his mouth in ways that made me think he might. We quickly pushed the
futon
out of the way and positioned ourselves as we might for a family photograph, sitting close together in the front room.

We could tell that Kazuko's mother was tired by the noise the door made sliding in its groove when she opened it. She stood for a long while taking off her shoes, while Milo and Kazuko and I waited secretly. Most of the red had gone from Milo's face by then and we'd hurriedly cleaned him up and dressed him for her. He had fallen back to sleep though, and the white knit cap that his grandmother had made curled off the top of his head like an old man's nose.

“Mother,” Kazuko called, not wanting to startle her when she saw us. “I 'm home, come look.”

Kazuko's mother stepped up into the anteroom but did not turn toward us. She wanted water on for tea and was miffed, I could tell, that tea was not ready, that Kazuko had not put water on when she'd arrived so early.

“Our factory was one of the ones bombed today,” Kazuko told her. “Near us many people were hurt or killed.”

Kazuko's mother stopped what she was doing and came into the room where Milo Maki slept upon the top of the table, all curled in his newborn way.

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “You are not injured?”

But Kazuko did not answer, nor did her mother ask again. Her eyes had reached the pinched persimmon of Milo's face. “
Ah ra
!” she cried, dancing sideways a bit and then coming over and running her hand softly over the flat front of Kazuko's kimono. “When? Where?”

Kazuko laughed for a time, pointing up at her mother as
she stood there above us. Milo sucked his seeded gums and opened his mouth once while Kazuko told her mother the story of the day, and soon Kazuko's mother picked him up lightly and began to sing to him even while Kazuko spoke. “
Sho-sho-shojo-ji. Shojo-ji no niwa wa. Tsun tsun tsukiyo de mina dete koi koi koi
.”

She danced with him through the small room, even over toward the tokonoma where the tatami was weak and the floor gave a little under her feet.

“He's had a long day, Mother,” Kazuko said. “Try not to wake him.”

Her mother danced with Milo into the other room, where she placed him on the floor and went about the business of laying out the
futon
in a proper manner, with crisp and clean sheets tucked under it. She had made new bedding for Milo. He had a tiny new pillow and a wonderful patterned top, and she knelt beside him when he retired, singing several songs that I had not heard since I was little and my mother sang them to me. She looked at Milo's small form sleeping there, at the way the blankets came up just to his chin, at his thick patch of black hair, all askew, like a poorly kept calligraphy brush. “Milo Maki,” she said, messing up the vowels a little, and I felt giddy, fresh, anxious to watch him grow, for him to recognize me as his father.

 

THE FIRST YEAR OF MILO'S LIFE WAS SERENE FOR US, but not for the city. Every day seemed to pass in photographic repose and I remember no events. At the end of Milo's first eighteen months, however, though Kazuko's mother went daily to her work at the uniform plant, Kazuko was still home with her baby. She had decided that she would stay with Milo long enough to see, at least, his robust flesh lose some of its baby tones, long enough to know, at least, that he knew her name and might call for her if, finally, she decided to work again.

The official word was that we were winning the war but the sounds from the sky made everyone suspicious. Airplanes with spider-faced pilots like the one Kazuko had seen had been finding
their way through our defenses often, and for awhile the radio and newspapers reported the locations of their strikes. Milo and I sometimes heard the awful buzz of the unknown planes in the hours of the morning when we were wide-eyed in our beds but not yet ready to rise. And not long after that Kazuko's mother began giving reports each evening that there were certain areas of the city that had been burned nearly entirely away. Kazuko kept listening and wondering what she would do if she heard, once again, the dull complaint that she'd heard over her factory, the patient whistle of a bomb descending. But as each month passed the neighborhood remained as it had been before the war. Except fewer housewives gossiped on the streets, fewer pushcart merchants called out the names of their wares as they passed slowly by.

To spend the days alone, yet still in the presence of another human being, always under the simple gaze of our baby, made us try to set an example for him. “Milo,” we would say, “it is wonderful to have you but there is a war on. You will be surprised later, when you find that life is not normally so poorly lived around us.” Kazuko would make up little songs containing messages pertinent to a good life, and as she sang and danced throughout the house Milo would seem to watch and listen. He was a fat baby, yet from the folds of his face I detected an intelligent interest in the songs his mother sang, as if he were listening to the words.

Then one Sunday, though we had been cautious about taking Milo out of the house too often, we decided to take him to the Buddhist temple nearby. There were still monks living in the temple and there had been articles in the newspaper asking, wouldn't it be better if these priests, scattered throughout the country as they were, donned uniforms and were placed among the troops to uplift their spirits and offer parables? They had been stupid articles and had made Kazuko's mother laugh to picture the priests all dressed like soldiers, Kazuko's small and delicate battle flags sewn to their sleeves. Milo, hearing the unfamiliar sound of laughter, smiled slightly and then farted as he tottled along.

It was a cool but clear day, and as soon as we passed under the temple gate we saw, ahead of us on the stone path, a young priest sweeping, sending dust into the air around him and peering at the rocks to pick weeds with his fingers.

“Young priest,” said Kazuko's mother, “what do you think of the article calling upon your kind to join the service? Do you think it justified?”

When he saw us the young monk picked up his cleaning basket and hurried off in the direction of the main temple house. He did not answer, and though the skirts of his robe danced up around his knees in the breeze he made, he did not slow down.

Kazuko's mother was holding Milo's hand and letting him walk slowly along the path beside her. We turned up the same path the monk had taken, and as we walked Kazuko reminded me of the story of our calico cat and how I had retrieved it from the arms of a gangster and how I'd suffered a real wound for my trouble. Kazuko's mother nodded as I walked beside her but she kept her eyes on Milo, her feet straight on the path. We walked up to the top of the small bridge that covered a carp pond and looked down into the open and waiting mouths of the beggar fish. “We will all be like that if the Americans win,” Kazuko said, then she picked Milo up and stretched way out over the railing with him, hoping that he would see the fish and recognize that there were other creatures on the earth.

“Stop that!” shouted her mother. “You might drop him! Stop now!”

She pulled hard on the sleeve of her daughter's kimono and when Kazuko bent back up, her mother quickly took Milo away from her, appalled by what she had done. “Really Kazuko, there are limits,” she said. “Talk if you must, but never lift a child toward an open pond! I know the war is hard on you but there are limits!”

Her mother was angry and walked quickly off the bridge ahead of us, taking Milo with her. And when we got to the main temple building Kazuko's mother was still punishing us by walking a meter or two ahead.

“Why don't you wait?” Kazuko called once, but her mother entered the big building and when we finally caught up she was feigning involvement with the Buddha image that sat before her, the light from its eyes so dull upon her face.

“The Americans are not going to bomb Kyoto,” she told us. “I heard it at the bath the other day. They are going to concentrate on Tokyo. They have respect for Japanese culture and have decided not to bomb our best cities.”

When I looked at Kazuko's mother I saw that she'd been crying, her tears falling down and wetting Milo's hair.

“I wasn't going to drop Milo in the pond, Mother,” Kazuko said. “I just wanted him to see the fish.”

“The ladies in the bath have been having an argument,” her mother said. “Do the American bombs blow things up or blow things down? Try to remember. Is it better to hide in the back of your house or to run out into the street and get under a tree? I told them of your experience and they'd all like an answer from you.”

Kazuko tried to take Milo's hand from her mother but she wouldn't let her. Milo looked toward Kazuko in the same way her mother did, as if he too expected an answer.

“I don't know,” Kazuko said. “There is nothing to worry about, you know. They are going to restrain themselves. The ladies in the bath won't have to worry about it.”

Her mother got mad again and said, “We are discussing, not worrying. It is a simple question. Do they blow up or down?”

Kazuko stood staring at her and at the dusty Buddha sitting there so patiently. “Down,” she said, finally. “If I remember correctly the bomb goes off on top of the object that it hits and the pressure from the explosion blows everything down. What difference does it make?”

“So if we were in the bath, if the ladies were in the bath, they wouldn't be very safe at all? They'd be hit by falling roof tiles and left dying and naked in the tubs. They'd be wounded and unable to cover themselves. Would they drown or would the impact from the bomb splash all the water out of the tubs?”

“The bath would not be a good place to be,” Kazuko said evenly.

Her mother nodded briefly when she decided that there was no hint of condescension in Kazuko's voice, then she and Milo turned their attention to the Buddha and the relics that sat in cages all around them. There were old Buddhist hats and long chains of beads with tiny Buddha images impressed within them. Kazuko's mother said her favorite temple article had always been a human hair rope, coiled like a thick and silky snake, in a huge glass case in the far corner. I enjoyed watching the way she pointed it out to Milo, and Kazuko said she remembered her mother showing the rope to her, in the same manner, years and years before.

“Once I knew where the hair for this rope came from,” said her mother, “but now I have forgotten. It was such a dramatic story that it seems impossible that I would forget it, but now I have. What do you make of that?”

When we had circled the inner walkway of the temple and were back in front of the bronze Buddha once again, Milo began to cry. Kazuko had full breasts and pulled her clothing around so that she could bring him to them, but her mother was still reluctant to give him up.

“Mother,” said Kazuko.

“You'll drop him in the carp pond.”

“He's hungry. I've milk for him. Everything's fine.”