The Patriot (34 page)

And yet there was nothing but the same silence about him. He could not be sure that there was any other change. The two girls on the other side of the partition were as courteous and quick to answer his call, and if he bought something the clerks in the shops were as submissive and eager as ever. No, but there was a change. People did not speak to him as easily as they used to speak in greeting or in the small talk of everyday. He felt stifled and smothered in silence, as though he were surrounded by darkness. Or was this his imagination, too, and was it simply that people were grave with their fears, and talked less gaily to each other?

He could not tell. And yet in this silence all his life faded into unreality. The tangible things which he had made for himself, his home and his marriage, his children and his place in the world, escaped him. The only reality now became this long constant argument in himself with Japan. For when he argued he seemed to see opposing him not Tama or Bunji or any Japanese, but a vague unknown Japan. He could not connect with that Japan this pretty city in which he lived, or these green hills and the islanded sea whose beauty he endlessly enjoyed.

And in his house Tama was more careful than ever for his comfort. Without planning it so, they now went out no more. One day he said, “Shall we take the children to the park?”

She shook her head. “They are quite happy at home,” she replied. “Why should we trouble to take them?”

She smiled at him. But after she had left the room it occurred to him, “Does she suffer among her own people because she is married to me?”

He could not ask her. If she did so surfer, if he knew it, then the very rock under his life would be shaken.

Outside his window he heard Jiro’s high sweet voice demanding, “Why does Miya cry, Mother? When you don’t see her, she is always crying and crying.”

He heard Tama’s quiet voice. “Her brother has been killed, Jiro.”

“Who killed him, Mother?” Jiro’s voice was lively with fresh interest.

“Chinese soldiers, in China,” Tama replied.

“Then they are bad!” Jiro’s voice came full of indignation.

And hearing it, I-wan was angry with Tama. Why could she not have said simply, “The man is dead!”? He leaned from his window and saw her watering plants in the garden and beside her was Jiro with his own small watering pot.

“Tama!” he said severely. “How can the child understand!”

At his voice she looked up, and he felt her look, long and sorrowful, fixed upon him. Instantly she became real for him. He wanted to explain to her—But now Jiro was watching a yellow and brown butterfly hovering over the wet flowers. The child had forgotten.

He sat down again to his book. But he must explain to Tama tonight—only, explain what? Three hundred innocent people dead—that she knew and would not forget. To anything he said she would, in silence, hold that answer. He sat, not reading, his book in his hand. In Shanghai, he remembered, there used to be a great many Japanese. No one paid any heed to them—there were all sorts of people in Shanghai, people of every nation. And yet somehow it seemed to him that he remembered the Japanese now more clearly than any others because they were so wholly themselves. They remained as they had come, Japanese. And wherever they lived, the houses they made and the gardens they made became bits of Japan, as though they so loved their own country that wherever they were they must still be there…. And yet, he knew his own people. They did not kill for play. The Japanese had done something—something new, to make them so angry. This he must tell Tama. He sat, thinking how to tell her.

And then she called to him to come into the garden, and he went out. The children were in bed and Miya had gone home. They were quite alone and together they walked up and down the sanded path which Mr. Muraki had put at the edge of the garden toward the sea. They looked out over the night-dark sea. This now was the time when he must speak. He must speak, but first he must break down her silence—by something, by anything.

“Were the children good today?” he asked her.

“Very good,” she replied tranquilly.

“I hope you understand why I spoke as I did about Jiro,” he went on.

“Oh yes,” she said quickly, and added, “but children don’t remember.”

Was there more in these words than she meant him to know? He tried to see her face, but all its outlines were lost in the dusk. He saw only a whiteness under her black hair. He must go on, then.

“You know, Tama, I feel so strongly—we must wait until we have the whole truth. I have written to my father, and I, myself, feel I will not decide until his letter comes.”

“Decide?” Her white face turned to him quickly.

“I mean, judge,” he said.

She turned her face toward the sea again without answering.

“You know this, Tama,” he insisted. And when still she did not answer he grew angry.

“Tama!” he cried.

Then at last she spoke.

“What has it to do with us?” she said.

No, but she was evading him. Inside herself she was thinking, feeling, he was sure of it—perhaps against him. He must reach her.

“I must feel you think there may have been cause,” he maintained.

And now she replied instantly, as though this answer had long been ready.

“What does it matter what I think when I am your wife?”

No, but this was what any Japanese wife might say. It was retreat—retreat from him, what else?

“Don’t be a—a Japanese woman!” he shouted.

Her voice came through the darkness.

“But I
am
a Japanese woman!”

Her voice was gentle with all its usual sweetness, and yet he felt her there at his side as unyielding and as inexorable, as impenetrable as the very night itself.

“The truth is you have already made up your mind,” he said roughly. He must beat against her somehow—somehow break her to pieces! “You believe, without any reason, that my people could simply massacre like savages—you don’t know us. If you think that, you have no understanding of me. We have suffered for years while you Japanese have been stealing our land, our trade—” He was being unjust enough himself, making her stand for Japan. But, having begun to talk aloud at last, he could not stop. “No, I know what happened. Our soldiers, when they saw Peking captured—and under an enemy flag—they could not bear it after everything else. We’ve held ourselves back all these years—”

She flew at him. She was shaking his arm.

“And who,” she demanded, “killed Japanese in Nanking on March the twenty-seventh, in nineteen hundred and twenty-seven, and who killed Japanese in Shanghai in nineteen hundred and thirty-two?”

“You have held it all these years—against me!” he cried.

But she shook her head.

“No—but against your people!”

“But I am they—to you!” He was angry enough to kill her, he thought—and then he remembered that a moment ago he had made her stand for Japan. Her voice reached toward him sadly.

“Am I to you—one of those—who ought to be killed?”

There was nothing of the Japanese about her now. They were two people speaking across the infinite difference of race. And then suddenly he felt her rush into his arms. Her arms were about his neck and she was sobbing on his shoulder. She was broken, at last. But he felt no triumph. She had broken without yielding.

“Hush—you will waken the children,” he whispered. In the stillness of the garden her weeping was loud, and Jiro woke easily. And how could they explain to him this weeping, he thought sadly. In himself he felt weak and tired, now that anger had flown. He smoothed her head.

“You are right,” he said. “The truth—whatever it is—has nothing to do with us.”

He clung to her and felt her cling to him, closer and more close, in fierce determined love.

… And yet, though each desired above all this union, in the midst of their passion in the night before they slept, his desire died. He wanted her—and then could not take her. She waited a moment. Then she whispered, “What is it?”

He could not answer because he did not know. He lay, himself surprised, and said nothing at all, his arms still about her. He was helpless and ashamed—but speechless. And after a little while, without pressing him, she withdrew herself and straightened her garments and arranged herself for sleep.

Did she sleep? He could not tell, since she was able to lie so still, sleeping or awake. He lay, touching her shoulder and thigh and foot. They were so close. Were they not close here in their own house? She moved toward him a little and he felt her hands take his hand and hold it to her bosom. And with her touch he knew. Her flesh, her sweet and intimate flesh, was changed to him. No, it was he who had changed. Tenderness poured into him, but there was no final desire. And in the very way she held his hand, so tenderly, too tenderly, he knew that she too had felt the same death strike across her heart. She too now wanted no more children. Out of the past something long dead had reached out, the will of their ancestors, and had pulled them apart.

“Ganjiro has a cold,” Tama said to him next day. “I had better stay by him tonight.”

She was moving her sleeping things out of his room into the room where Ganjiro now slept with his older brother. Tonight, she said—but he knew she meant every night. There could be no more passion between them.

But he only said, “Is he feverish?”

“A little,” Tama replied.

He took her wooden pillow into the other room and her mirror and the tiny chest of drawers which held the combs and pins for her hairdressing. He would never be angry again with her, he knew. All day long she had been so pitifully kind, so tender that his heart ached. For he knew that such tenderness was a chasm between them. There was no way to bridge it, to find each other’s real being. Whatever happened now, their tenderness would not fail. They were caught and held in it as in an amber.

He grew, as days went on, increasingly lonely. Sometimes he imagined that even Jiro and the little one drew away from him as though they disliked him. Then he told himself this could not be. It was simply that he was too solemn. But indeed his life he found more difficult every day. There had been not one letter from his father or from I-ko. Impossible to believe that I-ko at least had not written! He did not want to read the newspapers because he did not believe them. And yet if he did not read them he heard nothing.

One morning when he went to work he had been sent for to Bunji’s office and there at Bunji’s desk sat a young man whom instantly he knew he hated.

“I am Mr. Hideyoshi,” the young man announced briskly. “I am promoted from submanager in the Yokohama office to this post.” He grinned. “Unfortunately my eyes are bad, or I should be fighting for my country in China…. Sit down.”

He motioned to a chair and I-wan bowed slightly and sat down. Last time Bunji went away it was he who had been manager. But Shio had sent this man to work here—perhaps to watch him.

“Have you seen the paper this morning?” Mr. Hideyoshi burst into loud laughter.

“No, I have not,” I-wan said quietly. He was already full of hatred against this man.

“Read it, then!” The man flung the paper toward him. “It is really too funny.”

I-wan looked at the front page. There was a great deal about—why, about Shanghai! He had not looked at the papers for several days. No, but what were the Japanese doing now in Shanghai? He read hastily down the column. What was this? Laughter, laughter because of a mistake—

“The Chinese Help Japan!” he read. “Chinese Aviator Bombs Shanghai!” Laughter—laughter—down the page he followed hideous laughter! A young Chinese aviator had mistaken his aim upon a Japanese target and had dropped his bombs into a crowded street. “Hundreds of People Killed—”

No, but this was some Japanese trick! He read racing on—no, it was true—incredible, shameful, true. Here were the details, too true to be disbelieved. He knew the street. He had been upon it more times than he could count, and it was always full of people surging about the shops, buying, or simply staring at the show…. Here was the picture of it now, badly printed on the cheap Japanese paper, but still to be recognized, though the walls were fallen into twisted steel and crushed concrete, and bodies hung where they were caught.

He looked up to see Hideyoshi’s laughing face.

“Hah, you are reading about it! Terrible—but still very funny!” He laughed again. “To drop bombs on their own people—it’s funny, is it not?”

I-wan choked.

“It’s not true,” he muttered. “Some mistake—”

“No mistake,” Hideyoshi said briskly. “Every paper has the same story. Everybody is laughing. It is as good as a Japanese victory. Now the English and Americans will see how foolish the Chinese are. The Chinese are so kind—they help their enemies and kill their own people!”

“Then you admit the Japanese are killing the Chinese?” I-wan demanded.

“We can no longer endure their insults,” Mr. Hideyoshi replied, pursing his lips. “You must know that we have been very patient. Boycotts, prejudices, attacks from mobs, assassinations unpunished—we have endured all these for years at the hands of the Chinese. Now our Emperor is determined to put an end to Chinese animosity. We shall fight until all anti-Japanese feeling is stamped out and the Chinese are ready to co-operate with us.”

I-wan stared at him, not believing what he heard.

“You mean,” he repeated, “you will kill us and bomb our cities—and—and—rape our women—until we learn to love you?”

Now it was he who burst into loud laughter. He could not control his laughter.

“I am to love you, you say! Mr. Hideyoshi, I must love you, because you—you—”

Mr. Hideyoshi looked bewildered. “Not you as an individual,” he broke in. “Besides, we look upon you as a Japanese. You have been here so long and you are married to a Japanese lady—”

I-wan’s laughter stopped as though it had been chopped off.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Hideyoshi asked, seeing his face.

“Nothing,” I-wan answered. “I see—all in a moment—there’s nothing to laugh at.” He bowed quickly and went back to his own office and sat down. He felt choked again and his head began to throb with the old pain. He pulled out a drawer and drew forth some folders and pretended to begin work. But he could do nothing.