The Souvenir (8 page)

For the next three months, his wife entreated him to write their infant daughter a letter. My father balked. How could he explain the soldier's superstition against writing a farewell letter before combat? How could he make clear how desperate he was to see a picture of his new daughter?

In late December 1944, the Tropic Lightning Division was finally ready to move toward combat. They were divided into three groups and boarded ships for a convoy to Luzon. En route they staged a practice landing at Tetere Beach, Guadalcanal. “There were strong cross currents and faulty beach markings,” the yearbook reports. Deficiencies in their landing preparations were corrected before the convoy reached its destination of Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines.

His Russian soul also sustained him through combat. In April 1945, after sleeping on the ground and in holes for over a hundred days during the Balete Pass campaign in Luzon, “living through sights that left an indelible impression” on his mind, he confessed why he believed he had survived:

It was surprising to read my pragmatic father's belief in a talismanic word and a guardian angel.

Soldiers have always carried talismans into battle: a lock of a daughter's hair, a rabbit's foot, photos of sweethearts, a family Bible. Pomo Indian tribesmen from California, who fought in the United States Army during World War II, carried special handkerchiefs on which a tribal shaman painted magical geometric patterns. Yoshio Shimizu, and millions of other young Japanese soldiers like him, carried silk flags tucked inside their helmets or worn across their chests. Around their waists they wore
senimbari
, “thousand stitch” belts, which carried the collective good will of their womenfolk.

But my father carried with him
nichevo
. The literal meaning in Russian is “nothing.” He carried with him an attitude. Nothing. Zero. Void.

I wrote to my friend Olga, an émigré Russian actress, to ask her what
nichevo
means idiomatically. Olga wrote back, “
Nichevo
means that your father did not care about what was around him. He found something valuable inside him that gave him power to live. Also,
nichevo
means ‘OK' attitude, meaning that ‘we'll have the end of this nonsense and the day will come and we live normal life.' ”

Perhaps the “nichevo attitude” is what the Buddhists call nonattachment. Shrug it off. Concentrate on the breath. It will be over. He would come home. He had
promised
he would come home.

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I heard an Auschwitz survivor describe the attitude that enabled her to persevere as “the resignation to go on.… Okay, God, if that's what you want me to do—I'll do it in order to live.” My grandmother used to shrug her shoulders, lift her palms heavenward, and ask rhetorically, “Listen, everything is unbelievable. But what can we do?”

There's a related concept, it turns out, in the Japanese vernacular, the expression
shikata ga nai
. In John Hersey's
Hiroshima
, the first eyewitness account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast, a survivor explains: “ ‘As for the bomb,' she would say, ‘It was war and we had to expect it.' And then she would add,
‘Shikata ga nai
,' a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word
‘nichevo':
‘It can't be helped.' ”

Shikata ga nai. Nichevo. Nothing to be done but go on. During the Battle of Balete Pass, in Luzon in the spring of 1945, my father came down from the mountains by jeep to Clark Field, near Manila, to pick up supplies for his battalion. Two days later when he returned to his foxhole, it wasn't there anymore. Blasted away by a shell. Was that the spirit of nichevo, the work of a guardian angel, or just damn good luck?

His sister, Ruth, the angel who watched over him, was just fifteen when she died from a heart-valve defect. She had progressively weakened since she was ten or eleven. My grandparents did not exhibit the nichevo attitude when it came to their daughter. They traipsed from specialist to specialist in vain, hoping to find a doctor who could repair the tiny hole in their firstborn's heart. When she died in 1927, my father and his parents never stopped mourning.

Ruth had been my father's best friend and his ally against all the strange experiences of a new land. She broke ground for him, cleared the way. Just as significant, he was her protector. He was quick on his feet and fetched things for her. He reported the neighborhood gossip when she was confined to her bed. Small for his age, he took his role seriously. Ruth was the constant in his life between what was unknown and what was known. Then she was taken away.

Ruth's death was the shadow over my grandparents' lives, my father's life, and, in some way, it was the shadow over our lives, in 1950s Los Angeles, as well. He rarely spoke of her.

In 1951, a year before Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine, my sister, Ruth, contracted polio. She was six. I was just three months old, but Larry remembers the exact day. He remembers when Dad broke the news to our grandmother. The word “polio.” A shriek of grief, then weeping. My father reached into the bureau for a container of pills, begged my grandmother, “Take this! Stop crying!”

Norman Steinman locked away deep inside himself those two great sorrows—the death of his sister and whatever had happened to him in combat. These were private sorrows, ones I was not expected to share. I never knew my father to cry.

I
N THE FALL
of 1945, with combat behind him, my father was able to explain to his wife why he had resisted writing a letter to his infant daughter:

He tried to talk the young man out of it. He tried to cheer him, told him how silly it was to feel that way. But Melvin Smith insisted. He died at Umingan on January 29, 1945.

But he didn't tear them all up. He did write one letter to his infant daughter before he went into combat. He wrote it on January 4, 1945, aboard the convoy ship that carried the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division to Luzon. He finally sent it home on January 29, the day Melvin Smith was killed at Umingan.

The convoy reached Lingayen Gulf at 0000 (midnight, military time) on the eleventh of January 1945. When my father wrote this letter to his daughter, he was just days innocent of combat. Ruth was still healthy and whole. Nichevo was still strong enough to sustain him. The enemy was, though just barely, “over there,” in a place where Norman Steinman had never been and to which, after the war, he would never return except in memories he either tried to abandon or kept strictly to himself.

D
URING THE MONTH
I spent at Fort Worden reading and rereading my father's letters, certain phrases jumped out at me. It was shocking to come across the soldier's blunt, monosyllabic descriptions of his foe: “Those Nips don't give up until they are dead. So we have to kill them all.” This language was so alien to the vocabulary of the liberal and tolerant postwar father I thought I knew.

I logged those comments and checked dates. Most of them appeared after January 1945, after the Twenty-fifth Division landed at Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines. From his references to “Hal Rubin's gift,” my mother deduced her husband was on the eve of combat, and in one of the few of her letters that was preserved she wrote consolingly, “Being ruthless is a new experience for one as sweet and peace-loving as you.”

How does one transform a “sweet and peace-loving” man into a soldier, someone who is expected and willing to kill? Most World War II GIs were civilians hustled from dry goods stores in the Bronx, farms in Tennessee, mines in Colorado, banks in St. Louis. What happened to them when they encountered gruesome combat against the Japanese in the swamps and jungles of the Pacific Islands? What enabled them to kill other human beings? And, just as important, what psychological scars did they bear after they returned home?