Fireflies (18 page)

20

SILENT NIGHT

(HAL LYNCH)

The festive season was upon us. In celebration, SCAP hoisted two Christmas trees outside headquarters with a ten-foot banner across the façade: “Merry Christmas!”

After I got my marching orders, part of me considered leaving Japan. I'd go back to New York, I thought, get on the GI Bill and return to Columbia. Join one of the big agencies or magazines or dailies and make a living snapping mobsters and sports stars. Or I'd move to some honest-to-God small town, a Knoxville or a Jacksonville, take a job at the local paper and cover the high school football games, the petty brawls and larcenies that came to the county court each week. I'd arrive at the office bright and cheery in my gleaming new Cadillac every morning, settle down with a Southern girl and raise a litter of my own . . .

Then I thought of Christmas dinner with my mother and my aunts in the depths of a New England winter — the empty plate laid for my father, his sullen portrait glaring down from the wall. The snow falling silently outside, as if it were passing over the very edge of the earth.

So I decided to stay in Tokyo, to get drunk, and to see what the new year would bring. The men that still haunted the Continental were subdued now, almost meditative, resigned to another Christmas away from home. Most of the boys who'd seen action were already back home, their feet up in front of their well-deserved hearths in Lexington and Harrisburg and Worcester and all the other countless villes and burghs that make up the vertebrae of our nation. Those left behind walked the halls in their socks, wrote letters, played rummy and whist, busying themselves with innumerable small tasks to while away the time.

On Christmas Eve, SCAP organized a party. There was to be a dinner, a movie show, and then a performance by “native musicians.” I pictured the overheated hall, the red-faced officers in their paper party hats attacking their tinned turkey and eggnog. Douglas MacArthur standing up to make some flowery speech as the officers slumped over their trifles. It was all too god-awful to contemplate, and so, early in the evening, I wrapped up warm and headed out into the streets, alone.

~ ~ ~

It was bitterly cold, and everyone had their hats pulled down over their foreheads, mufflers pulled up to their eyeballs. I hitched a ride to Shinjuku on an infantry truck, but the driver got lost and took an unaccountable detour and we passed through the abandoned districts, the shantytowns of the old city. The water that flooded the bomb craters had turned to ice, and old pieces of metal and timber were frozen within, sticking out like the limbs of witches. Between the craters, clumps of people huddled around miniature braziers, burning paper, kindling, pieces of old furniture — anything that could hold a flame. Their hands cast flickering shadows over orange faces as they stared into the fires. They didn't look up as we passed.

The Infantry finally let me off outside the brightly lit, newly covered market by Shinjuku Station, where groups of fresh, excited young GIs were swapping their cigarette ration for beer and whisky. I did the same and took a couple of nips right there to warm myself up. Then I wandered the streets with no particular goal in mind. Tacked to a newly cut telegraph pole was a handbill advertising a concert. Handel's
Messiah
. This intrigued me, so I asked a man for directions to the theatre. As I strode up the street, a couple of kids ran past me, frosted white from head to toe, as if they'd been rolled in sugar. I wondered whether this might be some strange Japanese seasonal custom, but then the rumble of a truck came from around the corner with GIs hanging from both sides, pumping out a great, whirling mass of white powder like a blizzard of fine snow­ — DDT. Folks were hurrying along after the truck to get disinfected as the powder drifted down and settled in restless shoals on the frozen ground.

I finally found the old theatre. Elderly couples in Western dress were walking inside as I paid my entrance fee to a beaming young woman. The roof of the amphitheatre was mostly gone, the building open to the sky. From a slat seat above the stalls I looked up to see a silver needlework of stars. Down below, the orchestra and choir sat on metal chairs, their breath emerging in glistening clouds. A couple of GIs were scattered solitary in the aisles, huddled up, clutching their arms for warmth. Everyone was shivering, so I had the bright idea of passing the whisky around. I tapped the shoulder of the man beneath me, who glanced at his wife, and then took the bottle with a murmur of surprise and gratitude. After he took a sip, I gestured for him to pass it on. It went steadily around members of the audience, who directed glances of appreciation in my direction, before it finally returned to me with barely a sip remaining.

Down below, the conductor tapped his stand and counted two silent notes in the air with his baton. Then the voices began to fill the frozen night and there was an exhalation from the audience. We all sank back into our seats, watching and listening as the exquisite voices of the choir billowed up into the sky in clouds of tiny diamonds.

I pictured the notes floating up, rising high above the ruined city, above the men and women who lay shivering in their shacks and hovels far below, huddled together around their flickering fires, silently staring into the flames and wondering what the future would bring. The voices flowed out across the night, and I thought about the folks back home in America, the Christmas trees lit up and the children scampering about in the snow as their mothers stood in the doorways, calling them in for dinner. I saw men and women all across the world, reunited after all these long years of war, mothers hugging sons, girls embracing sweethearts, fathers with tears in their eyes as they welcomed their children home, home from the war, back home to where they belonged, at last, for war was over —
and they were alive
.

I saw stricken refugees trudging across the plains of Europe, frozen and weary as they settled down by their campfires, snowflakes whirling around them, holding each other's hands as they haltingly began to sing. I saw solemn glasses being raised to lost fathers and brothers and sons — to the ones who had not returned — and I heard prayers of requiem and the sob of quiet mourning float up into the sky, mingling with the precious, holy notes of the chorus. I heard the great, melancholy music float out across the world, over the shattered cities and the bombed-out ruins, the fields of carnage and the tangled remains of the living and the dead, the terrible music that floated through the darkness that shrouded our silent, injured world that Christmas night, as far below, its men and women all sat huddled together in front of their fires, staring into the flames, and wondering what the future would bring.

~ ~ ~

When the concert ended, I applauded the orchestra for a long time, my hands numb within my gloves. I climbed down the steps to congratulate the conductor, then presented another bottle of whisky to the members of the orchestra, who smiled and bobbed their heads in thanks. I bowed back, and we all laughed and took sips, trembling with cold. The rest of the audience quietly departed.

There were few people on the streets as I headed for the station, and those who were out looked grim and unhappy. I offered the bottle to people at random, but most veered away, and I realized that I was drunk. Only one fellow took it — he unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, then grinned and gave me a thumbs up:
Merii Kurisamasu!

I finally reached the station. The chemical truck had just passed and dashes of white powder were drifting about in the air. Time for bed, I thought.

Then, from nowhere, a group of elegant old ladies in colourful kimonos were tugging at my sleeve, their eyes twinkling, their faces as wrinkled as walnuts. They must have been freezing near to death, but their hair was styled to perfection, their kimono belts exquisitely tied, and they were bowing and smiling for all they were worth.

“Please, please,” they asked me in English, “can we
sing
with you?”

I couldn't quite understand. Then one of them explained — they were Christians, she said, and this was the first Christmas they had been allowed to celebrate for several years. This made me pretty emotional and so I said yes, of course they could, in fact, we would all sing together, and we took each other's arms. And then, this bold young man, and these delightful, wrinkled women whose country I'd helped raze to the ground, well, we all stood there together outside of a ruined train station as flakes of DDT floated down from the sky like snow, and then, God help me, we began to sing “Silent Night.”

PART THREE

Après Guerre

January 1946

21

YEAR OF THE DOG

(OSAMU MARUKI)

Mrs. Shimamura sang along to the radio as she washed the glasses. The inane and mournful chorus of “The Apple Song” was playing for the tenth time that day. She picked up the glasses one by one from the basin, twisting them this way and that so that drops of water flicked away from the rims, then swaddled them in the dishcloth and rubbed them vigorously, as if drying a child in a towel.

Her dimples had returned, I thought, as I watched her from my seat at the bar. I had my head in the pages of a story by the master, Jiro Tanizaki, my old idol, from his erotic, grotesque period. Once again, I revelled in his description of a lurid children's game, a leg bruising blue beneath sharp slaps. Ever since the end of the war, I had felt a jolt of excitement whenever I read the story, an odd pleasure in the thought of a sudden, stinging palm striking my own numb flesh.

A cold draft gusted in from the doorway. I gulped back my drink and shuddered, feeling a kind of sordid torpidity settle upon me. I studied the cover of the book. Tanizaki would still be writing, I thought, he would still be slogging away. Wasn't it at times of just such extremity and extenuation that art truly flourished? Tokyo eviscerated, a foreign army parading the streets — what would Tolstoy have made of it? Maupassant?

And yet here I sat, my lice-ridden overcoat draped over my shoulders, scribbling fantasies for the lost and the lonely. Hunched over my foul rotgut, tormented by constipation, a cough racking my lungs, my toes dissolving into the mouldy morass of my boots. Keening around a decent woman like Mrs. Shimamura like a camp dog, whining for scraps and sympathy. A wave of disgust washed over me, and my hand instinctively reached to my pocket for the tablets I kept there for such moments of despondency. I popped one into my mouth, and bit down on it.

I felt a sharp crack and a shooting pain screwed all the way up the front of my face. I urgently probed my mouth with my tongue. There was a gap next to my front incisor, the rotten gum spongy like dank vegetation. I tasted rotten, metallic blood and spat the split remains of my tooth and the dissolving Philopon pill into my cupped hand: a swirl of blood and saliva, the amphetamine fizzing into tiny bubbles, the decayed tooth a black pearl.

Whatever next? I thought. Would my eyeballs dim with rheum, the last of my hair fall out? The dull ache in my liver seemed to pulse and flare. I felt utterly destroyed.

“It's all gone,” I muttered. “Everything's gone.”

Mrs. Shimamura came over to me and put her tender, matronly arms around my neck. To my disgust, I began to sob into her bosom.

“There, there,” she said. “Stop being such a baby.”

She turned to the bar, and poured me a glass from her private supply. Then she folded her arms and became stern.

“Now, sensei. Don't go getting yourself so upset about everything. You don't have it so bad. You're no worse off than a million others. So pull yourself together.”

She turned back to her sink of dishes and started crooning again. I shrugged meekly, and went off for a lie-down upstairs.

~ ~ ~

There were many things that I pined for in those days following the war. Things that I fleetingly craved with an urgency I had never known before in my life. Persimmons were one of these, as for some reason, later on, were tangerines. I had always been partial to persimmons, of course, but tangerines I had never had any particular feelings about one way or another, until, on my return to Japan, quite suddenly, their dimpled, waxy skin, their tart sweetness, and, more than anything, their bright orange colour began to exert a powerful hold on my imagination. I could spot them from a hundred yards off, amongst the covered stalls and booths of the black market. Beyond the cups and spoons cast from melted fuselages, the muddled heaps of cast-off army garments: the tangerine vendor, his vivid fruit wrapped in newspaper at the back of a handcart. Cruelly, their price shot up almost as soon as they became more widely available; they all came via the American Postal Exchange, descending to us from the gods, as it were. And so they were to remain, perpetually hoisted just beyond my reach.

What I longed for most of all, however, was a really decent pair of shoes. Since my repatriation from the green hell of the camp on New Guinea, I had worn my hobnailed army boots day and night, as did most of the other returnees from the battlefield. After countless miles of trudging, swelling and shrinking, the cowhide had welded to my feet, so much so that it was now an effort to remove them. But they repulsed me. They were a badge of shame, a decrepit symbol of servitude to a suicidal ideal. They were uncomfortable as well: the metal heel rims had worn away, the seams had long since split, and icy water leaked in around my toes whenever I stepped in one of the freezing puddles that lurked across the city. I cursed them every time my heel scraped through the worn sole, every time the sodden laces squeezed the fragile bones of my foot. I had heard that certain black market shops sold looted officer's boots — high, elegant cavalry affairs cut from soft leather or European kid. But the thought of their buttery smoothness made me nauseous: they reeked of everything I despised. Perhaps, I thought, I could revert to wearing split-toe
tabi
and wooden clogs, as some of the other writers had done. But for all their homely charm, they seemed fundamentally feudal to me, and, after all, they were hard and uncomfortable, and so very cold in winter.

No. What I truly aspired to was a good, sturdy pair of Western shoes. Enviously, I had observed an American civilian on the tram a few weeks previously wearing precisely the style I desired. A smart pair of burnished Oxford brogues, reddish brown, aglow with heathery tints. A thick lock of coffee-coloured hair fell over the man's angular brow; he bore a striking resemblance to the Hollywood actor Gary Cooper. A neat, moulded camera case was slung over his shoulder as he sat, elbow on knee, chin perched on hand, newspaper raised by a spray of fingers. One leg casually dangled over the other, a neat Argyll sock clasping the ankle beneath. Below that was the beautiful shoe, rocking faintly back and forth to the rhythm of the tram.

I stared, racked by a sudden, violent desire. When he alighted near Yurakucho Station, I pressed my face to the window. I pictured myself casually clipping along the street, as he did now, pausing to glance in the window of the occasional bookshop.
Well
, I thought.
There at least goes a serious man
.

Perhaps, as a man with real shoes, I might feel like a human being once more, after years of being nothing but a soldier and subject. Perhaps the stopped clock of my life might start ticking once again — as a man of purpose, striding boldly into the future. Rather than just another faceless non-entity in a city of pinched, weary men, our service caps pulled over our eyes, our shoulders sparring with the wind as we trudged the disconsolate streets.

I hoarded every penny like a miser, denying myself tobacco, even shochu. I avoided the temptations of Kanda, and busied myself instead with my third edition of
ERO
. To my delight and good fortune, it met with considerable success. Struck by the popularity of the feature in our last issue, “The Dish I Most Lament,” I decided this time to expand it to encompass the entire panoply of frustrated desires hidden in our citizens' souls that winter. Once more I circumnavigated the Yamanote Line, stopping passersby and asking them to describe their heart's most secret desire. They were hesitant at first, unsure of how to respond. Then, the words began to spill out like a flowing river of dreams, as tears welled up in their eyes:

“My wife.”

“My son.”

“A good, long Noh play.”

“Pickled plums.”

“The knowledge that all of us Japanese were on the same side.”

“A real coat.”

“A working watch.”

For me, though, it was always the shoes. I had taken to leaving my boots in the street at night now, plugged with newspaper to contain their rotten smell of fermenting soybeans. The cowhide was crinkled and frosty by morning, and I had to rotate the boots over the brazier to thaw them out. But even outside, they haunted my sleep. I would dream they were calling to me, that they might somehow slip back into the building, hop up the stairs and lace themselves back onto my feet while I slept.

I was in Shinjuku one afternoon when I saw a man wearing a sandwich board. When I read it, I thought that heaven must be smiling upon me at last. A shoe shop was opening that very day, not half a mile distant. I rushed over to the place, and urgently scanned the window display.

There, in pride of place, was my heart's desire. A stout pair of russet Oxford brogues, stitched on each side with bronze thread. Barely worn, looking to be more or less my size. I darted in, demanding to try them on. The shopkeeper eyed me suspiciously while I wrestled them onto my feet. A perfect fit, snug and tight. I asked the man to tell me how much they cost.

The price was absurd. But I barely gave it a thought, and told him I would return directly. I hurried home to fetch all of my hoarded savings. Walking back to the shop, I became suddenly nervous, wracked by the thought that someone else might have purchased them in my absence. But when I arrived, they were still there. I thrust the money into the man's hands and tore my old army boots from my feet. I took the Oxfords in my hands and inhaled the cedary fragrance of the dappled leather, turning them to admire their subtle, coppery tints. Then I slipped them onto my feet, and firmly laced them up.

“Should I wrap these old boots in newspaper, sir?” asked the shopkeeper.

I glanced at them with loathing.

“Please dispose of them as you see fit, sir,” I said. “I have no wish to see them again.”

I turned on my heel and left the shop, feeling as if I were walking on air.

I made my way along the street, pausing every now and again to glance down. The leather pinched a little; I told myself it would take a while for my feet to become used to real shoes again. On the tram, I even crossed one leg over the other as I had seen the Westerner do, but quickly realized that it was an uncomfortable, constricting position. Several of the passengers, I was sure, took sidelong glances at me. I casually extended my legs, rotating my feet from side to side in order to impress upon them the dazzle and flash of the shoes' superb leather.

So absorbed was I that I entirely missed my stop. I was now some way from home. My feet were quite painful now; though of course, this was only to be expected at first; this was simply how it was with proper shoes. An alley led off from the main avenue, and I was surprised to see the lantern of a public bathhouse halfway along it. This was an unexpected treat. Most of the
sentos
had been badly damaged during the bombings and those that remained had little fuel available to heat the pipes. For a people who so valued cleanliness, this was a considerable discomfort. I hadn't had a chance to bathe for several months, myself. The thought of taking off my shoes and immersing myself in a hot pool of water filled me with exquisite pleasure.

It was a rundown tenement area and two children were tormenting a cat outside the building. As I approached, they looked up. The cat went mewling away and the children slunk off, glancing, I noticed with helpless pleasure, at my bronze beauties as I ducked underneath the curtain.

The place must have been old fashioned even before the war. Against the wall of the entrance hall was a row of wooden compartments with slotted hatches in which to store one's valuables. A scrawny woman dozed away in a booth, her neck a mass of chicken skin. I unlaced my Oxfords, with some relief now, admittedly, and placed them in a compartment. I rapped a ten-sen piece on the counter and the woman yawned and waved me over to the male changing room.

The place was deserted but for the trickling sound of water. A faint mould was growing over an engraved relief of furiously bayonetting soldiers along the wall. As I peeled off my clothes, I was appalled by the odour of my body. I piled my coat, shirt, and underclothes into a basket. Covering my nether regions with a hand towel, I slid open the door to the bathroom.

The air was dank and there was a chemical smell. But steam rose appealingly from the main pool and I shivered in anticipation at the thought of climbing in. I took a wooden bucket, filled it from the tap, and then, on my low stool, began to soap and rinse myself with the deliciously hot water. The hue of the bubbles that ran off down the drain was disturbingly grey. My body was speckled with a patchwork of sores and bites from legions of ticks and fleas and the rampages of bedbugs. I was horrified. I made a solemn vow to myself that I would track down one of the American trucks that were criss-crossing the city blasting out insecticide, and subject myself to a frosting.

Eventually, I seemed more or less clean enough, and I slipped into the big, steaming pool. I moaned with pleasure — it was utterly divine. I placed my hand towel on my head, and submerged my body in the hot water. After a minute, I opened my eyes.

What a startling sight. Somehow, I hadn't noticed how pale and shrunken my body had truly become. My skin was as white as tofu and my ribcage seemed to have sunk entirely into my chest. What a transformation had occurred since I had been called to the front. What an old man the war had made of me.

I sighed and sank back into the water. I mustn't feel sorry for myself, I thought, picturing Mrs. Shimamura's face with affection. After all, didn't it seem now as if things might finally be on the up? The magazine went from strength to strength; it kept at least some flesh adhered to my bones. Perhaps I could fatten myself up a little. Cut back on my daily doses of shochu and Philopon, regain some of my prior sturdiness . . .

My thoughts drifted to Satsuko Takara, and I felt an acute sense of lonely shame. The last time I had gone to the Ginza in the hope of glimpsing her outside her cabaret, she had not appeared, though I waited, shivering, until dawn. Perhaps she was dead now, I thought. Perhaps those visions of her on the street had been heaven-sent driftwood, a lifebuoy to which I should have tightly clung. Pride again — always pride. I thought of the night when I had taken her to the anarchic revue at the Moulin Rouge, when she had laughed along as heartily as the students, even though she was just a shop girl by trade.