The Black Isle (38 page)

“A sudden interest in the sciences, my Momoko?” He smiled his warden’s smile, one that was supposed to quash me with its effortless contempt.

“Those ‘scientists’ cut off a boy’s entire arm today, right in front of Li.”

“Perhaps I should have you stop seeing him. These visits clearly upset you.”

“That’s
not
what I meant!” I cried, then forced myself to rein in my outrage. “I’m just curious. I want to know what it is that they do, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it?” He finished off the Armagnac and began his long march to refill his glass. “You do realize that I’ve been giving in to you time and again. You ask me to pardon your parasite of a brother, find him a desk job, and I do. You ask to see that little worm, and I let you. And now, what is it, you want me to hand over military secrets in order to satisfy your
curiosity
? And if I did that, would you perhaps want to tell me how to deploy my men, how to secure my borders, how to shake hands with my own bloody generals? Momoko, does your pride know no bounds?”

I waited for him to construct his drink. This time he left the ice tray out on the dining table to melt—not intentionally but, I guessed, because he was getting annoyed.

“I had a very good day at work today,” he said, sitting down again. “But instead of asking me about my day and bringing me my slippers, like any other normal wife, all you can think about is yourself and your
curiosity
.”

“You never want to discuss your work. You’ve made that clear.”

“Ah!” He chuckled. “On that count anyway, you’ve been unfailingly obedient.”

“How was your day, my darling?” I forced out a saccharine smile and a genuflection so false even he had to laugh.

“My day, dear wife, was very fine indeed,” he returned in an exaggerated pantomime of husbandhood. “We made a significant victory today. You see, a few days ago, my boys chanced upon a camp of very angry Communists in the jungle. Two hundred, maybe three hundred of them, living in the swamp like rats, very angry rats. There was a series of skirmishes, and this afternoon, my boys brought the surviving fighters down to Shahbandar. All twelve of them—eleven, actually. One died en route and they had to toss him out of the jeep…Oh, as soon as the body landed, a tiger jumped out of the bushes and ripped off his head!”

His hyperbolic glee seemed specially designed to needle me. But even as I knew this, I couldn’t help feeling sickened: Were Issa and Kenneth dead? Ken had always struck me as a man with a greater destiny than this, yet history has a way of subverting destinies, especially the most promising ones.

“You’re very quiet,” Taro said, suddenly more sober. “Are you thinking about another fiancé or brother in that band of rebels? I know some of them were Ignatius Wee’s associates. But these were the naïve friends, the friends with no money or power who went to fight in the mud while Ignatius-san and his cronies sat in air-conditioned mansions eating our steaks and plotting against us. Actually I admire these Communists. They have guts and conviction. Fighting spirit. Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t be locking them up in Shahbandar and putting them through some fun and games. So is there anything I should know about any of them?”

I shook my head, my eyes burning. Mentioning my friends, were they still alive, would only single them out for worse treatment.

I prepared to go upstairs. No way was I going to display any more emotion for my tormentor’s satisfaction.

“They were quite audacious. The two hundred of them actually thought they could outfight us—with their antiquated Soviet weapons, no less. And while we’re speaking of numbers, I should mention the landmark figure we reached today: one hundred thousand.”

I started up the stairs. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to know.

“Where’s your fabled curiosity now, Momoko? Aren’t you curious one hundred thousand
what
? Dollars, monkeys, tigers, bananas?”

I was at the top of the stairs when I heard him bellow: “One hundred thousand dead Chinamen.”

It took several months for Taro’s mood to lift again, just in time for Obon, the Japanese festival of the dead. As I’d noted many times before, nothing cheers up the Japs like thoughts of death, save for perhaps the festivities surrounding their Foundation Day, which commemorates the special morning in 660 BC when a wiry little man fell out of the sun and declared himself emperor. Of course, I am distorting their history, but no more than they had distorted mine.

In an odd twist of fate, the night of Obon also happened to be my twenty-third birthday—August 3, 1945. But this wasn’t the only reason I would remember the night forever.

Taro and I ate a light ceremonial dinner of grilled sea bream and miso soup, after which we lingered at the table. He had a shallow sake cup poised on his knuckles, filled to the brim, and none of the liquid rippled or spilled. It was his sixth cup—the point of the demonstration being to prove how steady his nerves were, even under the influence. Finally, he glanced at me.

“Do you want to see that old friend of yours? The prince of Shahbandar—he’s asked for you.”

I leapt to my feet. His words were abundantly clear: Kenneth was still alive.

“Of course I want to see him!”

Taro, in theatrical mode again, winced. “Ah, if only you showed
me
such interest, Momoko. Oh, how times have cooled us…”

I had to keep him from going off on a tangent. “So, when can I see Kenneth?”

“Kenneth?” He looked startled.

I realized my slip. But the best response now was silence.

“Don’t you mean Daniel, your betrothed? Or has he also fallen by the wayside, like poor me?” He smiled slyly. “But yes. I do have a man at Shahbandar named Kenneth. Kenneth Kee, actually. But I doubt he’s your type—crude, ugly, low-class, swore like a sailor when my boys captured him. They found him in the swamp and perhaps they should have left him there. Your Daniel, on the other hand, has been faultless. Most obedient prisoner we’ve ever had. Says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for everything. That’s why they call him the Prince. I thought it only fair that I reward him with a visit from an old friend—that is, if she hasn’t already forsaken him.”

“I haven’t forsaken him.” Dampening the hope of seeing Daniel was, unfortunately, my new worry about Kenneth. As if the hell of Shahbandar weren’t enough, I’d further endangered him by mentioning his name.

“Good, good. Because I promised your Daniel he would see you.” Taro leaned forward to kiss my ear. “And you know how I hate to go back on my word.”

At ten that night, he took me to an Obon celebration with some fellow officers. This was the first time I would be seen by his peers, and I couldn’t tell whether this sudden change in policy reflected a change in his attitude toward me or if the kitchen simply needed an extra pair of hands.

The gathering was held at the beach house, its driveway newly lined with square paper lanterns, creating a catwalk of muted, glowing footlights. I can’t deny it—there was a serene elegance to this backdrop, reminiscent of Hokusai’s woodblock prints. The four tin soldiers who had been stationed there were nowhere to be found—perhaps their indiscretions had been discovered—and the illuminated house felt like a set readied by a team of spectral stagehands who vanished as soon as the players arrived.

Gazing upon the lovely scene, I was reminded that the Turnipheads were not without a fine aesthetic tradition; it was just that they had a remarkable propensity for subverting grace in the service of evil. As a result, I mistrusted their displays of beauty. What other modern society venerated stones and built shrines for wood sprites while at the same time encouraging—even celebrating—the thirst for human blood?

Of course, entering the house on Taro’s arm, I had no idea that the events of this night would return to debase me in the decades to come; otherwise, I might have found something sinister in the pile of samurai swords parked by the door. But I had become inured to such Turniphead habits and instead continued to make snide private jokes: Surely Taro’s friends were overcompensating for some manly lack?

I had worn my favorite red dress, the one with the silk spaghetti straps, copied from something I’d seen Myrna Loy model in a magazine. It was my birthday, after all. A red silk bow bloomed at my waist; I looked like my own birthday present. If Taro’s ego needed to be stroked in front of his superiors, I would submit to my wifely chore just this once and save myself the regret. The man had promised me Daniel as my reward.

The Turnipheads liked their drink. That fact had already been well established, if not by my eyewitness accounts, then by a long tradition in art, literature, and the annals of civil misconduct. Taro had invited ten colleagues to this drinking party, and they all showed up wearing their olive-green uniforms like a troop of overexcited Brownies. They ranged in age from Taro’s thirty to about sixty, and what united them, beyond the love of sake, was that they all looked more like buttoned-down bank managers than engineers of death. They seemed born to file paperwork behind drab desks and, on weekends, jostle fat babies on their knees. Although I’d expected to meet and greet their “wives,” with whom I could compare spouses and extrapolate rumor from fact, none had been produced.

Most of the officers had as many as three white sakuras—patriotic cherry blossoms—woven onto their striped shoulder boards. Despite being host, Taro had the fewest, just one. Given the national obsession with face, this struck me as comically poignant. It meant that all of his friends were higher ranked: commanders, rear admirals, and such who went to war emboldened with the promise of reincarnation as flower buds. As the night progressed, Taro’s low rank turned out to be a saving grace. As if to illustrate my treatise on the Japanese penchant for annihilation, the more sakuras an officer had, the more sake he was obligated to drink.

Exempt from this contest, Taro watched his friends drink. I played the docile hausfrau and served them with backbreaking devotion, pouring chilled sake from rustic clay bottles into their little cups, which they held out to me while seated cross-legged on the tatami. Part of me felt the occasion wasn’t quite real, that I was hosting a tea party for teddy bears, filling their dainty cups with water, except that my dolls were becoming ever more animated with each sip. Over the hours, as the room grew thick with tobacco smoke, their faces glowed red and grotesque; some even stood up to dance to the
shamisen
string music playing on the Victrola. As they stomped and skipped and crumbled onto the mats, gurgling with coughs and laughter, they seemed at last to be truly happy. Yet something was amiss—where were the geishas and the dancing girls?

Taro observed his superiors’ descent into silliness with a strange, detached grin. He pulled me gruffly down on the mat by his side, and for an instant, I almost believed he was going to confess that he’d poisoned the drink. Instead, he grabbed my wrists and kissed me in front of his muddled comrades, not releasing me until someone exclaimed that sake was spilling from the bottle in my hand.

A white-haired Three-Sakura roared his approval and applauded for an encore.
“Ankoru!”

The others followed suit, and Taro made a grand show of modesty, standing me up with him and bowing effusively. Then, very suddenly, he whacked the back of his hand against my cheek. I was caught unawares and pitched to the floor, dropping the sake bottle entirely. The men howled with laughter, and it began to enter my mind that the night’s entertainment was only beginning, that
I
might constitute part of the show.

Taro tore off his uniform shirt and flung it aside. His fury took me by surprise because, until this moment, I’d assumed he was in a good mood. Now, it was as if he’d found a way to funnel his anger and contempt for me into one bullish gaze. His comrades had retreated to the sides of the room, leaving Taro and me in the center of the arena. The lights began to dim so that instead of men around us there was only smoke and shadows.

As soon as I pulled myself off the floor, Taro charged at me. Some of the men gasped. This time, I ducked and avoided being slapped. I rammed my foot into what I knew to be a sensitive spot in his knee, causing him to grimace in pain and rage. I tried to run free, but I’d taken only three steps when I was shunted to the ground, face-first, with Taro pinning me flat with his weight like a sumo wrestler.

With the men applauding cheerily, Taro whispered in my ear, “Be brave, Momoko. Think of Daniel. Think of your friends. These men have power over their lives. We must make them happy.” His voice, unlike his act, was coaxing rather than stern. “Ignore them. Do as we always do. Submit to me.”

Before I could lodge my protest with a backward kick, he lifted me into a standing position and began ripping apart my red silk frock from behind so that my nakedness was unveiled to the audience, parcel by parcel, like a steer placed on auction for parts. My face, my neck, my belly, my loins—every piece of me was feverish with shame, yet I knew I had to endure. Lives were at stake. But Taro wasn’t just stripping me. He fondled me, caressing my tender flesh as each new patch of skin was freed; there was no difference in the way he touched me here and when we were alone in bed.

Finally, when the last of my dress fell to the floor, he unhooked my brassiere, let it drop, and cupped his hands beneath my trembling breasts.

Leaning in to my left ear, he breathed dreamily, “Close your eyes.”

The shushing of the waves on the beach, the rustling of the breeze against the shades, the plucks of the ancient
shamisen
and the sighs from the blackened edges of the room: All the sounds of the world quickly faded into the dark.

It was just Taro and me now, and the sounds we made. My open expression of pleasure was my way of encouraging his goodwill, to save his face in front of his superiors, and above all, to protect my own life and those of my loved ones.

I quickly discovered the advantages of the tatami—instead of limiting ourselves as on a bed, we had a play area that was vast, and there were no obstructions. The floor emboldened us. After coupling in our usual positions, we tried new arrangements. Gone was the anxiety about falling off the mattress. Gone were all our inhibitions. I rode astride him, taking him to the edge of rapture before he lifted me and flung me onto my back. I opened my eyes.
No, not so soon
, his avid pupils told me.
I want to satisfy you first
. He plunged three fingers into me and, unlocking my most sensitive spot, brought me to a maddening climax. I knew he was showing off, that I was an instrument only he had the privilege to play, but this did nothing to diminish my pleasure. He brought up his fingers, glistening clear with our married juices, and sucked on them.