The Naked and the Dead (37 page)

            Hearn shook his head. "Hell, no, my father can't even read or write. All he can do is sign checks."

            They laughed. "Wait a moment," Conn said, "Bill Hearn, Bill Hearn, by God,
I
know him, has some factories in the Middlewest, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota?"

            "That's right."

            "Sure," Conn said,
"Bill
Hearn. You look like him, come to think of it. I met him when I was out of the Army in 'thirty-seven, organizing the stock for a couple of companies. We got along fine."

            It was possible. His father would throw back his straight black hair, and clap Conn on the back with one of his meaty moist hands. "Hell you say, man," he could hear his father booming, "either you throw your goods on the table, and we talk a little turkey, or you can admit you're just a goddam fraud" -- then the twinkle, the charm -- "and we can just get potted together, which is what the hell we want to do in the first place." But, no, Conn wasn't right; Conn didn't quite fit it.

            "I saw his picture in the papers about a month ago. Have about ten papers sent to me regularly. I can see your old man's putting on a little weight."

            "Keeping about even, I guess." He had been sick in the past three years and was down to almost the normal weight for a man his size. Conn didn't know his father. Of course not. Conn wasn't even a first sergeant in 'thirty-seven. You didn't quit the Army to organize companies when you were a staff sergeant. Abruptly Hearn realized that Conn had not whored with Generals Caldwell and Simmons in Washington, oh, possibly once he'd had a drink with them, or more likely he'd served under them as a noncom before the war but the whole thing was pathetic, and a little disgusting. Conn, the big operator. Even now the watery sagging eyes, the paunch, the mottled bulbous nose, were staring at him with sincerity. Sure he knew Bill Hearn. If they put Conn on the rack, he'd die swearing he knew him, believing he knew him.

            "I'll tell you what, when you see Bill Hearn again, you tell him you saw me, or write to him, tell him that."

            What had gone on in Conn's head for twenty years in the Army? Or particularly the last five when he had discovered he could swim as an officer?

            Pop! went Dalleson's carbine.

            "I'll tell him. Why don't you look him up? He'll be glad to see you."

            "I might. I'd kinda like to see him again. They don't make them more sociable than your father."

            "Sure." With a delicious effort Hearn restrained himself from saying, Maybe he can give you a job at the gate, keeping people out.

            Instead he stood up. "I'm going in for a dip," he announced. He sprinted down the beach, hit the water flatly, and coasted under, feeling his mirth, his disgust, his weariness wash away in the delight of cold water against his heated flesh. When he came up he spouted some water gleefully, and began to swim. On the beach the officers were still sunning themselves, playing bridge or talking. Two of them were throwing a ball back and forth. The jungle looked almost pretty from the water.

            Some artillery boomed very faintly over the horizon. Hearn ducked under again, came up slowly. The General had said once, savoring the epigram, "Corruption is the cement that keeps the Army from breaking apart." Conn? Cummings hadn't applied it that way, but Conn was still a product.

            All right and so was he. What was corruption but knowing virtue and eschewing it? All very neat. And where did General Cummings fit in? That was a bigger question, that was one which couldn't be tied up in a package. In any case he was going to stay away from the General. Cummings had left him alone, and he would return the compliment. He stood up in shallow water, and shook his head to clear his ears. It was good swimming, damn good. Clean. He did a somersault underwater and then struck out with a steady stroke parallel to the shore. Conn was probably still beating his gums, still elaborating the myth that had become the man.

            "Wakara, what does
umareru
mean?" Dove asked.

            Lieutenant Wakara extended his slim legs, and wiggled his toes thoughtfully. "Why, it means, 'to be born,' I think."

            Dove squinted along the beach, and watched Hearn swimming for a moment. "Oh, sure,
umareru
-- to be born.
Umashi masu, u umasho.
Those are the basic verb forms, aren't they? I remember that." He turned to Conn and said, "I don't know what I'd do without Wakara. It takes a Jap to figure out the damn language." And he clapped Wakara on the back, and added, "Hey, Tom, am I right?"

            Wakara nodded slowly. He was a short thin man with a quiet sensitive face, rather dull eyes, and a thin neat mustache. "Good old Wakara," Dove said. Wakara continued to look at his legs. About a week before, he had overheard Dove saying to some officer, "You know our Jap translators are overrated. I do all the work in our unit, of course I'm in charge, but Wakara isn't much help at all. I'm always having to correct his translations."

            Now Dove was massaging his bony chest with a towel he had brought along. "Feels wonderful to get a sweat up in the sun," he muttered, and then turned to Wakara again. "I should have known that word, you know it's that diary we picked off that Jap major's corpse, fascinating document, did you have a look at it?"

            "Not yet."

            "Oh, well, it's wonderful. No military information, but the guy was a crackpot. The Japs are weird, Wakara."

            "They're dopes," Wakara said shortly.

            Conn lumbered into the conversation. "I have to go along with you there, Wakara. You know I was in Japan, back in 'thirty-three, and the people are illiterate. You can't teach them a damn thing."

            "Gee, I didn't know you were there, Colonel," Dove said. "Do you know any of the language?"

            "I never bothered to pick it up. I didn't like the people and I wanted no truck with them. I knew we were going to go to war."

            "No kidding." Dove formed a little mound in the sand with his palm. "It must have been a valuable experience. Did you know the Japs were going to go to war, Wakara, when you were there?"

            "No, I was too young, I was just a kid." Wakara lit a cigarette. "I didn't think so at all."

            "Well, that's 'cause they're your people," Conn told him.

            Pop! went Dalleson's carbine.

            "I suppose so," Wakara said. He exhaled his smoke carefully. At the turn of the beach he could see an enlisted man patrolling, and he turned his head down toward his knees, hoping he would not be seen. It was a mistake to come out here. Those American soldiers wouldn't like the idea of protecting a Jap.

            Conn drummed his paunch reflectively. "It's damn hot, I'm going to take a swim."

            "Me too," Dove said. He stood up, rubbed some sand off his arms, and then with a perceptible pause, asked, "Want to come along, Wakara?"

            "No, no, thanks, I'm not ready to go in yet." He watched them walk off. Dove was a funny man, rather typical, Wakara decided. Dove had seen him walking along the beach, and immediately he had had to call him over, ask that stupid question about
umareru,
and then he didn't know what to do with him. Wakara was a little tired of being treated as a freak.

            He stretched out on the sand, a little relieved that he was alone again. For a long time he stared at the jungle, which thickened, became impenetrable after thirty or forty yards. There was an effect which could be got; the jungle could be built up on a canvas out of a black-green background, but it would be a questionable technique. He certainly couldn't carry it off after not painting for two years. Wakara sighed. Perhaps it would have been better if he had stayed with his family in the relocation camps. At least he would be painting now.

            Through the glare of the sun on his back, the glittering brilliance of the sand, Wakara realized that he was very depressed. What was it Dove had said about Ishimara's diary? "Fascinating document." Had Dove actually been touched by it? Wakara shrugged; it was impossible for him to understand Americans like Dove, just as it was impossible for him to understand Japanese. In limbo. Still there had been a time in Berkeley in his senior year when his paintings were getting some notice, and many of the American students were friendly with him. But of course that was all shattered by the war.

            Ishimara, S., Major Infantry, Japanese Army. That was the way he had signed it, relinquishing himself again to anonymity.

            "Did you have a look at it, Wakara?" Dove had asked.

            Wakara grinned, staring at the sand. His own translation was in his breast pocket now. Poor Ishimara, whoever he was. The Americans had looted his corpse, and some noncom had brought the diary back. No, Wakara thought, he was too much of an American himself to understand really the kind of things that had gone on in Ishimara's head. Would an American keep a diary, write in it an hour before an attack? The poor bastard Ishimara, dumb, dumb like all the Japanese. Wakara unfolded his translation, read it over again for a moment.

            The sun was red in its setting tonight, red with the blood of our soldiers who died today. Tomorrow my blood shall be in it. This night I cannot sleep. I find myself weeping. I have thought achingly of my childhood, and I remember the boys, my school friends, and the games we have played. I think of the year I have spent with my grandparents in the prefecture of Choshi. I think, I am born and I die. I am born, I live, and I am to die, I think on this night.

            I do not believe in the Emperor, His Most Exalted, I must confess it.

            I am going to die. I am born, I am dead.

            I ask myself -- WHY? I am born, I am to die. WHY? WHY? What is the meaning?

            Wakara shrugged again. A thinker, a poet; there were many Japanese like him. And yet they died like anything but poets, died in mass ecstatic outbursts, communal frenzies. NAZE, NAZE DESU KA? Ishimara had written in huge trembling characters, WHY, WHY IS IT? and he had gone out and been killed in the river on the night of the big Japanese attack. He had fallen, shrieking, no doubt, a unit in an anonymous exalted mass. Who could comprehend it fully? Wakara wondered.

            When he had been in Japan as a child of twelve, it had seemed the most wonderful and beautiful country he had ever seen. Everything was so small; it was a country built for the size of a twelve-year-old. Wakara knew Choshi where Ishimara had spent a year with his grandparents; perhaps he had even spoken once to Ishimara's grandparents. And in the peninsula at Choshi, in two miles, one could see everything. There were great cliffs which dropped several hundred feet into the Pacific, there were miniature wooded groves, as perfect, as tailored as emeralds, there were tiny fishing towns constructed of gray wood and rocks, there were rice paddies and mournful low foothills, and the cramped choked streets of the city of Choshi with its smells of fish tripe and human dung, the crowded bloody docks of the fishing wharves. Nothing went to waste. All the land had been manicured for a thousand years.

            Wakara put out his cigarette in the sand and scratched at his thin mustache. It was all like that. No matter where you went, Japan was always beautiful, with an unreal finite beauty, like a miniature landscaped panorama constructed for a showroom or a fair. For a thousand years or more perhaps the Japanese had lived like seedy caretakers watching over precious jewels. They tilled the land, expended their lives upon it, and left nothing for themselves. Even when he was twelve years old he had known that the faces of the women were different from those of American women. And now in retrospect there was a curious detached wistfulness about the Japanese women as if they had renounced even the desire to think about joys they would never have.

            Behind the beauty it was all bare, with nothing in their lives but toil and abnegation. They were abstract people, who had elaborated an abstract art, and thought in abstractions and spoke in them, devised involuted ceremonies for saying nothing at all, and lived in the most intense fear of their superiors that any people had ever had.

            And a week ago a battalion of those wistful people had charged to their death with great terrifying screams. Oh, he understood, Wakara thought, why the Americans who had been in Japan hated the Japanese worst of all. Before the war they had been so wistful, so charming; the Americans had picked them up like pets, and were feeling the fury now of having a pet bite them. All the conversations, the polite evasions, the embarrassed laughs the Japanese had given them had suddenly assumed another meaning, had become malign once the war started. The Japanese to a man had been plotting against them. It was rot. Perhaps ten of the million or two million peasants who would be killed would have an idea of why they were being slaughtered. Even in the American Army the number was far greater.

            But killed they would be, because the Japanese were dopes. They had been dopes for a thousand years. Wakara lit another cigarette, and sifted some sand through his fingertips.

            Pop! The carbine sounded again.

            Well, there was nothing he could do about it. The Americans would march in eventually and after twenty or thirty years the country would probably be the same again, and the people would live in their artistic abstract rut, and begin generating some more juice for another hysterical immolation. Two million, three million killed, it was all in the Oriental's stepped-up version of the Malthusian law. He could feel it himself, understand that better than the Americans.

            Ishimara had been a fool. He didn't see things like population density; he saw it through his own shortsighted eyes, watching the sun go down with atavistic dread. The red sun and his own blood; that was what Ishimara knew. It was the sop allowed the Japanese. Deep in their own hearts, deep in the personal concretion of a diary, they could be philosophers, wistful philosophers, knowing nothing about the vehicle that moved them. Wakara spat on the sand, and then with a nervous furtive motion of his hand, he covered it over, and turned around to look at the sea.