A corporal escorts Goto Dengo and his one surviving comrade from the perimeter to a tent that has been pitched out on the mud, its ropes tied not to stakes but to jagged segments of tree trunks, or heavy fragments of ruined weapons. Inside, the mud is paved with the lids of wooden crates. A shirtless man of perhaps fifty sits crosslegged on top of an empty ammunition box. His eyelids are so heavy and swollen that it is difficult to tell whether he is awake. He breathes erratically. When he inhales, his skin retracts into the interstices between ribs, producing the illusion that his skeleton is trying to burst free from his doomed body. He has not shaved in a long time, but doesn’t have enough whiskers to muster a real beard. He is mumbling to a clerk, who squats on his haunches atop a crate lid stenciled MANILA and copies down his words.
Goto Dengo and his comrade stand there for perhaps half an hour, desperately trying to master their disappointment. He expected to be lying in a hospital bed drinking miso soup by now. But these people are in worse shape than he is; he is afraid that they might ask him for help.
Still, it is good just to be under canvas, and standing in the presence of someone who has authority, who is taking charge. Clerks enter the tent carrying message decrypts, which means that somewhere around here is a functioning radio station, and a staff with codebooks. They are not totally cut off.
“What do you know how to do?” says the officer, when Goto Dengo is finally granted the opportunity to introduce himself.
“I am an engineer,” says Goto Dengo.
“Ah. You know how to build bridges? Airstrips?”
The officer is engaging in a bit of whimsy here; bridges and airstrips are as far beyond their grasp as intergalactic starships. All of his teeth have fallen out and so he gums his words, and sometimes must pause to draw breath two or three times in the course of a sentence.
“I will build such things if it is my commander’s wish, though for such things, others have skill far better than mine. My specialty is underground works.”
“Bunkers?”
A wasp stings him on the back of the neck and he inhales sharply. “I will build bunkers if it is my commander’s wish. My specialty is tunnels, in earth or in rock, but especially in rock.”
The officer stares at Goto Dengo fixedly for a few moments, then directs a glance at his clerk, who nods a little bow and takes it down. “Your skills are useless here,” he says offhandedly, as if this is true of just about everyone.
“Sir! Also, I am proficient with the Nambu light machine gun.”
“The Nambu is a poor weapon. Not as good as what the Americans and Australians have. Still, useful in jungle defense.”
“Sir! I will defend our perimeter to my last breath—”
“Unfortunately they will not attack us from the jungle. They bomb us. But the Nambu cannot hit a plane. When they come, they will come from the ocean. The Nambu is useless against an amphibious assault.”
“Sir! I have lived in the jungle for six months.”
“Oh?” For the first time, the officer seems interested. “What have you been eating?”
“Grubs and bats, sir!”
“Go and find me some.”
“At once, sir!”
He untwists some old rope to make twine, and knots the twine into nets, and hangs the nets in trees. Once that is done, his life is simple: every morning he climbs up into the trees to collect bats from the nets. Then he spends the afternoon digging grubs out of rotten logs with a bayonet. The sun goes down and he stands in a foxhole full of sewage until it comes up again. When bombs go off nearby, the concussion puts him into a state of shock so profound as to separate mind from body entirely; for several hours afterwards, his body goes around doing things without his telling it to. Stripped of its connections to the physical world, his mind runs in circles like an engine that has sheared its driveshaft and is screaming along at full throttle, doing no useful work while burning itself up. He usually does not emerge from this state until someone speaks to him. Then more bombs fall.
One night he notices that there is sand beneath his feet. Strange.
The air smells clean and fresh. Unheard of.
Others are walking on the sand with him.
They are being escorted by a couple of shambling privates, and a corporal bent under the weight of a Nambu. The corporal is peering into Goto Dengo’s face strangely. “Hiroshima,” he says.
“Did you say something to me?”
“Hiroshima.”
“But what did you say before you said ‘Hiroshima’?”
“In.”
“In?”
“In Hiroshima.”
“What did you say before you said ‘in Hiroshima’?”
“Aunt.”
“You were talking to me about your aunt in Hiroshima?”
“Yes. Her too.”
“What do you mean, her too?”
“The same message.”
“What message?”
“The message that you memorized for me. Give her the same message.”
“Oh,” Goto Dengo says.
“You remember the whole list?”
“The list of people I’m supposed to give the message to?”
“Yes. Recite the list again.”
The corporal has an accent from Yamaguchi, which is where most of the soldiers posted here came from. He seems more rural than urban. “Uh, your mother and father back on the farm in Yamaguchi.”
“Yes!”
“And your brother, who is—in the Navy?”
“Yes!”
“And your sister, who is—”
“A schoolteacher in Hiroshima, very good!”
“As well as your aunt who is also in Hiroshima.”
“And don’t forget my uncle in Kure.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”
“That’s okay! Now tell me the message again, just to make sure you won’t forget it.”
“Okay,” says Goto Dengo, and draws a deep breath. He is really starting to come around now. They are trudging down to the sea: he and half a dozen others, all unarmed and carrying small bundles, accompanied by the corporal and privates. Below, in the gentle surf, a rubber boat awaits them.
“We’re almost there! Tell me the message! Tell it back to me!”
“My beloved family,” Goto Dengo begins.
“Very good—perfect so far!” says the corporal.
“My thoughts are with you as always,” Goto Dengo guesses.
The corporal looks a bit crestfallen. “Close enough—keep going.”
They have reached the boat. The crew shoves it out into the surf a few paces. Goto Dengo stops talking for a few moments as he watches the others wade out to it and climb in. Then the corporal prods him in the back. Goto Dengo staggers out into the ocean. No one has started yelling at him yet—in fact they reach for him, pulling him in. He tumbles into the bottom of the boat and clambers up to a kneeling position as the crew begin to row it out into the surf. He locks eyes with the corporal, back on the beach.
“This is the last message you will receive from me, for by now I have long since gone to my rest on the sacred soil of the Yasukuni Shrine.”
“No! No! That’s totally wrong!” hollers the corporal.
“I know that you will visit me there and remember me fondly, as I remember you.”
The corporal splashes into the surf, trying to chase the boat, and the privates plunge in after him and grab him by the arms. The corporal shouts, “Soon we will deal the Americans a smashing defeat and then I will march home through the streets of Hiroshima in triumph along with my comrades!” He recites it like a schoolboy doing his lessons.
“Know that I died bravely, in a magnificent battle, and never for one moment shirked my duty!” Goto Dengo shouts back.
“Please send me some strong thread so that I can mend my boots!” the corporal cries.
“The Army has looked after us well, and we have lived the last months of our lives in such comfort and cleanliness that you would hardly
guess we had ever left the Home Islands!” Goto Dengo shouts, knowing that he must be difficult to hear now above the surf. “When the final battle came, it came quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the cherry blossoms spoken of in the emperor’s rescript, which we all carry against our breasts! Our departure from this world is a small price to pay for the peace and prosperity that we have brought to the people of New Guinea!”
“No, that’s totally wrong!” wails the corporal. But his comrades are dragging him up the beach now, back towards the jungle, where his voice is lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters, and eerie cries.
Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale sewage. He turns around. The stars behind them are blocked out by something long and black and shaped kind of like a submarine.
“Your message is much better,” someone mumbles. It is a young fellow carrying a toolbox: an airplane mechanic who has not seen a Nipponese airplane in half a year.
“Yes,” says another man—also a mechanic, apparently. “His family will find your message much more comforting.”
“Thank you,” Goto Dengo says. “Unfortunately I have no idea what the kid’s name is.”
“Then go to Yamaguchi,” says the first mechanic, “and pick some old couple at random.”
METEOR
* * *
“YOU SURE DON’T FUCK LIKE A SMART GIRL,” SAYS Bobby Shaftoe, his voice suffused with awe.
The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it’s only September for crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.
Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed, gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.
“Could you reach that jiz rag?” Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is too short.
“Why?” Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns.
Shaftoe sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling in strange information.
Julieta is given to asking big questions.
“I just don’t want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal, ma’am,” he says.
He hears the flint of Julieta’s lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.
“Take your time,” she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar. “What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?”
Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians there, and Germans.
“See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller,” Shaftoe says. “So it’s going to come out. Inevitably.” He thinks he pronounces this last word correctly.
“Then what will happen?” Julieta says.
“We’ll get a wet spot.”
“So? It’s natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as beds have existed.”
“God damn it,” Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi handkerchief. Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body. He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.
Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn’t.
Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her coffee-scented flesh.
“The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night,” she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality. This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes of Stalin’s repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded and annotated by Julieta’s uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier, crack shot, and indomitable warrior.
Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it’s because they eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns excelled at an old-fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian-killing, but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans, who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian-slaughtering operation.
Julieta scoffs at this simple-minded theory: the Finns are a million times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all. She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.
He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left-over jism in his tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.
Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him appraisingly. “Be a man,” she says. “Make me some coffee.”
Shaftoe snatches the cabin’s cast-iron kettle, which could double as a ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of sails, but not Uncle Otto’s.
Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills. Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil-packed java and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.
“You use too much wood,” Julieta says, “Uncle Otto will be noticing.”
“I’ll chop more,” Shaftoe says. “This whole fucking country is full of nothing but wood.”
“You’ll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you.”
“So it’s okay for me to sleep with Otto’s niece, but burning a couple of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?”
“Grounds,” Julieta says. “Coffee grounds.”
The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been short-sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof. Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies, except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.
With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self-explanatory. The only thing that is missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off
the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.
Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta, pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto’s ketch. This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In Sweden he has found the calm, grey-green eye of the blood hurricane that is the world.
Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair, they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other, Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut-and-thrust flirtation.
Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably because Julieta is crazy—much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there’s no reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.
He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one hasn’t started yet.
When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is something that he has not done since—well, since he first made it, ten years ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a snapshot of Glory.