The veil parts and a perfect young woman in a severe black-and-white habit is standing in the gap, radiant in the green light coming off the terraces, carrying a bowl of steaming water. She peels back his hospital gown and begins to sponge him off. Goto Dengo motions towards the crucifix and asks about it—perhaps the woman has learned a little Nipponese. If she hears him, she gives no sign. She is probably deaf or crazy or both; the Christians are notorious for the way they dote on defective persons. Her gaze is fixed on Goto Dengo’s body, which she swabs gently but implacably, one postage-stamp-sized bit at a time. Goto Dengo’s mind is still playing tricks with him, and looking down at his naked torso he gets all turned around for a moment and thinks that he is looking at the nailed wreck of Jesus. His ribs are sticking out and his skin is a cluttered map of sores and scars. He cannot possibly be good for anything now; why are they not sending him back to Nippon? Why haven’t they simply killed him? “You speak English?” he says, and her huge brown eyes jump just a bit. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. To her, he must be a loathsome thing, a specimen under a glass slide in a pathology lab. When she leaves the room she will probably go and wash herself meticulously and then do anything to flush the memory of Goto Dengo’s body out of her clean, virginal mind.
He drifts away into a fever, and sees himself from the vantage point of a mosquito trying to find a way in through the netting: a haggard, wracked body splayed, like a slapped insect, on a wooden trestle. The only way you can tell he’s Nipponese is by the strip of white cloth tied around his forehead, but instead of an orange sun painted on it is an inscription: I.N.R.I.
A man in a long black robe is sitting beside him, holding a string of red coral beads in his hand, a tiny crucifix dangling from that. He has the big head and heavy brow of those strange people working up on the rice terraces, but his receding hairline and swept-back silver-brown hair are very European, as are his intense eyes. “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum,” he is saying. “It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
“Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian,” said Goto Dengo.
The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again: “I didn’t know Jews spoke Latin.”
One day a wheeled chair is pushed into his room; he stares at it with dull curiosity. He has heard of these things—they are used behind high walls to transport shamefully imperfect persons from one room to another. Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of them says something about fresh air and the next thing he knows he’s being wheeled out the door and into a corridor! They have buckled him in so he doesn’t fall out, and he twists uneasily in the chair, trying to hide his face. The girl rolls him out to a huge verandah that looks out over the mountains. Mist rises up from the leaves and birds scream. On the wall behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding blood from hundreds of parallel whip-marks. A centurion stands above him with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.
Three other Nipponese men are sitting on the verandah. One of them talks to himself unintelligibly and keeps picking at a sore on his arm that bleeds continuously into a towel on his lap. Another one has had his arms and face burned off, and peers out at the world through a single hole in a blank mask of scar tissue. The third has been tied into his chair with many wide strips of cloth because he flops around all the time like a beached fish and makes unintelligible moaning noises.
Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why has he not been allowed to die honorably?
The crew of the submarine treated him and the other evacuees with an unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.
When was he set apart from his race? It happened long before his evacuation from New Guinea. The lieutenant who rescued him from the headhunters treated him as a criminal and sentenced him to execution. Even before then, he was different. Why did the sharks not eat him? Does his flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.
Why could he swim? Partly because his body was good at it—but partly because his father raised him not to believe in demons.
He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.
He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.
Black-robe laughs out loud at Goto Dengo during his next visit. “I am not trying to convert you,” he says. “Please do not tell your superiors about your suspicions. We have been strictly forbidden to proselytize, and there would be brutal repercussions.”
“You aren’t trying to convert me with words,” Goto Dento admits, “but just by having me here.” His English does not quite suffice.
Black-robe’s name is Father Ferdinand. He is a Jesuit or something, with enough English to run rings around Goto Dengo. “In what way does merely having you in this place constitute proselytization?” Then, just to break Goto Dengo’s legs out from under him, he says the same thing in half-decent Nipponese.
“I don’t know. The art.”
“If you don’t like our art, close your eyes and think of the emperor.”
“I can’t keep my eyes closed all the time.”
Father Ferdinand laughs snidely. “Really? Most of your countrymen seem to have no difficulty with keeping their eyes tightly shut from cradle to grave.”
“Why don’t you have happy art? Is this a hospital or a morgue?”
“La Pasyon is important here,” says Father Ferdinand.
“La Pasyon?”
“Christ’s suffering. It speaks deeply to the people of the Philippines. Especially now.”
Goto Dengo has another complaint that he is not able to voice until he borrows Father Ferdinand’s Japanese-English dictionary and spends some time working with it.
“Let me see if I understand you,” Father Ferdinand says. “You believe that when we treat you with mercy and dignity, we are implicitly trying to convert you to Roman Catholicism.”
“You bent my words again,” says Goto Dengo.
“You spoke crooked words and I straightened them,” snaps Father Ferdinand.
“You are trying to make me into—one of you.”
“One of us? What do you mean by that?”
“A low person.”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“Because you have a low-person religion. A loser religion. If you make me into a low person, it will make me want to follow that religion.”
“And by treating you decently we are trying to make you into a low person?”
“In Nippon, a sick person would not be treated as well.”
“You needn’t explain that to us,” Father Ferdinand says. “You are in the middle of a country full of women who have been raped by Nipponese soldiers.”
Time to change the subject. “Ignoti et quasi occulti—Societas Eruditorum,” says Goto Dengo, reading the inscription on a medallion that hangs from Father Ferdinand’s neck. “More Latin? What does it mean?”
“It is an organization I belong to. It is ecumenical.”
“What does that mean?”
“Anyone can join it. Even you, after you get better.”
“I will get better,” Goto Dengo says. “No one will know that I was sick.”
“Except for us. Oh, I understand! You mean, no Nipponese people will know. That’s true.”
“But the others here will not get better.”
“It is true. You have the best prognosis of any patient here.”
“You are receiving those sick Nipponese men into your bosoms.”
“Yes. This is more or less dictated by our religion.”
“They are low people now. You want them to join your low-person religion.”
“Only insofar as it is good for them,” says Father Ferdinand. “It’s not like those guys are going to run out and build us a new cathe
dral or something.”
The next day, Goto Dengo is deemed to be cured. He does not feel cured at all, but he will do anything to get out of this rut: losing one staredown after another with the King of the Jews.
He expects that they will saddle him with a duffel bag and send him down to the bus terminal to fend for himself, but instead a car comes to get him. As if that’s not good enough, the car takes him to an airfield, where a light plane picks him up. It is the first time he has ever flown in a plane, and the excitement revives him more than six weeks in the hospital. The plane takes off between two green mountains and heads south (judging from the sun’s position) and for the first time he understands where he’s been: in the center of Luzon Island, north of Manila.
Half an hour later, he’s above the capital, banking over the Pasig River and then the bay, chockablock with military transports. The corniche is guarded by a picket line of coconut palms. Seen from overhead, their branches writhe in the sea breeze like colossal tarantulas impaled on spikes. Looking over the pilot’s shoulder, he sees a pair of paved airstrips in the flat paddy-land just south of the city, crossing at an acute angle to form a narrow X. The light plane porpoises through gusts. It bounces down the airstrip like an overinflated soccer ball, taxiing past most of the hangars and finally fishtailing to a stop near an isolated guard hut where a man waits on a motorcycle with an empty sidecar. Goto Dengo is directed out of the plane and into the sidecar by means of gestures; no one will speak to him. He is dressed in an Army uniform devoid of rank and insignia.
A pair of goggles rests on the seat, and he puts them on to keep the bugs out of his eyes. He is a little nervous because he does not have papers and he does not have orders. But they are waved out of the airbase and onto the road without any checks.
The motorcycle driver is a young Filipino man who keeps grinning broadly, at the risk of getting insects stuck between his big white teeth. He seems to think that he has the best job in the whole world, and perhaps he does. He turns south onto a road that probably qualifies as a big highway around these parts, and commences weaving through traffic. Most of this is produce carts drawn by carabaos—big oxlike things with imposing crescent-moon-shaped horns. There are a few automobiles, and the occasional military truck.
For the first couple of hours the road is straight, and runs across damp table-land used for growing rice. Goto Dengo catches glimpses of a body of water off to the left, and isn’t sure whether it is a big lake or part of the ocean. “Laguna de Bay,” says the driver, when he catches Goto looking at it. “Very beautiful.”
Then they turn away from the lake onto a road that climbs gently into sugar cane territory. Suddenly, Goto Dengo catches sight of a volcano: a symmetrical cone, black with vegetation, cloaked in mist as though protected by a mosquito net. The sheer density of the air makes it impossible to judge size and distance; it could be a little cinder cone just off the road, or a huge stratovolcano fifty miles away.
Banana trees, coconut palms, oil palms, and date palms begin to appear, sparsely at first, transforming the landscape into a kind of moist savannah. The driver pulls into a shambolic roadside store to buy petrol. Goto Dengo unfolds his jangled body from the sidecar and sits down at a table beneath an umbrella. He wipes a crust of sweat and dirt from his forehead with the clean handkerchief that he found in his pocket this morning, and orders something to drink. They bring him a glass of ice water, a bowl of raw, locally-produced sugar, and a plate of pinball-sized calamansi limes. He squeezes the calamansis into the water, stirs in sugar, and drinks it convulsively.
The driver comes and joins him; he has cadged a free cup of water from the proprietors. He always wears a mischievous grin, as if he and Goto Dengo are sharing a little private joke. He raises an imaginary rifle to his face and makes a scratching motion with his trigger finger. “You soldier?”
Goto Dengo thinks it over. “No,” he says, “I do not deserve to call myself a soldier.”
The driver is astonished. “No soldier? I thought you were soldier. What are you?”
Goto Dengo thinks about claiming that he is a poet. But he does not deserve that title either. “I am a digger,” he finally says, “I dig holes.”
“Ahh,” the driver says, as if he understands. “Hey, you want?” He takes two cigarettes out of his pocket.
Goto Dengo has to laugh at the smoothness of the gambit. “Over here,” he says to the proprietor. “Cigarettes.” The driver grins and puts his cigarettes back where they came from.
The owner comes over and hands Goto Dengo a pack of Lucky Strikes and a book of matches. “How much?” says Goto Dengo, and takes out an envelope of money that he found in his pocket this morning. He takes the bills out and looks at them: each is printed in English with the words THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT and then some number of pesos. There is a picture of a fat obelisk in the middle, a monument to Jose P. Rizal that stands near the Manila Hotel.
The proprietor grimaces. “You have silver?”
“Silver? Silver metal?”
“Yes,” the driver says.
“Is that what people use?”
The driver nods.
“This is no good?” Goto Dengo holds up the crisp, perfect bills.
The owner takes the envelope from Goto Dengo’s hand and counts out a few of the largest denomination of bills, pockets them, and leaves.
Goto Dengo breaks the seal on the pack of Lucky Strikes, raps the pack on the tabletop a few times, and opens the lid. In addition to the cigarettes, there is a printed card in there. He can just see the top part of it: it is a drawing of a man in a military officer’s cap. He pulls it out slowly, revealing an eagle insignia on the cap, a pair of aviator sunglasses, an enormous corncob pipe, a lapel bearing a line of four stars, and finally, in block letters, the words I SHALL RETURN.
The driver is looking purposefully nonchalant. Goto Dengo shows him the card and raises his eyebrows. “It is nothing,” the driver says. “Japan very strong. Japanese people will be here forever. MacArthur good only for selling cigarettes.”
When Goto Dengo opens the book of matches, he finds the same picture of MacArthur, and the same words, printed on the inside.
After a smoke, they are back on the road. More black cones coalesce, all around them now, and the road begins to ramble up over hills and down into valleys. The trees get closer and closer together until they are riding through a sort of cultivated and inhabited jungle: pineapples close to the ground, coffee and cocoa bushes in the middle, bananas and coconuts overhead. They pass through one village after another, each one a cluster of dilapidated huts huddled around a great white church, built squat and strong to survive earthquakes. They zigzag around heaps of fresh coconuts piled by the roadside, spilling out into the right-of-way. Finally they turn off of the main road and into a dirt track that winds through the trees. The track has been rutted by the tires of trucks that are much too big for it. Freshly snapped-off tree branches litter the ground.
They pass through a deserted village. Stray dogs flit in and out of huts whose front doors swing unlatched. Heaps of young green coconuts rot under snarls of black flies.
Another mile down the road, the cultivated forest gives way to the wild kind, and a military checkpoint bars the road. The smile vanishes from the driver’s face.
Goto Dengo states his name to one of the guards. Not knowing why he is here, he can say nothing else. He is pretty sure now that this is a prison camp and that he is about to become an inmate. As his eyes adjust he can see a barrier of barbed wire strung from tree to tree, and a second barrier inside of that. Peering carefully into the undergrowth he can make out where they dug bunkers and established pillboxes, he can map out their interlocking fields of fire in his mind. He sees ropes dangling from the tops of tall trees where snipers can tie themselves into the branches if need be. It has all been done according to doc trine, but it has a perfection that is never seen on a real battlefield, only in training camps.
He is startled to realize that a
ll of these fortifications are designed to keep people out, not keep them in.
A call comes through on the field telephone, the barrier is raised, and they are waved through. Half a mile into the jungle they come to a cluster of tents pitched on platforms made from the freshly hewn logs of the trees that were cut down to make this clearing. A lieutenant is standing in a shady patch, waiting for them.
“Lieutenant Goto, I am Lieutenant Mori.”
“You have arrived in the Southern Resource Zone recently, Lieutenant Mori?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“You are standing directly beneath a coconut tree.”
Lieutenant Mori looks straight up in the air to see several wooly brown cannonballs dangling high over his head. “Ah, so!” he says, and moves out of the way. “Did you have any conversation with the driver on the way here?”
“Just a few words.”
“What did you discuss with him?”
“Cigarettes. Silver.”
“Silver?” Lieutenant Mori is very interested in this, so Goto Dengo recounts their whole conversation.
“You told him that you were a digger?”
“Something like that, yes.”
Lieutenant Mori backs off a step, turning to an enlisted man who has been standing off to the side, and nods. The enlisted man picks the butt of his rifle up off the ground, wheels the weapon around to a horizontal position, and turns towards the driver. He covers the distance in about six steps, accelerating to a full sprint, and cuts loose with a throaty roar as he drives his bayonet into the driver’s slim body. The victim is picked up off his feet, then sprawls on his back with a low gasp. The soldier straddles him and thrusts the bayonet into his torso several more times, each stroke making a wet hissing sound as metal slides between walls of meat.
The driver ends up sprawled motionless on the ground, jetting blood in all directions.