Kensuke's Kingdom

  It was after our reconciliation that I came to know Kensuke better than I ever had before. His English became more and more fluent, and he clearly loved to speak it now. For some reason he was always more happy to talk while we were out fishing in his outrigger. We did not go out that often, only when the fishing was so poor in the shallows that we needed to catch big fish for smoking and keeping.

  Once at sea, the stories simply flowed. He talked a great deal of his childhood in Japan, of his twin sister and how the worst thing he’d ever done was to push her out of the tree in their backyard, how she’d broken her arm, how when he painted that cherry tree it always reminded him of her. But she, too, had been in Nagasaki when the bomb fell. I remember he even told me the address of where he lived when he was studying in London — No. 22 Clanricarde Gardens; I have never forgotten it. Once, he had gone to watch Chelsea playing soccer and afterward he’d sat astride a lion in Trafalgar Square and been chased away by a policeman.

  But it was Kimi and Michiya he talked of most, about how he wished he could have seen Michiya grow up. Michiya, he said, would have been nearly fifty by now if the bomb hadn’t fallen on Nagasaki, and Kimi would be exactly the same age as he was, seventy-five. I rarely interrupted him when he was like this, but once to comfort him, I did say, “Bombs don’t kill everyone. They could still be alive. You never know. You could find out. You could go home.” He looked at me then as if it was the first time such a possibility had ever occurred to him in all those years. “Why not?” I went on. “When we see a ship and we light the fire and they come and fetch me, you could come, too. You could go back to Japan. You don’t have to stay here.”

  He thought about it for some time, but then shook his head. “No,” he said. “They are dead. That bomb was very big bomb, very terrible bomb. Americans say Nagasaki is destroyed, every house. I hear them. My family dead for sure. I stay here. I safe here. I stay on my island.”

  Day after day we piled more and more wood on the beacon. It was massive now, bigger even than the one I had built on Watch Hill. Every morning now before we went down to the pool to wash, Kensuke would send me up to the top of the hill with his binoculars. I always scanned the horizon both in hope and in trepidation. I longed to see a ship, of course I did. I longed to go home. But at the same time I dreaded what that would mean. I felt so much at home with Kensuke. The thought of leaving him filled me with a terrible sadness. I determined to do all I could to persuade him to come away with me, if and when a ship came.

  At every opportunity now I talked to him of the outside world, and the more I talked, the more he seemed to become interested. Of course, I never spoke of the wars and famines and disasters. I painted the best picture of the world outside that I could. There was so much he didn’t know. He marveled at all I told him, at the microwave in our kitchen, at computers and what they could do, at the Concorde flying faster than the speed of sound, at men going to the moon, and at satellites. These things took some explaining, I can tell you. Some of it he didn’t even believe, not at first.

  The time came when he began to quiz me. In particular he would ask about Japan. But I knew very little about Japan, only that back home in England lots of things, including our microwave, had “made in Japan” written on them: cars, calculators, my father’s stereo, my mother’s hair dryer.

  “I ‘made in Japan’ person.” He laughed. “Very old machine, still good, still very strong.”

  Try as I did to trawl my memory, after a while I could find nothing more to tell him about Japan, but he would still keep asking. “You sure there no war in Japan these days?” I was fairly certain there wasn’t, and said so. “They build up Nagasaki again after bomb?” I told him they had, and hoped I was right. All I could do was to reassure him as best I could, and then tell him the same few things I did know about over and over again. He seemed to love to hear it, like a child listening to a favorite fairy story.

  Once, after I’d finished expounding yet again on the amazing sound quality of my father’s Sony stereo that made the whole house vibrate, he said very quietly, “Maybe one day before I die I go back to my home. One day I go back to Japan. Maybe.” I wasn’t sure he meant it, but it did mean that he was at least considering it, and that gave me some cause for hope. It wasn’t until the night of the turtles, though, that I came to believe Kensuke was really serious about it.

  I was fast asleep when he woke me. “You come, Micasan. Very quickly you come. You come,” he said.

  “What for?” I asked him, but he was already gone. I ran out after him into the moonlight and caught him halfway down the track. “What are we doing. Where are we going? Is it a boat?”

  “Very soon you see. Very soon.” Stella stayed at my heels all the way to the beach. She never liked going out in the dark very much. I looked around. There was nothing there. The beach looked completely deserted. The waves lapped listlessly. The moon rode the clouds, and the world felt still about me as if it were holding its breath. I did not see what was happening until Kensuke suddenly fell on his knees in the sand. “They very small. Sometimes they are not so strong. Sometimes in the morning birds come and eat them.” And then I saw it.

  I thought it was a crab at first. It wasn’t. It was a minuscule turtle, tinier than a terrapin, clambering out of a hole in the sand and then beetling off down the beach toward the sea. Then another, and another, and farther down the beach dozens of them, hundreds I could see now, maybe thousands, all scuttling across the moonlit sand into the sea. Everywhere, the beach was alive with them. Stella was nosing at one, so I warned her off. She yawned and looked innocently up at the moon.

  I saw that one of them was on its back at the bottom of the hole, legs kicking frantically. Kensuke reached down, picked it up gently, and set it on its feet in the sand. “You go to sea, little turtle,” he said. “You live there now. You soon be big, fine turtle, and then one day you come back and see me maybe.” He sat back on his haunches to watch him scuttle off. “You know what they do, Mica. Mother turtles, they lay eggs in this place. Then, one nighttime every year, always when moon is high, little turtles are born. Long way to go to sea. Very many die. So always I stay. I help them. I chase birds away, so they not eat baby turtles. Many years from now, when turtles are big, they come back. They lay eggs again. True story, Micasan.”

  All night long we kept our vigil over the mass birth as the infant turtles made their run for it. We patrolled together, reaching into every hole we found to see if there were any left, stuck, or stranded. We found several too weak to make the journey, and carried them down into the sea ourselves. The sea seemed to revive them. Away they went, no swimming lessons needed. We turned dozens right-side up and shepherded them safely into the sea.

  When dawn came and the birds came down to scavenge, we were there to drive them off. Stella chased and barked after them, and we ran at them, shrieking, waving, hurling stones. We were not entirely successful, but most of the turtles made it down into the sea. But even here they were still not entirely safe. In spite of all our desperate efforts, a few were plucked up out of the water by the birds and carried off.

  By noon it was all over. Kensuke was tired as we stood ankle deep in the water watching the very last of them swim away. He put his arm on my shoulder. “They very small turtles, Micasan, but they very brave. They braver than me. They do not know what they find out there, what happen to them; but they go, anyway. Very brave. Maybe they teach me good lesson. I make up my mind. When one day ship come, and we light fire, and they find us, then I go. Like turtles I go. I go with you. I go home to Japan. Maybe I find Kimi. Maybe I find Michiya. I find truth. I go with you, Micasan.”

  Shortly after this, the rains came and forced us to shelter for days on end inside the cave house. The tracks became torrents, the forest became a swamp. I longed for the howl of the gibbons instead of the roar of the rain on the trees outside. It did not rain in fits and starts as it did at home, but constantly, incessantly. I worried over our beacon, which was becomi
ng more saturated now with every passing day. Would it ever dry out? Would this rain ever stop? But Kensuke was stoical about it all. “It stop when it stop, Micasan,” he told me. “You cannot make rain stop by wanting it to stop. Besides, rain very good thing. Keep fruit growing. Keep stream flowing. Keep monkeys alive, you also, me also.”

  I did make a dash up to the hilltop each morning with the binoculars, but I don’t know why I bothered. Sometimes it was raining so hard, I could hardly see the sea at all.

  Occasionally we sallied out into the forest to gather enough fruit to keep us going. There were berries growing in abundance now, which Kensuke insisted on gathering — he didn’t seem to mind getting soaked to the skin as much as I did. We ate some, but most he turned into vinegar. The rest he bottled in honey and water. “For rainy day, yes?” He laughed. (He loved experimenting with the new expressions he had picked up.) We ate a lot of smoked fish — he always seemed to have enough in reserve. It made me very thirsty, but I never tired of it.

  I remember the rainy season more for the painting we did than for anything else. We painted together for hours on end — until the octopus ink ran out. These days Kensuke was painting more from his memory — his house in Nagasaki, and several portraits of Kimi and Michiya standing together, always under the cherry tree. The faces, I noticed, he always left very indistinct. He once explained this to me. (He was more and more fluent now in his English.)

  “I remember who they are,” he said. “I remember where they are. I can hear them in my head, but I cannot see them.”

  I spent days perfecting my first attempt at an orangutan. It was of Tomodachi. She would often crouch, soulful and dripping, at the cave mouth, almost as if she were posing for me. So I took full advantage.

  Kensuke was ecstatic in his delight at my painting, and lavish in his praise. “One day, Micasan, you will be fine painter, like Hokusai, maybe.” That was the first shell painting of mine he kept and stored away in his chest. I felt so proud. After that he insisted on keeping many of my shell paintings. He would often take them out of the chest and study them carefully, showing me where I might improve, but always generously. Under his watchful eye, in the glow of his encouragement, every picture I painted seemed more accomplished, more how I wanted it to be.

  Then one morning the gibbons were howling again and the rains had stopped. We went fishing in the shallows, out at sea, too, and had very soon replenished our stores of smoked fish and octopus ink. We played soccer again. And all the while the beacon on the hilltop was drying out.

  Wherever we went now we took the binoculars with us, just in case. We very nearly lost them once when Kikanbo, Tomodachi’s errant son — always the cheekiest, most playful of all the young orangutans — stole them and ran off into the forest. When we caught up with him he didn’t want to surrender them at all. In the end Kensuke had to bribe him — a red banana for a pair of binoculars.

  But as time passed we were beginning to live as if we were going to be staying on the island forever, and that began to trouble me deeply. Kensuke made repairs to his outrigger. He made more vinegar. He collected herbs and dried them in the sun. And he seemed less and less interested in looking for a ship. He seemed to have forgotten all about it.

  He sensed my restlessness. He was working on the boat one day and, ever hopeful, I was scanning the sea through the binoculars. “It is easier when you are old like me, Micasan,” he said.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Waiting,” he said. “One day a ship will come, Micasan. Maybe soon, maybe not so soon. But it will come. Life must not be spent always hoping, always waiting. Life is for living.” I knew he was right, of course, but only when I was lost and absorbed in my painting was I truly able to obliterate all thoughts of rescue, all thoughts of my mother and father.

  I woke one morning and Stella was barking outside the cave house. I got up and went out after her. At first she was nowhere to be seen. When I did find her, she was high up on the hill, half growling, half barking, and her hackles were up. I soon saw why. A junk! A small junk far out to sea. I scrambled down the hill and met Kensuke coming out of the cave house buckling his belt. “There’s a boat!” I cried. “The fire! Let’s light the fire!”

  “First I look,” said Kensuke. And, despite all my protestations, he went back into the cave house for his binoculars. I raced up the hill again. The junk was close enough to shore. They would be bound to see the smoke. I was sure of it. Kensuke was making his way up toward me infuriatingly slowly. He seemed to be in no hurry at all. He studied the boat carefully now through his binoculars, taking his time about it.

  “We’ve got to light the fire,” I said. “We’ve got to.”

  Kensuke caught me suddenly by the arm. “It is the same boat, Micasan. Killer men come. They kill the gibbons and steal away the babies. They come back again. I am very sure. I do not forget the boat. I never forget. They were wicked people. We must go quick. We must find all orangutans. We must bring them into the cave. They be safer there.”

  It did not take him long to gather them in. As we walked into the forest, Kensuke simply began to sing.

  They materialized out of nowhere, in twos, in threes, until we had fifteen of them. Four were still missing. We went deeper and deeper into the forest to find them, Kensuke singing all the while. Then three more came crashing through the trees, Tomodachi amongst them. Only one was still missing: Kikanbo.

  Standing there in a clearing in the forest, surrounded by the orangutans, Kensuke sang for Kikanbo again and again, but he did not come. Then we heard a motor start up, somewhere out at sea, an outboard motor. Kensuke sang out again louder now, more urgently. We listened for Kikanbo. We looked for him. We called for him.

  “We cannot wait any longer,” said Kensuke at last. “I go in front, Micasan, you behind. Bring last ones with you. Quick now.” And off he went, up the track, leading one of the orangutans by the hand, and still singing. As we followed, I remember thinking that this was just like the Pied Piper leading the children away into a cave in the mountainside.

  I had my work cut out at the back. Some of younger orangutans were far more interested in playing hide-and-seek than following. In the end I had to scoop up two of them and carry them, one in the crook of each arm. They were a great deal heavier than they looked. I kept glancing back over my shoulder for Kikanbo, and calling for him, but he still did not come.

  The outboard motor died. I heard voices, loud voices, men’s voices, laughter. I was running now, the orangutans clinging around my neck. The forest hooted and howled in alarm all around me.

  As I reached the cave I heard the first shots ring out. Every bird, every bat in the forest lifted off so that the screeching sky was black with them. We gathered the orangutans together at the back of the cave and huddled there in the darkness with them, as the shooting went on and on.

  Of all of them, Tomodachi was the most agitated. But they all needed constant comfort and reassurance from Kensuke. All through this dreadful nightmare Kensuke sang to them softly.

  The hunters were nearer, ever nearer, shooting and shouting. I closed my eyes. I prayed. The orangutans whimpered aloud as if they were singing along with Kensuke. All this while Stella lay at my feet, a permanent growl in her throat. I held on to the ruff of her neck, just in case. The young orangutans burrowed their heads into me wherever they could, under my arms, under my knees, and clung on.

  The shots cracked so close now, splitting the air and echoing around the cave. There were distant yells of triumph. I knew only too well what this must mean.

  After that, the hunt moved away. We could hear no more voices, just the occasional shot. And then nothing. The forest had fallen silent. We stayed where we were for hours. I wanted to venture out to see if they had gone, but Kensuke would not let me. He sang all the time, and the orangutans stayed huddled around us, until we heard the sound of the outboard motor starting up. Even then Kensuke still made me wait a while longer. When at last we did emerge, the junk w
as already well out to sea.

  We searched the island for Kikanbo, sang for him, called for him, but there was no sign of him. Kensuke was in deep despair. He was inconsolable. He went off on his own, and I let him go. I came across him shortly after, kneeling over the bodies of two dead gibbons, both mothers. He was not crying, but he had been. His eyes were filled with hurt and bewilderment. We dug away a hole in the soft earth on the edge of the forest and buried them. There were no words in me left to speak, and Kensuke had no songs left to sing.

  We were making our sorrowful way back home along the beach when it happened. Kikanbo ambushed us. He came charging out of the trees, scattering sand at us, and then climbed up Kensuke’s leg and wrapped himself around his neck. It was such a good moment, a great moment.

  That night Kensuke and I sang “Ten Green Bottles” over and over again, very loudly, over our fish soup. It was, I suppose, a sort of wake for the two dead gibbons, as well as an ode to joy for Kikanbo. The forest outside seemed to echo our singing.

  But in the weeks that followed I could see that Kensuke was brooding on the terrible events of that day. He set about making a cage of stout bamboo at the back of the cave to house the orangutans more securely in case the killer men ever returned. He kept going over and over it, how he should have done this before, how he would never have forgiven himself if Kikanbo had been taken, how he wished the gibbons would come when he sang, so he could save them, too. We cut down branches and brush from the forest and stacked them outside the cave mouth so that they could be pulled across to disguise the entrance to the cave house.

  He became very nervous, very anxious, sending me often to the hilltop with the binoculars to see if the junk had returned. But as time went by, as the immediate threat receded, he became more his own self again. Even so, I felt he was always wary, always slightly on edge.