The turtle house, p.10
The Turtle House, page 10
Grandminnie raises her eyebrows.
“You don’t need to leave, Grandminnie. I know you don’t want to.”
“And you need to go back to Austin. Back to your apartment and that roommate who is always calling. Stop worrying your parents. Life keeps going on, you know.”
The night I got home, I had told my parents that I didn’t know if I wanted to be an architect anymore. They didn’t believe me. So I told them I was lonely and I hadn’t made any good friends. They didn’t believe that, either, because they had called a million times and gotten my answering machine, so they knew I was out. I told them I was going through a quarter-life crisis. I told them that I missed them, that I missed home. Finally, I told them that I had screwed up designs for a building. But you’re so careful, they said. Finally I yelled at them, You don’t have to know everything about me! Shocked, they gave up asking and I got a job at Bags-N-Bows a few days later.
“Tell me more about Akio.”
“You can’t fool an old lady like me. I know how life can be.”
We’re quiet for a moment. I grab a slice of bread and tear it into itty-bitty pieces for the littlest sliders, tiny things that get picked off by hawks when they are sunning themselves, end up just a shell somewhere in a field. Maybe, I think, as I toss bread, they’ll eat this and grow just enough that they can’t be carried off.
Chapter 10
Kadoma
1943–1945
November 7, 1943
My love,
I have completed the most basic of training and have settled in Hsinking. I am living with many other new soldiers in the guesthouse of a mansion. Our leaders have the big house, and we are all camped out in a few rooms. We had our bikes parked in the front, chained to the fence, but they were stolen in the night when the fence was cut apart. Now we keep our bikes next to us as we sleep. I am married to my ten-speed. I share a pillow with my handlebars.
During the day, my main duty is to deliver letters and such from person to person. The bicycle the army gave me has wooden tires. Madness! It is like swimming in a current, trying to pedal through town. I’d like rubber tubes, and since you are so good at everything, I was wondering, dear future wife, if you could conjure up a rubber plant, plant it among our mothers’ peonies, and maybe make some tubes for me . . .
November 28, 1943
Thank you for the socks, dear Mineko. I do think their thickness will help with the blisters. My feet are unaccustomed to the amount of pedaling. Who has ever heard of infected feet due to bicycle overuse? It would be embarrassing if it weren’t happening to the others. We’re all university students, all learning how to make rice on our own. Which reminds me: yes, I’m eating well. When we fail to cook for ourselves, our superiors are kind enough to share food from their table. They have a full staff in their house! Maids, valets, cooks. The cooks are locals and have been taught Japanese recipes, and they are better than at home. I haven’t confessed any of this to my mother. She would be appalled.
I am sorry to hear about how Hisako is being cruel. You should trick her—tell her that if she stares into the water at the turtle house she’ll become a princess, then push her in. The turtles will eat her, since they eat everything you throw in there.
. . . Any luck on my inner tubes? How is the rubber plant faring?
December 11, 1943
I hate that in two weeks it would have been the end of the session and I would have been back with you, preparing to marry. I hate that I will be missing Shōgatsu. Light an extra-large and extra-hot bonfire for me to scare off the demons. It is increasingly confusing here. While some locals are gentle, others have been difficult. What I thought were pranks, were just a prelude to a little war. Trip lines for bikes, women stabbing soldiers in the marketplace, little explosions here and there. No great casualties, just injuries and annoyances. But do not worry about me, as I have become quite close to my superiors and they only send me to the safest of places in town. They like my winsome personality. And did I mention that the big house has an in-ground, indoor pool? It’s heated, Mineko, like a bathhouse. We bike boys can use it when the superiors aren’t bathing. I’m keeping up my strokes. You would be impressed. Must be my newly strengthened leg muscles . . .
December 29, 1943
Yes, I fell off my bike due to a wire strung across a street. I was lucky. It was attached to a device that could have exploded, but either the fellow who put it together read the directions wrong or I have good turtle luck. I landed on my pretty face, but my cheek will heal in time and the scar shall be quite dramatic and mysterious. Nothing broken, just bruised. I’ll be back in action in less than a week, which will be good. I hope that things will settle down as the new year approaches. More leisure time? One could only hope. I’ve heard plans of a big feast at the mansion (this is the benefit of the infirmary: gossip). Many of us will be invited, I think. Or, at least, we will be allowed to attend as the night wears on and officers get drunk. I plan to fill up my plate and pockets with fish cakes and return to my cot to write you letter after letter to celebrate the new year, which will surely bring the end of this war with an Imperial victory. We are only hearing good news from the islands, but I have my doubts that this is true. Is this what you are being told as well? Write to me your news. Of course I want to hear all the news of home: How is your sister? Your mother? Your father? I hear that the Americans are lousy fighters with horrible reputations for impurity and ignorance. I hope for only the best for you and miss you greatly. Bundle up and say hello to our turtles and our house, my love. . . .
Mineko waited for another letter from Akio. The last few, with their blacked-out sentences, made her feel unsteady and shaky, like they were holes Akio could fall through. She had known their letters were being read, but evidence of it, the thick black ink painted with precision, dyeing the paper and bleeding through to the other side, felt ominous. She wondered how much of her nearly daily letters were readable, how many had been delivered. She was also convinced that Akio was trying to protect her with his light and joking language. The letters themselves felt as polished as the newspaper articles she read and the truth as slippery as a fish. So, Mineko tried to censor herself as she wrote, tried to channel a perfect loyal citizen and still have her thoughts come through. I don’t care about this war. I never have. I want you home.
Letters from soldiers abroad came on Wednesdays, and a line formed at the mail outpost on the edge of Kadoma near the train station by six in the morning in fair weather and in the rains and snows that moved in upon them in the near-winter. Hunchbacked old women with tight white buns and thin, proud men, leaning on bamboo canes; young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, holding the hands of toddlers, rubbing their eyes; field-workers kept from active duty by a cleft palate or twisted limbs, wearing rough blue fabric, who once grew food for the populace, but now for only the military. Everyone in line was hungry, the audible rumbling of stomachs a wartime equalizer among classes.
Mineko grew friendly with this queue of waiters and hopers, remembering a tiny bit of candy from her stash for the little ones, playing peekaboo with the babies. Often she brought her sewing and because the wait was long and because she felt she should, she darned an elderly woman’s shawl if there was a moth hole, patched a worker’s woolen cap to keep out the rain. It was one of the oddities of war, she thought. Never had she spent so much time away from those her family associated with, the ones she had routinely passed on the sidewalks of her neighborhood, those of her station. Mineko enjoyed her line-compatriots and spoke of them at dinner, much to the chagrin of her mother.
“You and your downtrodden friends. This better not get back to the Satos.”
“We’re a nation at war, aren’t we all downtrodden?” Mineko responded angrily one evening, her nostrils flaring. Her mother yelled for her to be quiet and darted to the window to see if anyone had been passing by of note to hear such insolence. But being promised gave Mineko newfound prominence in her family, even if her mother and Hisako refused to admit it, so she wasn’t sent outside when she said this. Instead, she got to stay in her place at the table while her mother glared at her and Mineko’s words lingered at the edges of the room.
The last Wednesday before the new year, the post officer climbed on top of his service-window desk and announced that due to the overwhelming amount of Shōgatsu letters and gifts from their country to all over the Pacific and Manchukuo, it would be well into the new year, months maybe, before any would receive letters from abroad. When a woman burst into tears, causing her baby and two young daughters to do so as well, the postman became flustered and jumped down from his perch.
An elderly woman clicked her tongue in dismay. Even when a CLOSED sign was hung outside the door and the window hatch rolled down, the line lingered. The farm help left first. Mineko stayed until all had gone away.
Through the fall, Akio’s mother had been inviting Mineko to private weekly teas. Their meetings were awkward at first as Mineko struggled to sit still in her pine-green kimono, having worn mostly monpe as mandated by the state and learning that she much preferred the pants. But she brought with her Akio’s letters, willing to read aloud some parts of the correspondence, especially those pertaining to Akio’s health, food, and day-to-day life, and it became clear that he was protecting his mother from the less savory aspects of his experience. Mrs. Sato was impressed with Mineko’s serious attention to the details in Akio’s letters, how she was able to read between what Akio was saying and what he meant, as if translating a rare language. Mineko had researched his location as best she could, given the military’s strict control of the post, and described the terrain and what she believed the buildings around him looked like.
“Akio told me that you have the remarkable ability to see how things are built and are very curious. That you have an innate sense of scrutiny.”
Mineko did not know if this was meant as a compliment or as a statement of fact, and her face must have conveyed this confusion, because Mrs. Sato smiled gently.
“Mineko, it is like you study minutiae in order to treasure. You treasure him and you show honor to my Akio.”
Mineko was so struck by this woman’s understanding and immediately got to her knees and bowed before Mrs. Sato, something she did not foresee occurring. Mrs. Sato reached out her arm toward Mineko as she rose.
“Next time, we take our tea quickly and we walk together, yes? Maybe look at the foliage before winter falls?”
But that walk was never to happen. Before the new year, Mineko stopped receiving invitations. She had hoped that she could spend Shōgatsu with Akio’s family; she had hoped that she was making headway into the lives of her future in-laws and secretly worried that, perhaps, it was something she had said or done.
“Your precious Akio’s people have forgotten about you,” her sister said one afternoon, coldly, while slowly embroidering an apron. She had been working on it for months. Mineko remarked that Hisako had the hand-eye coordination of a drunk sloth. Even a sober sloth would be done with that apron by now.
Mineko had noticed the mourning flags. She had kept count on her way to the house to feed the turtles. She knew when a flag was put up; she noticed the holes growing larger in the ones that had been hanging too long in the cold. But after counting, she folded them away in her mind and cleared the streets to a time of less chaos. This is where she wanted her love of Akio to live—among the calm, pretty lanes of Kadoma, on the mossy backs of turtles, and in the purifying cold of the green pond of the turtle house.
And it was there that she daydreamed of her family with Akio. She imagined their children, gave them names and quirks and personalities, little arguments and little passions. Mineko assigned them bedrooms, walking through the house and seeing mats and toy trucks and dolls spread out. She imagined a mama cat giving birth in the genkan and spaniels running through the yard. She imagined herself at a desk in the corner, designing a new gazebo for the pond or an arched bridge to span the stream after the rainy season, Akio rubbing her neck because she had spent too much time looking down. She imagined improvements to the home, could hear the hammering that would be needed as they replaced boards and updated the kitchen. And in all these dreams, so real that she could nearly disappear into them, Akio was there, by her side, smiling.
On February 15, a telegram was delivered to the Sato home. As was village tradition, Akio’s mother and father came to the Kamemoto home, choosing to walk most of the distance in the cold. Mineko watched as they came through the gate, snow thick on Mrs. Sato’s umbrella. The crocheting she had been working on much of the winter, an impressive length of lace that wound into a cobra-like pile at her feet, fluttered as her father opened the door and a cold draft came in. There was a quiet, wordless hello. Mineko dropped the hook, her stitches falling apart, unknotting themselves before they hit the ground.
From Mrs. Sato, Mineko received the small official photo of Akio in his uniform.
There was no funeral, no pyre lit, just a small gathering at the temple and a flag draped on the Satos’ gate. Had they been an arranged match, a smaller flag would have been placed on the Kamemoto gate, but because they were a love match, there would be nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. The words took root in Mineko’s very soul. Akio was now nothing. He once had a body, but now they waited for bone fragments in a box to be returned at a later time. Then they’d be able to pick through them, arrange them in an urn, place him to sleep with his ancestors. But only if a body had been found. Or maybe there had been and it wasn’t identifiable. Nothing had been specified. The telegram raised more questions than answers. The Imperial Army gave few details inside their frilly language about honor and glory.
What she knew and what she carried with her: Akio had indeed attended the Shōgatsu celebration at the officers’ home. No one knew at what time, if they came to eat with the other men, or if they came after, if the meal was separate from the higher-ups, or if they filled their plates from the same table. What was known was that a member of a guerrilla group had become a cook, had planted himself within the ranks of servants and waited, months and months, until he took the poison provided by the Hans and used it in the feast. Which food, no one knew. How many died, no one knew. They were told simply that the garrison was quickly overrun with local men and women, waiting in the snow for a sign. Mineko imagined the raucous soldiers, drinking and eating and then suddenly growing ill, dying one by one until the mansion that Akio had described in his letters was quiet. Just lights on through windows, just a poisoned feast growing cold, a Buddha surrounded by orange slices and flowers overlooking the entire scene. Eventually, a fire was set, that night or the next day, or maybe it was the fire that had killed so many, not the poison. Who knew really?
Mineko’s sleeping brain dreamed every night that she was outside the officers’ garret, that she could see Akio leaving the party, walking along the path that led to the guesthouse. In his hands, he carried a bowl, he was singing a song. When he went inside, a light flicked on, gently, then the singing stopped. In the dream, Mineko screamed, but no one heard her, and she couldn’t move, her body wet and dripping, stuck in a glass box. A pale, silent swan flew from the roof of the house where Akio lay dying, a swan with wide wings and no water in sight, flying into the moon, like a painting. It was a dream that would repeat for hours, night after night, for many years, a dream that she would awake from sweating, but to which she always wanted to return.
Six months passed slowly, painfully. Mineko carried Akio’s photo with her at all times. To keep it from becoming too worn, she made a small canvas pouch for it, safety-pinning it onto her camisole. The family moved in a quiet dance around her. In between her duties, Fumiko would sit mournfully next to Mineko for a few minutes, her silence a vigil. Even Hisako took a break from pestering her sister, which Mineko did not fully appreciate. She wanted her younger sister to say something, anything. She wanted a reason to pounce, and yet she felt undone and open, as if her skin had been removed and she was all nerves and muscles out in the world. Nerves and muscles choking down breakfast. Nerves and muscles trudging to the turtle house. Nerves and muscles waiting, for what, she did not know.
Gossip spread that soon there would be Americans coming. Americans! Big men, dirty feet, and loud voices. And although the newspaper proclaimed victories each week, tiny islands that Mineko had to look up on a map to locate, the number of flags draped seemed to be too many. She came to feel that someone was lying, even mentioned it surreptitiously to her father, who shook his head and suggested that it was her severe sadness that caused such thoughts. But he, too, stopped sleeping, often out in the garden in the middle of the night. Mineko sometimes watched him, pacing, staring up at the moon. He lost so much more weight that the doctor visited twice in the spring.
It was her father who came to her one morning and suggested that the weather was now warm enough, and perhaps she’d like to go for a swim. Mineko had never imagined he found her swimming habit likable, although he had never confronted her on the subject. But the idea of being in the pond, of feeling the sloppy stones beneath her feet, made her queasy.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever swim again.”
“You will, my daughter. I know this loss is great. I have lost people, too. But there will be an opening, a moment from the gods that will help you move on. It will be like a foothold when you’re hiking—remember when we hiked when you were young?” Her father sipped some of the medicinal tea and tried not to grimace.
Mineko nodded. But it was difficult to remember scrambling over rocks with her father. Childhood felt so long ago.
Nearly another year passed. The days were slow-fast-slow-fast. Food was even more scarce, so Mineko was constantly hungry. She awoke, tried to find food for her family, slept, and repeated the pattern, which tightened the knot inside her gut. She joined up to dig ditches next to the main roads, in case of air raids, foxhole shelters for locals to hide in, and, ultimately, to fight from when needed. The Americans were coming, the rumors continued.
