Please Enjoy Your Happiness (26 page)

‘I didn’t see him after we went to the . . . er . . . Hall of Flowers,’ Oscar said.

‘What? What?’ the chief asked. Clearly he had no idea what Oscar was talking about.

‘The Hall of Flowers,’ Oscar said again. ‘It is famous, chief. The whole US Navy knows about that place, and if it has not been closed down it is because the chief of naval operations approves of it, don’t you think?’

‘What? What?’ the exasperated chief demanded. He was wiping spittle from his cheek.

‘Look, man – uh, sorry, “chief” – the Hall of Flowers is the best-run educational institution for boys and girls on this side of the Pacific. I was happy to make a donation. Um . . . Gunther
probably just missed the last boat – through no fault of his own, I am sure!’

Astonished because the chief was apparently buying into this explanation, I manoeuvred forth to use my skills of deception and subterfuge. ‘He probably did not overstay his welcome,’ I said. ‘The Hall of Flowers is a very welcoming place. There is good security there too. I wouldn’t worry too much.’

‘Well, look,’ the chief said. ‘Chaplain Peeples is very concerned about this, because Gunther is one of his assistants. He is going to put Gunther on report. The chaplain says that Gunther – like you, Rogers – is not an American citizen. He is a damned Nazi – I mean, he is German. And the chaplain says that any time a foreigner wearing the uniform of the US Navy is up to no good we can be sure he is vulnerable to exploitation and penetration by foreign espionage agents. All foreigners need watching, the chaplain says. And I am inclined to agree with him – not that I have any choice – because in my experience foreigners cannot be trusted. I don’t care if the Hall of Flowers is a five-star university. If it is run by the Chinese, that school can’t be trusted. If he is still at that place, they’ve put all kinds of Communist ideas in his head. You understand that, don’t you, Rogers? Chaplain Peeples has already warned me about you, smart-ass!’

I cringed, Yukiko. You may remember how alarmed I could become when trouble was afoot and my fate was uncertain. I was thankful that I had tucked that copy of
The Chinese Conquer China
and the latest
China Reconstructs
into my pants when I got aboard the ship in the dark of night. I had hidden them under my mattress, saving them for those hours when I might sneak away to read them in my hideout above the captain’s bridge. But I almost panicked when I began imagining Chaplain
Peeples, or Chief Drybread, going through my possessions to search for un-American literature. I was sure they had already broken into Gunther’s locker and had probably up-ended his mattress looking for documentation that Gunther was a spy or a degenerate or a dupe of the great Communist conspiracy to rule the world.

I told Oscar to stick around, and I raced back to my compartment, grabbed those items I knew would inflame the chaplain’s imagination, and gave them to my
pachuco
friend, who took one look at them and said, simply, ‘Cool.’

Later in the day there was still no Gunther. I was jumpy, an expression you thought was funny. I heard that a search party had been dispatched to Wan Chai. I also heard that certain members of the search party were extremely happy with their assignment: track down and apprehend Gunther Erlichmann at some kind of boys’ and girls’ school called the Hall of Flowers and make sure that you apologize to the schoolmistress for disturbing classes. That command, I knew all too well, had come directly from the chaplain.

Not much was happening on the firefighting front, so I decided to talk my way into the officers’ quarters and head straight to the chaplain’s chamber. The pilots who were also quartered there were familiar with me because of the work I did on the
News Horizon
, and they were always eager to lobby me for articles on themselves or their squadrons. They continued to ask if I knew any ‘college girls’ ashore. Poor guys. They didn’t have a clue.

I knocked on the chaplain’s door. I heard him say, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Rogers, sir. Seaman Rogers.’

There was a pause, a silence.

‘R-e-a-l-l-y?’ he said, dragging the word out slowly. ‘Come in here!’

I pushed open the door. Chaplain Peeples was sprawled in his green vinyl armchair. He looked exhausted and unhappy. Commander Crockett was standing behind the chaplain. He loomed over him with just a wisp of amusement on his rugged face.

‘The Hall of Mirrors, Rogers,’ Peeples said. ‘The Hall of Mirrors!’

‘Sir. Do you mean the Hall of Flowers?’

‘The Hall of Flowers!’ Crockett exclaimed. ‘I know that place.’ He silenced himself. But then he said, ‘The chaplain was under the impression that the missing seaman, your friend Gunther Erlichmann, had spent the night without authorization at an exclusive girls’ school of some kind. Now we know! The Hall of Flowers! Goddamn it to hell, Rogers. Seaman Erlichmann is AWOL [absent without leave] and he is holed up, I am pretty damn sure, in a whorehouse, chaplain, a whorehouse!’

Chaplain Peeples inhaled deeply. He looked appalled. ‘My altar boy . . . Gunther?’ he said. ‘I gave him so much good instruction.’

Both men stared at me as if I were an agent of the devil.

‘You,’ the chaplain said. ‘You, I expect such behaviour from. But not Gunther. You, I suppose, fornicated at the Hall of Flowers. You defiled?’

‘No, sir. Not I. There was this Russian woman and I didn’t—’

‘Russian!
Russian!
’ Commander Crockett shuddered. His jowls shook. He smacked the side of his head. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘Russians. Goddamn Russians. Here we go again. Seaman Erlichmann is a dead man. A dead man! I am going to
draw and quarter him myself, and you, Rogers, you! What will I do with you?’

Commander Crockett apologized to the chaplain for the profanity. And then, without saying another word and without looking at me, he left, slamming the door behind him so loudly that it sounded like a clap of thunder.

Chaplain Peeples shook his head in despair. ‘How is this possible?’ he asked weakly. ‘How can a young man fall this low?’

There was a knock on the door. Chief Drybread burst in. ‘Chaplain! Chaplain!’ he said. ‘We got him. He is in a Hong Kong hospital. He’s in the nuthouse! He’s sedated! They told me he is suffering from something called “compassionate emotional exhaustion”. The poor kid! They said it is caused by a youthful mania or exuberance.’

I had no idea what he was talking about.

Chaplain Peeples looked similarly confused. ‘So there is no crime?’ he asked. ‘So Gunther is not exactly AWOL?’

‘That’s correct, sir,’ the chief said. ‘No crime. No AWOL. He is unconscious anyway. They gave him enough of a sedative that he’s going to be sleeping for twenty-four hours. Too much of a good thing, according to one of the nurses. She said, “He’s just a boy.”’

‘Did he say anything before they sedated him?’ I asked.

‘The nurse said he was speaking German when they found him, so they didn’t know what he was saying . . . something about Wonder Bar.’

By that evening the
Shangri-La
was smashing through huge waves somewhere north-east of Hong Kong and south-west of Taiwan. With each plunge of the ship, the waves exploded over the blunt bow. From my hideout above the bridge I could see
spray ascending into the night sky where the moon flickered every now and then through the clouds. I was listening for the chorus of the Sirens but all I could hear was the wail of the winds, now high, now low. Wedged into a corner of the tiny chamber, I thought about how you were preparing yourself for the last week we would be in port in Yokosuka. You wanted that to be a happy moment, Yuki. You wanted us to listen silently to Debussy.

You might cry. You might not cry. Your short life had been stalked by tragedy, but you had survived. A vast army of women – whole divisions and regiments of women – had lived through the war, even as their men died, their homes were destroyed, their families ripped apart. Two atomic bombs had been dropped on them, and they had done whatever was necessary to go on living. I remembered a news photo of an expressionless mother, the skin peeling off her face because of burns and radiation, breastfeeding her contented baby. The more I thought about this, rocked in my cradle by the storm, the more I was certain that these women of Japan were the heroes. In my mind, it did not matter if they were bar girls or
mamasan
s or prostitutes or factory workers or the 31,080 women who in the years between 1947 and 1959 became ‘war brides’ of American servicemen, who were in love with them despite the damned regulations. In my mind, many women waited for a tender touch, a tender heart, a life worth living.

I thought of you at your house on the side of the mountain, waiting, waiting. I thought of you writing to me, sitting on the
tatami
matting, bent over the table with its very short legs, your typewriter positioned in front of you and your English dictionary close to your hand. I thought of all the effort you put into writing those letters and the absolute commitment
you had made to have me as your purest love. I thought too of all the unanswered questions I had in my head, all the puzzles seemingly without solution, and of all the many things I had no hope of understanding or knowing because I did not speak Japanese.

I thought of Japan too. I thought of the sight of Fuji with the snow-capped peak that I could see through the mist each time the
Shangri-La
returned to Yokosuka. Fuji existed. It was not just something surreal. It was not just a mirage. It was not something imagined, something that only appeared in woodblock prints. I knew, even then, young though I was, how little Americans knew about this land they had occupied.

I thought of all the stereotypes that never acknowledged the possibility that you, Yukiko, and so many other Japanese, loved Debussy and Beethoven, loved jazz and Kafka and Sartre and, yes, even Kerouac. I thought also of your extreme finesse, and how you maintained it even in Honcho, with its bars and nightclubs promising cold beer and hot women. I thought of
enka
, the music you loved, and the singers Misora Hibari and Matsuo Kazuko and the lyrics we had shared as we became friends.

I thought of that afternoon when you were telling me about Manchuria and your certainty that although you were Japanese you were a different kind of Japanese and that your real home was not Japan but it was in Manchuria, and I could understand that a little because my real home was not the United States of America, it was England. We had both lost our birthplaces and our countries.

That afternoon, while you were explaining why you felt like an outsider, you told me excitedly that you had seen an early film by the great director Kurosawa Akira named
Sh
ū
bun
[
Scandal
, 1950]. It starred the spectacular actor Mifune Toshiro, who was the bandit-rapist in
Rashomon
, and an actress with big eyes named Yamaguchi Yoshiko. In the film, Mifune plays a maverick artist on a motorcycle, who goes on a painting trip to the countryside. He meets by chance Yamaguchi’s character, a popular singing star looking for solitude. He offers her a ride. There is no romance, but a pulp magazine engineers a scandal after one of its photographers uses his trusty Leica to take a single picture of the artist and singer together.

‘Well, Paul,’ you asked. ‘Do you know that Yamaguchi Yoshiko is from Manchuria, just like me?’

‘Oh yes?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I am so proud of her. It makes me feel so happy. Do you know that just like me she speaks Chinese?’

‘I did not know that.’

‘Yes. Like me, she had friends who were White Russians. She had Jewish friends too. She is a coloratura soprano. Her father encouraged her musical talents, and she was taught how to sing by an Italian soprano married to a White Russian count – in Harbin!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. If you watch that film you will see her singing Japanese songs. But do you know that during the war she sang Chinese songs and acted in Chinese films and that she truly thought of herself as Chinese, and the Chinese people believed that completely?’

I had to admit that was unusual.

‘She became very famous in China. But she also became famous in Japan as the actress Ri Koran. It was another name she used. In China she was known as Li Xianglan. And now, after the war, she uses her birth name, Yamaguchi Yoshiko.
When the war ended, in China they criticized her for being Japanese. But the Japanese criticized her for being too Chinese. Maybe you have heard the song “China Night”?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everyone on the
Shangri-La
knows “Shina no yoru”. You can’t forget a tune like that. I don’t know what it means but I have heard it so much that I can almost sing it in Japanese myself.’

‘Well, she is the one who sings that song,’ you said, laughing.

You reached into that notebook of yours. You pulled out a sheet of paper with an English translation you had done of the lyrics.

Recently, Yuki, I came across ‘Shina no yoru’ on an old Japanese LP probably brought back to the United States by a returning GI. The title of the album on the hot pink cover, written in English in faux ‘Oriental’ lettering, is
Japan Song: A Night of China and other GI Favorite Songs
. I listened to ‘Japanese Rhumba’, ‘Ginza kan-kan musume’, ‘Aloha Boogie’, and ‘Uramachi Paradise.’ And then came ‘China Night’, and immediately the conversation we had about Yamaguchi Yoshiko emerged from my memory as if it were my favourite scene from
Casablanca
.