This Scorching Earth (14 page)

As he went on and on the Colonel stood with a frozen smile. Why, he wondered, did they always have to give speeches? Formal, rigid little people, they could never let anything, be it a pine tree or a good-by, go its own natural way. They were always fussing with it, making it what it wasn't, perverting it into something they thought it should be. It was so typical of Ohara, first the needless visit—completely ritual, no logical reason for it—and now this flowery and pathetically absurd good-by speech.

The Colonel had heard a hundred good-by speeches just like this one. He was enduring it with a stretched smile and an interested look when Gloria came in and said that someone was waiting to see him—a Mrs. Schmidt. While he was wondering who she was and why she had come, he held out his hand again and said: "Forgot that I had a visitor coming. You will excuse me, won't you?"

Mr. Ohara broke off in the middle of a sentence. "Sure, sure, you're a mighty busy man, Colonel, anyone can see that. I'll just stop and say a few words with my friend Major Calloway, if it's all right with you, sir."

The Colonel detected the sarcasm and smiled right through it. "Naturally, Mr. Ohara, please make yourself at home." Then to the boy: "Pleased to have met you, Ichiro."

The boy shook hands limply, shuffled his feet, and didn't look up. His father clasped the Colonel's hand with some emotion and then, with waves and backward glances, left the room.

Gloria brought in Mrs. Schmidt. That she was poor was the first thing that impressed the Colonel. She was poor the way he had always thought of Warsaw or Prague or Berlin as being poor. Having been to none of these cities, he usually thought of the inhabitants as being rather spectacularly impoverished, somewhat like the pictures he used to see of immigrants at Ellis Island, bundles of shawls and old shoes, held together with safety pins.

Mrs. Schmidt wore a shawl, a long, gray one which looked Jewish to the Colonel because he thought it looked as though it should be worn over the head and he'd seen pictures of Jewesses wearing shawls over their heads. It was secured around her shoulders with a plastic five-and-ten-cent-store brooch showing a Walt Disney fawn. There were tortoise-shell combs in her gray hair, and her shoes were cracked, the heels badly run over.

"I am Lotte Schmidt, the voice teacher," she said. Her voice was rather high, but the Colonel thought it melodious. In spite of the accent and the faint quaver of age, it made him think she may at one time have been a great beauty. It was the kind of voice one might have heard, years before, in ballrooms, under elaborate chandeliers.

"I would guess you are Viennese, Mrs. Schmidt," he said, offering her the chair recently vacated by Mr. Ohara.

She smiled, showing tiny, fragile-looking teeth, and the soft skin around her light-blue eyes wrinkled with pleasure. "You are quite correct, Colonel. I lived in Vienna until—well, until the war. Then I was living here."

"It must seem rather different from Vienna," said the Colonel.

She raised one small hand into the air. "Oh, Colonel, the difference is extraordinary. Tokyo and Vienna . . ." She laughed as though she had often been amused by the absurdity of the idea. "They are on opposite sides of the earth—I mean figuratively as well as literally." She paused. "But, you, Colonel. I would guess that you are from the South—perhaps Virginia."

"Well, how did you guess that?" asked the Colonel, pleased and aware that he was sitting too straight in his chair. Soon he'd have to make her state her business. But in the meantime the conversation was a pleasant antidote to Mr. Ohara.

"Your accent, of course, but, besides that, you are kind to me, whom you have never heard of, have never once met. You are a gentleman. You are—what is the word? Oh, yes—you are chivalrous."

Seeing that this embarrassed the Colonel, she laughed again, patted the folds of her shawl, pretended to examine her brooch for a second, and then, raising her light-blue eyes, said: "But you are probably a busy, though gallant, gentleman, so I will tell you why I have come."

The Colonel had begun to protest, but she held up her hand in a small negative gesture, the kind of gesture he himself might have used to a child.

"No, Colonel, chivalry and business do not mix. You Americans, even when you happen to be gallant, are really businessmen. Why, you even appreciate the American businesswoman." She looked at him and didn't smile until he did.

"I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned," said the Colonel. "I don't much like the new American businesswoman."

"No more do I," laughed Mrs. Schmidt, adjusting her shawl.

The Colonel thought the quaver in her voice more pronounced, yet she was no older than he certainly. She was still in her fifties. He also noticed that her hands shook very slightly. At first he thought it might be that she was cold. Then he realized that she was afraid.

In the next office Major Calloway had drawn a chair next to his and both he and Mr. Ohara were deep in conversation. Ichiro stood stiffly at one side. He had been offered a chair but had refused.

"It's this way, O'Hara," said the Major. "Like I was saying last time, if you have to mess around with the department of this and the sub-section of that, you'll just never get any place. The Japanese government is one big snarl of red tape. It's real feudal-like. Now the democratic way would be—"

"But just now the Colonel himself was talking about the Army red tape. Is the American Army feudal? Could that be?" asked Mr. Ohara brightly, pleased at being able to show the Major that he was up on his toes too.

"The Army's different," said the Major flatly. "Besides, I'm talking about the Japanese government, not the American Army. Two different things. So, like I was saying, the American way of doing things is to go right to the person in charge and just say your piece and get it over with. None of this behind-the-scenes business. All open and honest as the day is long. You don't need any of this old-fashioned third-party business. If you want to do something, you just go do it—that's Democracy."

"But if it is a real complicated business," began Mr. Ohara, "then you take all the responsibility on your own shoulders, as they say. What if, well, what if something went wrong—what then? I'd really be in the soup then, wouldn't I?" and he laughed somewhat feebly.

Michael looked up from his filing. From what he had overheard, it seemed to be yet another of the Major's reforming lectures. He had thought it was some sort of theoretical argument. Apparently it wasn't.

"... so, you see, I really came to ask a favor," Mrs. Schmidt was saying. She attempted to smile again, but her hands still shook slightly. She felt she could no longer avoid an explanation. "I've never been in one of your offices before. I am a timid, a very timid, person. As you know, I cannot go to your PX nor your Commissary nor your theaters nor even come into your buildings without a pass, and since I am so timid, I thought for a long time before deciding to come. But this morning I thought to myself: No, I really must. It is important."

The Colonel reached for a cigarette. "I very much wish it were in my power to do what you want, Mrs. Schmidt, but you are asking for the impossible. I'm only a colonel. I can't allocate money for something like this. I suggest you try the Army Educational Center. They have funds for this sort of thing."

She started to speak, her lips half-open, then sank back into the chair, half in despair, half in amusement. "It's so odd to find myself in this position, Colonel. As you have already seen, I am no businesswoman. I can't even keep our little grocery account straight. I'm of no use in the world except as a voice teacher. I had thought I would try to be a businesswoman this morning, but I cannot be. And this is my second attempt. I've already been to that Army school. They are not interested. I"—she began to smile—"I really don't know what I'll do."

The Colonel restrained an impulse to touch her hand, to reassure her. She seemed so pitifully alone. His own wife, equally well-bred, equally cultured, equally helpless, could very well have been sitting before him, her humility growing through every minute of silence. There were tears in his eyes.

The Colonel had already invented a history to fit her. Born in Vienna, she had been beautiful and beloved. The toast of Vienna, young men pulling her carriage, no champagne baths only because she would never want anything like that. Then marriage, her husband persecuted by the Nazis, flight to Japan. Here among an alien people, unknown, uncared for, she lived through the horror of the war, and now that the war was over she was no less alien. Surrounded by wealth, by food, by warm clothing, she could have none. Like the other Europeans who had survived the war while in Japan, she lived on the edge of existence. Her condition was much worse than that of the Japanese, thought the Colonel, because she had been used to more. The ridiculously small amount which satisfied their needs could not satisfy her. She had come, politely, with dignity, to beg.

"I'm only asking to give a recital, and to be paid for it," she said. "I would sing Schubert and Schumann and maybe some Hugo Wolf. And then, for encores, some of the songs that were so popular before the war, long before. From operettas, you know, like Bichard Tauber used to sing. That kind of program. Surely your soldiers must have heard of Vienna. At one time or another they must have listened to some Schubert lieder. It is impossible that they couldn't have."

"I'm sure they have. I am certain they'd love dearly to hear you, Mrs. Schmidt, but you are asking for what I cannot give you. The money at my disposal is solely for engaging Japanese artists. And you ..." He sensed he was on dangerously emotional ground, and quickly continued: "Besides, I cannot on my own responsibility schedule a Special Services program. We receive our schedules, and I only expedite them."

"Expedite," said Mrs. Schmidt with a trace of bitterness, "that is an Army word, is it not? I don't remember hearing it before. My English is quite old-fashioned, I fear. I never found it necessary to speak the Army language. Before the war—" She stopped, then said: "Well, before the war it was quite different here in Japan."

Yes, thought the Colonel, before the war perhaps she was a member of what must have been called the international set. She had been younger then. He could imagine her then, exclaiming with pleasure over the quaintness of the hibachi, the shoji, the tatami, but continuing to live in a world of Schubert and Strauss, hot chocolate for breakfast and gossip from Austria. One now saw little of the foreigners who had lived in Japan before and during the war. Occasionally in passing streetcars, entering the subway or coming out of a theater, one saw, amid the Japanese faces which the Colonel found identical, the blue eyes and brown hair of an Occidental. You could always recognize a member of the once-flourishing Continental society—he would be wearing an overcoat ripping at the seams, a too short and too tight belted coat, shoes which were cracked and glued; she would be wearing a hat with a mended veil, and her shoes would be the Japanese imitation of high heels. One could recognize them by their white look of poverty, by the furtive look of expired passports in their eyes. They were like another race, existing in the purgatory between the Japanese and the new army of—the Colonel's thoughts came to a sudden stop, for he had been just about to think "the new army of barbarians."

"What you folks don't seem to understand," said Major Calloway not unkindly, "is that us Americans are doing our damndest to give you all a decent way of life. We want to raise your standard of living. You know—a washing machine in every home, that sort of thing. Now that sort of life is worth working for, don't you think, and that's why all of us are out here working up a sweat over you."

The Major's evident willingness to go on forever mouthing such generalities was the soul of politeness, so much so that Mr. Ohara hated to bring up the mundane business at hand. But even exquisite politeness must have its end, especially when Mr. Ohara suspected the other didn't want to give him a chance to speak. "True, true, Major, absolutely and one-hundred-percent correct. But in reference to what you were suggesting before, I don't see how we could possibly explain, if anything happened, what we were really trying to do."

Since Mr. Ohara himself didn't understand too well what they were trying to do, he felt doubly inept, first in attempting to connect what the Major wanted with what he said he wanted and, second, in insisting upon a discussion of business matters which, he felt sure, could be so much better handled by someone else, by the middle-man procedure that the Major so disliked. That, after all, was the civilized way to do business—not this way.

"Looky, O'Hara, I thought we had all this settled. But I'll spell it out for you once more." The Major glanced at the others in the office and lowered his voice. "Your corporation could use dollars, couldn't it?"

"Yes, but—"

"And we could use yen. Now if we go through the banks there would be endless red tape, wouldn't there?"

"Yes, from my government and," he hastily added, "from your Army."

"O.K., I'll agree. So what we're doing is the smart thing, isn't it? We're going directly to the top, not fooling around with any of those in-between guys. You bring the yen, we supply the dollars. It's as simple as that."

It really was simple when you understood it, Mr. Ohara decided. Quite simple. To be sure there was a rigidly enforced directive against any illegal yen-dollar exchange, but Mr. Ohara was cosmopolitan enough to realize this law was simply for the soldiers, for the lower-ranking civilians. It didn't touch the more important. Japan had lots of laws like that. He began to feel a certain warmth toward democracy. Here it was on terms he could understand.