The Phoenix Tree. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ just landed here. I’m from Saipan and Luzon. I came up on the same ship as those men along there.’ He nodded towards the wounded beyond the line behind him. He had no idea where the soldiers had come from, but he took the risk that the ticket clerk also did not know. ‘I still have to get all my papers.’

      ‘Can’t give a ticket without papers.’ The clerk quickened the saw of his voice. ‘Stand aside.’

      Okada stood aside, feeling conspicuous; he glanced covertly around to see if there were any police nearby. He could see none, but he moved hastily away from the window before the clerk became too conscientious and started yelling for the arrest of a man trying to travel without a pass. Okada cursed San Diego for its ignorance, but the cursing relieved neither his feelings nor the situation. He moved to the outskirts of the crowd, down towards one end of the platform.

      He was standing there, debating his chances of crossing the tracks and trying to swing up into the train from the wrong side when it came in, when a voice beside him said, ‘Want to buy a pass?’

      He looked sideways at the man and had to choke the laugh in his chest. He looked like Joe Penner, or anyway a Japanese version; and though he had spoken in Japanese, he had exactly the same delivery as the comedian: ‘Wanna buy a duck?’ But this man would sell anything, the hustler at the world’s railroad stations.

      ‘Genuine or forged?’ Okada said.

      ‘Makes no difference. The old man in the ticket office wouldn’t know – all he wants is a bit of paper.’

      ‘How much?’

      ‘Twenty yen.’

      ‘You could sell me a girl for the night for that.’ They had given him those sort of details, as if sex had a place in the price index.

      ‘Of course. But she couldn’t carry you to wherever you want to go.’

      Okada looked around. No one was watching him and the hustler; then he saw the soldier on the nearest stretcher staring straight at him. For a moment he felt a sense of shame; then he put it out of his mind. He had no obligation to this soldier, the man had not been fighting for him. He took out a twenty-yen note and gave it to the hustler. The man, with a smile as forged as the pass, handed over a piece of paper.

      ‘This had better work, or I’ll come looking for you and break your neck.’ Okada tried to sound menacing, but the hustler seemed unimpressed.

      ‘Have a good journey,’ he said, and went off with a bent-kneed walk that looked more like Groucho Marx’s than Joe Penner’s.

      Okada looked at the pass; it looked genuine enough to be accepted. Then he turned back towards the line in front of the ticket office. As he passed the end of the stretcher line he looked down at the wounded soldier, who was still staring accusingly at him. He paused, wanting to say something to the man but unable to think of anything: scorn upset him, even that of an enemy. Then he saw that the soldier was beyond scorn or any other opinion: he was dead. Okada bent and gently closed the sightless eyes.

      When he reached the ticket window again the old clerk barely looked at him as he presented the pass and asked for a ticket to Nayora. Maybe he knew the hustler and his black market in passes; or maybe he was just another very minor bureaucrat who would settle for any piece of paper so long as the system was not disrupted. He certainly was not looking for a spy travelling without the proper pass.

      The train came in half an hour later. Okada caught it, stood in a crowded compartment and wondered if he would have any difficulty with Natasha Cairns when he made contact with her this evening. He felt exactly as he had as a boy and a young man: in his father’s homeland but not at all at home.

      3

      ‘Every nation must be taught its proper place,’ Chojiro Okada had said. ‘If every country in the world were allowed its own sovereignty, there would be nothing but anarchy. Japan would not be at war with America if the Americans had only understood that.’

      Tom had always been respectful in his arguments with his father; it was the only way the arguments could be continued. ‘Dad, there’s no natural hierarchy for nations—’

      Chojiro Okada waved a hand of dismissal. He had a working man’s hands, roughened and blunted by his early years in America, but they were capable of graceful movement. ‘Of course there is. Why do you think the British and the French and the Dutch founded their empires?’

      ‘I always thought it was for trade—’

      ‘That was only part of it. They all three consider themselves superior to the people they colonized. They have no right to be in Asia. We Japanese are the superior ones in Asia, we are the ones who should be teaching the others their proper place.’

      Chojiro Okada had been preaching the same doctrine to his son ever since the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, when Tom had been fifteen years old. The boy, intent on his own small battles in high school, had listened politely but without interest. Chojiro had tried to tell him that his own private battles had been far worse. But one could never tell the young about the past, there was never any comparison in their eyes with the present, neither for good nor for ill.

      ‘There’s none so blind as the young,’ he said.

      ‘What?’ Tsuchi, his wife, was busy cooking supper. She had become accustomed to his talking to himself, if only because she had forced him into the habit.

      ‘Nothing.’ Only a little less blind was a wife.

      He walked out of the hut, pulling his hat down over his brow against the pale blue glare of the Wyoming sky. The mountain peak had the sharp outline of winter; much sharper than the peaks had been back home. When they had brought him and his family here to Blood Mountain relocation camp two years ago he had felt a bitter, masochistic joy at how the Americans had spun the wheel full circle to grind him under again. He had got out of the bus that had brought them from Green River, where they had been unloaded from the train that had brought them from California, and he had looked around at the wide landscape, thinking how little it seemed to have changed since he had first seen it forty-one years ago.

      ‘Welcome back,’ he had said sardonically, but he had said it to himself, a private joke that he knew was pointless to share with his family. None of them, not even Tsuchi, knew what he had endured here.

      He had come to the United States from Nagasaki in 1901, when he was twenty-one years old. He was middle class, descendant of a long line of weapon makers who were more than artisans; the line could be traced back to one of the master swordsmiths of Tanega who were the first Japanese introduced to guns by Portuguese traders in the middle of the sixteenth century. Okada guns and swords were bought and prized by army and naval officers; Chojiro had completed his apprenticeship when he got into trouble. He had never told his own family why he had left Japan: he had climbed into bed with his eldest brother’s wife, something his brother’s wife had liked but his brother hadn’t. He had landed in San Francisco and, through one of the boarding-houses that also acted as employment agents, he had got one of the few jobs then available to Orientals: working on the railroad. He had worked for a year in Wyoming, never becoming accustomed to the vastness of the landscape; it had seemed to reduce himself in his own estimation, making him ridiculously small in any scheme of things. He had received poor pay, poor accommodation and poor food, had been abused day after day by the Irish foremen who, with the advent of the Chinese and Japanese labourers, had now moved up the social scale. It was the first time the Irish long upper lip had come close to being a patrician feature.

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