I was struck dumb — original sin was reflected against a pure sense of self and a bleak situation. I could feel Dong-ju’s powerful will for life, the will to construct his own reality. His emotive poem drew out deep feelings within me; perhaps the more so because he recited the words in a calm, low voice. I put down the pen and lobbed my nightly questions at him. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Where is your home town?’ ‘What’s the date today?’ ‘When will you be released?’ ‘What words can you think of now?’ I didn’t ask for his prisoner number or his Japanese name and I didn’t make him recite the multiplication tables again. Those questions polluted and ruined his memories. He deserved to recall happier times.
‘In the winter, white snow covered the village, and the deer and boars came as if they were guests, looking for food. The children flew kites that filled the sky, and the adults hunted falcons. I lived in a large, traditional tile-roof house near the school. We had a plum tree in our yard, an orchard of apricot trees in the back, and a large mulberry tree and a deep well outside the east gate. Oh, the mulberries were so sweet! I would shout into the well to hear the echo and raise my head, and see the sunlight on the far-away cross atop the church belfry. I took long walks, crossing the stream into the forest, climbing the hill towards the village, on paths that were lined with dandelions, where magpies flew overhead, where I passed young ladies, feeling the breeze. ’ His eyes were dreamy.
I remained quiet, unwilling to break his reverie. Memory had to be like a muscle: the more it was used, the stronger it must become.
He struggled to raise his eyes to meet mine. ‘Yuichi — Watanabe Yuichi!’ he called out.
‘Yes?’
He smiled. I realized he’d just wanted to utter my name before it, too, disappeared, before he ceased to recognize me. He was fighting a fierce battle in a war he would end up losing. He recited Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Rilke and Jammes constantly. He began talking ceaselessly, about his home town, his school days, literature, music and artists. Before, I used to ask him questions and he would answer, but now he talked and I listened. Watching him desperately cling to the last of his memory sent pangs through my heart. Since he no longer trusted his own mind, he was trying to move his memories into mine. ‘Have you seen Van Gogh’s paintings? Starry Night or Cafe Terrace at Night?’ he suddenly asked.
I had seen pictures of those paintings; I’d cherished a book of Van Gogh paintings in colour that we had at the bookshop. ‘Van Gogh was the artist of stars,’ Dong-ju said. ‘He loved stars and loved painting them. He wrote to his brother Theo about them, too. Listen to this.’ He took a few shallow breaths. ‘“But the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.”’ He looked anxious.
I knew he was having difficulty sleeping; his insomnia made him more agitated. I led him to the underground library, hoping it would lift his mood.
Dong-ju looked around the dimly lit space. ‘I’d hoped you wouldn’t find out about this. It’s too dangerous.’
‘But I did,’ I said, my voice crackling with fear. ‘I don’t know what to do. If anyone finds out, none of us will be safe.’ I regretted not running to Maeda the minute I’d discovered that dank underground space. It was too late, though, and now I could only live with the anxiety. Dong-ju grabbed my shoulders. ‘Even if it’s discovered at some point, you don’t know anything about it.’
‘You’re not going to implicate me?’
‘Even if I wanted to tell everyone, I won’t remember. Soon enough I won’t even remember this moment.’ He smiled bitterly and traced a finger down the spine of each book, as though to engrave the title forever in his head.
‘Soon these titles will vanish from my mind. As though I’d never heard of them. At some point you’ll have to tell me that I once read such beautiful books.’ His breath, visible in the cold, drifted around his pale face.
Each time he let out a breath, it was as though his soul were escaping.
Dong-ju recited another poem from memory. ‘“Hospital.” Shielding her face with the shadow of the apricot tree, lying in the back yard of the hospital, a young woman reveals her pale legs under her white gown and sunbathes. Not even a butterfly visits this woman suffering from tuberculosis. There is not a breeze against the not-unhappy tree.
// I came to this place for the first time after suffering for a long time from an unknown pain. But my old doctor does not know the illness of my young self. He says I am not ill. This excessive hardship, this excessive fatigue; I must not become cross. // The woman gets up and straightens her clothes and picks a marigold from the garden to place on her breast and disappears into the hospital. I wish for her health — as well as mine — to recover quickly; I lie down where she lay.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, more to reassure myself. ‘The doctors said your side-effects will disappear. You’ll leave this place on 30 November and write poems and publish books. After the war, when the world becomes a better place, countless people will read your poems.’
‘That’d be nice,’ he said, smiling faintly; he, too, must have been hoping for a happy ending.
Secretly, I was afraid that I already knew this story would end differently.
THE NAMES OF IMPOVERISHED NEIGHBOURS AND FRANCIS JAMMES, RAINER MARIA RILKE
The New Year brought nothing new. The winter deepened; there was no sign of spring. Something had tipped; the war wasn’t going as well and Japan was starting to lose. Nobody said it out loud, but everyone could tell. Citizens sank into torpor and anxiety infected everyone with lightning speed. An angry voice on the radio promoted a final battle to defend Japan; flyers were plastered all over the city, urging us to defend our country with our lives. I wasn’t convinced that victory would bring us anything other than more death and shattered consciences.
The prison was no longer a safe zone. In the middle of the night an immense shadow covered the city. Explosions overshadowed screams, blanketing everything in silence in their aftermath. The streets were engulfed in a sea of fire and later settled into ruin. Everything — love, belief, hope, dreams — burned. That January twenty metres of the northern prison wall collapsed under heavy bombing. Ensuing attacks cratered the yard, and two poplar trees on the hill were burned to a crisp. When the loud siren blared, the frightened guards dashed into bomb shelters; sometimes, the enemy planes flew in ahead of the warnings.
Everything hung on the abilities of the nation’s air defence. Warden Hasegawa ordered a review of the prison’s facilities; the newer Wards Four, Five, Six and the infirmary were fine. Stairways in the corridors led directly to the solid underground bomb shelters. The problem was the old central facilities, which didn’t have an underground shelter. Fearing retaliation after Pearl Harbor, the warden had tried to build one, but it had been determined that digging under the building would risk collapse. As a last resort, a bomb shelter was built outside, about thirty metres away, but it was too far to run to when sneak attacks were launched.