Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [103]
The ship’s captain, passing, exchanged a mechanical greeting and, misled by the blond naval haircut, asked Joe where he was from.
‘Portland, Oregon, sir.’
The captain nodded. ‘Rose festival, right? I hear it used to be quite a sight.’
If Joe had added that he was born in Japan, in Nagasaki, Captain Jensen could have told him, in his soft Southern drawl, that he had spent a few days in the town many years before. But Joe was Government Issue now, bound for Italy; the long cluster of linked islands he once studied on the map were on another page of his life, and he said nothing, so he missed hearing the captain’s story about the day he climbed a path high above the harbour in Nagasaki with his senior officer to a house with paper walls and met a woman called Butterfly and a small boy with blond curls.
‘Good luck, soldier,’ he said and moved on.
To Joe every new place provided an opportunity for distraction, for escape. Escaping from what, he had not yet worked out. Exploration was what lay ahead, an activity that filled him with elation, even if Africa had seemed an odd destination for a regiment bound for Europe.
Algeria was not an unfamiliar name: it came into a chapter or two of the textbooks, its aboriginal people hammered by waves of invaders, clinging stubbornly to their culture. Did it all come down to culture in the end, the trading of symbols and exchanging of gifts, language, mode of worship; village elders versus incomers?
Below him, watching the regiment disembark, were the locals, who were both Arab and French. Possibly Arab or French?
American and Japanese . . . American or Japanese: how do you plead?
Down the gangplank from the old boat that had earlier carried cargoes of bananas and today brought young men in khaki to a war zone, Joey, now GI Joe, found himself marching into Oran, where the ramparts of a Spanish fort loomed over sun-baked, sandy chaos.
From behind him Otishi attempted a gangplank lecture – ‘Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals –’ the noise of the docks drowned out the rest.
They stepped ashore, disembarking into hostility of various kinds. This was the very edge of Africa, a final step on the way to the war in Europe. But Algeria was part of France, allegiances muddled, death a bullet’s range away. Were the Arabs friendly?
‘How do they feel about us?’ Joe wondered aloud.
‘We’ll find out!’ Eager as a beagle, Otishi was peering about him, matching the past against the present, catching history on the hoof.
But the new soldiers, plucked out of confinement and away from watchtowers and armed guards to flourish their crusading credentials, were not here to learn. Before the friendliness of the Algerians could be tested, there were fresh orders: another boat, another sea voyage, another country.
The pep talks made it clear: they were offering their bodies to defend the free world from the Fascist threat. This fight – they knew because they were repeatedly so informed – was all about democracy and freedom; about the crime of people being deported to concentration camps simply for a word on their papers. How much irony could one situation take?
Otishi, by Joe’s side as they tramped from one dockside to another, bemoaned the lack of any marching songs for Nisei:
‘Normal GIs get to sing as they go; swinging rhythm, great tunes . . .’
Back home, Caruso’s sweet tones filled the airwaves – ‘Over There!’ with the boys roaring back, open-throated, to reassure the world that the Yanks were indeed coming, the boys were on their way, to do the job, to win the war.
Joe sang out, tentatively: ‘The half-Japs, half-Yanks are coming!’ He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t quite have the ring of the original, does it?’
48
In four months Joe aged a decade, the compacted time weighing him down like armour: heavy but not always protective. The bright new soldiers who had sailed from Oran to step ashore in Italy were worn and battered now; uniforms filthy, faces changed, stubble