Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [83]
‘Lighten up, man, or you’ll go crazy in here. You laugh or you lose it.’
He helped set up a loudspeaker system in the canteen. Someone magicked in a jukebox. The young crowded in, clustered, relaxing to the familiar beat: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James and his new singer, Frankie Sinatra.
But Joey obstinately remained outside the stream of camp life. Stranded in an interior exile he used observation as a tool: for him this was not imprisonment, it was extreme fieldwork. Malinowski urged the study of primitive institutions as living, functioning realities; he had looked at sea-washed shores, yam gardens and complex kinship laws; here the exotic was set in a mundane bleakness. Inside the bare huts Joey noted colourful posters and hand-painted pictures being pinned to walls.
A truck pulled in at the gate loaded with scrap timber which vanished before nightfall. In the next few days, glancing through windows as he passed, he saw the rough planks reinvented as bookshelves, dressers, frames to be draped with cloth as room dividers. Curtains were soon improvised to prevent guards or curious outsiders like Joey from looking in.
From the sidelines he saw how a social order was established – committees, hierarchies. The helpers and the helped. Where there were children, there was a schoolroom and teachers, albeit without desks or chairs. Where there were sickbeds, nurses. Project farm workers needed? Four hundred volunteered. Maintenance men? Another four hundred. Construction workers, garbage disposers, janitors, firemen, transport drivers. Round the barracks optimistic women planted shrubs, hedges, and flower beds to soften the stark environment. Old men slowly created a Japanese garden in a shadowy corner, carrying rocks, gravel, a stunted tree, watering obsessively to encourage moss.
Fifteen thousand people, bobbing rudderless on a sea of anxiety and fear determined to build a viable social structure by recreating within the confines of the barbed-wire fences a simulacrum of a normal world.
As the others organised their days, improved their surroundings, watered flowers, grew herbs, Joey found himself maddened by their docility, their acceptance of injustice, the way they bowed and smiled; the way they listened, dark eyes intent behind their heavy glasses. He was not one of them, not part of this keep busy, keep despair at bay movement. Perversely, he was irritated by their skill and speed and ingenuity; he did not accept the nothing-to-be-done-about-it fatalism of Shikata ga na – one of the few phrases he had learned to translate.
But inside the cramped, comfortless hut, barriers slowly dissolved. Kazuo was training to be an accountant and had been preparing for an exam when the Defense Command Order was pinned to the wall in his office; Taro’s family had arranged for him to marry a rich girl in Tokyo, when Pearl Harbor changed their plans; now parents and younger siblings occupied a hut further down the row.
‘They’re not happy; they wanted me to squeeze in there with them, where they could keep an eye on me.’
Kazuo punched the air. ‘Man, this is your break for independence! Freedom!’
Combing his hair in the hut mirror, Ichir paused to admire his reflection: an all-American dude, cool and sardonic – perfect. Ruefully he confessed his love of things American: the language, music, clothes, movies and, closest to his heart, the classic comics – ‘Batman! Superman! Captain America! I love those guys. I was planning to suggest a Japanese superhero for Marvel. Not any more, I guess.’
Conversations as closely harmonised as a barbershop quartet swung the four through personal biography, thwarted aspirations and shared anxieties. Gradually reticence slipped away and Joey could speak of his mother without embarrassment, could allow himself to wonder aloud what might be happening in Nagasaki: the town had docks and factories, inviting bombs. At night, after lights out, the murmured voices hung in the air, helping him into sleep.
Though even here he had spasms of uncertainty, wondering if the