Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [108]
The Warden had a small TV monitor on his desk, and I knew he watched it from time to time, since he often remarked to me about the inanity of this or that old show, and especially I Love Lucy.
THE RAPE OF Nanking was just one more instance of soldiers slaughtering prisoners and unarmed civilians, but it became famous because it was among the first to be well photographed. There were evidently movie cameras everywhere, run by gosh knows whom, and the footage wasn’t confiscated afterward.
I had seen some of the footage when I was a cadet, but not as a part of a well-edited documentary, with a baritone voice-over and appropriate music underneath.
The orgy of butchery followed a virtually unopposed attack by the Japanese Army on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, long before this country became part of the Finale Rack. Hiroshi Matsumoto had just been born. Prisoners were tied to stakes and used for bayonet practice. Several people in a pit were buried alive. You could see their expressions as the dirt hit their faces.
Their faces disappeared, but the dirt on top kept moving as though there were some sort of burrowing animal, a woodchuck maybe, making a home below.
Unforgettable!
HOW WAS THAT for racism?
THE DOCUMENTARY WAS a big hit in the prison. Alton Darwin said to me, I remember, “If somebody is going to do it, I am going to watch it.”
This was 7 years before the prison break.
I DIDN’T KNOW if Hiroshi had seen the show on his monitor or not. I wasn’t about to ask. We were not pals.
I was willing to be a pal, if that was part of the job. I believe he moved me in next door to him with the idea that it was time he had a pal. My guess is that he never had had a pal. No sooner had I become his neighbor, I think, than he decided he didn’t want a pal after all. That didn’t have anything to do with what I was or how I acted. To him, I think, a pal was like a piece of merchandise heavily promoted at Christmas, say. Why junk up his life with such a cumbersome contraption and all its accessories merely because it was advertised?
So he went on hiking alone and boating alone and eating alone, which was OK with me. I had a rich social life across the lake.
BUT THE DAY after the documentary was shown, late in the afternoon, about suppertime, I was rowing for shore in my fiberglass umiak, headed for the mud beach in front of our 2 houses in the ghost town. I had been fishing. I hadn’t been to Scipio. My own 2 great pals Over there, Muriel Peck and Damon Stern, were on vacation. They wouldn’t be back until Freshman Orientation Week, before the start of the fall semester.
The Warden was waiting for me on the beach, looking out at me in my crazy boat like a mother who had been worried to death about where her little boy had gone. Had I failed to keep a date with him? No. We had never had a date. My best supposition was that Mildred or Margaret had tried to burn 1 of our houses down.
But he said to me as I disembarked, “There is something you should know about me.”
There was no pressing reason why I should know anything about him. We didn’t work as a team up at the prison. He didn’t care what or how I taught up there.
“I was in Hiroshima when it was bombed,” he said.
I am sure there was an implied equation there: The bombing of Hiroshima was as unforgivable and as typically human as the Rape of Nanking.
So I heard about his going into a ditch after a ball when he was a schoolboy, about his straightening up to find that nobody was alive but him.
And on and on.
When he was through with that story he said to me, “I thought you should know.”
I SAID EARLIER that I had a sudden attack of psychosomatic hives when Rob Roy Fenstermaker told me that he had been busted for molesting children. That wasn’t my first such attack. The first was when Hiroshi told me about being atom-bombed. I suddenly itched all over, and scratching wouldn’t help.
And I said to Hiroshi what I would say to Rob Roy: “I thank