PART TWO
Blue Sea Lake, Summer, 1953
Bill Masters, undersecretary of state at External Affairs, cut an alarming figure in a bathing suit. Lake water glittered like quartz in the silver hair on his barrel chest and over his fleshy back. It was a marvel that his small feet and narrow ankles could leverage such mass. Watching him swim, Emmett was fascinated by the pretty movements of Bill’s limbs propelling him through the water.
Bill appeared to bear no ill effects from the alcohol last night. He slapped his belly and filled his lungs, “Great air,” pectorals jiggling, a friendly Samurai. With a happy sigh, he raised a glass of orange juice tarted up with vodka. “Great place, Emmett.”
Ethel called. “Yoo-hoo! Breakfast is hot!” She hopped partway down the cottage stairs to the lawn, decked out in a variation of the rayon paisley she’d worn the previous day, with fresh stockings and another pair of strapped sandals, shielding her eyes with one hand. Bill gave her a wave, toodle-doo. She trotted back up the stairs to the cottage, gripping the hand-railing, and then at the door, she leaned back toward Bill, her hand raised in another little private yoo-hoo.
Bill grinned with pride. “Comfy beds you got here.” He punched Emmett’s arm. “Ethel’s having a good time. She gets along real well with Suzanne.” They threw towels over their shoulders and began to walk up, Emmett following Bill’s amazing white feet with their purple veins and frank toes. Bill said, “Ethel doesn’t get on with too many Ottawa wives.” He stopped and waited till Emmett caught up to him. “Most of them are bitches. Seen from a female mind. I let Ethel stay home from a lot of functions. Better’n her being miserable. But it’s nice to see her happy. Thanks. Appreciate it.”
A boat cruised by. A small inboard filled with kids and their parents, trolling a couple of fishing lines and strains of Dean Martin slurring the words to “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming.” The boat was so close to shore, Emmett could make out a turntable balanced on a cooler amid the chaos of kids, life jackets, Cokes, towels, and a dog, a beagle.
Bill said, “Now, there’s a guy who likes to live.” He walked ahead, “I hope Ethel lets me have bacon.”
Emmett wondered how to power a turntable aboard a boat. Sun on blue water made the scene Kodak, a contrivance of colour technology. The boat wasn’t familiar on this part of the lake. He thought its driver must be lucky, head of an empire. He couldn’t see the man’s face under a sun hat.
After breakfast Bill and Ethel packed up to leave. Bill tickled Lenore under her chin, earning her mild scorn. “Okay, little baby,” said Bill. “I guess you’re not the laughing type.”
Ethel picked up Lenore and gave her a kiss. Lennie put her finger up Ethel’s nose, Ethel clucking, capturing the baby’s hand and saying, “Oh, you little bug.” Suzanne retrieved Lennie, “C’mon, professor.” They all went down to the dock. Ethel was thoughtful, kindly wondering: she’d never met such a serious baby. Her two teenaged boys were at Upper Canada College, bless them, but would soon be out for summer holidays. Becoming strangers to her.
Emmett lowered Ethel into the boat. She looked unsuitable for transport. Bill patted Suzanne, “You did fine,” and turned his back to speak more confidentially to Emmett. “I recruited you to External because you know Asia. We’re holding the line in Korea, but only so long as we keep the communists scared shitless, pardon my French. I’m not saying the Americans should drop an A-bomb on anybody, but the commies sure better know it’s in the equation. Now,” and here Bill shuffled a little, wiped sweat from his eyes; he appeared to be struggling to remember where he was going with this. Again he said, “Now . . .” his eyes darting over the smooth blue water, sweat running down his face into his fat neck. Then it came back to him, he was aiming to talk about what everybody wanted to talk about. “The Ruskies,” he announced, “the Ruskies and the Chinese communists are getting ready for World War Three. And it’ll be the big one. Us or them. Freedom or Communism. Anybody who doesn’t believe that is playing The Glad Game.” He gripped Emmett’s hand, maybe just to steady himself. “We need men like you, and we need you here, where you can untangle some of the gobbledegook we get from Southeast Asia. You’re young. You’re smart. And you know the Chinese.”
“Japan.”
“Whazat?”
“I was born in Japan.”
Bill looked at him blankly.
“I’m learning some Mandarin,” Emmett explained, though Bill already knew this, “but I can’t say I know the Chinese.”
“Good. Stick it out. You got yourself a future, Jones.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“Right.”
“Don’t dick around. Tell the RCMP what they wanta know. You get the Mounties off your back, they’ll straighten out the Americans. Then you can get on with your work. Get on with your life. No more suspicion following you around. Once and for all. Clear?”
“Yup.”
“Attaboy.”
They paused uncertainly until Emmett said, “I’m driving you to the landing.”
Bill laughed. “Forgot.” And stepped onto the hot boat cushions, Ethel warning, “Don’t fall, Daddy,” and Bill saying, “I’m always on Parliament Hill.”
Emmett and Suzanne and Lenore were studying Bill, Emmett wondering if it was heat stroke. Bill said, “In my mind. C’mon, Jones. Start this thing,” settling his backside. “Bye bye,” to Lenore; then, to Ethel, “That kid doesn’t like me.”
Emmett jumped into the boat. Before he started the engine, he heard, faintly, Dean Martin moving over the water.
A heat wave, lasting more than a week. It was so hot in the city, Suzanne kept Lennie at the lake; she and the baby stayed alone at the cottage while Emmett worked in town.
Nobody from External’s Security Panel and no one from the RCMP contacted him. Days passed, then another weekend when he was with Suzanne and the baby at Blue Sea Lake, and yet another week alone in the city, and still no contact from the Mounties. He tried to convince himself that they’d decided to let him alone.
He needed a few quiet hours at his office in the East Block on Saturday morning so he told Suzanne he’d go in for a couple of hours, then drive down to the lake. He promised to take Monday off and stay with them, if he could get ahead on some reports that needed his attention.
Leaving Parliament Hill at seven o’clock Friday evening, Emmett drove home, opening the door to an empty house, the drapes drawn against the heat, the house shady but stifling. He walked through the darkened living room, making no sound on the carpet, and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. The house was silent but for the small, yawning vibrations that houses make in summer heat. He startled at the crackling cellophane noise of a black squirrel’s feet running up an oak tree out on the lawn. There were waves in the plush broadloom, made from a vacuum, and a footprint. He remembered that the cleaning lady would have come today, letting herself in with her own key to clean the house even though it never got dirty when Emmett was alone in the city.
He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He’d forgotten to pick up something to eat on his way home. Nothing looked like dinner. He had that automatic feeling again, of being driven ahead by the thoughtless way time pushes him, pushes everyone, just slightly ahead of itself and then sweeps overhead like a rogue wave. He felt soulless, ill at ease, he needed to hurry, hurry to soothe himself; he was inconsolable, anxious from waiting for something to happen with the investigation. Liquor helped, it helped more and more. He poured himself a stiff Scotch and soda on ice, drank some, poured more, and went upstairs.
It was hotter upstairs. He paused to look into Lennie’s bedroom. The pale yellow walls could melt in the heat. Her closet door was ajar and he crossed the silent room to push it shut.
He changed his clothes, threw the white shirt he’d worn all day into the hamper, exchanged his dark blue trousers for a pair of shorts, took off his damp socks, and sat on his side of the bed while he sipped his drink.
The doorbell rang. Emmett peered down from the window that looked over the front of the house. He saw the dented lids of three hats, the padded shoulders of three men in suits standing on the stoop. He watched them, finishing his drink. The bell was rung again.
Two of the men left to walk briskly around the side of the house toward the garage, out of sight. The third man raised his head and caught Emmett looking down. Emmett knew him. It was Harold Gembey, chair of Security at External Affairs. Harold’s face was expressionless. They looked at each other for a moment. Gembey’s lips moved, he was calling the other men back, his eyes on Emmett.
Emmett went down and opened the door barefoot, wearing faded madras shorts and a green golf shirt that had shrunk in the dryer, to find only Harold Gembey standing there. “Emmett,” said Harold and held out his hand. “Glad to find you at home.”
The other two men returned from around the back of the house, their pant legs swinging. Harold Gembey introduced them. “Sergeant Frank Partridge. And Inspector Robert Morton, RCMP.”
Inspector Robert Morton removed his homburg hat. On his hand, he wore a gold ring with a diamond and he had a gold tie clip with another diamond chip. Emmett remembered the amber-coloured eyes, the short stocky frame, the compact build of a middleweight boxer. Here was Mr. Farce come to call.
Emmett said, “Bill Masters told me you’d contact me by telephone to set up an appointment.” Gembey started to apologize, but Morton pushed himself between them and walked in, and Emmett said wryly, “Make yourselves at home,” then followed Morton into the stuffy house. “My wife’s away with our baby girl.”
They sat in the living room, Harold Gembey and Frank Partridge on the couch, Robert Morton in the chair that Emmett normally occupied when he would read the newspaper after work, when Suzanne was at home. The men watched as Emmett went to open the curtains. He offered them a drink, which they declined, and then he poured himself a big one.
“Sit down, Emmett, please.” Harold Gembey had greying red hair and a red moustache and wore black-framed glasses. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Your name has come up with the Americans. And it’s our job, together, to find out why.”
“Why don’t we ask the Americans — together?”
Morton interrupted. “How’s your pal Leonard Fischer?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. Do you?”
“Buggered off to Russia,” Morton said, but he glanced at Partridge, as if it was a private joke.
Gembey rubbed his forehead. Emmett sensed that Gembey was in competition with Morton, that there was some kind of struggle going on between them. He sensed that they disliked each other, but that didn’t mean Gembey was on his side.
Gembey had a paternal attitude. Emmett knew him as one of the Oxford University trained civil servants, confident, sharp, and literate, blending in well at External Affairs — but Emmett saw a weakness in him, a failure of confidence and the consequent desire to please men whom he considered more powerful than he was. Gembey knew all the mannerisms of authority, but he lacked self-belief, he lacked goodwill.
Gembey said, “Tell us what you know about this man, John Norfield.”
Emmett said, “I knew John Norfield in the past.” To Morton, he added, “I’ve met you before too. A long time ago.” It was nearly seven years ago, in 1946, when he’d met Mr. Farce in Leonard’s apartment, a few months after Leonard had disappeared, apparently to Russia — to Moscow, or to drive a tractor on a collective farm by the Black Sea.
Gembey softly persisted. “Has this man Norfield been in touch with you in the last year?”
“I haven’t seen John in a long time.”
“Yet you were close friends, you and him,” Morton observed.
“Not really.” This was a complicated question, their friendship. He could say that much honestly.
Harold Gembey asked the questions after that, but he often looked at Robert Morton, as if Morton were a ventriloquist. “Remember things as accurately as you can,” Gembey told Emmett.
“Can I ask you something?”
Gembey glanced quickly at Robert Morton before responding, “Certainly.”
“Has something happened to John?”
Even the sergeant, Partridge, who’d been silent throughout, straightened.
Robert Morton spoke. “He’s been arrested.”
“What for?”
Morton stood up. Gembey eyed Morton uneasily as he spoke to Emmett: “MI-5 picked him up.”
“John’s in England,” Emmett said, surprised.
Gembey scratched his head and admitted reluctantly, “Well, he was.” He looked worried, maybe he was giving too much away. They all looked uneasy, embarrassed; it would be, after all, embarrassing if the Brits deported a Canadian spy. “We’re keeping it out of the newspapers,” Gembey said. He looked Emmett in the eye. “He got off.” With a quick, contemptuous glance at Morton, he added, “Unauthorized surveillance. No case.” Then slowly, as if he were trying to cipher something, protect Emmett, or protect himself, Gembey asked, “When was the last time you saw John Norfield? Think carefully.”
“1949, I guess.”
“Be precise.”
“It was fall of 1949. He’d been ill. Look. No one was close to John.”
“Except for your wife,” said Robert Morton.
“Suzanne was young and naive.” Then he added tightly to Gembey, “My wife has nothing to do with this.”
“From 1946 to 1949,” Morton said, speaking as if he were referring to notes but his hands were empty and he studied his diamond ring, “Suzanne McCallum, as she was known then, had an affair with John Norfield that he broke off. Norfield disappeared, like smoke.” Morton made a sympathetic face. “She was troubled for a while. She saw a psychiatrist, from October through December. An expensive head doctor, hired by her father. Her daddy set her up in a shop, selling pictures. And then you lost your job in Tokyo, came home, and she married you.”
“She’s none of your business,” Emmett said, then, to Gembey, “We have a child, for chrissake.”
Morton smiled, amused to see Emmett rattled. Emmett put his empty glass down at his feet and sat back in his chair, taking a breath.
At eight-thirty, though it was still hot in the house, he announced that he was chilly, excused himself, and went upstairs to change his clothes. He sat down on the bed and used the phone on the bedside table. It was a poor connection. Suzanne, through the crackling line, kept asking, “What’s wrong?” He told her that he’d changed his mind, he was coming down tonight. Late. He instructed her to go now, before it got too dark, tow the small outboard behind her inboard runabout and leave it for him at the landing. He told her he loved her and hung up. He’d started to change his clothes when he noticed that the bedroom door, which he was convinced that he had closed, was now open. Partridge was standing at the doorway. “After you,” Partridge said, and Emmett walked past him, back downstairs, Partridge at his back.
Robert Morton raised his eyebrows when Emmett returned still wearing shorts but made no comment.
Gembey seemed disgusted. He wanted to get this over with. He waved his hands, indicating that it was time to get down to brass tacks. “There’s something we need to establish very clearly, Emmett. Are you or were you ever a member of the Communist Party?”
“No.”
Gembey looked relieved and left the room. They could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Gembey was getting himself a glass of water. Emmett wanted another drink. And he was hungry. He’d had a sandwich at his desk before noon, nothing since.
Robert Morton moved to sit close to him, and in a low voice he said, “You’ve lied to me before.” Gembey returned and Morton moved away, saying, “And your Jewish pal, Leonard Fischer, you’re claiming he never contacts you?”
“No.”
Morton shook his head. “You really stuck your neck out for that jerk.” Now Morton seemed to be angry at Leonard, the one who got away. He said, “How about your wife? She still in touch with John Norfield?”
Gembey cut him off: “She’s not our territory, Morton.”
“She hasn’t seen him in years,” Emmett said quickly to Morton, but he knew he sounded too defensive. He had to protect Suzanne. She was innocent, naive, he had to shield her.
Morton continued, “Did she know that Norfield is a communist?”
“Everyone at the University of Toronto after the war either knew a communist or pretended to be one.”
“Now that sounds like an exaggeration.”
“It’s true. I guess you weren’t there.”
Partridge finally spoke. “You seem to think this inquiry is merely a personal matter, Mr. Jones.”
“Norfield was a POW in Hong Kong. That’s the most important thing about him. Everything else is an after-effect.”
Toward ten o’clock, the interview got general: what was Jones’s attitude toward the Soviet Union? Emmett reminded them that his field was Southeast Asia. “Yes, of course,” Gembey said, “we know that. What we’re trying to get at is more central.”
“Wait a sec,” Robert Morton interrupted. “Let’s follow this for a moment. ‘Mao Zedong has been China’s future since the Long March.’ Does that ring a bell?”
Emmett said, “No.”
“They’re your words.”
Emmett, seated in one of the Louis Quinze chairs Suzanne had inherited from her grandmother, was thinking, Mao is China’s future, Chairman Mao has been China’s past, present, and future since 1943. He said, “Turns out it’s true,” and then, to Gembey, “It’s not treason to know this fact.”
Robert Morton came and stood over him, jingling change in his pocket. “You were — disillusioned — with the Americans’ support of Chiang Kai-shek.” Then, in a simpering voice, “‘a symptom of ignorant imperialism.’” Morton turned on his heel and leaned to speak exclusively to Partridge, “‘If the kind reader will forgive a redundancy.’” Partridge smirked.
Emmett understood then, the words belonged to him, but it seemed impossible that he’d ever talked like that. Ignorant imperialism, yes, but kind reader? “I was young when I wrote that.” He remembered. He’d written an opinion piece in the student newspaper, The Varsity, when he was studying Asia at the University of Toronto.
“Not that young,” Morton said.
“Yeah. Not that young.” He’d been twenty-six. Not young.
Harold Gembey said dismissively to Robert Morton, “I don’t want to weigh too heavily on something he wrote in a university newspaper.”
“You still a fan of Mao Zedong?” Robert Morton asked.
“I’m not a fan of anybody.”
“Mass murderer, Mao,” Morton quietly observed.
Gembey said impatiently, “Let’s move on,” and asked, “You were recalled from your job at the Canadian Liaison Mission in Japan. Why?”
Emmett guessed that the RCMP was supposed to be taking a backseat in an internal inquiry. He answered Gembey. “Bill Masters wanted me back in Ottawa.”
Morton clicked his tongue. “You were close pals with the diplomat fellow, Herbert Norman. Both of you were recalled from Tokyo.” He added wonderingly, “You have the strangest taste in friends.” Partridge barked a laugh. Gembey let it stand, maybe glad someone else had put that on the table, Emmett Jones’s association with the diplomat, Herbert Norman, recalled from Japan just prior to Emmett’s recall, a man always shadowed by suspicion of being a traitor, in league with the communists.
“Yes,” Emmett said. “I worked with him in Tokyo three years ago, when I was stationed there during the Korean War.” He went to pour himself a third or was it his fourth drink. “Herbert Norman has been cleared,” he said, pouring whisky.
A diplomat, a scholar of Japanese history, Herbert Norman was a close friend of Lester Pearson, minister of external affairs. After Herbert was cleared, it was likely Pearson who got him promoted to head the American and Far Eastern division of External. The following year, Herbert had been sent to Washington as the Canadian representative to the United Nations. Then the US Internal Security Subcommittee went after him a second time, and within six months the Americans had pushed the RCMP and External — that would be Morton and Gembey — to interrogate him on suspicion of disloyalty — to Canada, to the US. Again, he was “cleared.” Now he’d been sent to New Zealand. Exile. Dry dock. His career probably ruined.
Emmett could hear Morton give a little chuckle behind his back while he drank.
When Emmett hit the road, it was nearly midnight and he was pretty drunk. He’d taken over the Alfa Romeo from Suzanne’s father that summer, and now he had the top down. When he left the city lights behind him, he began to talk to himself, over the winding road to Blue Sea Lake. It was about three in the morning when he arrived and took the small outboard across. He docked the boat by starlight, made his way up the stone stairs, and discovered Suzanne sitting in the dark veranda. She remained where she was and looked up at him. “It’s started, hasn’t it,” she said.
“Yes.”
A deep groan rose from her, but she kept her eyes steadily on his. “Would it be — acceptable — to you, if I asked you to forgive me?”
Emmett didn’t know what needed to be forgiven, and disliked her for assuming that this was all about her. They weren’t investigating her; he would use all his strength to make sure that they would never go after her for her relationship with John Norfield. He was too tired, but he went listlessly to put his arms around her and said, “It’s all right. I’ll take care of it.” He didn’t tell her that John Norfield had been arrested in England, and that he’d been let go. Maybe tomorrow he would tell her, but now he was tired.
She pushed him out of the way, sobbing so loudly he tried to quiet her. “Shhh,” thinking of Lennie, “shhh.”
Suzanne kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She ran outside. He could see her white bathrobe on the path down to the dock, could hear her weeping. She disappeared behind the trees and then he saw her standing on the rocks by the lake.
He went back inside, to Lenore’s room. It seemed far longer than five days since he’d held his baby girl. Lennie’s bedroom at the cottage was behind the kitchen. It was painted light blue and had screened windows on three sides. The leaves soughed in the wind, the shadows of their boughs moving all over. It was crazy to put her here alone in such a wildering world. She was awake, lying on her back in her crib, looking at him with those sombre grey eyes. He collected her, gathering her into his arms with a shawl around her, kissing her neck, inhaling her, “Hey, sweet baby, hey, little girl,” crooning to her, but inside his head, he was talking to Gembey, to Morton, he’d never stop talking to them. “I’ll be true to you,” he whispered to his baby. Gembey had wanted to know, when was the last time he’d seen John Norfield. And he remembered.
September 1949
Norfield had phoned and asked him to come, so he went and found John in the back room of his bookstore, seated with a black notebook in his hand. John lifted a face swollen, yellow, sweating, clammy. He’d been sick to his stomach in his little bathroom at the back and the whole place stank. John lifted a shaky hand and said, “Thank you,” and put the notebook in a drawer, as if relinquishing a duty. Then he went to the back and Emmett could hear water in the sink; John was washing his hands. When he returned, he walked past Emmett, fumbled with the door to his shop, and went out. “Please lock it,” John said, handing him the key, the sweat on his face slick and acrid-smelling. “I might be gone awhile.”
Emmett hailed a cab and helped John into the backseat, where he lay down. Emmett got into the front beside the cabbie, who asked nervously, “What’s the matter with your friend?”
John’s muffled voice came from the backseat, “Nothing that will hurt you.”
Emmett took him to St. Michael’s Hospital, and stayed while John was admitted, waiting in the hallway all afternoon till he snagged a doctor and asked if he could see him. “Are you family?” the doctor wanted to know. Emmett said that he was his brother and was let in.
John made an effort to sit up when Emmett entered the room — a show of dignity, or self-defence.
Emmett had never witnessed John’s bouts of illness, hadn’t realized they could be this severe, though he knew that John still suffered from some infection, a parasite contracted in the POW camp in Japan, and that he’d sometimes retreat from his friends for a week or more, avoid even Suzanne. Emmett would learn from Suzanne that John was ill when she’d phone and ask him if he could go for a walk, for coffee, and he’d gladly keep her company, despite the pain it caused him to see her so obsessed with Norfield. Now he asked John, “Do you want me to let Suzanne know?” John wearily shook his head, no. “Not till I’m clean,” he said.
Emmett spent most of the next three days at the hospital, reading the newspaper to John, or sitting with a book while John slept. He enjoyed this interlude, and John seemed grateful — he’d never known John to be so receptive.
On the fourth day, John asked him to bring a radio, and Emmett went out to buy one. When he returned to the hospital room, John was hanging up the phone, and now he regarded Emmett with that ironic grin, and Emmett knew that their relations were back to what they’d been before.
They were sitting on the bed, tuning the radio when Suzanne pushed open the door to Norfield’s room. Emmett saw her cream-coloured shoes, her shapely legs, a low-cut cream-coloured dress and a cream-coloured hat of some kind, like a Sultan. She seemed embarrassed. She looked beautiful and also silly and that seemed to make her mad. He stood, trying not to look too hard. She held a tremulous pose, a cream leather handbag slung over one arm, an unlit cigarette in the other hand. Her lovely voice, “Hello, boys.” Emmett thought she must be trying to look like Barbara Stanwyck or somebody like that; he found her more beautiful than Stanwyck, as beautiful as Lana Turner.
Norfield raised one knee under his bedclothes. Suzanne came to stand at the foot of his bed, biting her lip against whatever it was she wanted to say. Finally she put her cigarette into her handbag, took off the silly hat, and said bitterly, “Thanks for letting me know,” throwing the purse onto the bed. “I see you two are getting along fine.” And then, “Goddamn it, I was scared.”
“Of what?” John said.
“You just disappeared.” She calmed herself, she wouldn’t dare ask much of him. “Anyway,” she said, “are you all right?”
John said he was. Emmett thought, He actually does love her or he would never let her see him vulnerable, in a dishevelled hospital bed. Then John held up his hand: “Shhh.” He turned up the radio.
They heard a tinny voice announcing, “Russia has the atom secret.” Suzanne made a movement with her head, a pony yanking at the bit. Norfield’s hand went up again, and she calmed. The voice was going on about “the grim vision of an atomic war that would leave complete desolation in its wake.”
“It’s Truman,” said Norfield. “The Russians have the Bomb.”
Suzanne asked, “Are they just going to blow up the world?”
Emmett was curious to see if John would celebrate the Russians’ new “atomic secret.”
Suzanne, too, was watching John’s face. John looked closed in on himself, as if he wanted her to leave. “Well,” she said, “I guess it levels the playing field.”
Norfield twisted slightly, as if her opinion disappointed him, as if she made him disappointed in himself. His skin was yellow. Emmett knew it was his liver, damaged by dysentery in the Japanese camp. A shabby type of war wound. John had been an active soldier for less than three weeks before being taken prisoner for nearly four years. Emmett thought that John needed to keep the battle going; the war wasn’t over for him and never would be.
President Truman had finished talking, and an announcer was asking, “Will man destroy himself?”
When Suzanne visited Norfield in his apartment, she didn’t know that their words and sounds were being recorded. But Norfield did. He said almost nothing.
Suzanne liked John’s hands and his feet, the rare smile, his shirts, his smell, his scars, his reticence. She didn’t know that Robert Morton of the RCMP could hear the sighs she uttered, or the way she whispered John’s name, calling him, her lips pressed to his throat, his tender, determined silence.
“Hello,” she liked to whisper in a kiss, “hello.” She never felt sure that she was in the same picture as he was; she felt she was experiencing something parallax, disjointed from him. She was always shocked to see him; he left an after-image of his diffident, lonely posture, his distracted way of walking, slightly pigeon-toed.
And somewhere, deeply, innately, in John’s makeup, there was money. He didn’t make a show of it; he lived simply, worked steadily, selling books. Many evenings she found him in his tastefully under-furnished apartment, seated at his kitchen table, writing poetry that he hid with his hand before closing the notebook. Then he’d open a good bottle of wine and cook a couple of pepper steaks. His wardrobe was limited, but it was comprised of good dress shirts and a couple of cashmere sweaters. She’d never seen a hole in his socks. His cigarette lighter was sterling silver, well polished. He never talked about money. He was always clean, he smelled of Scotch and cigarettes, raw onions, soap, and some kind of oil he liked, made of crushed seeds.
Norfield’s middle- or even upper-class fingerprint made Suzanne comfortable around him, even though she expected to be chilled. She wanted to prove strong enough to sustain his disinterest. He wasn’t an ardent lover, and this was modern. She believed that she lived in an age of enlightenment.
While Hong Kong might have been John Norfield’s defining experience, Suzanne McCallum’s was a movie she’d seen five years ago, in 1944. Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Though it wasn’t Barbara Stanwyck who inspired the cream wardrobe, the turban that Suzanne wore to visit John Norfield while he was in the hospital with his liver; it was Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The two actresses mixed in Suzanne’s mind, for sexiness, for cunning. She once said to John, “I’m rotten to the heart, baby,” but he didn’t laugh.
Suzanne was only seventeen when she went to see Double Indemnity with her father. Until the last few minutes of that movie, it would never have occurred to her that a man would enjoy the embrace of a beautiful woman and then shoot her, twice. The force of those gunshots threw Suzanne back in her seat so hard her father leaned over to comfort her, cursing himself for having brought her there.
Fred MacMurray’s surprising gesture, his hand with the gun thrust into Barbara Stanwyck’s silk pyjamas, became Suzanne’s nearly subliminal point of reference, an image she recalled for a fraction of a second when life would disclose its underlying violence. It was her initial reaction to Fred MacMurray’s sudden act during an intimate moment, her first shock, that she brought to mind, to remind herself that she had once been naive. She thought that her womanhood dated from that moment.
One sunny afternoon last August, when she was taking a streetcar down College Street, before John got sick and went to the hospital without telling her where he was, she’d seen him driving his motorcycle, shining black and chrome. He came up beside the streetcar at a red light, and she didn’t wave or anything but she had a good look at him. His handsomeness, his jaw, the shape of his head, his taut, muscular arms, all of this stung her. He was self-contained; she had no idea what he was thinking. The light changed and he sped away.
She felt an icy need for him in her blood. She thought about him all the time, if you could call it “thinking.” He shook her so deeply she was almost afraid of him, but he made her feel very beautiful.
She didn’t pretend to agree with what she called “John’s politics,” which she understood to be as abstract — or as sensual, really — as those of her own father, who was a Liberal even in the way he had a Scotch and soda before dinner. She thought that men need their politics because they need to believe they’re part of a greater good. She was aware, of course, that John entertained ideas about communism and revolution, and she thought of it as an intellectual hobby, even an affectation, as if he’d taken up chess or a foreign language. At least he didn’t wear a beret. It was only in relation to John’s “politics” that Suzanne would feel friendliness for him, a compassionate, slightly domestic forgiveness, rather than enthrallment.
In Suzanne’s country, money and goodness seemed naturally to coexist. The Canada she knew could easily afford to entertain criticism without feeling any compulsion to make uncomfortable changes. She’d read some Marx and he seemed irrelevant, historical; her mind wandered. Suzanne was preoccupied by John Norfield because she didn’t understand him and could never know him. He could never give her enough.
John disappeared in January. Suzanne waited a week. She didn’t call Emmett, she didn’t want anyone to know that he’d really left her this time. He’d been very distant lately, watchful and unhappy, and now she knew in her gut that she had lost him. She gave it seven days, and then went to his apartment. She knocked at his door, but she already knew he was gone.
She had her own key and let herself in. The place was silent. From the street came the sound of cars rolling over fresh snow. The windows were patched-in paisleys of frost, and a bit of condensation pooled on the wooden windowsills, but otherwise the place was spotless — except for a dirty coffee cup sitting on the kitchen table; it wasn’t like him to leave something like that, he was always so meticulous. She went into the bedroom, the sheets pulled army-tight, and looked on the bedside table. She remembered distinctly that she had unclipped her gold necklace and left it on the pretty saucer he kept there, a porcelain saucer painted with gold pheasants —the necklace was gone, he must have taken it.
She opened his closet door. His clothes were in his closet, his woollen socks and laundered shirts were folded in his drawers, everything in its place. The only thing he’d taken was her necklace.
She lay down on his bed, not bothering to remove her shoes. The room had no odour, as if he’d taken that too. It was cold, but she slept anyway. When she awoke, it was dark, and the phone was ringing.
The phone was ringing. Suzanne stumbled to answer it. Surely it would be John. She had never been fully denied anything before and vaguely doubted that such a thing could ever occur. Then John’s voice.
“Where are you?” she asked him.
“Listen. You have to leave.”
“Why? Where are you?” she asked again.
“Have you got any money?”
She looked around for her purse. “I think so.”
“Get a taxi. Get out of there.”
“I came to find you.”
She thought she heard his sadness then; she thought she heard his yearning to see her, though he said not a word. The phone clicked several times; she said, “Hello?”
Then he said, “Suzanne.”
He spoke so tenderly, she answered, “What’s wrong?” But he had hung up. She put down the receiver and looked behind her. Someone was with her in the apartment.
The kitchen was dark. Her purse was in there along with the key to John’s apartment, on the kitchen table, beside John’s coffee cup. She needed her wallet, she needed money to get a cab. The apartment prickled with silence and electric light coming through the window from the streetlamps. She heard a shoe move. Momentum, confusion, fear brought her to the doorway to the kitchen. She saw someone standing in the dark. She said, unreasonably, “John?” The dark figure moved slightly. Suzanne moaned. She stumbled to the door, fumbled with the lock, and ran out to the street.
There wasn’t much snow but sheets of ice on the sidewalks and she’d left her coat behind. All was frozen, brittle and still, the street empty, except for a police car idling across the street. The police car did a fast U-turn on the road and rolled to a stop beside her, its tires crunching over the ice. A policeman got out and called her by name. “Miss McCallum.” He gestured, Get in.
She sat in the passenger seat. The policeman was a balding man in his fifties, someone’s father. He didn’t say anything and didn’t look at her. The only kind gesture the man made to Suzanne was to turn up the heat in his car. She had been living at her parents’ house in Forest Hill since finishing her BA, and when she began to give the policeman her address he cut her off and said, “I know.”
She rode in stunned silence for a moment, then asked, “How?”
He had an impassive face, but still he looked at her quickly, as if to see if she was serious. In what sounded like a more fatherly tone, he asked, “What do you think you’re doing, hanging around with those kind of people?”
She said nothing more then. She guessed that the policeman meant John, and John’s “politics,” and she didn’t want to make anything worse for him because she didn’t understand what was going on. The policeman had been watching the building. She thought it might be safe to tell him one thing. “There was a man in my friend’s apartment.”
The policeman didn’t respond.
The car pulled up before the house in Forest Hill and sat idling while she rang the bell; she didn’t have her key. She pounded on the door. Her mother, with her impressive coiffure, her satin dressing gown, opened, and said, “What on earth,” looking from her daughter and out to the police car, which was pulling quickly away, its brake lights already bobbing where the car lurched over the culvert separating the McCallum driveway from the road.
Suzanne woke up in her girlhood bedroom in her parents’ house, feeling dispossessed. She had refused to say much of anything to her outraged mother last night but had come upstairs to bed.
Now she went down and joined her parents at breakfast. Mama would not look at her, and her father greeted her with mild admonishment in his eyes. Mama was rigid, nibbling dry toast between her front teeth and finally slamming down her coffee cup, demanding, “Just what the hell is going on, Suzanne?”
Suzanne’s father gave his newspaper a dry little shake, and now Mama was angry with him too. She said, “Don’t you dare make this out to be nothing!”
“Perish the thought,” said her father.
Mama, Suzanne, Hazel the maid — taking away the remains of the scrambled eggs — registered this as uncharacteristically mean.
“I told you last night,” Suzanne said. “I was waiting for John and I fell asleep.”
“But why were you out in the night like that?” Mama wanted to know. “Without your coat?”
“I was sleepwalking,” said Suzanne.
Mama quivered, silently beseeching her daughter to be normal, to have normal ambitions, to date nice men without a history.
It was an ingenious lie, Suzanne’s. She had often sleepwalked as a child. The stories of her night-wanderings had been some of Suzanne’s favourites; it was fascinating not to remember an event to which she was central, though her mother told the stories as cautionary tales, a wary eye on her daughter, this vain young woman who didn’t know her own mind.
Mama waited for Hazel to finish taking the dishes into the kitchen, then lowered her voice and informed Suzanne, “Your father and I have hired a private investigator to look into this, this creep you’re so keen on. This Norfield character.”
“You did what?”
“We must and we will protect you!”
Suzanne hated everything about her mother this morning, her voice, her lips, her wrinkled throat. She and John had been watched, then, by her parents. The perverse intimacy of this, the violation, it was sick. She shouted, “You want to know about him, do you? I’ll tell you everything you want to know. This is a good man! This is a man who has suffered! He writes poetry!”
Her mother laughed bitterly, and Suzanne threw down her napkin and rose to flee the room, knowing she’d blundered.
With his right hand, her father reached and caught Suzanne’s wrist as she tried to pass, and he said, “I’m sure he’s a good man, Suzie. Just not right for you.”
Mama hissed, “That is an under statement!” Now she tossed her napkin onto her plate and pushed away from the table. At the doorway, she lifted her chin and regained some of her irony. “Your university experiments are over, Suzanne. No more Mein Kampf, no more Das Kapital.”
“Mein Kampf ?” said her father, laughing.
“Oh, you know what I mean, Theodore! You will come to your senses, young lady. You will behave in a manner appropriate to your station.” Then Mama swept from the room.
Her father gave Suzanne’s arm a shake and released her, amused. “She fumbled the ball, but she’ll probably win the game.”
“You actually hired a private detective?”
He shrugged to indicate yes. “I protect what’s mine.”
Suzanne liked her father, but he’d never been physically demonstrative with her, had probably never even kissed her (he would let her kiss his forehead), and they’d never talked about anything more personal than tuition fees. She found it horrifying that he now knew that she’d slept with someone. Yet he was reading his paper now, as if he didn’t mind. Did her father ever think about pregnancy, or was the paternal mind itself a contraceptive? She felt woozy. And then overwhelmingly curious: what had he learned about John?
“Well,” he began patiently, “as your mother had already informed me before I spent nearly a thousand dollars on a PI, John Norfield sells communist books. Now, whether or not that’s against the law seems obscure.”
“It’s only illegal in Quebec.”
He seemed pleased that his daughter knew at least that much. “Sit down, Suzie.”
She did, and he said, “He was a POW in Hong Kong. It damaged his health. You know that. It’s a terrible thing to happen to a man. Some men never get over something like that. I understand how you might be drawn to the fellow. He’s obviously not stupid. But he seems to court trouble. And he’s had experiences that must make him seem — mysterious in your eyes. Even glamorous. Am I right?”
She shook her head. “It’s not like that,” but fury and embarrassment seized her again. It was like that, it was exactly like that, and her father had to hire a private investigator before he could bother to try to figure it out.
He looked at his watch and took up his paper again, adding more firmly, “Your mother might not know the difference between Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, but she has a woman’s instincts. Don’t wreck your life. It happens. Even to nice girls from good families.”
Suzanne poured herself some coffee. It had become painfully obvious that she had to move out. This decision made it easier to sit with her father. She felt detached. Idly, she picked up the discarded front section of the newspaper and began to read. “Who is Klaus Fuchs?” she asked.
Her father put down his paper, apparently surprised to hear Suzanne make an inquiry into the bigger world. The headline read, “KLAUS FUCHS CONFESSES.” There was a picture of a man with a mass of black hair and round black glasses. “A spy,” said her father. “Fuchs was a physicist working on the atom bomb in the war. For our side. He was also passing information to the Russians. He’s going to jail for fourteen years.”
A spy. Suzanne studied the photograph. “Is he a communist?”
“He’s a traitor.”
She had the impression that her father didn’t know whether or not Fuchs had to be a communist to be a spy; she’d never in her life heard him say, I don’t know. She poured more coffee and read the newspaper report.
Fuchs had given enough information to the Russians for them to build the bomb that had upset President Truman so much last fall, when John was in the hospital — when she’d irritated John by saying, “That levels the playing field.” Fuchs was supposed to be working secretly for the British and the Americans, but he gave the atomic information to the Russians. She studied his photograph. He looked like a scientist.
She thought about John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima, the terrible story she’d read in The New Yorker magazine, that night she’d first met John. The slimy living bodies. Every atomic scientist is a criminal, she thought. Now everybody has the Bomb. Why were the RCMP outside John’s apartment? Because he, too, is a spy? It seemed impossible. John didn’t even have a university degree, he just read a lot.
Suzanne went upstairs to her bedroom and began to pack. She had to move out. She’d have to get a job. She knew what to do. She would work in a camera shop somewhere. A camera shop would be a clean place to work; it would be like a blank slate, and even her awful mother couldn’t protest. Suzanne already had a Brownie camera and she’d taken some photographs of people and trees that she knew were good; she was also good at doorways and avenues. She had taken some photographs of John, when he let her — and she remembered that she’d been surprised, pleased but surprised, when he let her.
Her father had a darkroom and he’d taught her how to develop film. She would be independent; she would join the working world; she’d work in a clean space, engaged in measuring light. It was a pure plan.
She felt strangely calm, packing her camera and a change of clothes. “What was I thinking, all this time?” she muttered to herself while she packed. “I’m twenty-three years old.” She was still numb from last night, and from the stark possibility that she might never see John again. She wondered, For how long had he been watched by the RCMP? Did they think he was a spy like Fuchs? The craziness of it felt like an analgesic against the pain she’d soon feel if John really had disappeared. It was almost exhilarating to have lost what she thought was “everything.” John was everything.
Her father stopped her when she was going out the front door with the big leather bag she’d used for books when she was at university. “It’s cold out,” he observed, conciliatory. He offered her a ride.
It was her father’s considered opinion that this Norfield character would turn into one of those vets who just can’t move on after a war. He assumed that Suzanne would grow impatient and look elsewhere. A police car in the driveway didn’t faze him in the least; that’s what the force was there for. His was a family of eccentrics, had been for generations, sleepwalkers, all of them. Suzanne had the family spunk, the family brains. The beauty and eventually the money. If Norfield went after any of it, he’d — what? — kill him, one way or another, but it wouldn’t come to that: his daughter’s radical phase was on the wane. She was the kind of woman a man wants to marry. And she wouldn’t marry a shopkeeper with night-sweats and a bad liver.
He dropped her off on Bathurst, ignoring the traffic that had to slide to a stop behind him. “Wait a sec,” he said, catching her arm, and with his mild, distracted affection offered his forehead for a kiss. He had a big, warm face. She asked him for change for the streetcar, and he topped it up with a five.
She had to go back for her purse, which she’d left on the kitchen table in John’s apartment, beside his coffee cup.
She took a streetcar, found a seat, and looked out the window, trying to see everything with the eye of a photographer. She thought, I have a tool to protect me from confusion. There was cloud cover. Her father had taught her that evenly distributed light reveals the object with less distortion. She would like that, a lucid perspective. She was not on solid ground. She would retrieve her purse. If the man was in John’s apartment, she’d take his picture.
Klaus Fuchs was going to prison for fourteen years, but he was a scientist, he’d given the Russians real information. What was John? A war vet, a hero, a believer.
She would go now, retrieve her purse, and photograph John’s apartment. If he didn’t come back, she’d have something, a memento. She hated the police for spying on John, and didn’t believe for a minute that he had done anything to deserve it. He’d seen how force works, in the war. He wanted it, like light, to be evenly distributed.
A believer; she thought about that, getting down from the streetcar at the stop near John’s suite. It’s not the right word. A disbeliever. That’s better.
Where do the believers live? In another country. There was no place for that kind of thing in Toronto. Everyone around here was an agnostic.
How she longed for him to answer the door. But no one came when she knocked, not even the RCMP. Then she remembered, she’d left the key inside when she’d fled. She stalked down to the basement level and rang the super’s bell, told him that she was John’s sister and that he’d asked her to fetch some family insurance policies for their parents, got a key, climbed the stairs back up to the second floor, and went inside.
It made her ache, the stillness of the place, steam from the radiators, a complacent winter sun, and now she was aware of the smell of Norfield’s soap, leather, wool. He had gone away, really absented himself. Such absence made her weep.
Weeping, she went to the kitchen. It was empty. Clean. Her purse on the table, her wallet still inside. The coffee cup. The key. She took out her Brownie and as she began to photograph these things in the even light, her sorrow evened, became quite blank. She photographed the bedroom, the bed. His closet, a pair of tanned shoes. His drawers, three leather belts rolled — that he rolled up his belts, that they were of such quality, made Suzanne again feel desperate. She considered staying here tonight, but her courage didn’t go quite that far.
It was time to leave. Yet she opened the kitchen cupboards and photographed the glasses there and then the forks in the drawer. The forks were beautiful; when she brought the camera close enough they could be the span of a bridge, a fence. She was an amateur, as a woman, a lover, a photographer. So be it. She didn’t wish ever to be cured of John.
She was very tired. She went back to his bedroom and this time she pulled the covers back, intending to climb in, to get warm, maybe to sleep. That was when she found his notebook. Lying on the sheet near the foot of the bed. As if he’d intended her to find it.
When it was time to leave, she locked John’s door, returned the key to the superintendent (keeping her own key in her purse, a hedge; finality did not suit her) and bundled out to the street. And there was Emmett Jones, standing across the street, looking at her.
Suzanne’s nerves were frayed, and she warmed to Emmett’s solitary vigil. Emmett belonged, she felt, among safe, reasonable people. It was snowing heavily now and milder; big flakes were falling, the cars mumbling congenially over deep tracks of snow, the red light where she waited to cross to join him refracted through moist air.
Emmett didn’t move, though he twisted his body slightly to watch her approach. When she got to him, he looked down at her — they were both tall people, Emmett and Suzanne, but Emmett was six-foot-two — neutral and intent. He let her come right up to him without speaking. He had snow in his hair. She said, “He’s not there,” and waved at the apartment building across the street.
Two men in a beige Chrysler parked at the corner turned to look.
A man in a hat tucked his newspaper under his arm and hailed a cab driven by an ordinary fellow in his fifties.
Suzanne shifted her bag to the other shoulder, conscious of John’s notebook tucked in among her few things. “Do you know where he is?” Then she regretted that she’d asked. Something leaked out; some reserve fantasy of her own stoicism. She shook her head. “Never mind. Forget it.” She smiled sadly at Emmett. “I always knew this would happen.”
She started to walk, assuming that Emmett would accompany her, which he did. Suzanne felt pain spooling from her solar plexus, like fishing line. She said, “Can I ask you something?”
Emmett nodded.
“Why were you standing there?”
“I got a phone call. From John. He asked me to come. To see if anybody was around.”
“And was anyone there? Besides me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to look for those things.”
Suzanne didn’t really know either. But she would learn. Looking had become her domain. She had nowhere else to live.
Suzanne did become a photographer but not in a shop; her father put an end to that. Her father said, “Start at the top and take it from there,” and paid the rent for Suzanne to have her own studio at the front of a low, single-storey building on Avenue Road, with her own suite in the back, looking out onto a small, overgrown garden. She hung out a sign: “McCallum Photographs.” She was finally pretty independent.
She felt she was strong because she was broken. Not merely broken-hearted; she’d broken faith with life. Until she’d seen John Norfield’s face, witnessed his loneliness, his sexy and cursed loneliness as it found expression in the way he smoked a cigarette, till she’d been so affected by his cool elegance, his vice, Suzanne might have anticipated a future as smooth as a golf green: a marriage to someone a little older and a little wiser, a few children, annulated maturity by means of Christmas turkey, Easter ham, the dinner rituals of the Christian calendar, the cadence of the beautiful and the good. But now she appeared to be rejecting her own tribe.
After John’s disappearance, she was initially in a state of shock, under a spell, an interdiction. She felt she’d driven him away by wanting too much of him. In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid — a male creature of terrible beauty — forbade Psyche to look at him, and made love to her only in complete darkness. And when Psyche lit the forbidden lamp to look at her beautiful lover, he punished her by vanishing. Suzanne had only the photographs she’d taken of John. She became obsessed with the darkroom, she could control her fate by making his image rise, make it rise again and again to the surface.
She was skinny in those days and drank brandy at dawn. Word got out about her studio, and people started to drop by to see her work; even a few strangers came to buy her photographs. The “art photos” made her parents’ social circle feel sorry for the McCallums; they thanked god that their own daughters were interested in the newly minted lawyers or men starting out in the financial sector, solid young men working for banks and accounting firms or in upper management in manufacturing and sales. Friends of her mother’s said that Suzanne had been ruined by education. They predicted that she would end up an anxious little spinster, after the family money ran out.
Suzanne’s was a Toronto of unhappy childish images. A wedding veil on a naked mannequin through a smashed window and the inevitable bald dolls. But her work improved. A chipped china bowl overflowing with a bushy coleus — even her mother’s friends thought it beautiful, but one asked the other while Suzanne pretended not to hear, “She shows the roots and not the flowers? Those are robins’ eggshells?” “They are potato peelings. With orange peel, and mould. It’s not coleus, it’s red cabbage.” “So much colour in a black-and-white picture, I’m amazed.” “I’m reminded of Wyeth.” “Oh, go on, Wyeth is an artist who makes art.” “It’s a still life, isn’t it? And death lurking under us, informing our lives. I surprise you. You forget, I’ve had some training.” “Oh you’re deep all right, as far as it goes, but she’s just a sex maniac having a nervous breakdown.”
Her father sat for a portrait of himself posing in a gubernatorial chair before a black velvet drop, well and proper. “The girl could make a decent living, taking portraits of our best people. Like Karsh.” “Sure. But she thinks she’s some big eccentric.” It was only lonely, balding Miss O’Brien, the Catholic spinster who used to teach piano, who could possibly be pleased with Suzanne’s portrait of her in the Irishman’s butcher shop beside the bloody shank of lamb.
Half-price Suzanne McCallum. “Don’t you dare feel an ounce of pity for her. She could have married Dirk Dupont and had all the money in the world.”
At the time of John Norfield’s disappearance in January 1950, Emmett was supporting himself by translating Japanese documents from the Russo-Japanese War for a professor at the university. The Russo-Japanese War was initiated by Japan in a Pearl Harbor–style attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur, Manchuria, in 1904, and it was like a rehearsal for World War One, fought hand to hand in the mud with bayonets, with anywhere between one hundred and thirty thousand to more than two hundred thousand soldiers killed in a year and a half — no one bothered to keep an exact count of the dead. Emmett was translating love letters written by a high-ranking Japanese officer to his mistress, letters filled with explicit, erotic descriptions of blood and guts, erotic carnage. Perhaps it was the love language of the Japanese officer that led to Emmett’s nightmares.
He worked at home, and didn’t speak with anyone for days on end, drinking countless pots of tea during the hours he sat writing, and after dark he would walk for miles until he thought he could sleep.
This work paid him enough to live on. But he needed a career. Several professors at the university, seeing Jones flounder, had suggested that his language skills could get him a job in the civil service, with External Affairs if he wanted it.
The vets were still being celebrated, but nobody talked about Bomber Command; he would be a source of shame to his professors, if they’d known that he’d bombed German civilians. Bomber Command violated the ideal that permeated peacetime versions of the war; he’d been one of those who had behaved like the fascists who’d bombed London.
So when his bearded professors suggested that he “try External” for a career, when they said that his internationalism combined with his (no doubt) heroic deeds in the war would make him a prime candidate for a role with the Canadian civil service, he would go silent in their book-lined offices. Privately, he did not believe there was such a thing as a civil government. He was unmoored. He read Marx’s essay called “The Perversion of Human Needs.”
“Alienation,” Marx wrote, “is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, but that everything is something different from itself, that my activity is something else, and finally, that an inhuman power rules over everything.”
Someone had described Emmett’s condition. Everything is different from itself. An inhuman power rules over everything.
He was bored in an ugly way. Bored by surfeit, bored by indecision, a buzzing hovering boredom that would not land. He missed the action of the war and hated himself for it. He had liked the chemistry of skill and fear in his blood when he was a pilot, and now he had to discover whatever would replace it. He missed John, he missed Leonard, he didn’t think he could love anyone but Suzanne. John’s disappearance had made Suzanne almost into a haunted widow. No word came from Leonard; maybe he’d actually made it to Russia, his communist paradise.
Emmett wrote, drank tea because he couldn’t afford liquor, walked, and slept. He dreamed about Germany. He dreamed of the burnt people, dreamed that they had gladly given themselves to the fires that destroyed them — their minds, their faces above their charred bodies were coherent and ordinary, and they spoke to him casually, even cheerfully, though he couldn’t understand their language.
His duty was to sample their flesh. In his dream he could taste the meat beneath the oily, roasted crust. He ate the flesh of one big man, his chest, the fat around the middle, then the thighs. He tasted the meat, which he found gamy, like venison, and he thought, I don’t like wild meat. The next burnt body offered to him was of a woman, and when he tore the crust with his teeth and bit into the roasted flesh, she tasted dark — rich and very dark, like wild fowl. He had only taken one dutiful bite when he decided he really couldn’t stomach anymore; he did not like the flavour. But there was the problem of the bite taken from her chest. He covered her with green leaves because he couldn’t bear to think that he’d spoiled her for the next man who might enjoy her.
He awoke and dressed and made tea and toast and began to work. The taste of wild game persisted and he felt sick. Downstairs, he heard the chime of his landlady’s grandfather clock, and then the doorbell; he heard her open the front door, and the old house shook a little when she slammed it shut again. He thought she must have gone out. But a moment later, there came a knock at his door.
A voice whispered urgently from the landing, “Emmett! Open!” He opened the door and there was Rachel, Leonard’s cousin. His landlady shrilled below, “Mr. Jones! Really!” He looked over the banister to where the landlady stood with her hands on her hips. She cried, “Disgraceful!”
“She’s my cousin,” he said. Even from three flights up he could see the disgust on his landlady’s face.
Rachel was puffing furiously. “A harridan,” she said. Then, loudly, so the landlady could hear, “An anti-Semite!”
Emmett ushered Rachel into his attic suite. She was dressed in grey wool with a white blouse buttoned high at her throat and a black hat with a band of red satin. She unpinned the hat and her hair fell around her shoulders. She’d become even more beautiful. He squeezed her arm and offered the chair at his kitchen table, moving aside his papers.
“The old sow didn’t want to let me in.”
“I’m not supposed to have women here.” He liked the sound of that. As if he sometimes “had” women anyway.
“Is that what she meant by ‘your kind’? ‘I don’t want any of your kind in my home.’ She meant Jew.”
He realized this was true. “I’ll move out.” Ashamed. He should have been aware.
Rachel smiled at him and put the cool palm of her hand to the side of his face. “Still the innocent.” She surveyed his small quarters, took in the documents stacked on the table, her square fingers stroking a page of Japanese script. “So learned, Emmett. I’m in awe.”
He offered tea and put the kettle on, feeling neither innocent nor learned. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He’d been solitary too long and didn’t have anything to say, but he was glad to see her, he was afraid his loneliness would show. He asked her if she’d heard from Leonard.
Rachel pursed her lips. “Yes, in a manner of speaking, I have heard from Leonard, the most incomprehensible palaver. Honestly. I don’t know if he’s happy or miserable, starving in the desert or working happily in the People’s Eden.”
“You got a letter from him?”
“It was his handwriting for certain. But I couldn’t hear his voice in the words he wrote, and he wrote the strangest things. ”
“Where is he, Rachel?”
“Russia, I’m almost certain. Though the stamp was from Holland. That didn’t stop the police from opening the letter. They didn’t even pretend it hadn’t been opened before it got to me.”
“Is he in Moscow?”
“I don’t know. I worry, Emmett. His words went around and around, but I don’t know what he’s doing or if he’s really all right.” She watched him pour the tea. “One thing, I came to discuss. In his letter Leonard wrote ‘thank you for watering the plants.’” She watched Emmett’s face and, though he didn’t say anything, she nodded, “I know. When did Leonard ever have any plants? I turn it over in my mind, and I wonder, what would be the same as a plant in Leonard’s life? Then, lightning strikes. His friends. His friends. And his books. Those are the plants he’s asking me to care for. You know him. Friendship and books matter more to him than anything — more than the Communist Party, if truth be known. He is at heart a lonely soul, betrayed, hungry for hope, starving for ideas, starving for friends to share his ideas. Tsk. So much trouble men will go to because they won’t admit they’re lonely.”
She put her hand over his, where it lay on the table between them. “Oh, Emmett. Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.” She sighed tremulously. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
She went on. “I didn’t come here to trouble you. I know that Leonard asked you to take his books from his apartment. He told me he was going to ask you to do that. Did he?”
Emmett felt seared by embarrassment. Leonard had told him to sell the books if he didn’t return, to give the money from the sale to Rachel. He’d forgotten this entirely. He indicated the several crates side-by-side in a corner beside his bed, serving as a table, nailed shut against his landlady’s incursions, and admitted, “I forgot they were there. What do you want me to do with them?”
“The police watch me, you know.”
He thought this sounded incredible.
“They’re probably watching you too, Emmett.”
He turned his back, looked out through the frost on the window. “They wouldn’t be interested in me.”
“I don’t want you to suffer for Leonard’s sake. And Leonard would sooner die than be the cause of harm to you. A friend is coming to take the books away. With your permission.”
It was such a gloomy morning the streetlights were still on. There were two cars parked across the street; only one of them had snow on its roof. “What about the risk to you?” he asked.
She sighed. “It makes me sick to be a dumb handmaiden to the Revolution. I must be useful. Can you imagine how hard it is? To accept a government that allowed the Holocaust to happen? What was the Canadian government doing to help us, while Hitler carried out his plan? Emmett? What did our government do while we were being — exterminated?”
He turned again to look at her. Her face was beautiful, serious, her mouth drawn down, her heavy eyes lowered, he could not match her sorrowful weight, he’d avoided weight, he’d been trained since birth to avoid weight. His nightmare came back to him, the taste of wild meat in his mouth.
She looked up at him trustingly and continued, as if he’d agreed, as if he would especially appreciate her view: “It wasn’t enough. It was the wrong kind of help and it wasn’t enough. I’m finished with compromise. I’ll go to prison if I have to. Now,” she patted Emmett’s hand in rhythm, “may I take Leonard’s books?”
He said yes, of course, and she took up her hat with its red satin band, went to his window, opened it, and waved the hat in the cold air, then she closed the window and returned to sit, drumming a drill pattern with her fingers on the table.
They heard the doorbell and the squawking protests of the landlady and the thud of boots on the stairs. Rachel opened the door and let in a burly man whom Emmett had never seen before.
Rachel introduced him as Max. Max sat on the edge of his chair. Emmett guessed that Max dreaded a delay in action, dreaded polite conversation with the irrelevant man who stored Leonard’s books. Max’s eyes wandered over the papers on the table, the Japanese script, then looked back up at Emmett with brown-eyed suspicion.
Max resembled the man in his nightmare, the one whose body Emmett had eaten. The table wobbled when Max leaned on it with his elbow; Emmett’s translation of a Japanese military sensualist rippled in dry air from the radiators. Rachel was talking and he understood that she was telling Max that Emmett was wonderful, her flattery prickling like hives in his skin, self-contempt hauling him down. He felt old, he would soon be thirty. His body understood sin even if his mind didn’t. He’d been tricked into killing German families while they slept. Now he was translating fascist eroticism for academic fascination, for rent money.
He heard what Rachel was saying, she was talking about the international hope in communism, she was mixing what he thought might be her Jewish version of Sunday school because she was talking about Egypt, Exodus, the ransoming of slaves. He was nervous that she was being too passionate in her speech; he’d been trained through his childhood in restraint, in ironic understatement, and he thought that what Rachel was saying might be lovely nonsense, but he was afraid that she was ultimately reasonable and that he would be called to act on her reasonable persuasion. Then he thought, I must give my life to something that will ransom my slavery, I must either redeem my life or kill myself.
Finally, Max asked Rachel in low voice, “Where are these boxes you want me to take to the car?”
Rachel indicated the three crates of books, and Max seized one and departed. On the third trip, he hoisted the last impossibly heavy crate onto his chest, nodded to Emmett, and left.
Rachel put on her coat. She stretched her arms above her head and somehow the thick rope of hair disappeared under the hat. She kissed Emmett on his lips. “Now you will have to make good on your promise to move out.”
He went to the landing to watch her descend the stairs, passing the landlady at the door. “Family documents of murdered relatives,” Rachel told her sternly and stepped out into the snow on the front porch.
Emmett tossed out the remaining tea, rinsed the cups, put his papers with his Japanese scrawl before him, and sat for a long time doing nothing. Patches of snow from his visitors’ boots melted on the oak floor. Rachel will risk everything for the Communist Party, to protest the failure of the Canadian government to protect Jews from the Holocaust. The landlady’s clock struck the hour. He remembered meeting Rachel in Leonard’s smoky apartment several years ago, hearing the earnest students talk about a stateless, classless society; he recalled the joy he’d felt at that moment, when he realized that he might free himself from the government that had fooled him into piloting for Bomber Command. Could he redeem his life, did he have the stamina, is there an ideal that could actually lift him physically from his solitude into action, into bliss?
Then he had an idea so contrary, so paradoxical, he laughed out loud.
He began to pack his few belongings.
Two weeks later, Emmett Jones wrote the entrance exam for the Department of External Affairs. He was interviewed, twice. And was accepted.
In April 1950, Emmett was preparing to move away from Toronto, to Ottawa, where he’d take up his position as a policy analyst with a special interest in the American occupation of Japan. He hadn’t seen Suzanne since John Norfield’s disappearance. She didn’t phone him anymore, and he was giving up on her. Moving away to Ottawa would put an end to his fixation. But he couldn’t leave without seeing her; he had to say goodbye.
Near the streetcar stop at St. Clair, he met a boy sitting on the yellow grass and on sudden impulse he gave the boy three dollars for the bicycle that lay beside him. The freckled, redheaded boy gladly took the money. Emmett had already ridden away before it occurred to him that the redheaded boy didn’t own the bike in the first place.
He cycled up to the McCallum property in Forest Hill. Mrs. McCallum, Suzanne’s mama, was standing on the white gravel drive between the stable and the house, talking to an old woman with a very crooked back. In the heat, the bent old woman wore a wool suit with a grey mink collar and grey kidskin gloves. She had abundant white hair arranged on her head, which sat at an acute angle, spools of hair wisping around her ancient face.
Emmett’s bicycle made a chewing sound over the gravel; white dust rose up and coated his shoes. He dismounted and sneezed.
Mrs. McCallum greeted him: “It’s Mr. Emmett Jones.” She turned to the old woman and more loudly said, “It’s Mr. Emmett Jones, Mother. An acquaintance of Suzanne’s. From her university days.” He realized that she thought he had a double name; Jones would be beyond her ken.
The old woman lifted her head like a tortoise to look at him with tortoise eyes. She was something out of Lewis Carroll, beautifully grotesque with age, privately amused. He felt himself liked, and he instantly liked her. She reminded him of his boyhood, when he was liked simply for being lanky, when people were pleasant and wealthy and offhand about their wealth. She offered him a kidskin hand to hold, a soft little nest of bones, gave a light, vigorous shake, and said, “How do you do, Mr. Emmett Jones.”
He said he was pleased to meet her, and the old woman announced, “You’ll have to come to tea.”
Suzanne’s mama sized Emmett up, regarding him with cool warmth. “You’re not carrying any books,” she observed.
“I was wondering if Suzanne is at home.” He realized that he might have phoned first; he’d been impatient.
Mama’s eyes widened. “She’s not here,” she said with some surprise. “She has a ‘studio’ on Avenue Road. She camps out in her ‘studio.’” She took in Emmett’s disappointment. “You didn’t know.”
He looked down his dusty shoes. “We’ve been out of touch.”
“It’s on Avenue Road,” said the old woman decidedly. He guessed that the grandmother did not disapprove of Suzanne’s “studio.” Then she added, “Have you seen her photographs? They’re pretty good.”
Mama gave directions to Suzanne’s “studio,” and the two women silently watched him remount the bicycle and waver on the gravel drive out to the street. When he reached the pavement, he stole a look in their direction and saw them deep in discussion.
Suzanne had been drawn from her darkroom to the front window to stare out at the street, and there was Emmett. She felt a pang of jealousy for his boyish handling of the bike, the long leg swung over the seat while it was still moving, Emmett letting it drop on the frowsy margin of weed, then rapping at the door as if he didn’t really care if he didn’t find her there. She opened the door at once.
She was in the midst of a project and had taken down the exterior sign that read “McCallum Photographs” because she didn’t want anybody to interrupt while she was at work on this new stuff. She was in a large room with lots of wall space and three clotheslines strung from wall to wall to dry the prints.
She’d had been up since five that morning and had kept herself going with brandy and coffee, as was her routine: to sleep from one until five or six, work in the darkroom till ten and then have a bath, go to bed for another couple of hours, rise, and go out and take photographs. She liked afternoon light. Today, she’d strayed from routine, skipped the bath and morning sleep, kept up the spiked coffee in the darkroom, not necessarily because she was making great advances with the work but because she couldn’t stop.
It was eleven o’clock when Emmett made his surprise visit. She’d emerged from the darkroom a few moments earlier, her heart pounding. Her vision was as she imagined a fly’s vision must be — stills flashing at three frames per second. When she saw him swing his leg off his bike like a boy, she envied his healthy unconsciousness.
Emmett noticed the purple shadows under her eyes. The room smelled of burnt coffee and booze and a chemical reek that he’d soon learn came from her darkroom. Her puppet-like movement unnerved him. When she embraced him stiffly, he could feel her ribs raking out from her spine. He said he was sorry to drop by so suddenly, and she said, “No!” and waved for him to come inside.
As he walked between the lines of photographs, he could sense her holding her breath.
In every print there was a figure walking away over an expanse of concrete or lawn, a man or a woman, sometimes a dog, always images of their departure, their private intentions. He was struck by the geometry of streetscape and her skilful use of film, the depth of field, detail and focus, the pocked texture of cement, veins of creosote in a telephone pole, a brick storefront, rusty trash cans. Somehow the colour of rust was suggested in the black-and-white film, just as the blades of grass crisscrossed by afternoon shadow suggested green. A formal presentation of the banal, her stark attention to emptiness. And he thought, She’s still grieving for Norfield.
When he told her the photographs were “good,” she laughed sharply and said, “No no.”
He asked her, Could they go out for something to eat? She said that would be nice, but she wasn’t fit to be seen so why didn’t he come through here? They walked through her curtained darkroom and into her suite at the back of the building.
She told him to have a seat at a rickety white table while she took a knife and sawed at a loaf of bread that had been left there. She was skinny but crazily beautiful.
“There,” she said, smiling and throwing down slices of the stale bread, sitting, then jumping up again, “I’ve got butter!” But her fridge was empty except for a jug of water.
“Can’t you sit down?” he asked.
She sat, tapping her foot.
“I met your grandmother,” he told her.
For a moment, Suzanne’s face relaxed and fell open. “Did you?” She was so rapt it cost her further effort to think this through. “You were at the house?” She darkened. “You saw Mother?”
“That’s how I knew where to find you.”
She nodded, Emmett, watching her, thinking of her as a pearl in a string of pearls. When he told her he was going away, she gave him a stricken look. Then she asked, “Are you going to find the old woman?”
He was amazed. This was a story he’d told her years ago when they’d first met; a not-entirely-true story about his childhood in Japan, a story about the “old woman,” Sachiko, his father’s mistress. Suzanne had turned his life into a fairy tale. He told her that he didn’t know if he would find Sachiko. Maybe she’s dead.
But Suzanne yawned and with one finger tipped a dry piece of crust, letting it fall back onto the plate. “Well,” she said, “we’ll miss you.”
“We.” Did she mean her mother and her? She was fractured, multiplied by the loss of John Norfield. It was hopeless. Anger pressed his jaw tight. She was oblivious, caught in a light, mesmerized, he’d been wasting his time.
What was it about Norfield that had captured her? Emmett would exceed Norfield, he’d better him, he’d prove to be the better man. He’d cut free of both of them. He said he had to go and finish packing.
She saw him out distractedly. He imagined that she was embarrassed. She was astute about men; she’d long understood that he was attracted to her, and she was uncomfortable. Let her have her ghost, Emmett thought, the mysterious Norfield who has vanished liked smoke. Let her live on smoke.
They didn’t embrace. She held her front door open while she watched him pick up his bike and when he was ready to go, she said, “Well. Goodbye.”
From the street he turned to look back at her over his shoulder just as she was swinging her door closed and their eyes met. Only a few minutes ago he might have been encouraged by the confusion he saw there. But he was through with that. He rode quickly down the falling slope of the city.
Emmett moved to Ottawa and began his career as a policy analyst, dealing with reports coming out of Tokyo where the Canadian government had a Liaison Mission whose main job was to explain in bureaucratic lingo the American occupation of Japan in the wake of the bombing. He taught himself shorthand and typing so he wouldn’t always be dependent on a secretary. His modest salary with External was twice what he’d been making as a translator.
His anger toward Suzanne cooled and hardened. He counted the years since he’d got “tangled up” with her and with Norfield as lost years. His relations with them now seemed quite corrupt — as if he’d been their pet, their audience.
He threw himself into his new job at External Affairs. He was thirty years old; he had catching up to do.
In his capacity as analyst, he soon became fascinated by reports written by a man by the name of Herbert Norman who was working out of Occupied Japan. Herbert Norman described the circumstances of the current American military occupation there in a style that Emmett would try to emulate: lucid tracts, with cultural allusions dating back far before the Meiji era.
He studied Herbert Norman’s writing and researched his sources. He sought out other publications by the man, editorials in Amerasia composed in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression; this was youthful work, provocative, pretending to apologize while the writer admitted he was “stepping on the toes of economic, political and national vested interests.”
Emmett worked hard, stayed late into the night or smuggled files home for his private hours, sipping Scotch while he worked, letting his mind play. But it wasn’t enough to be reading. He needed to have real influence. He couldn’t sleep and there was never enough work — not enough to make him feel substantial. He needed a sense of glory that certainly wasn’t available to him in the well-mannered offices of External Affairs.
He pushed his superiors at External to give him a posting in Japan. He cultivated the mentorship of a senior civil servant by the name of Bill Masters, a professional bureaucrat who liked to see himself as a key player in the careers of young men. Bill was convinced that Jones was his very own creation, a delusion that Emmett encouraged.
He was always there by the time Bill Masters arrived at eight a.m. When Bill saw Emmett at his desk, he’d stop for a minute and happily observe, “At it again, Jones? Don’t burn yourself out.”
Emmett kept Bill aware of his restlessness and ambitions. He let Bill know that he was testing External, that he wasn’t sure if it was the right career for him. Bill had boasted to the prime minister that he’d made a talented new recruit. Prime Minister St. Laurent didn’t like a department with a lot of coming and going. It was important to retain talent, to foster a stable civil service that would keep the Liberal Party in power.
It paid off quickly. Bill Masters arranged for Emmett to be posted to Tokyo for six months on probation, with an extended contract if he worked out, at the Canadian Liaison Mission to Occupied Japan. He was to start work there early July 1950.
On June 25, North Korea attacked South Korea. The UN Security Council voted to go to war against communist North Korea. The Russians, North Korea’s allies, boycotted the United Nations that day, so the vote in favour of war was unanimous — though no one was permitted to call it a war: it was called “a police action.” The execution of the war in Korea would be in the hands of US General Douglas MacArthur, who was also running the American occupation of Japan from his offices in Tokyo.
Emmett told himself that he was going “home” to Japan. He was also returning to war.
<>
June 30, Bill Masters, Emmett’s newly acquired mentor, took him to the airport. Bill got a real kick out of launching his protégé on his first foreign assignment, and he talked at Emmett right up to the departure gate, giving him the lowdown on his own successes (“and that’s just the half of it”), his stories pivoting around the countless times he’d been pursued by inferior associates. “So I told them, ‘Look’” — with one stubby finger Bill tapped at his wristwatch — “‘I don’t have time to dick around. When you fellas finally figure out the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground — get back to me.’”
It came time for Emmett to board the plane, and Bill’s voice rose in pitch as he talked faster. They were calling the flight when Bill began to recount an incident in 1945, just before the end of the war, involving Amerasia magazine and J. Edgar Hoover. A complicated story involving thousands of stolen classified documents from British and American Intelligence that Hoover’s FBI discovered in Amerasia’s New York editorial offices. Bill kept saying, “You understand? This is the FBI we’re talking about here. Herbert Norman was writing for Amerasia. That makes Herbert Norman hot, in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover. You’re going to meet Herbert Norman in Tokyo. Comprendez?” But there wasn’t time for the whole story, the plane was waiting, its engines drowning out Bill’s voice, and Bill said, “Do I have to spell it out?” He embraced Emmett, his eyes filling with tears, and said, “Choose your friends like you choose your enemies and you’ll do fine, son.”
Emmett walked across the tarmac, the sun on his back, his shadow stretching ahead. Bill shouted something, but a weedy wind was blowing, an orange sun bulleted off the belly of the airplane, a North Star. He passed a rippling red flag, climbed the stairs to the plane, was greeted by a pretty blond, and took his seat. Peripherally, he could see Bill, looking diminished, standing where he’d left him. Emmett was troubled by Bill’s loyal witness to his solitary departure and the whisper of small, inflated significance. Bill’s warning against Herbert Norman had actually enlivened his hope that the man would work with him. He needed to feel the edge of conflict. Being a Canadian civil servant, he had already learned, could be like living in a padded cell. He had to have access to something radiant, something much bigger than himself.
The North Star stormed into the air. The aircraft was unpressurized; it was like being inside a steel drum in a hailstorm — the noise was deafening, it was cold, the constant vibration drilled into him. The plane was a pig compared with the Lancaster he’d piloted. But he was flying to Japan. He comforted himself through the long flight by conjuring memories of the home he would soon see again.
Tokyo was hot, and everywhere there were beautiful Japanese women in western dress, hundreds, thousands of beautiful women, unaccompanied, cool, and apparently untroubled. Japanese blossoms wearing Betty Grable shoes picked their way through the rubble of bomb craters, delicately stepping over the amputees begging on the streets, the homeless and the orphans who lived in the railway stations.
Emmett was shocked to see so much of the city still in ruins from the American firebombing, and he asked himself if he really had been living in solitary confinement for the last five years — he should have anticipated this much devastation. A million and a half people had lived in the wood-and-paper city firebombed by B-29s in 1945. No one knew how many had been killed; their ashes lingered in the scorched city.
Overhead remained the shell of a brick office building with its windows blown out. Emmett walked in its shade, then turned a corner and was blasted by sun. An entire block on the western side of the street was a bomb crater filled with rubble even now, more than five years later, being pulverized under the treads of a yellow Caterpillar. The city had an ersatz frontier feel, like a movie set, with American jeeps and Cadillacs driven by steel-jawed chauffeurs transporting American army uniforms and the black suits of the non-Asian financiers.
He made his way through the ruins toward the Canadian Liaison Mission, sickened by the soot on his clothes, oily grime that collected on his socks and pant legs. The journey to Tokyo had taken five days, the North Star landing to refuel on five airstrips en route, and in that time he’d barely eaten or slept. He’d comforted himself with nostalgia on that long journey, imagined arriving to his lost past, to a pre-war Tokyo of grilled mackerel, salty miso, black cherries, the taste of the sea and blossom, the special occasions for a little boy who would come to this city with his mother and father, to take holiday pleasures, to eat in restaurants and go to museums.
Emmett picked up a newspaper and sat with it on a park bench while he tried to get his bearings. He fell asleep every time he blinked. He felt unwell, he had that taste in his mouth again, the taste of wild meat, and he finally went into the bushes that circled the park and vomited. When he returned to the bench he lay down and fell asleep. And dreamed of burning cities, saw the flames from the cockpit of his airplane, felt turbulence, dreamed of fighting his way up and out of a firestorm and being sucked into the fires he’d lit himself. When a Japanese man in a clean black uniform poked him awake, Emmett realized he’d been shouting. A small Japanese boy wearing an oversized New York Giants baseball shirt was watching him thoughtfully with his fingers in his mouth.
An hour later, he was at the Canadian Liaison Mission, in an inconspicuous building with an ultra-modern reception room furnished in teak and presided over by a sleek woman wearing a black shift and a string of white beads. He gave her his name, and she pinched a file between blood-red nails, scrolled a list, gave him a nod, her smile curt and quick as if she’d typed it, tipped her head toward the corridor while tucking yet another file under her shapely white arm.
“I just came to check in,” he said. He was a mess, he smelled sour and unclean. “I’ve been travelling,” he told her.
The receptionist marched forward, indicating he was to follow, her black heels tapping on the parquet. Coming to a halt at a closed door, she leaned her bare shoulder against it and swung into a square box, her hand on the doorknob. Then she waved, swanlike, Enter.
There were two desks with chairs, an empty bookcase, an empty filing cabinet with its drawers open. The receptionist finally spoke. “Looks like you’ll be all on your lonesome here, honey.”
He was disappointed by her voice, which was reedy, tourist-town Ontario. She perched on a desk, “Take a load off, might as well,” and indicated that Emmett was to occupy the other desk beneath a map of Japan and the Korean peninsula. She sighed with peevish boredom. “I guess they only hired the one of yous.”
“I just came to check in,” he said again. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
She gave a little burp. “That’s the Pepsi talking back.”
“I have to find a place I can lease for six months.”
“Yeah, get yourself settled. Well, any-who.” He wasn’t her type. She started out to the hallway, then turned, “Be a doll and do me a favour? Take a file over to Dai-Ichi?”
She thought he was hesitating so she patiently explained, “His nibs’ office? The general? It’s a secret report and he’s gotta give his royal assent.”
Dai-Ichi, the headquarters for General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the American Occupation, SCAP. Emmett agreed, he’d deliver the report to his nibs.
“Swell,” she said. “See? I’m putting your name on it. Jones, Emmett, Canada. That way, he’ll make your acquaintance.”
Dai-Ichi was a six-storey building that had housed an insurance company before the war, near the moat surrounding the emperor’s estate, a solid building somehow spared, though bombs had struck the imperial palace. Emmett showed his new papers identifying him as a member of the Canadian staff. A starched MP shouldered a rifle and escorted him to the sixth floor, to a warren populated by uniforms running from one desk to another. He followed the rifle to a large office and saw through its open door a well-built man in khaki appear then disappear, a long-stemmed pipe gripped between his teeth while he paced, apparently dictating.
The MP stopped at the door, and Emmett entered, bringing the oratory to a halt. “General MacArthur, sir,” he said. “I’ve come from the Canadian Liaison Mission.” He offered the file marked “Top Secret.”
With graceful discourtesy, General Douglas MacArthur turned his back on him and said, “Put it on the desk.”
Emmett took a look around the room. An ugly onyx clock stood on the mantle. To one side was a worn leather divan and a gentleman seated there. This gentleman, too, had a pipe between his teeth, but he removed it and warmly observed, “I’ll bet you’re Emmett Jones.”
Emmett admitted that he was.
“I’m Herbert Norman,” said the man and stood to offer his hand. “I’ve been expecting you.” He was as tall as Emmett and was perhaps only ten or fifteen years older, but he demonstrated the debonair formality of another generation. It was the analyst who wrote for Amerasia, the man whose reports from Japan had so filled Emmett with admiration, the man whom Bill Masters had warned him against because he’d attracted the attention of the FBI.
General MacArthur waved a patrician hand, taking in Emmett’s rumpled clothing. “You may as well stay, now you’ve interrupted,” resuming his monologue.
Emmett was flattered for the first ten minutes and then, gradually, horrified. After twenty minutes, he glanced at Herbert Norman seated beside him on the divan. Herbert met his eye with a look that managed to convey, It is amazing but do not be amazed.
“Lucius Aemilius Paulus,” the general was saying. “Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. These are my advisers. I look into their lives, and there I find almost all the answers. They are my source, my lodestone.” He evoked Napoleon Bonaparte too and named each famous battle. Friedland, Jena, Eylau, Ulm, Marengo, and Bassano. But he qualified his admiration of Bonaparte, adding that his first inspiration in manoeuvres against the enemy’s flanks was Genghis Khan.
Several fighter jets flew over, low, rattling the windows, but MacArthur went on, his granitic face entirely unfazed, effortlessly raising his voice. Emmett could see the tightening muscles under the khaki shirt. General Douglas MacArthur was not insane by wartime standards. Even President Truman, at this juncture, was satisfied, even happy with the general’s abilities in occupying Japan.
From war, MacArthur moved to economics. Emmett guessed that he was practising a speech, in his strange broad accent, oratory that he intended to deploy in more significant arenas but that was all out of proportion for an audience of Canadians. “The best men in America,” he intoned, “our great nation’s key industrialists, will be stultified, will grow inert under the burden of socialism.” Another squadron, or the same one returning to salute on its way to Korea, zoomed overhead, closer, louder. MacArthur fumed steadily, implacable. The bombers flew off, the clacking of desk officers resumed.
“A Marxist philosophy of financing the defence of other nations will lead directly to the path of communistic slavery.” The general finally stopped to light his pipe.
In this respite, Herbert Norman idly commented, “Japan excepted.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The United States is financing Japan,” Herbert observed.
MacArthur didn’t miss a beat. “We do as God instructs us to do. When Japanese guns were silenced, it was my sacred duty to carry to the land of the vanquished foe, solace, hope, and faith.” In a low voice, he added, “I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.”
Emmett choked. A loud bark, a startled, horrified laugh erupted from his gut.
The general strode close and gazed down on Emmett Jones, as if from afar. His pose, shaken but indomitable, was contrived to suggest a statesman’s sorrow over the vulgarity of the common man; he was sad but not for himself. Emmett saw shyness even in the general’s imperial attitude — shyness and megalomania. MacArthur was embarrassed, and this increased Emmett’s dread because it indicated how invincible the man believed himself to be; his pride was fragile and titanic. MacArthur swung back toward his desk, where he lifted and weighed the top-secret report that Emmett had delivered, but now he was evidently self-conscious, acting.
“Well,” Herbert Norman said softly, “I believe we’ll leave you to your work, General.” Emmett followed Herbert’s cue and stood to leave.
MacArthur was studying the report and he gave a dramatic are-you-still-here wince. By the time they were at the door, the general appeared to have regained his composure. Emmett heard him speak — privately memorizing — “Jones. Emmett. Canada.”
The road to the James-yama Estate in Shioya was steeper than the one in Emmett’s memory, its surface more broken, riven by mud flushed out by the rains. Shioya hadn’t been firebombed as completely as nearby Kobe had been, but still, he didn’t recognize the few houses he passed.
The sky cleared and Emmett remembered that mink smell, that fecund stink in the summer wind blowing from the Inland Sea. A fresher east wind kicked up; the sunlight seemed stained, saturated with the red leaves of the sumac that grew beside the mountain road where he climbed. When the road curved north, the wind failed. In the shady forest, holly fern grew beneath the maples and red pine. He turned his back on the mountain to look down at the distant, silent sea.
From a blind curve, an army jeep hurtled toward him. Emmett heard it, and felt the gravel scattered by its front tires, before he flung himself off the road. The jeep passed so close he saw the sun flicker on the driver’s brush-cut as the vehicle raced away. An American army uniform. Emmett stood carefully and spit on his hands to remove the dirt embedded in his skin. He caught his breath and resumed his climb when the birds began to sing again.
Around the next curve the road ascended more steeply. The wind blew once more, and then he saw the granite lion that marked the entrance to the estate. The sight was so familiar it was as if he were seeing himself. Here he used to play with his friends after school. The lion’s stone mane furled down its chest, its jaws opened in a grimace big enough for a boy’s head.
His parents had sent him to a private school called Canadian Academy, with kids from the US, Europe, and Australia. Japanese children from Kobe went there too. A pretty teacher would take them all down to the seashore, the boys in short pants, the little girls in printed kilts that they held above the waves. He’d been compelled by the decisive, delicate way his Japanese friends moved, like a habit of flight. Now most of those schoolmates were dead. Five years ago, in 1945, more than eight thousand people were incinerated in Kobe, in twenty-three thousand tonnes of magnesium thermite. All the supplies of napalm had been used up on Tokyo. Emmett knew it to be true. He had searched out this information within days of his arrival in Japan.
He had searched through the names of the dead. He had found Sachiko. She must have been evacuated out of the estate, to Kobe, where she’d been killed in the firebombing.
Thinking now about Sachiko’s death, Emmett felt a rush of high-voltage fear in his body. As if he didn’t exist but was a play of light, a staged illusion. From the cockpit of a Lancaster, in the name of glory, he’d rained fire, just like the airmen who’d dropped the firebombs on Japan. The terror remained in him and he tried to calm down, but he felt like he was evaporating, sizzling into nothingness. He was not loved, he hadn’t been touched in too long, he needed more than sex, he needed someone to gather him in.
He came to the withered row of plum trees that hedged the lawn surrounding Sachiko’s long, low clapboard house with its bronze roof. The peaty soil had washed away, exposing the trees’ tough ochre roots. The lawn was overcome by weeds, but the house seemed in fair shape; its plaster needed whitewash, the cypress shutters needed oil, but it was intact, unscathed.
The shutters were open, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was living there now. If Sachiko hadn’t been evacuated, she might still have been living in this house; the place quite accidentally would have turned out to be his father’s parting gift, a refuge for the woman who destroyed his family. Emmett rephrased that. The woman who defined his family.
He stood at the plum trees to watch the house for signs of life while he walked his mind through its rooms; the entrance with its umbrella stand (his father’s hat on the umbrella stand, a telling clue for him as a boy as to whether his father was here); the elegant dining room with its portraits of English gentlemen; the sunroom where Sachiko sat and where Emmett’s father would sit with her while he had a whisky and soda.
There might have been some time, months, maybe even years, when Emmett and his mother didn’t know of Sachiko’s existence. It was eventual as dawn, his father’s lies giving way, not to truth but to a double world where he could let his wife and son know with a nod, with wincing disapproval as if at their bad manners, what was to be acknowledged and what was to be ignored, until Sachiko became an aspect of his father, a necessity, in such a way as to make Emmett and his mother feel complicit, almost responsible, being inadequate to capture his father’s full attention. Gradually, imperceptibly, Emmett’s mother acknowledged Sachiko, though never face to face; his mother had behaved helplessly, with pathetic righteousness. Emmett loved her resentfully, despising her weakness, angry that it might reflect his own.
For about three years, mother and son, father and mistress, had formed a louche club. During this interlude, Emmett grew tall, grew at least four inches every year. He was a wiry kid in tennis sneakers, wearing a white sweater over his shoulders, knotting its sleeves at his chest.
Now he stood beneath the plum trees and watched the house, wondering how he should approach when he heard a man call out in a loud voice. “You looking for the girl?”
A westerner, his enormous size exaggerated by a blue kimono, was striding toward him from a footpath that Emmett remembered having taken as a shortcut through the estate. “The girl,” the man repeated, approaching, “you looking for Aoi?” He had a mid-west American drawl.
Emmett couldn’t immediately frame what he’d come looking for. (My father loved a Japanese woman who sat in the sunroom that looks toward the mountain.)
The American brought all of his own horsepower to a standstill; Emmett could hear the machinery of that body seize and tick. He had a thick, sunburned face and neck, the red flesh scored by white seams, and he bore the attitude of a man who considered himself of great good nature that nobody should take for granted. He waited for a reply, his firm mouth opened a little, lightly panting. The kimono must have been specially made: no Japanese kimono would have fit him, and the blue was too artificial for Japanese taste.
“I used to live here, in a house nearby.”
“Where’d you spend the war, friend?” the American asked with abrupt suspicion.
“Air force. England. Germany.”
“You a Canadian fella?”
When Emmett said that he was, the man didn’t try to hide his disappointment but looked up at the house, seeming to weigh the worthiness of a Canadian against whoever lived there now. He scratched a sunburned cheek, giving off a sagey male scent. Some kind of darkness rushed over him, and he shrugged it off and walked away, his blue kimono billowing in his wake.
A moment later Emmett was ringing the bell, hearing the door chimes inside play “Waltzing Matilda,” a detail he’d forgotten.
The young Japanese woman who answered wore baggy wartime trousers and a man’s white dress shirt. She looked like a southerner, solidly built with a big face that barely accommodated a mouthful of oversized teeth that she showed in a confident smile. He was drawn to the way her lips parted, and to her eyes, which seemed capable of genuine surprise. She pressed the open door between her breasts. In English, “Yes?”
He told her his name. He said he used to live here at the estate, he said that this house, too, had once been leased to his father, for his father’s friend. “I was curious to see it again.” He peered around her, as if Sachiko would appear. “My father’s friend was killed in the war.”
The young woman seemed bemused. So he had lost a house, a friend. War took nearly everything. “The Americans gave the house to me,” she said with pride. She was in her early twenties, maybe a little older. She surveyed him, taking in the pressed pants, the polished shoes, and said, “Would you like to see?”
Inside, he saw an unsubstantial smattering of cheap furniture; only a few pieces of the heavy Edwardian stuff remained. The umbrella stand was still there, as was the sideboard, and Emmett remembered that at either end of the sideboard was a drawer: one that had contained silver cutlery displayed in crinolines of black velvet, the other containing liquor. His father would come in, remove his hat and place it on the umbrella stand, take off his coat and hand it to the Japanese butler, then pour himself a drink.
The sideboard stood in a dining room with lead-paned windows too high up to permit a view. The dining room table was gone, as was the Indian rug that he used to lay on, tracing the mandala. Somebody had covered the cypress floor with linoleum. It looked like a boarding house.
She saw his face and suggested, “You may come this way,” leading him through the kitchen — it had remained the same, the same high cabinets, the yellowed icebox, the stone floor — and through the swinging doors to what had been the library, emptied of books, pale spaces like day-moons on the sooty blue wall above the fireplace where the portraits had once hung, and through to the sunroom.
This was where Sachiko had sat, always elegant, sometimes traditionally and sometimes wearing western dress. She would let Emmett spend an afternoon with her here, while she sat doing nothing, yet with an attitude of sufficiency. Her chaise remained, as did the petite point ottoman that he would sprawl on, dangling his arms and legs onto the rattan matting. He stared at where Sachiko had sat, where he’d lingered in her neutral presence.
French doors opened to a garden where there was a small pond that had once held goldfish and a lawn bordered with the naked stems of azaleas and the reddish-purple, almost black glow of late chrysanthemums. Here was where eventually he’d come to hide from his father. The heat remained then too, and the zing of cicadas. His father was really sick, hidden from sight at the other house, where his mother could watch him slowly deteriorate in a bedroom that Emmett never entered, observing the quarantine necessary for patients with tuberculosis. At home, he was keenly aware of his father’s unseen suffering, and so he spent his time at Sachiko’s house. Sometimes he pretended that he was his father. He mimicked his mannerisms. It compensated for never being able to tell the man how he yearned for him.
Her name was Aoi. She was an unusual-looking young woman who believed herself beautiful and thus became so. He’d begun by speaking to her in Japanese, but she always responded in English. The room where they sat had been Sachiko’s room, and now he moved slowly, staring, remembering, nostalgia a sweet syrup in his veins. Everything appeared to be coated in a greasy film; he thought it was from the candles they’d used for light during the war.
He asked her where she’d learned to speak English. In Australia, she told him, she’d gone to school there. Her father had died, she didn’t say how. She said that when she returned to Japan after the surrender, the Americans gave her this house to live in. “Mr. James wants me out,” she said, but she made it sound like this, too, was a special benediction. Everything she said sounded like that — her victory over English partly made it seem that way; she had a victorious accent, and her Japanese decorum was like that of a clown, a geisha in baggy trousers, a strangely beautiful woman.
When Emmett was a boy, the James-yama Estate was comprised of fifty-five houses, plus Ernest W. James’s own mansion and a clubhouse with a gym that had once employed an Italian trainer who ran exercise classes to music. Earnest W. James was buying up yet more of the mountain when he was imprisoned by Japanese police, July 1940, along with another fourteen British residents of Kobe, including Emmett’s father, who was so ill with TB. A Reuters correspondent by the name of Cox had written a letter that found its way to the house in Vancouver where Emmett lived with his mother after he’d got out of the sanatorium with a clean bill of health. The letter informed them that his father had died while being interrogated. The official story was that he had jumped out a window.
Earnest W. James fled the Shiyoa estate, fled the country, and the Japanese government froze his assets. His mansion then served as a recreational hall for the Imperial Japanese Navy, while Germans, Italians, French, and Japanese citizens lived in his fifty-five houses.
“You knew this house before the war,” Aoi said.
“My father leased it, yes, and another house for us, my mother and me. But he lost both houses when he was put in prison.”
“Two houses!” said Aoi, ignoring the fate of his father.
“His mistress lived here.” He yielded to the temptation of playing the prince. He liked that he could please her.
She smiled her toothy smile and jumped up. She had a great figure. He was beginning to find her quite magnificent. She said that she was terrible not to have offered him something to drink. “Wait,” she said and left the room. Even in the baggy clothes, she was voluptuous.
He went to the doors that led to the garden and pulled them open — the sound of them opening was not as he remembered — such a small thing for a body to remember — so he looked closely and saw the miniature mountains of sawdust on the mat, and then he saw the white ants.
The house sat on timber that had soaked up rain delivered by the spring typhoons; the wet wood had invited termites. He went outside. The sun had set behind the mountain. The road would be dark on his descent. He walked the perimeter of the house. Everything returned to him, every window frame, every inch of clapboard, but it was being eaten away by the white ants. In the dusk, he saw them moving in the wood; the house, its stasis seemed to depend on their agitation. So this is the way, this is the way the material world will reveal its secret, destructive aspect.
He re-entered through the French doors to find Aoi seated on the floor. She had changed into a white kimono and she held a lute on her knees, a biwa. Her black hair was cut so it exaggerated the broadness of her face and formed two black triangles on each cheek, then gathered in a long ponytail snaking down her back. The biwa, the kimono, her posture, all indicated tradition, but the smile she gave him was self-mocking.
She took a fan-shaped pick, a plectrum, from the folds of her kimono and struck the strings, drawing a wave of sound, a metallic, exciting music, her hand forcefully striking. She began to sing. Her voice had a muscled lower register, a masculine, glottal voicing of the Japanese.
It was a long, ancient song about the fall of the Heike. Emmett had heard performances of it at least twice before, but never a performance by such a woman. Her hand with the plectrum striking and gliding like a knife-sharpener against the steely voice of the instrument, her muscular voice thickening on the consonants, then thinning eerily.
When the song was finished, Aoi bowed, stood, bowed again, and shuffled from the room, carrying the biwa by grasping the instrument at its neck. The plectrum had disappeared somewhere. She was wearing white gym socks. He thought of Charlie Chaplin.
When she returned, she carried a tray with a glass and a bottle of bourbon. The kimono was of padded white silk and made her seem unapproachable. He had come to seek a trace of Sachiko, his secret mother, and instead he’d found this extraordinary woman. He wanted her so badly he was touching her sleeve when he spoke to her, touching her knee.
He began to drink bourbon. No matter how much he drank he felt sober. Aoi offered to cook dinner and took him to the kitchen. But when he saw the tiny portion of rice she found in the kitchen cupboard and generously offered to him, he said that he wasn’t hungry.
When he undressed her, he was shaken by her beauty. She was of such grand scale she was almost intimidating. He held her breasts in his hands, kneading them in a way that he knew hurt her a little. She smelled of rice powder, a smell that made him ache. He had never inflicted lust on a woman this way, heedless of hurting her, with her long legs around his neck, rising over her while she laughed, catching her breath.
In the early morning they went down to the seashore and watched a boy and a girl, likely a brother and sister, on the pier. The little girl studied her brother as he let a net into the water, then raised it and searched through the kelp, laying the net on the dock. It was windy, sunny, but suddenly cold. From the beach, families flew kites that darted like swallows in the wind. He watched the keenly coloured kites, and then again searched out the two children on the pier. The brother brought his net out of the water, laid it down, then picked up something whitely blue and fleshy, and held it up to show his admiring sister. The thing changed shape in his hands and dangled its many legs. The little sister clapped her hands.
Herbert Norman asked Emmett to have lunch with him. They didn’t exactly work together; as envoy, Herbert had higher status than Emmett did — but Herbert had maintained a kindly interest in Emmett’s progress as policy analyst with the Liaison Mission. It was October now, and Emmet was finding his way on the job.
They were sitting at a long counter in a noodle joint. Herbert bent toward the bowl of ramen and let the steam wash over his face. “General MacArthur believes that the Chinese communists won’t get involved in Korea.” When Herbert raised his head, his glasses were fogged and he removed them. “He says the American forces will ‘strike awe in the Chinese heart.’” Herbert did a pretty good imitation of MacArthur. He smiled sadly. “The general believes that the Orientals will ‘bow down before America’s supreme power.’ Chinese soldiers are little men, see? All three hundred thousand of them.”
Herbert Norman had been working around the general since 1945. “Our views are ‘divergent,’” he said, bending again toward his soup. “In MacArthur’s terms, ‘divergent’ means barbarian.” Then he burst out bitterly, “Why the hell would they investigate me.”
Emmett asked him what he meant. “Investigate you? Who?”
“Never mind. I’ll spoil your lunch.”
Emmett waited till Herbert reluctantly explained, “Someone named me in his testimony before the US Senate Security Subcommittee.”
Emmett said that this sounded far-fetched, Herbert’s name coming up like that. How could such a thing happen? He was remembering Bill Masters warning him to be cautious of Herbert Norman.
“I take it you’ve heard of Senator Joe McCarthy,” Herbert said.
“Sure. But how could McCarthy touch you?”
“He can’t. But I’m unnerved, I admit.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Crazy. Yes.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about. Surely. It’s outrageous.” But Emmett knew it probably wasn’t outrageous. Herbert had been flagged by the FBI by writing for Amerasia — the New York-based magazine that had been discovered with stolen high-level secret documents in its offices. He wondered what else had brought Herbert to the attention of the American Security bloodhounds.
“The minister assures me I’m protected,” Herbert was saying wanly. “Pearson is a friend of mine. I’m a Canadian citizen. Still — one’s name — ” he broke off and put his spoon down. He saw Emmett’s face. “I don’t think it’s gone so far as to affect those around me.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“You should be.”
At Herbert’s right, a Japanese man had finished eating, but rather than leaving right away, as everyone else did, he stayed, eavesdropping. Herbert said, “How about we take a walk?”
It was a warm fall day. They made their way to the moat surrounding the emperor’s palace. Emmett reached to touch the twisted branches of the cherry trees lining the path. The broad moat and brick wall surrounding the palace grounds were on a grand scale. He’d been scrutinizing detailed maps and aerial photographs of tiny Korean villages, of mountain roads and hidden valleys, he was under-slept from working long hours and then taking a train back out to see Aoi for one night on the weekends, and now he stumbled and gripped the iron railing to prevent himself from falling down the steep slope into the water with the swans and lily pads and the rifles trained on him from the emperor’s gardens.
Herbert noticed Emmett’s unsteady step. “Are you okay?”
“I think I’ve been working too hard.” Emmett took off his jacket. “Ottawa wants a report about women’s book clubs in suburban Tokyo.”
“That’s knocking you out?”
“Spurious inaction takes a lot of energy.”
Herbert said vaguely, “This war that is not a war.”
Emmett told him that he intended to do some research into the relationship between the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, and the government since the surrender. “I’ve been ordered to avoid anything hot. I’m told to stay away from the subject of the war in Korea. I wonder if General MacArthur has complained about me. I don’t think he likes me very much.”
“You laughed at him. Big mistake. Don’t be blinded by his melodrama. The Japanese love him. He’s truer than true.” Herbert hesitated. “MacArthur is going use his popularity to lure the Pentagon into giving him more rope. Then he’ll provoke the Chinese communists into full-scale war.”
“Where are the Chinese troops now?” Emmett asked this abruptly, as if the question had just popped into his head. Herbert jumped a little and answered, “In China, for all I know.”
Emmett shrugged, “Does anyone have any real information? Does MacArthur have any intelligence? Is he all shadow play?”
“I don’t know,” Herbert said with more emphasis. Then, “Look. I’m leaving Tokyo.”
Emmett asked him where he was going.
“Ottawa. Pearson believes it’ll go better for me if I’m there while the RCMP do their investigation.”
“I see,” Emmett said. “Ottawa wants you to lie low for a while. For show. To appease the Americans.” Herbert Norman’s face revealed some relief at this assessment. Emmett continued, “You’ll go to Ottawa, you’ll clear things up, you’ll return to Japan, and get on with your work. Good.”
“Think so?”
“You have to face down this kind of speculation in person.” Herbert turned his back, and Emmett could feel his loneliness. “Easy for me to say,” he added.
Without looking at Emmett, Herbert said, “I want to give you some advice. When you’ve used my name on any of your reports, you should redact it, don’t name me anywhere.”
“I won’t erase your name, Herbert.”
Herbert shook his head. “You don’t understand. A man thinks he’s defending his own freedom, he thinks there’s no reason for him to tell, say, the FBI what he’s doing, he thinks it’s none of their business. Turns out, it’s always their business. Protect yourself. Redact my name and never mention me again.”
Herbert Norman quietly left Tokyo a week later, mid-October 1950. Emmett didn’t redact Herbert’s name from his files and correspondence. He fobbed off the report on ladies’ book clubs to a female researcher who was glad to get out of the office while he went ahead with his own investigation into the connections between the CIA, the post-war Japanese government, and the Yakuza. The report was received cautiously in Ottawa, considered risqué, overly confident: Canadian civil servants were expected to be euphemistic, uncritical — but he wasn’t formally censored. Bill Masters sent a fatherly, personal note urging him to take a stronger interest in what the Japanese ladies were reading. “We’re looking for soft information,” Bill wrote, “the stuff you can get only from civilians. Something credible.”
Emmett wasn’t supposed to board an airplane with a group of American journalists he’d befriended and fly into North Korea. So he didn’t tell anyone; he took a sick day, claiming to have the flu. The sleek receptionist answering his early morning phone call told him to take two aspirin and drink plenty of Pepsi. “How sick are you?” she asked. He told her that he thought a day in bed would get him back on his feet; he’d be in tomorrow.
He took a taxi from his suite to the airport in the company of the American pressmen, pulling his hat low over his eyes and telling the journalists that his government wasn’t too keen on field trips. That appealed to them, and at the military airport they told the pilot that he was a reporter from Michigan. They said he had the nondescript good looks of somebody from Kalamazoo.
The clipper carrying the pressmen was on the trail of the air force plane carrying General MacArthur, who wanted to see the Yalu River, to gloat over the apparent retreat of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. They were flying very low, at about six thousand feet, deep into the war zone, but the ancient mountains were peaceful. There was a village on the north side of the winding black river. Emmett heard the newsmen nervously speculate over whether there were anti-aircraft guns in the area.
In the seat beside Emmett was a journalist named Wilson, an American in his late forties who’d been in the Far East for well over a decade. Wilson stood up and leaned over him to see out the window. Against a startling blue sky, a heavy grey American bomber, a B-29, was approaching from the south. The plane carrying the general suddenly veered, and the plane with the journalists followed in a steep curve that threw Wilson into Emmett. They untangled, Wilson apologized, and when Emmett looked out again, the bomber was visible about five hundred feet below. Emmett took a leather pouch not much bigger than a cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket and from it he slipped a silver object, a miniature camera, into his hand. The bomber was circling back toward the river. Then it dropped its load.
The bombs struck the village, igniting a fire that spilled out in orange blooms and black smoke. Emmett photographed the roiling flames and what he believed were the tiny figures of the peasants scattering. There were no trees; even from this altitude the gunner had a clear view. Dirt rose in yellowish puffs from the dry earth around the burning village. No one from the ground was firing back.
The air force plane flew on, following the river, and the journalists’ plane trailed after them. Behind them the sun shone on smoke that rose into columns of pink marble.
“I’ll be damned,” said Wilson shakily. “That was some show. I bet we weren’t supposed to see that.” He took out his notebook.
The plane was filled with shouting men. What did you see? What do you know about that? Somebody said, “We laced into them, didn’t we! Son of a bitch!” Whether in anger, disgust, or valorous excitement, Emmett didn’t know. He watched the mountains for signs of Chinese troops, his camera held ready.
Wilson was making notes in shorthand. He glanced over and said, “That’s a really small camera.”
Emmett shrugged. “A hobby of mine.” Then he said, “Those were breadbaskets, each carrying seventy-two incendiary bombs filled with napalm.”
Wilson gave him a look and returned his attention to his notebook. Emmett read Wilson’s shorthand. Day, time, location, number of bombs, estimated size of kill by bombing, by fire, by machine gun, estimated number of enemy. He said to Wilson, “There aren’t any soldiers here.”
“They’re hiding.”
“I don’t think so.” There’d be no sense for soldiers to hide here. The village isn’t close enough to the railway line, and it’s too exposed. Who would the soldiers attack, anyway? The only danger came from the air.
There weren’t any anti-aircraft guns. Wilson could figure this out for himself. But Emmett asked Wilson, “If you write that nobody shot back — that there probably weren’t any soldiers anywhere near the village the USAF just bombed — would your newspaper print it?”
Wilson angrily muttered, “Sure.” He took a flask from his jacket pocket, offered it to Emmett, who gladly accepted. “But I’m not going to report it that way.” Wilson saw Emmett’s disappointment, and he added, “How do I know where the soldiers are? We’re nearly two miles in the air.” Wilson drank, muttering, “Goddamn fucking bastards.”
Emmett guessed that Wilson meant the Chinese communists. His eyes searched the mountains for signs of Chinese troops but saw no one. They were flying over a rail line broken by bombs, but he saw no people anywhere.
Wilson went on writing and drinking. He noticed Emmett’s intense white face and he observed, “You’re in a funny spot.”
“Think so?”
“You came out here just because you were curious?”
“That’s right.”
“Got more than you bargained for.”
“I’m glad I know what I know.”
“Sure, but what can you do about it? You can’t even report it to your government. You’re not even here.”
“I’m glad I know,” Emmett said again, looking toward the Korean mountains, their summits filled with snow. He believed that the air force had bombed that village to give the general an exciting show.
“More stupidity,” Wilson said, “more gratuitous cruelty. Mean, blunt force. You’re glad to know?” Wilson had had quite a bit to drink, but he appeared to be sober. He had an unmemorable face, his features obscured by capillary veins across his sagging cheeks, his green eyes moist and heavy-lidded. His first assignment as Far East correspondent for LIFE, he’d told Emmett, was to cover the Nanking Massacre. “Yeah,” Wilson said, “it’s better to know.”
Wilson continued, “It makes it hard to enjoy life, to feel good about being a human being, knowing what people are happy to do to each other. So” — he took a drink — “I don’t intend to live very long. But I won’t live my life like a bat in the dark. I’ll look at it full in the face.”
Emmett stared into the mountain sky. “These kinds of things,” he said, “evil things, they can make a man turn. Make him nihilistic. A man’s got to find something to hope for. He’ll go crazy if he can’t imagine something better. He’ll start to hate himself. And hate others.” He turned toward Wilson.
The way Wilson shook his head indicated he’d already, long ago, considered that. “It’s a commitment, understand? Knowing how bad it can get and not looking away. It’s like deciding to love someone. Love the bastards who blow the place up.”
“What if you hate the bastards?”
Wilson shrugged and handed him the flask. “Then you’ve let them kill you too.”
Emmett took a drink.
Wilson said, “I believe in the margin of error. I will forgive human fallibility till I finally get run over by an army jeep.”
Their plane was heading back to Tokyo. Ahead of them was the air force plane carrying General MacArthur. Wilson was saying, “A buddy of mine, a reporter, was in the Philippines with MacArthur when we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. He said that MacArthur was all cut up about it. My friend told me he walked into MacArthur’s quarters in Manila, and MacArthur could hardly talk he was so sad — he was all quiet for a change. MacArthur asks my friend, ‘Do you know what this means?’ My friend says, ‘What does it mean, General?’ MacArthur says, ‘It means there’ll be no more wars.’ He says, ‘It means I’m obsolete. The scientists are going to run things now.’ MacArthur was as sad as sad could be, over the atom bomb.” Wilson shook his head. “No more war. He wept.”
In October 1950, MacArthur believed he would win the war in Korea by Christmas. By October 20, his forces had overtaken North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, and General MacArthur had told President Truman, “If the Chinese try to get down to Pyongyang, there’ll be a great slaughter.”
Unless the Chinese gained air protection. And only the Russians had the power to provide air protection to the People’s Liberation Army.
The Chinese had Russian air support by the first of November. Then the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army infiltrated the UN lines, cut them off and circled their flanks, drove them out of Pyongyang into the snow-covered mountains in small, disparate groups of wounded men. Anyone too injured to walk froze to death or was captured.
November 27, thirty below zero, one hundred and fifty thousand Chinese soldiers marched through the snow of Manchuria undetected and came out of the night to encircle the Americans at the Chosin Reservoir in the northeast of North Korea. MacArthur began to try to orchestrate a massive retreat. He wouldn’t permit anyone, however, to call it that, a retreat. Reporters were instructed to write that the American troops had “moved back to new prepared positions.”
On a sleeting day in December, Emmett was working from his office at the Canadian Liaison Office in Tokyo when the receptionist popped in and told him he had a visitor.
“Who is it?”
“Beats me.” Following Emmett down the corridor, she added, “He looks like the nervous type.”
A man in his mid-forties wearing a wrinkled black suit with a white shirt and a skinny black tie, unmistakably jet-lagged and harried, sat smoking in one of the Bauhaus chairs. He wore black glasses, had an oblong face, and he looked unhappy.
He stood and offered his hand. “Miller. George Miller. US State Department. How are we today, Mr. Jones?”
The interview took place there, in the reception area, while staff came and went, and the receptionist sat at her desk reading a Sears Roebuck catalogue. George Miller told Emmett that he was with the Policy Planning Staff, a Washington-based “think tank.” He announced that he was going to lay his cards on the table. “I hear you speak Japanese,” he said, adding with strange emphasis, “must be handy with the girls.”
Emmett said nothing.
“Talking the talk, right?” Miller prompted. “It gets you a head start with the ladies.”
“Not really.”
“Poor little Japanese butterflies,” said Miller.
Emmett thought, He’s talking about Aoi. He had been to see Aoi just that weekend. He could still smell her on his clothes.
Miller put out his cigarette and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “We’re glad Canada has men like you working here. Top-notch.”
“Thanks.”
“We just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“Of?”
“What’s that?”
“Same page of what?”
Miller gave him a dirty look, running a finger over his lips. “You speak Chinese too, that right?”
“My field is strictly Japan.”
“You sure?” Miller made enough of a smile to suggest that it was okay if Emmett laughed. Then he said, “I hear you’re a great fan of Mao.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It’s not baseball.”
“What’s that?” Miller cocked his ear.
“I’m not a fan of anybody.”
Miller sat back. “Good.”
Emmett said nothing.
“You’ve got friends in Ottawa.”
“Oh?”
“A real rising star.” Miller began to scratch irritably at the back of his head. “I keep telling Washington, the Canadians aren’t stupid. But you know what? Sometimes they don’t believe me.”
Miller went on, “I’m being direct with you. Why? Because I respect you. Sure I do. We keep working with you. Why?” He polished his glasses, deliberating, Emmett supposed, an alternative. “We work for a common goal. What’s that? Freedom! We’re going to wipe the communists from the face of the earth.
“Listen, pal” — Miller leaned toward Emmett — “you want to wear a — what,” he motioned, “sign around your neck tells everybody who you are? Huh? Don’t be a patsy. It’s like the Middle Ages over there in China. Soviet Union? Same damn thing. There’s no equality,” Miller scoffed, as if Emmett had been arguing with him. “They tell you, Emmett, you go work in this, what, rice paddy. I don’t care who you are or how many goddamn languages you speak, how many college degrees you got or who you know. The thing is this. The communists have the A-bomb, and millions, millions of innocent people are going to die. Rosenbergs, you heard of them, you know them?”
“Sure I’ve heard of them.”
Miller paused. “You ever meet them?”
“Of course not.”
“Course not. How would that happen? Forget it. I’m talking in my sleep.”
“Mr. Miller,” Emmett said. “Can I call you George? What do you want?” He told himself to stay calm.
Miller gave a savvy, sideways look and jumped out of his chair to speak into Emmett’s ear. “Who knew the Chinese were going to get involved over there?” Miller pulled back and jerked his head to the left, aiming west, to Korea. Then he came so close again, Emmett could smell the urinary fragrance of airplane in Miller’s hair. “Somebody knew. How about your boss?”
“I’ve got many bosses.”
Miller said, “Aw,” sour and self-pitying; this must be a chore, a time-consuming errand, going after a junior analyst. “The diplomat who’s under suspicion.”
“I can’t speak for Mr. Norman.”
“You can’t speak for Mr. Norman. How about yourself? Can you speak for yourself?”
“Yup.”
“So?”
“The Chinese are crammed between a rock and a hard place.”
“Okay. Send them a sympathy card.” Miller sat down again, jittering his knees.
“I don’t know why your government keeps propping up the Nationalists. It seems almost stupid. Arrogant but also stupid. Your pal Chiang Kai-shek is a lame duck.” Miller jumped a little, hearing this, and Emmett could feel anger like a welcome drug in his veins; he spoke in a low voice, fury rippling through him. “A corrupt duck. He and his soldiers, his bankers, they’re all on the take. You guys are being taken for a ride.”
Miller smiled as if he’d hit the jackpot. He spoke more loudly, apparently so the receptionist could hear him from her desk, as if he would impress her with his wit. “We’re a bunch of ignorant imperialists. That’s how you put it? Ha ha.”
The expression sounded sophomoric. Emmett leaned forward as if he might punch Miller’s condescending face.
“Go on,” Miller said.
“Of course Mao Zedong’s going to get involved in Korea,” Emmett said. “He gets military support from the Russians. And the Russians have wanted to take over Korea for years.”
“Your pal Herbert Norman tell you that?”
“Everybody knows it. Except you. You guys cut Mao off, so he goes to the Russians for support. What else can he do? You pretty well set up the People’s Republic of China.”
Miller looked at him in disbelief. “You know what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything new. Everybody knows about it but the US of A.” He hated Miller now, hated him for assuming he had power over him.
Miller stood up, ran his finger over the starch burn on his neck. “It’s interesting. How these ideas get around. Circulate.” He put his fingers under his nose and sniffed them.
“It’s common knowledge among us thinking folk.”
“Yeah. Sure. Let’s hope there’s no cause for any further divergence, Mr. Jones.” Miller surveyed the room. “You might want to consider your future. You like Tokyo. Must be a real homecoming. Be too bad to be sent back. Kind of a disgrace.” He smiled. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Nobody’s sending me back, Mr. Miller. In fact, if I weren’t a gentleman and a Canadian civil servant, I’d suggest you go fuck yourself right about now. And that would be rude.”
He went back to his office, shaken. Miller had threatened to have him “sent back,” and while the American official should theoretically have no influence over his career, he’d let himself be cornered, he’d said too much, and though he’d smiled while he told Miller to fuck himself, he’d made a mistake, snagged an enemy.
“Glad we met,” Miller had said generously, and he shook Emmett’s hand rather slowly, looking into his face with paternal pity. Poor bastard, Mr. Miller implied in his handshake.
Emmett wrote a report for Bill Masters; revised it, drinking, revising till he’d achieved a politely detached position outlining the fatal ignorance of George Miller from Washington.
Bill Masters responded with a scolding memorandum, giving Jones “a little history lesson.”
“You ought to know,” wrote Bill, “the US policy, keeping the Russians and the Chinese from the vast industrial potential we forecast in Japan and the rest of Asia, is crucial. Take a minute and consider the repercussions of a world takeover by the Chinese and Russian communists. We support the Americans or we lose everything. That’s our policy. Pearson made that clear in ’48.”
“By the way,” Bill wrote as a postscript, “your friend Herbert Norman has been cleared.”
Emmett wasn’t the only person to wonder this: If there was really no evidence that Norman was a communist and a threat to security, how could the US Senate Committee have persuaded Ottawa to recall him to investigate? There must have been a grain of sand, a seed, a Herbert Norman who might actually exist. Herbert Norman had been right to grieve over his lost reputation. His life would never be the same.
A week passed, then Emmett got another dispatch from Bill Masters. “I had a personal visit from George Miller, your friend with the State Department. What kind of socialist flummery came out of your mouth, Jones? You’re a fan of Chairman Mao, are you? I’m reminding you — you’re on probation.”
Emmett paced, furious, despising his own shoebox career. He packed a few things, took the train south to Kobe and then a bus to Shioya, and climbed the snowy road to see Aoi.
He arrived late Friday night. The lanes of Shioya were sparsely lit with lanterns. He hadn’t realized that it was nearly Christmas till he got to James-yama, where the American armed forces personnel who still occupied several of the houses of the estate and the British subjects who were returning in their wake had strung coloured lights and hung cedar with red bows. Approaching the house, he heard the thrilling clatter of a biwa. The player reached the end of a phrase and began it again.
There were big footprints from a man’s boots in the snow leading to Sachiko’s front door, where there was nailed a Sakaki branch, bare of ornament, a relic.
Emmett rang “Waltzing Matilda.” Something made him look back at the road. In the blue light he saw a man passing from view behind the plum trees, the deeper blue flag of his kimono billowing in his wake. Emmett carried his duffle bag containing his shaving kit, a change of underwear, clean socks, and condoms. He realized he might have warned Aoi that he was coming. She’d finished practising, had begun to play with her customary gusto, and didn’t break off to answer the door. But the latch was open, he discovered. He left his bag in the hall and went through the empty house to the sunroom, where he found Aoi engaged in an epic recitation of the Satsuma rebellion; she didn’t stop but leaned forward as if he were some kind of elemental force she must press against.
He took to the chaise and waited for her to finish. She wore the white kimono. He sensed that it was going to be a rocky night.
When at last the Satsuma rebellion came to its mournful end, Aoi stood and ceremoniously swept the sleeves of her kimono from her arms to carry the biwa to its case before turning to him and bowing.
“It’s late,” she said. “And you didn’t call.”
He apologized.
Aoi ushered him to a room he didn’t know existed; it must have been off limits when he was a boy. It was more traditional than the rest of the house; its tatami mats were in good shape. She was flustered. “I have things I must do,” she said. He apologized again for showing up unannounced. She said, “Well, you’re here now,” and bowed and left him there.
The hibachi was already lit, the room was warm, the bedding had been unrolled, and a clean towel lay beside water in a basin. Dimly he marvelled that she was so well prepared for him. The heated room made him sleepy so he lay down on the futon to wait for her and fell asleep.
He awoke to the presence of someone in the room and saw her figure against the glowing embers in the stove. “Aoi?”
She came to kneel beside his bed.
“I’m not good,” she said.
“Yes you are. You’re very good. You’re beautiful.”
She made love the way she talked, he decided later, with the same laconic self-absorption and pride. In the darkness, his bed was a raft at sea, with no direction. The walls of the room melted away in waves of pleasure.
When he awoke, Aoi was gone. It was not yet dawn. Embers glowed in the hibachi. The room was chilly. He got dressed and put on his coat and boots and left the house.
He was on his way up the mountain as the sky lightened, following a path lit by snow. The ascent was vigorous enough to warm him, the path cleared of fallen trees; even the pine needles had been raked and swept.
He’d often thought that he preferred the country of his birth over the country of his nationhood; preferred its cultivated grace to the wild waste of tree and rock. In Canada, he’d yearned for Japan, homesick for a land so ancient as to be an extension of human thoughtfulness; all the countryside a shrine. Now, ascending the mountain pursued, in his mind, by a Washington think tank, the countryside made him feel claustrophobic, it felt like a binding contract. He wanted wilderness.
He climbed until the path levelled out and spread through the trees. A stone fireplace had been built among the cypress and sugi, and rope decorated with white pennants linked the trees. A Shinto shrine. He looked to the low mountains in the distance, the neat brown and blue arrangement of forest. The Kami, the spirits of this place, were silent. Mist drifted in to obscure the pine trees, winding itself around the branches of the pines. Emmett had walked this mountain before, with his father, years ago. Now he felt that his father remained hidden in the mist, in the silence of the Kami. The pines were visible, then invisible, while the mist shifted, leaving its wet trace. His father is dead. His father’s lover, Sachiko, is dead. His mother is dead and gone. Nothing remains of the dead, but the damage they’ve done.
There was nothing to do but walk back down. Snowy, morning light reminded him of Ontario. The path returned him to the garden at the back of the house, under a layer of snow patterned by birds’ feet, covering the stones right to the edge of the black water of the fishpond. Green grass thrust raggedly through the snow. He’d gotten cold, his boots were wet, he’d snagged brittle twigs from the persimmon tree in his hair. He approached the house and tapped on the glass of the French door.
Aoi stood inches away, separated from him by a pane of glass. She was huge, wearing a cloak, a weave of black and ochre, and her face was coated in heavy white makeup with an aureole of rouge beneath her eyes. Her thick black hair had been lacquered so it rose high from her forehead, adding several inches to her considerable height. Her shining hair was again shaped strangely into jet-black triangles at her cheekbones.
She didn’t blink. He swayed his body far to the left then far to the right, and her red-rimmed eyes followed him, the whites of her eyes, her nearly black irises tracking his movement, but she was unsmiling. Like a bat unfolding its wings, Aoi spread the wide sleeves of the cloak, revealing her muscular forearms, and opened the door. Heat pulled him to itself and he fell inside. His feet began to needle and thaw.
He shook the twigs from his hair onto the mat and tried to remove his boots, but the laces were frozen. Finally he pried them off and peeled off his wet socks. When he looked up to address Aoi, she put her finger to her painted lips, “Shhh.” She waved, Follow.
Aoi returned him to the tatami room. The curtains were drawn against the morning light. He fell onto the futon with a childish moan of contentment and then stood up quickly: his clothes were damp and not very clean. Aoi shuffled in her white socks to stand before him and take his musty tweed jacket, folding it and placing it near the stove. She returned and put her cold hands under his sweater and lifted it over his head. He laughed but she shushed him.
Her cloak had silk buttons, one looping over the other. He reached curiously to touch her hair, but she gripped his right wrist while she undid the silk clasps. Then she let him go and stepped toward him. As she did so the cloak fell away, revealing the naked body below her painted face, the creamy whitewash that ended at her collarbone.
He travelled his fingers over her breasts and rounded her stomach, then ran along the strong shoulders, pushing her backward till she was lying down. The rouge around her eyes made them look huge and animal. He moved so his body covered hers and pinned her arms back. He felt the delirious surge of freedom, an existence without restraint; his life lifted from him, a fleeting sliver of childhood, pure greed, destructive and pleasing to himself. This time he cried out.
Aoi put her hand over his mouth and forced him back until he kneeled between her legs while she sat up. The careful arrangement of her hair had become a tangle of rich black braid. There was the dense scent of her rice powder smeared on his chest.
She walked to the window and pulled aside the curtain. Emmett followed, gathering up the cloak to drape it over her shoulders. With a tone of defiance, Aoi told him that the cloak had belonged to her grandmother. “It is from Manchuria,” she said.
He began to get dressed. Even the sparse furnishings seemed disappointed. He wondered why he felt as if they’d just had an argument. He asked her if she was all right.
Aoi, cloaked and pallid, shook her mane and arranged the garment around her feet. She might have been preparing to greet His Imperial Majesty. In a low voice she asked him, “Why do you never ask me about my father?”
Emmett was struggling with his pants. He wondered, indeed, why he’d never asked her about her father. She’d said he’d died. And the Americans had let her stay in the house. He apologized; he was sorry that he’d spoken to her so little; he was always distracted by her unusual looks, her uncommon beauty. “Tell me,” he said.
She shook her head.
Emmett put on his shirt.
“He was a hero,” she said.
Her voice had a shrill register he’d never heard before from her. He continued to get dressed. He wanted to be prepared for what came next.
“He was a hero,” she repeated. “A Japanese hero.” Then she laughed in the way that he liked, in her estranged, solitary victory over the meaningless defeat of her country. She abruptly saddened. “Ah,” she said, “poor Father.”
Aoi looked from the window down onto the snowy lawn and the road beyond. She spoke softly in singsong English. “When the dead are listening, what do we tell them?” In the eggy light, her broad face was a moon, even in its irregular shape. She lifted her face to him, tears flowing over the white surface of her face. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The moon was crying. She lay down on the floor with her face buried in her arms and raised her head to look at him. Her tears had washed the rouge into two V’s under her eyes. The remains of lipstick were smeared to the corners of her mouth.
She rolled over onto her back, wrapping the Manchurian cloak around her body, but for her right breast — and it did look like a lotus blossom — and the dissimilitude of her large form, its continent of Manchurian ochre and shades of black, and its floating breast in misalliance with her gorgeous clown-face, all made him keenly glad he’d come here after all.
She stared up at the ceiling, coiling her hair round her finger. “My father died to redeem his purity.”
This was a Japanese expression. Emmett guessed that she meant that her father had died by suicide. A redemptive, purifying suicide. There must have been shame. It would be indelicate of him to question her on this. So he said nothing.
A half-hour later, she walked down with him to where he could catch his bus. It was cold and she covered her ears with mittened hands. Once, he turned to find her kneeling several feet back, rocking herself, inwardly, intensely focused. She held up her hands filled with fresh new snow and showed him this.
He looked hard to see what she wanted him to see. Snow. And all around, trees, which were very good trees, in the way Japan was good, and which were good in ways quite unlike the good trees of Canada.
Aoi stood up in the freezing wind, regarding him from behind her ruined makeup, her hair wildly dishevelled, like a giant and sexually knowledgeable child.
“I can’t leave my country,” she said.
“I’ll see you in two weeks,” he promised. She didn’t respond; she didn’t believe him. Women have a way of doing that, he thought; they make you feel bad and then refuse to tell you what you did.
He succumbed to the temptation to be at a loss for words and left her on the road below the plum trees. He was some distance away when he heard her calling out. “Emmett Jones!” He stopped and listened. I have taken something from you! Aoi’s voice winging overhead, her tone of victory with a desperate edge.
Emmett walked to a low row of artisans’ shops in Kobe, to a warm wooden room where a handsome, middle-aged woman sat at a drafting table drawing maps. The walls were covered with similar hand-drawn maps and below them twenty or thirty cubbyholes were filled with scrolls. There were hangers draped in sea charts. Land surveys hung from the rafters, swaying in the heat coiling up from the hibachi. The place smelled of sandalwood. The woman looked at him from under the papery folds of her eyelids, laid her pen in a dish, opened a drawer, and removed the train schedule to Tokyo. The cartographer’s office served as an information centre. She said in English, “So much coming and leaving.”
With her smooth, greying head, she looked like a piece of soapstone. While she prepared his ticket, she asked, “Where is your home in the United States?”
He told her he’d been born in Japan but that he was actually Canadian. She uttered a cry of delight and called out in Japanese. A Japanese man wearing a hakama, a fellow in his mid-twenties with a shining, merry face, unmistakeably of the same family, appeared from behind a screen. She introduced him. “My brother,” she said. “Dr. Kimura.” She said the name as if it were a light joke.
“Canadian,” said the woman, pointing at Emmett. “Canadian,” she repeated, pointing at her brother.
Dr. Kimura bowed. In neat consonants, he said it was wonderful to meet a fellow Canadian.
“I was born here,” said Emmett.
Dr. Kimura burst out laughing. He had a boy’s voice. “I was born in Ottawa.”
His sister smiled wanly, with a tremor of disapproval.
Dr. Kimura said, “I’m going to Tokyo tonight, to board a ship and go home.” He put stubborn emphasis on the word home.
Dr. Kimura’s sister remarked that she had found him a companion for his journey to Tokyo, for she happened to know that Mr. Jones was catching the same train, and they both must hurry or they’ll miss it. “Ah!” said Dr. Kimura. “I’ll be glad to have a chat with you!”
The night journey to Tokyo was intensely pleasurable. Kimura loved to talk, but he was also a curious listener, and Emmett trusted him with harmless, almost gossipy details of his life.
Several times Emmett brought the conversation round to Aoi, to the difficulties of her relations with a gaijin. He tried to imply that she confused him, intending to portray himself as a man willing respectfully to submit to women’s irrationalities. Kimura listened with a look of subdued merriment on his face.
They arrived in Tokyo at nine that night and found a bar doing brisk business in the rooms upstairs, catering to Japanese sailors and the new Japanese police wearing shabby, hand-me-down American uniforms. Emmett ordered sake from the very pretty, very young girl.
Kimura wasn’t yet a doctor; he was still a student. The war and an internment camp in Guelph, Ontario, Kimura pointed out, had slowed his progress. Kimura called himself “a relativist” — a Nisei, he insisted, being a man of two existences. His father had remarried as soon as his first wife died, and he’d left his daughter, Kimura’s elder sister, sixteen years old at that time, behind in Japan while he journeyed to Canada in search of — what?
“Freedom!” said Kimura, laughing. “Crazy, eh?”
Kimura was born within a year of their immigrating. They couldn’t go back. Japan had closed herself off again, to purge all enemies of the kokutai. It was hard for Kimura’s sister, left behind, but things got much worse for her in the war years when the thought police, the Kempeitai, watched those with even the slightest connection to the United States. Anyone who gave her employment was suspected of harbouring a spy, a decadent infesting Japan with the foreign ideology of individualism. She’d nearly starved.
“But you aren’t American.”
Kimura laughed and put his arm around Emmett’s neck, kissing his cheek.
Kimura was tough on his race, but if Emmett gave way to any criticism of the Japanese, Kimura would flip to the other side in passionate defence. “The manner of a man’s death will determine the value of his life,” he said and added, lugubrious with drink, “We can’t expect someone like you, Emmett Jones, Christian, to understand our noble tradition of seppuku. An act of honour, a demonstration of free will.” Here, he shrugged and winced. “But to suicide for the emperor?” He made a light sound with his mouth: “Pfft.”
Kimura was we as a Japanese and I as a Canadian. “I am not convinced,” he went on, “that every one of the tens of thousands of suicides in the last ten years adds up to nobility. Maybe it’s impossible to do anything nobly anymore. Nobility has been diluted among too much population on the planet.” Kimura smiled like one of the Gods of Good Fortune and called out for the pretty little girl to bring them Scotch whisky.
The sailors and police in their shabby uniforms put down their beers and turned to look at them. Kimura cheerfully raised his cup and said in English, “Goodbye, Buddha-Heads! Goodbye, everlasting shame! Goodbye, kokutai! Tomorrow I go home to Canada!”
Without a word, four sailors pushed back their chairs and approached like men called to perform manual labour, casually fitting brass knuckles onto their hands. The man who reached Emmett first took a swing, but he was so drunk Emmett dodged the first blow, and he heard the brass knuckles clatter to the floor. The sailor staggered back and hit him barehanded, this time punching his face hard enough to break his glasses. Emmett’s mouth filled with blood. He hit the man under the jaw, snapping his head back till his body leered toward the floor and he fell.
Two sailors were holding Kimura so another could hit him square in the gut. Emmett caught one of the sailors by the arm, turned him around, and hit him with his left fist, knocking him to the floor. He knew immediately he’d broken his hand. The policemen abandoned their beer to join the fight. Emmett grabbed the brass knuckles from the floor, then wrapped his arms around Kimura, twisted him out of their reach, and hurled him toward the door. With the brass knuckles in his right hand, he swung his arm full length and caught a Japanese policeman in the throat, axing across his larynx with his whole swing. Blood spurted from the man’s mouth and nose and he buckled suddenly, bleeding so much Emmett could smell it.
Emmett dragged Kimura, limping, out to the street, where they flagged down an American SCAP vehicle.
The car was driven by a fellow from SCAP whom Emmett recognized from meetings at Dai-Ichi. The fellow turned around and looked at Emmett’s bleeding face. Emmett said, “Bar fight.”
Kimura said, “Damn! I think I’ve torn my meniscus cartilage!” Kimura and Emmett began to laugh too hard. Kimura’s merriment had been changed, as if his cheerful transparency had become opaque. His laughter was harsh, despairing.
The American took them to the dockyards, dropped them off on an oily dock, and drove away without comment.
Kimura and Emmett hid behind a stack of wooden crates. It was a cold night and they huddled together for warmth. Soon Kimura limped off and returned with a wet cloth to wash the blood from Emmett’s face. “You’ve broken your nose,” he said, and then gripped Emmett’s nose with the heels of his hands and gave a firm push sideways. Emmett heard a crunch.
At six o’clock the following morning, Kimura boarded the ship that would take him away from Japan. Emmett couldn’t see well without his glasses. He stood on the dock and waved goodbye to Kimura, a vague figure standing at the ship’s railing. During the night, they had agreed neither of them could afford to be caught in the brawl. Kimura would never escape Japan; Emmett would face criminal charges and lose his job.
“That man I hit might be dead,” Emmett had said to Kimura.
Kimura calmly responded, “We would have been beaten to death.”
Emmett was dimly surprised to discover such a steel edge in the young doctor, but he thought about what Kimura’s sister had endured. And Emmett knew how brutal the Japanese police could be — it was Japanese police who had killed his father.
Emmett had black eyes and a swollen left hand; he’d have to explain to the people at the Liaison offices how this had happened. He and Kimura agreed: Emmett would report an incident that had taken place that night. He would report that he’d been accompanying a Japanese man from the Tokyo train station when they were jumped. He would even give the name, Kimura. Kimura is a very common Japanese name. Emmett had been struck in the face and had broken his hand with a clumsy punch, but there were no other injuries. This man Kimura had gone his own way once they’d assured each other that they were all right. Emmett hadn’t called the police because the muggers had vanished; assaults were common on the streets of Tokyo, and the police would have nothing to go on, tracking down homeless men.
Emmett would always wonder what the SCAP official who’d picked them up off the street thought had happened. He never learned the man’s name, and he never heard from him, even when the dailies reported that a policeman had been killed by “a thug” in the Minato district in the early hours of Monday morning.
The Japanese police didn’t report publically that one of their own had lost his life in a bar fight with a white man, no doubt an American. They did not antagonize their occupiers. They bent, supple. Emmett was relieved of any consequence of the fight.
The receptionist tapped her nails at his office door while Emmett was on the phone with an optometrist. His new glasses would be ready to pick up that afternoon. He’d bandaged his hand, and he fumbled as he put the receiver down. She poked her head inside and said, “It’s his nibs. He wants to see you.”
“I have an appointment.”
She looked at him while she waited for him to understand that he had no choice, and then she retreated, leaving his door open, her high heels tapping, calling out in a singsong, “Better run, sweetie pie. The general said ‘now.’”
At Dai-Ichi, making his way into MacArthur’s office, Emmett had to step aside to permit a flurry of reporters who were on their way out. Somebody said, “Hey, Jones. Who won? Her husband?” Their faces were blurry, but he didn’t think that his friend Wilson was among them; Wilson had said he was going to Pusan, to observe the chaotic retreat of MacArthur’s Eighth Army.
It was a few days after Christmas and the UN forces were getting shot in the back. MacArthur had just fed the press the news that his forces had managed to wipe out thirty or forty thousand Chinese and North Koreans during the “withdrawal.” Nobody talked about the hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians being killed. The reporters chatted happily as they filed past. They’d been under a UN-imposed censorship, so it was gratifying to get the lowdown from the general.
General MacArthur was seated at his desk when Emmett arrived. He made a slight grimace when he took in Emmett’s black eyes and told him to close the door. The din out in the hallway faded away and then the room got so quiet, Emmett could hear the ticking of the onyx clock. He must have waited ten minutes while MacArthur sat with his manicured hands spread upon a green felt desk blotter, absorbed in thought until, in due time, he took up a pen and several sheets of paper and wrote a lengthy note, unhurried, without hesitation or erasure. That done, he lit his pipe.
Finally, MacArthur spoke. “Mr. Jones. How many communists are in North Korea?”
Emmett began to say that he didn’t know when MacArthur interrupted: “I think you do. But I will clarify. There are nearly three hundred thousand Chinese communists soldiers in North Korea. There are one hundred and sixty-seven thousand North Koreans, soldiers, and guerrillas. Add to that six hundred and fifty thousand Chinese communist soldiers in Manchuria and another quarter of a million communists on their way to the thirty-eighth parallel. As we speak. More than a million communist soldiers, Mr. Jones, well armed with Russian matériel. And I lost fewer than thirteen thousand men.”
“Yes. I heard,” said Emmett, wondering what MacArthur had meant by “I think you do.” He added blandly, “It’s remarkable, sir.”
MacArthur stood. “Then why isn’t that knowledge reflected in the irresponsible statements emanating from your government?”
“My government, sir?”
“Your man Pearson.” MacArthur began to pace so quickly he stirred the papers on his desk. “That fool Atlee. Nehru. And your man Pearson.”
Emmett said that he would communicate the general’s dissatisfaction to the minister.
“Do,” MacArthur said. “Tell Mr. Pearson that he’s damaging the morale of my troops. Ask him, Mr. Jones, kindly to restrain himself from sabotaging my war. Tell him to confine his commentary to the superior manner by which I’ve executed our tactical withdrawal. That is, if he is capable of behaving in a way suitable to a foreign official, and not like some small-town gossip.”
MacArthur returned to his chair. “When I flew over the Yalu,” he said softly, “I could see all the way to the Siberian border. All that spread before me was an endless expanse of utterly barren countryside, and the black waters of the river. It was a dismal, bleak, utterly empty landscape. And it was blanketed in snow.”
MacArthur fell silent. Emmett wondered if the general actually had gone mad. There was snow only high in the mountains when they’d flown over the Yalu. MacArthur of course didn’t know that Emmett had been there, in the plane with the newspapermen.
MacArthur whispered, “Snow. A massive deployment of hostiles, a phantom army moving only at night, absolutely camouflaged during the day, blending into the land. Their tracks covered by snow. They moved by stealth at night. And by day, they simply folded themselves away.”
MacArthur’s tone changed. “But that wasn’t their sole advantage, was it? There was something else, something your man Pearson and his ilk don’t acknowledge in their easy perversions of truth. Do you want to tell me what that was?”
“Pardon me?”
“I asked you, Do you wish to conjecture, what was the communists’ third weapon?”
“That’s beyond my scope, general.”
“Beyond your ‘scope,’ is it? Then let me help you. The communists’ third weapon is a traitor in our midst. The Reds won the first rout because they have a spy. Correction. They have spies. They’re being ‘tipped off.’”
Emmett let nothing show on his face.
MacArthur was warming up. “There is a leak in intelligence. It’s in Washington. It’s in London. Why not in Canada? You seem to want a ‘moral persuasion’ on the world stage, with your holier-than-thou pulpit diplomacy. It’s blatantly evident that my operations are known to the enemy in advance. My strategic movements are being conveyed to Lin Piao. The Chinese knew that Truman restrained me from moving against them at the Sui-Ho dam. That’s why they could infiltrate and fragment my units. There is a leak in Washington, Mr. Jones. And now, tell me, why shouldn’t I believe there’s a leak in Ottawa too? I have a hunch it doesn’t stop with your friend Mr. Norman.”
The general put his pipe between his teeth before politely inquiring, “And why are you not laughing now, Mr. Jones?”
Spring broached, and no one had connected Emmett with the death of the policeman in the port district. It looked like the SCAP official wasn’t going to make any trouble. No word came from Dr. Kimura, and Emmett figured that he had returned to Ottawa, had taken up his medical practice, and would prefer to forget an unfortunate manslaughter in a Tokyo bar.
No word came from External Affairs either, nothing that would indicate that Bill Masters or anyone in External knew about the general’s theory, his phantom Canadian spy leaking information about his troops’ movements. Emmett had dutifully written to External to report the encounter with General MacArthur in self-mocking terms, as a humorous episode while he was temporarily handicapped by a painful hand and the loss of his spectacles, injuries he’d sustained while defending a stranger from a gang of homeless men living in the streets of Tokyo.
Then, abruptly in early April 1951, General MacArthur was fired.
It was the end of May, and sunny, when Emmett awoke in his suite, a few blocks away from the Liaison offices. He’d been dreaming about John Norfield; he could smell John’s scent of cigarettes and Scotch.
John had been asleep in thick moss of the kind that grows on granite. Moss, emerald green, wet from recent rain. It must have been summer; it was warm in the untrustworthy Canadian way. Pain emanated from John, who slept inside Emmett’s sleep, one nightmare after another all night long in an exhausting rosary that must be worked and worked.
Emmett lay in bed and watched strips of blue sky through the blinds in his apartment. He’d been telling himself that he’d soon go to see Aoi. But as the weeks passed, the silence between them grew almost tangible and he began to feel stubborn toward her. He admired her, but he didn’t understand her. She made him lonely; it was like being in love with a mountain range.
Someone knocked at the door.
He was wearing his pyjama bottoms and an undershirt. A Sunday. He got out of bed, pulled a cardigan over his undershirt, and opened the door to a tall Japanese man wearing a black uniform with gold braid epaulets and matching cap. It couldn’t be the Japanese police; the uniform was too new. Anyway, a uniform on a Japanese man could signify a general attitude rather than a particular rank in a particular force. As it turned out, the gentleman was a taxi driver. The taxi driver held a letter in his spotless white gloves, offered it to him, bowed deeply, and departed.
Emmett kicked the door shut with his bare heel, tearing open the envelope. The letter was from External Affairs, requiring his presence in Ottawa. He had been recalled.
Monday morning, hungover, Emmett stood at the teak desk of the sleek receptionist. The receptionist was on the phone and swivelled her chair to face the wall. The New York Times, dated May 30, lay on her desk. He picked it up and read the headline.
Two top diplomats in the British Foreign Office, one stationed in London, the other in Washington, had defected to the Soviet Union.
He took the newspaper to his office to read it.
Their names were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Burgess was a high-ranking secretary in the British Embassy in Washington. Maclean was head of the American Department at the Foreign Office in London.
The British Commonwealth brigade was fighting in Korea, so messages passing between the Pentagon and Dai-Ichi would have been copied to the Attlee government through the British Embassy in Washington and the American Department in Whitehall, both domains of Burgess and Maclean. The two Brits would have had access to information passing between the Pentagon and the headquarters in Japan, and they could have easily forwarded it to the Soviet Union. All of MacArthur’s plans for fighting the war in Korea could have been flowing into the hands of the communists through the British Foreign Office, through Burgess and Maclean.
Thirst drove Emmett down to the staff cafeteria, where the talk was all about the two spies and the damage they must have done. No one there appeared to know about Emmett’s recall; they moved their chairs over to give him room without interrupting their flow of talk. It was unlikely that they knew about his situation and didn’t care; this kind of instability in the Liaison offices made everyone uneasy, and the staff was still shaken by the loss of Herbert Norman. Emmett sat stiffly with his former colleagues, young men who were not hungover, who were not under a cloud, who seemed stupid and uninformed but enviable nonetheless.
The language specialists, policy analysts, secretaries, and assistant secretaries, all the men and women in the cafeteria agreed: there are communists everywhere, hiding. That’s how the Reds work. To infiltrate, to sap our strength and weaken us from within. One of the women, a pretty little redhead, confessed that she was scared, her eyes tearing up. “It’s hard,” she said, “to keep my Christian faith constantly on guard against so much evil!” The young men murmured encouragement, but she went on, “No, honestly! It’s not just the communists! It’s — it’s the fairies! The queers !” In some confusion the men moved their chairs a fraction apart. Several of the young men laughed, not unkindly, and one of them said with a hint of irony, “You’ve just gotta be vigilant, Mary,” and another said more seriously, “The fact is — it’s up to all of us to be vigilant.”
Someone began to hold forth about President Harry Truman. Truman had suddenly relieved General MacArthur of his command in April, charging him with insubordination over the fiasco with the Chinese in North Korea. “The spy scandal spells the end of President Truman,” the fellow said. “They should impeach Truman and elect MacArthur.”
“MacArthur for president?” The conversation moved on to MacArthur’s recall, and all the controversy surrounding the war with the Chinese. The blond young man seated beside Emmett insisted that they should’ve dropped a nuclear bomb on the Reds at the Yalu. “Would’ve saved a lot of lives,” he solemnly asserted.
One by one they went back to their desks. Emmett sat alone at a table strewn with overflowing ashtrays and torn matches. He pulled the letter from his back pocket, smoothed it, and reread it. It was a toneless instruction to return to Ottawa “at his earliest convenience,” to report to External and receive further instructions, signed by a man he’d met only once, in the Far Eastern Division. It was marked “For Your Eyes Only.” So no one at the Liaison Mission knew.
But when he returned to his office, the few belongings he’d kept there were in a small cardboard box. He opened his filing cabinet. It was empty, as were all the drawers in his desk. There was a paperclip on the carpet; otherwise the room was cleaned out. When he was gone, it would be without a trace.
The phone on his empty desk began to ring and he answered. It was the receptionist, her voice for the first time indicating some interest in him. “I’ve got a call for you,” she said mockingly but impressed. “Long distance collect. She wants to know if you’ll accept the charges.” The receptionist gave one of her little Pepsi burps and added, “You got yourself a girlfriend, mystery man?”
It was Aoi. He said that he’d pay for the call. The receptionist said, “Okay, honey, here she is,” and put Aoi through.
He had never before spoken to Aoi on the telephone. She sounded vulnerable. He asked her if she was all right, and she said that she was. Then she said nothing. He told her, “I’m tied up at the moment. I’ll come out to see you — the day after tomorrow. Is that okay with you?” She said that it was okay, but she sounded diminished, and a sense of dread rose in him when he said goodbye.
He picked up the cardboard box and walked. On his way out he left some money with the receptionist to pay for Aoi’s call. The receptionist gave him a knowing look and said, “Good luck, eh?”
Emmett began to make arrangements for the long journey back to Canada. He hesitated to say goodbye to Aoi, telling himself that it would be needlessly painful, that he might jeopardize her claim to the house on the estate. He thought that the American in the blue kimono must have been watching him come and go from her house, and he considered the possibility that the blue kimono was connected to Mr. Miller, who in turn had connected him with the British spies. He felt he was the subject of conversations everywhere.
The UN forces and the Chinese were bombing North Korea to pulp, killing each other and tens of thousands of civilians. There were more than one hundred and thirty thousand POWs — Chinese and North Korean — crammed into a UN concentration camp on an island off the coast of South Korea, in conditions that had nothing to do with the Geneva Convention. All night Emmett walked the streets of Tokyo, stopping for a drink in a bar, then walking again. Very early morning he awoke on a park bench. Young Japanese boys were playing baseball a few yards away. They were in spotless white uniforms, but, he noticed, their white socks and sneakers were blackened. The cherry trees had burned when Tokyo was bombed; saplings were growing up around the burnt skeletons of the trees, but the soil was still sooty. He didn’t want to go to his apartment, so he walked all morning. Even before noon, the delicate Japanese girls were tripping over the rubble of freshly cleared bombsites, holding hands with American soldiers and smoking Lucky Strikes. The Japanese, encouraged by the profits the banks were making off the Korean War, were practising demokurashii.
He spoke to no one but bartenders for four days. Before he finally started the grasshopper route back to Canada, he typed up a letter to Aoi, telling her that he had to leave the country and he didn’t know if, much less when, he’d be back. He gave her the Ottawa address for External Affairs and asked her to write to him there. He told her that he would miss her very much. He thought for a minute and then, because his left hand was still in a cast, he signed it clumsily with his right hand, “Love, Emmett.”
At quarter to nine on the third Monday of June 1951, Emmett was on his way to see Bill Masters. Beside him, climbing the stairs to Bill’s office in the East Block on Parliament Hill, was a balding man wearing a brown suit, anywhere between forty and fifty years old, patchily shaved, his green face leached by alcohol, carrying a paper lunch bag smelling of egg.
Emmett had anticipated that his appointment at the Liaison Mission in Tokyo would be extended for three years, yet he’d been recalled after only ten months. He intended to remind Bill that his work had been good, better than good. In his brief time there, he’d assessed the Japanese constitution, he’d written what he knew to be lucid analyses of General Douglas MacArthur’s relationships with the Tokyo press, and he’d been able to unravel some of the horrors of the Korean War. He’d written several profiles of Tokyo gangsters. He’d even overseen insightful research into ladies’ book clubs! He’d mastered a certain congenial, authoritative tone in his reporting on American influence in East Asia. He already had analysts working under him, men who’d been there longer than he had. This is the speech he’d prepared for Bill.
In one of the last reports that Emmett had written — before his unnerving meeting with General MacArthur — he told the story of Herbert Norman and John Emmerson, who was with the State Department, taking an army jeep to a prison camp just outside Tokyo in 1945, to pick up two Japanese prisoners, Shiga Yoshio and Tokuda Kyuichi, communist leaders who had been incarcerated since 1928. The prisoners were interrogated by American officials, returned briefly to prison, and then released.
It was General MacArthur who had ordered the release of the two communist leaders, believing that it would let off steam, moderate the antagonisms between the old Right and old Left. Emmett had written that MacArthur intended to “geld” the two men, brand them as impotent old-timers no longer a threat to national security.
Emmett had paused for a moment before writing about communists. The flu-like symptoms of the Red scare made it contagious even to say the word communist. But he believed that he was demonstrating that he had nothing to hide.
Then the British spies defected. And now there were going to be communist conspiracies around every corner, in every closet, under every bed. Here he was, stuck in Ottawa. His usefulness in Japan was wasted.
At the gloomy landing to the third floor, the man with the egg-salad sandwich let out a tidy fart just as a good-looking woman briskly stepped ahead of them onto the stairs. The woman in her trim tweed skirt and high heels, a brunette with her hair swept up from the nape of her neck, surged ahead and the egg salad wearily dropped behind. When Emmett was still following her into the corridor to the left where Bill Masters had his office, she looked back, appraised him, and gave him a smile. He said, “I’m not trailing you.” And she said, “Too bad.”
So he was feeling better when he passed by Bill’s secretary, Agnes — who’d been there for decades — and entered Bill’s office.
Bill reached across his desk to shake Emmett’s hand. “Glad you made it,” Bill said. “You all in one piece?”
“Yup. Same as always.” Emmett took a chair.
Seated opposite, Bill looked like a part of his desk. He’d been in that same office or one very much like it since the end of the war, and Emmett had the impression that everything in it was not merely an expression of Bill but actually was Bill. The light was always bad in the East Block, and Bill wouldn’t get rid of the thunderously heavy velvet swag drapes that darkened the room. Beside the inevitable leather sofa, there was a credenza decorated with golf trophies and a tray with rye and glasses, and it, too, was Bill.
Bill saw Emmett eyeing the liquor and said hopefully, “A bit early, isn’t it?”
On the desk between them lay the report that Emmett had written shortly before his departure from the Tokyo Mission, the one about the two Japanese Communist Party officials released from prison.
“What’s up, Bill?”
Bill grimaced. He patted the report. “Nice work.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I don’t know why — ” Bill began.
“I was doing good work in Tokyo. How do you expect me to get anywhere if you don’t leave me alone and let me do what I have to do?”
“Wait a minute.”
“Just tell me why I’m here, so I’ll know how to get out again.”
“Since when did you get to be such a hothead?”
Emmett got up and poured himself two fingers of rye, no ice, and when he turned and met Bill’s surprised gaze, he said, “I’m on Tokyo time.”
“Look,” said Bill. “We’re just trying to make the most of our resources. Meaning you. And guys like you. We can make better use of you here.”
“Doing what? Translating the Tokyo newspapers?”
“That and other things.”
“Are you serious?” Emmett thought about the man with the egg salad sandwiches coming to the office every day, probably speaks five languages but lives a life so boring his wife is glad he drinks so much, she’s hoping for cirrhosis, a widow’s pension.
Bill didn’t look friendly right now. “Remember George Miller?”
“The Washington ‘think tank.’ So what?”
“So what? Who’s running the show in Japan, huh? How are we going to get anywhere if we alienate the Americans?”
“I don’t give a shit about the Americans.”
“Then you’re stupid.” Bill picked up the Liaison file and slapped it on his desk. “Why’d you go and stick your neck out? After I told you they were none too pleased with your talk about the Chinese. And this — ” indicating the file, he made a show of calming himself down.
“I’m reporting facts.”
“There’s no such thing as facts. MacArthur wanted to geld a couple of old communists? What the bejeezus are you talking about?”
“I don’t trust MacArthur,” Emmett said. “But that was an intelligent decision. Surprises me, in fact. It seems too reasonable.”
“Be that as it may, MacArthur is yesterday’s man.”
“Not to the Japanese.” But Emmett didn’t want further conversation about MacArthur. He’d written that material before MacArthur had insinuated that he was leaking information about his troops’ movements in Korea.
Bill pointed at Emmett. “Let me give you some friendly advice. Not that you deserve it.” He gazed longingly at the glass in Emmett’s hand. “Always look at the bigger picture.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“Of human affairs, Jones, of the real political situation in real human terms. Not some perfect world where men are angels.”
“You bring me here to tell me this? This is a fucking house of mirrors.” He drained his glass and was going to pour himself another when Bill told him coldly to sit down.
“Here,” said Bill, and he poked his stubby finger into his desk, “right here in Ottawa, or in Tokyo, what the Christ, Manila, Seoul, anywhere there are Americans, we work with them. You don’t think I know my ass from a hole in the ground? What we’re doing here is selective, you know that. We’re not winning any elections, we’re here to support the men who do. And that means we smooth the way, we avoid controversy. We don’t sell our souls to the devil, but we do get along with the Americans. Anything short of that is for the pulpit. You want to think you’re changing the world, get a job in a university, become a preacher. You want to have a real effect on real events, Jones — Emmett.” Bill was winding down. “Look” — he almost said “son” but stopped himself — “I’m talking about the long run, a career in the service. You want to be another flash in the pan?”
“It’s for my own good, is it, Bill?”
Bill’s hazel eyes regarded him from under swollen eyelids. “You might view it that way. In time.”
Emmett stood up to leave.
“Did it ever occur to you —” He wanted Emmett to thank him for his support; it would have been a bleating appeal for gratitude, but Bill reined himself in and brusquely placed the last Tokyo report in his OUT pile, then plucked another file from his IN pile and picked up his pen. “Tell Agnes to bring me coffee,” he said. When Emmett opened the door to go out, Bill added, “Come for dinner sometime. Meet my wife.”
So Emmett did say thanks and left, cursing.
He had to get resettled in Ottawa and then report to somebody in the Far East Division. But he went to Toronto instead.
After Japan, even in ruins, in its forceful repair, the ugliness of the Canadian cities weighed on him. Ottawa was craven and stale, eager to imitate whatever the citizens guessed might be sophistication. The squat concrete and limestone buildings had no history; it was a bland, cringing, bloodless colony. He was angry all the time. He got drunk the first night back in town and then again the second and third nights. He wanted to get into a fight with a stranger in a bar; he was bursting apart, he had to be held, he had to be reassembled in the arms of another, he needed a woman. But he was thinking, This is Canada, this is McCallum land, he wanted only Suzanne McCallum of Forest Hill, and he was sick of pretending that he didn’t.
He bought a car, a three-year-old Plymouth coupe, and drove it down to Toronto. He thought he’d drop in on her, just drop by. She was probably seeing someone; maybe she was even married. A woman like that. He’d drop by and probably find her married to someone, and then he’d finally let her go and get on with his life.
He drove through a suffocating hot afternoon and got into town under towering storm clouds, in air gone yellow and electric. A dog, a yellow mutt, lay in the centre of St. Clair Avenue. He thought it must have been hit and killed, but it lifted its head when his car came to a stop a few feet away, hauled itself up by its front legs, and slouched off to one side to let him pass. In his rear-view, he could see the animal amble back to the centre line to lie down again.
The broad hot avenue with its broad hot sidewalk was nearly abandoned except for the Greek men sitting out on cane chairs drinking little glasses of wine as if they were in their own living rooms. A streetcar rumbled toward him, and he thought it was louder than it should be when he realized it was thunder he was hearing. He didn’t have time to roll up the window on the passenger side before the sky opened.
The rain sluiced down, flooding the street, rising up to the curbs. He thought Suzanne’s place was several blocks north of St. Clair, he couldn’t remember how many, but he could barely see through his windshield and he was in the wrong lane to turn onto Avenue Road.
He saw a woman standing at the corner. She was empty-handed, not even carrying a purse, which seemed unusual, as was her thinness, and the way she let herself get soaking wet. She wore a blue dress, or maybe it was green, and it clung to her legs. Her feet, in flat shoes, were in an inch of rainwater. What struck him hardest was that she was so calm and uncaring about the scandal of rain pouring down on her in her nice clothes. He pulled up at the curb where she stood. A delivery van had been following and it lurched to a stop and the driver leaned on his horn. The woman bent down to peer in at his open passenger window, taking in the rainwater pooling in its upholstery. Her eyes were filled with light, sky blue. She smiled at him as if they were fools to have made such an irresponsible arrangement. Emmett thought, Oh god, I want to marry you, Suzanne McCallum.
It was the same studio that Suzanne had set up before he took his leave for Japan. But it was altered, had been made more upscale and less — “less broken,” she’d said when she saw him appraise the curtains on the windows, a fairly new settee to one side. Patrons could extinguish their cigarettes in a standing bronze ashtray with a bare-breasted Athena. There was a small fridge in one corner, where, when she opened it to fetch cream for his coffee, he saw a bottle of gin and three lemons. He would have liked a drink of gin for his nerves, but he was holding his breath, waiting to learn that she was seeing someone, a good-looking lawyer selected for her by her father.
She sat down on the couch and crossed her bare legs. She’d disappeared awhile to change out of her wet clothes. Now she had on a soft green dress that was like a shirt, with buttons all the way down, belted, and he was imagining unbuckling, unbuttoning. She said, “I think I was a bit — oh, I don’t know — a bit of egg shell last time we saw each other.”
“Better now?”
She nodded “Uh-huh,” and smiled at him peacefully.
The rain wasn’t letting up. He hoped it wouldn’t. Her blond hair was drying into waves and the daylight grew dusky. He walked around looking at the photographs on the walls. She offered to turn on a lamp and he said no, he could see fine. “What makes them shine like that?” he wanted to know.
She told him it was a method in the darkroom she’d been learning. “I’m becoming a bit of a cliché. But I love the way it looks, the silver.”
“Luminous.”
She laughed, flattered. He remembered that about her, an easy modesty; something he liked very much. But just then she stretched, as if she was bored, and looked out the window, and he thought for sure she had to be somewhere or she was expecting someone, the eldest son of a Liberal MP. She pushed her hair into place, a gesture he’d seen her mother make, caught him looking and laughed uncomfortably. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”
“No. I should get going.”
“I have a date tonight.” She said this with some anguish, blushing. “I never have dates! I think it’s the first one I’ve ever had!”
He doubted this was true but sort of knew what she meant. He looked at her curiously, feeling his nerves ride down his arms and into his fingers. “It’s all right, it’s normal.”
“It doesn’t feel normal. It feels stupid.”
“Suzanne.”
“I guess I got a bit lonely. A bit bored.”
“Do you ever see Norfield?” He felt he could ask this now, though he’d been wondering forever.
She indicated no with a small shake of her head. He’d pried. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wilfully regained her composure and sat up straighter.
He said, “You look as if you’re doing okay. As a photographer.”
“I do sell some,” she said. “I might have a book!” And then that candid modesty again, “I also get an allowance from my family.” She liked to laugh at herself, dismissing the importance of her successes and maybe diminishing the significance of her failings.
Emmett stood to leave and she walked him to the door. She was running her hands down her sides, pressing the wrinkles from her dress with her hands on her thighs. She grumbled, “I wish I didn’t have to. I don’t like dates. I don’t know what I was thinking. I never want to do anything I’m supposed to do.” She looked up at him. Her blue, blue eyes had a rim of black around them.
“Then don’t,” he said.