The Last Thing You Surrender, page 48
George Simon was the son of a wealthy man. He had grown up in a large house with fine things and always enough money to buy anything he wanted. He had always felt vaguely embarrassed by that. But it occurred to him as he watched the weeping man read his letter from home that nothing he had ever purchased, nothing he had ever owned, held as much value to him as those few pages did to that poor prisoner. But of course, value and worth were calculated differently in a wretched place where you had nothing. A cigarette meant more here than a Cadillac would have. In some part of his mind, George knew that the guards would soon enough be aware of the theft and come looking for the perpetrators. And he knew it was the height of foolishness to walk boldly through camp slipping letters and chocolate bars into men’s hands.
But again, try though he did, he simply could not care. It struck him that he had not cared about much of anything for months. Not since the day his Bible had been stolen. Not since he had been forced to kneel in the rock garden next to Danny Boy Flaherty and felt his knees torn to shreds. Somehow, he had done it. Somehow, he had knelt there for the required 48 hours. And when, finally, the Japs had lifted the heavy wooden pole from his legs and allowed two other prisoners to carry him away, George knew that something in him had changed. He knew the Japs had lost their power to make him fear, to make him give a damn about consequences. It wasn’t courage he had found. It was submission. Kneeling there beneath that weight, beneath that sun and moon and sun and moon, he had accepted himself as dead, had given himself over to his own inevitable demise. And there was something liberating about that.
In the months since, George had become steadily more daring, more foolhardy. He stole with reckless abandon from shipments that came through the shipyard. He snorted with contempt when Shitface ordered him to hurry up. He neglected to bow before The Watcher’s office, took the beating that came, and then repeated the infraction the next day. Some men said he had gone crazy. Some said he had a death wish. He thought both were right. So he made no particular effort to hide what they were doing that Christmas Eve day as he and Andy roamed about the camp giving away the stolen loot. Nor was he especially surprised when Satan and his guards stormed into the mess a couple of hours later and pulled them from the audience of the Christmas show.
The men on the makeshift stage had been in the middle of an obscene version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” but everyone stopped and turned to look as George and Andy were hauled away. The guards never spoke. Neither did George and Andy. The two Japs threw them, still without a word, into the benjo and pointed for them to climb down into the pit beneath. George didn’t even wonder who had ratted them out. He didn’t care.
George knew, in a distant, abstract sort of way, that there was something wrong with him, that you were supposed to care about such things. Self-preservation required that you care. But a year here had taught him the great secret of life: What you thought didn’t matter. What you wanted didn’t matter. What you did didn’t matter. Even what you prayed didn’t matter. So what did it mean to care? What was the point?
George and Andy stood together at attention in the pit. They were directly beneath the toilet seats, and the muck came halfway up to their knees. They were so cold.
“Well,” said Andy, “here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
“I’m sorry, Ollie,” whimpered George. They both laughed.
The structure above them rested on bricks, and from where George and Andy stood, their view of the world was constricted to a rectangle. They could see the big mess hut where, just a few minutes before, they had sat in the audience watching the Christmas pageant. George could still make out the sound of the men’s voices singing “Joy to the World.” At the end of the show, there was supposed to be an ersatz nativity scene where a spectacularly ugly Aussie named Boone appeared as the Virgin Mary. George’s sole regret was that he was going to miss that.
From where they stood, Andy and George could also see Satan—or at least, his sandal-clad feet—pacing up and back. He was speaking to them in a voice of patience and reason they had never heard from him, like a teacher instructing wayward pupils. And they could see the feet of the interpreter as he translated Satan’s words into English. For whatever reason, Satan apparently wanted this particular speech to be clearly understood.
“You men are not Japanese,” the translator was saying in his cultured, manicured English.
Even as George heard this, a fresh sluice of watery shit came raining down. He felt it oozing down his neck and willed himself not to vomit. It was warm and smelled of decay, with a coppery undertone of blood. A furtive voice whispered through the slit above, some prisoner George didn’t know saying, “I’m sorry, fellas. I’m sorry. They made me do it. Hang in there.”
“If you were Japanese,” the cultured voice went on, “you would have spared yourself this disgrace. You would have spared your family this shame. You would have fought until the very end and died honorably in combat. Or you would have killed yourself and your family could have been proud to know you chose death over surrender. Instead, you allowed yourselves to be captured.”
Satan stopped talking, paused in his walking, waited for the interpreter to catch up. The interpreter said, “One of you gaijin even lied and claimed to be the son of an American senator so that we would spare your miserable life. You are no politician’s son, George Simon. We investigated your claim. Your father is a worthless lawyer in a minor town. But you lied and convinced a gullible captain that you were someone important, so badly did you want to live.” The interpreter spoke the last word with heavy contempt.
“I never said I was a senator’s son,” muttered George.
Satan barked something. “Silence, dog,” said the interpreter.
“Hell,” said Andy, “I’d say I was Roosevelt’s son if I thought it’d get me out of here. And my family is Republican.”
Again, Satan yelled. Again, the interpreter said, “Silence.”
Satan took a moment to gather his thoughts. Then he began pacing and speaking again in the same professorial tones.
“You white men,” the interpreter said, “have no concept of honor. This is why you will lose the war. It is already happening, did you know that? Los Angeles has fallen. Chicago and St. Louis are no more. Your country lies in ruins; many, many of your people are dead. The emperor’s Imperial Army is closing in on your capital city even as we speak and your crippled president is urinating on himself and regretting that he was such a warmonger.”
“Goddamn,” growled Andy. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. It’s bad enough we have to stand here. Do we have to listen to this bullshit, too? I swear, George, I’m going to kill this miserable fucker if it’s the last thing I do.” He began to yell. “You hear me, you slant-eyed bastard? You hear me?”
This time, Satan did not deign to acknowledge the outburst. He continued speaking without a pause. “The American race is a collection of mongrelized barbarians, including black savages not long out of the trees. Yet, you have the audacity to believe all other races are your inferiors and that you can tell us what we may and may not do. Whatever made you think you could give orders to a warrior race that was already many centuries old when Europeans were still learning to make fire? Now see what your impertinence has cost you. Nippon has exposed America before the world for the empty noise that you are, for the decadent fools you have always been.”
Now Satan came over, bent his head low so that they could see his face. He held up a finger and pronounced his judgment. “Till morning,” the interpreter ended, and both men walked away. With the Jap guard finally, thankfully gone, the only sound was the echo of men’s voices. They were singing “It Came upon a Midnight Clear.”
“Merry fucking Christmas,” said Andy.
“Yeah,” said George. “Same to you.”
“Teach us to steal from the Japs, eh?”
“Yeah,” said George. And he thought of Thelma and what she had written, and how he had clung to it as to a window ledge over a 50-story drop.
You make sure your decency, your humanity, is the very last thing you give up.
He had thought once that those words might save him.
But Thelma, he decided, standing there in the pit in the cold, had been wrong. Your humanity is not the last thing you surrender. The last thing you surrender is the belief that your humanity means something, that it makes you anything more than just another animal on the earth, rooting around in the mud of your own existence, repetitively eating, fucking, shitting, and then dying at the end. The last thing you surrender is the idea that God gives a damn about you.
Skeletal, covered with bruises, fleabites, and sores, and standing almost up to his knees in muck, his hair slicked to his scalp by the stuff, George knew in that moment that he had made that final surrender. The fact that he was a man, that he was human, that he sought to be decent and moral meant nothing. He was not one of God’s elect. God had no elect. George had been stripped of everything—education, wealth, culture, dignity, his race, his country, his faith … all of it, gone. He had nothing left but his life, about which he cared very damn little.
From the hut, the men sang “Silent Night,” their heavy men’s voices lifting the ancient words of holiness and hope like a prayer into the brittle and uncaring sky.
“You okay over there?” Andy asked.
“Yeah,” said George.
“You’re awful quiet.”
“Not a whole lot to say.”
“Want you to know, I don’t regret what we did. Not a bit.”
“Me neither,” said George.
“Those men, they needed something to give them hope. And that’s what we gave them. Hell, that’s what we gave ourselves. Far as I’m concerned, that was a good thing. Especially for Christmas.”
“It was a stupid stunt,” said George.
“Yeah,” said Andy. “But it was a good thing.”
Still the men’s voices rose from the hut, singing “Silent Night.” Still the sky looked down, cold and uncaring.
And out of nowhere, Andy began to recite. “And there were in the same country, shepherds, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.”
George looked over at him in disbelief. Andy met his gaze, his eyes luminous and purposeful in the shadows. “And lo,” he went on, the words of Luke echoing off the underside of the Jap shithouse, “the angel of the Lord appeared unto them and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.”
“Cut it out,” said George. The recitation made him uncomfortable.
“Help me,” retorted Andy. Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
Andy stopped. He fixed George with that same luminous stare. “Help me,” he said again.
A single tear cut through the muck on Andy’s face. And when his Yank friend spoke again, George heard his own voice rise hesitantly in union. “For unto you is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was, with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest. And on Earth, peace, good will to men.”
When they finished, they just looked at each other, their breath puffing out from them in gray clouds. From the hut, George heard uproarious laughter and knew that Boone had just made his entrance as the Virgin Mary.
Andy said, “Amen.”
And the night passed.
And the morning came.
The sun still lay below the eastern horizon when George saw the Jap guards go storming through the huts as they always did, heard them kicking and cursing and hitting with rifle butts. A moment later, the men came staggering out to line up for morning tenko.
A guard knelt down, said something in Japanese, and waved Andy and George up out of the pit. They climbed stiffly, slowly, their muscles frozen by cold and by the long night of standing. The guard made a show of covering his nose at the stench of them and gestured for them to walk ahead. George’s pants, heavy with muck, would have fallen off his bony hips had he not held them up. He and Andy stumbled toward the formation. Men tried to look at them without looking. Satan was standing there before the assemblage, his eyes the all-too-familiar half-moons of fury, his lips knotted in a knowing smirk. He was wearing some kind of ornamental Jap kimono, a sword scabbarded at his side. The translator was standing with him. The Watcher was watching from the porch of his office, his face unreadable as ever.
As George moved toward his place in the formation, the same guard who had come to get him shouted something in Japanese and pointed, indicating that he and Andy were to stand facing the formation instead. Mystified, George and Andy did as they had been told. The guard said in a tone of command, “Hizamazuke!”
George and Andy looked at him. They looked at each other. They had no idea what the Jap was saying.
He repeated it, “Hizamazuke!”
He kicked George behind the knee and George went down, even as the interpreter said, helpfully, “Kneel.”
Andy knelt beside George. George felt his arms yanked roughly behind him. Then one of the guards tied his hands. He looked over at Andy. The same thing was being done to him. Satan stepped forward and began to strut back and forth, bellowing to the assembled prisoners. The interpreter began to speak a moment later.
“These men stole from the colonel. This means they stole from the emperor of Japan. And that means they stole from God.”
Satan turned, looking down on the two men. He spoke and the interpreter said, “Which of you first hatched this blasphemy? Which of you had this idea?”
“I did,” said George. He spoke up quickly, for he knew now what was coming and he only wanted to get it over with.
“George!” cried Andy. “Don’t!”
George ignored him. “He had nothing to do with it. He was an idiot. I used him. I fooled him into thinking the guards had given me these things and told me to pass them out.”
“George, don’t!” cried Andy. And then, to the interpreter, “He’s lying. Can’t you see that? We both did it! We both did!”
The interpreter dismissed Andy with a wave. He spoke to Satan. George could tell that none of what Andy said had been shared, because Satan fixed his gaze only upon George and sneered. And even though that was the result he had wanted, it made George angry. “And you know what?” he cried. “I’d do it again if I could. I don’t give a fuck what you yellow cocksuckers do. Do you hear me? I don’t care what you do!”
As the words were translated, Satan’s mad eyes grew madder still, and George felt a distant satisfaction at the knowledge that he had managed to get under the bastard’s skin at least once before he died.
It happened too fast. Satan tore the sword free of its scabbard, raised it high, and brought it flashing down. Blood leapt. Andy’s body keeled over, and Andy’s head fell into the mud, staring up at George with a surprised expression.
It took George a moment to process that this had actually happened. His mind was searching frantically for an out, a recount, a work-around that might somehow make this obscenity not real. But it was real, horribly, indisputably, and an instant later, when George’s mind finally accepted this, George’s mouth screamed. No words, just a scream—just primal hatred, revulsion, red fury ripping out of him. In that moment, Satan leaned close and spoke through a thin smile. George was barely aware of him. He was still screaming, staring at Andy, whose eyes had gone dim. George’s tears flowed.
Then the translator leaned down to George’s ear and softly, almost solicitously, spoke Satan’s words in English. “Do you care now, gaijin?” he asked.
Satan did not wait for an answer. With a grunt, he lifted the sword high. Everything that had ever happened to him flashed through George’s mind. Everyone he had ever loved was there.
Then The Watcher spoke some harsh command. Satan hesitated. He looked back over his shoulder, and George thought he might disobey whatever he had been told. There was a moment. Then, with a palpable reluctance, Satan nodded and lowered the sword, still stained with Andy’s blood. Again the interpreter leaned over. “The colonel said to let you live with it,” he said. George gaped. Words seemed to have lost meaning, to have become just a collection of unintelligible sounds.
He bawled without knowing it, bawled like a baby for his friend and for all the things he had surrendered. Satan kicked him and George, his hands still bound, fell sideways into the mud. Behind him, he heard the tenko count begin.
thirty
LUTHER’S EYES POPPED OPEN ALL AT ONCE. FOR A MOMENT, HE wasn’t sure what had awakened him. Then he heard the hard clicking of his own teeth.
He was sitting in his gunner’s seat in the turret of Lena Horne, his head hunched down, his hands pinned under his armpits, but he might as well have been crouching naked in a freezer for all the good it did. His joints ached with cold. Luther had half a mind to pull out his Ronson and hold the flame against his skin to see if it would burn him. It was—or at least, Luther thought it was—the first day of 1945. Two months of town-by-town, field-by-field fighting had brought the crew of the Lena Horne to this country crossroads, the northbound spoke of which led down into some little Belgian village. German forces controlled it, but the Allies would be massing today to wrest it from them. Lena Horne and two other tanks from Baker Company were guarding this approach to the town until infantry arrived.
Not that Lena would be of much help once the battle ensued. A glancing hit from German artillery the day before had damaged the transmission. But with so many tanks already out of action, both from enemy artillery and mechanical problems, Lena had been towed into position to provide what support she could until reinforcements arrived. Jocko said Heavy Maintenance would be out today to tow them in. Luther was looking forward to it, welcoming even a few hours of respite behind the lines as the tank was repaired.
