Gone to Soldiers (39 page)

The real world he entered at work was that of intimate contact with the Japanese naval mind. He saw the war backwards from the way most Americans did. He had learned of the desperate improvised American invasion of Guadalcanal from surprised Japanese reports to headquarters. He learned of the sinking of American ships from the triumphant claims after battles, although they were learning that the Japanese, like the Americans, claimed far more than were really knocked out, always. They could check the American claims of ships torpedoed and sunk against the Japanese damage reports, and they could check the Japanese crowing against actual U.S. losses. Every pilot always thought he hit his target, but few did.

His knowledge of Japanese continued to grow, which gave him a schizophrenic feeling of entering the enemy culture. He had to see the world as they did, or try to; it was deeply alienating and yet fascinating. He found himself not infrequently thinking in Japanese. The two cultures had extremely different premises, what they took for granted, what they thought you could and could not do in any given situation.

For the first time in his life, he felt useful. Enrolled. Engaged. People lived or died, ships with a thousand men on them survived or went down because they did or didn't decipher and translate a Japanese message correctly. They could not teach the American brass how to fight night battles or how to use their radar or how to respond aggressively and fast to the chance to fire on a Japanese vessel. One of the admirals in the Pacific was always withdrawing to refuel his forces whenever an engagement loomed. Intelligence could only offer opportunities. They could warn the Marine pilots of impending raids, for those pilots were scrappers who took advantage of any chance they were given. Daniel felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life.

He was like a man who has lost forty pounds and taken up systematic exercise looking at photographs of his former flabby self: he felt disgust. How could he have drifted along weakwilled and passive? He had been a child until he arrived here.

At night he went home to the tiny apartment on the third floor. The pressure was less extreme this fall, except during battles. Enough new people had arrived so that they were divided into three watches, covering the entire twenty-four hours. Nonetheless, their hours of work reflected the level of crisis in the waters off Guadalcanal. When the fleets steamed off to refuel and repair and regroup, he went home at normal suppertime. During periods of heavy naval engagements, he worked through the night. Half a world away, day was night and night was day, but the volume of traffic overwhelmed them and they slogged on.

Rodney was not the roommate of Daniel's dreams. He was a tolerable-looking man who thought of himself as handsome, as he had been raised to believe everything about himself was perfect. He was tall and blond, his complexion pasty or beet red with the sun; he had rabbit teeth and watery eyes. Daniel found the observation of Rodney shaving almost more than he could take in the morning without cracking up. Rodney ogled himself. He drew up his chin and threw himself glances of arrogant hauteur, of smoldering passion, of frank approval.

Rodney smoked a meerschaum pipe. During the week, he never drank, but when Saturday night arrived, he seemed to have the policy of continuing until he was maudlin. Daniel had never heard an opinion out of his mouth that he found interesting.

Downstairs an apartment of girls moved in. One was dark, willowy and engaged, flashing a diamond the size of a pecan. One was a short brown-haired southern-sounding girl who made eyes at him on the stairs, but disappeared permanently before he had made serious contact. The third was a tall blond with a down-east twang who went swinging along the street with a walk he appreciated, fast, sexy, covering ground. She was not around much, but she had a charming wide-eyed smile. She told him her favorite brother was Navy too.

“What happened to Dixie?” he asked her.

“Gone abroad,” she said and did not pause to elaborate. She was off down the street running because she saw a cab stopping and if you had a need for a cab and a chance at one in Washington, you did not dally or stop to say your farewells.

He expected a third roommate but none appeared. He learned when Down East went to work, contriving to walk to the bus with her. “Are you looking for someone else to move in?”

“We wouldn't have to look hard around here, would we? No. It's a tiny place for two people—just like yours, I imagine—”

“Why imagine? Come up and visit us. Borrow a cup of something.”

“I don't know,” said Down East with a flash of her cornflower blue eyes, “that you have anything that I need, Ensign.”

“My name is Daniel. Daniel Balaban. What does the A. in front of Scott stand for?”

“Abra. You're from New York?” She waited for his nod. “I lived there. Actually I've only sublet my apartment, because after the war, I'm going back. It's the only vital place.”

“I liked Boston better. Boston and Shanghai.”

That intrigued her. She raised a single eyebrow at him. Then the bus arrived, ending their conversation. On the overcrowded bus, Daniel thought, staring into the blond head tucked below his nose, sodomy would be easy but conversation impossible.

Many new people arrived in the OP-20-G office from the two language schools and from other far reaches of the Navy, the universities and civilian life. Daniel, now made a lieutenant junior grade, supervised three yeomen and began a tentative affair with Ann Korobuso, hedged around with her prohibitions. She would not come to his apartment. With the anti-Japanese feeling endemic in Washington as well as the rest of the country, she did not like going out. She would only permit him to visit her at her apartment observing a list of precautions when her aunt, with whom she was living, was safely and surely out. She was always a little nervous.

Ann was the offspring of a nisei father and a woman of Norwegian ancestry from Seattle, now divorced. Her father had been put in a camp in Missoula, Montana. Ann lived with her mother's sister, who had a civil service job in the accounting office at State. Her aunt Elinor was kind to her, she said without conviction.

He found her beautiful but reserved. Sadness clung to her like the sandal-wood perfume she used. He enjoyed her company, yet he enjoyed leaving her and escaping the sighs, the veiled glances, the enigmatic retreats. He knew that he either had to save her or offer her little indeed, and he opted for the latter. Her enthusiasms were those of an American woman her age, so that at times she reminded him of a blighted Judy. Only her exotic appearance and her knowledge of Japanese redeemed her from boring him, that and their ability to talk shop together. They tended to be on the same schedule and did not have to field questions from each other on what they were doing. Rodney was always having to break dates with women when a crisis arose, and his lame explanations never seemed to make amends.

Ann read movie magazines, ladies' magazines, serials about plucky women who made do. Her favorite author was one he had never heard of, a fluffhead named Annette Sinclair. Once he arrived to find Ann in tears. He was terrified that something had happened to injure or frighten her, that some new menace had stretched out to touch her father in the camp, her mother who was remarried with small children in Nome. All that had happened was that she had read one of Annette Sinclair's dopey stories in which the man deeply wounded the woman who loved him, accusing her wrongfully of infidelity when she had only been trying to save his job.

It was a very partial romance, perhaps encompassing two or three evenings of intimacy a month, then another couple of teatimes or polite suppers under the maiden aunt's suspicious glances, lunches at a table in the cafeteria with other decoders and translators. If anyone else guessed their affair, they paid no attention. Ann never cast him obvious glances. She was too polite, too reserved, too shy to transgress against proper office demeanor. Often he forgot she was there. His work absorbed him.

In the hall, on the way to the bus, he flirted with Abra Scott. He tried to figure out why she fascinated him. She was moderately pretty; Washington was jammed with girls just as pretty. Her features were too angular, her face a little too long for beauty.

It was the way she held herself, the way she moved, that raised his temperature. She was what they called spirited, with a racy air that intrigued him. She seemed to be involved in her own adventure. He did not think of her as innocent, the way he thought of Ann as victim. Neither was she sultry or sluttish. He had the feeling that she did what she wanted, when she was sure she wanted it. Obviously she liked his company. If he was not downstairs when she arrived, she loitered to wait for him. Although she flirted with him and let him take her arm as they strolled to the bus, she would not see him. She would not come upstairs and only invited him in when her roommate needed help carrying a trunk.

Several times when she was off to a party in a dress that left her arms bare, he noticed her smallpox vaccination scar, a rosy star in the flesh of her upper arm. Each time he wanted to touch it, to bring his mouth to it. Whenever he imagined being in bed with her, he remembered that scar on the honey gold skin of her arm. All through the fall he associated a light ferny odor with her body, but one day she changed her perfume, and after that she wore a more distinctive musky floral.

A number of mornings she did not show up at all. He learned not to wait, because he would be late, and she would not appear. He decided she had something going, although he could not figure out who the lucky guy was. The Army uniform, the sergeant, belonged to Susannah, the dark-haired roommate with the rock. Otherwise many young people came and went. They had occasional noisy farewell parties to which he and Rodney were sometimes invited.

Both girls were working for the government, but he could not figure out who or what they were involved with. Like him, they volunteered no information. Some of the men who came to their parties were in uniform, but many were not. A lot of them seemed to be ex-academics. Sometimes Abra came home from wherever she worked at suppertime, and sometimes, like himself, she arrived much later or even in the middle of the night—and the same with the engaged woman, Susannah.

Naval engagements and the Japanese buildup on Guadalcanal took them over completely at work. Even with all the new people, they could barely keep up with the flood of intelligence. It was crazy, he thought, how in this room in a former girls' school in Washington they read messages from half a world away and told Marine pilots at Henderson Field when and where to bomb and warned the Navy that the Japanese were preparing to send a force against Guadalcanal and knew more accurately than the ships slugging it out in Ironbottom Sound with incredible losses exactly which Japanese ships had been hit badly enough to hurt them and which were only scratched. He felt sometimes as if he were up in the tower of an immense battleship. He liked that image. They were obsessed with the fighting, but they viewed it from the reverse side. He could still remember when Martins, who was following transmissions from the
Shugai
cried out, “Damn, they got us.” Then realized what he was saying. Because them was us, and us was the enemy. Daniel simply pretended not to hear, as had everyone else around them, because they understood. Watching the war through Japanese eyes, sometimes they passed over.

Over in Africa, Allied forces had landed in Casablanca, but that fighting was unreal to Daniel, because he was not a part of it. He made a faint effort at following the rest of the war, but the fighting that engrossed him was Guadalcanal; there was little in the papers, intentionally he was sure, because of the high risk of failure, and yet he felt that was where the war was being won or lost and that the issue was up for grabs.

One of the men who had requested a transfer out of the cryptanalysis division into field intelligence had been killed on Guadalcanal. He had been left wounded on a sandbar, where a fleeing marine had seen the Japanese bayonet him. Suddenly policy in the department changed because it occurred to the brass that guys like Daniel knew secrets that could change the war. If the Japanese had interrogated Cory instead of bayoneting him, would they now know about Purple and the other decrypts? Wouldn't they have found out that the Americans were reading the naval codes? Wouldn't they change all the ciphers to a completely different system?

No one from the cryptanalysis section was to go into the front lines again, that was the new ruling. If Daniel had sometimes fantasized about what he would do in combat, now he knew his combat was to remain mental. What he carried in his head was a weapon the Navy was finally learning to value, knowledge worth a carrier or two.

As he had learned in the Yenching Institute at Harvard that he had a brain, so he was learning here that he could be useful. He was beginning to trust himself. Now his earlier enthusiasms and attempts to escape the tedium of what was expected could be perceived, if he chose, as apprenticeship for what he was doing. And that was in the fullest and most honest use of that word, intelligence.

JACQUELINE 4

Roads of Paper

11 novembre 1942

Today the Germans poured across the border to the unoccupied zone, and now we are one country again, united miserably under total Nazi control. I wonder how Papa is—if he is well or ill, if he is free, if he has been caught, if he has been deported. Daniela and I sat up late tonight discussing the news. Now I am writing this in bed under the covers.

We have two rooms in the XIe arrondissement, some blocks from the Jewish quarter. This is a French-born working-class sector, many Communists here and supposedly some resistance, although we have seen few signs of it aside from an occasional slogan on a wall or a creative defacement of one of the endless posters telling us of executions, reprisals and new laws hemming us about ever more tightly.