Please Enjoy Your Happiness Read Online Free Page B

Shang’. Every day we were fed ‘shit on a shingle’, shredded chipped beef in a milky sauce on black toast, the whole thing loaded with saltpetre or other chemicals to smother our libido, or so the story went. I envied the skipper of
The Torment
at that moment and every man aboard her being tossed about in our wake.
    Another time we came across a single palm tree fastened to atiny white coral speck of an island no bigger, it seemed to me, than a soccer field. The sea was like glass, and the island seemed to be floating on it, while the palm tree with its coconuts swayed as if it were an island girl delighting in our presence. The next time we came that way, the palm tree and its island were gone. I asked about that. Someone told me our aircraft had bombed it into oblivion.
    The girls at the White Rose and the dozens of other saloons in Yokosuka had their secrets. We sailors had secrets too, but ours were bright and funny and full of bravado. We would never admit we were lonely. Never. We were certain we were not lonely. But the truth was that every time we arrived in Yokosuka we went looking for the girls we knew. On the fringes of the streets with bars were a few whorehouses for sailors who wanted sex but did not want company, those who could not handle tears of joy, or holding hands, or slow dancing. Hostesses at bars like the White Rose often had secrets that were nightmares of desperation. This was less than fifteen years after the end of World War II. Many women had lost husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sisters, parents, and friends. Millions of homes had been destroyed in US firebombing runs directed not at military or industrial targets but at the civilian population. You told me once that people with connections to Hiroshima and Nagasaki often had extreme personalities, even if they were not in those cities when the atom bombs tumbled out of the sky. And families like yours that had settled as colonists in northern China when Imperial Japan seized territory there also were shattered, almost as if they had been A-bomb survivors, by the violence they experienced trying to escape from Manchuria when the Soviets attacked. Whole settler villages were exterminated. You told me an especially horrifying story about aheavily built Russian woman soldier in leather boots who killed a huddled group of Japanese mothers and their children with her machine gun which you called ‘a mandolin’. Parents abandoned their children or pleaded with Chinese families to take them. Women whose men were killed often were raped or offered themselves as wives to Chinese farmers. Japanese records suggest that more than thirty thousand civilians perished and another thirty thousand were never accounted for in the month of August 1945 alone. The bulk of the exodus continued until late 1946, dwindling to a trickle of people in 1948. Those who made it back to Japan, you said, were often treated as if they were foreigners because they had been born in a foreign land.
    Yes, you had secrets, the first of which I heard when I walked into your hospital room and saw you lying in a wrought-iron crib. Someone had placed a single white gladiolus flower in a chipped glass vase on the table by the window.
    We did not say anything for several minutes. There was a lot of sunlight coming through the window, and it blinded me until I found a corner of the room where I could see you better. Your eyes were following me around the room – that I knew. Everything in the room was white, including your face, but the pupils of your eyes were as black as the seeds of a longan tree. Finally you said, in a kind of English that sounded as if it had been rehearsed, ‘Paul. I am a very bad woman. Can you forgive me?’
    What a big question that was to put to a kid right out of high school. You addressed me as if I were an adult. Did you know at that moment that if you continued down that path I would fall in love with you? Did you believe that I, a mere boy, would love