Читать книгу A Geography of Secrets - Frederick Reuss - Страница 13

38°54’48.19”N

77°3’57.84”W

I took the old man’s card from my pocket. He lived nearby. Dropping by unannounced seemed vaguely in keeping with some earlier custom. He would understand. Leaving my car in the library lot, I walked down Wisconsin Avenue and made a left on P Street.

I’d met him just the week before my father died. I had come to the library to do some research in the Peabody Room, which houses a unique archive devoted to the history of Georgetown. Marge introduced me to the archivist, explained to him that I was doing a book about maps and Washington.

“How did you know?” I asked, surprised.

“Your mother told me.” She wrinkled her nose and touched my forearm in mock apology.

When the archivist brought out the map I’d come to see—a Civil War-era map that showed the location of all the Union forts defending the city—an elderly man sitting at an adjacent table asked if he might also have a look. I explained to him the map’s historical significance. It was printed in 1862 by a commercial publisher to sell to tourists but depicts a secret, wartime landscape. The government confiscated all copies, destroyed the plates, and put the publisher out of business. “It’s very rare,” I told him. The man rubbed his chin and nodded as if he knew something more. I wondered if he was recalling the soda fountains and flophouses of a city I was too young to remember.

He lived in a small wood-frame house with red paint peeling off the siding in thick chunks. The shades were drawn on all but the top-story windows, which made the place seem minimally inhabited. The front door was on the second story. I climbed the cracked iron staircase, pressed the buzzer, and waited. I was about to give up and leave when a window just above me opened. “Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you. We met at the library.” I took out the card and waved it for him to see.

“Oh, yes. Yes,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

By the time the door finally opened, several minutes had passed. He was much frailer than I remembered and was wearing a tie and jacket, which explained the delay. I apologized for not calling first. “I wouldn’t have answered,” he said and offered his hand. “Sales calls are all I get anymore.”

The house smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. “You got my note,” he said, closing the door.

“I was just at the library.”

This seemed to please him. He ushered me into a dimly lit living room lined with bookcases. The musty smell of old furniture made it feel cramped, but in a cozy way. An old clock ticked loudly on the mantel above the fireplace. On a side table, mounted on a polished wooden block, was a stone head from a Hindu temple. When he saw that I was looking, he asked, “Do you recognize it?

“From India?”

“From a temple, I’m ashamed to say.”

“Ashamed?”

“I bought it in Delhi. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have bought it.” He touched his fingertips to the stone. “Pillaged works of art were for sale everywhere right after independence. Have you been to India?”

“I lived in New Delhi and Madras as a child.”

“Well then you must know where Kanchipuram is.”

“I do, yes. My mother has a sari from there.”

“What were your parents doing there?”

“Foreign Service,” I said.

“Well, it would have been well after my time.” Looking slightly pained, he asked, “What do you think I should do with it?”

The question came as a surprise. I hesitated for a moment, unsure what was meant by it. “Give it back,” I finally said.

He ran his fingertips over the figure, then turned to me and said, “Precisely what I intend to do.” He stepped over to a staircase leading down to the lower floor, and motioned for me to follow. He took the steps one at a time, holding on to the railing with one hand and bracing himself on the wall with the other. At the bottom, he pointed to something hanging on the wall. “The map,” he said and stood aside. It was drawn in ink on yellowed paper, about two feet square, mounted in a black lacquer frame protected by glass. I stepped up for a closer look at what appeared to be a diagram, heavily annotated in Japanese.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Of course I do. I was there.” He pointed to the land feature at the bottom. “That’s Guadalcanal,” he said. “And that’s Tulagi.”

“You were at Guadalcanal?”

“Yes,” he said. “Right there. In one of those boats.” He pointed to a small row of triangles. “Two Higgens boats and a tank lighter. I was in the middle one.”

“Can you read the Japanese?”

“I can’t. But I have a translation. Sit down. I’ll get it.”

The room was comfortably furnished with a sofa and a large easy chair. It looked onto a small, enclosed back garden lit by lights recessed in a high brick wall. The house had long ago come to a standstill and would remain exactly as it was until he was gone. The walls were hung with paintings that had the feel of works by friends. One, a whimsically rendered tropical bird, was captioned at the bottom in thick black paint: This bird is native to Papua New Guinea ... a rather hard to find variety but once in the hand it speaks, it squawks, it lives on foreign currency.

“I can’t seem to find it,” he said, coming down the steps. “But if you like, I can tell you what happened.”

“Only if you’ve got the time.”

“I’ve got nothing but time.” He laughed. “Speaking of which, it’s time for my cocktail. Will you have one? All I can offer you is a vodka martini.”

“Why not?” I said, still buzzing from the whiskey and coffee.

He carefully prepared the drinks and then served them on a little silver tray. “Cheers,” he said and sat back down in the easy chair. As he sipped, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a packet of cigarettes. “Care for one?”

I shook my head, watched as he produced a Zippo lighter. “You look surprised,” he said.

“Don’t see too many people your age smoking.”

“Don’t see too many people my age, period.” He grinned. “I’m ninety-three. At my age, the effects of smoking are entirely positive.” He held the lighter with both hands and lit the cigarette. “I was the press officer for the First Marine Division,” he said settling back in the chair. “There was very little fighting on Guadalcanal when we landed. The Japanese had their main base on Tulagi, and there had been fighting there, but we could only get scattered messages by radio. First Division headquarters decided to send over a party to get firsthand info on what was happening. It was August 12, 1942. As press officer, I was one of the ones chosen to go. Japanese ships had free use of the channel between our island and Tulagi. They’d been shelling us quite freely. They had no opposition except guns and artillery, so they’d pop up and shell us. We knew the crossing would be dangerous and wanted to get started before sunrise and their planes started coming. But we didn’t get off until after nine.”

He took a puff of his cigarette, leaned forward. My eyes kept returning to the map behind him.

“I took a dunking getting aboard the boat. Soaked my boots, so I took them off. I think every time I got into a landing craft, I soaked my boots.” He drifted off for a moment, then got up and went to the map. “We were in these three boats.”

“It looks like six to me,” I said.

“Yes. Three going and three returning. I told you it was a special map.” He turned and smiled. “Anyway, we were three boats. Two Higgens boats and a tank lighter filled with drums of gasoline and supplies for the marines on Tulagi. It was a beautiful South Pacific day, sunny, clear. Except for the sound of the boats’ engines, everything was quiet. After about an hour and a half, Captain Murray shouted to me, ‘Take a look. Is that a submarine?’ My glasses and binoculars were too wet with spray to make anything out. Just then it began firing. Shells splashed to the left and right. Ranging shots.” He pointed to the diagram of a submarine just to the right of the boat convoy. The glass covering the map was smudged with fingerprints, years of pointing. He must have sensed what I was thinking because he turned to me, finger still pressed on the glass, and said, “My life didn’t flash before my eyes or anything like that. But I was very absorbed in the moment.”

There was a strange ambiguity in his expression, as if all the intervening years could be traced back to that single point on the map. I stepped in for a closer look and wanted to ask if he told this story often, but didn’t want to risk insulting him. “What did you do?”

“There wasn’t much we could do. The coxswain turned up the speed, but the old boat began to shake and shiver. Smoke was pouring out of the engine housing. Obviously, it wasn’t going to last much longer. The other boat, seeing we were in distress, came alongside, and we jumped in. It wasn’t easy with the boats bumping together, shells exploding in the water. I left my field glasses, canteen, and pistol belt behind, tumbled into the boat like a sack of beans. And my boots! I didn’t have my boots! I may as well have been naked. Just as we were aboard, a battery of marine artillery on Tulagi began firing. It was pure luck that they’d seen us and were in position to begin firing the howitzers. Anyway, the Japs submerged, and we made it to Tulagi safely.”

It seemed a rather abrupt ending to the story. “And the map?” I asked.

“The map came to me on Guadalcanal a few days later.” He sat down again, puffed on his cigarette. “Are you interested in history?”

“I’m interested in your story.”

“My story? It’s nothing but an old wartime tale.”

“Isn’t that history?”

He smiled. “Perhaps, perhaps not. I’ve always honored the Muses.”

I had no idea what he meant. I don’t think he was trying to lead me on, or to be oracular and pretentious.

“I’ve been lucky,” he went on. “Over the years I’ve come to know other versions of what happened that day, in written accounts and from people I met years after the war who were also there. A dear friend and colleague whom I met back here after the war. He was attached to the battery of pack howitzers that fired on the submarine.” He stubbed out his cigarette and chuckled. “We’d been friends for years before we put our stories together.”

“He’s in the map, too?”

He pointed to the two arrows drawn on either side of the submarine showing the direction of artillery fire. “If I remember, the Japanese reads, ‘Received fire from Tulagi, 7 to 10 cm type.’ Anyway, the significance for my friend was very different. They’d fired on the sub without orders. In fact, had gone against the wishes of their superiors, who didn’t want them to give away the position of their guns. He was worried about facing disciplinary action.”

“Did they sink the submarine?”

“No. It submerged, and we never saw it again.” He pointed to a large block of Japanese text. “The Japanese had a completely different impression of events. They saw high-speed boats, fully loaded with men and munitions. Flying the British flag!” He laughed. “High speed? Our engines had conked out. And where did the British flag come from? We had a good laugh over that one.”

He drifted off for several minutes in that unseeing way the elderly have of keeping you out of their thoughts and in their gaze. His blue eyes, clouded by cataracts, were like shrunken points of glass. The tear ducts were ripped and raw looking, as if something too large had passed through each socket. The only sound was the clock ticking on the mantel upstairs. I tossed back the remainder of my drink. “How’d you get the map?” I finally asked.

He sipped his drink before answering. “A few days later, back on Guadalcanal. The Japanese made some air drops to their troops just west of us. One of the baskets fell behind our lines. In it was—among cigarettes and candy and encouraging messages for the soldiers—an estimate of the situation. The map. It was translated right away by Pappy Moran. He’d been a missionary in Japan before the war, was our interpreter and prisoner interrogator. What struck me, of course, was the attention given to the encounter with the submarine. They’d gotten it all wrong. Completely wrong.” He shook his head and chuckled.

“When did the significance of the map strike you?”

“Well, from the beginning, I knew it was unique. So far as I know, there isn’t another one like it in existence.”

“I mean, did you see the personal significance right away?”

“Personal significance?” The question seemed to amuse him. “I certainly didn’t think in anything like those terms back then. Even now, I’m not sure ‘personal’ is the word I would use to describe its significance.”

“What did you do with it after the war?”

“I put it away with the rest of my war papers and forgot about it,” he said and set his empty glass on the table.

“But now you’ve got it hanging on your wall.”

“Yes, I do.”

“So why do you have it there?” I flushed as I said this, aware of the provocation in my tone.

He eased back in his chair, turned an appraising look on me, as if uncertain how much further he wished the conversation to go, and reached into his breast pocket for another cigarette. “I would say its significance for me is the opposite of personal. It has, in just about any way you look at it, nothing whatsoever to do with me.” He put the cigarette to his lips with a shaky hand. “We live on a molten sphere with a thin crust orbiting the sun. Every event that occurs on it takes on a nearly infinite number of simultaneous meanings.” The Zippo was produced. His hands trembled.

“But it’s a key to a specific event. Something meaningful that once happened.”

“Meaningful?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head—a little sadly, it seemed, as if he wished he could give a different answer. “From up close, war is always about nothing. For people who experience war, there is only confusion and forgetting. It’s the ones who were never there, the ones who come later, who always decide what happened. They’re the ones who write the histories, erect the monuments and memorials. Make up the meaning. The cliché that history forgotten is history repeated.” He smiled and shook his head. “Well, the problem is often precisely what it is that is remembered. And who is doing the remembering.” He began coughing, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The past is a mental thing. It doesn’t exist. The Pyramids and the great libraries, the Internet, are only the frailest scraps of physical evidence and will all disappear in time. Every night I have my cocktail, smoke my three cigarettes—this is my second. Don’t think I haven’t been counting. Later, I’ll take my sleeping pill. I’m addicted and need it to sleep. And every morning, I wake up and, goddamn it, can’t believe I’m still here!” He flashed a wry smile, something straight out of an old movie. There was something stagy about his manner. He seemed eager to make an impression on me. Age entitled him to the grand distance he took, the talk about meaning and meaninglessness, past and present. I wondered what he thought about GPS and Google Earth and a shrinking world confused by the technology of seeing.