Chapter 28 #3
He wasn’t the only one who put this together.
If a man stopped picking at lice, everyone would start eyeing the doomed man’s socks, feeling bad for him, saying prayers for him, but still.
Leonard didn’t realize he’d stopped picking until an army captain on his work crew, a man named Zimmerman, grabbed his shoulder and said, “Come on, now. Kid. Hey. Come on,” like he was trying to talk Leonard out of something.
This army captain, Zimmerman, started asking Leonard questions about where he was from and what he planned to do when he got home.
Leonard told him about Florida, and about his parents, and how guilty he felt for what he was putting them through.
But mostly, he said, he talked about me.
He’d lost the lucky bell by then—he couldn’t remember how. The army captain said that didn’t mean anything, and there was no such thing as a bad omen except if he made one in his head. He said Leonard should try to imagine me there beside him, and what I would say if I could see him.
“I got good at it,” he told me. We were still in his dented car, in the shade of the diner, the upholstery beneath my shorts soaked with sweat.
“It was crazy. You were there, Nora. You were in the camp, right in front of me like you are now. You were wearing that blue shirt you wore in Bradenton, short sleeved, your skin suntanned. Your hair stayed dry in the snow. You wanted me to go up and talk to people.” He laughed, scratching his head, his thinned hair. “You kept telling me I should try.”
More often than not, he took my advice. He’d never been so socially outgoing in his life.
“I couldn’t always do it,” he said. “When I had dysentery, no. And even when I was okay, more or less, I was never as good at it as you were. But when I did manage to get other guys talking, I’d feel better. It helped some of them, too, I think.” He shook his head. “I know it did.”
Because of the vitamin deficiency, the general starvation, they all started going night blind, which was as terrifying as anything, he said.
Starting at dusk, ending at dawn, he could have his hand right in front of his face and not see it.
A full moon would make no difference, even on a cloudless night.
But even in those long black-out hours, he said, he could hear my voice.
On those nights, imaginary-me didn’t suggest he go try to make conversation with anyone.
I just told him, again and again, that I loved him, and wanted him to come home.
“You saved me,” he said.
I wiped my eyes, shaking my head. I didn’t want to argue about it. But he was talking about the imaginary-me, the me that lived in his head. The real me had been in New Jersey, falling for lies and full of spite.
“You did,” he said. “No question. Well, you and my big feet. A lot of the guards, they didn’t have good boots. But nobody wanted mine. That made a difference for me, I know.”
The following April, when our child was three months old, when I was back in St. Pete and getting run out of high school by the likes of Hazel Morgan and some idiot boy putting a basketball under his gym shirt, the Chinese took over management of the camp.
The new guards, Chinese guards, all spoke English, and generally had a softer touch.
They allowed the prisoners to build a fire and run the burning edge of a stick along the inner seams of their clothes to kill the lice.
Rations increased, slowly at first. When the river melted, the prisoners were allowed to bathe in it, and for the first time in months, Leonard got a look at his concave chest and stick arms and jutting-out hip bones.
The other men around him were all the same.
They stared at one another, quiet. Of the eight hundred Leonard came in with, maybe three hundred were still alive.
Not long after that, the prisoners were called out to the main field, organized into lines, and asked for their name, rank, and service number.
This encouraged everyone. And then a Chinese officer, bright medals on his jacket, climbed up on the back of a jeep with a megaphone.
This officer was silver-haired but quick in his movements.
He spoke English well, and with a British accent.
He started off by saying they would all have to work together to improve the conditions of the camp, but it might take a while, given imperialist bombings were not only killing scores of civilians but putting food and medicine in short supply.
Meanwhile, he said, they shouldn’t think of themselves as prisoners, but as students.
From now on, they’d be students of truth.
—
Conditions continued to improve. They started getting rice, then rice with no maggots in it, then sometimes there was even fish.
Doctors were brought in. Some of these doctors asked for volunteer assistants, and because Leonard’s crew wasn’t dragging as many bodies to the river every day, he was free to volunteer.
They assigned him to a Dr. Wang, a middle-aged woman who spoke three languages, none of them English.
One thing she did, right away, was diagnose the prisoners suffering from beriberi, and she was able to get hold of thiamine supplements that helped most of them.
Antibiotics were harder to come by, but sometimes she could get those, too.
Dr. Wang showed Leonard how to give injections, and clean wounds and instruments. She was a serious person, he said. But when she saw that someone was improving, she would smile and give him the thumbs-up.
So there was plenty that was good about the Chinese taking over.
The bad part, the political classes, started that May.
Ten hours a day. Attendance mandatory, no exceptions.
Classes were organized by rank and race, so Leonard was in a group of around a hundred white enlisted Americans who were marched every dawn to a barn about a mile away from camp.
They sat on the ground of this barn—all together in the mornings, in small groups in the afternoons.
The instructors, all Chinese, sat on the ground as well, and they were young and friendly.
They knew American slang, American jokes.
One instructor told Leonard he’d been to Florida, and that he’d even surfed at Daytona Beach.
Another could quote Shakespeare and the Bible, Dickens, and Whitman.
This same instructor once took an apple out of his pocket, small but unbruised, and told Leonard’s group he’d been saving it for his lunch, but could see that one of the weaker prisoners in the group needed it more.
“I’m going to give him my apple,” the instructor said. “Because I’m a communist.” He handed the apple to the sick man. Leonard and the others watched this man eat it in maybe five bites, core and all.
They had study groups. Literate prisoners read writings by Mao, by Marx.
They were quizzed on articles in The Daily Worker.
Illiterate prisoners were read summaries, and expected to listen closely.
Regular guards, armed with batons or rifles, were always watching from the back.
If a prisoner didn’t want to interact with those guards, he had to be a good student.
That meant listening to lessons without eyes glazed over, and also being an active participant—you couldn’t just mouth the words to a chant while thinking about how tired you were or whether there’d be any fish at dinner.
You had to chant with your voice, and chant like you meant it.
You could pick at lice, but your eyes had to be open and attentive, focused on the instructor, and you really had to be paying attention, ready to be called on with a question, and to give the right answer: What was the only true democracy?
Communism. Who started the war? Wall Street warlords.
What leaders truly cared about their people?
Chairman Mao, Stalin, Kim Il Sung. What was the purpose of these classes? Mental liberation.
When the instructors noticed bad behavior—someone refusing to give up imperialist thinking, someone failing to come up with examples from his own life to support that day’s lesson, someone capsizing on the barn floor and falling asleep—that someone might first get a friendly warning that he needed to adopt a better attitude toward learning.
If the behavior persisted, the instructor would eventually signal to the guards, who would hurry over to help the bad student to his feet and out of the barn.
Some disappeared for good. The ones who came back, weeks later, appeared deeply shaken, and did not require further warnings.
Leonard said the whole time he was in the barn, even with his brain addled by hunger and thirst and boredom, he worked hard to think his own thoughts.
But sometimes the instructors said things he couldn’t argue against, even in his head.
The Chinese knew all about Jim Crow laws, for example.
They had pictures of Hoovervilles and half-naked and hungry-looking American children standing in front of shacks, and they had pictures of J.
D. Rockefeller’s mansion. They knew things Leonard had never heard about that turned out to be true, like American vets having to protest in DC to get their wartime bonuses, and none other than General MacArthur ordering troops to throw tear gas at the vets and their families.
Our own vets. All kinds of things hard to defend, mixed in with a lot of lies and threats, day in and day out, with the lice still biting, and his hunger ferocious. Sometimes thinking he’d never get home.