Chapter 28 #4
But he wasn’t brainwashed, he said. Nobody was, not that he saw.
Some prisoners were more open to what the instructors were telling them.
Not many of them, but a few. There was one guy he came in with, from Louisiana, who’d never had a decent pair of shoes before he joined the army, who’d been hungry his whole life.
He was open to the lessons. But not brainwashed.
Leonard didn’t like that word at all. He said whoever made it up had never set foot in Camp Five, guaranteed.
They all knew those petitions they signed were propaganda.
He signed because if there was one holdout, everyone suffered.
Food withheld. Health wise, not every man was out of the woods.
Not at all. The day before Dr. Wang disappeared, she signed her name to an open letter of apology for prioritizing sentiment over revolution—meaning she’d given some sick prisoner medicine even though he refused to write an essay about how well the camp was run.
Leonard didn’t think for a minute her brain was washed.
“She was like us,” he said. “Just wanting to live.”
He tapped the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel. We were still parked in the shade of the diner. But it was mid-morning now, or later. The breeze coming in the windows was already hot. I wanted the discomfort, was glad for it. Even as I knew it couldn’t compare.
“If you’re watching a movie,” he said, “if you’re watching a Hollywood actor play the tough guy, you think, ‘Well if I were in that situation, I’d be like him, the one who doesn’t break on anything.
’ But when I was there, that first winter and spring, the petitions weren’t the breaking I worried about. ”
He said he had bigger temptations to resist. Snatching a bean ball from somebody still alive but too weak to fight back; taking somebody’s socks before he was actually dead; ratting on somebody for making a Mao joke so he’d get extra rice for a week.
He said he’d be lying if he claimed he was never tempted, and anyone who didn’t understand that had never gone hungry for long.
His goal, his only goal, was to survive without hurting someone else’s chances.
Not everyone managed that, he said, but most of them did, and anybody who stayed human in Camp Five had much to be proud of, signed petitions or not.
He could only hope the people calling them brainwashed and weak never had to find out what they’d do in similar circumstances.
“I called you a coward,” I said.
He shook his head. “My parents made you think that. They lied to you. Nora, I’m telling you all this so you know I understand. I understand why you signed.”
I rested my forehead in my hands. The paper napkins he’d gotten for me were wet with tears and snot, and wadded up in my lap.
I told him I appreciated the connection he was trying to make.
But what I signed in New Jersey, giving away our daughter, wasn’t just a petition, wasn’t just propaganda.
It meant something. And I wished, so much, that I could take that signature back.
“But the circumstances,” he said. “They weren’t so different.”
I didn’t agree with this at all. New Jersey wasn’t North Korea. I hadn’t lost any fingers to frostbite. Nobody poked me with a bayonet. That day in the hospital, I was tired, but not starving. I could have stood up to Miss Berry. Carol did.
“Did she have somewhere to go?” Leonard asked. “Did she have somewhere to take her baby?”
I nodded, thinking of her trust fund, the room with money she’d come into. Leonard held up his hands like, well, there you go.
I’m aware that some people never really come back from wars, even once they’re home and safe. But it’s also true that others come back completely themselves, and even stronger in some ways. With Leonard, for example—the whole time we were talking in his car, his knee didn’t bounce, not once.
I’m not saying his mind was unscathed. But I think now that the very things that held him back when he was young—his shyness, his stubbornness—helped him during the long days in that barn, and helped when he was back in the US and having to face people who thought he was weak, and a traitor.
Long before he set foot in Korea, and before I met him, he mostly kept to himself.
You could think of that as a bad thing, a lonely thing.
But I think a lot of people who keep to themselves also know how to keep their own counsel, whatever is going on around them.
Someone like me, wanting to get along with people, might not have fared as well.
—
Things got easier, he said, all through 1952.
They didn’t know the list of prisoner names had been released, or that their captors now had reason to keep every one of them alive, even happy.
They only knew that they started getting protein every day, and then larger portions.
Political classes became optional, and nearly everyone stopped going.
When the weather turned cold again, each prisoner got a padded coat and a hat with earflaps.
The dying pretty much stopped. The Chinese put up a basketball hoop and volleyball net in the camp.
The prisoners knew what that was about, and sure enough, professional photographers showed up to take pictures.
That fall, prisoners were offered a chance to compete in an inter-camp POW Olympics, the games that Buddy had mentioned.
For a lot of guys, it was their best chance to see if friends had survived in other camps.
Or to ever go anywhere again. They didn’t know how long the fighting would last.
I asked Leonard if he’d competed. I was hoping they’d had a swimming competition, and that even with his missing fingers, he might still be able to butterfly across a pool with speed and grace. I wanted him to say yes. I wanted him to still have that.
He shook his head. “It was mostly new captures who competed. Those of us who came in that first winter were still too weak.” He paused. “And I was pretty down at that point.”
“Just at that point?” I didn’t understand. “When things had gotten better?”
He looked embarrassed, rubbing his chin. He told me that by then, he’d gotten his mother’s letter, telling him I’d married Russ.
“You had every right,” he said. “I know that. I want you to be happy, Nora. Even if it’s not with me.”
A man in a Hawaiian shirt came out of the diner, followed by a woman holding a toddler.
The woman shielded the boy’s face from the sun, and the man hurried ahead to the car on Leonard’s side and opened the passenger door for them.
Leonard and I were quiet, waiting for them to drive away.
Before they did, the woman looked out her window at us and said, “Oh my goodness, it’s so hot out here. You two should go inside!”
We nodded and smiled, waiting for them to leave. We couldn’t go in, both of us sweat-soaked and teary. Leonard asked if I wanted to get out and walk down to the water, just long enough to cool off.
He had the same long stride he’d always had, but he slowed to keep pace beside me, just as he’d always done before. He told me he’d been swimming almost every evening after he got off work at Publix. He said that when he was in the camp, he’d dreamed of the ocean. It had been there with him, too.
I was thinking I’d take off my sandals and get my legs wet, but the tide, once we stepped into it, felt so cool that we kept walking.
Soon, we were in up to our necks. When a wave rolled in, we both rose with it, dog paddling beneath the surface.
I took in his face, the angles and shadows of it.
He looked older than he should have, his skin weathered, his lips grown thin.
But if I’d been seeing him for the first time, if he were some stranger bobbing next to me in the water, it would have been like all those years ago, when I first saw him in the courtyard. I would’ve felt the same pull.
It’s hard to know what a child will inherit, what features and traits get passed along to the next.
I’d already wished for our child to be alive and happy, wherever she was.
But I now also hoped that she would someday look in the mirror and find his beauty, and have some sense, some knowing, from where it came.
—
When we were back in his car, our clothes still wet, I asked him about the blond girl.
He said her name was Joyce. She studied literature at Rollins, in Winter Park, and he’d met her when she was home in St. Pete for Christmas break.
He’d visited her a few times in Winter Park, he said.
She’d come back to St. Pete for spring break, too. That’s when I saw her at the ball game.
He saw my expression, and his one eyebrow rose. “Nora, you got married.”
I brought my elbow to my nose and breathed in. My skin still smelled of the sea. “You think you’ll get married? You and Joyce?” I strained to make my voice chipper, but it just came out high-pitched.