Dedicated to the freedom-loving people of Ukraine
In March 1978, I had enough of shared living, finally admitting the obvious—I was an adrift, reclusive odd duck. My search for a house focused on South San Francisco, noted for its affordability, its closeness to the city and a steep hillside on which the town’s name and moniker was spelled out in humourless concrete letters: SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY.
One Sunday morning, the realtor, all chatter and jangling jewelry, drove me to view a one-bedroom bungalow, 1940s vintage with exhausted Sears appliances. She waited for me in her Lincoln, convinced that I hated it, given my leaden expression during the tour.
I ambled down the driveway to the backyard: a smattering of dandelions and clumps of grass, like a bad hair day. On the other side of a picket fence, primed to collapse, stood an old man leaning on his rake, studying me closely. Muddy overalls, wafer-thin with scarce grey hair. As I approached, a smell, both dry and fruity, came from the weeds at my feet.
Then a voice like rubbing pebbles together, “Used to be a fair patch of salvia right there. You like gardening?” An odd opening to a conversation with a stranger, but I found it refreshingly different from the usual small talk.
Totally out of character, I answered instantly without guile, like a six-year-old, “I don’t know how, but I like trees and flowers.”
A burst of air whooshed from under the bottlecap of my past. Martel Avenue, my first childhood home. While my parents were totally immune to greenery, I loved to flop on the grass and watch everything that flitted by me, imagining that I was Ferdinand the Bull from my storybook.
His indigo-rinsed eyes considered my answer. “I’m Stan, the old-timer around here. All the houses need work, but the land is heaven. Hard to find these days.” He slowly bent down to grasp the Thermos at his feet. His hands trembled but he understood himself, picking it up slowly and carefully.
“Mine’s Emily.” I always hesitated for a split second before I called myself what I was not. “So, why is it heaven?”
“It’s where I find beauty and solace. Where I can grow my own food with nothing on it but taste, right outside my back door.”
He shuffled over to the fence. I extended my hand. He reached for mine. A firm but considerate grip from his leathery fingers, knitted with scars and veins.
“Solace? Something I haven’t found.” I blurted this out as our palms touched. I was astonished to hear me say anything authentic about myself.
“If you end up buying the place, I’ll start you on some surefire things, like radishes and marigolds.”
I shrugged and replied, “I’m a complete novice.”
He laughed. “So, Emily, are you good at anything?”
“I can play Schubert.” I’ve been steadily playing the piano, getting much better again. The alchemy of music always took me far away from confusion and trouble.
Hearing the tired voice of the realtor calling me from the street, I shouted back to wait a few minutes. I don’t know exactly why, but I realized the old man with the rake was someone I should get to know. I shifted my weight between my legs, stalling. Time to burrow to the surface. “Stan, I must tell you from the off that I’m a lesbian.” Maybe by accepting myself, maybe I’d get lucky and find the same.
“I think the world’s had enough hate, if you ask me.” A little smile, which I returned. “Emily, I’ll return your confidence in me by doing the same.” He left to gather two folding chairs, hoisting one up and over the fence for me. I sat down and listened, taking in every word of his story.
A prisoner of war
When he was 19, he enlisted in the Marines. His unit was shipped to the Philippines. When the Japanese overran Bataan in 1942, he was captured and managed, somehow, to survive a death march of more than 50 miles to an infamous POW camp.
His voice quivered as he unwrapped a chronicle of horrors in sparse language—the suffering of thirsty men trudging in single file, many who were wounded, prodded by rifle butts, shot if they fell.
At the camp, the prisoners were forced to bow every morning to the absolute ruler of his captors, and beaten with bamboo sticks if they didn’t stoop straightaway or low enough. Captured Asian women were used as prostitutes; a long line of guards waited outside the hut where they were kept. So many Americans and Filipinos died from torture, disease and malnutrition.
His story evoked an image from a Holocaust documentary I saw when I was barely 11 years old. A line of 60 iron shoes installed on an embankment along the Danube River, a ghostly memorial for the Jewish victims of the Nazis in Budapest. They were herded to this place, ordered to remove their shoes and shot, each in turn, falling into the water below.
When the film ended, I raised my hand: “Rabbi, the Germans produced Beethoven and Bach, great cities, and culture. How could they do this?” I don’t remember much of his answer, just a long history lesson about anti-Semitism that didn’t dissolve 60 iron shoes.
When Stan finished his story, I asked him the same question. “How could the Japanese, known for their arts of great beauty and refinement, be capable of such cruelty?”
He closed his eyes. “Not a simple thing to sort out, but a chunk of it must be contempt for folks who weren’t Japanese, warrior worship and thirst for power. Emily, no country’s immune to brutality.”
“Yeah, case in point, our war in Vietnam.” My voice trailed off. Napalm, bombing, more than a million dead, all of what led me to destroy draft files that unhinged the course of my life and severed me from my own name.
“Yes,” he nodded. He found his Thermos and took a long sip, setting it down. “Decency and respect for others have to be taught to every generation.”
“But it all goes wrong if we don’t face up to the truth.”
He stood up slowly, stamping to shake the stiffness out of his legs. “When people cover up their history, it’s because they’re ashamed and full of false pride. After the war, the Japanese didn’t want to face up to their crimes. We’re no different, you know. In school, did you ever learn the real story about slavery or how the West was won?”
“How can kids learn with a white-washed history?” Despair in my voice, but no acceptance.
“You know the answer to that.” He patted my shoulder. “I’ve something to cheer us up. Wait here.”
Finding the will to survive in a bonsai
He returned with a miniature tree on a metal stand that mimicked the shape and scale of full-size trees. I recognized the art form of Japan known as bonsai, only achieved by skillful training and pruning. His bonsai had two limbs, shaped as if flattened by the force of the wind. Dense, dark green needles stretched upward like candles. I was transported to a still, diminutive forest.
“It’s a mountain pine about five years old.”
It’s here where I leave hate behind. It’s here where I take deep breaths and find some peace.
A prisoner of war, he sardonically referred to himself as “the guest of the emperor.” I couldn’t believe he would want anything to do with the Japanese or their culture.
He explained that one of the camp guards created a bonsai, using a sapling of a Benguet pine, which was often used for hedging around Filipino coffee plantations. He had trained the pine with wires and tended it lovingly, placing it on a sunny window shelf above his bed.
Stan glanced furtively at the bonsai whenever he passed by the guard’s billet, memorizing each graceful twist of the tiny trunk and slender green needles, a vision he held in his mind when hungry, thirsty or in pain. He imagined this fragment of beauty in a diminutive forest all his own. The guard had unwittingly given him the will to survive.
“I found a way to endure my memories. When I tend this bonsai or plant seeds in the garden, I become part of the natural world. It’s here where I leave hate behind. It’s here where I take deep breaths and find some peace.”
“Now I understand why you garden, and maybe why I should.”
We shook hands again, and I walked back to the street where the realtor was checking her watch. I glanced back at the house, which didn’t look at all like what I toured a short while ago.
Around Tax Day, a moving van transferred my slim possessions to my first home next to Stan.
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image 1 Francesco Foti from Pixabay 2 image by Ilona Ilyés from Pixabay
