Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“You move!” the corporal yelled, hustling them along.

Move Fletch did. If he didn’t move, they would bayonet him on the street and laugh while they did it. His legs and especially his feet hurt. He kept telling himself it was only because he’d done too much work for too long on too little food. He kept telling himself that, yes, but he had more and more trouble making himself believe it. He was starting to get beriberi. Not only weren’t they feeding him enough, they were feeding him the wrong kind of not enough.

A blond woman on the sidewalk bowed to the Jap soldiers. Was that Jane? Excitement, then dejection-it wasn’t. This gal was older and tougher-looking. He’d seen worse, though. He laughed at himself. His interest in women right now had to be purely theoretical. He didn’t think he could get it up if he had a crane to help.

He laughed again. “What’s funny?” Virgil Street asked. Anything that made a day go by a trifle better was to be cherished. Fletch explained. The other POW snorted. “Hell, buddy, way we are now, a clapped-out fifty-cent whore’d turn up her nose at us even if we could get it up.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Fletch looked down at himself. He doubted he weighed a hundred twenty pounds, and at least ten pounds of that were dirt. Along with everybody else in this sorry outfit, he smelled like the monkey house in the zoo. He would have killed for a sirloin, a baked potato, and pie a la mode. Hedy Lamarr dancing the dance of love in the altogether? Forget about it.

And then he did see Jane, and he stumbled and almost fell on his face. He recognized the sun dress she had on; she’d bought it on a shopping trip down to Honolulu, and crowed about the price for days. She was very tan. Her hands looked like hell; they were almost as battered as his own.

She saw him, too. Her jaw dropped. Her mouth shaped an O. Her eyes widened. She didn’t say a thing, though. He started to scream her name-he started to, but caught himself before anything more than a gurgle escaped his lips. If he showed he knew who she was, what would happen to her? She’d catch it from the Japs, odds were.

She’s alive, anyway, and she doesn’t look too bad. Maybe she’d started to call him, too. If she had, she also had too much sense to finish. I love you, he mouthed, and wondered if she could read lips.

He must have slowed down. A guard whacked him across the shoulder blades with a length of bamboo. He staggered, but kept his feet. The bastard would have kicked him if he’d gone down. Could he have got up after a couple of good licks? He hoped so, anyhow. If he couldn’t… Well, that would have given Jane something to watch, wouldn’t it?

“You move!” the Jap corporal yelled again.

On he went; he had no choice. Ships passing in the night, he thought. Jane stared after him; he looked back over his shoulder once to see. But their ship had taken a torpedo and sunk back before the war started. Whatever he saw now, wasn’t it just debris floating on the surface?

Two tears ran down his face. He wiped them away with his skinny, filthy, sunburned forearm. When he looked back over his shoulder, Jane was gone. Had she ever really been there? He knew damn well she had. Whatever the Japs had done to him, they’d never been able to make him cry.

ALL ALONE IN THE APARTMENT she’d shared with Fletch once upon a time, Jane Armitage lay on the bed they’d also shared once upon a time. Her shoulders shook. She sobbed into the pillow. He was alive. She supposed she should have been glad. She was glad-and then again, she wasn’t. Wouldn’t he have been better off dead?

She’d seen plenty of POWs. She’d imagined seeing Fletch that way. That only went to show the difference between imagination and reality. A bright-eyed skeleton with a ginger beard…

And he’d seen her, too. For that little stretch of time, it had been as if he’d never got drunk, as if she’d never talked to a lawyer. If he could have broken out of that sorry pack, she would have… She didn’t know what she would have done. Whatever he wanted, probably.

He was either still lurching along or at hard labor somewhere only a couple of miles away right now. In the movies, she would have figured out a way to go to him and comfort him and feed him and get him away from the people who were making his life a hell on earth. It would have been easy as pie, and the Japs wouldn’t have caught on, at least not till too late. Then they would have been left gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists as she and Fletch rode off into the sunset together.

Real life, unfortunately, didn’t usually come with a Hollywood ending. The Japs were a lot tougher and smarter than the villains in the movies. She didn’t have the faintest idea how she could spirit Fletch away from the work gang he was in, or even how she could get him any food. If she did get Fletch away, what could she do with him? Stash him here in the apartment? Then he could never go out, and she could never have anybody in. Anyone who spotted him could blackmail her forever. And a ration that wasn’t adequate for one wouldn’t come close to feeding two. They’d both starve. And he’d probably-no, certainly-want to sleep with her again, and, that moment of surprise on the sidewalk aside, she didn’t want to sleep with him. Oh, maybe once out of pity, but no more than that, for God’s sake. And trying to get him out and failing would lead not to one horrible death but two.

“Shit!” she said, all at once understanding why Hollywood endings were so popular. They were a hell of a lot better than the way things went when the cameras weren’t rolling.

BEFORE THE JAPANESE OCCUPIED HAWAII, Jiro Takahashi had never been a man of any great consequence here. Oh, he did his work and he paid his bills and he had some friends who thought he was a pretty good fellow, but that was about it. He could go anywhere without having anyone pay special attention to him.

It wasn’t like that any more. He’d been on the radio several times. He’d had his words and opinions featured in Hawaii’s Japanese-language press. And he’d even had his picture and his translated words show up in Honolulu’s English-language papers.

Now his fellow Japanese said, “Hello, Takahashi- san !” and bowed when he went by. Or they called him “the Fisherman,” like the sentries at the consulate. They asked his advice for their problems. They did favors for him, and tried to have him get favors for them from the consul and his henchmen. They treated him like an important person, like a doctor or lawyer-not like a real fisherman.

He loved every minute of it.

He’d had haoles bow to him as if he were a senior Japanese officer. They probably wanted him to do them favors, too, the only trouble being that he had no English and hardly any haoles spoke Japanese. But getting respect from people who’d looked down their noses not just at him but at all Japanese before things changed was as heady as strong sake.

The only people who seemed unimpressed-to put it mildly-with his rise in the world were his sons. Hiroshi and Kenzo did their best to act as if nothing had changed, or to wish things hadn’t. Once, when they were out in the Oshima Maru and no one else could hear, Kenzo asked, “Why couldn’t you just keep your head down like most people, Father?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jiro answered his own question before Kenzo could: “It means you’re still full of sour grapes, that’s what.”

“You think the Americans are gone for good,” Kenzo said. “You think you can call them all the names you want. But they haven’t gone away. They’re sinking more and more ships these days. Their planes come over more and more often. What will you do when they take Oahu back? You’ll be in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, that’s what.”