The Day We Lost Tilo

A STORY

by FRANCES JOHNSON

WE LOST Tilo (pronounced by himself Tee-lo, for Phillip) on the fourteenth of September, 1949. in Kanda Prefecture, Tokyo.

The day began like any day in fall, hot and languorous even early in the morning, wit h sounds of get a in the streets, pittapittapittapitta like a light rain, oxen hoofs on cobblestones, the creaking wheels of carts. Already there was dust and pollen in the air, even in the house. I slipped quietly from bed, leaving Bob—I almost thought the Major — still sleeping like a well-built anchovy.

I moved secretly because I wanted these moments for myself, to knit myself and life together before facing the day’s bafflements. In the little garden I could be whole. I would step scrunehingly across the hot white gravel to the small pool where late rose and lavender water lilies were even now unfolding to the sun. I would feel the bamboo dipper which rested beside the pool smooth against the palm of my hand. I would sprinkle the steppingstones leading to the bamboo gate until the pale gray slabs darkened with moisture and the varicolored grains of ore jeweled the pathway in the sunshine. Then 1 would sit quietly, the moist dipper dripping intermittently in cool trickles down my bare leg, and compose myself.

Silently I dressed, green and white cotton, white sandals, lipstick to minimize too large hazel eyes in a plain face. I made my way downstairs and slid back the shoji screens that opened to our garden, for we lived not in an army billet but in U..S. House 93, a Japanese home used by the Occupation. Tilo was in the garden before me.

lie was intensely busy, standing still, watching the carp in the pool. His browned body, sturdy like Bob’s, smooth and pecan dark, was polished with a thin film of perspiration and given a rich patina by the early sun. His scalp showed clean and white and new like rice paper where the sun’s rays struck the dark butch of his bent. head. He was lustrous as a pearl, there in the morning garden. I ached to clutch his warm skin-smelling body close, but his intensity was so rigid that i was afraid he might shatter in my arms. At that instant he was not eligible for possession.

He was a carp for some moments while I watched, and then for a shorter time a bonsai tree in a bronze container. A trickle of perspiration ran from under his sunward ear down his neck and across his chest, He laughed with a laugh that lilted and rose like linnet’s song, splashed himself with a handful of green water, and began a frenzied run around the garden, Tilo again.

“Tilo.”

“Ohio, Ohio, Ohio,” he chanted in Tilo-Japanese. “Morning, morning. Ohio.” Round and round and round, bare brown feet on white gravel, bare brown five-year legs like pumps. He had dressed himself in sun-tan shorts, and he raced in a giddy circle like a, chocolate-colored merry-go-round.

“Akiko-san,” he shouted.

Our maid, Akiko, a middle-aged Japanese woman, bowed serenely at the back door, smooth and tidy as a marble. Tilo flung himself into her arms unrestrainedly. Her doting was like fertilizing soil which let his shoots push through, nourished but unhampered. 1 was afraid of blighting him with the intensity of my own devotion, parching and weakening him. How does one learn to give, to offer oneself freely and naturally to another person, to spill over and pour fort h one’s whole being like a freshet in the spring, to cry Yea to loving and to life?

I glanced back into the garden, retreating visually and spiritually from a problem I could not handle. The street sounds returned in thicker volume. Far down the road the tofu man was crying his bean cake, and from some distant alley sounded the noodle vendor’s flute. It was time to start breakfast.

“Why do you let Tilo eat those daikon pickles with his mush?” Bob loomed large and neat at the table, in sun-tans that smelled of arrowroot starch. “Haven’t you ever seen the Japanese prepare them, packing them into bamboo tubs with their bare feet ? ”

Bob, oddly enough, worried more than I about Tilo’s physical well-being. I let him buy sweet potatoes on the street and run around without shoes.

“Akiko-san brings them.” How limp an attempt to convey my feeling that it was more dangerous to reject love than pickles. Yet if Tilo got a bug.

“Daikon, daikon,” he shouted, chomping them down between spoon fuls of oatmeal. He became engrossed in the blue-white pickle dish, spoon suspended in mid-air, the mush slopping on the table.

Bob halted his coffee drinking at the barrier of Tilo’s absorption, no way under, over, through.

“Judith, it will be a good thing when Tilo — Phillip — starts to school.”

For the first time that morning I loved Bob. How wrong he was as to a solution to the problem of Tilo. “Yes, dear.”

Bob rubbed his hand over his own crew cut, rose, and kissed me good-by. Tilo ran back and forth, up and down the hall, bare callused feet like whisks on the tatami.

“Sayonara, sayonara, sayonara.”

“Little Nip.” Bob reached for Tilo’s head, but Tilo had converted himself into the hanging in the tokonoma, and the hand dropped, repulsed. “See you tonight,” he added awkwardly.

2

I LEFT Tilo before the scroll and went into the kitchen after Akiko. She was smiling happily into the pickle dish as I entered. We worked together for a while, though it. distressed Akiko to have me work beside her, and then I bathed and changed for the Commissary.

“Tilo, let’s go.”

“Tilo-san, Tilo-san.” Akiko had a high bird voice, shrill but sweet, and her notes reached Tilo anywhere in the house or garden. “Tilo-san.

But Tilo did not rush up or answer.

“Tilo.”

We ran through all the rooms and through the garden, calling. When we came together again in the room off the garden, our eyes admitted the truth to each other — Tilo was gone.

I clutched my heart, not a mid-Victorian gesture but an animal response to pain. Akiko emitted a high keening wail. Tilo!

Together we raced down the lane into the dusty main thoroughfare. It was all strange, strange. There was no familiar sight in all this world, in the hot dusty street with rows of carts, some hauled by people and some by animals, in the narrow branching alleys where white characters painted on red or blue strips of cloth advertised their wares in an unintelligible ballet, in tiny women bunched into bulky work pants, in well-muscled men with hand towels bound round foreheads to catch their perspiration. Disjointed world. Cries 1 could not translate to words. Placards I could not read. Expressions I could not fathom. Into this world Tilo had vanished, and I, I too was lost.

Akiko was running to each passer-by and clutching him with frantic hands. A torrent of words poured from her, heads shook, men and women turned to each other, everyone began to run and peer into shops up and down the maze of lanes. I grabbed Akiko.

“Arigato, arigato,” I cried, restored in part to sanity by the confusion about me. “Akiko, come.”

I drew her back to the house. The telephone.

“Give me the MPs. Mochi, mochi, M-u, P-u. Oh, Military Police? I’ve lost my little boy. Tilo. Phillip Carradine. Age five. Dressed in tan shorts . . . yes, that’s all. U.S. House 33. Hurry, please.”

“Major Carradine . . . Bob. Tilo’s gone. I don’t know how long. An hour maybe. Yes, the MPs. They’ll work with the Japanese police? Yes, I’ll stay right here. I don’t know how it could happen. You will ... in the jeep? Yes, here by the telephone. I will. I promise. Hurry . . .”

The Japanese police arrived first, two small men in shabby blue serge uniforms, one of whom talked and one of whom wrote Japanese characters with a bail-point pen in a black notebook. The talking one questioned me in English and Akiko in Japanese. He seemed most efficient, but his scornful glance at Akiko as they departed made me think. Akiko wore a look of . . . of doom, there was no other word. Old Japanese traditions flashed into my mind — seppuku, leaps into Mount Fuji, plunges over the waterfall at Lake Chujenzi, the Fortyseven Ronin, Butterfly.

“Akiko-san, not your fault. My fault. It will be all right. O.K. Tilo will come back.”

She bowed.

“Please, Akiko, please.”

I sat down on the ledge of t he tokonoma to catch my breath. There were three chrysanthemums in a porcelain vase, piercing in their perfection of line, insistently beautiful in spite of human pain.

“Ma’am?” There were two MPs at the door.

I brushed back a strand of hair. “Please come in. I’m Mrs. Carradine.”

One MP was tall, lanky, lean-faced, and sandycolored; the other was short, stocky, dark, with a bullet head and ruminant eyes. The stocky one, I learned, was from Montana and the lanky one from Texas. They had both tracked down hundreds of lost children in the South and West.

“You jest repose yore mind, ma’am. We’ll find yore little boy. We ain’t never lost a lit tle American boy here yet. Nonc’s even fell into the Emperor’s moat. Yo’re all tensed up. I know how it is, ma’am. It’s the littleness of everything here, makes you kinda nervous like, havin’ things so small.”

A thread of laughter drew itself through fear. How mixed and glinting all emotion is. This lump of fright cleaved by t he yellow line of mums upon a branch, strung through with trembling mirth.

“You see, Sergeant, my home is in Rhode Island.”

He had a slow warm grin that filled out his lean face. “There’s somethin’ ridiculous about this whole business,” he drawled philosophically, “you an’ him an’ me, in this . . .” His wide gesture included the house, the garden, all Japan.

A sergeant with sensitivity and proportion.

“Judith-u-san, prease.” Akiko tugged my skirt. “Priest here . . . takuhachiso-san.”

True enough, a mendicant priest in a short black Buddhist robe and an inverted flower-basket straw hat upon his head was standing silently in the entrance. In his left hand he held a wooden begging bowl and in his right a tall wood staff.

“Hojo-san, hojo-san,” Akiko bowed.

The Texas sergeant ambled over and struck up a three-way conversation with undoubted authority and apparent, and I suspected ungrammatic, ease. A stream of Japanese flowed from all sides. The stocky sergeant pocketed his notebook, shook his bullet head, and unwrapped a stick of gum. Noting my isolation from the general scene he gallantly extended the package.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he apologized.

I started to refuse, but caught myself up in time. “Thank you.” I unwrapped and folded as I had seen him do. The sugar sweetness in my mouth made me feel ill.

“This priest-san here’s seen yore little boy down the bookstore way,” Texas volunteered.

“Oh!”

“There, there, take it easy, ma’am. The boy had on a paper hat an’ was beatin’ away on a big drum with a lot of little Japanese kids. He looked right happy. Mustang and me’ll head right over an’ check.” He signaled the gum-chewing sergeant with a jerk of his head, and then scrutinized my face. “That’s a purty little garden you got there, Miz Carradine. Why don’t you go set in it for a spell an’ kinda rest up a bit.”I must look a ghost from shock and gum. “Think about Rhode Island.”

In my excitement I could think of no place to toss the gum. It loomed an insuperable problem. I finally put it in my handkerchief and handed the whole to Akiko. I had better take the sergeant’s ad vice.

3

I WENT and sat on a warm rock beside the pool. The receding voices of the sergeant and the priest were still audible. As a final sound came the chink of metal in a wooden bowl. It was comforting to have such a thoughtful person searching for Tilo. How had the priest known? How had he recognized Tilo and come here to me? How? The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, and the garden and the sounds from the street once again turned strange.

“Judith-u-san, Judith-u-san,”Akiko was bowing faster than ever in the opening which led to the garden, “the Genelal, the Genelal.” Her eyes were enormous, and I could see her heart pounding through the blue and white yukata.

“Mrs. Carradine?”

It was the General, tall, straight, antique-featured, formidable, like an ancestral painting framed in shoji with a little garden in the foreground for scale and contrast.

“Please.” I rose.

lie motioned me back with his hand. “Shall we sit out here? The maid can bring me a chair from the house. Don’t be alarmed.” A glint of laughter sparked in his eyes, like ore through the wetted steppingstones. “There’s nothing portentous about my visit. I called to reassure you. We’ll find your son.” He sat regally in the chair which Akiko between bows had managed to place in the garden. I reacted between laughter and anger at his calm, pompous assurance in the face of all eventualities. I started to snap “It’s not your son,” when I looked closely into the strong face, tired in the full sunlight as it had not revealed itself to be in the dimmer passageway. Despite my skeptically trained mind I felt reassured in his presence.

The humor shone again. “We are surprisingly efficient for an Occupation.”

“May I offer you something — coffee, tea, a drink perhaps?”

He shook his head. He looked about the garden, seeingly. His eyes followed the steppingstones to t he gate.

“Is this the way your son left?”

“I don’t know. The last time I saw him was in the entranceway. He was standing in front of the tokonoma, looking at the scroll. Not really looking at it, either.” I saw the sturdy brown body and the cropped head and the firmly set brown dirty feet. “He has a way of becoming whatever catches his attention. At times it can be very perturbing.”

The steady gaze returned to the steppingstones and the gate. His eyes clouded as if lie were looking far back, or far ahead.

“Can’t you feel what this would mean to a little boy—” his hand indicated the stones and gate in a fine expansive gesture — “this beckoning invitation? Step along my jagged path. Open my golden gate. Here lies the world.”

“I never thought of it like t hat. To me the garden has always been a . . . a sanctuary.

He studied me and the small enclosure, quite perfect in its line and form. “Yes, yes, I can see that. But one should first step out before coming back to rest.” He paused. “Perhaps. Possibly for saints and poets it’s different.” He smiled and rose, declining to judge. I rose with him and started toward the house. Akiko was already rushing toward the front door.

“Don’t go in. The garden suits you. Try not to worry. Your boy’ll be back. I’d like to meet him someday. I’ll leave by the gate.”

The garden was much too small for him. The gate too. He turned when he was half in, half out, and raised his hand in an old Roman gesture, ave atque vale. It was theatric, but moving, too.

To my amazement I found myself crying. Once started, the tears kept, on coursing down my cheeks. It was not only for Tilo who was lost and the fear that tied an indissoluble knot in my stomach and lay there through visitors and conversation and chrysanthemums and Akiko’s endless comic bowing. It was partly for myself, that I had never seen the gate as an invitation and that gestures were so alien and difficult for me. And it was partly for the policemen, whose blue serge uniforms were so shinyshabby, and for the Sergeant because Japan was so small for him, and for Tilo and the General because one always ultimately has to exit through the gate alone.

“Judith.” Bob rushed into the garden and caught me close. “Judith, don’t take on so. It’ll be all right, dear. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh over the phone. Please, Judith.

It was quite consoling sobbing in Bob’s arms in the hot sunshine, but it was obtaining love through false pretenses. I was not crying out of remorse or terror over Tilo but through the luxurious selfindulgence of Weltschmerz. My guilty conscience forced me to draw back stiffly.

“I’m all right, Bob. I should have watched him. But the General says he’ll get Tilo back.”

Because of my withdrawal, or my statement, Bob became the Major again. “The General!”

“He came about Tilo.”

“Here?” Bob made his usual bewildered gesture of hand through hair. “He must think we’re terribly inefficient parents, losing our son.”

“No, no, he didn’t, Bob, really. I don’t believe he thought about efficiency at all. Do you know, he and Tilo have much in common. Only the General observes and weighs, and Tilo is.”

“ What did he say? What did you do?”

“We talked about the garden.”

“You talked about the garden. Judith, my God!”

“Can’t you believe me, Bob? It was . . . right .”

He dropped into the vacant chair and kneaded his temples with fists. One night almost seven years ago we had stood together on the sand watching a moon-path on the Atlantic. An unexpected wave had drenched us, and sopping wet, eyelashes pointed and hair stringy with salt water, noses and chins ad rip, Bob had asked me to marry him.

“I believe you, Judith.” He lifted his puzzled face. “I’m not much good at moods and things. I can’t often follow you. Or Tilo. Where do you go? What’s it mean to you? Why? Even like letting him eat those pickles.” His voice rose. “You know those damned pickles aren’t good for a kid. He’ll get liver flukes or dysentery.”

Right after I’d said “yes” that night, Bob was worried about my catching cold.

“Can you take off the rest of the day to look for Tilo, Bob?”

“Yes. Sure. You stay here.” He was all purpose and action again. “There’s a million kids all over Kanda, weaving around wit h one of those portable shrines and beat ing drums and chanting.”

“Are there, Bob? What, a wonderful day Tilo picked for going out the gate!”

Bob looked at me peculiarly. “Judith, you’d better lie down and rest a bit. Take a sedative.” He patted my arm with awkward vigor. “We’ll find Tilo all right.”

4

THEY never did find Tilo. Not. Bob who rushed precipitously forth, a field-grade St. George, nor the Japanese police, nor the American MPs; not all the forces of the Occupation nor the Occupied.

Tilo found himself. About five o’clock, when the day had turned to honey, thick and sweet with the heated richness of autumn, as I sat numbed within the garden, I heard suddenly, above all the homegoing noises in the far street, Tilo’s clear piping voice enunciating politely, “Arigato, gosai-masu.

Charged with vitality, I ran and flung open the bam boo gate. “Tilo!”

He was a long way off at the end of the narrow path that led to the main street. The setting sun was behind him, creating a black paper cutout of Tilo’s return — tlie rear end of an ox, tail flicking against flies, the rubber-tired front, wheels of a loaded cart, a Japanese farmer in khaki pants and inner tube geta with a rice straw hat atop his head, the foremost row of a line of wooden buckets, the dipper end of a huge, muchly stained ladle, and atop the highest bucket, arms held confidently out to the farmer, Tilo in all his glory.

“Arigato,” he called again as the farmer carefully deposited him on t he ground. He put his dirty heels together and bowed quite formally, ridiculously ceremonial.

The farmer bowed in return and catching sight of me transfixed in the gateway he bowed and bowed toward me. I bowed and bowed in return.

The farmer made a clucking noise with his tongue, the strain of tugging rippled along the ox’s rump, his tail slashed, the wooden tongue jerked, and the heavenly cart disappeared from sight in a series of creaks and a long line of covered buckets.

“Hello, Mama.”Hippety-hop, skippety-skip, Tilo came barreling down the path.

“Tilo!”

How splendid he was. As he raced nearer, the full bedazzlement of his added attire burst upon my amazed sight. Lo, he was adorned in a blue crepe-paper hat tied under his chin with long red streamers that fluttered behind him as he ran. About his neck like a pendant hung a red-lacquered Buddhist fish bell. In ids right hand like a scepter lie brandished a padded drumstick with which to beat the bell. In his left he clutched a gummy soybean cake with a temple stamp baked into its once golden crust.

“Tilo.”I knelt in the gateway and clutched him hungrily to me. “T ilo, darling.”

I buried my face in his sweet, fat, dirty neck. He smelled more than sweaty.

“It’s not me, Mama,” he cried. “It was the bucket. Hi, Akiko-san. Konichi-wa. Komban-wa.”

And suddenly everyone was there, all jamming into the garden, Bob and t he two policemen and the two sergeants and the mendicant priest, and they were all exclaiming and shaking hands and bowing. Akiko tossed a yellow-striped dishtowel over her face to hide her emotions, but that did not stop her in the least from bending up and down, up and down. Everyone had to explain just how he had sighted Tilo and then lost him, only for a second, you understand, and then picked up the trail again. And then the telephone began to shrill, and it was the General.

“Mrs. Carradine? I hear your son is back. How is he?”

“He’s . . . he’s wonderful!” Like a. flood it poured over me just how wonderful Tilo’s departure and return really were. “Why, it’s like a miracle. You know. You understand.”I was babbling into the telephone, unable to halt my flow of words. “Tilo went out through the gate with nothing, and he’s come back with a blue crepe-paper hut and a red fish bell and a drumstick and a temple cake with soybean paste inside.” I was laughing and crying together. “And he’s brought all Japan back into the garden with him, soldiers and police and a priest, the whole world right into the little garden.”

As I burbled the words there rose before me quite clearly the vision of the General himself as he sat in the garden that afternoon, so royal in the teakwood chair, so gloriously ham in the garden gate. Yet impressive too. “As a moral lesson to us both,” my laughter this time was genuine, not hysterical, and a goodly portion of it was directed at myself, a grown Rhode Island woman who had been gushing, “Tilo came back riding atop a honey bucket, and he smells.”

The General’s own laughter pealed out over the telephone, rich and warm and human. Everyone in the garden, Bob, the sergeants, the police, the priest, and presumably Akiko, listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

“Judith.” Bob, the Major, was horror-struck.

“Thank you for telling me,” the General’s voice came through the receiver. “Some afternoon, after a very important meeting, may I stop by for tea?”

Bob was rubbing his head again. The rest of the ensemble was standing by, a la Greek chorus.

“Please, won’t you all sit down.”

Most of them did. It was a long while before we finally cleared the garden. The Japanese police wrote reports. The sergeants wrote reports. The Buddhist priest meditated. I routed Akiko upstairs to draw a long hot sudsy bath for Tilo. Finally everyone was done. The soldiers saluted and left. The police bowed and retired. Bob and I stuffed money into the Buddhist begging bowl. The priest remained impassive before the donation, but. as he also withdrew, his eyes rested softly upon Tilo, who was at that moment being the red fish bell.

“Nice boy-u,” he said.

“Thank you very much.”

“Sayonara.”

“Judith!” Bob yelled in his Major voice, “Tilo’s got something in his pocket and he’s eating it.

It was seaweed, little black squares of seaweed that Japanese children buy from street vendors as a treat.

“He’s been sitting on that bucket of night soil and now he’s eating seaweed out of his pocket!”

“Oh, Bob, it won’t . . .” To sense another’s need, to gain insight from this revealing day, to give oneself, respond, to yield. “Yes, dear. Tilo, honey, give Mama the seaweed.”

Dutifully he handed it over and trudged off upstairs to be bathed. His linnet laughter tumbled down to us, fresh as the morning, unexhausted by the adventures of the day.

The garden was empty but for Bob and me. Twilight dissolved its outlines. The leaves lost their definition, and the steppingstones blended imperceptibly into the surrounding gravel. The street sounds entered muted through the cooling air and the bamboo gate, the wonderful symbolic bamboo gate, and floated free in the lavender light .

I opened my arms wide to Bob.

“Judith.”

The captured seaweed fell from my unresisting hand into the fishpond, and a carp leaped in the quiet evening.

Upstairs, I knew it. very well, Tilo was gaily stuffing down the dirty soybean cake in his bath.