It was pure luck that they’d seen us and were in position to begin firing the howitzers. Anyway, the Japs submerged, and we made it to Tulagi safely.”
It seemed a rather abrupt ending to the story. “And the map?” I asked.
“The map came to me on Guadalcanal a few days later.” He sat down again, puffed on his cigarette. “Are you interested in history?”
“I’m interested in your story.”
“My story? It’s nothing but an old wartime tale.”
“Isn’t that history?”
He smiled. “Perhaps, perhaps not. I’ve always honored the Muses.”
I had no idea what he meant. I don’t think he was trying to lead me on, or to be oracular and pretentious.
“I’ve been lucky,” he went on. “Over the years I’ve come to know other versions of what happened that day, in written accounts and from people I met years after the war who were also there. A dear friend and colleague whom I met back here after the war. He was attached to the battery of pack howitzers that fired on the submarine.” He stubbed out his cigarette and chuckled. “We’d been friends for years before we put our stories together.”
“He’s in the map, too?”
He pointed to the two arrows drawn on either side of the submarine showing the direction of artillery fire. “If I remember, the Japanese reads, ‘Received fire from Tulagi, 7 to 10 cm type.’ Anyway, the significance for my friend was very different. They’d fired on the sub without orders. In fact, had gone against the wishes of their superiors, who didn’t want them to give away the position of their guns. He was worried about facing disciplinary action.”
“Did they sink the submarine?”
“No. It submerged, and we never saw it again.” He pointed to a large block of Japanese text. “The Japanese had a completely different impression of events. They saw high-speed boats, fully loaded with men and munitions. Flying the British flag!” He laughed. “High speed? Our engines had conked out. And where did the British flag come from? We had a good laugh over that one.”
He drifted off for several minutes in that unseeing way the elderly have of keeping you out of their thoughts and in their gaze. His blue eyes, clouded by cataracts, were like shrunken points of glass. The tear ducts were ripped and raw looking, as if something too large had passed through each socket. The only sound was the clock ticking on the mantel upstairs. I tossed back the remainder of my drink. “How’d you get the map?” I finally asked.
He sipped his drink before answering. “A few days later, back on Guadalcanal. The Japanese made some air drops to their troops just west of us. One of the baskets fell behind our lines. In it was—among cigarettes and candy and encouraging messages for the soldiers—an estimate of the situation. The map. It was translated right away by Pappy Moran. He’d been a missionary in Japan before the war, was our interpreter and prisoner interrogator. What struck me, of course, was the attention given to the encounter with the submarine. They’d gotten it all wrong. Completely wrong.” He shook his head and chuckled.
“When did the significance of the map strike you?”
“Well, from the beginning, I knew it was unique. So far as I know, there isn’t another one like it in existence.”
“I mean, did you see the personal significance right away?”
“Personal significance?” The question seemed to amuse him. “I certainly didn’t think in anything like those terms back then. Even now, I’m not sure ‘personal’ is the word I would use to describe its significance.”
“What did you do with it after the war?”
“I put it away with the rest of my war papers and forgot about it,” he said and set his empty glass on the table.
“But now you’ve got it hanging on your wall.”
“Yes, I do.”
“So why do you have it there?” I flushed as I said this, aware of the provocation in my tone.
He eased back in his chair, turned an appraising look on me, as if uncertain how much further he wished the conversation to go, and reached into his breast pocket for another cigarette. “I would say its significance for me is the opposite of personal. It has, in just about any way you look at it, nothing whatsoever to do with me.” He put the cigarette to his lips with a shaky hand. “We live on a molten sphere with a thin crust orbiting the sun. Every event that occurs on it takes on a nearly infinite number of simultaneous meanings.” The Zippo was produced. His hands trembled.
“But it’s a key to a specific event. Something meaningful that once happened.”
“Meaningful?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head—a little sadly, it seemed, as if he wished he could give a different answer. “From up close, war is always about nothing. For people who experience war, there is only confusion and forgetting. It’s the ones who were never there, the ones who come later, who always decide what happened. They’re the ones who write the histories, erect the monuments and memorials. Make up the meaning. The cliché that history forgotten is history repeated.” He smiled and shook his head. “Well, the problem is often precisely what it is that is remembered. And who is doing the remembering.” He began coughing, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The past is a mental thing. It doesn’t exist. The Pyramids and the great libraries, the Internet, are only the frailest scraps of physical evidence and will all disappear in time. Every night I have my cocktail, smoke my three cigarettes—this is my second. Don’t think I haven’t been counting. Later, I’ll take my sleeping pill. I’m addicted and need it to sleep. And every morning, I wake up and, goddamn it, can’t believe I’m still here!” He flashed a wry smile, something straight out of an old movie. There was something stagy about his manner. He seemed eager to make an impression on me. Age entitled him to the grand distance he took, the talk about meaning and meaninglessness, past and present. I wondered what he thought about GPS and Google Earth and a shrinking world confused by the technology of seeing.
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