lessons.
'Know that I died bravely, in a magnificent battle, and never for one moment shirked my duty!' Goto Dengo shouts back.
'Please send me some strong thread so that I can mend my boots!' the corporal cries.
'The Army has looked after us well, and we have lived the last months of our lives in such comfort and cleanliness that you would hardly guess we had ever left the Home Islands!' Goto Dengo shouts, knowing that he must be difficult to hear now above the surf. 'When the final battle came, it came quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the cherry blossoms spoken of in the emperor's rescript, which we all carry against our breasts! Our departure from this world is a small price to pay for the peace and prosperity that we have brought to the people of New Guinea!'
'No, that's totally wrong!' wails the corporal. But his comrades are dragging him up the beach now, back towards the jungle, where his voice is lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters and eerie cries.
Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale sewage. He turns around. The stars behind them are blocked out by something long and black and shaped kind of like a submarine.
'Your message is much better,' someone mumbles. It is a young fellow carrying a toolbox: an airplane mechanic who has not seen a Nipponese airplane in half a year.
'Yes,' says another man-also a mechanic, apparently. 'His family will find your message much more comforting.'
'Thank you,' Goto Dengo says. 'Unfortunately I have no idea what the kid's name is.'
'Then go to Yamaguchi,' says the first mechanic, 'and pick some old couple at random.'
Chapter 52 METEOR
'You sure don't
The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.
Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed, gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.
'Could you reach that jiz rag?' Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is too short.
'Why?' Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling in strange information.
Julieta is given to asking big questions.
'I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal, ma'am,' he says.
He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.
'Take your time,' she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar. 'What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?'
Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians there, and Germans.
'See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller,' Shaftoe says. 'So it's going to come out. Inevitably.' He thinks he pronounces this last word correctly.
'Then what will happen?' Julieta says.
'We'll get a wet spot.'
'So? It's natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as beds have existed.'
'God damn it,' Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi handkerchief Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body. He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.
Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.
Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her coffee-scented flesh.
'The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night,' she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality. This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes of Stalin's repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded and annotated by Julieta's uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier, crack shot, and indomitable warrior.
Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it's because they eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns excelled at an old-fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian-killing, but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans, who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian-slaughtering operation.
Julieta scoffs at this simple-minded theory: the Finns are a million times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all. She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.
He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left-over jism in his tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.
Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him appraisingly. 'Be a man,' she says. 'Make me some coffee.'
Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast-iron kettle, which could double as a ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of sails, but not Uncle Otto's.
Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills. Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil-packed java and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.
'You use too much wood,' Julieta says, 'Uncle Otto will be noticing.'
'I'll chop more,' Shaftoe says. 'This whole fucking country is full of nothing but wood.'
'You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you.'
'So it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece, but burning a couple of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?'
'Grounds,' Julieta says. 'Coffee grounds.'
The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been short-sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof. Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies, except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of coffee smugglers. Finns are
