My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir by Brian Turner

Author:Brian Turner [Turner, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Who can say what made Papa raise his left arm on a December morning in the Solomon Islands? What was it that caught his attention? The Marine patrol stopped, each man crouching down the way ferns curl their fronds inward to the touch. The root-buttressed boles of whitewood trees rose high above them, their green canopies filtering shafts of light, holding it in clusters near the topmost branches. Island lychee rose ninety feet high in a burst of red-hued leaves. One of the Marines considered the ripening fruit hanging overhead, thin-skinned with a blackening peel, and for a brief moment he thought the tree appeared to branch into leaves of flame.

High up in the canopy, a lone skink ate from an epiphyte, mashing the vegetation in its mouth into a wet pulp. In a month that would bring twenty inches of rain, here was a brief lull, an opening of light, and the men’s hearing adapted to the widening acoustics of the rainforest now that the constant drumming of water had ceased. The Marines listened to the surrounding jungle, the fine hairs of the inner ear attuned to the subtle shifts of tone the morning offered. Shade warblers and thicketbirds sang. They heard fruit doves and moorhens, honeyeaters and Woodford’s rail. A drongo flew over, high above. Birds called out from the bamboo stands south of Mt. Balbi. They sang in the floodplain forest and in the coconut groves, in the ancient limestone forests and along the river courses.

A Bougainville Monarch landed on a man’s shoulder, but his focus was set beyond the green veil before him. He didn’t notice the widening beauty of wings opening and closing on the belt of ammunition he carried. Behind the veil of leaves, the eyes of the Japanese officer blinked, quick as a bird startled from the brush. My grandfather swung his machete upward from left to right in a wide arc of metal that caught the man at the neckline, above the Adam’s apple and just where the smooth column of the neck angles forward to the jawbone. The force of the blow lifted the man’s face upward for a brief vision of leaves and sunlight before he staggered backward and fell into the green crush of the jungle.

Papa stumbled in the adrenaline and tunneling clarity of that moment, the world around the two men blurred beyond recognition. His right foot caught in the snakelike roots of the tangled undergrowth and he almost fell over, on top of the Japanese officer, who was choking on his own blood, staring wild-eyed at my grandfather, while instinctively trying to unsheathe his katana from its scabbard.

I don’t want to picture my grandfather quickly stepping on the man’s wrist to pin it to his body as he swung the machete down and split the man’s throat open wide across the jugular, a blow that turned his face sideways into the cool damp of the crumpled leaves. I’d rather Papa simply pause in the shock of the

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