War to end all wars!

By Jing Villamil

 

THE original storyteller was Grandma herself. And before the storytelling was a ritual her awed listeners would watch raptly entranced.

Gone elderly, she still wore her former grace and beauty. She must be truly graceful and beautiful before her prime: tall, slender frame, fair skin, red-brown hair, a dark red mole in mid-forehead between and slightly above her brows. She looked so much like the heroine in Gone with the Wind, but Castillian! She was more beautiful than her daughters; and that was a fact not one of the daughters contested as fiction.

Before her story, she would first wrap her shawl tight, tighter round her shoulders, in summer heat or dampish rainy nights. Next, she would wiggle her tall frame into the rocking chair that was her physician husband’s far longer than hers. Then she would whisk open her fan with a loud whack. Briskly, she would fan herself, fan the space beside and up above her head; then she would tap the fan to each dear sweaty smelly child kneeling before her knees or wrapped round the arms and back of her chair. She would summon the wind to please dispel the warmth, to lend her some cool, in her mind, in her mien. And when her cloying jasmine scent began to blend with the distinct whiff of penicillin breathing out from deep within the wood of the chair . . . then, and only then, shall her story start.

She was student nurse to a young Japanese Army officer weakened with the unfamiliar tropics heat. He would follow her with adoring eyes as she worked fast through her checklist. When strong enough to speak, he asked her name and where could such beauty come from. In his perfect educated English! Upon hearing where she came from, he turned agitated. “Go home to your island, quickly now! Hide your family far away from the town. The Japanese are coming!” He cleared his throat, quickly realizing he was Japanese himself. And he squinted up an adorably apologetic eye to the beautiful nurse so taller than himself. And who was fast disappearing!

As she ran, she unpinned the white cap on her head and with her reddish hair unfurling in waves, she was Red Riding Hood rushing from the not so big, not so bad wolf. She screamed permission from all persons concerned to leave her patient, to abandon her studies, to flee the city. By bus, by boat, by big strides of her long legs, she reached her island home. She lifted her Mamang from her sickbed, called out to her sisters as beautiful as she, called out to her brothers (she had siblings more than a dozen), loaded them all in one longboat. They rowed and rowed and crossed over to another sea. And she found them all safer refuge in an island almost non-populated but unbelievably thickly forested. Where you ride horses not bikes to go everywhere.

Soon after their flight, the Japanese landed. Well, the officers were educated Japanese; the soldiers were Koreans not as equally learned. There was a difference, and the difference could mean life or death.

Grandma would pause significantly at this point and interject an observation of her own. A wish. That her children and their children may not go through a cruel and deprived war as the one she had gone through.

And if she knew better then, the next storyteller after her would have answered: “in your war, you fought strange cruel men. In this our war, we shall fight a stranger war that might end all wars. Ours would be a war not against men, but the unseen, more determined to eradicate us from this land of the living.”

And we shall fight them with no guns, no cure. But the strength of our will to survive. That we may live to fight another war.

(To be continued.)

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