The Silence of Puʻuloa

At noon the bells did not ring.

They always rang at noon, the Catholic cathedral and Kawaiahaʻo and the Anglicans and the little ones in Kakaʻako, all slightly out of time with each other, and the King had heard them every day of his life that he had been in the city; and at noon on the seventh of December none of them rang, and he noticed it, standing in the hall, as a man notices a clock that has stopped. He did not know who had decided it. Perhaps nobody had. Perhaps every verger in Honolulu had stood at the foot of his rope at twelve o’clock and thought about the black flowers and the people on the streets and the sky, and let go of it.

He went out to walk in the grounds.

Kealoha came with him, three paces behind. He had not asked Kealoha to come and would not have known how to tell him not to.

---

It was hot now. The wind had come back properly in the late morning and was blowing steadily off the mountains, the ordinary trade wind, the wind that blew on four days out of five in the year and that nobody in Honolulu noticed any more than they noticed breathing, and it was carrying the smoke away.

He could see it from the lawn. The great darkness that had stood over the plain since eight o’clock had not gone, but it had leaned. It stood up from the place where the anchorage was, still black at the base, still thick, still lit at the bottom now and then by a flare of orange that was too far off to hear, and at about the height of the Waiʻanae ridge it bent, all of it, the whole tall column, and went away to the south-west in a long smear across the sky and out over the sea, thinning as it went, until far out over the water it was only a brown stain on the blue, like the mark left on a ceiling by a lamp. The city was clear. The sky over ʻIolani was perfectly blue. The sun stood almost straight overhead and the shadows of the palms had shrunk to circles round their feet, and the light was the hard white noon light of December that made everything look as though it had been cut out of paper.

It was very quiet. That was the thing he would remember. After the noise of the morning, the silence of noon was a physical thing, a weight, the way the air is heavy after a storm. The guns had stopped two hours ago. The aircraft had gone. The sirens had gone, mostly, though now and then one went up somewhere towards the harbour and fell again. There was no traffic on King Street at all. The army had said to stay off the streets, before the wireless went, and the city had stayed off them; and so the only sounds were the wind in the palms and the birds, who had come back, and the low continuous sound of several hundred people on his lawn talking to each other quietly, the way people talk in a hospital corridor.

He went first to the makai gate, because he had not let himself look at it properly since a quarter past nine, and he made himself look at it now.

The hole in King Street was perhaps twelve feet across, raw, with the tram rails bent up out of it and the water from a broken main lying brown in the bottom. The car was still on its side against the far kerb, roped off with the cord from the flagstaff. The gap in the railings had been roped too, and a constable stood by it, and a man from the Board of Works was looking into the hole with his hands in his pockets as though he expected it to explain itself. The sheets were gone from along the barracks wall; a truck had come from the undertaker’s on Nuʻuanu Avenue at eleven, and the Guard had carried them out to it one at a time, and the people on the lawn had stood up as each one went past. Across the road the courts stood with every window empty and their front scarred black. And in front of them, on his plinth, untouched, without a mark on him that the King could see, the first Kamehameha held out his arm towards the palace through the settling dust, as he had at a quarter to six; and three or four people were standing at the foot of the plinth with their hands flat on the stone, the way people touch a thing to make sure it is there.

He stood at the gate and looked at that for some time. Then he went back in among the people on the grass.

And under all of it, if he listened, which he tried not to, nothing at all from the west. Not a gun. Not a ship’s siren. Six miles off, where the darkness stood, there was silence; and he knew, because Cunningham had told him, that there were men in the water there, in the burning part, and that some of them were still alive, and that the silence of Puʻuloa at noon was the silence of a great many people very busy and a great many more who would never make a sound again.

He stood for a moment on the gravel with his hands behind his back, the way his father had stood on the mauka veranda in the mornings looking at the mountains, and then he went on.

---

There were people everywhere. He had known there were; he had seen them from the steps. But walking among them was different. From the steps they had been a crowd. On the lawn they were people, and each of them was doing something.

A Hawaiian woman under the banyan was feeding a baby. A Portuguese man was asleep on his back on the grass with his hat over his face and his hands folded on his chest, quite peacefully, as though he had come to the palace grounds for that purpose on every Sunday of his life. Two Chinese boys were playing a game with pebbles on the gravel, in the raked lines, very seriously, and the gardener’s boy, who had come back from wherever he had run to at eight o’clock, was standing over them with his rake and not saying anything. An old haole woman in a hat with cherries on it was sitting very upright on a folding stool that somebody had brought her, reading a prayer book. A Filipino family had made a camp at the foot of the coronation pavilion, with a blanket and a basket, and the youngest child had climbed up onto the pavilion steps and was sitting under the dome where Kalākaua had been crowned in 1883, eating one of Mrs Higa’s musubi and kicking her heels.

Nobody stood up when he passed. He had wondered whether they would. They looked up at him, each of them, and saw who it was, and some of them nodded, and one or two said something in Hawaiian, quietly, his title or a greeting, and then they went back to what they had been doing. It was, he realised after a while, exactly how the people on the outer islands looked at him when he drove past on his tours: as though the King were weather. He had always taken it as a sign that he did not matter very much to them. He began to understand, walking on his own lawn at noon among the people who had come in off the street, that he had misunderstood that too. People did not stand up for the weather. They looked at it, to see what kind of day it was going to be.

---

He looked in at the barracks.

He did not go in. He stood at the door, and Kealoha stood behind him, and he looked down the long room that had been the Guard’s dormitory since the other Kamehameha V built it, seventy years before, and it was full. Every bed had somebody on it, and there were people on the floor between the beds on blankets, and people sitting against the walls, and the room smelled of carbolic and blood and the rice Mrs Higa had been cooking, and the windows were all open and the wind came through. Dr Chun was at the far end with his sleeves rolled up, bent over a man on a table. There were two nurses he did not know, in the uniform of the Queen’s Hospital, who must have come from somewhere; and three women from the city who were not nurses, tearing sheets; and two of the Guard carrying a basin between them; and in the middle of the room, kneeling on the floor beside a boy of about ten with a bandage round his leg, holding his hand and talking to him in Hawaiian, the Queen.

She did not see him. He did not want her to. He watched her for a moment. Her white dress was ruined. Her hair had come down on one side and she had pushed it back behind her ear and it had come down again. She was laughing at something the boy had said. The boy had a Japanese face, and was talking to her in Hawaiian, and she was answering in Hawaiian, and laughing, and the boy was looking at her as though she were the most surprising thing that had happened to him all day, which, the King thought, she very probably was.

He went away from the door before she could look up.

---

“How was it possible?” he said to Kealoha.

They were standing by the banyan, in its shade, a little apart from the people under it. He had not meant to say it aloud. He had been thinking it since nine o’clock, at the switchboard, and before that, on the lawn, watching the specks fall into the smoke, and he had been keeping it where Mr Pell had taught him to keep the thoughts a constitutional sovereign was not entitled to, and it had come out by itself.

Kealoha did not answer at once.

“Sir?”

“The whole of the Realm’s fleet,” the King said. “In one place. On a Sunday. In the morning. With the aircraft on the airfield in rows. And nobody knew they were coming. Nobody. Not the Navy. Not the Army. Not the Realm. All those officers who came to dinner, Thomas, and talked about Japan, about the oil and the talks and what Japan might do, all through the autumn, every one of them sure that it would be something, somewhere. And it was here. And nobody knew.” He looked at the darkness in the west, leaning out to sea. “How was it possible?”

Kealoha stood with his cap under his arm and looked at the same place.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said.

“You read the books.”

“Yes, sir. The books are about guns. They are not about this.” He was quiet for a moment. “I think, sir, that everybody was sure it would be somewhere else. I think that is all I know. Every officer I ever spoke to at Schofield was sure that if Japan did anything it would be somewhere else. In the south. In Malaya. In the Philippines. Somewhere a long way off. I was sure too.” He paused. “I think, sir, that if you had asked any of them this morning at seven o’clock where the one place in the Pacific was that Japan would never dare to strike, they would all have said the same place. They would have said here.”

The King said nothing.

“I don’t know how it was possible, sir,” Kealoha said. “I don’t think anybody does. I think it will be a very long time before anybody does. And I think,” he added, with great care, “that when they find out, sir, it will not be anybody in this Kingdom who has to answer for it. That is the only thing I am sure of.”

It was not an answer. The King had not expected one. He had asked because the question needed to have been asked aloud, by somebody, in Hawaiian air, on Hawaiian ground; and now it had been, and nobody could answer it, and that was all there was.

---

A man stood up under the banyan as they turned to go.

He was Japanese, in his forties, short and very broad in the shoulders, in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and no tie, and the King knew him, after a moment, for the man who had come in at the Richards Street gate an hour ago with his wife and his mother and three children and stood just inside it with his hat in his hand. He stood up now, with his hat in his hand again, and bowed, very low, the way the old men bowed at the consulate on the Emperor’s birthday, and stayed down.

“Please,” said the King.

The man straightened up. His face was quite still.

“Your Majesty,” he said, in English. “I wish to say thank you for letting us sit here.”

“It is your Kingdom,” said the King. “Where are you from?”

“From Kakaʻako, Your Majesty. From near the cannery. My name is Shiroma.” He hesitated. “I am a fisherman. From Kewalo basin. I have a boat, the Kotoshiro Maru, a sampan, with my brother. My brother took her out this morning at half past five, as on every Sunday, with two men. To the south of Barbers Point, for aku.” He stopped, and the King saw his hand tighten on the brim of the hat. “He has not come in. The other boats from Kewalo that were out, some came in at nine, very fast, and they say there were aircraft over the water, and the Navy’s ships firing, and that they saw a sampan on fire off the point. They do not know whose.”

The King did not say anything for a moment.

“I do not know what has happened to him,” said Mr Shiroma. “I wanted to say, Your Majesty, that he is not a spy. They will say that the boats that were out are spies. My brother is not a spy. He went for aku.” He bowed again, not so low. “I wanted to say it to somebody. I am sorry. You are the King.”

“I am,” the King said. “And I have heard you. Your brother went for aku. I will remember it.”

Mr Shiroma looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and sat down again under the banyan beside his wife, who had not moved through any of it, and put his hat back on his knee.

---

“Sir,” said Kealoha, when they had walked on. “The flag.”

The King stopped. He had not looked at it since a quarter to seven. He looked at it now. It was on the roof above the central tower, where it always was, standing out stiff in the trade wind towards the sea: the eight stripes, white and red and blue, and the Union in the canton, very bright against the blue of the sky, the brightest thing in the city.

“Somebody asked me, sir,” said Kealoha. “One of the men at the gate. He asked whether it ought to come down. Because of the aircraft. He said it was the only flag flying in this part of the city, and that you could see it from the harbour, and that if they came back it would show them where the palace was.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I would ask you, sir.”

The King looked at the flag for a while. Then he looked at the lawn: at the Portuguese man asleep with his hat over his face, and the woman feeding her baby under the banyan, and the Filipino child on the steps of the pavilion, and Mr Shiroma with his hat on his knee, and the old woman with the cherries on her hat, reading her prayer book; all of them sitting on the grass of ʻIolani in the hot noon light, in the silence, and every one of them, he saw now, every few minutes, without seeming to know they were doing it, lifting their eyes and looking up. Not at him. Past him. At the roof.

“They know where the palace is, Thomas,” he said. “They found the gate this morning without any help from the flag. Leave it up.”