Free The Souvenir by Louise Steinman

add,
‘Shikata ga nai
,’ a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word
‘nichevo’:
‘It can’t be helped.’ ”
    Shikata ga nai. Nichevo. Nothing to be done but go on. During the Battle of Balete Pass, in Luzon in the spring of 1945, my father came down from the mountains by jeep to Clark Field, near Manila, to pick up supplies for his battalion. Two days later when he returned to his foxhole, it wasn’t there anymore. Blasted away by a shell. Was that the spirit of nichevo, the work of a guardian angel, or just damn good luck?
    His sister, Ruth, the angel who watched over him, was just fifteen when she died from a heart-valve defect. She had progressively weakened since she was ten or eleven. My grandparents did not exhibit the nichevo attitude when it came to their daughter. They traipsed from specialist to specialist in vain, hoping to find a doctor who could repair the tiny hole in their firstborn’s heart. When she died in 1927, my father and his parents never stopped mourning.
    Ruth had been my father’s best friend and his ally against all the strange experiences of a new land. She broke ground for him, cleared the way. Just as significant, he was her protector. He was quick on his feet and fetched things for her. He reported the neighborhood gossip when she was confined to her bed. Small for his age, he took his role seriously. Ruth was the constant in his life between what was unknown and what was known. Then she was taken away.
    Ruth’s death was the shadow over my grandparents’ lives, my father’s life, and, in some way, it was the shadow over our lives, in 1950s Los Angeles, as well. He rarely spoke of her.
    In 1951, a year before Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine, my sister, Ruth, contracted polio. She was six. I was just three months old, but Larry remembers the exact day. He remembers when Dad broke the news to our grandmother. The word “polio.” A shriek of grief, then weeping. My father reached into the bureau for a container of pills, begged my grandmother, “Take this! Stop crying!”
    Norman Steinman locked away deep inside himself those two great sorrows—the death of his sister and whatever had happened to him in combat. These were private sorrows, ones I was not expected to share. I never knew my father to cry.
    I N THE FALL of 1945, with combat behind him, my father was able to explain to his wife why he had resisted writing a letter to his infant daughter:
    Let me go back about a year ago and describe a scene in New Caledonia. One night Melvin Smith—a Texas boy whom I had basic training with at Camp Fannin—came into my tent and we were shooting the breeze but I could tell there was something on his mind. Finally before the evening was over he came out with it. “Steinman,” he said, “would you do something for me?” “Sure Smitty—shoot,” I said, “what is it?” “Will you keep a letter and some personal papers for me when we leave the Island—and mail it to my folks in case I don’t come back?”
    He tried to talk the young man out of it. He tried to cheer him, told him how silly it was to feel that way. But Melvin Smith insisted. He died at Umingan on January 29, 1945.
    I believe that the fear of dying paralyzed his will to go on, and that was the cause of his death. So I had to tell myself every day that I would be coming home, and when I started a letter to Ruthie—and I started many—I just couldn’t be glib or jocular or breezy and once I started to get serious, I thought of those farewell type letters and tore it up.
    But he didn’t tear them all up. He did write one letter to his infant daughter before he went into combat. He wrote it on January 4, 1945, aboard the convoy ship that carried the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division to Luzon. He finally sent it home on January 29, the day Melvin Smith was killed at