A Gesture Life (18 page)

I unbuttoned the chest pocket of my shirt and deposited the bit of paper. I said nothing to the corporal, for I did not know what I could say or otherwise do except attend to his present circumstance as any decent and clear-thinking medical officer would. He was genuinely grateful and relieved, and he bowed almost wistfully before me, making me feel as though I had indeed come to his aid, that I had helped save him from whatever fate he supposed would befall him were he to visit the ones delivered for our final solace and pleasure. And I recall understanding this last notion. For although it was true the talk throughout the camp was still of the
glorious brightness of our ultimate victory and its forever dawning reach, the surer truth as yet unspoken was that we were now squarely facing the dark visage of our demise.

Famous, of course, is the resolve of the Japanese soldier, the lore of his tenacity and courage and willingness to fight in the face of certain death. But I will say, too, that for every man who showed no fear or hesitance, there were three or four or five others whose mettle was as unashamedly wan and mortal as yours or mine. As the defenders of the most far-flung sector of the occupied territory, we understood there was little question of the terrible hours ahead of us, and it was a startlingly real possibility that every man in the camp, every soul one looked upon, would soon be dead. This, I know, was a constant thought of mine, enough that my dreams were wracked nightly by the burden of it. And perhaps even more than my own death, my nightmares spelled the chance of Captain Ono and the few other medical personnel all being killed, and that among the scores of the horribly wounded, I’d be the lone surviving medical officer, the last hope of the broken and dying.

Corporal Endo seemed all too beleaguered to me, and I began to guide him quickly past the commander’s hut, his gaze almost rigidly locked upon the shuttered windows. We had gone past the hut by some thirty paces when all of a sudden he grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

“Lieutenant…”

I looked up and saw that the door was open, and that the figure of a man stood out on the open porch, his hands perched on his hips. He seemed to be surveying the darkened compound, and the corporal and I both stopped in our tracks, trying not to make a sound. From the silhouette it was clearly Colonel Ishii, with his thick torso and bowleggedness and the distinctly squared-off shape
of his head. He was naked, and he was sonorously inhaling and exhaling, deeply up from the belly. From our angle we could glimpse as well inside the two-room house, but the only sight was a clothes trunk against a far wall and a few lighted candles set atop it. There was no indication of anybody else being inside, no sight of the girls or the house servant or Captain Ono, who besides being the head physician was also something of a confidant to the commander, his personal surgeon and counsel. Many evenings after supper Captain Ono could be seen on his way to the commander’s house, and when directives from central headquarters in Rangoon had come concerning preparations for the inevitable enemy offensive, the doctor was always included in the briefings.

The commander himself was someone whom these days people might call a “health nut,” as some of his ministrations were quite peculiar. For example, he would exercise vigorously in the early mornings, an intense regimen of calisthenics and stretches that would challenge a seasoned drill sergeant. Following this, sweating like a plow ox, he would allow himself to be bitten by descending swarms of mosquitoes, as a way of bleeding himself. Out behind the hut, he would cover only his face and neck and let the ravenous insects feed freely on his belly and chest and back. One would assume he’d have suffered terribly from malaria, as a large number of the men did, but he seemed perfectly fit right up to the day we received news of the Emperor’s surrender, when he committed ritual suicide. Captain Ono made it a point to describe the commander’s daily methods to me, I believe, in the hope that I would find them intimidating and remarkable, and back then I probably did consider them so. I was deeply impressionable and unassuming and full of dread, knowing little else but whatever was provided to me by professional men like the doctor, who were authoritative and
born into an elite caste, and who seemed the very incarnation of our meticulously constructed way of life.

The colonel took a step down. He was a bit wobbly. I thought he had seen us, and I was ready to address him to avoid seeming as if we were trying to conceal ourselves in the darkness, but he bent down to peer beneath the floorboards of the hut, which was set up off the ground on short posts. After a moment’s inspection he stood up and began speaking down toward the crawl space, his tone eerily gentle, as if he were speaking to a niece who was misbehaving.

“There is little reason to hide anymore. It’s all done now. It’s silly to think otherwise. You will come out and join your companions.”

There was no answer.

“You must come out sometime,” Colonel Ishii went on, taking another tack. His effort seemed almost ridiculous, given that any other commander would have simply had soldiers retrieve her, or just shot her dead with his pistol, and perhaps on another evening the colonel himself would have done exactly that. “I suppose it’s more comfortable under there than out in the jungle. But you know there is food inside now. The cook has made some rice balls. The others are eating them as we speak.”

“I want to be with my sister,” a young voice replied miserably. She was speaking awkwardly in Japanese, with some Korean words mixed in. “I want to know where she is. I won’t come out until I know.”

“She’s with the camp doctor,” the colonel said. “To have her ear looked at. The doctor wanted to make sure she was all right.”

The girl obviously didn’t know the doctor was the same man who had struck down her sister. There was a pause, and the colonel simply stood there in his blunt nakedness, the strangest picture of tolerance.

The girl’s voice said, “I promised my mother we would always stay together.”

“You are good to try to keep such a promise,” the colonel said to her. “But how can you do so from down there? Your sister will be back with you tomorrow. For now you must come out, right at this moment. Right at this moment. I won’t wait any longer.”

Something must have shifted in his voice, a different note only she could hear, for she came out almost immediately, slowly scuttling forward on her hands and knees. When she reached the open air she didn’t get up, staying limply crumpled at his feet. She was naked, too. The clouds had scattered and the moon was now apparent, and in the dim violet light the captured sight of them, if you did not know the truth, was almost a thing of beauty, a scene a painter might conjure to speak to the subject of a difficult love. The colonel offered his hand and the girl took it and pulled herself up to her feet, her posture bent and tentative as though she were ill. She was crying softly. He guided her to the step of the porch, and it was there that her legs suddenly lost power and buckled under her. The colonel took hold of her wrist and barked at her to get up, the sharp report of his voice sundering the air. She didn’t respond or move, but lay there feebly, her head lolling against the step. She was sobbing wearily for her sister, whose name, I thought she was saying, was “Kkutaeh,” which meant bottom, or last.

The colonel made a low grunt and jerked her up by her wrist, and it looked as if he were dragging a skinned billy goat or calf, her body thudding dully against the step and then being pulled across the rough planking of the porch. He got her inside and a peal of cries went up from an unseen corner of the room. He shouted for quiet with a sudden, terrible edge in his voice. All at once he had become livid, and he shoved the girl with his foot as though he
were going to push-kick her across the floor. Meanwhile the sentry had heard the outburst and ran around to the front, instinctively leveling his rifle on us as he came forward. I raised my hands and the sentry yelled, “Hey there!,” and I realized that Corporal Endo, inexplicably, had begun to sprint back into the darkness of the jungle.

I barked, “Don’t shoot!” but the sentry couldn’t help himself and fired once in our direction. The shot flew past well above me, though I could feel it bore through the heavy air. There was little chance that it could have hit the corporal, or anyone else. The sentry seemed shocked at his own reaction and dropped his rifle. I was relieved, but the colonel had already come out of the house, this time a robe hastily tied around his middle, a shiny pistol in his hand. Over the sentry’s shoulder I could see the colonel take aim from the veranda and fire twice. It was like watching the action through a very long lens, when everything is narrowed and made delicate. Then a questioning, half-bemused expression flitted across the sentry’s face, and he fell to the ground like a dropped stone.

The colonel walked over and motioned to me with the gun to let down my hands. He had recognized me as the doctor’s assistant. “Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said unseverely, not even looking down at the sentry’s body, which he practically stepped over as he approached me. I knew the man was dead, as one of the bullets had struck him in the neck and torn away a section of carotid artery. The ground was slowly soaking up his blood. The colonel said, “You are a medical man, are you not?” Up close the colonel was more inebriated than I had surmised, his sleepy eyes opaque. “You can help me then, I hope, with a small confusion I was having this evening.”

He paused, as if trying to remember what he was saying, and in
the background I could hear the chaotic shouts of orders and footfalls coming from the main encampment. I replied, “However I am able, sir.”

“What? Oh yes. You can aid me with something. I was being entertained this evening, as you may know, and it occurred to me that there was a chance of…a complication.”

“Sir?”

“You know what I’m talking about, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, though in fact I had no idea.

“They are young, after all, and likely fertile.” He paused a moment and said as if an aside, “And of course, being virginal, that can’t protect them, can it?”

“No, sir.”

“Of course not,” he concurred, as if I had asked him the question. His ignorance surprised me. The colonel was in his mid-thirties, which is not old in the world, but late in the war he was practically ancient. He crossed his arms in an almost casual pose, though he kept a tight hold on the pistol, which poked out beneath one folded arm. “And yet one grows up with all kinds of apocrypha and lore, yes? I mean us men. A young woman naturally receives guidance and training about such matters, estimable information. While it seems we are left to our own methods, each by each and one by one. To our own devices, yes?”

Immediately I thought of Corporal Endo and his interests, and then with alarm wondered where he was now, but I couldn’t answer, as a squad of armed men came running up to us. The colonel waved them forward. The squad leader, a corporal, seemed shocked to find the lifeless body of the sentry lying in awkward repose by our feet.

“Remove him,” the colonel said, prompting the corporal to
order two of his men to lift up the corpse, which they hefted by the armpits and calves. Someone gathered the dropped rifle and the bloody cap. Two other men were to remain as sentries. Soon enough they were bearing the body off, the assemblage disappearing beyond the pale ring of lamplight about the hut. I realized then that neither the colonel nor I had spoken a word of explanation to the men, nor had any of them even whispered a question.

“You’ll look after this,” the colonel said to me matter-of-factly, referring, I understood immediately, to the death report, which was filled out whenever time and circumstances allowed. He was not requesting that I cover for him or whitewash the situation in any way; rather, he was simply reminding me of one of my usual duties, as though not wanting me to be remiss. The next day I would note in the necessary form that the sentry, a Private Ozaki, was shot dead by a forward sniper who was sought out by our patrols but never found.

I bowed curtly and the colonel acknowledged me with a grunt. I waited while he ascended the low porch and went inside. As I started back for my own tent, I could hear him speaking again, in a calm, unagitated tone, the same way he had spoken to the one of them who had hidden beneath the house. “Look at my girls,” I heard him saying, repeating himself slowly, like a father who has been away much too long. “Look here at my girls.”

BY MID-MORNING
the day was already muggy and bright. I hadn’t gone in search of Corporal Endo the night before, nor did I have any interest in doing so amid the usual early bustle of the day. No one knew he had instigated the shooting, or that he had even been present, and when it was announced that patrols would be increased to prevent further sniping, I hoped he would keep quiet and let the event pass. Colonel Ishii, whom I saw during the morning exercise, seemed fresh and fit. I had not confided in anyone, for there was no one to confide in. But in truth I was more than just annoyed with the corporal. In fact I felt sure my association with him—and indeed, my continued tolerance—should come quickly to an end. I didn’t care about him, or perhaps closer to the truth was that I didn’t wish to care about him any longer. He had plumbed the limits of my patience, and I was sure I should be done with him.

I was also aware that a half-humorous notion about me had begun circulating about the camp. It was not so awful, but embarrassing all the same; namely, it was being joked that I was
intending to become a professional mental therapist or psychologist after the war, and that I was employing Corporal Endo as a “practice patient.” Of course I found the jest insulting, and to know my name was being snickered about the infantrymen’s tents, but it was particularly shaming when Captain Ono casually mentioned during an inspection of the ward that I might take an interest in one of the soldiers who had just come in from the front, who had not a scratch on his body but could no longer see or hear or speak. Captain Ono had effected all manner of examination on the man, and finally ended up restraining his arms and legs and beating him on the feet with a switch. But even this had not worked, for the man just moaned torturedly from his throat, as though he were drowning in the pain.

“Why don’t you sit with him awhile, Lieutenant,” he had said thickly after that, his brow crinkled. “Perhaps it’s only you who can reach him now.”

At the time I was almost sure the captain was being serious with me, and in fact I spent a quiet hour that evening at the man’s bedside, inspecting his stoic face for the least indication of sentience. It was soon thereafter I understood that the doctor had been teasing me, and I felt, for a moment, the sharp heat of anger and shame. I was a young man, yes, but one of some learning and modest position as a junior officer, and if it was true that I was trained in a military school, not having his kind of university pedigree, it still seemed somewhat unfair of the doctor to belittle me so before a ward of enlisted men. I tried not to give further quarter to the feeling. The doctor was highly skilled and noted throughout our theater of operations for his innovations in field surgery, and I hoped that I could learn from him techniques and procedures that my textbooks and manuals could only hint at, such as his
preliminary forays into open-heart surgery. In this sense it could be said that I genuinely admired Captain Ono, even held him up as a model for my future career. I had known from the first moment I met him that he was a person of singular resolve and even hardness, particularly when it came to the disposition of what must always be for him the patent, terrible frailty of his patients and others under his care, but I assumed it was his necessary mode, his own way of focus and concentration.

So it was with the girls whose charge he had left to me. And they were left to me, just as the captain had instructed, immediately after the commander was finally done with them. In the afternoon, I was the one who ordered that they be housed temporarily in one of the barracks, displacing a handful of men for several nights. The final receiving house was nearly completed, being built by a crew of native tradesmen who were following specifications provided by Captain Ono. I was to oversee this as well, but there was little left to be done.

In fact, it was all but finished. The comfort house, which is how it was known, was a narrow structure with five not-quite-square doorways, each with a rod across the top for a sheet for privacy. The whole thing was perhaps as long as a large transport truck, ten or so meters. There were five compartments, of course, one for each of the girls; these were tiny, windowless rooms, no more than the space of one and a half tatami mats, not even wide enough for a tall man to lie across without bending his knees. In the middle of each space was a wide plank of wood, fashioned like a bench seat but meant for lying down on, with one’s feet as anchors on either side. At the other end, where the shoulders would be, the plank was widest, and then it narrowed again for the head, so that its shape was like the lid of a coffin. This is how they would receive the men.
After their duties were over, they would sleep where they could in the compartment. They would take their meals with the older Japanese woman, who was already living in her own small tent behind the comfort house. She would prepare their food and keep hold of their visitors’ tickets and make sure they had enough of the things a young woman might need to keep herself in a minimally respectable way.

I alone was responsible for their health. Captain Ono had briefed me fully. Well-being aside, I was to make certain they could perform their duties for the men in the camp. The greatest challenge, of course, would be venereal disease. It was well known what an intractable problem this was in the first years of fighting, particularly in Manchuria, when it might happen that two of every three men were stricken and rendered useless for battle. In those initial years there had been houses of comfort set up by former prostitutes shipped in from Japan by Army-sanctioned merchants, and the infection rate was naturally high. Now that the comfort stations were run under military ordinances and the women not professionals but rather those who had unwittingly enlisted or been conscripted into the wartime women’s volunteer corps, to contribute and sacrifice as all did, the expectation was that the various diseases would be kept more or less in check. Certainly, it was now the men who were problematic, and there was stiff penalty and corporal punishment for anyone known to be infected and not seeking treatment. I had one of the sergeants announce final call for the camp in this regard, as I hoped to quarantine anyone who might infect a girl, who in turn would certainly transmit it back among the men many times over, but it was very close to the time of their visits and only two men came forward complaining of symptoms, both of whom were in the ward already.

I was also to examine the girls and state their fitness for their duties. I was surprised that Captain Ono had given me this responsibility, though of course he had already completed an exam for the personal sake of the commander. But as there were procedural considerations, it was up to me to ask the older woman, who was called Mrs. Matsui, to bring them to the examination and surgery room of the ward.

I had put on a doctor’s coat and was sitting at the desk with several folders of paperwork that needed completing for the Captain. I usually did this work for him, though it wasn’t part of my stated tasks, but that afternoon I found I had no real patience for it. The intense heat of the day seemed to bound and treble inside the room, and the stiff white coat was yet another layer atop my regular uniform. I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day, because of the sticking temperature and the crabbed feeling of an incipient illness, which I knew was due partly to my shock at events of the previous night, as well as the anticipation of this present moment, which should be nothing at all for an experienced medic but was unnerving all the same.

The woman, Mrs. Matsui, poked her head through the open doorway and bowed several times quickly. She was pale and pock-faced and dressed in the tawdry, over-shiny garb of a woman who had obviously once been in the trade. She was clearly, too, a full Japanese, and the fact of this bothered me now, to see her cheapness against the line of modest girls that trailed her.

They were all fairly young, ranging from sixteen to twenty-one. At the head of them was a tallish girl with a dark mole on her cheek. She was pretty, in an easily recognizable sort of way, with arched eyebrows and a full, deep-hued mouth. The two beside her were more retiring in their appearance, their eyes averted from me
and everything else; they seemed to be clinging to each other, though they weren’t touching at all. The next girl, I realized, was the one who had hidden beneath the commander’s hut. She had firm hold of the hand of the girl behind her, her eyes unfocused, as if she were blind.

Her sister, whom I had not seen up close until then, was the only one of them who gazed directly at me. She did not stare or hold my sight; rather she met my eyes as someone might on any public bus or trolley car, though her regard was instantly fixing and cold. She had a wide, oval-shaped face, and there was still some faint bruising along the side of her jaw and upper neck. She had been housed with the captain while the rest of them had gone on to entertain the commander; the doctor had reserved her, implying to the commander that she was not a virgin like the others, who would offer him the salubrious and then other ineffable effects of his taking their maidenhood, which to a soldier is like an amulet of life and rebirth.

But in the end, I believe, it was not that the doctor thought her to be simply beautiful. For it is a fact well evidenced that there were many attractive, even lovely girls that one could have as a soldier of an occupying army. It was a more particular interest than that, and one I think perhaps he himself could not (and would not) describe. Like a kind of love, which need not be romantic or sexual but is a craving all the same, the way a young boy can so desire something that he loves it with the fiercest intensity, some toy or special ball, until the object becomes him, and he, it. Early the first morning after the girls’ arrival I chanced upon him going into this very room, and in passing the closed door I heard him asking questions of someone concerning parentage and birthplace and
education. A female voice had answered him clearly and evenly, and I knew it must be the fifth girl, the one called “Kkutaeh.”

I told Mrs. Matsui to ready them for examination and she ordered them to remove their clothing. They were slow to do so and she went up to the girl with the mole and tore at her hair. The girl complied and the rest of them began to disrobe. I did not watch them. I stood at the table with a writing board and the sheets of paper for recording their medical histories and periodic examinations. There was special paperwork for everything, and it was no different for the young women of the comfort house. The girl with the mole came to me first. I nodded to the table and she lifted herself up gingerly. She was naked and in the bright afternoon light coming from the slatted window her youthful skin was practically luminous, as though she were somehow lit from inside. For a moment I was transfixed by the strangeness of it all, the sheer exposed figure of the girl and then the four others who stood covering themselves with their hands, their half-real, half-phantom nearness, which I thought must be like the allure of pornography for Corporal Endo. But then Mrs. Matsui came around the front of the girl on the exam table and without prompting from me spread her knees apart.

“You’ll probably see they’re all a bit raw today,” she said hoarsely, like a monger with her morning’s call. “Nothing like the first time, right? But you’ll believe me when I say they’ll be used to it by tomorrow.”

Her cloying tone and familiarity put me off, but the woman was right. The girl’s privates were terribly swollen and bruised, and there were dried smears of crimson-tinged discharge on her thighs and underside. Mrs. Matsui had just delivered the four of them
from the commander’s hut, and the faint, sour odors of dried sweat and spilled rice wine and blood and sexual relations emanated from the girl. When I reached to examine her more closely she curled her hips away and began whimpering and crying. Mrs. Matsui held her steady but I didn’t touch her then, nor did I do anything else but visually inspect the others. Their condition was more or less the same. I was just beginning to examine Kkutaeh, the only girl who had not been with the commander, when the door quickly swung open. It was the doctor, in his fatigues, entering the room.

“What do you think you are doing?” he said sharply, staring at the girl on the table.

I answered, “The required examinations, Captain. I’ve nearly completed them, and I’ll have the records for you shortly—”

“I don’t need
records
from you,” he said, not in the least hiding his irritation. He pushed Mrs. Matsui aside, then took hold of the girl by the back of her neck. Her shoulders tightened with his touch. He was applying subtle pressure, enough so that she was wincing slightly, though not letting herself cry out.

“I need order from you, Lieutenant. Order and adherence to our code. And yet this is a challenge. Time and again, what appears to elude you is the application of principle. It is never how one acts or reacts. It is never simply efficiency. The true officer understands this. It is the keeping to certain standards which is the only guide. You examined them, yes. But in doing so you abandoned far more important principles. This examination room, for example, is a disgrace and besmirchment upon our practice.” He nodded at the clothes in piles on the floor, the scattered sandals; in the course of the examinations I had completely neglected to tell the girls they could put their clothes on again.

“You perform your duties but your conduct is often still so
middling. In truth, I remain unconvinced of you. Now I am to prepare for a procedure this afternoon. You’ll get them out of here and ready for receiving the officer corps tonight. The comfort house is done?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then go to the rest of it, Lieutenant.”

“Captain, sir,” I said, glancing at the girl beside him. She was stony-faced and still grimly silent. “I have not yet completed the examinations.”

The doctor was staring at the girl on the table, not acknowledging my statement. Already he seemed to consider us gone. He was a person most centrally focused, someone who—in his own mind—could almost will his thoughts and desires to bear upon the wider truth. Of course it is often in the military, where one has fixed standing, that this can be seen, but in the case of the doctor I was sure he was as unimpeachable in civilian life as he was here, in this, his surgeon’s room. He had a wife and young child back in Japan, whose attractive portraits on his desk had been steady witness to scores of bloody procedures and assays and mortal extinguishments, and I thought surely that any other man would have long retired them to the confines of a drawer or private cabinet. But now here he had the girl, Kkutaeh, unclothed on the table, and was pushing her to lie down on her back, his drawn, humorless face hovering above her shallow belly.