A Gesture Life (23 page)

As I took my early morning walk I decided not to go directly to the infirmary but rather to detour toward the latrines, where I passed by the longish, narrow comfort house, with its five modest, unadorned doors all set in a row. It was quiet, no doubt empty, but I made my way toward the nearest door and swung it in on its
doweled hinges in order to look inside. There was no one there, as I had expected. Just the oddly shaped plank of wood, like a strange, otherworldly pew in the middle of the tiny space more like a stall than a room, the wood stained dark at its bottom end. This is what the enlisted men had been queuing for these past few afternoons. I hadn’t done so myself the week earlier, when it was the officers who visited exclusively (and still did, in the late evenings now, sometimes for the entire night), and though I was publicly saying to my fellows that I still would, I could not yet remove from my thoughts how Corporal Endo had offered to give me his ticket, how desperately he had wanted to relinquish his turn. The night before I had felt uncomfortable when I saw the men waiting in lines outside the doorways, smoking and taunting and singing to one another as they waited, their exuberance amazingly whole, unattenuated. I wished I could be just the same as they, I wished for the simple sheerness of their anticipation, whether it was born from desire or lonesomeness or fear or anger or dread.

But I did not have such a feeling, nor could I call it forth. I supposed I should be half-glad. Maybe it was because I knew enough of what would happen in the tiny room, or what would occur in turn over the long hours of the afternoon and evening. One could say it was a medical knowledge. Or so I chose to encounter it. I knew that twenty or even thirty or more would visit each one of them, and that the resulting insult would be horribly painful and ignominious. The older woman, Mrs. Matsui, had brought over one of them after their first full evening with the enlisted men; the girl could hardly walk and was bleeding freely from her genital area, which was bruised and swollen nearly beyond recognition. She was weakened from the blood loss, and I had the orderly wrap her in blankets and instructed Mrs. Matsui to give her an extra ration of
porridge from her supplies and some dried fish broth as well, which she stridently protested but could do nothing about. The girl had no other injuries, per se, though she hardly responded when spoken to or even when examined. Her eyes were lightless and nearly fixed. I had intended to keep her in the infirmary for several days, for observation and treatment and rest, but after Mrs. Matsui complained to the doctor about having to give her extra without compensation, he ordered that the girl be sent back to the comfort house immediately in order to resume her duties. As for the other three girls, he instructed me in a carefully written note, I would remove them only if they were diseased or if a malady was imminently life-threatening, and in all other instances I was to employ the least wasteful treatment and have Mrs. Matsui take them away.

Which is what I did in this case, and each subsequent time one of them was brought in, despite their terrible condition. It was not against my field training, certainly, to treat a patient in such a way with the aim of returning him to his duties as soon as possible, for in wartime it was never a question of salubrity, really not for anyone. Rather, as the doctor had already pointed out to me, it was a matter of standards, in this case to apply the level of treatment that was most appropriate for the situation, and for whom. In this schema the commander had his level, the officers theirs, the enlisted men and others yet another, and so on and so forth, until it came to the girls, who had their own. All this was inviolable, like any set of natural laws.

So as I left the cramped room and went out into the drifting mist of the morning, what struck me, what gave me pause, was the note Captain Ono had written. I would treat the girl, K, quite differently, in a manner of his private choosing, perhaps before she was even sick or afflicted. I wasn’t against the order itself, which
seemed in fact a good idea, to examine the girls regularly, with an eye toward prevention (if we were truly attempting to avoid the trouble with venereal outbreaks that had debilitated whole units of the Imperial Army), but what his order rankled against, which was the very code of all our association, and community. And yet I did not think doubtfully of the doctor for long, as I convinced myself to hold a deeper faith in his judgments, which must, I knew, be informed by years of study and experience and the accrued knowledge of his line of noblemen and scholars. He had seen something in K, I wanted to believe, he had discovered a curiosity in her, a uniqueness scientific or medical or otherwise, that attracted beyond her physical beauty, which was by any standard transcendent, somehow divine.

I stepped around the side of the comfort house and peered behind it, where Mrs. Matsui’s broad tent stood. It was quiet there, too, in its sag and tilt, and beyond it (though still close, as if they were all part of one unit) were the larger corps’ tents, spread out in less than strategic groupings. Across from these, set on a rise of land, was one of the officers’ houses, and then behind that and partly in my sight the infirmary, everything in this morning remaining unto itself, and as such appearing remarkable and unremarkable at once. Such an observation is a symptom of living but it is one especially true during wartime, when simple, real things like a tent or a house (or a body) can take on a superreality, in the acknowledgment that they can be blown literally into nothingness, instantly pass from this state to the next. This the fate of my good friend Enchi, killed in Borneo. I was given over to these thoughts, somewhat negatively so, perhaps due to the grim events that had occurred in recent days, which seemed to be accepted by the men
but none too easily. No matter what Corporal Endo had done, or the blanket necessity of his punishment, it was never a simple matter to conduct an execution of one of our own.

The image of which, I must say, I did not wish to let trouble me that placid morning, for in the solitary spell of my walk, amid the fog lightly huddled with a strange near-beauty over even this, a military camp, I tried to imagine how time itself could somehow stop, how the slumberers in Mrs. Matsui’s tent and in the tents beyond might remain just so, unto themselves, as it were, peaceable and unmolested. As if untouched by the practices of wartime. And if this hope was most egregiously naive and sentimental, which it no doubt was, I only wished for myself that I could bear whatever burdens might fall to me, that I might remain steadfast in my duty and uphold my responsibilities and not waver under any circumstance, and by whatever measure. For I feared, simply enough, to be marked by a failure like Corporal Endo’s, which was not one of ego or self but of an obligation public and total—and one resulting in the burdening of the entire society of his peers.

I have feared this throughout my life, from the day I was adopted by the family Kurohata to my induction into the Imperial Army to even the grand opening of Sunny Medical Supply, through the initial hours of which I was nearly paralyzed with the dread of dishonoring my fellow merchants, none of whom had yet approached me, or would for several weeks. It must be the question of genuine sponsorship that has worried me most, and the associations following, whose bonds have always held value for me, if not so much human comfort or warmth.

I would have spent the rest of that predawn taking a steady, lone walk about the perimeter had I not in the half-light nearly run into
Captain Ono and the girl, K. They were coming from the direction of the yard, where the commander’s hut was, approaching at an almost marching pace, the doctor tugging her along by the hand, his thin, tall frame bent resolutely. He looked quite agitated, stiff in the face, and nearly slung her to the ground when he saw me.

“Lieutenant Kurohata!” he said sharply, eyeing the women’s tent behind me. “You should be in your quarters or at the infirmary. I’ve been searching all over for you.”

“Forgive me, sir. I woke early and thought to take a walk.”

“I don’t want to hear your explanations. They mean nothing to me.”

K was half-kneeling beside him, propped on the ground by her forearm. Her thick hair had come undone, and it fell in a shiny black cascade, totally covering her face. She hadn’t yet moved. Her clothes were disheveled, her blouse crumpled and hastily knotted in front, her baggy pants torn at the side along the seam, exposing a pale sliver of skin.

“You must have a penchant for disturbing me,” the doctor said lividly. He was speaking uncomfortably close to me, his breath sour with waking. “It so happened that the commander sent his sentry to my quarters to have this one escorted back to the infirmary. He was extremely upset. It seems she’s bleeding.”

“Bleeding, sir?”

“Menstruating,”
he said. “How is this possible, Lieutenant? I entrusted you to anticipate these kinds of complications.”

“Forgive me, sir, but I’m not certain how I could have known.”

“You could have asked her, Lieutenant,” he said with some disgust. “Simply asked. You should know this wouldn’t be tolerable for the commander. He has particular requirements.”

“But what could I have done, sir? I cannot stop her menses.”

“Don’t be insolent as well as stupid!” he shouted. “You should have made certain that it was another of them who would stay the night with the commander. But as is your character, I’m afraid, you are satisfied with leaving things to tenuous chance and hope and faith in the arbitrary. If I had patience I would wonder once more about your training. And so now you see, because I couldn’t find you to escort her, and with the commander requiring a medical officer only, I had to be roused. And so you’ve made me undertake the task of an errand boy. Now you take her, for I don’t want to gaze upon her even once until you hear from me. Do you finally understand me, Lieutenant?” He marched off toward his quarters before I could reply.

The girl waited until he was completely gone before rising. She didn’t brush away the red-brown dirt from her shirt elbows and her knees, nor did she pull up the hair that was messily covering her face. The light was just now up, and I could see her dark eyes veiled through the skeins of her hair, staring out blankly across the loosely organized squalor of the camp. She was certainly not aware of me in the way she was of the doctor, with her shoulders narrowed with steel and hate. Nothing like that at all. With him gone, she was suddenly present but not present, and would hardly be a person at all were it not for her seemingly insoluble beauty, which the time in our camp had not yet worn away. I spoke to her then, asking her to follow me to the infirmary, where I had already prepared a small space for her behind a curtain in what was originally intended as a second supply area but was no longer, as we were now sorely lacking in most everything and would be until the end of the war. But she did not acknowledge me or move. She barely seemed to
breathe. I spoke again, a bit more forcefully, though to no avail, despite the fact that she understood Japanese well enough, as she’d shown on several occasions.

“Young lady,” I said finally, in her own language, “why not come with me now? The captain could return, and he won’t be pleased on finding us still here. It will make things easier for us both, which is preferable to another course.”

Her expression turned instantly, not in mood so much as aspect, the way she gazed at me as though I had magically appeared from nothingness. She searched me with her eyes but did not speak, and as I walked to the infirmary she trailed me at a few meters, not from fear or deference but more as though trying to regard the whole of me. When we reached the building I directed her to the examination and surgery room and she went in without pause. As the doctor had generally instructed me, I was to “disinfect” her, treat her for anything she might have contracted en route to us, though of course without lab equipment and certain obvious symptoms it was impossible to tell anything with certitude.

With Captain Ono, in fact, it was more a point of “purity” than disease; he was particularly fastidious in his personal practices, as he was always groomed and shaved like any town physician, and most often took his meals alone in the officers’ mess, unless he was to dine there with the commander. I was surprised that he didn’t prepare his own meals, given his attitudes, for he was often disgusted with the general state of the camp and of the men, particularly now, when conditions were less than orderly. None of it could measure up to his private standards of cleanliness. The infirmary was of course a model of hygiene and efficiency, which I was most willing to maintain for him, despite his sometimes searing criticisms in this very room (and in front of others), which were
aimed not at my specific conduct but at the legacies of my “training” and “background”—the ultimate question being of my
ethos,
as it were, a term (from his brief university schooling in England) that he seemed to employ often, for my edification.

In the surgery room, I had the girl sit up on the table. She watched me silently as I laid out the instruments, a swab and probe and speculum, with the uses of which, in all frankness, I had no experience whatsover. I had very briefly observed the doctor conducting such an examination, but my knowledge was relegated to the little I could remember of anatomy texts, with nothing of the practical. I hadn’t expected ever to treat a female in the course of my war service.

So I was ever more uncertain and confused. I also felt suddenly quite different. I had particular “feelings,” to be sure, though not necessarily or discreetly for her. At least not yet. Rather, these came in the manner in which one normally has a feeling, which I think is governed as much by context as by what is actually happening. And the context that early morning, before the camp had arisen and the day begun, before the resumption of everything having to do with wartime and soldiering, which is the grimmest business of living, was one I had not quite conceived, or experienced, before. There was no protocol I could pattern myself by. Of course one might point out that I had been with Madam Itsuda in Singapore, but there the situation was in fact wholly defined and contracted. K was a young woman, my same age—and in the almost civilian calm of the pre-reveille, with us set apart from all manner of order and rule, I realized I did not know how I should begin to comport myself with her, whether to be forceful or distant or kind. Finally I decided to put away the instruments and asked her if she had any sores or other outbreaks. She shook her head, and I decided
not to give her a shot, which would make her terribly sick. I then handed her a vial of a simple cleansing solution, which I told her to mix with clean water and flush herself with several times in the next few days.