A Gesture Life (24 page)

“You should go back now to get your things,” I then told her. “But return here directly.”

She nodded and stepped down from the table. I locked the cabinet of instruments and supplies, hearing the rustle of her rough-spun trousers as she was leaving the room. Normally I should have had to escort her, to prevent a possible escape, but there was nothing but hilly jungle and forest for many kilometers. One of the others had already attempted to leave after the first rounds with the officers but was eventually found some days later (and quite nearby), dehydrated and half-starved, and when she was recovered she was beaten very badly, as an example to the others.

But when I turned, K was still standing in the doorway. She had been watching me as I put away the supplies.

And then she said, quite plainly: “You are a Korean.”

“No,” I told her. “I am not.”

“I think you are,” she said, not looking away as she spoke. I didn’t know what to say. She sounded much more confident and mature in her own tongue than when she mumbled and half-whispered in Japanese. And there was an uprightness about her posture. Certainly I had an impulse to order her to be silent, harshly command that she leave immediately. But I felt unsettled by her forward bearing, as I was at once amazed and strangely intimidated.

I replied: “I have lived in Japan since I was born.”

She nodded and said slowly, as if testing my willingness, “But I think, sir, that most Japanese would never bother to learn to speak Korean as well as you do. And if they did know how, they wouldn’t
reveal it. There are many Japanese settlers where my family lives, merchants and administrators and police, and this is how I know. When you first spoke outside, I thought it was my younger brother talking to me again. Your voice is just like his.”

I did not wish to go on conversing with her any longer, and yet I found myself listening to her closely, for it was some time since I had heard so much of the language, the steady, rolling tone of it like ours and not, theirs perhaps coming more from the belly than the throat. It was almost pleasing to hear the words, in a normal register. But her talk was also not vulgar or harshly provincial-sounding as was the other girls’; she was obviously educated, and quite well, and this compelled me even more, though it shouldn’t have. She seemed to sense this, and remained where she was standing, waiting for me to say something. I cleared my throat, but nothing would come out.

She then said to me, “I thought there was something different about you. I think you are not like everyone else.”

“I don’t know what you’re speaking of,” I said. “I’m a medical officer of the Imperial Forces, and there’s nothing else to be said. Yes, you are partly correct. I spoke some Korean as a boy. But then no more. Such things are not easily forgotten, and so I have the ability still. But this is none of your concern.”

“My Korean name is Kkutaeh,” she said, speaking over me. Her expression had brightened, her face wonderful to behold. “But I never really wanted the name. I’m the youngest of four daughters, so you can see how I got it. May I ask yours?”

“I don’t have one,” I told her immediately. But this was not exactly true. I’d had one at birth, naturally, but it was never used by anyone, including my real parents, who, it must be said, wished as much as I that I become wholly and thoroughly Japanese. They had of course agreed to give me up to the office of the children’s
authority, which in turn placed me with the family Kurohata, and the day the administrator came for me was the last time I heard their tanners’ raspy voices, and their birth-name for me.

I said to her, “This is not necessary conversation.”

“I simply want to talk with you.”

“We have talked enough,” I told her, sitting down at the desk, with my back turned to her. “You’ll go now and get your things. When you return, you’ll remain in the other room, where I left you the blankets for your bedding. Please don’t disturb me further. I have much work to do today.”

“For Captain Ono?” she said.

“I have many duties, in various areas.”

“Will you tell me what he wants from me?” she said now, a little desperately. When I turned she was but an arm’s length away. I could smell the lingering air of a musky perfume, which Mrs. Matsui required the girls to wear. But compared to the sharp, sour reek of the men, even the tawdry scent was transporting. She asked, “Why has he kept me from what the others must do?”

“What are you talking about? You haven’t yet been at the comfort house?”

“I have not,” she answered. For the first time she looked somewhat frightened. “Last night I was to visit the commander, and so he had to send me. But before that the captain has always ordered Matsui-san to keep me in our tent. Sometimes he has her bring me to his private quarters, when he examines me. He runs his hands over my body and examines me everywhere. But that is all. He has kept me from the comfort house.”

“You are lying to me.”

“I would not lie about such a thing. You can ask Matsui-san. I would rather be killed, like my sister, before going to the comfort
house. But I am growing afraid of what the captain will do with me. It can only be horrible, I am certain. He is the only one who truly frightens me, and I think he must have a terrible plan. Forgive me for speaking like this, but you have a gentle character to your face. You seem kind and careful, and I feel I can say these things to you.”

I could not believe Captain Ono had ordered what she described, even if he thought she was “dangerous,” which I could not at all see. I wondered, too, if the commander knew of this arrangement, or whether he would find it (as I or anyone would) to be an egregious mark on the captain’s
self-respect,
at least in the Japanese sense of the term, which has little to do with pride or one’s rights but with the efforts a person should make to be viewed well by his comrades. Yet I was not about to question the captain in front of her, or show my own hesitance. It was all very disturbing, though in truth a large part of me had indeed begun to sense the irregularity of his requests and the broadening license he seemed to be taking in respect to the camp. The commander, as noted, was hardly evident anymore, and it was Captain Ono who was increasingly charging and addressing the corps of the men; it was his issuances that were being enacted and followed, with Colonel Ishii appearing these days only intermittently before the officers on the veranda of his hut, often pink-faced and slow of speech.

“The captain must have his reasons,” I said to her, “which I am not privy to and would not speak about if I were. I am responsible for certain medical duties and that is all. I need know nothing about this matter. Furthermore, I think you should not dwell on the present circumstance. Please let me finish. If you are not serving at the comfort house, then there are undoubtedly other duties awaiting you. Whether they will be better or worse no one but Captain Ono can say. And just as with the rest of us here, a fate of life or
death awaits you; in this regard, as the commander once said to us, it is best if we all take an accepting path. This way destiny can find its right station.”

“Is that why the soldier was executed?” she asked. “Because he was resistant?”

“He was ill of mind,” I said, trying not to remember Corporal Endo’s adolescent, pockmarked face. “And obviously dangerous. You should be thankful for what was ordered for him.”

“I am only thankful for what he did. I am happy for my sister now. I don’t cry for her anymore. And I am hoping that someone like you will do the same for me. That is why I ask if you know what the captain wants. If I’m to have the same misery, then I would beg you, as a countryman, to take your gun from your holster and put me down right now.”

“I am not your countryman,” I said to her, pushing my chair back as I rose. “And I will certainly do nothing of the kind. Please stand back now.”

“But what if I were attacking you?” she said, stepping forward. “What would you do then? If I took one of those surgeon’s blades from the cabinet, and I rushed at you with it, you would have to, yes? You would have to shoot me.”

“I will not be shooting anyone,” I said to her, almost shouting, my hand hovering at my side, grazing the pistol handle. “I am a medical officer. I have never fired at another human being, much less a young woman. I hope I will never have to. You had better go now and get your things. I am ordering you to do so. I order you!”

But she stepped forward again and her hands, pale-white and small, lunged out for my throat, my eyes. I had to step aside and then strike her across the chin with the ball of my open palm, and she fell awkwardly and hit her head on the steel leg of the
examination table. I was shocked with how hard I had struck her, and it was a half-minute before I could get her to regain consciousness. When she did and opened her eyes she began crying, from the smelling salts, certainly, but also, I thought, from her realization that I had not in fact shot her dead.

“I didn’t intend to strike you so forcefully,” I said to her. “I am sorry. But you gave me no other choice.”

“Why won’t you help me?” she said, raising herself out of my grasp. Her mouth was bleeding, as she had bitten her tongue on falling. “If you have any compassion you will help me. You should know I won’t let him do anything to me. I won’t. I will kill myself before that. Or I will kill him first somehow, and then myself.”

I let her words pass as she got to her feet, and I decided that I ought to escort her to Mrs. Matsui’s tent to get her things immediately and lodge her inside the makeshift quarters. I was to lock her in the surplus supply closet, which was a lightless space with a narrow door and an iron loop for an old-style brass lock, the kind typically used on a cabinet or chest but this one quite large and heavy. The idea of confining her like this seemed somewhat more reasonable to me now, for it seemed she ought not to be allowed to roam freely about the infirmary or the camp. But it was the first time I had actually spoken at length to any of them, and then in my childhood language, which stirred me in an unexpected way. As we walked to Mrs. Matsui’s tent and back I felt a certain connection to her, not in blood or culture or kind, but in that manner, I suppose, that any young man might naturally feel for a young woman. This may sound ludicrous, and even execrable under the circumstances, but I was youthful and naive enough that I possessed much more of a kind of hard focusing than any circumspection, which one may argue has remained with me for my whole life.

But I could not lock her inside the supply closet. It had no slatted window or other means of decent ventilation, and with the rays of the afternoon sun directly hitting the outer wall, I feared she might die of heatstroke or else suffocate in the cramped, lightless space. So as often as I could during the day I allowed her to stay with me in the examination room. She was weary from not sleeping the night before and lay down on the floor while I attended to my usual administrative work for Captain Ono. I knew that he could stop by at any time, but somehow I was not thinking about that chance. I was thinking only of K. She did not speak very much, nor ask any more about me, and after some time I turned to see that she had finally fallen asleep, her knees drawn up toward her chest. I stared at her for quite a long moment, taking in her figure and loosely fisted hands and the serene, pale oval of her face, when she slowly opened her eyes. She did not otherwise move. She merely met my gaze and acknowledged it, and then fell asleep again, her breathing light and even. Or perhaps, I thought, she had never really awoken.

If someone had asked me then what I felt, I would have been unable to answer. But if I can speak for that young man now, if I can tell some part of the truth for him, I would say that he felt himself drawn to her, drawn to her very presence, which must finally leave even such a thing as beauty aside. He did not yet know it, but he hoped that if he could simply be near to her, near to her voice and to her body—if never even touching her—near, he thought, to her sleeping mind, he might somehow be found.

FOR THE BETTER PART
of the next four days our company was undisturbed, the whole of the infirmary standing empty. On those mornings I awoke especially early, finishing my camp-wide duties as soon as I was able, and by nine o’clock or so I could hurry back to my tent and get myself in decent order. With a washcloth I would swab my neck and underarms and feet and put on a clean shirt and trousers. I rubbed tooth powder along my gums and smoothed down my crewcut hair and set my cap on straight. I made sure to empty my pistol of bullets before placing it in the holster, which I would then attach to my belt. Then I would go to the officers’ mess and ask for a half-ration of cooked rice from the mess sergeant, who would nod and not say a word. When I reached the infirmary I’d wash my hands and then mix it with two rice balls I’d saved from my own meal the evening before and make them larger, dusting them with shrimp powder.

K seemed to like the pink-colored powder. Not the taste so much, I suppose, which was more salty than fishy, but the fact that
I had taken the time to prepare the rice balls for her, form them into rounded wedges and brightly color one corner. When she looked at them set on the paper in my hands she said, with an acknowledging tone, “All they need now is sesame seeds.” So on the next day I took a pinchful from Sergeant Takagawa and carefully sprinkled it over the rice balls. When she saw what I had done she didn’t take them from me right away (as hungry as she was) but took my cupped hands and held them for what seemed many seconds. I wished then that I could have found some strips of dried fish for her, or a partridge egg, or anything more substantial, for she appeared quite thin to me, the bones of her shoulders seeming pronounced all of a sudden and her eyes darkly sunken in her face. In fact there was a full ration of food for her at Mrs. Matsui’s, but she had refused to eat in the days before she was sent to the commander’s hut, and it was only in the time with me that she finally began relenting before her hunger.

I watched her eat on those mornings. We didn’t talk much, but rather sat in the threshold of the closet door, like people waiting for something to happen. In the afternoons, I had to leave her and lock her inside the closet again for a couple of hours, in order to complete the rest of my non-medical responsibilities, and by the end of them I began to feel anxious, as though the dwindling of the day was not coming fast enough. I couldn’t help but picture her in the closet, barely two meters square, lightless save for the sunlight pushing through cracks in the wall, the heat blooming and redoubling in the tight space. But it was not her so much that made me uneasy. I felt as if my lungs and heart were detaching, moving outward to the skin, and that this was all too obvious to everyone I dealt with. As I was checking the state and condition of the mess hall and the latrines and supply dump, ordering men to clean and
organize and raze (the secondary rounds of busywork in that long, odd probation from any fighting), I was almost certain that the soldiers were sensing my impatience and discomfort. They could not know, of course, the first thing about what Captain Ono had instituted, or my own increasing involvement, and yet I thought they kept meeting my gaze, not insubordinately but with a wonder and a host of questions. Who is the one we haven’t yet seen? What is he doing with her, there in the empty sick house? Has the poor medic actually fallen for her?

And what if he had? Would he have truly known it then anyway? It was nearly unimaginable, of course, to think such a relationship was possible, and yet in a strange way the doctor’s untoward interest in her, and his highly irregular orders, let me believe that my befriending her and showing her kindness and constantly thinking of her when she wasn’t present was almost ordinary. In fact, K admitted to me that she had not been menstruating some days before, that she had intentionally pricked her thumb with a wood splinter and smudged the blood around her private area and thighs, in the hope that the commander would reject her. Normally I could not have abided such information; and yet what was happening to me was so quick and sure, like one of the late autumn deluges that were sweeping in on us more and more often, the red-brown water suddenly ankle-deep, seeping in everywhere, and in the last minutes before I would go to her again I was practically trembling.

But it was really only toward dusk and evening that first day, when she was willing to talk with me, that I lost myself. I brought her some more rice, and after finishing she didn’t simply turn away and dwell in a corner until it was time for me to go. The daylight grew weak and dim and was almost gone, the exam room we were in becoming nearly dark. She asked again after my childhood and
my families, the Ohs and the Kurohatas. To my surprise, she didn’t want to know only about my first parents; in fact, the Kurohatas seemed to intrigue her more. She was curious as to how they had treated me and raised me and if they loved me the way she was sure my birth parents must have loved me, even though they’d given me up.

I told her I believed the Kurohatas felt a strong bond with me, that they had provided me with every advantage and opportunity they could muster, a respectable house and schooling and outside lessons, and had always treated me like a son.

“But I was wondering if they love you like a son.”

“I think so. But I am not sure if there is a difference,” I said, “if they have always treated me like one.”

“I suppose not,” she said, her face hardly apparent to me in the darkness. I offered to light an oil lamp, but she wanted to keep the room dark. Then she said: “Have you always treated them like parents?”

“I can only hope I have,” I replied, instantly picturing them as they stood by their German sedan and waved to me as I boarded the troop ship at Shimonoseki. But I had not felt moved enough to cry, as did some of the other young men leaving home for the first time, even at the sight of my mother weeping fitfully into a kerchief. This is not so awful a farewell, was my thought, even if I am to die. I will miss them and feel sorry for them, and if I return I will be happy.

“You sound uncertain,” she said.

“I am only uncertain of my honoring of them, which I am always failing in. But that is a child’s lifelong burden.”

“Yes,” she replied, her voice a bit softer. “You’re probably right, Lieutenant. Even for those of us who would not wish it, like me,
one of four unwanted daughters. Yet I know that if my father were to come to me tonight and ask me to wash his feet with the last drops of water I had I would not hesitate for a second.”

“You would be good to do so,” I said.

She didn’t answer immediately. All I could make out was the vaguest shape of her face.

“But he would never ask me such a thing,” she said. “He would hardly ever speak to me, you know, or to any of us girls. To him we were unaddressable, even before all the trouble that happened to our family. He might say, toward my mother or one of our servants, that I should fetch his slippers for him, or that I should be quieter, or go play outside. I didn’t sense hatred or bitterness from him. But what he had for me was mostly nothing at all, as if I were of the most distant blood. He touched me only once I can remember. A light hand touching my head, when my brother was born. I thought it would be the touch of a god.”

“Was it?”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t. Not at all.”

“But he must have been pleased at the birth of your brother.”

“Of course he was. But they became so protective of him, he and my mother both. So in turn we were to be as well, the four of us girls.”

“And you were not?”

She didn’t answer for some moments. I heard the rustle of her trousers as she shifted in her chair. “I loved him when he was born. I love him now. But I wasn’t like my sisters or my mother, that way. Perhaps it was because we were closest in age. I was never quite filial, and my father and everyone knew it. Yet my brother never minded. He’s a kindhearted boy.”

“Is he still at home?”

“I must hope so,” she answered, her voice low and quiet. “Or my sister has suffered and died for nothing.”

I told her then, “I am sorry for what happened.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking too of Corporal Endo, and how I might have helped him more. “I know you are thinking that it is better that your sister is dead, than serving in the comfort house. But it’s also possible that she could have eventually gone out of this place and had a long and decent life. She could have persevered, as I believe you will.”

K laughed then, though gently and without any tone of derision. I asked her again if I might light the oil lamp, and this time she said I should. The light came up quickly, and in the warm cast she was perfectly radiant, her round face golden and smooth. She seemed to be gazing on me somewhat somberly, as if I had just been born into the difficult world, her eyes bearing a sadness and awe.

She said softly, “You are an unlikely fellow, Lieutenant Kurohata. You should know I am grateful for at least your hopefulness. I do hear that, and I am appreciative. But please let’s rather continue what we were speaking of before, than talk of my sister, or this place. I don’t wish to think of her right now. You understand, I know.”

“Certainly, I do.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said, bowing her head, just as she might in everyday, civilian life, and I felt suddenly illicit in her presence, as though we’d slipped out of sight of our chaperons and found ourselves in a darkened, private park somewhere.

“Will you tell me more about your growing up? About your schooling? I always like to hear of what others have done.”

“It was nothing too unusual,” I told her. “I finished the upper
school and was admitted to the university, but when the war broke out I was reassigned to the military institute instead, for field medical training. Eventually I’ll go to medical school, but I am more than willing to serve in this way now. I’m looking forward to my final training, though, and becoming a surgeon.”

“What kind?”

“I’m not certain yet,” I said to her, though I already knew I’d like to specialize in something like cardiopulmonary surgery. I was afraid to speak aloud my wish, lest it never come to pass. In fact I have always been fascinated by the workings of the heart and lungs, the immortal constancy and vitality of their operation. Before I witnessed the doctor massaging the cobbler’s heart, I had in my childhood seen a butcher quickly kill a small pig, slitting its throat and then immediately cutting it open as it hung from its hind legs. The first swift cut at the sternum was for an instant strangely unbloody, and I could see the quivering heart and the pliant sacs of the lungs, still alive as the pig was for a few moments longer. Since then, I have had the thought from time to time that indeed these were the vessels of the animal’s spirit, and that perhaps our souls, too, reside not in our minds but in the very flesh of us, the frank, gray tissue which seems most remarkably possessed of the will to go on, to persist. Sometimes when one is a physician or a medic or a nurse, the physical body can take on an almost mystical presence, and whether living or not becomes a certain marker of the world, a sign of the wider circumstance. And though she was before me I thought of her again reclining in her sleep before I unlocked the door, this person in a tiny closet-room, this solitary girl in a box.

I said to her, “I’m curious. Why don’t you tell me of how you grew up? Of the schools you must have attended.”

“I don’t have much of any schooling,” she said, surprising me.
“Not of the formal kind. I went to grammar school for several years but it was decided by my father that as with my sisters I shouldn’t continue.”

“But you seem quite well educated.”

“I have tried to educate myself,” she answered, with the barest edge of pride. “So after that, all this time, I’ve studied at home, first with my older sisters, and then with my brother. He and I would climb the hill behind our house and I’d secretly read the lessons along with him, and also help him whenever I could. I don’t mean to brag, but I know more Chinese characters than anyone in my family, except, of course, for my father, who was renowned in our province when he was a younger man for his learning and his public recitations of classical poetry. My mother would tell me and my sisters of his speaking, how impressive and brilliant he was, and we grew up idolizing him. We made sure to be absolutely quiet in the mornings, when he read and smoked his pipe in the study.”

“I like to read, too,” I spoke up, “whenever I can. Mostly medical texts, of course, but literature as well. I have enjoyed some modern novels, too, especially several French and German, which I have found to be passionate and distinctly dark, in turn.”

She nodded with a half-smile, and I realized how enthusiastic I probably sounded, as though we were on an initial date, like any two university students. And yet I could hardly contain myself, able to broach such subjects after those many months of drudgery and routine and anxious inaction.

“You’re lucky to have read other kinds of books,” she said. “I’ve only read lesson books and the like, and then when my father was away I might steal into his study and try to read poetry and historical texts. He didn’t have any Western novels among his books, which I would have loved. He would never have them in his
library. He always told my brother that we should revere our Asian heritage and protect it from foreign influences, that whether Chinese or Japanese or Korean we were rooted of a common culture and mind and that we should put aside our differences and work together.”

“This is exactly our Emperor’s mandate,” I told her, “to develop an Asian prosperity, and an Asian way of life.”

“Though it seems it is to be a Japanese life,” K said, her tone somewhat ironical. But after a few moments she sensed my quiet and said to me, “I wish that we could read one of those novels you mentioned, and then talk about it. A story set in another land and time in history, with completely different sorts of people. Since I was a little girl, I always wanted to live a completely different life, even if it might be a hard one. I was sure I wasn’t meant to belong to mine. Maybe you can describe the stories to me, and we could pretend we were in their lives, those European people in the novels, involved with their own particular problems, which I am sure must be very compelling.”