Above the East China Sea: A Novel (29 page)

The lieutenant’s gaze followed my beautiful, bereaved cousin until he caught sight of my sister and saw what I saw: a magically pretty girl whose eyes sparkled and whose cheeks flushed pink as a rose. His bow was especially deep and respectful. My sister returned it, then tilted her head down and to the side, swept her hand with all the fingers pressed together so that it resembled the ivory petal of a lotus blossom, and bade the lieutenant to enter in a voice soft and high as a geisha’s. My heart burst with pride; no Japanese noblewoman could have been more elegant than my sister.

Nakamura seated himself. We all knelt in a circle around him and
watched the lieutenant drink his cup of tea. He slurped loudly to express his appreciation and compliment my sister, finishing with a sigh of satisfaction, as if he’d just consumed a banquet. Using only the tips of his joined fingers, he carefully passed the empty can his tea had been served in back to Hatsuko and asked, “If it pleases you, I should like to sing a song to express my gratitude.”

We all clapped and begged him to sing, but he waited for Hatsuko’s permission. Eyes downcast, she nodded and the lieutenant sang.

Nakamura’s voice, though slightly nasal, was pleasant enough. When he finished, all of us except Mitsue clapped and begged for another. I was pleased to see that Nakamura’s eyes instantly leaped to Hatsuko’s face to seek her approval. “Hatsuko, what do you think? Would you like another
gunka
to bolster our spirits?”

“Of course,” she implored, her voice, filled with new, high trills and a soft breathiness, sounding strange to me. “Your patriotic songs are a gift to us. They are strengthening our love for our emperor.”

“As you wish,” Nakamura answered in the old-fashioned, formal way that many officers adopted. His voice, however, was strong and direct as he sang.

After singing all the
gunka
he knew, the lieutenant asked, “Would you girls like to see proof that we Japanese are destined to rule the world?”

We all competed to show who could agree with the most eagerness.

Nakamura waited for us to quiet down; then he carefully plucked an empty cigarette package from his pocket and held it up triumphantly. In the center of the small white package was the perfect red circle of a rising sun.

“Lucky. Strike.”
Nakamura touched each foreign word as he pronounced it. “Don’t you see? Even the enemy begs for our good fortune and power.”

We bounced on our knees, clapped and shouted, “
Banzai!
” considerably buoyed up by the lieutenant’s proof of our invincibility. Before he left, his gaze swept the dark corners of the cave until he found Mitsue; when their eyes met, he bowed and my cousin dipped her head. I guessed that Mitsue must have told him about her dead fiancé and he was showing his respect for a fellow soldier in arms.

When Nakamura was gone, all the girls except my sister and Mitsue whispered and giggled like silly children. Hatsuko merely sat with a faraway look on her face, so transported that she even stopped scratching. Mitsue simply sat apart, looking sad. I chastised myself for forcing her into my scheme; obviously Nakamura had brought up painful memories of her dead sweetheart. Still, I went to sleep that night happy that my plan had worked so well. A Lucky Strike, indeed!

TWENTY-EIGHT

Over the next few weeks, Lieutenant Nakamura became a regular visitor to our cave. We needed the bit of cheer he offered, because our work in the wards grew ever more difficult and distasteful. The rooms carved into rock became crowded with patients, both those who had been wounded in battle and the far greater numbers disabled by typhus, dysentery, malaria, and dengue fever. When all the bed planks had been filled, patients were laid directly on the rocky ground. There was no medicine for any of them. No sulfa for infections. No morphine for pain.

They all suffered, but the worst were the tetanus and gangrene patients. Those afflicted with tetanus would bite anything they could lay their hands on, whether it was a rag or another soldier. In the end, their jaws locked together so tightly that it was a struggle to pour a
thin stream of water into their mouths, and they groaned deep in their throats as thirst drove them mad. The gangrene patients screamed in unbearable agony as their limbs turned dark and swelled grotesquely, before they finally went rigid and silent.

Even as conditions deteriorated, and their patients needed them more than ever, the regular army nurses from Japan, like Tanaka, took to disappearing with greater and greater frequency. While their patients suffered unendurable agonies, those nurses simply left the wards and gathered secretly in a distant supply closet to smoke cigarettes that they rolled out of newspaper and pine needles. If one of us had the temerity to disturb them to ask whether they would administer an injection or change a dressing, these hard women, many of whom had been prostitutes before enlisting, would subject us to the harshest of tongue-lashings. None harsher than the ones delivered by Head Nurse Tanaka.

No one dared bother Tanaka because of the rumors that she poisoned patients she found too disruptive. I tried not to believe this, but couldn’t help thinking of how the young private with dysentery who couldn’t control his bowels and constantly soiled himself had died so suddenly in his sleep. As had the gruff old sergeant who bellowed all day long for bedpans, water, food. As had the haughty captain who called Head Nurse a fat slob because, while all her patients were wasting away, she kept getting suspiciously plumper and plumper. He accused her of stealing her patients’ food and threatened to have her investigated. That night he, too, died in his sleep.

I could dismiss the rumors that Head Nurse Tanaka was the cause of these deaths, until the roof of our cave collapsed. All of us escaped the cave-in except for a senior girl, Hanashiro, who was one of our best student nurses, renowned for her unfailing cheerfulness. We all worked furiously, bloodying our hands dragging rocks off of her, and, though we did succeed in saving our friend’s life, her brain had been damaged. From then on, Hanashiro would wander around with a vacant smile on her face, unable to work or even speak, squatting in front of us with no shame and relieving herself whenever she felt the need.

In honor of the person Hanashiro had once been, we were all, even the officers, kind to her. The only one she seemed to bother was Head Nurse Tanaka, who would rail on about what a disgrace she was and how taxing it was that we all had to watch over Hanashiro so she
wouldn’t hurt herself, and that, generally, she was a menace to the group. No one paid Head Nurse any attention, since she was always complaining about something. But one night, when Tanaka was on duty, Hanashiro, who was perfectly healthy except for her brain, died in her sleep. From then on I stayed as far from Head Nurse as I could.

TWENTY-NINE

When we return to the front gate of the golf course, we find a group of a dozen Okinawans waiting. Jake exchanges a few words with them, then holds the gate open for the pilgrims who’d texted to let him know they were waiting to enter. “Go on ahead back to the house and get some sleep,” he tells me. “I’ve got to take them to the shrine, then lock up after they leave. It’ll be a while.”

In the guest room, I clear a bunch of Jake’s little sister’s dolls off the futon. They look like a tribe of Barbies crossed with space aliens fully accessorized with tiny shoes and purses. I lie down, certain that I won’t be able to sleep.

A second later, I’m wandering through a vast open meadow where bison, giraffes, and white cats wearing red capes nibble at the grass. I glance down, and at my feet is the gray-speckled linoleum that covered the floors of one of the three schools I attended when we moved so much during fourth grade. When I look back up, I’m standing in front of the class being introduced as the new girl. An iguana in a tall cage stares at me, one eye goggling forward, the other pivoting around to take in the back view.

Codie appears and begins brushing her hair with a tiny silver fork. With each stroke, her curls and frizz straighten until her hair flows like satin around her head. In the next instant, our grandmother takes the fork and is combing the curls back into Codie’s hair. It is not the grandmother I knew, though. Instead, it’s Grandma Setsuko as she was in my favorite old photo of her. She’d told us that the black-and-white had been taken at an Okinawan club in the late sixties, early seventies,
sometime around when she met my grandfather Eugene. Her eyes are thickly lined; her hair is ratted into a bubble that rises behind the shiny band of ribbon holding it back from the pouf of bangs that fall over her broad forehead. She is planted front and center, gazing adoringly up at the group playing onstage. They’re the band from the cover of her favorite album.

Always embarrassed by the gap between her front teeth, my grandmother hides most of her smile with a hand in front of her mouth. Still, the corners of her lips show on either side of her hand. They’re painted with a lipstick so pale they seem white. She could have been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend instead of Eugene Overholt’s. That’s the grandmother I see in my dream, who lifts up a curly, unstraightened section of Codie’s hair, lowers her head into the unruly curls, and kisses my sister’s wavy hair as if each strand were a beautiful flower with a heavenly scent.

“When are you coming back?” I ask my sister, eager to work out the details so that she can return.

Before Codie can answer, brown water splashes against my ankles and the taste of caramelized sugar fills my mouth. In that instant information way that dreams have, I know that the droplets come from bullets being shot into the puddle of mud at my feet. I know that my sister and I are being hunted and we have to find safety before the planes come again. I grab her hand and pull her along. But no matter how fast we run, the bullets stitching a deadly seam in the earth follow right behind us. The seam fills with blood, but I know that if I can only hang on to my sister until the bullets make ten thousand red stitches, we will be saved. We run harder, but the dirt turns to mud that sucks away our frantic strides until we’re not moving at all.