A Gesture Life Page 21
So I went out from the Lerner’s feeling as though my spirit was being loosed into the expansive, dusky caverns of the mall, wafting upward against the bank of skylights whose grimy filter recast the bright autumn sunshine into a hazy, gauzy glow. I felt lacking, of course, bereft in the thought of my adopted daughter and her son simply staying behind in the store, as they must do at the end of every afternoon and with hardly a thought of missing anything or anyone. And I thought if I were the boy, what would I know tonight except that a silver-haired man with wiry fingers had taken me around and bought me things and seemed to know Momma well enough and had plenty of the money she did not? What would I remember by the next afternoon, except for his old man’s voice like a soft bellows, the strangely slow shuffle of his feet, his high, weak cough? For who was I to him, really, or to his mother, for that matter, but a too-late-in-coming, too-late-in-life notion of a grandfather, a sorry, open-handed figure of a patriarch, come back hungry and hopeful to people he never knew?
As such, I wouldn’t have blamed Sunny if she couldn’t help but make a scene and denounce me in front of all. Perhaps I would have welcomed it had she thought twice about my reappearance in her life and flashed me those hard eyes from her youth; that way, at least, I might not have come back to this house of mine sensing that it had grown even vaster—and me that much smaller within it—in the wake of the easy, joyful hours I spent with her son. And then my having the companion feeling, too, that my life had all at once become provisional again, the way a young man’s might be, open to possibility and choice and then vulnerability as well, a state of being I have always treated with veritable dread. For it is the vulnerability of people that has long haunted me: the mortality and fragility, of the like I witnessed performing my duties in the war, which never ceased to alarm, but also the surprisingly subject condition of even the most stolid of men’s wills during wartime, the inhuman capacities to which they are helplessly given if they have but ears to hear and eyes to see.
In my car in the parking lot, I sat for a few minutes with the engine running before I drove away. A particular sight was arresting me—and not of Tommy or Sunny. Rather, it was an otherwise insignificant notice: that group of Middle Eastern men who had opened the temporary Halloween store just the week before were already dismantling their modest, homespun window displays before Halloween had even arrived, stripping the shop. I was on my way out but stopped to watch them for a moment. They did not appear too upset or disturbed, just went about their work the same steady way as they had begun it. I felt badly for them, of course, knowing that they must be losing a decent amount of money, and that they were presumably stemming their losses with this very quick closing. They were again out in front of the place with ladders, unsticking the paper banners and signs, and I noticed inside the store a teenaged boy and girl sitting at chairs and working beside each other, the girl folding up various-sized squares of black cloth, Halloween table linens and napkins, and placing them in boxes. The young man wasn’t as serious as the girl (his twin sister?), in fact he was clearly enervated by the task and was effortfully closing up each small box, fitfully running a tape dispenser across the tops. He was talking to her, but it seemed in a haranguing sort of way, his jawbone working continuously. There was a short stack of the taped boxes beside him, which he kept kicking lightly with the side of his foot. The girl, a slender young woman with high, wide-set eyes, wouldn’t be annoyed by his attitude. She steadily made her way through a heaping, messy bin of the dark fabric. She would take each piece and shake it free of its haphazard folds and smooth it down flat on her lap, then begin to fold it again from corner to corner. The boy finished sealing a box and, having no others, watched her diffidently. She was picking another square of cloth from the bin and beginning her procedure, when he reached over and meanly picked at it, causing it to fall to her feet. She paused, then retrieved it and started over. But again he messed up her work. This happened twice more until finally the girl took the cloth and shook it open and placed it over her own head. The boy was confused. She sat there with her face covered in black, and he yelled at her once and then rose abruptly and left her.
The girl remained there, under the veil, unmoving for some time. And as I sat parked in the mostly empty lot in the long shadow of the mall, I felt I understood what she was meaning by her peculiar act, how she could repel his insults and finally him by making herself in some measure disappear. As if to provide the means of her own detachment. It was because of this notion—as well as the simple cloth itself, similar enough to the swath Sunny once found in a lacquered box in my closet—that I remembered the girl again, Kkutaeh, the one I came to call simply K, and the events in our camp in those last months of the war.
* * *
AFTER THE KILLING, and the execution of Corporal Endo, it was unusually quiet in the camp. It was then that K was placed under my care. This under direct order by the doctor, Captain Ono. He determined that she was despondent and suicidal, and possibly dangerous to others, particularly to the other girls. I had no reason to doubt his appraisal as I hadn’t observed her or spent any length of time with her, nor would I have disagreed with him had I believed otherwise. He found me one afternoon doing paperwork and called me out into the small clearing behind the infirmary, where our medical wastes and other garbage were discarded. He said gravely, “I have determined that the girl (he always called her this, never referring to any of the others) is a risk and should be quarantined periodically. What will happen is that I will let the intervals be known to you, and under my authority you will remove her from her service and examine her thoroughly.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But what shall I examine her for?”
“For infection and disease,” he said sharply, staring at me as if I were a total fool. “You will prepare and treat her if necessary. I expect her to be free of illness when she comes to me. Keep her and isolate her beforehand.”
“Here in the infirmary, sir?”
“Where else, Lieutenant! Come up with something, can’t you? For all I care you can use the surplus supply closet. In fact, that will do. You’ll lock her inside, of course. Do you understand, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him, though not being completely certain of what he was actually ordering me to do. I stood waiting at attention, but he was silent. I could normally “remove her from her service” for medical reasons, with his permission, of course, but to select her out regularly, and only her, before indications of an illness or malady was unusual indeed.
“Resume your duties,” he muttered, turning to go back inside the infirmary. He paused at the door. “Another thing. About the sign.”
“Sir?”
“So that you know when to get her ready. I don’t want to have to speak to you every time. In fact from now on I want to minimize such contacts between us. I’m too busy to be supervising you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then what shall it be?” he said sternly.
I had no hint of an answer for him, and I shuffled my feet. He then looked somewhat pleased, while regarding me.
“Well, it should be that then.”
“Captain?”
“Since this will now be a critical responsibility for you, Lieutenant, perhaps it ought to be fairly obvious, so that you won’t have any confusion and waste my time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In this spirit, then, you will look out each morning for a black flag.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“A black flag. What do you think, Lieutenant? I will affix it on the front of the infirmary. I suspect even you will be able to notice this.”
“I believe I will see it clearly, sir, yes.”
He waited for me to respond further, as if he hoped to provoke me with his choice of sign. But I remained at attention, not meeting his piercing eyes, trying as hard as I could to imagine myself far away from him and this place, perhaps swimming in the quiet sea that lapped the shore of Rangoon. I had been thinking lately o
f that posting, which was mostly a last, brief R&R for us as we awaited transport to a more forward base. I remembered having the thought then in the glowing dusk on the beach that the war, oddly enough, was not so awful; that a young man uncertain of himself could find meaning amidst the camaraderie of his fellows working in such shared purpose, and that in fact there was no truer proving time for which he could hope. And yet it seemed everything fell away whenever Captain Ono addressed me, all my carefully built-up perception of things, and in the sorry depletion I could feel the searing, rising surges of what must be pure enmity. I have never quite shown this expression, and I did not then with Captain Ono.
“Look for it, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he finally said, and with a flit of his surgeon’s hand he turned and left me.
What he had determined as the sign, the black flag, was of course meant for me. Hata is, literally, “flag,” and a “black flag,” or kurohata, is the banner a village would raise by its gate in olden times to warn of a contagion within. It is the signal of spreading death. My adoptive family, I learned right away, had an ancient lineage of apothecaries, who had ventured into stricken villages and had for unknown reasons determined to keep the name, however inauspicious it was. Captain Ono’s choice, of course, was intentionally belittling, though I could see, too, how the sign would serve to keep others away from the infirmary who would naturally assume there had been an outbreak. As there was no recent fighting in our area, the infirmary, was in fact empty and had been so for some weeks, and he could have a privacy there that was not possible anywhere else in the camp, even for an officer.
A few mornings later I rose before dawn and the morning call. I dressed and began my usual ablutions: a quick wash with a dampened rag, a fitful, pulling shave with a knife’s edge, and then a meager, rationed morning meal of barley porridge and tea from the officers’ mess. It was much the same as any other morning, but as I finished I realized, gazing out at the lightly fogged-in camp, how actually pitiable the condition of things had become. There was of course the threat of an enemy offensive looming about like a pall, but even that, too, seemed to be dissipating, the notion grown more enervating, somehow, than frightful. Soon enough, we would understand that the fighting had indeed passed us over, but we did not believe that then. There were various scatters of litter about the encampment, and all about the air was the fouled, earthy smell of the far latrines, which had filled up again and needed to be cleared. This was the unheroic state of our far-flung outpost, in fact one forgotten by both home and foe, and under the increasingly retiring leadership of Colonel Ishii, who was hardly to be seen anymore outside his house.
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 t
hese 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.