A Gesture Life Page 23

  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.

  12

  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.”

  “They are interesting,” I said, recalling the figure of a woman in a small French provincial town that was her world, and prison. “And sometimes even tragic.”

  “I suppose it ought to be so,” K replied. “Or it wouldn’t be much of a tale, would it, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” I said to her, gazing at her face and wondering if she knew how difficult the present life would soon be for her, and for me as well.

  Near midnight, I acceded to her request and walked with her to the place where her sister was buried. There was no marker, no sign, just a slight mound of dug-up earth barely noticeable in the moonlight. I waited for her at a respectful distance. As we returned she told me of her two other sisters, who were already engaged to be married and so could not be sent away from home. A recruiter had come to the door with some military police, carrying a list of single young men in the town. They were going to conscript her brother, and as her father had lost his influence and standing and had no money left to bribe them, he could do nothing about it; but he pleaded with them in his study and soon thereafter they left. The next day the recruiter returned by himself, but for K and her sister. Their mother had already prepared each of their bags, their father having spirited his son off somewhere before dawn. She gave them each a fancy silken doll, stuffed inside with a little traveling money. They would help the family, she told them while crying, by going to work in a boot factory outside of S
himonoseki. But when they arrived at the harbor they were immediately transferred onto a cargo ship bound for the Philippines and Singapore, and then boated to Rangoon, before finally being trucked through the forested hills here to the camp. They had not known at all what awaited them, no idea what their true service would be.

  I was somewhat taken aback by her account. I could not quite accept the whole truth of it. But it was more perhaps that I had reached the limits of my conception, than thinking there was something in her story to doubt. Although it was the most naive and vacant of notions to think that anyone would willingly give herself to such a fate, like everyone else I had assumed the girls had indeed been “volunteers,” as they were always called. To the men in the queue, they were nothing, or less than nothing; several hours earlier I had overheard a soldier speak more warmly and humanly of the last full-course meal he remembered than the girl he’d been with the previous afternoon. He was a corporal attached to the motor pool, a typically decent young man. He crudely referred to the comfort girl as chosen-pi, a base anatomical slur which also denoted her Koreanness. Though I knew it was part of the bluster and bravado he displayed for his fellows, there was a casualness to his usage, as if he were speaking of any animal in a pen, which stopped me cold for a moment. I certainly did not think of the other girls as animals, and yet I cannot say they held any sort of position in my regard; perhaps my thinking was as a rich man’s, who might hardly acknowledge the many servants working about his house or on the property, their efforts and struggles, and see them only as parts of the larger mechanism of his living, the steady machine that grinds along each night and day.