A Gesture Life

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 Shimonoseki. 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.

In fact a few minutes later I found the soldier and asked him to explain himself and his usage, but he was so bewildered by my question he could hardly speak. “I don’t know what to say, Lieutenant,” he said sheepishly after a pause, “but isn’t that what they are?”

From his perspective, I suppose, he was telling only what he knew. And had I been of the slightest different opinion, I too would probably have thought of them that way, as soft slips of flesh, a brief warm pleasure to be taken before it was gone, which is the basic mode of wartime. But with K, I was beginning to think otherwise, of how to preserve her, how I might keep her apart from all uses in any way I could.

After returning from the gravesite, we sat under the cool cast of the moonlight in the small yard behind the infirmary. There was a dense ring of wide-leafed vegetation enclosing the space, and no one could see us. She was not so obviously upset at having seen her sister’s grave; she had not cried out or made any sound of mourning. Now in fact there was a lightness to her voice, as if she were almost being playful with me, though I knew it wasn’t that either. It was something different, a strange kind of release or relief. For the first time she seemed truly vulnerable to me, not just her physical body, which was always endangered, but her spirit. She would not come closer to me, as much as I thought she wished to, hungering not for anything like love but for plain, humble succor. And though I wanted to, I did not attempt to embrace or touch her or reach out. I did not shift or move at all. What prevented me I can’t know, whether it was deference or detachment or a keening heart of fear.

Earlier she had wanted to speak in the darkness, and now, too, she asked if we could sit close to the building, beneath the low eave, every part of us in the shadows. I could finally understand what she was wishing for. I believe it was so she couldn’t see my uniform or the shine of my boots or even my face; I realized that she was trying to pretend we were other people, somewhere else, with the most ordinary reasons for keeping such furtive company, just our whispering voices apparent to the night air.

We stayed there until just before the light began to rise again. Then I led her back inside and to the closet-room where she slept. I undid the brass spike lock and opened the door and she quickly stepped inside the cordoned blackness. Again I could hardly see her. I bid her good night and told her I would be shutting the door and locking it again. She didn’t answer, and as I was closing the door she pressed her weight against it, and I thought for an instant that she was trying to force it back open. But the pushing stopped and it was her pale fingers curled around the door edge, and then the fall of her long straight hair loosely covering the side of her face. Her eyes were cast downward, and as the door swung open a little, I took her hands cupped weakly into fists and she let me open them and hold them, her hands in my own tremulous hands. I was breathless. I had closed my eyes. And I remained there for what seemed a very long time, drawing no closer to her as we stood in the threshold of her cell, unmoving, unspeaking, barely resisting all.

* * *

TWO MORE WHOLE DAYS I had, before I saw the black flag raised upon the tilted pole of the infirmary. I was heading there in the early morning, in my hand the long, flat, two-pronged key for the lock to the supply closet, when I saw that piece of cloth. At first I thought it was a blank spot in my vision, a colorless void. Then a patch of sky opened low in the east and the light hit the door, and the flag next to it became unusually lustrous, reflective and yet flat-seeming with its absolute stillness. It was larger than I had first thought, a perfect square of black silk. I thought it was of the Chinese kind, its texture subtly striated and banded; and the way it fell stiffly from the two holes cut out along one edge, through which a rough twine was looped and then lashed to the short pole, it was like a piece of shiny, burnt parchment.

I did not touch it. Instead I let myself inside and went directly to the back of the building, to the closet where I had left her. I took my key and pushed it up through the brass slots of the lock. When I opened the door she was already standing up, waiting for me. I gave her the rice balls hidden in my pockets; I had saved them from the officers’ mess the night before, not eating two of my own and taking two others when I saw that the cook had stepped outside for a smoke. We sat on the blankets she had laid out over the floor. I let her eat a little while before speaking.

Then I said to her, “He did not come here last night?”

She shook her head, swallowing the last of the rice balls. “I woke up when I heard someone walking around this morning. I listened but he seemed to go away. It was the captain, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said to her, not meeting her eyes. She was staring at me, I could feel it. I told her, “I think it is this evening, K, that he will come to the infirmary.”

She nodded to herself. We were quiet for some time, and I felt I ought to do something for her, or at least say a few words. I had nothing ready to offer, however, though not because there wasn’t any feeling inside me. I had too much feeling, perhaps. I felt a stone in my chest, which seemed almost to pin me down.

She spoke softly now: “I must ask you again if you will help me.”

“I am sorry, K, but I have told you there is nothing I can do.”

“Yes, I know, but we are friends now,” she said, “and I only ask that you give me something now. I don’t expect you to help me in any other way. You’re a medical officer, and you must know what to give me, so I won’t wake up again.”

I could hardly bear to picture her that way.

“Please, Jiro,” she said, using my name for the first time. She had asked what it was the night before, and I had felt strange telling her, though now the sound of her speaking it was like a balm. “Please. You can help as no one else.”

“I won’t.”

“How can you not wish to, knowing the captain will come here tonight?”

“I do wish to help you.”

“Then you ought to do so,” she said, somewhat harshly, her voice ringing in the ensuing silence. But then she gathered herself, her hands clutching her elbows. She tried to smile. “You have been too kind, spending time with me and bringing me extra food. I have told you how you’re so much like my brother, generous and innocent like him. Blessed that way. But I’ve thought you’ve been a little brave, too.”

“I don’t think I am brave.”

“You are.” She sat up on her knees. “I don’t know what risks you’re taking by being kind to me. But I know you are taking risks. What would the captain have done if he had found us in the other room yesterday or the day before that, sitting and talking as we were? What would he have done then?”

I couldn’t say what would have occurred. I still couldn’t imagine myself challenging him, or being insubordinate in any way, and yet the thought of accepting whatever punishment he deemed deserving for me, and especially for her, seemed equally impossible. In the last few days I had begun to find myself defending her, at least in my mind, stepping between her and others, or pulling her from some faceless danger. But in truth it was solely the doctor and surgeon, Captain Ono, who ever had any purpose and intention for her, who even knew, besides myself, where K was, and it was his narrowed, severe visage that I could not yet conceive of repelling.

“I want to help you,” I said to her. “But I can only do for you what I have done already, and nothing more. I have tried to keep you in a state of healthfulness, which is my responsibility, and the captain would ultimately understand that, I believe.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to speak like that, Jiro. I know you don’t believe only what you say. You’re not just being a dutiful medical officer. I thought we had talked yesterday about what might happen after the war. What your hopes and plans were, to go to medical school and become a respected physician in Kobe. And then meeting a nice girl from a good family and having many children, all of you in a fine house with beautiful grounds. I enjoyed talking like that, about what the future would hold. Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And remember what you said? How we could perhaps meet again, in an interesting place like Hong Kong, or Kyoto. What fun times we might have, seeing the sights together. We were just talking, I know, but sometimes that’s enough to make everything seem real.”

“I would like it to be real,” I said, recalling the serene temples I had described to her, the ones in Kyoto I had visited on school trips, the plum trees blooming about their hilltop perches in fantastical color. “I stayed awake until almost morning, thinking of other places you might like to see.”

“What were they?”

“I thought of the rocky seasides on Shikoku, the steep cliffs above the water, the humble fishing villages there. Because you said you liked the water, and swimming. And then of course there is Tokyo, which I have not yet been to, but which must be wondrous in all its activity. They say it is a hundred Kobes, put all together.”

“My father was there once,” she said, surprising me. “When I was eight or nine. He brought back a fancy set of brushes for us girls to share, and brand-new English lesson books for our brother. For my mother he brought a tiny chest filled with European face powder and perfume and lip pencils.”

“Why was he there?” I asked.

“He was a kind of ambassador, I think. My mother told us that a number of noblemen and civic leaders were going to Japan, to have discussions on the issue of the Japanese colonists coming to Korea. They were trying to come to an agreement, of sorts, to make it better for everyone, and fairer for those who were being displaced from their homes and shops. I remember how pleased my father was when he returned, as pleased as I have ever seen him, even taking us girls to be photographed the next day, with our mother. But by the end of the year he was most disillusioned. Nothing had changed. In fact there were more settlers than ever. And in town people began to blame my father, as he was the local official who had gone on the mission. One night we came home from a farmers’ festival to find our house burning down. We had to leave our land and move into a house-for-let, and soon after that he hardly spoke to anyone. Even our brother. He just stayed in his room of books, reading Chinese poetry and practicing his calligraphy.”

“You never mentioned what kind of family you were from.”

“Would it have made a difference in anything?”

I shook my head, knowing that it would not have. But nonetheless it explained her speech, her education, what I was finally understanding to be her class, which I hadn’t quite fathomed until then, having had no contact with such Koreans. In fact she had poked fun at my own talk, which was to her rough and slangy and of the streets, the twisty, cramped ghetto alleys of Kobe. And it seemed incongruous, as well, how it was that I, the only child of a hide tanner and a rag maid, should come to wear a second lieutenant’s uniform of the Ocean Sky Battalion of the Imperial Forces, and that she, born into a noble, scholarly house (if perhaps one fallen), would have to sleep in a surplus closet of a far-flung military outpost, her sister already dead and buried, wishing upon herself the same horrid end.

“I want to believe that you and I will do all the things we spoke of,” I told her. “I am hoping the war will end soon, as has been rumored, and perhaps much sooner than anyone knows. It is said the war in fact has been going very badly. There is even talk the Americans will soon attempt to invade Japan itself. No one will say it, but the end is likely coming, and an accommodation will be made. It must. Perhaps it will be next month, or next week even. Then we can go out of this place, we can go out of this place together, and I will take care of you and protect you no matter where we go.”

“But you say he is coming tonight,” she said sharply. “The doctor will come here tonight. Tonight! Will the war end before then? This afternoon? Will you spirit us away before the dusk falls, Jiro? Because if not there is nothing more to talk about in a real way. There is dreaming and dreaming talk and little else, which is happy enough, and maybe all that remains to us. But please don’t try to make things sound real anymore. It makes me feel desperate and mad. You’re a decent man, Jiro, more decent than you even know, so please. You can pretend, if you wish, and I’ll pretend with you, as much as I am able. But I ask you please no more than that.”

She became weary all of a sudden, and let her arms fold beneath her as she lay on her side on the meager blanket. The crown of her head was almost touching my knee where I sat beside her, and after a moment I reached out and began stroking her hair. She had let me do this before and she did not mind now. Her hair was unwashed and heavy and unsweetly redolent but to me it was a perfect mane. Two nights before I had done the same when she grew tired and lay down, stroking her gently at first but then more vigorously and deeply, running my fingers down to her soft scalp, until my hands were warmed and smooth with her oil. She fell asleep and I went to my tent and could not sleep myself, the rich, bodily smell wafting over me. I held up my hands as I lay on my bedroll, and before I knew it I had tasted and kissed them and rubbed them on my face and neck and elsewhere, and in the morning I wanted to be with her like nothing I had ever known. But on sight of the closet door I had to retreat and scrub my hands in the exam room, ashamed by the feeling that I had secretly profaned her.

But now she closed her eyes as I stroked. She had told me she was no longer sleeping much at night or any other time, hardly shutting her eyes even a few minutes a day. She wanted to fall asleep but could not. But I thought now she was very near it, her breathing steady and rhythmical, and it seemed with each pass of my hand through her hair her exhalations grew longer and lighter. It had been many years since I had watched a woman sleep; the last time was when I lived with my first parents in Kobe, where we slept all together in a one-room house. My mother and father would be heaped in the corner like a mound of sackcloths, the noise of their exhausted slumber keeping me awake, my mother tittering in her dreams. Some mornings her pants bottom was pulled half-down, her long straight hair fallen down into the corners of her gaping mouth, my father’s hand clutching her breast. I remembered wanting to brush the loose strands away from her mouth, to cover her nakedness with the blanket.

But here beneath me, K was falling away, the line of her mouth softening, and though someone (even the doctor) could come by at any moment, I crawled around and lay down behind her, so that our bodies were aligned, nestled like spoons. She was warm and still and I gently pressed my face into the back of her neck and breathed in the oily musk of her hair. And it was so that I finally began to touch her. I put my hand on the point of her hip and could feel all at once the pliancy of it and the meagerness and the newness, too. I felt bewildered and innocent and strangely renewed, as though a surge of some great living being were coursing up my arm and spreading through my unknowing body. She was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or somehow forcing herself to, and she did not move or speak or make anything but the shallowest of breaths, even as I was casting myself upon her. I kissed as much of her body as was bared. I kissed her small breasts, which seemed to spill a sweet, watery liquid. I gagged but did not care. Then it was all quite swift and natural, as chaste as it could ever be. And when I was done I felt the enveloping warmth of a fever, its languorous cocoon, though when I gazed at her shoulder and back there was nothing but stillness, her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, and she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all.

I said then, I love you, and she didn’t answer. I love you, I said again, in Korean, not whispering it this time but speaking it as clearly as I could, and when she didn’t reply I assumed she was completely asleep. I rose carefully and stepped back and buckled my trousers, wanting desperately to wake her and kiss her on the mouth but instead letting her remain, recalling how restive and sleepless she said she’d been. I would have done anything then to lend her some peace. I would have executed whatever she asked of me, helped her even to escape. I would have willingly injured another human being had she asked, or needed me to. And it unnerves me even now how particular and exacting that sensation was, how terribly pure. That a man pleasured could so easily resolve himself to the whole spectrum of acts, indifferent and murderous and humane, and choose with such arbitrary will what he shall have to remember forever and forever.

I went out of her closet-room, whispering to her that I would return in several hours, with food for her and maybe something to drink, and thinking ahead to an entire evening in her company; but as I gently shut the door I thought I heard a murmur. I couldn’t lock it; to do so seemed at that moment too cruel. Instead I stood quietly for a moment and waited and indeed it was K, saying over and over very quietly what sounded most peculiarly like hata-hata, hata-hata. But as I listened more closely I realized that she was fitfully crying, though in quelled gasps, as if she were trying to hush herself. I was afraid to move, lest she hear me, and so I remained, my ear lightly pressed to the worn wood of the door, until she quieted and was silent again and in fact fell asleep, her breathing deep and certain.

After I left her I found myself in a state of unease and exhilaration. I could understand why she should become upset, that she was perhaps sad for the end of her maidenhood (which I thought then was the most precious ore of any woman), but hadn’t I professed my devotion to her, hadn’t I in mitigation said the words that should let her know what I was intending for us, after the war? I thought I should have also told her that I was now resolved to speak candidly with Captain Ono, that I was prepared to suggest to him my keeping a log of my duties around the camp and infirmary — which I had indeed begun compiling. At least I would not wilt and fade and disappear before him, as I had score upon score of times.

And yet I had no other, further plan; there was no good recourse from her required duties to the camp, there was no actual reprieve I was offering her. I loved her, though I cannot say how that love was or if it was true or worthy in any sense, having never in my life been sure how such a thing should be. I can say I wanted her and could not bear her being with another, and if those are veritable signs, then I should rightly hold her in memory in every way that I am able, and to the last of my days.

Captain Ono, however, was seemingly nowhere to be found; I even sought him out at the commander’s hut, rapping on the door sharply until the new sentry ran up around the side and requested that I stop, saying the colonel was “resting” for the afternoon. The captain had indeed been around, he said, with his medical kit, as he had each morning for some days, and in the afternoons the colonel required strictly undisturbed quiet, as ordered by Captain Ono.

I recalled then the multiple requisitions I had just sent by courier to Rangoon for morphine and ether, as our supply for surgery was curiously dwindling, despite our not having conducted any recent procedures. I had long suspected he was medicating the commander, though certainly not against the man’s will, as one sometimes saw them talking in the evenings on the veranda of the hut, the colonel’s demeanor familiar and jovial, if a bit too loose. The probable fact of this further emboldened me, and as I went around the camp in search of the doctor I felt more determined than ever to withstand whatever insult he might level at me, and somehow influence him to agree to my sole stewardship of “the girl” under some obscure technical or medical rationale.

So sure of myself was I, so certain of my imminent resolve, that the thought of committing an aggression seemed again suddenly quite natural to me, as if I were a man long accustomed to the necessity of such things. I remember suddenly feeling suited to the notion, perhaps even bristling with it as I strode purposefully about the camp, the image of Ono desperate and pained beneath the weight of my will. For I had been quietly considering various revenges upon him, drawing up the ways I would pay him back for his diatribes and affronts, my plans including, too, the most extreme of acts. Had someone asked, I would have denied any such thoughts, but in the core of my heart I was tending the darkest fires. I had certainly despised others before, particularly the boys in the school I attended after being adopted by the Kurohatas, boys who treated me with disdain most of the time and at worst like a stray dog. Each day I vowed to wreak vengeance upon them, see them through some terrible circumstance I’d contrived, or else await the hand of fate. But nothing ever transpired. I never attempted to mark them, and soon enough we passed on to the upper school and there were plenty of others to befriend, both cause and enmity mercifully fading from my mind. I say mercifully because it was never my nature to harbor such thoughts, which have always been near-caustic to me, but in respect to the doctor a vital, searing charge was propelling me, an ashen, bitter hate whose taste I no longer abhorred.

And though exactly how I cannot describe, mixed up with this was my feeling for K, and my sudden sense of her nearness to me. It was a connection aside from what we had just done, what I should say I believed already to be a special correspondence between us, an affinity of being. This may sound specious — one may rightly think here was a young man in the blush of his first sexual love, typically conflating sensation and devotion — but I was not thinking so much of her body or even the desirous tentacled feeling of mine. I was considering what she had suggested about our pretending to be other people, like figures in a Western novel, imagining how we could somehow exist outside of this place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of such folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love.

So when I finally came upon the doctor, when I finally saw the angular shape of his back and his wiry neck as he berated several soldiers for the dilapidated state of their quarters, it seemed I was summoning the picture of my plunging a long blade into his throat, terrorizing him not with pain so much as the fright of an instant, wholly unanticipated death. In reality I was carrying a scalpel in my holster (pinned against the pistol), and I actually reached into the leather pouch as I approached him and felt the metal handle. I could simply pull out the razor-sharp instrument and insert it a few centimeters into his skin and run it down the length of the carotid. None of the men would protest, and if one did, it would be too late. The doctor would clutch at his throat, the blood would flow forth freely, and in less than a minute he would quietly expire.

Captain Ono turned to me just as I was a few steps away. But my hand was at my head in salute and he said, with no little irritation, “What must it be now, Lieutenant?”

“I would request to speak with you, sir. It’s an important matter.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. The enlisted men were holding themselves in, pleased as they were to witness an officer receiving the captain’s harsh treatment.

“And what would this concern, Lieutenant?”

“I was hoping to speak in private, sir. It concerns one of the volunteers.”

“You surely are being scrupulous, Lieutenant Kurohata. And is right now the most necessary time for you to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“Yes, sir,” I said sharply, nearly barking. One of the enlisted men couldn’t help himself and let out a snort at my pained rigor. The captain at once wheeled and struck him across the face with his open hand, and the man fell down, more, it seemed, from sheer surprise than the force of the blow. He quickly stood up without any help and stood at attention, as were his fellows. A wide red welt rose up over his eye and the side of his face. The doctor waited and then hit him again, and again the man fell down and then got back up to his feet, this time more tentatively. The whole action seemed somehow self-evident, being strangely mechanical. He then turned to me and in no different a voice said, “Then perhaps you and I should talk elsewhere, Lieutenant Kurohata. I require a few more moments with these men. You’ll meet me at the infirmary shortly.”

I did not of course want to go back there with him, but he had already dismissed me and immediately resumed addressing the men, criticizing them for their indolence and disorganization. Such a sight was becoming more and more common. Like most others in the camp, the doctor himself seemed caught in a state of increasing agitation, the protracted stretch of waiting and inaction and ennui causing flares of anxiety and disruption. A rash of fights had recently broken out among the men, and the feeling within the officer corps had, in fact, become distinctly chilly and distant, what with the system of command ever loosening and the threat of fighting having clearly passed us over.

I was walking quite slowly, as I was loathing the thought of the three of us together, her so near to him in my presence, and the doctor actually caught up with me before I reached the infirmary. He took me by the shoulder to stop me, the windowless back wall where K was locked in the closet just in our sight.

“Perhaps you’ll realize someday, Lieutenant, why I’ve been so hard on you,” he said flatly, no more avuncular than he ever was, or could be. “I say this not because I care what you think of me, or even for your sake. I cannot be concerned with you, as an individual. I think you well know this.”

I assented openly, for the first time feeling somehow equal to him, imminently free.

“Good,” he said, taking out a small case of etched silver. He offered a brown-wrapped cigarette to me, but I declined. He took it for himself and lighted it, smoking quickly and deeply. “You are not an incapable young officer, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said, exhaling the spice-edged smoke. “But you are gravely misguided, most all of the time. I fear I shall believe this about you to my death. You probably don’t care. But I know you believe I take you to task because of your parentage. I’ve always known of this, yes. But that never mattered to me. It’s for the weak and lame-minded to focus on such things. Blood is only so useful, or hindering. The rest is strong thought and strong action. This is why, Lieutenant, I find myself unable to cease critiquing you. There is the germ of infirmity in you, which infects everything you touch or attempt. Besides all else, how do you think you will ever become a surgeon? A surgeon determines his course and acts. He goes to the point he has determined without any other faith, and commits to an execution. You, Lieutenant, too much depend upon generous fate and gesture. There is no internal possession, no embodiment. Thus you fail in some measure always. You perennially disappoint someone like me.

“Right now, you want to speak to me about the girl in there,” he went on, pointing up the path to the homely building. “You wish to be resolute about something about her and yet I see nothing in your face or posture that will convince me of your desires. You sound as if you would trounce me, but I look at you directly and what is solid in you but your sentimental feeling and hope? Tell me, tell me freely, in any way you wish.”

“I think you have taken questionable liberties about the camp. With the girl, and then also with Colonel Ishii.”

“What exactly?”

“You have steadily usurped command, sir. Everyone knows how the colonel remains inside all day and night, how he is hardly awake anymore.”

“And what do you know?”

“That we are again out of certain anesthetics and painkillers, which I believe you are offering to the colonel too frequently, perhaps even with the intent to incapacitate him.”

“Why should I wish to do such a thing, Lieutenant, when I have always had the commander’s ear, on all matters? What pleasure or advantage would it give me?”

“I don’t know, sir. Perhaps you want complete control,” I said, amazed at my own directness.

“Over what?” he rasped at me. “Over this meaningless outpost? These stupid, backward herds of men? You are less observant than I gave you credit for. I accepted this posting because I was assured there would be steady fighting in the region, and that I could institute a first-rate field hospital and surgery ward. I expected there would be plenty of casualties, with constant opportunities for employing new techniques and procedures. At minimum there would be the regular exercise of autopsies. Of course there’s nothing now of any interest. It’s a cesspool of nursery maladies, insect bites and rashes. This is a situation that you might appropriately command, but not I. Colonel Ishii naturally understood my frustration and formally requested long ago that I be transferred, but his request has yet to be acknowledged. Meanwhile, I cannot optimally serve our cause, and my skills are no doubt eroding. The colonel, if you are curious, has chronic, severe pain from a shrapnel wound suffered in the early years of the war, in Manchuria, and he chooses to relieve himself of it. It is never my place to regulate him, unless his doing so affects the battalion, which it has not.

“About the girl, Lieutenant, I will say this. You have obviously taken an interest in her, which is of course unavoidable. She is most comely, though I say that not to describe her sexual attraction, which in this forsaken place and to these men any girl or woman would possess, even that annoying shrew Matsui-san. But as for this girl, she has a definite presence and will and lively spirit. There’s clear breeding there, if you didn’t quite know. Unlike what you were probably taught in your special indoctrinational schooling, Lieutenant, there are indeed Chinese and Koreans of special and high character, in fact, of the same bloodlines as the most pure Japanese. There is a commonality between someone like her and me, a distinct correspondence, if one very distant. This is one of the reasons I’ve separated her — you could say as a means of acknowledging that relation, particularly with her sister having been killed. But you, Lieutenant, you can of course look narrowly upon someone like her, for private uses and pleasures, rather than the larger concerns.”

“What are those, Captain Ono?” I said sharply. “Will you inform me, sir, as I have little idea.”

The doctor grinned, the corners of his mouth tight, half-appreciative of the acuteness in my voice. “What are they indeed, Lieutenant! What do you think the Home Ministry has been promoting all these years, but a Pan-Asian prosperity as captained by our people? Do you understand what that really means? I can see you don’t. We must value ourselves however and wherever we appear, even in the scantest proportion. There can be no ignoring the divine spread of our strain. You, it is obvious, are helplessly concerned about the girl — that one female body, there in the infirmary. There is something to this, no doubt. But I am not confined to such thinking. I don’t care about her. She is not of any consequence, except as a kind of rare vessel of us, to be observed and stewarded. For the present time she is important to me, and when she is no longer I shall give her over to you, to do with her what you wish, whether you would bed her or journey the world with her or drown her at the shore. But as long as you see the banner there, Lieutenant, you shall keep to the duties I’ve set out for you and retain her in the manner I command. I raise it for you and you alone, and you will heed it without hesitance or prejudice.”

“I cannot promise such a thing, sir,” I said stiffly, stepping forward slightly. “And I cannot let you visit her tonight, or on any future day.”

He stared at me incredulously, searching my face, and then laughed, surprising me, as I thought he would rage and explode at my insubordination.

“You are an immense fool,” he said. “I almost feel sorry for you. What do you think you are doing, protecting her honor? I suppose you imagine she’s your maiden, and you her swordsman. You do, indeed. And you also think that I’ve been saving her these last few days in anticipation of some memorable evening?”

“She said you had not visited….”

The captain shook his head, grinning again, though he was not amused. “The girl is telling stories, and you are believing them. Did she tell you how much she thought of you, too, how much she loved you?”

“She never professed such things.”

“Perhaps she suggested how she would like to meet you again, after the war?”

When I didn’t answer, the captain scoffed and said grimly, “Shut up now. Or better yet, go away. I can’t stand to look at you. Your presence is demoralizing me.”

“I will not let anyone else go to her, sir.”

“No more of you, Lieutenant!” he shouted, waving his hand. “You had permission to address me freely but now you will silence yourself and leave me.”

“I wish her to be my wife. I will marry her when the war ends. I have already decided this.”

The captain stared at me with an expression of pure disgust, as if I had violated every law and code of his living. “You have ‘decided’ this, Lieutenant? So you have already had your sweet trifle with her, I suppose; you have taken her there on her dirt bed?”

“I will love her,” I said as fiercely as I could, though the words immediately rang shallow and distant. “No matter what you say.”

He laughed terribly. “Even if I tell you she is pregnant? Oh indeed, yes. I suppose she must have tricked the commander about her menses. It doesn’t matter now. I’m letting the pregnancy go, in fact, to see how long she’ll stay that way, once she begins servicing the whole of the camp. She was pregnant before even I was able to take my pleasure. Before anyone here had her. Who knows who her real master is? The commander and I certainly aren’t. So now you can fancy yourself to be her foster lover, her foster groom, as it were. And then stepfather to her child, if it ever comes to be….”

But before he could finish speaking I tackled him square in the gut and the force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He lay for a moment beside me trying to get back his breath, then rose slowly to his knees. I wanted to get up to strike him but my right shoulder seemed to shear like wet paper when I put weight on my hand, and I knew it had completely separated. The pain was severe enough that it didn’t feel like much of anything when the captain punched me in the belly. I watched, numbly estranged from myself, as he unholstered his service revolver and struck me again, once or twice or several times. He then pulled back the hammer and placed the cold ring of the barrel end to my forehead. He seemed very close, as if he were peering into me. He had no malice or rage in his face, simply a plain expression of purpose. I passed through then to another reach of bodily suffering, the pain already become a thing memorial, an insolvent fever in the tissue and bones.