A Gesture Life

8

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, I didn’t seek out the pleasure of women. At least not like my comrades in arms, who in their every spare moment seemed ravenous for any part of a woman, in any form, whether in photographs or songs or recounted stories, and of course, whenever possible, in the flesh. Pictures were most favored, being easy. I remember a corporal who in his radio code book kept illicit slides of disrobed maidens, a sheaf of which he had salvaged from a bombed-out colonial mansion in Indonesia. Whenever I walked by the communications tent he would call out in a most proper voice, “Lieutenant Kurohata, sir, may I receive an opinion from you please.”

The women in his pictures were Western, I think French or Dutch, and caught by the camera in compromising positions, like bending over to pick up a dropped book, or being attended in the bath by another nude woman, or reclined in bed and pulling up a furry scarf between the legs. The corporal had perhaps a score of these, each featuring a different scene, replete with detailed settings and whatever scant costume, and he slowly shuffled through them with an unswerving awe and reverence that made me believe he was a Christian. Of course I shouldn’t have allowed him to address me so familiarly, but we were from the same province and hometown and he was exuberantly innocent and youthful and he never called to me if others were within earshot. I knew at the time that he had never been with a real woman, but he seemed to know their intimacies, as if in going through his photos he had become privy to the secrets of lovemaking, the positions and special methods and the favored styles of the moment.

I myself, up to that time, was hardly what one could call experienced, but unlike the corporal I found little of interest in the hand-sized tableaux. They held for me none of the theatrics and drama that he clearly savored in them. Instead, I was sure, they smacked of the excess and privilege of a sclerotic, purulent culture, the very forces that our nation’s people and will were struggling against, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to where we were posted at the time, in the foothill country of old Burma, approximately 125 kilometers from the outskirts of Rangoon. The women in the photocards were full-figured, not quite young, though several of them were attractive in an exotic manner, such as circus performers who do bizarre tricks to force one’s eye.

The one image I preferred was the one of the bath. It was a mostly unadorned scene. With no other props but the tub and a coat hook for the robe and towels, the staging was quite plain. A woman was receiving a bath as she stood exposed, the attendant to the side of her in the midst of sponging her long, pale back. Somehow, I always noticed the helper more than the featured bather. She was younger, and more delicately limbed, like a Japanese, though in truth it was her face that struck me. From her expression, one could think she was truly intent on washing the woman’s body, as if she weren’t concerned with the staging or the camera or the oddity of her own nakedness, but of her task alone.

Several times the corporal offered to give me that particular card, but I didn’t want the bother and worry of keeping it among my few personal things, should I be killed and those items along with my remains be tendered to my family in Japan, as was customary. In most all cases the officer in charge of such transferrals checked the package to include only the most necessary (and honorable) effects, but one heard of embarrassing instances when grieving elders were forced to contend with awkward last notions of their dead. I feared it would be especially shaming to mine, for as adoptive parents they might shoulder the burden of my vices even more heavily than if I had been born to them, blood of their blood, as there would be no excuse but their raising of me. Troubling to me was the image of my mother, peering at the photo of the bathers, and so inescapably remembering me, and then having desperately to hide it in her cosmetics chest before my father arrived home from his factory. Still, being twenty-three years old and a man and having been only with that Madam Itsuda during my first posting in Singapore, I was periodically given to the enticements of such base things, and unable to help but step into the radio tent whenever the corporal addressed me.

“Have I shown you this new series, sir?” he said one sweltering afternoon, reaching into the back inner flap of his code book. His eyes seemed especially bright, almost feral. “I traded some of mine to a fellow at munitions. He had these. He said he was tired of them, sir.”

There were several photographs, which he had pasted into a small journal book, the cardstock and image of much lower quality than the corporal’s Dutch assortment. But these were pictures of women and men together, from a close-in perspective, patently engaging in sexual intercourse. I had never seen such pictures before, or even imagined they could exist. The depicted acts were crudely staged, but seemed actual enough, and the style of the photography, if this could be said, was documentary, almost clinical, as though the overexposed frames were meant for some textbook of human coitus. To my mind, there was nothing remotely titillating in them, save perhaps the shocking idea that people had willingly performed the acts while someone else had photographed them.

The corporal, unfortunately, took more than a customary delight in the pictures. He seemed to be drawn into the stark realism of them, as if he desired to inhabit them somehow. I would notice him every so often around the camp, lingering about on his own, the private journal always in his clutch. In the week or two after he had first shown them to me, I encountered him several times, each instance finding him further disheveled in appearance, wholly unwashed (and reeking most awfully, even more than the camp norm), as well as being slightly jumpy and skittish, with a scattered gaze. His face had erupted in a sudden rash of pimples. He was, as mentioned, callow and youthful, as yet, at nineteen, without much developed musculature or hair on his lip. He was the youngest boy of a fairly prominent family, whose holdings in our town included a trucking firm and an automobile dealership. He had been trained in coded field communications to take advantage of his obvious intelligence, and to avoid the likely consequences of his physical immaturity if he were an infantry regular, which would be certain injury and possible death at the punitive hands of superiors, long before an enemy confronted him.

I took pity on him because of this, though I was afraid that lurking beneath his quick mind was a mental instability, a defect of character that I was certain would lead him to a troubling circumstance. As one of the brigade medical personnel, I decided to write a memorandum to Captain Ono, the physician-in-charge, advising that Corporal Endo be evaluated and possibly even relieved of his duties and disarmed; but as with much else in wartime, it was lost, or ignored. I should have understood the corporal’s strange behavior to be an alarm — for example, he had placed among the photographs of his elders in the small shrine next to his bed several of the newly traded pictures, and actually cut out certain lurid forms and applied them in a most dishonoring fashion beside the portraits of his stolid-faced grandparents. When I lingered over this personal shrine, the corporal assumed I was admiring his artistry and even offered to refurbish mine if I so desired.

This was in the early fall of 1944, when it seemed our forces were being routed across the entire region. Ever since Admiral Yamamoto’s transport plane had been ambushed and destroyed by American fighter planes some eighteen months before, the general mood and morale, if still hopeful, had certainly not been as ebullient and brash as it was in the high, early times of the war, when the Burma Road fell, and Mandalay. And now with our being under threat of attack from British and American dive-bombers — though none seemed to come for us, as if we’d been forgotten — the behaviors of the brigade, and most notably of Corporal Endo, grew increasingly more extreme. Sometimes, if one stood outside the communications tent, one could hear him talking to himself in a singsong voice, pretending — as he readily admitted to me — to be a film star like Marlene Dietrich or Claudette Colbert in the midst of a romantic seduction. Of course the corporal didn’t speak English, but he memorized well enough certain dramatic tones and utterances such that his gibberish seemed almost real. Others had heard him do this as well, and there was soon suspicion among some of the officers that the corporal was a homosexual, and one of the captains even asked me if in my opinion he was a threat to the other men, like a contagion that should be checked. I told him I did not think so, but that I would be watchful of his activities and make a full report.

I knew, of course, that the corporal was constituted like most men. And not because of his interest in pornography, which was all too typical and rampant around the base. His unusual conduct was, I believe, a simple by-product of the deepening atmosphere of malaise and fear. I myself had developed a minor skin condition on the lower calves, and I was treating many others for similar irritations such as boils and scalp rashes and an unusual variety of fungal infections. It seemed the whole encampment was afflicted. Corporal Endo had no such physical problems, save his acne, and so I began to consider the possibility that his expressions were of a besieged mind, one perhaps innately tenuous and fragile and now — under duress — grown sickly and ornate.

Late one evening he came to my tent behind the medical quarters and asked if he could come inside and speak to me. He had washed up somewhat, and he looked much like the corporal of old. After awaiting my permission, he sat down quietly on a folding stool. I had been reading a surgery text on fractures under the dim oil lamp, and though I was weary and about to retire, it was clear the corporal was disturbed, and so I thought it best to give him some attention. There was a trenchant, focused look to his eyes, as if a notion or thought had taken a profound hold over him and he was useless before it.

But he didn’t speak right away, and so I asked him if I might help him with something.

He replied, “Please forgive me, Lieutenant. I’m rude to request a moment from you and then waste your time.” He paused for a few seconds and then went on. “You’ve been most generous to me, and I feel I’ve only returned to you the most inappropriate conduct and manners. There is no excuse. I feel ashamed of myself, so much so that I sometimes wish I were no longer living.”

“There’s no need for such a sentiment, Corporal Endo,” I said, concerned by his words. “If your shame comes from showing some of your pictures to me, you must obviously know that it was always my choice to look at them. You did not force them on me. Now, on the other hand, I would only be insulted if you suggested that I had no autonomy where your pictures were concerned, like any child. If this is so, Corporal, then you had better leave my tent immediately or ready yourself to suffer the consequences.”

“Yes of course, Lieutenant,” he answered, bowing his head in a most supplicant angle. “I’m sorry, sir, for the implication. But if you’ll excuse me, it wasn’t only the pictures I was talking about. Please forgive my insolence, but it is another thing that makes me feel somewhat desperate.”

He paused again, crossing his belly with his arms as though he were ill or suddenly cold. Then he said, “You see, sir, it’s about the new arrivals everyone has been talking about. It’s known around camp that they’re scheduled to be here soon, and I’ve received messages for the quartermaster that the supply transport and complement will likely arrive by tomorrow.”

“What about it, Corporal?”

“Well, sir, it’s not my task to do so, but I’ve looked around camp yesterday and today, and I haven’t been able to see where they’ll be housed once they’re here. All of us enlisted men are in the perimeter bivouacs, and the more permanent buildings in the central yard are of course being used. I thought as one of the medical officers, you might know where their quarters would be.”

“I don’t see where this is any of your concern, Corporal. But if you must know, they’ll probably be housed in tents, like everyone else. Where exactly will no doubt be quickly determined, but not by me. I’m not in charge of their status or medical care. That will be Captain Ono’s area, as he’s the chief medical officer. Anyway, none of this is a matter of great importance, particularly to someone like you.”

The corporal bobbed repeatedly, his face still quite serious. “Yes, sir. Should I then speak to Captain Ono?”

“If you must,” I said, feeling that I would soon grow most annoyed with him if our conversation went on any longer. But I felt somewhat protective of him, and I feared he might provoke Captain Ono, who was known in the camp for his sometimes volatile outbursts, a mien which should have seemed quite odd for a medical doctor but somehow didn’t seem so at the time. In fact, Captain Ono was quite controlled, if a bit grimly so, wound up within himself like a dense, impassable thicket. A week earlier, however, he had beaten a private nearly to death for accidentally brushing him as he passed on a narrow footpath near the latrines. Ono ordered the man to kneel and in plain view of onlookers beat him viciously with the butt of his revolver, until the private was bloody and unconscious. He treated the same man soon thereafter in the infirmary, in fact saving his life with some quick surgical work in relieving the building pressure of blood on the brain. I know that the commanding officer, Colonel Ishii, had actually spoken to the captain afterward of the benefits of meting out more condign discipline, and the captain seemed to take heed of the suggestion. In fairness, it was an isolated violence. Still, I was concerned for Corporal Endo, and so I said to him: “Will you tell me what your interest in all this is? You won’t find the captain very patient, if he agrees to speak to you at all. He’s a very busy man.”

The young corporal nodded gravely. “Yes, sir. I should not speak to him until asking you. I’m grateful for your advice. You see, sir, I was hoping that I could be among the first of those who might meet the volunteers when they arrive. If there is to be a greeting in the camp, for example, I would be honored to take part—”

“Corporal Endo,” I said sternly. “There will be no public greeting or reception of any kind. You ought to strike any such notion from your thoughts. As to meeting the female volunteers, it is the officer corps that will first inspect their readiness. Enlisted men, as I’ve been informed, will be issued their tickets shortly thereafter, and it will be up to you to hold a place in the queue. I’m new to this myself, in fact, and so my advice is that you make do with the limits of your station and rank and fit yourself as such to best advantage. I see you are most anxious to meet the volunteers, as will be most of the men when they learn of their arrival, and so I suggest you remain as circumspect as possible. I am also ordering you not to corroborate or spread further news of their arrival. There will be time enough for foment in the camp.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“The other piece of advice I have is that you put away all the picture cards you’ve collected. Don’t look at them for a while. Resist them. I believe you’ve developed an unhealthy reliance upon them, as if they and not rice and tea were your main sustenance. Do you think this may be true, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir,” he said regretfully.

“Then take my advice. Bundle them up and put them in the bottom of your footlocker. Or give them away to someone.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try,” he replied, his voice drawn low in his throat. “Would you be willing to take them from me, Lieutenant?”

“Certainly not,” I said, anticipating him, and so, unangered. “You’ll have to find somebody else. I’m already disappointed in myself for having taken an initial interest. As I’ve said, this is not your fault. But now that I consider it, you ought to throw them away or destroy them, rather than blighting another. There’s an atmosphere of malaise in the camp, and I believe it’s partly due to a host of anticipations, both good and bad.”

“It’s assumed the British and Americans will soon mount another major offensive, in the northern and eastern territories.”

“No doubt they will. As the commander instructed the officers last week, we must all be prepared for a cataclysm. We must ready ourselves for suffering and death. When the female volunteers do arrive, perhaps it would be good if you make your own visitation. This is most regular. But keep in mind, Corporal Endo, the reasons we are here as stated by the commander. It is our way of life that we’re struggling for, and so it behooves each one of us to carry himself with dignity, in whatever he does. Try to remember this. I won’t always be around to give you counsel.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, rising to his feet. He bowed, but didn’t lift his head immediately, and said, “Sir?”

“Corporal?”

“If I may ask, sir,” he said weakly, almost as a boy would who was already fearing he knew the answer. “Will you be visiting the volunteers as well?”

“Naturally,” I immediately replied, picking up the text I had been reading. “You may take your leave now, Corporal.”

I didn’t look up again, and he left my tent shortly thereafter. I was glad. In truth, I hadn’t yet thought of the question he’d posed, and for the rest of the evening and part of the night I wondered what I would do. I had answered the way I had for obvious reasons, to assure the corporal of the commonness of all our procedures, and yet the imminent arrival of these “volunteers,” as they were referred to, seemed quite removed from the ordinary. Certainly, I had heard of the longtime mobilization of such a corps, in Northern China and in the Philippines and on other islands, and like everyone else appreciated the logic of deploying young women to help maintain the morale of officers and foot soldiers in the field, though I never bothered to consider it until that night. And like everyone else, I suppose, I assumed it would be a most familiar modality, just one among the many thousand details and notices in a wartime camp. But when the day finally came I realized that I was mistaken.

* * *

THE CONVOY ARRIVED a few days after I spoke to Corporal Endo, just as he had heard reported. It had been delayed by an ambush of native insurgents and had suffered significant damage and loss of supplies. There were at least a dozen men with serious injuries, for three of whom there was nothing left to be done. Two trucks had had to be abandoned en route, and I remember the men immediately crowding around the lone one bearing the twenty-kilo sacks of rice and other foods like pickled radishes and dried fish. At the time we were still in good contact with the supply line, and there were modest but still decent rations available to us, though it was clear the supplies were growing steadily feebler with each transport. The ambush had left the truck riddled with bullet holes, and one of the sergeants ordered a few of his men to pick the truckbed clean of every last kernel of rice that had drizzled out of pocks in the burlap. They appeared as if they were searching for insects or grubs. It was a pathetic sight, particularly when the sergeant lined up the men after they finished and had them pour their scavengings into his cap, which he in turn presented to the presiding officer-in-charge.

In fact I believe the whole group of us had nearly forgotten about what else had been expected, when a lone transport drove slowly up the road. It stopped and turned before reaching us in the central yard, heading instead to the commander’s house of palm wood and bamboo and thatch, a small hut-like building situated at the far east end of the expansive clearing. I could see that the doctor, Captain Ono, had just emerged from the commander’s quarters and was standing at attention on the makeshift veranda. The driver stopped in front and jumped out and saluted the captain. Then he went around and folded down the back gate to the bed. He called into the dark hold and helped an older woman wearing a paper hat to the ground. She seemed to thank him and then turned to bark raspily inside. There was no answer and the woman shouted this time, using a most crude epithet. It was then that they climbed down from the back of the truck, one by one, shielding their eyes from the high Burmese light.

They were dressed like peasants, in baggy, crumpled white trousers and loose shirts. One might have thought they were young boys were it not for their braided hair. The older woman and the driver pulled each of the girls by the arm as she descended and stood them in a row before the steps of the veranda. Captain Ono didn’t seem to be looking at them. Instead he stood at attention, clearly waiting for the commander to call out and have him bring the arrivals — five in all — inside for inspection. That there were only five of them seems remarkable to me now, given that there were nearly two hundred men in the encampment, but at the time I had no thoughts of what was awaiting them in the coming days and nights. Like the rest of the men who were watching, I was simply struck by their mere presence, by the white shock of their oversized pants, by their dirty, unshod feet, by the narrowness of their hands and their throats. And soon enough it was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled cotton of their poor clothes that shook me as if I had heard an air-raid siren, and which probably did the same for every other man standing at attention in that dusty clay field.

The commander must have spoken, for Captain Ono ordered the older woman to gather the others and march them up the steps. The girls looked frightened, and all but one ascended quickly to the veranda landing. The last one hesitated, though just momentarily, and the captain stepped forward and struck her in the face with the back of his hand, sending her down to one knee. He did not seem particularly enraged. Without saying anything he struck her again, then once more, and she fell back limply. She had not cried out. The older woman waited until Captain Ono stepped away before helping the girl up. Then the captain knocked on the door. The house servant opened it and he went inside, followed by the four girls and the older woman bracing on her shoulder the one who had been beaten. The house servant then closed the door and stood outside on the veranda, his hands at his sides, stock-still as we.

That night there was an unusually festive air in the camp. Groups of soldiers squatted outside their tents singing songs and trading stories in the temperate night air. There was no ration of sake in the supply shipment except a few large bottles for the officers, but the men didn’t seem to mind. They weren’t raucous or moody. Instead they beheld the drink of their anticipations. Strangely enough, Corporal Endo alone seemed in a dark mood, and he sought me out as I took my evening walk. Even then I enjoyed a regular period of daily exercise, like my morning swims later in life, to reflect on and review the day’s happenings and thereby try to make sense of them, contain them so. That evening, as I wended my way along our camp’s perimeter, subsumed in the rhythmic din of birds and insects calling out from the jungle, I couldn’t help but think of the sorry line of the girls entering the commander’s house, led by the physician, Captain Ono. They had spent the better part of the afternoon inside with Colonel Ishii, shielded from the intense heat of the day. The captain had come by the infirmary soon after their entering to inform me of my new, additional duties — that I, and not he, would be responsible for maintaining the readiness of the girls, beginning the next day. Very soon the fighting would resume (he said this with a chilling surety), and his time and skills would be better spent performing surgery and other life-saving procedures.

As I was the paramedical officer — field-trained but not formally educated — it would be more than appropriate for me to handle their care. They were quite valuable, after all, to the well-being and morale of the camp, and vigilance would be in order. He was as serious as if we had been discussing the commander’s health, though for the first time he seemed to be addressing me personally, even patting me lightly on the shoulder. His general implication, of course, was that their present good condition was likely to change with the imminent visitations by the officers and noncommissioned ranks and then the wider corps of the men, and that their continuing welfare would soon present me with difficult challenges.

Corporal Endo found me just short of the far southeast checkpoint, beyond which our squads were regularly patrolling the watch. To the left of us, one could see the faintest glimmers of light filtering through the half-cleared vegetation of the perimeter; it was the commander’s hut, some fifty meters away. There was no music or other sound, just weak electric light glowing through the slats of the hut’s bamboo shutters. Every so often the throw of light would flicker as someone moved in front of the window. The corporal and I were both drawn to it, and as I glanced over at him I could see the tiny play of illumination in his eyes.

“Lieutenant, sir,” he addressed me gloomily, “I’ve been thinking all afternoon about what’s to come in the next days.”

“You mean about the expected offensive from the enemy?”

“I suppose, yes, that too,” he said. “There’s been much radio traffic lately. Almost all concerning where they’ll strike, and when.”

“Near here, and soon,” I replied, echoing what Captain Ono had pithily said to me.

“Yes, sir,” Endo said, “that seems to be the conclusion. But what I was thinking of mostly again was the volunteers.”

“You’ll have your due turn,” I said, annoyed that he was still preoccupied with the issue. “It will be a day or two or three, whatever becomes determined. In the meanwhile you should keep yourself busy. It’s an unhealthful anticipation that you are developing, Corporal. You must command yourself.”

“But if I can make myself clear, sir, it’s not that way at all. I’m not thinking about when I’ll see one of them. In fact, sir, I’m almost sure of not visiting. I won’t seek their comforts at all.”

This surprised me, but I said anyway, “Of course you’re not required to. No one is.”

“Yes, sir, I know,” he said softly, following me as I made my way on the path that headed back toward the main encampment, directly past Colonel Ishii’s hut. We walked for some time before he spoke again. “The fellows in the communications and munitions areas drew lots this morning, to make things orderly and have some excitement as well by predetermining the order of the queue, and by sheer chance I took first place among my rank. There was much gibing and joking about it, and some of the fellows offered me cigarettes and fruits if I would trade with them. I had to leave the tent then, and they probably thought I was being a bad winner.”

We had reached the point on the path that was closest to the hut. The sentry noticed us and let us pass; he was a private I had recently treated for a mild case of dysentery. Again there was hardly a sound, save the sharp, high songs of the nighttime fauna. The hut, with its thatched roof and roughly hewn veranda, was the picture of modesty and quiescence.

I asked, “So why did you leave?”

“Because I didn’t want to so freely trade my place in front of them,” he said, his voice nearly angry. He gazed anxiously at the hut, as though the humble structure were some unpleasant memorial. “You see, sir, I’ve decided not to visit those girls. I don’t know why, for sure, because it’s true that every day I’ve been in this miserable situation I’ve been thinking about being with a woman, any woman. But yesterday after I saw them arrive in the camp I suddenly didn’t think about it anymore. I don’t know why. I know I must be sick, Lieutenant. I do in fact feel sick, but I didn’t come to ask for any treatment or advice. I don’t want my lot anymore but I realized I didn’t want any of the others to have it, either. So I thought I could ask simply that you hold it for me, so none of the fellows can get to it. Some of them would try to steal it from my things, and I’m afraid I’d misplace it on my own.”

He then showed me a torn-edged chit, a tiny, triangular bit of rice paper with a scribble on one side. It was nothing, or less than nothing, not even something to be thrown away. His fellows would certainly just push and jostle for their place when the time came, chits or not. But the corporal handed the scrap to me as if it were the last ash of an ancestor, and somehow I found myself cradling it. I thought for a moment he had deceived me about his virginity and was suffering from something like an untreated syphilitic infection, but I saw nothing but the straining earnestness of his narrow, boyish face. I knew he was unsteady, but now I was quite certain his mind had descended on a most infirm path. His only tempering note was how he had described the present time as a “miserable situation,” an appraisal that seemed highly regular, if somewhat disloyal to our morale and cause, and which, no doubt, was undeniably true.

I unbuttoned the chest pocket of my shirt and deposited the bit of paper. I said nothing to the corporal, for I did not know what I could say or otherwise do except attend to his present circumstance as any decent and clear-thinking medical officer would. He was genuinely grateful and relieved, and he bowed almost wistfully before me, making me feel as though I had indeed come to his aid, that I had helped save him from whatever fate he supposed would befall him were he to visit the ones delivered for our final solace and pleasure. And I recall understanding this last notion. For although it was true the talk throughout the camp was still of the glorious brightness of our ultimate victory and its forever dawning reach, the surer truth as yet unspoken was that we were now squarely facing the dark visage of our demise.

Famous, of course, is the resolve of the Japanese soldier, the lore of his tenacity and courage and willingness to fight in the face of certain death. But I will say, too, that for every man who showed no fear or hesitance, there were three or four or five others whose mettle was as unashamedly wan and mortal as yours or mine. As the defenders of the most far-flung sector of the occupied territory, we understood there was little question of the terrible hours ahead of us, and it was a startlingly real possibility that every man in the camp, every soul one looked upon, would soon be dead. This, I know, was a constant thought of mine, enough that my dreams were wracked nightly by the burden of it. And perhaps even more than my own death, my nightmares spelled the chance of Captain Ono and the few other medical personnel all being killed, and that among the scores of the horribly wounded, I’d be the lone surviving medical officer, the last hope of the broken and dying.

Corporal Endo seemed all too beleaguered to me, and I began to guide him quickly past the commander’s hut, his gaze almost rigidly locked upon the shuttered windows. We had gone past the hut by some thirty paces when all of a sudden he grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

“Lieutenant…”

I looked up and saw that the door was open, and that the figure of a man stood out on the open porch, his hands perched on his hips. He seemed to be surveying the darkened compound, and the corporal and I both stopped in our tracks, trying not to make a sound. From the silhouette it was clearly Colonel Ishii, with his thick torso and bowleggedness and the distinctly squared-off shape of his head. He was naked, and he was sonorously inhaling and exhaling, deeply up from the belly. From our angle we could glimpse as well inside the two-room house, but the only sight was a clothes trunk against a far wall and a few lighted candles set atop it. There was no indication of anybody else being inside, no sight of the girls or the house servant or Captain Ono, who besides being the head physician was also something of a confidant to the commander, his personal surgeon and counsel. Many evenings after supper Captain Ono could be seen on his way to the commander’s house, and when directives from central headquarters in Rangoon had come concerning preparations for the inevitable enemy offensive, the doctor was always included in the briefings.

The commander himself was someone whom these days people might call a “health nut,” as some of his ministrations were quite peculiar. For example, he would exercise vigorously in the early mornings, an intense regimen of calisthenics and stretches that would challenge a seasoned drill sergeant. Following this, sweating like a plow ox, he would allow himself to be bitten by descending swarms of mosquitoes, as a way of bleeding himself. Out behind the hut, he would cover only his face and neck and let the ravenous insects feed freely on his belly and chest and back. One would assume he’d have suffered terribly from malaria, as a large number of the men did, but he seemed perfectly fit right up to the day we received news of the Emperor’s surrender, when he committed ritual suicide. Captain Ono made it a point to describe the commander’s daily methods to me, I believe, in the hope that I would find them intimidating and remarkable, and back then I probably did consider them so. I was deeply impressionable and unassuming and full of dread, knowing little else but whatever was provided to me by professional men like the doctor, who were authoritative and born into an elite caste, and who seemed the very incarnation of our meticulously constructed way of life.

The colonel took a step down. He was a bit wobbly. I thought he had seen us, and I was ready to address him to avoid seeming as if we were trying to conceal ourselves in the darkness, but he bent down to peer beneath the floorboards of the hut, which was set up off the ground on short posts. After a moment’s inspection he stood up and began speaking down toward the crawl space, his tone eerily gentle, as if he were speaking to a niece who was misbehaving.

“There is little reason to hide anymore. It’s all done now. It’s silly to think otherwise. You will come out and join your companions.”

There was no answer.

“You must come out sometime,” Colonel Ishii went on, taking another tack. His effort seemed almost ridiculous, given that any other commander would have simply had soldiers retrieve her, or just shot her dead with his pistol, and perhaps on another evening the colonel himself would have done exactly that. “I suppose it’s more comfortable under there than out in the jungle. But you know there is food inside now. The cook has made some rice balls. The others are eating them as we speak.”

“I want to be with my sister,” a young voice replied miserably. She was speaking awkwardly in Japanese, with some Korean words mixed in. “I want to know where she is. I won’t come out until I know.”

“She’s with the camp doctor,” the colonel said. “To have her ear looked at. The doctor wanted to make sure she was all right.”

The girl obviously didn’t know the doctor was the same man who had struck down her sister. There was a pause, and the colonel simply stood there in his blunt nakedness, the strangest picture of tolerance.

The girl’s voice said, “I promised my mother we would always stay together.”

“You are good to try to keep such a promise,” the colonel said to her. “But how can you do so from down there? Your sister will be back with you tomorrow. For now you must come out, right at this moment. Right at this moment. I won’t wait any longer.”

Something must have shifted in his voice, a different note only she could hear, for she came out almost immediately, slowly scuttling forward on her hands and knees. When she reached the open air she didn’t get up, staying limply crumpled at his feet. She was naked, too. The clouds had scattered and the moon was now apparent, and in the dim violet light the captured sight of them, if you did not know the truth, was almost a thing of beauty, a scene a painter might conjure to speak to the subject of a difficult love. The colonel offered his hand and the girl took it and pulled herself up to her feet, her posture bent and tentative as though she were ill. She was crying softly. He guided her to the step of the porch, and it was there that her legs suddenly lost power and buckled under her. The colonel took hold of her wrist and barked at her to get up, the sharp report of his voice sundering the air. She didn’t respond or move, but lay there feebly, her head lolling against the step. She was sobbing wearily for her sister, whose name, I thought she was saying, was “Kkutaeh,” which meant bottom, or last.

The colonel made a low grunt and jerked her up by her wrist, and it looked as if he were dragging a skinned billy goat or calf, her body thudding dully against the step and then being pulled across the rough planking of the porch. He got her inside and a peal of cries went up from an unseen corner of the room. He shouted for quiet with a sudden, terrible edge in his voice. All at once he had become livid, and he shoved the girl with his foot as though he were going to push-kick her across the floor. Meanwhile the sentry had heard the outburst and ran around to the front, instinctively leveling his rifle on us as he came forward. I raised my hands and the sentry yelled, “Hey there!” and I realized that Corporal Endo, inexplicably, had begun to sprint back into the darkness of the jungle.

I barked, “Don’t shoot!” but the sentry couldn’t help himself and fired once in our direction. The shot flew past well above me, though I could feel it bore through the heavy air. There was little chance that it could have hit the corporal, or anyone else. The sentry seemed shocked at his own reaction and dropped his rifle. I was relieved, but the colonel had already come out of the house, this time a robe hastily tied around his middle, a shiny pistol in his hand. Over the sentry’s shoulder I could see the colonel take aim from the veranda and fire twice. It was like watching the action through a very long lens, when everything is narrowed and made delicate. Then a questioning, half-bemused expression flitted across the sentry’s face, and he fell to the ground like a dropped stone.

The colonel walked over and motioned to me with the gun to let down my hands. He had recognized me as the doctor’s assistant. “Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said unseverely, not even looking down at the sentry’s body, which he practically stepped over as he approached me. I knew the man was dead, as one of the bullets had struck him in the neck and torn away a section of carotid artery. The ground was slowly soaking up his blood. The colonel said, “You are a medical man, are you not?” Up close the colonel was more inebriated than I had surmised, his sleepy eyes opaque. “You can help me then, I hope, with a small confusion I was having this evening.”

He paused, as if trying to remember what he was saying, and in the background I could hear the chaotic shouts of orders and footfalls coming from the main encampment. I replied, “However I am able, sir.”

“What? Oh yes. You can aid me with something. I was being entertained this evening, as you may know, and it occurred to me that there was a chance of…a complication.”

“Sir?”

“You know what I’m talking about, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, though in fact I had no idea.

“They are young, after all, and likely fertile.” He paused a moment and said as if an aside, “And of course, being virginal, that can’t protect them, can it?”

“No, sir.”

“Of course not,” he concurred, as if I had asked him the question. His ignorance surprised me. The colonel was in his mid-thirties, which is not old in the world, but late in the war he was practically ancient. He crossed his arms in an almost casual pose, though he kept a tight hold on the pistol, which poked out beneath one folded arm. “And yet one grows up with all kinds of apocrypha and lore, yes? I mean us men. A young woman naturally receives guidance and training about such matters, estimable information. While it seems we are left to our own methods, each by each and one by one. To our own devices, yes?”

Immediately I thought of Corporal Endo and his interests, and then with alarm wondered where he was now, but I couldn’t answer, as a squad of armed men came running up to us. The colonel waved them forward. The squad leader, a corporal, seemed shocked to find the lifeless body of the sentry lying in awkward repose by our feet.

“Remove him,” the colonel said, prompting the corporal to order two of his men to lift up the corpse, which they hefted by the armpits and calves. Someone gathered the dropped rifle and the bloody cap. Two other men were to remain as sentries. Soon enough they were bearing the body off, the assemblage disappearing beyond the pale ring of lamplight about the hut. I realized then that neither the colonel nor I had spoken a word of explanation to the men, nor had any of them even whispered a question.

“You’ll look after this,” the colonel said to me matter-of-factly, referring, I understood immediately, to the death report, which was filled out whenever time and circumstances allowed. He was not requesting that I cover for him or whitewash the situation in any way; rather, he was simply reminding me of one of my usual duties, as though not wanting me to be remiss. The next day I would note in the necessary form that the sentry, a Private Ozaki, was shot dead by a forward sniper who was sought out by our patrols but never found.

I bowed curtly and the colonel acknowledged me with a grunt. I waited while he ascended the low porch and went inside. As I started back for my own tent, I could hear him speaking again, in a calm, unagitated tone, the same way he had spoken to the one of them who had hidden beneath the house. “Look at my girls,” I heard him saying, repeating himself slowly, like a father who has been away much too long. “Look here at my girls.”