TWENTY-TWO

 

Sometime in the spring — one of the newer prisoners told me it was the middle of April — we started wondering if the fortunes of the Japanese were changing. They seemed very gloomy. Sergeant Akamatsu and the other officers gave regular speeches to the troops in which they all cheered defiantly and shouted banzai, but the officers’ faces were grim and there was a misery in their demeanour that I hadn’t seen before. They meted out harsh discipline against their own. The newer prisoners whispered about what they’d heard in the news before their capture. They said the war was turning against Japan, and whenever planes flew overhead, it was to reinforce the eastern front, where the Allies were striking hard.

Akamatsu gathered all the younger male prisoners together one morning. He announced he had an urgent task for some of us. He prefaced this with a long speech about the emperor, his divinity, his descent from the primordial sun god, and, above all, the unbreakable devotion of his subjects. In a small clearing outside the camp, revived drills by the Japanese troops underscored his point.

“A large number of our heroic injured soldiers will arrive tomorrow morning by train from the north,” he said. “The hospital in Tung Koo Chow will be their new home, and the existing patients must be relocated. The staff will co-operate.”

It would be our job to help move the patients from this hospital. These were mostly locals and a small number of foreigners — Western missionaries and teachers — and Akamatsu said they would go to a nearby farmhouse.

The Japanese piled into four trucks while the dozen of us they picked to help marched in the middle of the convoy. I was with Leuk, the farmer’s sons, and a few others prisoners all about our age. A breeze blew over the road, but we still choked on the fumes from the trucks and I walked with my hands cupped over my mouth and nose. Along the road, a burned-out farmhouse gave off its last wisps of smoke, and clusters of crows fought loudly over dark forms on the ground. I thought I heard a child screaming in the distance, so I took my hands from my mouth and covered my ears and coughed until the farm was out of sight.

Tung Koo Chow was very quiet. If the townspeople had been out earlier in the day, the sound of the trucks must have sent most of them inside. I looked back, and as the trucks passed, people crept out of their houses and the front doors of shops reopened.

We stopped at the entrance to the grounds of St. Paul’s Hospital. Outside the gates, an officer waited in his car while his driver briskly ran a cloth over the hood and windshield. Three trucks and two ambulances were lined up behind it. As our convoy pulled up, curious faces emerged in the hospital windows. A senior Japanese officer spoke harshly to Sergeant Akamatsu and pointed repeatedly at the hospital’s main door and then went back to his car and was driven off, the ambulances following him.

Sergeant Akamatsu opened the gates and marched ­ostentatiously down the path with ten soldiers behind him. He ordered us to follow them, and we shuffled behind the neat clip of their boots. As we approached, a doctor in a white coat and a nursing sister came out and stood on the front steps of the hospital. The doctor left one hand resting on the large iron door handle. Akamatsu walked up to him and asked if he was in charge.

“I am,” he said stiffly. Like the nurse, he looked past the sergeant at us. Maybe he thought we were patients.

“Many of our soldiers are coming by train this evening. You need to empty the hospital for them. Move your patients out to the village or discharge them, but we need this place emptied out within four hours.”

“We can’t do that,” said the doctor. “Everyone here is very sick; there’s nowhere else for them to go.”

Akamatsu’s jaw flexed. The rest of his body was rigid. Only because I stood close to him was I able to see one index finger drop slowly along the length of his riding crop.

“I said move them,” he answered.

The nurse fingered the small metal cross that hung from her neck, and the doctor looked at us again. I realized I had been standing with my mouth open and felt stupid. I closed it and my tongue scraped against the dry inside of my mouth.

“We can’t,” the doctor repeated. “Where on earth could I put them?”

Akamatsu’s neck and scalp flushed. “You think you can’t? Then we’ll move them,” he answered.

The doctor’s demeanour broke and he swallowed hard. “I said — I said there is nowhere else they can —”

Akamatsu turned and shouted orders at the other soldiers. His voice raked the air like gunfire, spittle flying from his lips. I understood none of it, of course, but the meaning was in his body — the fists, the blood vessels on his face, the torrent of words.

When he was done, the soldiers shouted “Hai!” and marched up the hospital steps. Akamatsu told us to get off the path and wait on the front lawn. Nurses and some patients had been watching the scene from the windows on all three floors, and they retreated when Akamatsu started shouting.

The doctor and nurse ran after the soldiers, but the last soldier up the steps turned and shoved them back with his rifle and then slammed the door. The doctor got up and turned to Akamatsu, saying they weren’t allowed in. Akamatsu put his right hand on his pistol and shouted at the doctor to step aside. The doctor hesitated when he saw Akamatsu touch his gun. His expression changed and he started to say something. Akamatsu didn’t care. He drew his gun and shot the doctor in the head, and when the nurse turned to run, he shot her twice in the back. He kicked their bodies off the steps into the bushes and went inside.

Through the windows, I saw and heard the staff and patients trying to keep the soldiers away. One orderly shouted at another to help him block the doors of their ward, and an older nurse pulled a patient from a window. I felt a drumming in my head as though I had been struck from behind. I rested my hand on my burning stomach. Watching the swirling forms of soldiers, staff, and patients through the windows, I felt time slow. Already the months of my exile had felt long and the changing of the seasons delayed, and now the day itself slowed to an inhuman crawl.

Leuk, the farmer’s sons, the other men and boys, we all stared at the white facade and the three neat rows of windows. The sounds were very clear: the screams, the doors breaking apart, the collision of bodies with solid objects. Two white-clad nurses wheeled patients away from the doors and struggled to stop one patient, who looked as though he was deranged, from leaving. But they were on the first floor. The soldiers were starting at the top.

They began shooting the patients. Despite all the gunfire we’d heard over the past several months, Leuk and I started at the first shot. On the top floor a window opened, and the shouting became much clearer as all the windows banged violently open. It was like the rising of a curtain at the theatre.

An old man with a bandaged head appeared suddenly in a window in a tall-backed wheelchair. One of his hands was raised and waving strangely. He lunged forward as the soldier behind him tipped his chair. The old man plummeted to the gravel below. Another man, much younger, followed from the same window. The soldiers disgorged the sick and mutilated into the air, as though unloading bags off a truck. One soldier, a burly man I’d noticed earlier, dragged an injured woman towards a window. The uniformed hands of a nurse seized him by the arm and tried to break his grasp. The patient gripped the window frame with one hand, but her other was pressed over a bloody bandage across her abdomen. The soldier shot the nurse and pushed the woman through the window with his boot. The nurse was the next to fall.

When she landed, I thought her eyes looked into mine. She had fallen on her back, on top of the others. The bullet had passed through her neck, but her face was untouched. She was pale, young, and wide-eyed, gazing far away as only the newly dead can do. She looked almost alive, but in the staring white of her uniform she seemed already dressed for burial.

The Japanese started clearing the lower floors. When one man tried to climb through a window, Akamatsu shot him and he fell into the bushes. Behind him, a nurse laughed hysterically. Two soldiers, seeing no one left to deal with, holstered their guns and tore her uniform from her before throwing her to the floor.

Many survived their falls, even some who had been shot. With the upper floors cleared, the Japanese turned their fury on the survivors outside. They dragged a man from the heap who was smeared with feces from a corpse that had fallen on him. All the while the man cursed them loudly. A soldier took a garden hose off the wall and put the nozzle up between his legs. They turned the water on and he swelled until his belly gleamed and his cursing blazed into a wordless scream. They dragged the last few nurses through the hospital doors and laid them on the ground, and then used them into a despairing silence and shot them all when they were done. When I saw the expression in the nurses’ eyes before they died, I stopped believing that this could ever end.

I felt each blow, each fall, every gunshot exploded in my ears and every scream stretched my jaw. I lost all sensation of myself — the hunger in my stomach, my soaking cheeks, the grass pricking my naked ankles. I felt only what I saw and heard in the glacial crawl of this moment. Beside me, my brother heaved dryly and struggled to stand. I felt the bile burning his throat. I was utterly empty, nothing more. Then, as Leuk retched and the farmer’s son sobbed loudly behind me, I wiped my eyes until I saw clearly that all the victims were finally dead.

Their stillness cleared my mind. For a moment I heard nothing of the soldiers’ laughter and shouts, or the sobs of those around me. The scene before me disappeared. I wanted only to be gone, to be home, and never hear screaming or gunfire again. I wanted to sit in the garden beside my mother, or run up the cool stairways of my school, smelling its camphor and old paper, and the wild aroma of its orange trees in blossom. But those things were very far away and very old now, memories from another person’s life, and they were fitted to a world I’d left behind.

Akamatsu stepped forward as some of his soldiers dropped shovels and jerry cans on the ground beside him. He jerked his head to the lawns on our right and looked at us with a mocking smile.

“Now clean this up.”

 

We staggered over the road back to camp. Open calluses bled on my hands from the shovel, and my clothes and hair stank of gasoline and smoke and scorched flesh. We still had to walk between the trucks. They let us stop at a stream on the way, where I sucked in the murky water like a lamprey. I held my brother’s hand, and we were silent all the way back.

As we returned to the camp, it began to rain. Leuk went inside, but I stood away from the shelter and let the drops land on me. I hung my head and the rain fell over the nape of my neck, and I tried to let its lightness and slow trickle displace the pounding in my brain. Soon I was soaked. The dirt ran from my skin into my clothes. Grey water dripped from my fingertips, and the water stung my calluses. I stared vacantly at my shoes, which had torn open at the toes, though the laces were strangely intact. The lower buttons on my shirt were gone, and when I saw the tarnished belt buckle exposed, I raised a trembling hand to conceal it. Someone called me. Three times I ignored it and stayed standing in the rain.

“Chung-Man, are you sick?”

I couldn’t answer Ling. She was as soaked as I was, and yet seemed cleaner, so clean that when she reached out to touch me, I recoiled and moved away, fearing I would destroy her.

“Come inside,” she said. Her hand was open and her arm clear of its old bruises. I backed away.

“No, I want to stay out here. I feel hot. The rain, the rain is —” I gasped as though I’d been hit. I looked up to make sure the rain covered my face so that no one, especially Ling, could see the tears pouring down it. I screwed my eyes shut tight and covered them with my hands, but behind them there burned images that I couldn’t look away from. I inhaled hard through my nose, trying to smell something that was real and in front of me, anything but the stench of gasoline. I clutched the buckle and let the pin dig into my palm.

It rained until long past dark that night. I didn’t line up for the meal, but Ling brought me some food. We sat together outside the shelter and ate, saying nothing to each other.