The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  He’s still a little warm. I keep checking. You know, just after he died, when the nurse finally took the mask off his face, that was the first thing I did.

  I put my arm around her shoulder and briefly reached over to touch Sheung’s forearm.

  I’m sorry I didn’t make it.

  No, don’t apologize. He’d been unconscious since yesterday. They started giving him more morphine then, and after that he stopped fidgeting. You must be tired. Have you eaten?

  Tat-Choy sat down on the other side of the bed.

  Mother, I spoke to the doctor. Now that Uncle’s been here, they’re going to move Father to the morgue soon.

  Yee-Lin’s lips trembled and she slid her hand farther down her husband’s back.

  You know, Chung-Man, all the arrangements have been made. He made them all years ago. He always took care of things. He was so good at that. He knew everything. I don’t know anything. What will I do? I can’t drive, I don’t know the lawyer’s number or how to pay the bills.

  Sister-in-law, I began.

  She fell forward and put her head on his chest, burying her arm beneath his back, all the way to her bony shoulder.

  After the funeral I flew back to Chicago. My program had just relocated to a new hospital near Northwestern and it seemed the ribbon-cutting would never end. The hallway chatter and official memos were studded with platitudes about how this facility had the latest of everything and with clichés about the hospital of the future and the miracles of science. The constant stream of these bromides drove me to a kind of hypnotic dullness, and in idle moments I found myself gazing stupidly at the banks of new computer screens, the automated equipment in the labs, and oversized photographs of grimacing philanthropists that loomed in every hallway. None of it interested me. Both novelty and routine seemed to peel away to disclose the underlying emptiness. Then there was a fire at my favourite lunch spot down the street from the hospital. It wasn’t a big fire, but when the restaurant reopened a month later, I didn’t return to it. My habits seemed more easily broken.

  I went back to Hong Kong four months later. Tat-Choy picked me up at the airport and warned me Yee-Lin wasn’t doing well. In his car, he turned to me with a desperate look.

  Uncle, I haven’t been able to tell anyone in the family. But you’re a doctor. You need to see her.

  In nervous and rapid speech, which he punctuated by either clearing his throat or squeezing his hands over the steering wheel, he told me of his mother’s sudden decline after his father’s death. He said the maid began to call him at odd hours in a panic. The first time Tat-Choy went over, he found his mother in the bathtub wearing a cotton dress, soaked and half buried in a mass of soap foam, shouting nonsense. Then she complained of foul odours in the flat, and if it happened during or after meals, she would vomit on the spot no matter where she was, even the building elevator. She said the flat smelled like sewage and she drove the maid to tears with her cleaning orders. She washed herself constantly, burning herself with hot water and scrubbing pads. One night she said the stench of sewage was so unbearable that she ran out onto her balcony on the twentieth floor. Tat-Choy and the maid had to pull her back inside. He sobbed at a traffic light as he told me how he and a nurse had to drag her into an ambulance.

  We arrived at the hospital. Of course, it was all beyond me. I had seen much as a doctor, bodies tormented with disease. But in that role I stood apart from the suffering and was bound to my patients by abstractions such as duty and decorum. When I saw Yee-Lin at the hospital — and I admit with shame that my visit was brief — the illness, the injury, the damage, whatever it was, wasn’t hers alone. It was something that I shared intimately with her, that I recognized like the sound of my own heart in my ears, and I recoiled. Knowing that Tat-Choy couldn’t possibly understand this, and maybe shouldn’t, I stammered that only the doctors at the hospital could help her. I couldn’t say anything else. He looked straight at me, my nephew, my flesh and blood. My turgid words fell flat and my throat seemed to close, and I knew that I had only gazed blankly at the wall above her head rather than look at her. My banality was a facade. He stared at me as I revealed the depth of his mother’s suffering, and her distance from the world to which he always thought she had belonged.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We were quickly marched out of the camp, only to be made to wait for hours outside the fence. Most of the Japanese trucks were idle, their hoods open and spare parts spread over the ground on large oilcloths. Some were up on jacks at dangerous-looking angles while soldiers crouched under them with their tools. One soldier worked with this shirt off. His ribs stood out as starkly as mine did. At the front of one truck, a sunburnt driver stood before the open hood with an armful of cables and hoses, looking dazed and uncertain. Akamatsu moved between them, his uniform undisturbed and his voice full, barking at them to finish up. He seemed the only machine that could not fail.

  Earlier, I had heard we would be driven to the new camp to save time, but now Akamatsu said we would walk. I looked around and counted about sixty prisoners. Each one had a meagre collection of belongings. The Japanese ordered us to carry the food supplies as well, even those reserved for the soldiers. There were large bags of rice weighing about twenty pounds each, sacks of mouldering sweet potatoes and millet, and bamboo cages with live chickens that the soldiers had taken from the villages. Women and some of the smaller children, including Wei-Ming, were given bags of millet to carry. Some of the men were made to carry bamboo poles across their shoulders with baskets holding sacks of rice at either end.

  One man, a merchant called Mr. Yuen, was fitted with one of these as he knelt on the ground on legs covered in ulcers. When he tried to get up, his legs shook so badly that it took him a while just to get one foot back on the ground, so two soldiers kicked him in the back and kidneys. Then he was up on both feet, though he still bent forward because he couldn’t lift the rice. After more blows, he straightened his back, but as soon as he rose, he shook terribly. The loads were unbalanced and I knew he would end up on the ground again, so I ran over and removed one of the sacks from the heavier side. After that, he straightened up, though he was pale and covered in in sweat. One of the soldiers pointed angrily at the bag and gestured for me to carry it. I put it over my shoulder opposite my own bag.

  It had been a cool morning and clouds still hung across the sky, but now in the forest it felt hot and suffocating. I walked with Leuk and couldn’t see Yee-Lin, Wei-Ming, or Ling. Yet I was strangely unafraid. Maybe the load on my back gave me a sense of purpose again, or my sudden act in aid of Mr. Yuen had lifted my spirits. I could see him walking ahead, shaking. I shifted the load on my back as I watched him so that I felt its weight all the more and imagined that I was diminishing his trouble. As we walked, I focused intently on him, so that aside from Leuk huffing next to me and the occasional sounds of the forest, my mind was absorbed in the struggling motions of Mr. Yuen. I marked when he passed a tree and counted the number of steps until I reached the same mark. The count dropped as I caught up with him. These games were all I had in the moment, and not knowing where the girls were, and fearing that any word to Leuk would get me beaten, I retreated into these exercises.

  The one truck the Japanese had brought with them rumbled noisily at the front of the convoy. The soldiers bringing up the rear on foot were getting impatient with the stragglers, and I heard prisoners shouting as they were hit. Akamatsu allowed short breaks for water and food. Each time, we found it harder to get going again. I looked for the girls whenever we stopped, but because we were ordered to remain in line, I never saw them. By midday, Mr. Yuen had fallen far behind me so that I could no longer count my distance from him and needed other games to occupy me.

  It was the middle of the afternoon and becoming unbearably hot. I was so tired and thirsty that even thinking seemed to wear me out, and all I could do was walk. Then I heard familiar voices and turned to see Ling and Wei-Ming, and Yee-Lin holding her hand. They were being led up the edg
e of the road by a soldier and were followed by two girls and two boys who looked to be between eight and ten. They put all the children together and the soldier walked beside us. Leuk and I talked briefly to Wei-Ming, but we were breathing hard under our loads. I was glad to see that Yee-Lin, Ling, and the children had less to carry.

  The forest thinned to a shrubby field of sparse palms, with hills ascending in the distance. The road turned to take us alongside a river. The sound of rushing water distracted me while I plodded heavily beside Leuk. I leaned to the side where I carried the sack, as though I might topple into him. Next to us, a field of midsummer grain shook in the wind and birds gorged themselves on the unripe seed, swarming in dense clouds as they must have been doing all over the country, feeding on crops whose harvesters had fled or died. At the edge of the field a collapsed house smouldered, dissolving into ash and smoke against the downdrafts off the hillsides. Wei-Ming and Yee-Lin walked on the outer edge of the line, and when a low-hanging branch appeared, the soldier who walked with us paused and held it up until the girls had passed, leaving the prisoners behind to deal with it themselves.

  In the early evening, we halted. I had thought we would be driven on like cattle into the night, but the soldiers too looked exhausted. Wei-Ming hung asleep over Yee-Lin’s shoulders, and Leuk was almost delirious, muttering under his breath about going home to bed. Then I realized that at some point he had taken the sack of rice off my shoulder and carried it himself. Ling was behind us. Because she had no possessions, she had nothing to carry and was the most alert among us. Her face shone with sweat and was scratched up by branches.

  Most of the prisoners were too tired to eat, but some ate the stinking rations the Japanese gave out — cooked sweet potatoes that had been carried all day, knocked to a pulpy mess. They put sacks of these down and people crouched around the open burlap bags, scooping the mash up with their hands and licking it off their fingers and wrists. Wei-Ming woke up and complained that she was hungry. That made me angry. I was hoping she would sleep through the night, and though I was hungry too, I dreaded having to share food from those sacks. I would have eaten even worse food, but my fear was that the other prisoners would knock me away to keep me from getting anything.

  The soldier who had walked beside us during the day called to all the children. He walked slowly and looked us over as though doing an inspection. The adults watched him warily. Finally, he spoke to Leuk in hesitant Cantonese, asking if we were hungry.

  At first I thought he was taunting us, until he reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled mass of waxed paper. He unwrapped it carefully and held it in his palm for a moment. Inside the paper were several large brown lumps of cane sugar. He broke the sugar into pieces and distributed all of it among the eight children and Yee-Lin. When his hand came near me, I hesitated to reach out because I didn’t believe what he held was real. I took a jagged piece from his palm, and as I brought the sugar to my mouth, a thick stream of saliva poured from my lips onto my wrist. I put the whole thing on my tongue and slowly closed my mouth. The edges of the crystal scraped the skin inside my cheeks. I closed my eyes. I let the crystal rest on my tongue. Despite my thirst, my mouth became awash in saliva, which dissolved the sugar to form a syrup. The saliva ran out from under my tongue, and I could taste where the syrup ran out beside it like two streams colliding. I swallowed it as slowly as I could. When the crystal had shrunk to a little ball, I opened my eyes. The others were all doing the same. No one had thought to bite down on their sugar or swallow it in an instant.

  Then the soldier told us to come to the soldiers’ campfire for some food. Leuk and I got up at once, and Wei-Ming, hearing of food and seeing us rise, got up too. Ling took her hand and told her not to go and then looked at me and said we shouldn’t go with him.

  “If he has food, I want it,” I said, and even in my fallen state I could hear the lonely animality of those words. Ling didn’t move, but when Leuk and I started down the path behind the soldier, the other four children came too, and then Wei-Ming, and finally Ling and Yee-Lin followed. We hurried down the line, passing the adult prisoners who had fallen or lay exhausted on the hard, trampled earth. The sugar had sharpened my senses; a small, diamond-like piece of it sat delicately under my tongue as we walked. The odour of the prisoners stood out sharply in the forest air.

  Akamatsu was nowhere to be seen. Six soldiers had set a grate over a small fire. On it sat a thin metal pot, which one of them stirred with care. They had broken open one of the bamboo chicken cages. Two chickens hung, still living, from a branch and another was in the pot in pieces, swirling in the opaque broth of rice starch. One of the soldiers shredded some salted fish with his hands and threw the pieces in. On the ground behind them lay an exploded mass of feathers and chicken guts, already aswarm with little black beetles, so that the mass still seemed to be a living creature.

  The soldier who had given out the sugar told us to sit down. We sat in a half-circle just behind the soldiers. We were silent, partly because we were afraid, partly because a breeze kept sending the odour of the stew our way. The last bit of sugar had just dissolved in my mouth, and with that and the smell of food, I felt revived.

  A soldier gave the pot a final stir and picked up a pile of wooden bowls. He and another soldier dished out the stew and began handing the bowls to us. There were only five bowls, so we let the other four children and Wei-Ming eat first. The soldiers were already eating, and when it was my turn to have some, I was afraid there would be nothing left. But the bowl I received was full. It had been filled right to the edge, and for all my hunger, I moved it towards myself slowly for fear of spilling even a drop. Little mirrors of fat floated over the stew, and when I took my first sip, a piece of fish slipped between my teeth. I remembered my mother’s rules and ground it slowly between my molars before washing it down with the broth. Like those who’d used it before me, I wiped the bowl out with my finger before handing it back with thanks. I didn’t ask for more.

  The soldier walked us back to our place in the line. He offered his water bottle to Yee-Lin and she drank. Then he passed it around. The adults sitting on the ground, their mouths streaked with sweet potato and dirt, stared at us. A man extended his hand to ask for some water too, and the soldier pointed to the muddy stream. The man turned like a dog and crept down the bank, where he lowered his lips to drink. He came back when the soldier was gone and asked us if we had eaten anything. I told him chicken and rice, and he laughed bitterly. I couldn’t tell what he meant by it.

  In the morning, we marched. The soldier who had given us the sugar told me to carry the rice sack again, and it felt even heavier now. The terrain became more uneven, and as we were climbing a muddy slope I slipped and the sack fell off. The soldier walked over and slapped me three times on the back of my head until I got up. It didn’t really hurt, and as I was picking the sack up I found a small hole in the corner of the fabric. I worked it open with my finger and let the rice seep slowly out. By midday it was much easier to bear.

  Around noon, when the sun was directly over us, the road widened and the forest thinned, leaving us more exposed. The heat, the openness, and the sudden drop in the breeze unsettled both the soldiers and the prisoners. Twice, small flocks of birds burst suddenly from trees, and the soldiers took aim but didn’t fire. They shouted back and forth. The truck braked abruptly three times, and each time the soldiers behind us ran ahead to talk to the others. While the truck was idle, the engine laboured noisily, and the noise seemed to unnerve the Japanese. After the third stop, the truck resumed driving very slowly.

  It had crept along for less than a minute when gunfire and shouts erupted ahead. The soldiers ran forward with their weapons out. We fell to the ground. The shooting was erratic and the truck engine, far ahead and out of sight, revved loudly. I shook against the ground, pressed my hands over my ears, and felt my belt buckle scratching against the dry, sandy earth. The soldiers shouted and gunfire seemed to be everywhere, but I also heard shou
ting in Chinese, and prisoners screaming. My heart pounded so hard I could feel my skin pulse against the hard soil. I called to my siblings and reached out over the ground. I found Yee-Lin’s hand, and Wei-Ming was next to her. Then I heard planes flying overhead, very low.

  The soil beneath my face stank. It didn’t have an earthy smell or the dry mineral odour of sand. A stench emanated from it, as though the earth itself were putrefying. Feeling as though I might vomit, I turned my head sideways and caught sight of the planes just as they vanished over the canopy. Moments later I heard something like thunder, the sound of bombs falling on what I prayed were Japanese soldiers.

  It was over quickly. No one moved. I heard terrible screaming, far up the line. In the winter, when I had heard such screams through the windows in Hong Kong, I could usually discern something about them — young or old, man or woman, injured or just frightened. But in these screams there was an indistinctness that revealed nothing of age or sex. Some stopped or faded quickly, others rose and fell. Soon the Japanese ordered us to get up and resume our march down the road.

  A few minutes later, an old cemetery appeared on our right, between the river and our path. People in civilian clothes lay in its grounds and by the road. I guessed they were locals who had tried to ambush the Japanese with hunting rifles and stolen handguns. Crows were already descending.

  Near the road, one man staggered towards one of the large curved tombstones. He stumbled forward, turning his head back to look at us. I didn’t understand where he was headed until he stopped abruptly and fell down next to a stone. A moment later we were just a few feet from where he sat. He had propped himself into a sitting position facing the road. He looked straight at me.