The dog went to lie behind the stove as soon as they got home and she was still lying there next morning and all through the day. Refused to eat or move. Growled when anyone came near. Stayed in that state three days and everyone had given her up for dead. She gave a low moan the afternoon of the third day and went slowly to the door, an odd stutter in her hind legs. Wish let her outside and she went to the edge of the woods where she circled, whining the whole time, her tail up high and squatting awkwardly as she turned. It would have been comical if the animal wasn’t in so much torment. He didn’t know what was happening or how to help and simply stood there as the dog passed the turr, beak first and all of a piece. Every feather in place and not a mark on it, looking strangely serene and composed for something so defiled.
Anstey fell asleep at some point in the story and he and Harris sat quiet awhile when he was through. He glanced down at the sick man, lying there motionless and half blind. Like something the world had swallowed whole and shat out.
By the following Wednesday they had completed a bomb shelter for every two barracks. On Thursday, the detail was marched through the gate to a flat stretch of land two hundred yards outside the fence and ordered to dig again. Six feet deep this time and twenty yards square, a length of twine tied to wooden posts set out to mark the boundary. In the hospital barracks that evening Harris mentioned the dimensions as he was spooning morsels of beef from a tin into Anstey’s broth.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“Another shelter, I guess.”
“Too big for a concrete roof. Give like glass if it was hit.”
“Okay,” Harris said. “What is it, then?”
Anstey lay still a long time while the two men waited for an answer. He was almost completely blind now and stared blankly at the ceiling. It unnerved them not to be able to read his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, in a way that made them think he had ideas he wasn’t willing to offer.
The next morning when they were marched back out to the site, a handful of civilian carpenters were already at work, laying posts fifteen feet from the hole. They stole glimpses of the raised wooden platform taking shape as they spaded deeper into the ground, the sound of hammers driving nails echoing off the camp walls behind them.
“What the hell are they putting up over there?” Wish asked finally.
Spalding stopped to glare at him. Went back to work, slamming the spade into the dirt furiously, as if he was falling behind in a digging competition.
“So?”
“That’s a machine-gun platform, is what that is,” he said, still shovelling.
Wish and Harris stood on their tiptoes to watch the carpenters at work and then looked around themselves at the hole they were standing in. Seeing it for what it was for the first time.
“Fuck,” Spalding was whispering. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He dropped his shovel and started laughing suddenly, his hands on his hips. He said, “Things must be looking pretty bad for the Imperial Japanese Army.”
A Korean guard walked to the lip of the dig, yelling at him to get back to work.
“Well what’s the difference?” Spalding said loudly. He held his arms wide. “Now or later. No goddamn difference at all, is there?”
Harris stepped a few feet farther away from the American. Refusing even to look at the man. The guard was almost hysterical, the surge of words incomprehensible until Wish heard him start counting backwards from five.
“Three,” he repeated in English. “Two, Spalding.”
The American stooped to pick up his shovel. “Shit,” he said. He flicked a spadeful of dirt up near the guard’s feet. “This ain’t so bad,” he said.
Anstey gave up eating before they ran out of the meat they’d bought to feed him. Harris stubbornly fortified the soup each evening, sneaking a tin into the hospital to slip tiny chunks of beef into his bowl, passing it on to other patients when it was clear that Anstey wouldn’t be able to eat. Wish was surprised at himself for letting it go to others so easily. But they were all dead men, if the machine-gun platform was any indication. Food seemed beside the point.
They talked back and forth to one another, and to Anstey, although they couldn’t say if he heard a word most of the time. It was all rumours of the war’s progress and the desperate condition the Japs found themselves in. Something bizarre and monumental had occurred the day before, Hiroshima was the word they kept hearing, something unprecedented. There was a change in the demeanour of the guards at the camp, a peculiar glassy fragility had come over them.
“The Yanks are going to burn the fucking country to the ground when they get here, Ants,” Harris said. “The Japs know it too.”
There was a subdued sense of anticipation about them as they spoke, a viciously nihilistic hopefulness. They were resigned to dying in the lead-up to any American invasion and they lived for nothing but that inevitable event.
Ronnie Matthews came into the sick bay, walking quickly. “Lefty’s about,” he said.
“He’s coming in here?”
“Directly.”
Harris and Wish looked up and down the aisle. The doctor was sitting at one end with a Japanese orderly.
“What’s wrong?” Matthews asked.
“Beef tin,” Wish whispered.
The interpreter stepped inside and started straight for them. Matthews kept moving for the door at the opposite end of the building.
“Under the bed,” Wish said.
Harris dropped the tin as he got to his feet, kicked it out of sight.
The interpreter shouted, “What was that?”
Wish and Harris bowed but said nothing. The interpreter pushed them aside and reached under the bed, came up with the tin.
“This man,” he said, pointing to Anstey, “has stolen from the Red Cross supplies.”
The British doctor was coming down the aisle toward them. He said, “This man can’t sit up in his bed.”
“He will be moved to the cells until the commandant recommends appropriate punishment.”
“No fucking way,” Harris said, stepping between the interpreter and Anstey’s bed. “I stole it,” he said. “I stole the damn beef.”
Wish looked away from them.
“Wait here,” the interpreter said, and he went back toward the door.
“Jesus, Harris,” Wish said. “He’ll beat the hell out of you over this.” Wish looked to the doctor. “Tell him, for chrissakes.”
“Tell me what?” Harris said.
“Anstey’s already gone, you stupid cunt. He’s a dead man.”
“Not by that bastard’s hand, he’s not.”
There was an accusation in Harris’s voice that made Wish go calm, his skin crawling cold.
“We’re all dead men,” Harris said.
The interpreter came back down the aisle flanked by two guards. “You,” he said, pointing at Harris with the beef tin. “You stole this.”
“Yes sir.”
“No,” Wish said.
“Fuck off, Furey.”
“It wasn’t him, sir.”
“He’s a liar,” Harris shouted.
The interpreter held up his hands, displaying uncharacteristic composure until both men went quiet. “Who stole this ration?” he asked Wish.
“I did, sir.”
The interpreter waved the tin at Harris. “Did you steal this?”
“Yes sir,” he said. “I did.”
The interpreter looked back and forth between the two. His face was blank, neither surprised nor pleased nor offended. Just that peculiar glassiness. “Very well,” he said finally. “You will both come with me.”
All of the feeling had gone out of Wish’s legs and he couldn’t make himself move. Harris stepped past him to start for the door. Whispered “You stupid cunt” as he went by.
At the evening roll call both men were brought before the assembly on the parade square, where Captain Koyagi interrogated them through the interpreter and they confessed again to stealing from
the Red Cross supplies. Wish and Harris were stripped to the waist and forced to their knees with their backs against a post, their arms lashed behind them.
Koyagi gave a lecture on the evils of petty theft, explaining that the Red Cross materials belonged to the prisoners as a collective and they hurt only themselves by stealing from one another. Then he nodded to the interpreter.
Wish watched the interpreter and a second guard coming toward them, bamboo sticks in their hands. All of Nishino’s faux cheerfulness was gone, only a sullen resoluteness to the face, a bleak sincerity. Wish thought of Mercedes suddenly, realized she’d been all but absent from his mind for weeks now. As if there was no place for her in the certainties he’d accepted for himself.
He said, “You’ll let Mercedes know for me, Harris.” Knowing Harris had no better chance of surviving than he did. But taking some comfort in the fiction, regardless. “You’ll tell her.”
“All right,” he said.
Wish stared off into the middle distance, thinking of her face the morning he’d stood naked for her out by the Washing Pond. It looked as if she was about to laugh but she lost herself suddenly, watching him. It was a strange act of love, he thought, his standing apart from her naked, she simply taking him in.
He pictured that look on her face now. Lost himself inside it for a moment.
After the morning roll call, Nishino watched the prisoners shuffle off to their workstations or to the vehicles waiting at the gate to take them to the shipyard or one of the coal mines farther out the harbour. There had been a dozen mistakes in the numbering off because of prisoners missing from their habitual spots in the line, and Nishino beat each man as he shouted their correct number. It seemed a deliberate strategy, to garble the language or claim not to know it. His back lit up with spasms every time he swung the stick.
When he left the parade square he went to his barracks and lay down to rest. The nightmarish details out of Hiroshima still running through his head. Every living thing in the city, they were told, human and animal, seared to death. It was barely conceivable, too surreal to credit. He’d never felt angrier or more helpless. Thinking about it exhausted him.
He had no idea how long he’d been asleep when the commandant’s staff assistant shook him by the shoulder. Captain Koyagi wanted to see him. Bad news, Nishino knew. The sun was high as he crossed the square, mid-morning already. The commandant’s office was in the building nearest the camp gate, underneath the watchtower. Nishino had been alone in the room with the officer only once before, on the day he arrived from Mushiroda camp, when he presented Koyagi with a letter of introduction from Lieutenant Sakamoto. The furnishings were spare, a single wooden table along one wall, a filing cabinet, two straight-back chairs before the desk. The only opulent touch was the officer’s chair, an English-style wingback finished in green leather. Koyagi had read the letter standing behind the desk, glancing up from the paper occasionally. He folded it away immediately after finishing it and bowed perfunctorily to Nishino before dismissing him. Nishino had no idea what the letter from Sakamoto contained, but it hadn’t been welcome information to Koyagi. The commandant was professional but cool in his dealings with his new interpreter, giving him the run of the camp and never offering any criticism of his conduct, though Nishino could sense a deep-seated disapproval in his manner.
Koyagi rose from the leather chair when the interpreter came in. They bowed to one another.
“Sit down,” Koyagi said, pointing to the straight-back chairs.
Nishino glanced at them and then back at the officer. Koyagi was almost a head shorter than he was. He said, “I would prefer to stand.”
“As you wish.”
Nishino kept his eyes focused on the top of the desk.
“Do you know why I’ve asked to see you?”
It could be anything, he thought. To tell him the Americans had invaded the country. That the prisoners were to be executed and buried, the camp torched. Events were moving toward some final, apocalyptic resolution and it seemed to Nishino that his fate and the fate of Japan itself were about to be set before him.
Koyagi walked past Nishino to the single window looking out on the parade square. They stood nearly back to back, like two men about to fight a duel.
“How long have you been with the Imperial Army, Private Nishino?”
“Almost six years, sir.”
“You did your field training with Lieutenant Kurakake.”
“Yes.”
“He is a good man. A good soldier.”
“Yes.”
“But soft. This is his one weakness. Softness.”
“I don’t agree, sir.”
Koyagi made a noise in his throat. “Your loyalty to him is commendable. He taught you to kill, Nishino?”
“Of course.”
“How did he do this?”
“We were—” Nishino paused—“with prisoners,” he said.
“Each soldier was ordered to bayonet a prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“Did any soldiers in your unit refuse?”
“Some hesitated.”
Nishino could hear Koyagi turn from the window behind him.
“Tell me, how did Lieutenant Kurakake deal with these soldiers? The weak ones?”
“He beat them with the flat of his sword.”
“And did this suffice?”
“For the most part.”
“For the most part?”
“There was one soldier who was unable, even then.”
“This soldier was named Ogawa. Chozo Ogawa.”
Nishino turned his head to look directly at the captain. He pulled himself more rigidly to attention, shifting most of his weight to his left leg. “Yes sir.”
“Ogawa wept, is this true?”
“He did.”
“And?”
“After the beating failed to move him, Lieutenant Kurakake ordered me to assist.”
“How?”
“We stood side by side and charged prisoners together.”
“How often?”
“Five, six times. Until Ogawa stopped crying.”
“You didn’t despise him for this?”
“Of course I did. He was unfit. He was unfit to be a soldier.”
“Did you know of his connection to Lieutenant Kurakake?”
“Not at the time,” he said. “I did not.”
Koyagi came back around his desk and sat in the leather chair. “Please,” he said, “be seated.”
Nishino’s back was slick with sweat. He felt light-headed. Koyagi motioned to the chairs again and he sat finally.
“I went to officer school with your former commandant at Mushiroda Camp, Lieutenant Sakamoto,” Koyagi said. “We were both sent to Manchuria from military school to take up our assignments with the infantry. Our company commander was a certain Colonel Ogawa.”
“Chozo’s father?”
Koyagi nodded as he lit himself a cigarette. He leaned across the desk and offered one to Nishino. “There were twenty-two raw officers there at the time. We knew nothing about war that wasn’t learned in a classroom. So we were given a weeklong field-operations training session. Do you know who our instructor was, Private?”
“Lieutenant Kurakake?”
“Exactly right. Lieutenant Kurakake.” Koyagi stared at the interpreter, a strange look on his face, a look of mystification and glee. “A lieutenant then and he remains so even now.”
“He prefers to fight.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps that is the reason. He was certainly a good soldier, a good teacher. Those first days he took us around the scenes of earlier battles, showing us what had gone well, what had failed. Asking us to transfer our book knowledge to the field of war. Discussing strategy, tactics. All around us the carnage of the real thing.” He smiled at Nishino. “I was twenty-two years old, you understand. I had never done more than slap a face in my life. I was afraid I lacked the stomach to make that transition.” The officer drew on his cigarette.
“On the next-to-last day, Kurakake took us to the detention centre. There was a room full of Chinese incarcerated there and he pointed to these men. Civilians mostly. Villagers. Peasants. Kurakake said, ‘These are the raw materials for your trial of courage.’ And then we were dismissed.
“In the morning we were taken to the site of our trial. There were seats set out for the regimental commander, the battalion commanders, the company commanders, all arranged near the edge of a pit three metres deep. And twenty-four prisoners were there as well, bound and blindfolded. That is when it came clear to me, Nishino, what our trial would be. Kurakake bowed to the regimental commander and ordered a prisoner brought to the pit. The Chinese man was carried to the spot and forced to kneel there. Kurakake looked us each in the eye. He said, ‘Heads should be cut off like this.’ There was a bucket of water beside him. He unsheathed his sword and scooped up a dipper of water, pouring it over both sides of the blade. He stood behind the prisoner and steadied himself, legs wide, the sword raised behind his head.”
Koyagi had barely begun his cigarette, but he leaned forward to tamp it out in the ashtray. “I was eighth among the raw officers. When my turn came my only thought was, ‘Don’t do anything unseemly.’ One of the others had lost his nerve and simply slashed the prisoner’s head. He had to strike again and again to kill his man with Kurakake shouting at him, calling him a fool. I didn’t want to disgrace myself. I bowed to the regimental commander and unsheathed my sword. I wet it down as I was instructed and stood behind my prisoner. I held the sword above my shoulder and then swung down with one breath, Yo!” Koyagi made the motion with the flat of his hand. “I washed my sword and wiped it down with paper. When I sheathed it I noticed the blade was bent slightly from the force of the blow. And I was changed too, Nishino. As all soldiers are. When I returned to my unit that night I was stronger somehow. I was ready to serve. I felt without a doubt it was my destiny.” The officer used the English word, mispronouncing it in an old-fashioned way,
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