by Arif Anwar
When Ichiro does not respond, the doctor taps his eyelids lightly to make him understand.
He opens them just a sliver before the blazing light overwhelms them. How can there be so much of it if they have drawn the shades? It is as though the sun has left the heavens to visit his room. Did they lie? Is this a cruel punishment devised for his state? He turns his head to the side, wanting no part of this painfully bright world.
“Seems a good sign.” The doctor’s voice holds grudging approval. Ichiro is afraid to peep again, his vision scalded by light on his first effort, but he forces himself. Gradually, the shining mist that first shrouded his world begins to lift. The light’s burning intensity becomes bearable, until the images of his new world telescope into clarity.
He is—as he already deduced—in a hospital cabin. And it is also true that they have drawn the shades, their outlines etched bright by the sun. A floor lamp shines dim yellow above him, illuminating little—a twin to the IV drip on the other side. And there are blurred figures—what seems a tall man with a mustache. The other is near the window. A woman. He cannot discern her face but has no doubt who she is.
HE sees her again when she walks through his door the next day and closes it behind her. He wishes her a good morning in English, and adds, “Happy Easter.”
About to reach over to check his bandages, she stops. “And a Happy Easter to you,” she says, surprised.
She resumes replacing his bandages, disposing of them in a bucket by her feet. They are spotted dark with blood. His shoulder aches less now.
“How did you know that today is Easter?”
“I’ve kept count of the days since my crash. Besides, I am a Christian.”
She pauses again, her green eyes narrowed. “Do you truly mean that?”
“Yes.”
She shakes her head. “All the things we’ve been told about your lot were about the differences, not the similarities.”
She takes the bowl of porridge on the side table, clotted now into an ugly lump. She is about to feed a spoonful into his mouth when she stops again. “Can you name the twelve apostles of Christ?”
He names them all, enunciating with care, and sees the distrust on her face melt steadily. At the end, she stands with the spoonful of porridge still hovering near his mouth. She appears embarrassed.
“Did I name them correctly?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “You named eight more than I could.”
HE wakes to the patter of rain in the morning. A cool wind blows in through the window. The past few days were hot and dry. The trees grimy with dust. But now the rain has washed the world and he can see its true colors—the deep green leaves, the rust-red bricks that line the path to the hospital, the beds of coral roses in the front garden.
The too-close skies and oppressive air of Burma feel a world away, and Japan, with its frigid winter nights and mountain slopes strewn with milk vetch, another lifetime. He has entered a new world in old skin. The plane’s fire has not burned out his doubts. The bullets that pierced him have not bled him free of weakness. It is hard, so hard and frightening to be brave. He wants to plunge back into the depthless pool of beauty that is this world.
Claire does not come in during the day. His breakfast, lunch and medication are delivered by a nurse with dark hair and pouting lips painted red. This nurse—whose name he will later learn is Rachel—is beautiful in her own way. But whatever pity that Claire has extended him, Rachel does not share, her antipathy to him clear in the way she looks at him, the brusque manner in which she inspects his bandages. He finds this reassuring, because it is what he expected all along.
Claire visits him at dusk. He can hear the low of cows returning home, strange chants that have a religious cadence. This is not the first time he has heard it, so he asks her what it is.
“The Moslem call to prayer. It happens five times a day, beginning at dawn.”
“It has a strange beauty,” he says. “It is almost—”
“Haunting?”
“Yes. It is haunting. But I heard other sounds as well. Horns being blown. Was that Moslem also?”
“Conch shells. The Hindoos offering prayers to their many gods and goddesses.”
She does the requisite inspection of his wounds, a test of his vision where she holds out her fingers in different numbers and at different distances. He passes.
“Do you need to visit the loo?”
He wavers. There is a protocol to be followed. Each time he needs to use the toilet, the doctor or nurse-in-charge has fetched two soldiers who keep their rifles aimed at him as he is released from his restraints. They then follow him into the bathroom with guns pointed at his back or face depending on the nature of his business there.
But this day she walks to the door, peeks outside and then locks it.
“What are you doing?”
She begins to undo his restraints. “I’m going to trust that you won’t try to harm me when I release you. Or escape. Think of this as a courtesy, both to you and the soldiers who have to accompany you.”
He rubs his wrists in relieved wonder. She has moved on to his legs. For a moment, his soldier’s heart surges. He quickly considers the chances and potential consequences of pushing her away and trying to escape, dismissing the feasibility by the time she finishes. He is too weak to even overpower an unarmed woman, not to mention that the hospital is crawling with soldiers.
But most importantly, he does not want any harm to come to her.
Traces of this calculation must have risen to his face. Because when she looks at it, she stands straight and crucifies him with a stare. “Am I going to regret this?”
He shakes his head.
The bathroom has a thin towel hanging on the rack, a bar of soap on the holder, and toilet paper. The rest is bolted down, including the “mirror”—a sheet of stainless steel polished to a reflective finish and riveted to the wall.
He opens his mouth and examines its dark expanse before the mirror. The molar that is the second from the back on the left lower side is larger than the others, its color off. He takes the towel and, wrapping it around his index finger and thumb, uses it to wiggle the tooth from side to side.
It takes more effort than he expects, but he manages to detach it from his gum. It sits on the towel, surrounded by a bloody corona. Using his now long nails, he fishes out the tiny glass capsule within.
Like the tooth, it is marred by his blood. He washes it clean so that it shines in the wan light; the liquid inside clear and unassuming until it forms a murderous partnership with the glass that contains it, the glass that will cut him once broken in his mouth, providing egress to his blood so the cyanide can shut down his cells one at a time. Choking them of air. The scent of bitter almonds will fill his senses and within five minutes of ingestion he will convulse on the floor. Within ten he will know eternity.
He will no longer wonder what he will face at the British prison camp, about the disgrace of his mother and father as parents to a captured soldier. About love, marriage, children.
Death. That glacier perched on a mountain. In a slow slide toward him every day, its cold breath was on his face now. This is what is expected. To lay his life down without question and sacrifice himself at the altar of Pride and Shame—the dark gods who rule Japan, loom behind the Emperor’s throne, their monstrous, bloated bodies slumped over his nation, their terrible wings blocking out the light.
A hammering upon the bathroom door. Urgent and insistent. Claire’s voice is tinged with panic. “What are you doing in there?”
Startled, he turns. The capsule drops from his hand, strikes the floor with an audible clink and rolls toward the drainage hole in the corner.
“I am almost done!” He scrambles on the floor to stop the pill, but his grasping fingers send it skittering even closer to the gaping hole. He lunges, stopping it a bare inch from the edge.
His heart pounds in his chest. He has ripped his stitches. He can feel fresh blood seep into his
shoulder.
Claire speaks again. Her mouth must be right on the door, for her voice is resonant against the wood. Her words a plea clothed as threat. “I’m giving you another minute to come out. If you don’t, I will . . . I will have to call for help.”
“There is no need. I am coming out.” He stands with effort and returns the capsule to his tooth, the tooth to his jaw.
She is standing back from the door when he opens it. She appraises him from head to toe. He sits on the bed and positions his feet to be once again restrained.
“That can wait,” she says, venturing into the bathroom.
She returns after a minute. Her fists are on her hips. A mother’s pose. He is amused despite his pain.
“What happened?”
“I fell down.”
“How?”
“There was water on the floor. I slipped.”
“I didn’t see any water.”
“I used the towel to wipe it.”
“I see.” She peels back the collar of his gown to examine his shoulder, frowning. She touches him there, ever so softly, but he flinches and so does she. They stare at each other, a moment meant to frame an act of duty become something else. She blushes, red invading her pale features so that her face echoes the color of her hair. She steps back, eyes on him as though she fears an attack. She goes to the table by the wall and returns with Dettol, fresh dressing, gauze, tape and scissors.
Once more she cleanses his wounds, bandages them with care. When she finishes, she says, “I have to tie your arms again. Stay still, please, or you’ll rip the stitches again.”
Once finished, she produces two small pills from her apron, holds a glass of water to his lips. “These will help you rest.”
He swallows them. He wants oblivion.
THE dark-haired nurse does not return the next day. The sunlight wakes him instead, so bright and clean that it is as though he was never asleep. Claire comes early. She locks the door behind her, removes his restraints and places before him a bowl of hot runny porridge.
“Why do you show such kindness toward me?” he asks her.
“I have been doing my duty.”
“More than that. If not for you, Selwyn would have had me transferred to the prison camp much sooner.”
“As long as you are in one of these beds you are a patient, no matter the flag you were born under.”
“Even though our nations are at war?”
She stops in the act of adjusting his drip. “I don’t need to be reminded. I was in Rangoon when the Ja—the Japanese invaded.”
“The British invaded these shores as well. They just did it a few hundred years before us.”
Her eyes flash too quickly for him to recognize whether it was from anger, regret or another emotion, but her voice is even when she speaks. “I suppose we did. I don’t defend the past, nor use it to justify the present.”
“Is that the difference between us?”
“Between the British and the Japanese or you and me?”
“You decide.”
“The fundamental difference between you and me—long before we can consider the flags under which we were born—is that I’m a woman and you’re a man. Every morning when I wake up, there’re a thousand obstacles that either don’t exist for you or are invisible. A hundred considerations I have to make before I open my mouth, decide where I can go and can’t.”
“I am certain that being British gives you certain advantages. The world is your playground.”
“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
“Who said that?”
She laughs. “Virginia Woolf. Perhaps you should read more women writers.”
She asks him about his diary, wanting to know why it is in English.
“I will be punished severely if my commanding officers read my journal. I write in English to protect myself.”
“Where did you learn to speak it so well, though?”
“We were required to learn two foreign languages apart from classical Latin in First Higher School. I had to pick between German, English and French. I chose the first two. I learned French on my own, but I am less skilled in it.”
She nods, impressed. “We just learn English at school. Latin, of course, if you’re learning the classics. A little French if you fancy it.
“Are all Japanese soldiers as well-spoken as you?” she asks after a while.
“I don’t know. But many of us joined directly from university, so we are usually well-read.” He thinks of his friends, the many bright flames that will be extinguished in this war before they can burn their brightest.
“You’re not the way I thought you’d be.”
“Because I speak your language?”
“No, because you are thoughtful.”
“Death makes philosophers of soldiers.”
“Are all Orientals so fatalistic?”
The word is new to him, but he can guess at the meaning from the German counterword—fatalistisch. He asks her what it means nonetheless, and she tells him—“to be a servant to fate.”
“We are all servants to fate whether we accept it or not.”
“Not I,” she says, and stiffens because voices have drifted close to the door. She relaxes only when they move on. “What is the last memory you have of home?”
He closes his eyes and casts his mind back. “A spring morning. I woke to birdsong. We had breakfast together: my mother, father, younger brother and me. Later, I took a walk in the woods, up a mountain path. Just by myself.”
“Do you not remember leaving? Saying good-bye?”
“I am telling you what I chose to remember. It was the last day of an old life. I began a new one at university. Another in the army. What of you? What do you remember of home?”
“A cold rainy morning. Warblers sitting fat and soaked in the trees. Milk tea with my mother and sisters. Getting married the same day. The hem of my wedding gown was trimmed with mud. That’s stayed with me.”
He remembers then that Bengal is home to neither of them, Claire no more an extension of this place than he. Perhaps that is what lies behind the British frenzy for building monuments on strange shores, he thinks, laying train tracks that span a thousand miles, binding the land with roads and highways as though subduing a wild creature. They were both island nations, frantic to leave their blue prisons—to leave marks on lands that do not want them.
“You are married.”
“His name is Theodore. He’s stationed in Imphal.” Reaching into her apron, she takes out his journal. And a pen. “These are for you. Given that your eyes are working just fine now.”
He examines the latter. A silver-and-gold Parker 51, with a black barrel. It has a pleasing heft in his hand.
She notices his admiration. “A cousin brought it for me from New York. The ink dries fast. It’s really quite lovely to write with.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, you can only have it until you’re finished writing.” She heads for the door. “I’ll be back to check on you in three hours. I have the key today, so don’t worry about someone else walking in.”
HE writes. Not once does he look up from his journal, the only sound in the room the scratch of his pen against the page.
Claire enters minutes after the bell clangs to announce noon, and he looks up, smiling, shaking his hand to rid it of the cramp that always seems to settle in. “Sorry. I had to recall several days’ worth of memories.”
He holds out the journal and pen to her. “I would be grateful if you kept these. In fact, I have a further request. On the last page, I have written down the address of my friend’s mother. Once I am moved to the camp, would you be kind enough to send this to her?”
“I shall. But I must go now. There are other patients waiting.”
He bows his head. “Thank you. I have another favor to ask of you. Please release me so that I may use the WC?”
“You promise me tha
t there will be no more of that silliness from the last time?”
“I do.”
“Very well.” She undoes his restraints.
He goes in, putters about in the bathroom, making the noises expected of him—sitting down on the commode, working the flush; the tap at the washbasin.
He stands before the mirror, staring at the haggard apparition before him. Has it only been two years since he joined the army?
He has never been religious. He has visited church more out of love of family than fear of judgment. He loves Jesus, but as a man and not the Son of God. He believes his soul to be eternal, redeemable, yet the Japanese side of him demands death, to plunge into the black without a backward glance. If he swallows the pill, will his spirit wander this world forever? A moaning hungry ghost as the Buddhists describe? A scrap of ash swirling in the wind but never breaking apart?
There is only one way to find out.
He opens his mouth and begins to pull out the false tooth again.
Shahryar & Anna
Washington, DC
SEPTEMBER 2004
HE meets Katerina again the next day, this time in Lafayette Square. He sends her a text message and in fifteen minutes, she is skirting around the statue of a mounted Andrew Jackson to approach him. Her hair is tied back in a tight bun today, her cream-and-white dress cinched with a gold belt. She reminds him of a Patrick Nagel print.
“I’ve looked him up,” he says when she sits down. “What we’re talking about here is very serious. This could be jail time.”
“What is the bigger risk, Shar? This, or going back to Bangladesh not knowing if you will ever be able to see your daughter again?”
“I could always get another visa to come see her.”
“You could. We’re not discounting that. But this is the post-nine-eleven world we live in. You’re a Muslim male that fits the profile. Bangladesh is not on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, but who knows what could happen in the future? It’s just not a guarantee.”
He considers her argument. Even though three years have passed since those dark weeks and months that followed 9/11, that febrile air of fear, confusion and mistrust remains in America, as if the entire nation caught a disease that even after a cure, leaves one weaker, disfigured.