The Fire by Night

by Teresa Messineo

  “We need to get them the fuck out of here.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  Two soldiers rounded the medical tent: a young man with veiled eyes and a curling lip, and the captain. They separated upon seeing her, making some hand motion Jo could not decipher. The captain walked toward Jo.

  Jo looked at the man again and it should have been with wonder, it should have been with awe; if this had been a war movie—a grand, glorious propaganda movie as only Hollywood could put out—he would have been played by Cagney or Gable or Grant. Here was a brave soldier, a fearless leader, defending an outpost against incredible odds. Jo should have loved him for that alone, but she didn’t. He was swagger and bravado and military might, but the lives of her men—to him, six worthless men, injured now and useless—they meant nothing. People were nothing. Military objectives, taking and holding a position, using and expending manpower, these things made sense to him, these things were real, but not the men themselves—they didn’t exist for him. And if they didn’t exist, the disheveled, half-crazed nurse who looked after them mattered even less. Jo looked at Captain Clark now as he came up to her, hands on hips, spitting before he spoke, and realized how much the movies had conditioned her, had prejudiced her. She’d believed that all U.S. soldiers in perilous positions would be just as truthful, upright, clean-mouthed, good, and pure as they were on-screen. Here was an American, and the odds were against him, certainly. And yet the man was still a bastard.

  “We need you, all of you, all of this”—here he gestured widely toward the tent—“out of here.”

  Jo stared at him blankly.

  “We need you out of here,” he repeated, frowning. “I cannot hold this position with you saddling me. Damn it all to hell, you’re doing laundry, for Christ’s sake.”

  Jo shook herself a little, as if trying to stay awake.

  “We’ve had typhus in the tent, sir. He was deloused with a flit can when we got him, but you know how those things can spread.” She added another “sir” as an afterthought, as if she hadn’t realized she had been speaking to anyone beside herself.

  “I don’t care if there’s typhus. They can all die for all I care. Their being here is endangering my men, and that’s my only priority.” Here he looked straight into her glassy eyes. “My only priority.”

  This man was bothersome, simply bothersome. How could she have ever thought him evil? His ears were so funny. He was laughable. That was it. Jo felt like laughing. Laughing and laughing and never stopping. She started to smile, a provocative smile, not directed at the man in front of her but at insanity with whom she was flirting. She turned toward the tent, still grinning. The captain grabbed her arm and spun her around so she was inches from his face.

  “What’s your fucking problem?”

  “Don’t speak that way in front of a lady,” Jo said without thinking. It was her line; that had been her cue. The captain shook her, hard, until she saw spots and winced from the pain.

  “When I see a lady, then I’ll watch my tongue.”

  Jo pulled away from him with the last of her strength, the pain and her anger snapping her back into reality. She turned sharply and started toward the tent.

  “I didn’t dismiss you. Salute, Lieutenant.” His eyes narrowed, pronouncing her relative rank like it was a joke, like it was an insult.

  Without turning to face him, Jo said, “When I see an officer, I’ll salute him.”

  “That’s insubordination,” the captain fumed, struggling to keep his voice down, throwing his helmet to the ground instead.

  Jo walked back to him quickly, her voice hoarse and vicious. “What are you going to do, Captain? Relieve me of my post?”

  With that, she hurried back into the tent, the heavy sheets still sagging down the line, the smaller towels already snapping in the rising wind.

  6

  Kay Elliott

  Winter, Early 1945, Santo Tomas Internment Camp,

  Manila, Philippines

  Kay looked down into the courtyard below. Palm trees still lined its perimeter, ornately carved windows still looked out onto a rectangular enclosure once lush with Bermuda grass and gardenia and ylang-ylang. But now the ground was packed earth, worn smooth and hard by the thousands of bare feet traversing it. Hastily constructed shanties sprouted up out of it like mushrooms where once benches had stood, where once university students had studied or debated or laughed at their professors who said life was hard and that ideas had consequences. This was Santo Tomas.

  Kay turned wearily from the window. Raucous screeching reached her ears from below—dirty children in underpants were fighting over a game played with sticks. “It is not your turn.” “Yes, it is, you went last time.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” “I’m going to tell.” Her ward was full—her ward was always full—with the young, the old, children, those with dysentery, those with dengue fever, the starving . . . everyone was starving. She had no medicine left, but even if she had, there was no medicine for that. When you thought about it, there were two basic ways to starve to death—wet or dry. Every day, she saw people die from starvation—beriberi they called it out here—and yet she couldn’t decide which way was worse. Wet beriberi was quickest. You’d pass someone in the courtyard and say hello; he’d look okay one day, and the next he’d be swollen, arms, legs, face, beyond all recognition, and inside fluid would be building up too, engorging his heart, impeding blood flow to his lungs, bringing on a heart attack. He’d grab his chest, or his arm, collapse, and it would all be over. The dry kind was more insidious. You could tell someone was fading—a patient in the ward, the person next to you in chow line. You could see their collarbones sticking out and count their ribs, and then, all of a sudden, they would kind of wither right in front of you, shrivel up into themselves, staggering and falling down in a daze. They’d seem to sleep, but it wasn’t sleep. It seemed amazing afterward that there was anything left to bury: they were so brittle the wind should have been able to blow their fragments away like sand. Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. This was Santo Tomas.

  Four thousand civilians, eight university buildings, six hundred makeshift shanties. The nurses shared the second floor of the main building with three hundred women; between them, they had three showers, five washbasins, and five toilets. One of the girls could make herself wake up whenever she wanted, so she would rouse her fellow nurses at five in the morning to get a chance at a shower. Even so, there were half a dozen women under each spigot, each vying for a spot; someone had hung up a sign on a scrap of old paper: IF YOU WANT PRIVACY, CLOSE YOUR EYES. Kay felt in her pocket for the four squares of toilet paper she had been rationed that day, making sure they were still there. It was impossible to make do with only that, she knew, but then she thought of the men, who only got two.

  She went from bedside to bedside—or rather, from slung sheet to slung sheet, each holding suspended within it another dying, starving representative of the human race. She applied cool compresses, gave patients dirty water to sip, held their hands, like claws, in her own hand, its bones becoming more pronounced, its blue veins sticking up in greater relief, each day. The nurses kept to their shifts like boys playing soldier, like girls playing house, even though by now they would fall down several times on their way to the wards. Kay knew it was only a matter of time now until one day they would fall and be unable to get back up.

  There was a bustle behind her, and several Japanese officers entered the ward. Everyone froze. Literally. It was like playing statues. How that had irked Kay when she first came to this place—to have to bow and kowtow or stand, motionless, for hours at a time before these men while roll was called or inspections were conducted, during the endless announcements and proclamations. Wherever they were, they would have to stop—with one foot on a stair, halfway through a door, standing with their hands in a sink. Stand and not move, not sit or squat, not fall down, no matter how tired they were, no matter how their world swam or spun around them. Because she had seen
that gentle missionary beheaded in front of her own weeping children; she had seen that insurance salesman shot in the stomach and left to bleed to death—all day, good God, how had that taken all day?—for trying to pick papayas for the pregnant internees. She knew what it was like here. She knew what these men were like. By now, she knew Santo Tomas.

  But it seemed that they were in for a shorter interview than normal today; this was not an inspection or confiscation, but interrogation of the chief medical officer.

  “These death certificates you signed,” the Japanese officer yelled, his English perfect; he had gotten his undergraduate degree in California. “You say, ‘Cause of death: starvation.’ You cannot write that.”

  The doctor tried to stand erect in the face of the enemy but only succeeded in slumping just the slightest bit less. Kay could see that he was having trouble focusing on his interrogators, widening and narrowing his eyes, craning his neck forwards and backwards in a vain attempt to see them properly.

  “But that’s how they died.”

  “Not so many. You cannot say so many died that way. It is not true.”

  The doctor blinked again, pushed his glasses farther back on his nose, and swallowed. He looked around at the ward. Even with his distorted vision, he could see the bones—scapula, clavicle, sternum, vertebrae, sacrum—pushing up out of the sagging flesh of his patients’ bodies. He made a hopeless gesture with his hands.

  “They’re starving, sir. They’re all starving.”

  The officer looked for a moment as if he was going to strike the doctor, who was already swaying back and forth unsteadily on his feet.

  “It is not starvation. You Americans are just weak. You are homesick. Put down ‘homesick’ as cause of death from now on.”

  Kay looked nervously at the doctor. She could not tell what he was thinking, what was going on inside. He smiled the tiniest smile and whispered, almost inaudibly, “Homesick?”

  “Yes. You will in future put ‘homesick’ down as cause of death.” The officer looked meaningfully at Kay, then back at the doctor, who understood the unspoken threat. It was the same as it had been, early on in their internment, when one of the patients had managed to escape. Then the Japanese had come in, grabbed the two patients on either side of the empty bunk, and hung the men all day by their thumbs. After that, a sign had been posted on each floor of the hospital stating that the Japanese would not be so “lenient” should another escape be attempted. That if it happened again, the patient on either side of the escapee’s bunk—along with the nurse on that floor—would be shot. No more escapes were attempted after that.

  “Homesick, sir,” the doctor repeated dully, shaking his head slowly in his defeat, the slight motion nearly making him lose his balance. The Japanese officers left as quickly as they had come. The ward came back to life. Kay moved quickly toward the doctor, easing him down into a chair.

  “Did you hear that, Miss Elliott? Homesick.”

  “Yes, doctor, I heard. We’re all homesick.”

  “But not enough to—not so much that a good meal wouldn’t—” He couldn’t finish his sentence.

  “No, doctor, no.”

  The doctor sighed, and it sounded like the wind shaking dry aspen leaves in the fall. Kay shivered, recognizing the more insidious form of “homesickness” marking out its next victim.

  She looked out the window at the Pacific blue of the sky. That was the only thing that could boast any beauty in a world of filth and ugliness and death. Kay remembered how the sky had looked almost blindingly light as she and the other nurses emerged from the tunnel in Corregidor, handkerchiefs to nose and mouth, stepping over and around dead bodies, looking up, forcing themselves to look up at the sky because they could not look down. When she recalled those first few days after surrender, they seemed like a blur—their fear as the Japanese entered the tunnel, interrupting surgeries, interrogating officers, inspecting the nurses’ dormitories in the middle of the night, their guards walking around in nothing more than G-strings. The Americans’ confusion and dismay as the Japanese walked confidently to a lateral—identical in appearance to any other—and knocked in its sham plaster wall, confiscating the enormous cases of Red Cross cornmeal, canned meat, vegetables, fruit, fresh water—along with an entire field hospital stocked with precious medicines and supplies—none of which they had known about and all of which could have delayed their surrender, possibly even avoided it, if Allied help had come in time. The nurses’ agony at having to leave their seriously wounded patients behind in the tunnel; Kay had broken a crate and made a makeshift frame to put over her sickest patient, draping it with mosquito netting, the tiny invaders already swarming into the opened tunnel, landing on men too ill to brush them away, bringing with them dengue fever and malaria and death nearly as certain as that promised by the Japanese.

  Now Kay made her way carefully down the stairs—recently, she had begun to hold on tightly to the banister to steady herself—and walked into the squalor of the courtyard. She remembered a time when outside vendors had been allowed into the encampment, offering food for sale to supplement the meager rations of the camp, bringing with them fruit, vegetables, eggs. But since the nurses had been instructed by their commanding officers to burn all their money and checks before being taken captive, they had had to subsist, at first, on the few ounces of food provided—mush, rotting fish, rice stripped of its thiamine-rich husk. It hadn’t been enough. So, through an underground system no longer imaginable only three years later, the civilian executives and CEOs imprisoned along with the girls had obtained credit from their companies and, with it, had issued handwritten IOUs to the American nurses. The nurses’ pay—which they would receive upon liberation, should they survive the war and should America still stand as a nation—made them viable financial risks. So the girls had borrowed, borrowed extravagantly, to stay alive—an egg for seventy cents, half a cup of peanuts for a dollar; milk for $75. (Sugar remained unavailable at any price.) But even at those outrageous prices, the food was worth it: one meal, even one part of one meal, could mean the difference between life and death. Kay thought of the two Red Cross comfort kits she had received; they had been divine—the coffee, the meat, the chocolate. They had brought her back to life, made her feel human again, but it hadn’t been enough, it could never be enough. She thought of the man who had sold his for $3,000. They had buried him the following month.

  She was sure the Japanese were stealing the comfort kits, just as they stole or destroyed their mail, just as she had heard they confiscated the boxes marked SQUIBB and PARKE DAVIS and AMERICAN RED CROSS down at the pier and then offered the precious, donated supplies back for sale to the American doctors and nurses—as if they could afford it, as if they had any money or credit anymore, as if there was any currency in a world of starvation other than food. All of Manila was falling. People broke into the internment camp.

  They had no way to know what was happening in the outside world. She had received only one letter in all this time, a letter from Jo, a letter Kay had read and reread and thumbed through until the sweat from her fingers had made it grimy and blurred the edges of the cursive characters. She wished Jo was with her, and then she berated herself—of course she didn’t wish Jo was here, in this hell. She just meant, Jo. What we got through together.

  Kay tried not to keep looking back, but when she least expected to—when she least wanted to—she remembered New York, remembered that doctor, that man, a predator, really. Their last year of training, when they met him, he had been so beautiful, so charming at first; she could still see the way his perfect eyebrows cut into the perfect smoothness of his face, that impeccable high, white face, and she hated herself for remembering there ever was a time when they hadn’t seen through him, hadn’t known him for what he was. Kay hadn’t been the only one. With the exception of the matron—and what hold did he have over her to make her turn a blind eye?—each of the nurses had learned to work in fear of that doctor. Jo had split her lip fighting him of
f in the women’s lavatory, Kay had bruises she explained away with an imaginary fall. But that was after his facade had worn away. At first he was all attentiveness, cool and collected and indisputably attractive; the new nurses would get weak in the knees just staring at him. He had brought in little presents too—peanuts or candies or buns still hot from the baker. He could be ingratiating, witty, funny, winning them over with his fine clothes and his fine manners. He was a gentleman, surely, a doctor first and foremost, the savior of the world they lived in, and at first the women gave him the honor, the devotion, the fealty that role demanded.

  But he had been right—no one would believe them. He was a brilliant surgeon, the best in their busy hospital, some said the best in the city. He was from the cream of society, sought after as a speaker, as a teacher, as a dinner guest in the best homes. No one would believe some silly nurse, who probably had a petty grievance. You know what these girls are, just looking for attention, putting themselves forward. They shouldn’t be working anyway, no decent girl would be a nurse. Just look at her, the way she walks—she probably asked for it. The nurse who had spoken out had been discharged. Kay knew her, knew she had been unable to find work at their hospital, at any hospital. She’d left town, gone back home. The doctor was right—they were nobodies, easily replaced. Kay could hear him shuffling down the cold corridors even now, his one, tiny flaw—clubfeet not quite corrected, even after half a dozen surgeries—impeding his stride. That seemed ironic—a surgeon with clubfeet. People joked behind his back, but they cast their eyes down when he was near them. Please, God, don’t pick me.