It was a great relief. And there, as I stood on the ruined cobble of the patio under a wide starless sky, the reports of music and voices playing off the hidden trees, an image of another time suddenly appeared to me, when I began my first weeks of service in the great Pacific war. I was initially stationed in Singapore, awaiting my orders to whatever front I would be sent to.
One evening, my comrades and I were on our way to a welcoming club, a grand house which was once a prominent British family’s residence but was now used as a semi-official officers’ club, with the usual entertainments. There was no sanctioned establishment as yet, and we young officers were more than grateful for the outpost.
My mates, Lieutenants Enchi and Fujimori, and I had eaten our dinner at a cart stand and were strolling to the club, a yellow two-story colonial structure with a double veranda and white columns. Enchi was already quite drunk, as usual, and Fujimori didn’t have far to go. Drinking was never very alluring to me, but that night I had decided to take a few glasses of rice spirits with dinner. We were to be shipped out to our respective fronts in a matter of days, each of us assigned as medical assistants to bases that would serve the forward units. It was an august time, those first years of the war, and everyone to the man was supremely hopeful of a swift and glorious end to the fighting.
Enchi was talking about the girls that were to be brought to the club that evening. He was excited and speaking quite loudly, his face flushed with drink.
“I heard there are to be local girls there tonight, young ones, perhaps even virgins.”
Fujimori said to him, in his customary dry manner, “You wouldn’t know it if they were, Hideo, you grand masturbator.”
“I certainly would!” Enchi cried, coming up and slinging his arms about us, so that we were a trio. “Your sister isn’t a virgin, let me tell you”
It was an old joke from him, and Fujimori was of course unperturbed. He unhinged himself from us and replied, “Well, let’s see if you can manage your way inside one tonight. The last time, I practically had to aim you. But you don’t remember. You never remember.”
I wasn’t with them on their last “outing,” as I had little interest in pleasure-for-hire, but that evening I thought I would at least accompany them, if only to see if their exploits matched the accounts I’d listened to, which were always extremely colorful.
“My good friend Jiro,” Enchi said to me, lurching us forward with his heavy steps, “why don’t you join us tonight? What is it? Are you not so fond of women? You can tell me.”
“I’m not fond of women who are prostitutes,” I said, though in truth I’d made several of my own visits, in secret. “Besides, they’re all old and probably diseased. Made of face powder and cheap perfume.”
“That’s why you ought to stay around tonight!” Enchi replied, poking me in the chest. I pushed him away and he nearly fell down on the road. Fujimori was up ahead of us, calling in a strange voice after some schoolgirls walking on the other side of the canal. Enchi went on, “These are fresh girls who are coming. You’ll see. They’re not the old Japanese aunties who are shipped in. I’m tired of them, too, you know. It’s like screwing a bag of soybean curds, just all mush and mess.”
“I wonder what they must say of you, Hideo.”
“No matter, no matter,” he said, shaking his large, squarish head. He had the habit of closing his eyes when beginning to speak. Within a month, I would receive a telegram from Fujimori that Enchi had been killed in Borneo, torn apart by a mortar round outside a medical station. “I’m not proud, Jiro. Not proud at all. I’m only looking for a bit of satisfaction. Just a little bit and I’ll die happy.”
As we approached the clubhouse, we saw a crowd of soldiers outside. Fujimori had already reached them. Usually such gatherings would be loud and boisterous, but there was a stillness about the air that seemed unnatural. They were standing in a group at one side of the house, near the front of the wide veranda. Fujimori was ordering them to make way for him, being an officer. When we ran up, there were other officers now coming out from the main entrance, shouting orders at the group on the ground.
“Move back! Don’t touch anything!”
“I’m a medical officer,” I heard Fujimori say. He sounded grave and sober. “But it doesn’t matter. She’s in no need.”
“I say move back!” The man speaking was Major Irota, chief of staff to General Yamashita. He was the only one out of uniform — in fact, he was wearing a blue silk robe and was slipperless. “Who saw what happened? Speak up!” The men stood silent, except for Fujimori, who was kneeling by a girl. Enchi and I were standing beside him. The girl was naked, and the skin of her young body looked smooth and perfect, except that her head was crooked too far upward. It was obvious her neck was cleanly broken. She was quite dead.
“No one saw anything?” Major Irota shouted. “Very well. I expect it to remain so. Now I want all of you off these grounds immediately. Lieutenant, you’ll bring the girl inside.”
He was ordering Fujimori, and as nobody had any choice in the matter I helped him carry the body inside. Enchi stood aside, looking slightly sick. Fujimori lifted her by the armpits and I took her legs. She was astoundingly light; one of us could have easily done the job. We brought her inside while Enchi followed. The major motioned for us to go to the back of the house, the duty officer leading us to a cramped room behind the kitchens. We laid her out on a butcher’s table, and he ordered us to wrap her in burlap. We would do so and then report to the duty officer that the body was ready.
The girl was the first dead person I had ever seen. She was neither homely nor pretty. She was just a girl, otherwise unremarkable, perhaps fifteen or so. I kept thinking she looked to be Korean, with her broad, square face. She barely had any pubic hair. Her palms were lighter-toned than her hands. The same with her feet. I lifted and turned her as Fujimori spread the cut-up sacks beneath her. Enchi was sitting in a chair in the corner, watching us as he nervously smoked.
“It’s only one floor,” he finally said, quizzically. “She must have landed just so to snap her neck like that.”
Outside, when I first lifted the girl, I had noticed two girls’ faces peering over the ledge of a second-floor window. They looked scared more than sad. Then they were quickly pulled back inside.
“Perhaps she made sure to land on her head,” he said, but Fujimori didn’t answer. He had placed the sacks over her chest and shoulders and around her legs and was now winding the cord tightly to bind her.
“It’s like one of those English-style roasts, eh, Fujimori?”
“Shut up.”
“I’m not trying to be humorous,” Enchi said.
“Shut up, anyway,” Fujimori said again, this time quite grimly. He pulled a bag over the girl’s head and wound the cord about her neck, then weaved the loose end through the bindings on her torso. He neatly slip-knotted it, and soon enough he was done. We then stood there for a moment, looking at his unusual work.
“How skilled, us medics,” Enchi said from his chair. “The major will be impressed.”
The atmosphere in the house that evening was typically rowdy. No one seemed mindful of what had happened a few hours earlier, that a girl had leaped to her death from one of the very rooms now being employed for the officers’ entertainment. Enchi was so drunk with rice wine that he had passed out in the parlor room, never making it upstairs, and Fujimori, who always grew quieter as he indulged, was sitting glumly among the regular working ladies, sipping at his porcelain drinking cup. We didn’t say much to each other after preparing the girl. We had caught sight of the duty officer and a corporal carrying her body out the back of the house, to a light transport truck. They counted aloud and swung it up and in like a sack of radishes. One could clearly hear the full sound it made on the metal bed, deep-voiced and surprising.