I wandered upstairs, eventually. I wasn’t particularly interested in the entertainments of the new girls. But I kept thinking about them looking over the edge of the sill, how they’d gazed transfixedly at the body. On the landing, several men were playing a card game, gambling while they awaited their turn in the bedrooms. One of them was complaining that the wait would be longer, as now there was one fewer than before.
“Say, what are you doing?” he barked at me. I was walking down the wide, ornately papered hallway. “There’s an order here, if you haven’t noticed. We’re the next group.”
“I’m not waiting.”
“You’re surely not,” he said, rising from his kneeling position. He teetered slightly before gaining his feet. “I’ll make certain of that.”
“I told you I’m not on the queue.”
“Then where are you going?”
“Can’t you see I’m a medical officer?”
He peered at my lapel insignia and nodded. Then he realized that I had been one of the men to carry in the body. “Oh, I get it. You’re here to save us from the clap. But don’t you think you ought to have checked the girls before they got started? It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?”
“Fortunately, Lieutenant, not for you,” I said. My crisp tone seemed to convince him, and he bowed hesitantly as I walked down the hall and to the wing where they had quartered the new girls.
There was a group of six standing in the short hallway, which was almost a vestibule for the larger run of the wing. I strode past without incident. Typically, officers would have the privilege of spending hours and sometimes whole evenings with a woman, but in this instance a special rationing had been instituted. It seemed the men were all too familiar with the offerings of the professional aunties, and the arrival of these girls had most everyone edgy and expectant. General Yamashita, one presumed, had been first to take his enjoyment when they came in. It was said the four girls were shipped all the way from Shimonoseki, via the Philippines, and that in fact two others had been “lost” during the lengthy sea passage. Now there were three, though it was known that other new, young women would be arriving imminently, and in numbers that would be satisfactory for all.
But I didn’t really care for these kinds of activities. It was true that I had visited the welcoming house a few times since being stationed in Singapore, but I wasn’t enamored of the milieu, the transactional circumstances and such. Like any man, I sometimes had that piercing, wrecking want, and in moments I allowed it to propel me to frequent one of the women, Madam Itsuda. As noted, I did this discreetly. She must have been forty at the time, nearly twice my age, and I can’t say I held deep feelings for her (as that would have been ludicrous). I appreciated her gentle, laconic manner and understanding mien toward my youth and naivety. She was never belittling, nor did she pretend that I was special, and I can still remember her smoothing her somehow always tidy floorbed, the sheets invitingly turned down.
Why I was going to the new girls, then, I couldn’t exactly say. I was naturally disturbed by the earlier events, but the fact that I would be concerned in particular about them, even think an iota about their circumstance, confused and irked me. I kept imagining the three of them, one to a room, the lights unchastely left on. At the head of the west wing, it was strangely quiet. English-style houses were, if monstrous, at least sturdily built. One of the doors suddenly opened and a girl ran out, crying. She was naked, and there was a faint smudge of blood staining the inside of her legs. She tried to run past me but I automatically caught her, not knowing what else to do.
“Please,” she said, her eyes frantic. “Let me go, please, let me go!”
“There’s no place to go,” I said, unthinking. “You must stay in the house.”
She looked surprised at my words, staring at me as if I were someone she knew.
“Please,” she said, crying even harder now. “I beg you.”
A stout officer with a towel around his waist came stumbling out of the room. He was the group captain who’d come on the same transport as I. “There she is! I’m grateful to you, Lieutenant. We wouldn’t want another leaper, would we?”
“I beg you, O-ppah, let me go!”
“She’s a pretty one, isn’t she?” he said, taking her from me. He slapped her once in the face, quite hard. She fell quiet. “She goes on a little, though. Say, what was that you were saying to her?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“I thought I heard you say something, in her tongue.”
“No sir, I didn’t.”
He looked confused for a moment, but then shrugged. “Ah, what does it matter? We’re all here for relaxation tonight, right? And don’t look so concerned. We won’t be much longer. There’ll be plenty left, for you and your mates.”
“Yes, Captain.”
He led her back down the hall to the open door. She followed him, in limp half-steps. Before they reached the room, the girl looked back at me, the side of her face raised red from the blow. I thought she was going to say something again, maybe O-ppah, how a girl would address her older brother or other male, but she just gazed at me instead, ashen-faced, as if in wonder whether I had uttered the words to her at all.
* * *
I WAS THINKING of that girl as I walked around the side of the Gizzi house and its waist-high weeds and saplings; I wondered if she had survived the war and was still living now, in Singapore or Korea or perhaps even here in this country. Or whether like Lieutenant Enchi she had been killed soon thereafter, by whatever circumstance, and been cheated of (or spared) the endless complications and questionings of a life duly spent. And what would she or Enchi think of me, an old man loitering in the shadows of a party house in America, peering into private rooms?
As I turned onto the front yard, the two young men who had first greeted me were still on the sofa, the skinny one passed out over the edge of the wide arm. His largish companion was sitting up, however, simply looking out at the night and laughing softly to himself. I thought he had gone mad. But as I crossed his field of vision he said something, whispering to me in a little boy’s voice.
“What?” I said to him. “Excuse me? I can’t hear you.”
“She’s up there,” he was saying, his face screwed up in what I took to be mock fear. He repeated, “Up there.”
He tipped his head toward the dormer over the garage. There, in the window, a seam of light shone through a break in the heavy curtain.
“You know my daughter, Sunny?”
“Don’t tell him I told you,” he answered more fearfully, getting up to walk away. He was already heading down the street, holding the neck of the big bottle between two fingers. “Don’t say anything, okay?”
I ascended the flight of wooden stairs attached to the side of the house. The steep treads were spongy and rotting, and with each step it seemed the whole thing might collapse beneath me. At the landing I had to stop to catch my breath. The door was a half-window with a lacy curtain on the other side of the dingy glass.
And there she was. She was standing in the middle of the squarish room, her figure in profile. She had on only a gray tank-top and her underwear. She was dancing, slowly, by herself. Her jeans and her sweater were splayed on the floor in front of her. I looked to the side and saw her audience, two men sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed. They were calling and toasting her with bottles of beer. One was a young black man wearing a worn baseball cap; the other, I thought, was Jimmy Gizzi, whom I’d seen once or twice around town. A hand-sized mirror lay between them on the carpet, sprays of bright white powder salting the glass.