I told Mrs. Matsui to ready them for examination and she ordered them to remove their clothing. They were slow to do so and she went up to the girl with the mole and tore at her hair. The girl complied and the rest of them began to disrobe. I did not watch them. I stood at the table with a writing board and the sheets of paper for recording their medical histories and periodic examinations. There was special paperwork for everything, and it was no different for the young women of the comfort house. The girl with the mole came to me first. I nodded to the table and she lifted herself up gingerly. She was naked and in the bright afternoon light coming from the slatted window her youthful skin was practically luminous, as though she were somehow lit from inside. For a moment I was transfixed by the strangeness of it all, the sheer exposed figure of the girl and then the four others who stood covering themselves with their hands, their half-real, half-phantom nearness, which I thought must be like the allure of pornography for Corporal Endo. But then Mrs. Matsui came around the front of the girl on the exam table and without prompting from me spread her knees apart.
“You’ll probably see they’re all a bit raw today,” she said hoarsely, like a monger with her morning’s call. “Nothing like the first time, right? But you’ll believe me when I say they’ll be used to it by tomorrow.”
Her cloying tone and familiarity put me off, but the woman was right. The girl’s privates were terribly swollen and bruised, and there were dried smears of crimson-tinged discharge on her thighs and underside. Mrs. Matsui had just delivered the four of them from the commander’s hut, and the faint, sour odors of dried sweat and spilled rice wine and blood and sexual relations emanated from the girl. When I reached to examine her more closely she curled her hips away and began whimpering and crying. Mrs. Matsui held her steady but I didn’t touch her then, nor did I do anything else but visually inspect the others. Their condition was more or less the same. I was just beginning to examine Kkutaeh, the only girl who had not been with the commander, when the door quickly swung open. It was the doctor, in his fatigues, entering the room.
“What do you think you are doing?” he said sharply, staring at the girl on the table.
I answered, “The required examinations, Captain. I’ve nearly completed them, and I’ll have the records for you shortly—”
“I don’t need records from you,” he said, not in the least hiding his irritation. He pushed Mrs. Matsui aside, then took hold of the girl by the back of her neck. Her shoulders tightened with his touch. He was applying subtle pressure, enough so that she was wincing slightly, though not letting herself cry out.
“I need order from you, Lieutenant. Order and adherence to our code. And yet this is a challenge. Time and again, what appears to elude you is the application of principle. It is never how one acts or reacts. It is never simply efficiency. The true officer understands this. It is the keeping to certain standards which is the only guide. You examined them, yes. But in doing so you abandoned far more important principles. This examination room, for example, is a disgrace and besmirchment upon our practice.” He nodded at the clothes in piles on the floor, the scattered sandals; in the course of the examinations I had completely neglected to tell the girls they could put their clothes on again.
“You perform your duties but your conduct is often still so middling. In truth, I remain unconvinced of you. Now I am to prepare for a procedure this afternoon. You’ll get them out of here and ready for receiving the officer corps tonight. The comfort house is done?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go to the rest of it, Lieutenant.”
“Captain, sir,” I said, glancing at the girl beside him. She was stony-faced and still grimly silent. “I have not yet completed the examinations.”
The doctor was staring at the girl on the table, not acknowledging my statement. Already he seemed to consider us gone. He was a person most centrally focused, someone who — in his own mind — could almost will his thoughts and desires to bear upon the wider truth. Of course it is often in the military, where one has fixed standing, that this can be seen, but in the case of the doctor I was sure he was as unimpeachable in civilian life as he was here, in this, his surgeon’s room. He had a wife and young child back in Japan, whose attractive portraits on his desk had been steady witness to scores of bloody procedures and assays and mortal extinguishments, and I thought surely that any other man would have long retired them to the confines of a drawer or private cabinet. But now here he had the girl, Kkutaeh, unclothed on the table, and was pushing her to lie down on her back, his drawn, humorless face hovering above her shallow belly.
Mrs. Matsui immediately gathered the rest of the girls and then with a swift slap quieted the one of them who was unwilling to leave her sister in the room. She was inconsolable. Mrs. Matsui and the other three girls had to work together to drag her out, her sister on the table remaining oddly unmoved, almost dead to her and everything else. Through the shouting and the clamor I removed the doctor’s white coat and left it folded on the desk chair. When I shut the door I did not look back into the room.
I was relieved to be outside. I came upon the enlisted mess tent, and the steward there saw me and offered to prepare me a cup of tea, as he sometimes did in the afternoons. I sat on an upended crate and waited, welcoming the small kindness. In the corner of my vision Mrs. Matsui and the others were half-carrying the still hysterical girl in a tight formation toward the comfort house, which seemed, being newly built, a lone clean island in the growing fetor of the camp. With dusk, I knew, the officers would begin their visitations — myself as well, if I chose.
I also noticed what I thought to be the slight figure of Corporal Endo, crouched at the far end of the central yard where it gave way to dense jungle. He was sitting back on his haunches, his canvas radioman’s cap pinched down over his brow to shade his eyes from the fierce late daylight. He must have seen me but he did not wave or nod or make any gesture; he appeared to be surveying the goings-on, particularly the troop of girls making their way to Mrs. Matsui’s tent behind the comfort house. Perhaps he had been waiting for them to come out from the medical hut, or perhaps he had just then crouched to rest, the timing being mere coincidence. Whatever the case he would later not say to me or anyone else. And thus what he committed next is also a mystery.
He rose from his crouch and began a medium trot toward Mrs. Matsui and the girls. The initial distance between them was not too great, perhaps sixty or seventy meters, and I was able to see the whole of the event, from start to end. The corporal was not a natural runner, lacking any real physical gifts, and he could have appeared to be awkwardly exercising, oddly stretching his legs, though hardly a soul was exerting himself any more than was necessary those days, given the shrinking rations of food and fresh water and the sapping seasonal heat. Some small part of me probably fathomed what he intended, and yet I simply watched the scene like a disinterested spectator, whose instant glint of prescience is somehow self-fulfilling.
The corporal approached and ordered them to halt. I could only partly hear them — the supply transports were being fueled and sent back to the south — though I could gather that Mrs. Matsui was objecting to what Endo seemed to want, which was an immediate private audience with one of the girls. As if to counter his rank she motioned back to the medical hut, but he pushed her aside, the girls falling away except for the one girl they were holding. She fell weakly to her knees, and it was Endo who raised her up with a stiff pull. She was not fighting him; in fact, her gait seemed to lighten, as if he were an old acquaintance and she was pleased to see him. Some men by the trucks had noticed the commotion and began calling to him, asking what was he up to, but shouting it in a hearty, knowing way. He ignored them and dragged her along quickly, until they reached his original position at the edge of the bush. When the two of them disappeared into the dense foliage and did not come back out for several minutes, the corporals and privates working near the trucks began to jog over, and it was then that I knew something irregular had occurred. I slipped beneath the netting of the mess tent and slowly made my way across the dusty red clay of the yard, past the officers’ quarters and privy, then past the narrow comfort house, its walls rough-hewn and unpainted and smelling of fresh-cut wood, to where the canopy rose up again and the shade cooled the air. My legs felt unbearably heavy, and infirm. They were gathered there, in the trodden entrance of a patrol trail, the half-dozen or so men and the couple in their midst, him sitting on the ground with her lying down beside him.