The lieutenant ordered the corporal to bring player number 4, the cleanup batter, to the edge of the hole. Once again they tied his hands behind his back, then they blindfolded him and had him kneel down on the ground. He was a tall, strongly built young man with massive arms the size of most peoples thighs. The lieutenant called over one young soldier and handed him the bat. Kill him with this, he said. The young soldier stood at attention and saluted before taking the bat, but having taken it in his hands, he just went on standing there, as if stupefied. He seemed unable to grasp the concept of beating a Chinese man to death with a baseball bat. Have you ever played baseball? the lieutenant asked the young soldier (the one who would eventually have his skull split open with a shovel by a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk).
No, sir, never, replied the soldier, in a loud voice. Both the village in Hokkaido where he was born and the village in Manchuria where he grew up had been so poor that no family in either place could have afforded the luxury of a baseball or a bat. He had spent his boyhood running around the fields, catching dragonflies and playing at sword fighting with sticks. He had never in his life played baseball or even seen a game. This was the first time he had ever held a bat.
The lieutenant showed him how to hold the bat and taught him the basics of the swing, demonstrating himself a few times. See? Its all in the hips, he grunted through clenched teeth. Starting from the back-swing, you twist from the waist down. The tip of the bat follows through naturally. Understand? If you concentrate too much on swinging the bat, your arms do all the work and you lose power. Swing from the hips.
The soldier didn't seem fully to comprehend the lieutenants instructions, but he took off his heavy gear as ordered and practiced his swing for a while. Everyone was watching him. The lieutenant placed his hands over the soldiers to help him adjust his grip. He was a good teacher. Before long, the soldiers swing, though somewhat awkward, was swishing through the air. What the young soldier lacked in skill he made up for in muscle power, having spent his days working on the farm.
That's good enough, said the lieutenant, using his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. OK, now, try to do it in one good, clean swing. Don't let him suffer.
What he really wanted to say was, I don't want to do this any more than you do. Who the hell could have thought of anything so stupid? Killing a guy with a baseball bat... But an officer could never say such a thing to an enlisted man.
The soldier stepped up behind the blindfolded Chinese man where he knelt on the ground. When the soldier raised the bat, the strong rays of the setting sun cast the bats long, thick shadow on the earth. This is so weird, thought the veterinarian. The lieutenant was right: I've never seen a man killed with a baseball bat. The young soldier held the bat aloft for a long time. The doctor saw its tip shaking.
The lieutenant nodded to the soldier. With a deep breath, the soldier took a backswing, then smashed the bat with all his strength into the back of the Chinese cadets head. He did it amazingly well. He swung his hips exactly as the lieutenant had taught him to, the brand of the bat made a direct hit behind the mans ear, and the bat followed through perfectly. There was a dull crushing sound as the skull shattered. The man himself made no sound. His body hung in the air for a moment in a strange pose, then flopped forward. He lay with his cheek on the ground, blood flowing from one ear. He did not move. The lieutenant looked at his watch. Still gripping the bat, the young soldier stared off into space, his mouth agape.
The lieutenant was a person who did things with great care. He waited for a full minute. When he was certain that the young Chinese man was not moving at all, he said to the veterinarian, Could you do me a favor and check to see that he's really dead?
The veterinarian nodded, walked over to where the young Chinese lay, knelt down, and removed his blindfold. The mans eyes were open wide, the pupils turned upward, and bright- red blood was flowing from his ear. His half-opened mouth revealed the tongue lying tangled inside. The impact had left his neck twisted at a strange angle. The mans nostrils had expelled thick gobs of blood, making black stains on the dry ground. One particularly alert- and large-fly had already burrowed its way into a nostril to lay eggs. Just to make sure, the veterinarian took the mans wrist and felt for a pulse. There was no pulse-certainly not where there was supposed to be one. The young soldier had ended this burly mans life with a single swing of a bat-indeed, his first-ever swing of a bat. The veterinarian glanced toward the lieutenant and nodded to signal that the man was, without a doubt, dead. Having completed his assigned task, he was beginning slowly to rise to his full height, when it seemed to him that the sun shining on his back suddenly increased in intensity.
At that very moment, the young Chinese batter in uniform number 4 rose up into a sitting position, as if he had just come fully awake. Without the slightest uncertainty or hesitation-or so it seemed to those watching-he grabbed the doctors wrist. It all happened in a split second. The veterinarian could not understand: this man was dead, he was sure of it. But now, thanks to one last drop of life that seemed to well up from nowhere, the man was gripping the doctors wrist with the strength of a steel vise. Eyelids stretched open to the limit, pupils still glaring upward, the man fell forward into the hole, dragging the doctor in after him. The doctor fell in on top of him and heard one of the mans ribs crack as his weight came down. Still the Chinese ballplayer continued to grip his wrist. The soldiers saw all this happening, but they were too stunned to do anything more than stand and watch. The lieutenant recovered first and leaped into the hole. He drew his pistol from his holster, set the muzzle against the Chinese mans head, and pulled the trigger twice. Two sharp, overlapping cracks rang out, and a large black hole opened in the mans temple. Now his life was completely gone, but still he refused to release the doctors wrist. The lieutenant knelt down and, pistol in one hand, began the painstaking process of prying open the corpses fingers one at a time. The veterinarian lay there in the hole, surrounded by eight silent Chinese corpses in baseball uniforms. Down in the hole, the screeching of cicadas sounded very different from the way it sounded aboveground.
Once the veterinarian had been freed from the dead mans grasp, the soldiers pulled him and the lieutenant out of the grave. The veterinarian squatted down on the grass and took several deep breaths. Then he looked at his wrist. The mans fingers had left five bright-red marks. On this hot August afternoon, the veterinarian felt chilled to the core of his body. I'll never get rid of this coldness, he thought. That man was truly, seriously, trying to take me with him wherever he was going.
The lieutenant reset the pistols safety and carefully slipped the gun into its holster. This was the first time he had ever fired a gun at a human being. But he tried not to think about it. The war would continue for a little while at least, and people would continue to die. He could leave the deep thinking for later. He wiped his sweaty right palm on his pants, then ordered the soldiers who had not participated in the execution to fill in the hole. A huge swarm of flies had already taken custody of the pile of corpses.