Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“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.

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.”