Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

The colonel took a step down. He was a bit wobbly. I thought he had seen us, and I was ready to address him to avoid seeming as if we were trying to conceal ourselves in the darkness, but he bent down to peer beneath the floorboards of the hut, which was set up off the ground on short posts. After a moment’s inspection he stood up and began speaking down toward the crawl space, his tone eerily gentle, as if he were speaking to a niece who was misbehaving.

“There is little reason to hide anymore. It’s all done now. It’s silly to think otherwise. You will come out and join your companions.”

There was no answer.

“You must come out sometime,” Colonel Ishii went on, taking another tack. His effort seemed almost ridiculous, given that any other commander would have simply had soldiers retrieve her, or just shot her dead with his pistol, and perhaps on another evening the colonel himself would have done exactly that. “I suppose it’s more comfortable under there than out in the jungle. But you know there is food inside now. The cook has made some rice balls. The others are eating them as we speak.”

“I want to be with my sister,” a young voice replied miserably. She was speaking awkwardly in Japanese, with some Korean words mixed in. “I want to know where she is. I won’t come out until I know.”

“She’s with the camp doctor,” the colonel said. “To have her ear looked at. The doctor wanted to make sure she was all right.”

The girl obviously didn’t know the doctor was the same man who had struck down her sister. There was a pause, and the colonel simply stood there in his blunt nakedness, the strangest picture of tolerance.

The girl’s voice said, “I promised my mother we would always stay together.”

“You are good to try to keep such a promise,” the colonel said to her. “But how can you do so from down there? Your sister will be back with you tomorrow. For now you must come out, right at this moment. Right at this moment. I won’t wait any longer.”

Something must have shifted in his voice, a different note only she could hear, for she came out almost immediately, slowly scuttling forward on her hands and knees. When she reached the open air she didn’t get up, staying limply crumpled at his feet. She was naked, too. The clouds had scattered and the moon was now apparent, and in the dim violet light the captured sight of them, if you did not know the truth, was almost a thing of beauty, a scene a painter might conjure to speak to the subject of a difficult love. The colonel offered his hand and the girl took it and pulled herself up to her feet, her posture bent and tentative as though she were ill. She was crying softly. He guided her to the step of the porch, and it was there that her legs suddenly lost power and buckled under her. The colonel took hold of her wrist and barked at her to get up, the sharp report of his voice sundering the air. She didn’t respond or move, but lay there feebly, her head lolling against the step. She was sobbing wearily for her sister, whose name, I thought she was saying, was “Kkutaeh,” which meant bottom, or last.

The colonel made a low grunt and jerked her up by her wrist, and it looked as if he were dragging a skinned billy goat or calf, her body thudding dully against the step and then being pulled across the rough planking of the porch. He got her inside and a peal of cries went up from an unseen corner of the room. He shouted for quiet with a sudden, terrible edge in his voice. All at once he had become livid, and he shoved the girl with his foot as though he were going to push-kick her across the floor. Meanwhile the sentry had heard the outburst and ran around to the front, instinctively leveling his rifle on us as he came forward. I raised my hands and the sentry yelled, “Hey there!” and I realized that Corporal Endo, inexplicably, had begun to sprint back into the darkness of the jungle.

I barked, “Don’t shoot!” but the sentry couldn’t help himself and fired once in our direction. The shot flew past well above me, though I could feel it bore through the heavy air. There was little chance that it could have hit the corporal, or anyone else. The sentry seemed shocked at his own reaction and dropped his rifle. I was relieved, but the colonel had already come out of the house, this time a robe hastily tied around his middle, a shiny pistol in his hand. Over the sentry’s shoulder I could see the colonel take aim from the veranda and fire twice. It was like watching the action through a very long lens, when everything is narrowed and made delicate. Then a questioning, half-bemused expression flitted across the sentry’s face, and he fell to the ground like a dropped stone.

The colonel walked over and motioned to me with the gun to let down my hands. He had recognized me as the doctor’s assistant. “Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said unseverely, not even looking down at the sentry’s body, which he practically stepped over as he approached me. I knew the man was dead, as one of the bullets had struck him in the neck and torn away a section of carotid artery. The ground was slowly soaking up his blood. The colonel said, “You are a medical man, are you not?” Up close the colonel was more inebriated than I had surmised, his sleepy eyes opaque. “You can help me then, I hope, with a small confusion I was having this evening.”

He paused, as if trying to remember what he was saying, and in the background I could hear the chaotic shouts of orders and footfalls coming from the main encampment. I replied, “However I am able, sir.”

“What? Oh yes. You can aid me with something. I was being entertained this evening, as you may know, and it occurred to me that there was a chance of…a complication.”

“Sir?”

“You know what I’m talking about, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, though in fact I had no idea.

“They are young, after all, and likely fertile.” He paused a moment and said as if an aside, “And of course, being virginal, that can’t protect them, can it?”

“No, sir.”

“Of course not,” he concurred, as if I had asked him the question. His ignorance surprised me. The colonel was in his mid-thirties, which is not old in the world, but late in the war he was practically ancient. He crossed his arms in an almost casual pose, though he kept a tight hold on the pistol, which poked out beneath one folded arm. “And yet one grows up with all kinds of apocrypha and lore, yes? I mean us men. A young woman naturally receives guidance and training about such matters, estimable information. While it seems we are left to our own methods, each by each and one by one. To our own devices, yes?”

Immediately I thought of Corporal Endo and his interests, and then with alarm wondered where he was now, but I couldn’t answer, as a squad of armed men came running up to us. The colonel waved them forward. The squad leader, a corporal, seemed shocked to find the lifeless body of the sentry lying in awkward repose by our feet.

“Remove him,” the colonel said, prompting the corporal to order two of his men to lift up the corpse, which they hefted by the armpits and calves. Someone gathered the dropped rifle and the bloody cap. Two other men were to remain as sentries. Soon enough they were bearing the body off, the assemblage disappearing beyond the pale ring of lamplight about the hut. I realized then that neither the colonel nor I had spoken a word of explanation to the men, nor had any of them even whispered a question.

“You’ll look after this,” the colonel said to me matter-of-factly, referring, I understood immediately, to the death report, which was filled out whenever time and circumstances allowed. He was not requesting that I cover for him or whitewash the situation in any way; rather, he was simply reminding me of one of my usual duties, as though not wanting me to be remiss. The next day I would note in the necessary form that the sentry, a Private Ozaki, was shot dead by a forward sniper who was sought out by our patrols but never found.