Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

The woman, Mrs. Matsui, poked her head through the open doorway and bowed several times quickly. She was pale and pock-faced and dressed in the tawdry, over-shiny garb of a woman who had obviously once been in the trade. She was clearly, too, a full Japanese, and the fact of this bothered me now, to see her cheapness against the line of modest girls that trailed her.

They were all fairly young, ranging from sixteen to twenty-one. At the head of them was a tallish girl with a dark mole on her cheek. She was pretty, in an easily recognizable sort of way, with arched eyebrows and a full, deep-hued mouth. The two beside her were more retiring in their appearance, their eyes averted from me and everything else; they seemed to be clinging to each other, though they weren’t touching at all. The next girl, I realized, was the one who had hidden beneath the commander’s hut. She had firm hold of the hand of the girl behind her, her eyes unfocused, as if she were blind.

Her sister, whom I had not seen up close until then, was the only one of them who gazed directly at me. She did not stare or hold my sight; rather she met my eyes as someone might on any public bus or trolley car, though her regard was instantly fixing and cold. She had a wide, oval-shaped face, and there was still some faint bruising along the side of her jaw and upper neck. She had been housed with the captain while the rest of them had gone on to entertain the commander; the doctor had reserved her, implying to the commander that she was not a virgin like the others, who would offer him the salubrious and then other ineffable effects of his taking their maidenhood, which to a soldier is like an amulet of life and rebirth.

But in the end, I believe, it was not that the doctor thought her to be simply beautiful. For it is a fact well evidenced that there were many attractive, even lovely girls that one could have as a soldier of an occupying army. It was a more particular interest than that, and one I think perhaps he himself could not (and would not) describe. Like a kind of love, which need not be romantic or sexual but is a craving all the same, the way a young boy can so desire something that he loves it with the fiercest intensity, some toy or special ball, until the object becomes him, and he, it. Early the first morning after the girls’ arrival I chanced upon him going into this very room, and in passing the closed door I heard him asking questions of someone concerning parentage and birthplace and education. A female voice had answered him clearly and evenly, and I knew it must be the fifth girl, the one called “Kkutaeh.”

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.