Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“Resume your duties,” he muttered, turning to go back inside the infirmary. He paused at the door. “Another thing. About the sign.”

“Sir?”

“So that you know when to get her ready. I don’t want to have to speak to you every time. In fact from now on I want to minimize such contacts between us. I’m too busy to be supervising you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then what shall it be?” he said sternly.

I had no hint of an answer for him, and I shuffled my feet. He then looked somewhat pleased, while regarding me.

“Well, it should be that then.”

“Captain?”

“Since this will now be a critical responsibility for you, Lieutenant, perhaps it ought to be fairly obvious, so that you won’t have any confusion and waste my time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In this spirit, then, you will look out each morning for a black flag.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“A black flag. What do you think, Lieutenant? I will affix it on the front of the infirmary. I suspect even you will be able to notice this.”

“I believe I will see it clearly, sir, yes.”

He waited for me to respond further, as if he hoped to provoke me with his choice of sign. But I remained at attention, not meeting his piercing eyes, trying as hard as I could to imagine myself far away from him and this place, perhaps swimming in the quiet sea that lapped the shore of Rangoon. I had been thinking lately of that posting, which was mostly a last, brief R&R for us as we awaited transport to a more forward base. I remembered having the thought then in the glowing dusk on the beach that the war, oddly enough, was not so awful; that a young man uncertain of himself could find meaning amidst the camaraderie of his fellows working in such shared purpose, and that in fact there was no truer proving time for which he could hope. And yet it seemed everything fell away whenever Captain Ono addressed me, all my carefully built-up perception of things, and in the sorry depletion I could feel the searing, rising surges of what must be pure enmity. I have never quite shown this expression, and I did not then with Captain Ono.

“Look for it, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he finally said, and with a flit of his surgeon’s hand he turned and left me.

What he had determined as the sign, the black flag, was of course meant for me. Hata is, literally, “flag,” and a “black flag,” or kurohata, is the banner a village would raise by its gate in olden times to warn of a contagion within. It is the signal of spreading death. My adoptive family, I learned right away, had an ancient lineage of apothecaries, who had ventured into stricken villages and had for unknown reasons determined to keep the name, however inauspicious it was. Captain Ono’s choice, of course, was intentionally belittling, though I could see, too, how the sign would serve to keep others away from the infirmary who would naturally assume there had been an outbreak. As there was no recent fighting in our area, the infirmary, was in fact empty and had been so for some weeks, and he could have a privacy there that was not possible anywhere else in the camp, even for an officer.

A few mornings later I rose before dawn and the morning call. I dressed and began my usual ablutions: a quick wash with a dampened rag, a fitful, pulling shave with a knife’s edge, and then a meager, rationed morning meal of barley porridge and tea from the officers’ mess. It was much the same as any other morning, but as I finished I realized, gazing out at the lightly fogged-in camp, how actually pitiable the condition of things had become. There was of course the threat of an enemy offensive looming about like a pall, but even that, too, seemed to be dissipating, the notion grown more enervating, somehow, than frightful. Soon enough, we would understand that the fighting had indeed passed us over, but we did not believe that then. There were various scatters of litter about the encampment, and all about the air was the fouled, earthy smell of the far latrines, which had filled up again and needed to be cleared. This was the unheroic state of our far-flung outpost, in fact one forgotten by both home and foe, and under the increasingly retiring leadership of Colonel Ishii, who was hardly to be seen anymore outside his house.

As I took my early morning walk I decided not to go directly to the infirmary but rather to detour toward the latrines, where I passed by the longish, narrow comfort house, with its five modest, unadorned doors all set in a row. It was quiet, no doubt empty, but I made my way toward the nearest door and swung it in on its doweled hinges in order to look inside. There was no one there, as I had expected. Just the oddly shaped plank of wood, like a strange, otherworldly pew in the middle of the tiny space more like a stall than a room, the wood stained dark at its bottom end. This is what the enlisted men had been queuing for these past few afternoons. I hadn’t done so myself the week earlier, when it was the officers who visited exclusively (and still did, in the late evenings now, sometimes for the entire night), and though I was publicly saying to my fellows that I still would, I could not yet remove from my thoughts how Corporal Endo had offered to give me his ticket, how desperately he had wanted to relinquish his turn. The night before I had felt uncomfortable when I saw the men waiting in lines outside the doorways, smoking and taunting and singing to one another as they waited, their exuberance amazingly whole, unattenuated. I wished I could be just the same as they, I wished for the simple sheerness of their anticipation, whether it was born from desire or lonesomeness or fear or anger or dread.

But I did not have such a feeling, nor could I call it forth. I supposed I should be half-glad. Maybe it was because I knew enough of what would happen in the tiny room, or what would occur in turn over the long hours of the afternoon and evening. One could say it was a medical knowledge. Or so I chose to encounter it. I knew that twenty or even thirty or more would visit each one of them, and that the resulting insult would be horribly painful and ignominious. The older woman, Mrs. Matsui, had brought over one of them after their first full evening with the enlisted men; the girl could hardly walk and was bleeding freely from her genital area, which was bruised and swollen nearly beyond recognition. She was weakened from the blood loss, and I had the orderly wrap her in blankets and instructed Mrs. Matsui to give her an extra ration of porridge from her supplies and some dried fish broth as well, which she stridently protested but could do nothing about. The girl had no other injuries, per se, though she hardly responded when spoken to or even when examined. Her eyes were lightless and nearly fixed. I had intended to keep her in the infirmary for several days, for observation and treatment and rest, but after Mrs. Matsui complained to the doctor about having to give her extra without compensation, he ordered that the girl be sent back to the comfort house immediately in order to resume her duties. As for the other three girls, he instructed me in a carefully written note, I would remove them only if they were diseased or if a malady was imminently life-threatening, and in all other instances I was to employ the least wasteful treatment and have Mrs. Matsui take them away.

Which is what I did in this case, and each subsequent time one of them was brought in, despite their terrible condition. It was not against my field training, certainly, to treat a patient in such a way with the aim of returning him to his duties as soon as possible, for in wartime it was never a question of salubrity, really not for anyone. Rather, as the doctor had already pointed out to me, it was a matter of standards, in this case to apply the level of treatment that was most appropriate for the situation, and for whom. In this schema the commander had his level, the officers theirs, the enlisted men and others yet another, and so on and so forth, until it came to the girls, who had their own. All this was inviolable, like any set of natural laws.