Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

He fell over then. We could only watch until he stopped moving, the life running out of him and down through the cracks of the floorboards. I wiped and examined the wound after he was dead. It was amazingly precise. K was still holding the blade, standing stiffly above us. She was not exultant; the color had left her face. She had stabbed him with a deep, short incision through the major artery, which had been rent open like an undammed stream. He looked quite peaceful to me then, slighter as he lay, as if the dying had made him youthful.

And for a brief moment, too, I almost felt her hand hovering over me, angled high, and I closed my eyes in anticipation of the sundering edge. She could have stabbed me just as swiftly. For as with any man in the camp, she should have tried to kill me. And if I believed then that she did not do so because she valued me or hoped to be saved by me, I realize now that it was neither of those things. Not at all. She had not hurt me for the same reason that she had given over her body some hours before, not for passion or love, or mercy or humanity, but their complete absence and abasement, such that there were no wrongs remaining, no more crimes, nothing to save herself from.

In an odd way, I think now that K wanted the same thing that I would yearn for all my days, which was her own place in the accepted order of things. She would be a young woman of character, as significant to her father as was his son. She would have the independence that comes from learning and grace. She would choose her kind of devotion; she would bear children and do her necessary work, a true vocation, and she would grow old as I have grown old, though she would look backward with a different cast than mine, a different afterlight. All I wished for was to be part (if but a millionth) of the massing, and that I pass through with something more than a life of gestures. And yet, I see now, I was in fact a critical part of events, as were K and the other girls, and the soldiers and the rest. Indeed the horror of it was how central we were, how ingenuously and not we comprised the larger processes, feeding ourselves and one another to the all-consuming engine of the war.

K leaned on the examination table and doubled over, gagging, still gripping the surgical knife. Nothing came out but some watery spittle. I tried to help her but she pushed away my hands.

“Please,” she said, wiping her mouth with her forearm. “Please, Lieutenant. Don’t touch me.”

“I’ll only ever do so when you wish.”

“Then please…” she said, her eyes sickly, desperate. “I won’t be touched anymore.”

“You will come with me when the war is over.”

“Don’t speak of that,” she said wearily. “I don’t wish to think of it.”

“You will, I promise…there’s nothing that can prevent it. Not even this.”

“I am not going anywhere with you!” She was crying now, suddenly mad. “I am not going with you! Do you hear me?”

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t want your help!” she shouted. “I never wanted your help. Can’t you heed me? Can’t you leave me be? You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent. But I will tell you now, it is my sex. The thing of my sex. If you could cut it from me and keep it with you like a pelt or favorite stone, that would be all. You are a decent man, Lieutenant, but really you are not any different from the rest. I’m sorry I gave myself to you, not for me but for you. Perhaps it was a second’s hope. For that I’ll be sorry to my death. But if you loved me, Lieutenant, if you truly loved me, you could not bear to be with me. You could not see me like this, you could not stand for one moment longer the thought of my even living.”

“I love you,” I said, in hardly a voice.

“Then show me, Jiro,” she answered. “I’m too cowardly to do it myself. I want to but I can’t. There is his pistol. The guards are going to return at any moment and they will announce themselves. When he doesn’t answer they’ll come in. You must say I killed him just as I did, and that you took his pistol and you shot me. If you cannot do it yourself, then say so now. I’m afraid, but I have nothing left to do. There’s no escape. I know you dream of one but it doesn’t exist. This time won’t end. It will end for you, but not for me.”

K bent and loosed the weapon from him and put it in my hand. She moved back a little, stepping away from the body of the captain. She wasn’t crying anymore. “Jiro. Please. You are a good man. Yes, you are. A good man now.”

The pistol weighed heavily in my hand, as though I’d never held one before. I had shot in training and for practice but never once fired at something living, much less her. But she was right, I knew. It was incredible to think there was a way for us, the hope akin to how a boy might fancy that he could truly fly, perched up high in the limbs of a tree. And he might even fashion paper wings and lash them to his arms, he might feel the airy hollowness of his bones, he might know like the sun the perfect certainty of his flight, and yet his first step tells, it tells with prejudice the rules of the world.

Yet I could not shoot. I could not. Whether for love or pity or cowardice. Then we heard the men returning, and I looked out and saw they were accompanied by a first lieutenant, a hulking, boorish man named Shiboru, who was in charge of the guards. They were but steps away from the stair and landing. I pulled Captain Ono by the neck and sat him up and stuck the muzzle to his wound. Then I fired. K shouted out, in surprise and dread. I dropped the pistol and let him fall dully. Shiboru came running in with his sidearm drawn as I was kneeling beside the captain.

“He’s shot himself,” I said. “Get the large bandages in the cabinet.”

Shiboru looked confused, but I pointed at the cabinet and he complied. I realized it was he who had executed Endo that day. He hurriedly brought the gauzes but when he gave them to me I told him it was already too late.

“How did this happen?” he said, not yet holstering his revolver.

“It was an accident,” I replied, picking up Ono’s gun. “He was playing with the girl. Doing tricks for her. He was switching hands when it went off.”

“What happened to you?”

I told him the captain had beaten me the day before, not explaining any further, and Shiboru naturally didn’t question it. He looked down at the captain’s body and said haughtily, “Only real soldiers should toy with such things. And even then. So I suppose you’re the base doctor now, eh, Kurohata?”

“If the colonel wishes it.”

“Oh, that he will,” Shiboru answered, nodding to the hall. “It seems the old man needs his medicine. He insisted on me coming here and getting the captain. Right off, too, with the needles and all. I suppose you’ll be by daily as Ono here was. I’ll let my men know.”

He snorted when I didn’t answer, and he said gruffly, “He’s in his house. You better go there now. The sentries will take care of this mess. She’ll come with me.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“She’s got no reason to be here. I know what was going on, Kurohata, like everybody else. The doctor, having it special. In fact, maybe you, too? But no more, eh? Everybody’s bored with just the three others. They’re nearly useless now besides. Fucking skeletons. Can’t you fix them up or something? It’s almost better with your own hand. At least you don’t want to throw up when you’re doing it. But this one, she’s a doll. Skinny, but she’s a real beauty. Come here, doll. Come here to your big brother.”

I went to the storeroom to get the vials of the tincture, trying desperately to think of what to do. When I came back the guards were waiting to escort me to the commander’s house, but I stopped at the exam room to try to stall or convince him to leave her to me. It was strange, then, when I looked inside; I thought I saw her gazing at him almost tenderly, with a last human glimmer, and then I knew in an instant how terrible all the rest of it would be. She reached out with one hand and seemed to caress him, but he groaned instead, clutching one side of his face. When he let go there was a fine red line, from the corner of his eye down to his mouth. He started bleeding profusely. She had cut him, but not too deeply, as though she were trying only to mark him. She didn’t move away. Then he punched her hard enough on the mouth that some of her teeth flew out, like tiny white birds.