Authors: Shaena Lambert
The next day the interpreter comes to Shamshuipo.
She makes her first appearance at afternoon
tenko.
How many men line up in the sun? Eighteen Americans, seventy-six Canadians, two British. For a while there were a couple of Dutch men, but they died of dysentery. The prisoners are called to muster. Standing still causes shooting pains, like having pins buried in the soles of your feet; all through the lines there is the shuffle of men shifting their weight.
Ed stands at attention, yellow-skinned from dysentery. The rice has given him diarrhea. A trickle of bright orange rust burns his anus, and runs down the back of his leg.
The chief officer of the
Kempetai
has barked out an order. The men all call him Monkey Face, though sometimes they call him Tojo’s chimp. It is true that he looks like a monkey—scruffy chin, wrinkled brow, long arms, big lower lip: a monkey on a mission.
The young woman repeats the order. This is something new. The men listen to the bark of the officer translated into a feminine register. Her voice is clear and cold. Heavily accented. She wears a belted tunic of dun-coloured cotton with two breast pockets, over shapeless trousers. She stands stiff and stern beside the chief. Perhaps she feels that she must not show compassion—for her own protection, this must be so. But how can she look on them and be unmoved? Ninety-six starved men standing under the burning sun, some with bellies fat with beriberi, one with a goitre as big as a grapefruit dangling under his chin, men shifting from foot to foot, the restive stirring of chickens, a smell of rotting flesh. In the front row an open wound forces one man to lean on another. Within the pink flesh, watermelon-coloured, the girl can see bone.
Their eyes are on her now. Something new to look at: a woman’s face. They see her cheekbones, her dark eyes in which they search for an acknowledgment of what they have become. She sends her gaze to the corrugated roofs of the huts, before glancing back again at the goitres and bones, the swelling and thinning of flesh. She finds the courage to look at faces: faces of men whose souls have been swallowed by their bodies, pain forcing them to focus on nothing but the soft sand at their feet. Faces of the ages, showing no surprise.
She hears a slurping sound to her left. A man falls forward. The
Kempetai
chief calls out an order for hospitalization. She translates.
Attention. This man is sick. You men to the right, to the left, take him away.
The guards shove two other men with the end of their bayonets. They are released from the line to drag away the fallen man, his feet pigeon-toed in the sand.
Tell them they are cowards who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.
She hears the chief officer say this and she nods, translates his words. That this suffering might have been brought about by some fault of their own sends breath back into her lungs: they are so terrible in their suffering, covered in running sores, and yet they still cling to life. This itself must be cause for punishment. She tries, under the burning sun of the compound, which has given her a headache, she tries to believe they deserve to suffer, through faults of the worst cowardice and depravity. She tries to tell herself that they are less than human; otherwise they would have killed themselves long ago. It is a trick of thought: it goes through her head faster than she can control it—because humans who get treated in this way must be criminals, or belong to sicker, weaker sub-species.
Now the chief officer says that there has been a theft of vitamins from the medical hut. Boxes have been broken into and five bottles have been stolen. She knows this means the Red Cross bottles that belong to the prisoners. She was told about Red Cross supplies by a male interpreter who received his training, as she did, at Tokyo-2D. She pauses only an instant, then she translates clearly, staring between the faces of the men, feeling the sweat between her breasts, running down to her stomach, tickling like a fly.
There has been a theft of vitamins that were to be evenly distributed in due course to all the men in the camp. But a coward took them for himself. A man was seen pocketing bottles. Call out your name.
The chief officer’s voice is very loud, as though he were bellowing orders at troops, not ghosts. He stands with his legs apart, his long, curved sword in its sheath, wearing shorts and a dun shirt.
Call out your name.
Why does he care so much who stole the vitamins? Who is he?
He is a man with a large moustache. He is short with a wrinkled brow. Often she has seen him scratching his scalp furiously, when he thinks he is not being observed. But now he plans to make something happen. He is calling up his
bushido,
his fighting spirit. Honour is at stake in this courtyard. These men are half-dead and should be finished, but still they cling to life like leeches. They steal vitamins. Now he, the chief officer of the
Kempetai,
unbuttons the leather sheath and draws out his sword.
The magic of weapons. The interpreter feels what he has done—how he has made himself invincible, drawn a circle around himself, protecting his body from the shambles, the smell and the animal shifting of feet. He alone believes in something noble. He believes in the fighting spirit, he believes in killing those who do not have the dignity to die. He believes, most ardently, in the blade of his father’s sword.
Coward. It will be better for you if you step forward.
His words, so loud, are like muskets fired above their heads. They are followed by the words of the interpreter, but they do not carry well; they barely rise above the heated sand. By now the men understand that her little voice is just as merciless as the chief officer’s. His brutality is bad and full, a parody of cruelty, but it gives them something real in their ears. The interpreter’s voice is precise. She does not look again at their faces, but she does not falter.
The sun is directly above their heads now. Shadows smaller than tombstones at their feet. Heads without hats suffer in heat like this.
You. Stand forward.
The sand is not white. Close up it is grey, the same colour as the gravel in the compound at Tokyo
2
-D. An old man used to go out in the late afternoon and rake the gravel in swirls.
A man has been pushed forward from the second line.
The interpreter looks at the sand, imagining swirls. She hears a sound that is loud, a crack to the head, perhaps, then another sound, which is a boot on a body. Thuds. Very bad thuds such as she has always known. Cries of pain, a high-pitched cry, a groan. She glances to her left to see jumping up and down. The guard is jumping on the man’s back. She studies the ground again. In the patch ahead of her it is worn through the sand to the dirt, and covered in a talcum-like dust. More thuds. Boots against his back. She hears another groan; leather boots against what must be spine.
It is then that she looks up and meets the eyes of the prisoner standing directly in front of her. He has seen her flinch. Just that, nothing more. She lets herself look into the eyes that have seen her flinch. They hear another groan, and then she looks beyond his head.
For a long time the sounds go on. She notices that the light on the wall behind is very bright, the cleanest white, like porcelain. Beyond that far wall is the sea. It cannot be seen, but it is there. She realizes she can hear seagulls crying. For too long there has been thudding, kicking. Sweat has run down her stomach, into her belly button, soaking the belted area of her waist.
At last the chief officer calls out:
March.
The interpreter’s voice, a refrain:
March.
The men move out of the compound, a band of ghosts dispersed. In the sun a body, knees bent, an angle of awkward prostration; blood pooled like a shadow around his head.
Dead bodies, she will learn, look like sacks stuffed full of nothing. Shit and blood. They are the worst thing. A man who is dead is less than nothing. And this man is dead. He has been kicked to death for stealing vitamins.
That was the interpreter’s first day at the Shamshuipo prison camp for men.
A
UGUST 1, 1952
—Two months have passed since our Hiroshima Maiden returned to Riverside Meadows, post-surgery, and there can no longer be any question: Keiko Kitigawa is having a marvellous time. You have read in this column about her visits to the Norwegian ambassador’s residence, her wonderful conversation with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and of the banquets and luncheons she has graced with her presence. What may be less well known is the way she has adapted to life in a Long Island suburb. Dr. Raymond Carney operated on Keiko Kitigawa’s face in mid-May. Plastic surgery, our latest science, has advanced greatly in recent years, and Dr. Carney is optimistic that Keiko’s skin will show no trace of its former disfigurement. To heal properly, her face has had to remain swathed in compression bandages for a period of ninety days. This period is soon to be over, at which point the bandages will be removed. As you may imagine, Keiko and the Project organizers are on tenterhooks awaiting the final outcome.
Soon after her return to Riverside Meadows (See “Around the Clock Care, June
3
”), Miss Kitigawa quickly began to regain her strength. Before the second week was out, Keiko was gossiping over the fence with the young mother next door. It helps that Frances Warburgh is only a few years older than Keiko herself, and that both love to pore over magazines about fashion and hair, discussing the latest “do’s.”
While Keiko’s surgeries are famous, less well known are the small obstacles she faces daily. All the timesaving gadgets
American women take for granted have been a puzzlement to Miss Kitigawa. There are no big refrigerators in Japan, nor are there those basic necessities in a woman’s kitchen: the electric toaster and automatic can opener. Yet Keiko mastered both appliances and even prepared Japanese teriyaki for the Lawrences (see photo facing page).
Her neighbours confessed that they were surprised to see an “atomic maiden” walking to the grocery store or waiting for the train. “I never dreamed I’d see such a thing,” said Mrs. Evelyn Lithgow, a mother of three. “Initially, I had no idea how to react.” Luckily, she did what comes naturally, extending a neighbourly hand. It wasn’t long before Keiko found herself overwhelmed with invitations to picnics and backyard parties.
Mrs. Daisy Lawrence, a charming plump woman with a huge smile, has taken every step to make Keiko feel at home. Mr. Lawrence, our equally charming resident host, is a radio writer, though presently he’s hard at work on a novel. I asked him if the new work was to do with the Hiroshima Project, to which he replied, “Not likely.” One can hear the sound of Mr. Lawrence typing whenever one visits Riverside Meadows. “How often does he work like this?” I asked. To which his cheery wife replied, “He stops to sleep.” Clearly, however, he stops to make himself amusing to his young guest. He can be seen often in her company, fanning the coals in the barbecue for an outdoor picnic, or escorting Keiko and Daisy to the drive-in theatre in neighbouring Nassau County.
But these easy pleasures will—to everyone’s regret—be suspended when Keiko’s bandages are removed. As soon as Dr. Carney unveils the affects of his surgery, Miss Kitigawa will begin a series of engagements, starting with a nationally televised appearance on
Ask a Doctor,
Dr. Carney’s own program. With the hydrogen bomb daily rumoured to be close to completion, Miss Kitigawa’s voice has never been more needed.
As for ending her summer of relaxed suburban pleasures in order to speak out against the hydrogen bomb, I recently asked Keiko how she felt about making such a sacrifice. We were lounging on the front steps of the Lawrences’ bungalow while the afternoon sun filtered through the linden trees. At that very moment a red-haired boy of seven sped by on his bicycle, streamers flying, bell ringing—a real summer spectacle. He waved to Keiko, just as though she were part of the neighbourhood gang, and she waved back, before a shadow touched her face. I knew she was remembering her own childhood, which, too, had been free from care, until that fateful moment seven years ago.
“I do not want any more children to suffer,” she said to me quietly. “Not American children, not Japanese children, not Russian children.”
These words, spoken with such gentle conviction, moved me indescribably.
I
RENE PAUSED IN HER TYPING
and read over what she’d written. Marvellous time. Backyard picnics. She had been composing her article to take her mind off what had happened last night in bed, her conversation with Raymond, but what she’d written wasn’t so bad: it had the lilting cadence her readership asked for, the feminine touch. The reality didn’t completely match her description, but that was often the unfortunate case with articles for “The Women’s Circle.”
In truth, Keiko’s success—the way she seemed to fit into that suburb; her interest in the newest fashions, which she lisped to
Daisy’s neighbour, that appalling, pregnant redhead; even the arrival, out of nowhere, of a beau—all this success, this talent at being precisely what everyone wanted her to be, struck Irene as perverse. But she couldn’t write that.
As for Riverside Meadows itself, there were at least a thousand neuroses skittering like mice through the streets of that suburb. More than one woman looked like she drank heavily; while the men, pressing their wan, middle-aged faces to the windows of the train, haggard from nights out on the town, might be dreaming of anything, death even, as an escape from their wives. That was Riverside Meadows: a scream of despair, which nobody could hear above the grind and shake of the train.
People were talking about such a thing: how the incessant rocking of the train could affect a man’s brain waves, his libido even. Meanwhile, the women were all quietly going mad behind their gingham curtains. And so last week, wearing a gorgeous black hat and matching waffle-weave skirt, cut on the bias, Irene had knocked on Dean’s office door and suggested that she write her next column on that phenomenon, from a woman’s perspective, of course.