It took much longer than he would have imagined for the Chinese men to die. Their sliced-up bodies poured prodigious amounts of blood on the ground, but even with their organs shredded, they went on twitching slightly for quite some time. The corporal used his own bayonet to cut the ropes that bound the men to the trees, and then he had the soldiers who had not participated in the killing help drag the fallen bodies to the hole and throw them in. These corpses also made a dull thud on impact, but the doctor couldn’t help feeling that the sound was different from that made by the earlier corpses—probably because they were not entirely dead yet.
Now only the young Chinese prisoner with the number 4 on his shirt was left. The three pale-faced soldiers tore broad leaves from plants at their feet and proceeded to wipe their bloody bayonets. Not only blood but strange-colored body fluids and chunks of flesh adhered to the blades. The men had to use many leaves to return the bayonets to their original bare-metal shine.
The veterinarian wondered why only the one man, number 4, had been left alive, but he was not going to ask questions. The lieutenant took out another cigarette and lit up. He then offered a smoke to the veterinarian, who accepted it in silence and, after putting it between his lips, struck his own match. His hand did not tremble, but it seemed to have lost all feeling, as if he were wearing thick gloves.
“These men were cadets in the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school,” said the lieutenant. “They refused to participate in the defense of Hsin-ching. They killed two of their Japanese instructors last night and tried to run away. We caught them during night patrol, killed four of them on the spot and captured the other four. Two more escaped in the dark.” The lieutenant rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand. “They were trying to make their getaway in baseball uniforms. I guess they figured they’d be arrested as deserters if they wore their military uniforms. Or maybe they were afraid of what communist troops would do to them if they were caught in their Manchukuo uniforms. Anyway, all they had in their barracks to wear besides their cadet outfits were uniforms of the officer candidate school baseball team. So they tore off the names and tried to get away wearing these. I don’t know if you know, but the school had a great team. They used to go to Taiwan and Korea for friendship games. That guy”—and here the lieutenant motioned toward the man tied to the tree—“was captain of the team and batted cleanup. We think he was the one who organized the getaway. He killed the two instructors with a bat. The instructors knew there was trouble in the barracks and weren’t going to distribute weapons to the cadets until it was an absolute emergency. But they forgot about the baseball bats. Both of them had their skulls cracked open. They probably died instantly. Two perfect home runs. This is the bat.”
The lieutenant had the corporal bring the bat to him. He passed the bat to the veterinarian. The doctor took it in both hands and held it up in front of his face the way a player does when stepping into the batter’s box. It was just an ordinary bat, not very well made, with a rough finish and an uneven grain. It was heavy, though, and well broken in. The handle was black with sweat. It didn’t look like a bat that had been used recently to kill two human beings. After getting a feel for its weight, the veterinarian handed it back to the lieutenant, who gave it a few easy swings, handling it like an expert.
“Do you play baseball?” the lieutenant asked the veterinarian.
“All the time when I was a kid.”
“Too grown up now?”
“No more baseball for me,” the veterinarian said, and he was on the verge of asking, “How about you, Lieutenant?” when he swallowed the words.
“I’ve been ordered to beat this guy to death with the same bat he used,” the lieutenant said in a dry voice as he tapped the ground with the tip of the bat. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Just between you and me, I think the order stinks. What the hell good is it going to do to kill these guys? We don’t have any planes left, we don’t have any warships, our best troops are dead. Some kind of special new bomb wiped out the whole city of Hiroshima in a split second. We’re either going to be swept out of Manchuria or we’ll all be killed, and China will belong to the Chinese again. We’ve already killed a lot of Chinese, and adding a few bodies to the count isn’t going to make any difference. But orders are orders. I’m a soldier, and I have to follow orders. We killed the tigers and leopards yesterday, and today we have to kill these guys. So take a good look, Doctor. This is another way for people to die. You’re a doctor, so you’re probably used to knives and blood and guts, but you’ve probably never seen anyone beaten to death with a baseball bat.”
The lieutenant ordered the corporal to bring player number 4, the cleanup batter, to the edge of the hole. Once again they tied his hands behind his back, then they blindfolded him and had him kneel down on the ground. He was a tall, strongly built young man with massive arms the size of most people’s thighs. The lieutenant called over one young soldier and handed him the bat. “Kill him with this,” he said. The young soldier stood at attention and saluted before taking the bat, but having taken it in his hands, he just went on standing there, as if stupefied. He seemed unable to grasp the concept of beating a Chinese man to death with a baseball bat.
“Have you ever played baseball?” the lieutenant asked the young soldier (the one who would eventually have his skull split open with a shovel by a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk).
“No, sir, never,” replied the soldier, in a loud voice. Both the village in Hokkaido where he was born and the village in Manchuria where he grew up had been so poor that no family in either place could have afforded the luxury of a baseball or a bat. He had spent his boyhood running around the fields, catching dragonflies and playing at sword fighting with sticks. He had never in his life played baseball or even seen a game. This was the first time he had ever held a bat.
The lieutenant showed him how to hold the bat and taught him the basics of the swing, demonstrating himself a few times. “See? It’s all in the hips,” he grunted through clenched teeth. “Starting from the backswing, you twist from the waist down. The tip of the bat follows through naturally. Understand? If you concentrate too much on swinging the bat, your arms do all the work and you lose power. Swing from the hips.”
The soldier didn’t seem fully to comprehend the lieutenant’s instructions, but he took off his heavy gear as ordered and practiced his swing for a while. Everyone was watching him. The lieutenant placed his hands over the soldier’s to help him adjust his grip. He was a good teacher. Before long, the soldier’s swing, though somewhat awkward, was swishing through the air. What the young soldier lacked in skill he made up for in muscle power, having spent his days working on the farm.
“That’s good enough,” said the lieutenant, using his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. “OK, now,’ try to do it in one good, clean swing. Don’t let him suffer.”
What he really wanted to say was, “I don’t want to do this any more than you do. Who the hell could have thought of anything so stupid? Killing a guy with a baseball bat …” But an officer could never say such a thing to an enlisted man.
The soldier stepped up behind the blindfolded Chinese man where he knelt on the ground. When the soldier raised the bat, the strong rays of the setting sun cast the bat’s long, thick shadow on the earth. This is so weird, thought the veterinarian. The lieutenant was right: I’ve never seen a man killed with a baseball bat. The young soldier held the bat aloft for a long time. The doctor saw its tip shaking.
The lieutenant nodded to the soldier. With a deep breath, the soldier took a backswing, then smashed the bat with all his strength into the back of the Chinese cadet’s head. He did it amazingly well. He swung his hips exactly as the lieutenant had taught him to, the brand of the bat made a direct hit behind the man’s ear, and the bat followed through perfectly. There was a dull crushing sound as the skull shattered. The man himself made no sound. His body hung in the air for a moment in a strange pose, then flopped forward. He lay with his cheek o
n the ground, blood flowing from one ear. He did not move. The lieutenant looked at his watch. Still gripping the bat, the young soldier stared off into space, his mouth agape.
The lieutenant was a person who did things with great care. He waited for a full minute. When he was certain that the young Chinese man was not moving at all, he said to the veterinarian, “Could you do me a favor and check to see that he’s really dead?”
The veterinarian nodded, walked over to where the young Chinese lay, knelt down, and removed his blindfold. The man’s eyes were open wide, the pupils turned upward, and bright-red blood was flowing from his ear. His half-opened mouth revealed the tongue lying tangled inside. The impact had left his neck twisted at a strange angle. The man’s nostrils had expelled thick gobs of blood, making black stains on the dry ground. One particularly alert—and large—fly had already burrowed its way into a nostril to lay eggs. Just to make sure, the veterinarian took the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse. There was no pulse—certainly not where there was supposed to be one. The young soldier had ended this burly man’s life with a single swing of a bat—indeed, his first-ever swing of a bat. The veterinarian glanced toward the lieutenant and nodded to signal that the man was, without a doubt, dead. Having completed his assigned task, he was beginning slowly to rise to his full height, when it seemed to him that the sun shining on his back suddenly increased in intensity.
At that very moment, the young Chinese batter in uniform number 4 rose up into a sitting position, as if he had just come fully awake. Without the slightest uncertainty or hesitation—or so it seemed to those watching—he grabbed the doctor’s wrist. It all happened in a split second. The veterinarian could not understand: this man was dead, he was sure of it. But now, thanks to one last drop of life that seemed to well up from nowhere, the man was gripping the doctor’s wrist with the strength of a steel vise. Eyelids stretched open to the limit, pupils still glaring upward, the man fell forward into the hole, dragging the doctor in after him. The doctor fell in on top of him and heard one of the man’s ribs crack as his weight came down. Still the Chinese ballplayer continued to grip his wrist. The soldiers saw all this happening, but they were too stunned to do anything more than stand and watch. The lieutenant recovered first and leaped into the hole. He drew his pistol from his holster, set the muzzle against the Chinese man’s head, and pulled the trigger twice. Two sharp, overlapping cracks rang out, and a large black hole opened in the man’s temple. Now his life was completely gone, but still he refused to release the doctor’s wrist. The lieutenant knelt down and, pistol in one hand, began the painstaking process of prying open the corpse’s fingers one at a time. The veterinarian lay there in the hole, surrounded by eight silent Chinese corpses in baseball uniforms. Down in the hole, the screeching of cicadas sounded very different from the way it sounded aboveground.
Once the veterinarian had been freed from the dead man’s grasp, the soldiers pulled him and the lieutenant out of the grave. The veterinarian squatted down on the grass and took several deep breaths. Then he looked at his wrist. The man’s fingers had left five bright-red marks. On this hot August afternoon, the veterinarian felt chilled to the core of his body. I’ll never get rid of this coldness, he thought. That man was truly, seriously, trying to take me with him wherever he was going.
The lieutenant reset the pistol’s safety and carefully slipped the gun into its holster. This was the first time he had ever fired a gun at a human being. But he tried not to think about it. The war would continue for a little while at least, and people would continue to die. He could leave the deep thinking for later. He wiped his sweaty right palm on his pants, then ordered the soldiers who had not participated in the execution to fill in the hole. A huge swarm of flies had already taken custody of the pile of corpses.
The young soldier went on standing where he was, stupefied, gripping the bat. He couldn’t seem to make his hands let go. The lieutenant and the corporal left him alone. He had seemed to be watching the whole bizarre series of events—the “dead” Chinese suddenly grabbing the veterinarian by the wrist, their falling into the grave, the lieutenant’s leaping in and finishing him off, and now the other soldiers’ filling in the hole. But in fact, he had not been watching any of it. He had been listening to the wind-up bird. As it had been the previous afternoon, the bird was in a tree somewhere, making that creeeak, creeeak sound as if winding a spring. The soldier looked up, trying to pinpoint the direction of the cries, but he could see no sign of the bird. He felt a slight sense of nausea at the back of his throat, though nothing as violent as yesterday’s.
As he listened to the winding of the spring, the young soldier saw one fragmentary image after another rise up before him and fade away. After they were disarmed by the Soviets, the young paymaster lieutenant would be handed over to the Chinese and hanged for his responsibility in these executions. The corporal would die of the plague in a Siberian concentration camp: he would be thrown into a quarantine shed and left there until dead, though in fact he had merely collapsed from malnutrition and had not contracted the plague—not, at least, until he was thrown into the shed. The veterinarian with the mark on his face would die in an accident a year later. A civilian, he would be taken by the Soviets for cooperating with the military and sent to another Siberian camp to do hard labor. He would be working in a deep shaft of a Siberian coal mine when a flood would drown him, along with many soldiers. And I …, thought the young soldier with the bat in his hands, but he could not see his own future. He could not even see the events that were transpiring before his very eyes. He now closed his eyes and listened to the call of the wind-up bird.
Then, all at once, he thought of the ocean—the ocean he had seen from the deck of the ship that brought him from Japan to Manchuria. He had never seen the ocean before, nor had he seen it since. That had happened eight years ago. He could still remember the smell of the salt air. The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort. Would he ever see it again? He loosened his grip and let the bat fall to the ground. It made a dry sound as it struck the earth. After the bat left his hands, he felt a slight increase in his nausea.
The wind-up bird went on crying, but no one else could hear its call.
•
Here ended “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.”
Cinnamon’s Missing Links
•
Here ended “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8.”
•
I exited the document to the original menu and clicked on “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9.” I wanted to read the continuation of the story. But instead of a new document, I saw this message:
Access denied to “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #9” based on Code R24.
Choose another document.
I chose #10, but with the same results.
Access denied to “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #10” based on Code R24.
Choose another document.
The same thing happened with #11—and with all the other documents, including #8. I had no idea what this “Code R24” was, but it was obviously blocking access to everything now. At the moment I had opened “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8,” I probably could have had access to any one of them, but #8 having been opened and closed, the doors were locked to all of them now. Maybe this program did not permit access to more than one document at a time.
I sat in front of the computer, wondering what to do next. But there was nothing I could do next. This was a precisely articulated world, which had been conceived in Cinnamon’s mind and which functioned according to his principles. I did not know the rules of the game. I gave up trying and shut down the computer.
•
Without a doubt, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle #8” was a story told by Cinnamon. He had put sixteen stories into
the computer under the title “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” and it just so happened that I had chosen and read #8. Judging from the length of the one story, sixteen such stories would have made a fairly thick book if set in type.
What could “#8” signify? The word “chronicle” in the title probably meant that the stories were related in chronological order, #8 following #7, #9 following #8, and so on. That was a reasonable assumption, if not necessarily true. They could just as well have been arranged in a different order. They might even run backward, from the present to the past. A bolder hypothesis might make them sixteen different versions of the same story told in parallel. In any case, the one I had chosen was a sequel to the story that Cinnamon’s mother, Nutmeg, had told me about soldiers killing animals in the Hsin-ching zoo in August 1945. It was set in the same zoo on the following day, and again the central character was Nutmeg’s father, Cinnamon’s grandfather, the nameless veterinarian.
I had no way of telling how much of the story was true. Was every bit of it Cinnamon’s creation, or were parts of it based on actual events? Nutmeg had told me that “absolutely nothing” was known about what happened to her father after she saw him last. Which meant that the story could not be entirely true. Still, it was conceivable that some of the details were based on historical fact. It was possible that during such a time of chaos, a number of cadets from the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school were executed and buried in a hole in the Hsin-ching zoo and that the Japanese officer in charge of the operation had been executed after the war. Incidents of desertion and rebellion by Manchukuo Army troops were by no means rare at the time, and although it was rather strange to have the murdered Chinese cadets dressed in baseball uniforms, this could have happened as well. Knowing such facts, Cinnamon might have combined them with the image he had of his grandfather and made up his own story.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Page 63
