Broken Jewel - [World War II 05]

by David L. Robbins

  Most of the men spread themselves on cots. A dozen queued in the doorway, to return to their assigned chores interrupted by the air raid. Firewood detail, cooking, tutoring, maintenance, sewing, administration; the men, women, and children in the camp handled hundreds of tasks, like in any small town.

  The silence in the wake of the plane deepened. The collective breath of the internees was held. Guards ran pell-mell toward the field.

  From the barracks beside Remy’s, a tall boy strode with hands in pockets. He wore his black hair over his ears. His long-legged gait, in sneakers and patched shorts, was swift enough to carry him to the packet before the Japanese could beat him to it.

  Once more, Mac lapped a hand over Remy’s shoulder. Mac pressed to hold him in place, though he needn’t have. Remy had no intention of going out there. He’d already had one brush with hotheadedness this morning. Besides, the boy had an independent streak. That’s why the Japanese had taken him out of Remy’s barracks and housed him next door, in No. 11 with the other troublemakers.

  The boy, who’d grown gangly in his nineteen years, closed in on the packet, outpacing the guards. He bent his long frame to pluck it from the grass, then unraveled it into two parts. The first was just something to weigh the package down; he cast this off. The second item the boy held aloft, to show the camp a green box of cigarettes.

  Willets snorted. “That’s gonna be bad.”

  A tall man, Janeway, crowded beside Remy in the doorway. He’d been a bridge builder on Bataan, with a reputation for graft that stuck with him into the camp. Remy would not bet with him, he was known to welch.

  “That’s gonna get him more than a binta.” Janeway patted Remy’s arm. “Sorry, old man.”

  Janeway was right. The Japanese were not going to let the boy off with a slap. Far from it. Remy winced, quelling the impulse to pop Janeway in the jaw. Not because Janeway deserved it for his statement, but Remy wanted to lash out at something and Janeway had deserved it other times.

  Close by, for Remy’s ears only, Mac clucked his tongue. Perhaps it was the old man’s brothel years that had taught him to speak softly.

  “What is the matter,” he whispered, “with the men in your family?”

  Out in the field, the Japanese neared the boy, who maintained a purposeful, theatrical unawareness of them closing around him.

  Remy answered, “I don’t know.”

  Again he wanted to raise his arm and flash the V sign, this time so his son could see it. The gesture would serve no purpose. The boy was not facing him, nor was anyone.

  From the commandant’s office in the center of the camp, the brass gong tolled the all clear.

  “But look at him,” Remy said to Mac above the ringing. “He’s goddam terrific, ain’t he?”

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Two

  T

  WO JAPANESE wrapped Hua in her bedsheet. Carmen stood aside and closed her own short haori robe across her bare belly. The soldiers hoisted Hua off the thin tatami mattress, to lug the corpse out of the small room down the two flights of stairs. Carmen in her black sneakers followed.

  Outside the building, the guards set down the body. They were replaced by two more who took up the ends of the blemished sheet. Hua had soiled herself as she died and was being carted to her grave with it gathered around her. Carmen kept at a distance, to be allowed to attend. If she drew attention to herself, she might be sent back inside.

  The grave had been dug thirty paces from the rear of the academic building. The new guards struggled with Hua for the short walk to the hole, sometimes skidding her swathed body through the dirt. They were not large men, the Japanese.

  One other guard waited beside the shallow grave. Corporal Kenji watched the approach of the body with hands folded, respectful and quiet, a contrast to the complaining pallbearers dragging the body as much as they carried it.

  The two soldiers set the body beside the hole. They put hands on hips and arched their sore backs. Kenji, lean and taller than any of the other Japanese, beckoned with a long finger for Carmen to come closer. She approached, keeping her robe shut, but remained on the opposite side of the grave from Kenji.

  Hua was not allowed to be buried in her bedsheet. The two soldiers gripped it by the corners and spilled her into the hole. She landed oddly on her side. She seemed caught in the middle of a seductive gesture or dance, both hands above her shoulders, wrists cocked. Like Carmen, Hua was naked beneath her yellow haori.

  One of the guards balled up the sheet. He tossed it across the grave to Carmen.

  “Sekken o shite.”

  Kenji interpreted. “He wants you to wash it.”

  The pair of soldiers stalked off. They clapped their hands to be rid of the job.

  Carmen rolled the sheet tighter to bundle away the odor. She laid the balled linen at her feet, nodded to Kenji.

  “How did she do it?” he asked in English.

  “Why?”

  “If I am to pray for her, I should know.”

  Last night, after the final visitors, Hua entered Carmen’s room with hands cupped as if bearing something fragile. She squatted like the peasant girl she was. Carmen’s small room had no chair, only a tatami, a table for a lamp, and a basin for the disinfectant water. Nothing covered the window, which faced south above the barbed wire.

  Hua opened her hands to show Carmen a dozen pills. She mimicked lapping them up.

  Hua said in English, “I kill.”

  Carmen corrected her. “I die.”

  Kenji’s gaze fell into the hole with Hua. “Where did she get the pills?”

  “From soldiers. Where else?”

  Carmen hardly knew the girl. Hua spoke only Chinese; the few words of English last night were the only ones that passed between them in the three months Hua had been assigned to the shuho at Los Baños. Before her arrival, Carmen had been here alone for six months.

  Hua quickly contracted gonorrhea. The doctor gave her a 606 shot. The medicine made her bleed too much. Hua was taken to the infirmary. The doctor scraped her uterus. She could not have babies afterward. The doctor told Carmen these things as a way of reminding her to make all the soldiers wear condoms.

  Hua had been short and round-faced. Her skin bore the yellow pallor of the Chinese. She was not popular with enough of the soldiers and did little to ease Carmen’s burden. As Hua grew more ill, she faded to pasty white. The soldiers preferred taller, thinner Carmen, her angular Spanish face, flesh the color of wet sand. Because Carmen was Filipina, she had the tinge of the exotic for the guards and the battle groups on their way to Manila.

  The shuho served twenty to forty soldiers every day. While Hua was in the hospital, Carmen serviced them all, as she did before Hua came to Los Baños. When the Chinese girl returned, the demand for Carmen lessened only among the soldiers passing through Los Baños, not among the frequenting guards of the camp.

  The Japanese would not wear the saku if they did not want to. If they were refused sex, they sometimes became violent. Carmen had been beaten, cut by the sword of an officer, and—with the war turning bad for Japan—offered suicide pacts by sad and mortified boys who clouted her when she refused to accompany them into the afterworld.

  In Japanese, Kenji prayed over Hua. Finishing, he glanced across the grave to Carmen.

  “Can you pray some more?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I’m enjoying the sunshine.”

  “We are finished.”

  From her robe, Carmen pulled a wooden tag. This belonged to Hua. It had hung on a peg next to Carmen’s tag, on a board on the third-floor landing. Across the top of the board was inked a banner reading , jugun ianfu, for “military comfort women.” This was not how the soldiers referred to the girls; they called Hua and Carmen pii—a vulgar Chinese word for vagina. The shuho was on the third floor of what had been the school for animal husbandry at Los Baños Agricultural College. The comfort station opened six months after the Japanese brought their internment camp here. Th
e animal husbandry building stood vacant alongside the crowded camp, the shuho the only activity inside.

  Hua’s tag been inscribed with , the kanji character for “flower,” the meaning of the girls name in Chinese. The soldiers visiting the shuho who wanted the Chinese girl saw the tag and asked for “Hana.” Carmen’s tag was inscribed with the character , for “song.” The soldiers called her “Songu.” Kenji did not. He let Carmen keep the token of her real name.

  Carmen dropped Hua’s tag into the grave. She pointed at a shovel stabbed into the clay mound beside the hole.

  “When will they cover her up?”

  Kenji did not answer. His attention had floated upward into the morning, south beyond the barbed wire. The American planes most often came from the south.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Carmen did not want to go to her room. The sun and breeze across her skin were precious.

  “May I stay out a little longer?”

  “Go inside.”

  She knelt for Hua’s bundled sheet. This brought her closer to the girl in the grave. Carmen mined herself for some sense of Hua’s release and tragedy. Instead, she muttered “Salamat,” in brief gratitude for the soldiers Hua had occupied away from Carmen. She appreciated, too, that Hua’s suicide meant her own tag on the board upstairs had been turned over for these few minutes to say Songu was unavailable, allowing Carmen to stand under the open sky.

  The sound of the plane swelled. Kenji followed to the door of the animal husbandry building before jogging off.

  She hurried up the steps with Hua’s sheet. At the top of the stairs, the old Filipina woman who with her husband ran the shuho for the Japanese barked at her, “Move, girl!” Carmen did not know the names of either of the collaborators. She’d been instructed to call them Mama and Papa.

  The old woman raised a hand as if to swat her. Carmen paid no mind. Grumbling, Mama turned over Songu’s tag on the board. Carmen went to Hua’s room in the south wing. She stuffed the reeking sheet beneath Hua’s table to wash the linen tonight with her own and the day’s used condoms. She crossed the foyer to her room and stood on her tatami to see the American plane from her window above the camp.

  The internees all moved indoors, as they must. Carmen looked for Kenji, so easy to spot, tall in his soldiers cap. She found him between barracks, pointing the way for the internees to get out of the open. The internees walked with little urgency despite the shouts to hurry, “Hayaku!” The exceptions were the two hundred nuns and priests who hustled into their twin barracks near the southern fence that the internees called Vatican City. In the camp, the Catholics had a reputation for following orders, according to Kenji, who talked to Carmen of his job, the internees, the war. He smuggled her extra rations. Often, she listened and ate during her allotted time with him instead of having sex.

  Thirty minutes with a comfort woman cost a regular Japanese soldier 1.50 yen. Kenji claimed his monthly pay was only 15 yen. Privates and corporals were permitted to visit before noon. Noncommissioned officers paid 2 yen, until 2 p.m. Junior officers paid 2.50 and senior officers 3 yen. Only senior officers were allowed to sleep with Carmen overnight. The old makipili couple collected the money and handed the soldiers’ chits. Papa knocked on the doorframe outside her curtain when time was called. Mama handed Carmen none of the cash, claiming it went to pay for Carmen’s food, clothing, and expensive medicines. Carmen should not ask for money, Mama had scolded. Japan fought for her liberation and for the whole Pacific. Carmen must give all and ask for nothing. Mama believed in this bargain. Carmen did not have such consolation. Money or no money, this was not liberation.

  From her perch, she watched the American plane bore in on the camp, skirting thickets and bamboo groves. The fighter came alone, with no plain intent. The guards looked frightened, and well they should be. Carmen knew the Americans, knew they could be crazy and act without design. These traits were unfamiliar to the Japanese.

  The fighter flew past the camp only meters above the barracks. The propellers wake peeled thatch from roofs. The camp shuddered and the engine drowned out everything. Carmen cheered from her window, aware that the old makipili woman might hear her.

  The American fighter zoomed kilometers past the camp before wheeling around. The twin-tailed plane was sleek, green as the jungle. American bombers and fighters had appeared above Los Baños for the first time last month. Rarely in the mornings was Carmen able to observe; she could hardly rise from her mattress with a soldier pressing her down. Never would Carmen smile for America when a soldier was between her legs, she did not care to be struck. But this morning, she could watch from her window and thanked little Hua once more for making it so.

  Again, the pilot lined up to fly past the camp. He came in low like his first pass. This time he machine-gunned the ravine in several bursts. The violence seemed an amusement for the flier. The Japanese remained stunned and behind cover. Carmen thumped the flat of her palms against the wall, adding her own pounding to what the fighter gave the ravine. The pilot shot past, then banked above the bay for another pass. Approaching this time, he slowed, opened his cockpit, and dropped something small inside the barbed wire. He saluted his countrymen and allies and flew away. Carmen watched him go for a long time, until sight and sound of the plane vanished.

  The camp remained rigid. No internees spilled from their barracks, no guards resumed their stations. The commandant’s gong did not ring. The small package in the grass seemed to send the camp out of kilter, as if one more American thing inside the wire, even so tiny, was one thing too much.

  The instant the boy appeared, the quiet ended. From fifty meters away, she knew it was him. His long amble into the field sent the same ripples through the camp as the fighter plane. He wore his dark hair long, almost longer than Carmen’s. From her window, she heard people scattering to other windows to see, then cautious calls between barracks, the ones blocked from a view of the field asking what was happening. She heard his name, not for the first time, but always the same. This was how Carmen had named him in her heart. That Tuck boy.

  He was the only American outside his barracks. The boy did not hurry across the field but walked with a grace and length that outdistanced the Japanese.

  Carmen’s chest tightened. She whispered, “Go back, boy.”

  He reached the packet first, bent for it. He unwrapped his prize and thrust it high for the camp to see. He held a small box, no larger than his hand, and faced Carmen in her high window.

  The guards closed in. With movements as calm as his strides had been, the boy lowered his arm, tapped the box once, and popped a cigarette to his mouth. He reached into his pocket for a lighter. He blew one cloud of smoke before the guards reached him and knocked him down.

  In the camp, the gong sounded. Internees poured from their barracks, making their way to the field to see for themselves what that Tuck boy had done, and what he would reap.

  Mama rapped knuckles on the doorframe. She entered, pushing aside the curtain. The old woman, creased and brown, carried a plate of rice balls and a steaming bowl. The soup held salted water with a strip of boiled fish.

  “Get away from that window. I’ll have it boarded up.”

  Carmen turned from the boy. He became lost in the field beneath a tangle of soldiers, in front of a growing semicircle of gawkers. Carmen imagined the cigarette still on his lips under the pile of Japanese.

  “And if I could,” she asked the old woman, “what would I do to you?”

  Mama set the food on the floor beside the tatami. Behind her, the curtain parted again. The entering Japanese held it aside for the old woman to leave.

  Carmen lay back while the soldier set his ticket on the table. She opened her scarlet robe and spread her knees, keeping her feet flat on the mattress. The guard fumbled with his pantaloon buttons and with slipping the saku over his erection. He knelt on the edge of the mattress. Carmen tilted her chin to the ceiling, gazing backward out the window. Unnamed and unwatched, the soldier lowere
d his breath to her neck. Carmen put a rice ball in her mouth.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Three

  T

  HE JAPANESE were going to see an American pick up whatever had been dropped into the camp. They weren’t going to make him rush or break into a run. He’d stroll as if they didn’t exist.

  Once he stood over the package, Tal measured the seconds before the guards arrived. He needed to hurry.

  He knelt on the grass. The pilot had wrapped a pair of goggles around a small olive box. Cigarettes. Tal uncoiled the goggles, cast them aside. Printed on the box was the brand, Lucky Strike, and the words “I shall return. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.”