The jungshindae were shadowy, Yumi knew this. The recruiters searched for virgins, to be gifts to the emperor. Why should a virgin work better in a factory? Yumi had not even started her menstrual bleeding. To avoid the recruiters, she wore her hair in the style of a married woman, gathered at the back and secured with a long pinyo, hairpin. Without telling her parents, she accepted a marriage proposal from a very old man, figuring he would be her last resort.
One evening in the autumn, at the beginning of the school term, her father called her into the rice field. He put her in the ox cart and drove past the village to an inn with the smells of wood smoke and bitter kimchi swirling in the days ending light. The inn was lit by electricity. Soldiers came and went. Yumi’s father left her behind, saying he would return in two hours. She was to work for the innkeeper and bring home her pay.
The innkeeper put her in a tub of steaming water. The man’s wife scrubbed Yumi, then gave her cotton underwear and a silk kimono. Yumi was left barefoot. The innkeeper ordered her into a room upstairs.
Inside sat a Japanese officer, dining alone on sake and dried squid. He patted the floor cushion beside him for Yumi to join him at the table.
Come, he said. Well enjoy ourselves.
Yumi told him she did not know him, so how could she enjoy herself?
I am a Japanese soldier, and I have no one to talk with.
Then you should talk with Japanese people. I am Korean.
The man stood in front of Yumi.
Sit with me. It is an order.
I am not in the army.
He laid his hands on her shoulders.
But you are, he said.
The soldier was a fighter, he knew how to sweep Yumi’s legs from beneath her in one move. He landed on top. He brought his face close as if to kiss. Yumi had never been kissed on the lips by a boy or a man, but she understood what was happening.
She did not waste effort screaming, the innkeeper and his wife would not help. She turned her face from his mouth. She kicked and flailed at him. He struck her across the face. Yumi had been hit her whole life by her father, so this did not slow her. She slapped the soldier flush across his own cheek. He took a fist to her.
Yumi could not stop him from spreading the kimono and dragging off her underpants. He climbed on top and stuck his thing—this was the English word Kenji used, though Carmen thought it needlessly delicate—into her. Yumi felt torn in half. The pain roused her enough to bite the officer’s shoulder. He did nothing but pound himself into her harder.
The Japanese would not stop. Yumi decided that fighting him would only bring more pain. She chose stillness, flopping her arms and legs flat to the floor like a doll. The Japanese humped, grunting to his finish. Finally he pulled out and Yumi’s body was her own again. It felt foreign to her, so different and ugly from what it had been only minutes before. He stood. Blood slicked his groin and smeared her thighs. He buckled his uniform in place. He drew back his boot as though to kick her, then left the room.
The innkeeper’s wife brought a cup of tea.
Here you are, little one.
I want my father.
He will be back tomorrow. You stay here tonight.
Did the soldier pay you?
Yes. For the meal.
In the morning, Yumi was given back her clothes and taken to the village train station. She stood in a line with two dozen girls, all taller than her, most a few years older. The line moved toward the train. Black tar paper covered the windows. Yumi watched for her father to arrive to take her out of the line. A soldier at the head of the queue eyed the girls before choosing which darkened car they would climb into.
Manchukuo, he’d say to one. This girl went left and the soldier made a notation on his clipboard. Philippines, he’d say next, and that girl turned right.
Yumi reached the head of the line, heart leaping to her throat. My father, she said to the soldier with the clipboard.
Philippines, he said.
Surrounded by soldiers on the platform, Yumi could not run or fight. The old man she’d engaged herself to could not help, he didn’t know she was here. In her panic she could not even recall his name. Yumi stepped aboard the train. She peeled back an edge of the black paper that sealed the window.
Her father appeared on the platform. He spoke to a soldier who handed him a rice-paper scroll, then he walked away. Yumi cursed her father like she had her body the night before; neither belonged to her now.
Traveling into the night, the train carried Yumi and ten girls west to the sea. Every one of them was from a poor village. They’d all been virgins, told they would be sent to Japan for factory work to repay a large loan made to their families. Each had been raped, some more than once, yesterday. After trading stories, they slept in one another’s arms as if dissolved together by tears. In the morning, they boarded a cargo ship bound for Manila.
“Then,” Carmen said to conclude Yumi’s tale for her, “you came to Los Baños.”
Yumi listened to Kenji’s translation. She answered for herself in English.
“No.”
Kenji’s expression changed to surprise as he translated Carmen’s inquiry. Where have you been? He shook his head with the girl’s answer. “At the Round Pearl.”
This was the biggest shuho in Manila. Carmen’s father had spoken of it, of brisk morning coffee sales from his cart. The Round Pearl held more than a hundred girls, from every nation Japan had conquered plus trained prostitutes from Japan’s Amakusa Islands.
How long was Yumi there?
A year. She celebrated her fourteenth birthday at the Round Pearl.
Carmen asked, “Why do you have bruises on your ankles?”
Yumi had tried to escape from the truck that brought her to Los Baños four days ago. She jumped from the back. Soldiers ran her down and hobbled her with ropes. But she was glad to be in Los Baños now. She had an otosan, a father figure, in Toshiwara. He promised he would look after Yumi. And a sister in Carmen.
The road to Los Baños entered a stretch of forest. The girls, Kenji, and the thousand soldiers walked in the shade. Yumi pulled down the tunic that had covered her while she told her tale. Instead of returning the shirt to Kenji, she spread it in a cape over Carmen’s shoulders, tapping Carmen on her bare sternum to show that it was her turn to speak. Only the one listening would walk naked for the soldiers.
Carmen spoke. Kenji reversed his translation, turning her English words into Japanese for Yumi.
Carmen had not been tricked like Yumi by the Japanese. No money changed hands. She was Filipina, a citizen of a battleground country. Because the Japanese had fought for this land, they felt no need for petty deceptions. They simply kidnapped the young girls here. Carmen was seized from a street corner in Manila standing with her father at his carinderia. Her father resisted the soldiers and was beaten. Carmen begged them to take her and leave the old man alone. They did. The one who raped her that night at the police station was a member of the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police. He told Carmen that if she tried to escape, the Kempeitai would not look for her, they would come for her family, who were very easy to find.
Listening, Yumi’s features fell in more sadness than when she’d told her own tale. Carmen’s father had fought and suffered blows to protect his daughter. Yumi’s father had sold his child away.
Carmen swept the tunic off her shoulders. She handed it to Kenji. Both girls walked naked again. Carmen took Yumi by the hand.
In the town of Calauan, the soldiers fell out for rest and water. Kenji handed the girls their rolled-up clothes. He walked off to find the commanding officer of the troops. Carmen and Yumi dressed.
The sun rode high in a clear noon sky. The little town had been decorated for Christmas. Evergreen wreaths hung on many doors, candles burned in windows. A life-size crèche had been built in the center of town. Soldiers went to it and threw Mary and Jesus in his crib from the shade of the stable. Soldiers took their places on the cool straw.
Kenji returned. “It’s enough,” he said. “We can go. We’ll flag down a truck on the road.”
The three walked toward the edge of town. Tired soldiers called rude farewells. Carmen told Kenji she would ask at a hut for some food and water.
“No.”
“Why, Kenji-sama?”
“You’re not allowed to have contact with locals. You know this.”
“What I know is that Yumi and I are thirsty and you have no water to give us.”
Carmen chose a house. She left Kenji and Yumi to knock on the door beside humble sprigs of holiday pine. An old woman answered. She cocked an eye past Carmen to Kenji standing in the road with the Korean girl.
“Paano ako makakatulong sayo” the woman asked warily. How can I help you?
Carmen answered in Tagalog. “May we have something to eat? And some water. We have been walking for four hours.”
“Are you whores?”
“No. We are captives at the Los Baños camp.”
The old woman crossed herself. “I’ve heard of this.” She turned to shout into the hut. “Benito!”
A scrawny teen boy poked out his head. The woman waved a hand at him, to make him hurry. “Magsalok ka ng tubig at longganisa” Fetch water and sausages.
Carmen said, “Thank you.”
“Nothing. At the camp, you give the soldiers sex?”
“We don’t give, old woman. They take.”
“Forgive me.”
In moments, Benito hustled around the corner with a jug of water and three brown links on wax paper. The smell of pork set Carmen’s mouth watering; the rarity of the gift ignited a regret for her sharp tone with the woman.
“You are kind,” Carmen said.
The old Filipina handed over the jug and sausages. “What is your name?”
“Carmen.”
“Carmen, do you talk with the soldiers?”
“No.”
The woman smiled. Behind her, little Benito grinned, too.
Before the old woman shut the door, she said, “Ulitin mo”
Start.
~ * ~
Chapter Eight
R
EMY SHEATHED his bolo. He squatted on the mossy earth to pour his canteen over his head. Two others quit work when he did and sat with him in the shade on the soft ferns. The guard Ito turned his attention to the forty-five men in the firewood detail who were not taking a break.
Keppinger, on one side of Remy, panted heavily. He’d run a dairy business on Bataan before the war.
“Son of a bitch,” he lamented. “I can’t draw a full breath.”
The other fellow, the journalist Owen, agreed, shaking his head, “I’ll tell you. Next they’ll be sending a hundred of us out here. I’m weaker n a kitten.”
The talk referred to a decree two months ago by the Internee Committee doubling the number of workers on all heavy details, like logging. The poor nutrition and failing health of the camp were responsible. Because the men often sacrificed food for their wives and children, they suffered more. Last week the doctors issued a report declaring that every internee of Los Baños had intestinal worms. The men of the camp could not work like men, another blow to their pride and willpower. As Remy saw it, the struggle was not just to stay alive but to stave off becoming submissive, as the Japanese wanted to make them.
Remy took a few swallows, then capped his canteen. Ito limped across the jungle floor, which was littered with brush and branches shaved from the logs. The cart groaned, almost full. In the traces, Toshiwara’s bull complained with every switch on the rump to drag the sled onward.
Remy watched Ito. The guard was one of the many Japanese in Los Baños to have seen combat, a veteran of the Chinese campaign and Burma. He’d been known to show off his scars from bullets lodged in his hip and shoulder, or the one that had creased his chin. On all sides of Ito, internees sawed at trees, split them into cordwood, tossed the logs into the cart. The guard took down his cap to run a sleeve across his brow.
Remy rose from his haunches and backed away. Owen hissed, “What’re you doing?”
Remy raised a finger to hush him. Keppinger waved Remy back to the ground, whispering, “You’re gonna get us all binta-ed. And you’re gonna get shot. Damn it, sit down.”
Ignoring them, Remy slipped away from the detail. His gambler’s instinct told him this was a play he could make. Ito was a proud soldier, pawned off to Los Baños as broken goods with his limp. He might turn a blind eye to disobedience so long as the infraction was not done in his face. Still, Remy could only risk being gone for a minute. Keppinger and Owen slid closer together, to close the gap where Remy had been.
Staying low, he ducked into the thick brush. Pulling out his bolo, Remy hacked through the overgrowth to a spot he’d kept his eye on all morning, waiting to get near enough to sneak off. The forests around the campus brimmed with fruits and berries; before the war, the university had been one of the Philippines’ experimental agricultural stations. In the first two years of the camp, the Japanese let the internees feed themselves from the coconuts, mangoes, cassavas, and bananas, the bounty growing wild within easy reach of the camp. This stopped when Nagata arrived.
Remy folded to his knees, finding his object. He filled his pockets with tiny wild tomatoes, red and wasted out here in the woods. He told himself to quit picking once his pockets began to bulge, but couldn’t stop. He crammed many into his mouth.
When he’d stashed as many tomatoes as possible in his pants and tunic, even filling his fedora before screwing it back on his head, he spun behind him for the other prize he’d spotted. With the bolo, he dug beneath several green stalks topped with yellow flowers. He ripped them out of the earth, then cut away the gingerroots. Remy ate several more tomatoes to make room for them.
Crouching, he scampered back to the logging site. He crept up behind Owen and Keppinger. The two slid aside to let him sit between them again.
“I miss anything?”
Keppinger laughed. “Just me shitting myself. I swear, Remy, you got ice in your veins.”
Owen nodded. “I will not play cards with you. Ever.”
“Don’t know about ice,” Remy said, “but I do have these.”
He dug out a handful of the tiny tomatoes. Ito stayed busy watching the last logs fill the cart.
Remy let them stuff their mouths. In the sun, Ito turned just as Owen gulped the last tomato.
The guard gazed at the men, tapping a palm against the rifle stock hanging at his side. “Go now!” the Japanese shouted to the detail. The bull seemed to understand and bellowed its concurrence.
The men shouldered their axes and saws, many drank the last of their canteens in the line forming around the cart. Ito took his station, limping at the front.
The path down the mountain to the camp took thirty minutes. Remy kept near the back of the line, to avoid Ito’s scrutiny. Others near him raised eyebrows at his stretching pockets. Remy considered handing out more tomatoes, even popping a few into his mouth to ease the lumps, but he knew the power of starvation. If the men saw him eating one tomato, if he gave one more away, he’d have to give it all. He couldn’t do that.
The detail eased down the last of the slope, emerging from the jungle. The west gate of the camp lay two hundred yards ahead. Ito stood to the side of the path, letting the men and the ox cart shamble past him. Remy’s gut wrenched. What was Ito doing? Remy had no time to figure out the guard’s intent. He moved a step off the path toward the last of the trees, as if to take a leak. He would dump all the tomatoes out of his pants and shirt.
“You!” Ito called, pointing. “Tuck-san!”
Remy froze beside the path. The remaining men slid past, clucking their tongues. Young Donnelly the Aussie patted him on the shoulder. “The brigs not so bad, mate.”
The internees at the head of the line approached the gate. The bull bellowed, knowing its day’s work was near an end. Remy shuffled toward Ito, the two of them alone on the path.
He stopped in
front of the soldier. Their eyes met. Remy bowed.
Ito motioned for Remy to straighten.
He poked one of Remy’s bulging pockets. Then, with a disapproving look, he tapped a finger to his own temple.
“Atamaga warui da ne”
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 11
