The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  “China is a province of Japan,” he went on, echoing the posters I had seen back home. “Your property belongs to us now, and you will be taken to a camp.”

  He didn’t say where because he didn’t care if we understood. Leuk, Yee-Lin, Wei-Ming, and I stood together. Their bags were on the ground behind us. Mine was still somewhere in the woods, and I was thinking about how I could retrieve it. I couldn’t see Kei or Ming anywhere. Soldiers strolled around us with their rifles cocked, and I loosened my shirt from my pants to conceal my belt buckle. Leuk did the same.

  I believed that retreating to the village, rather than trying to run, saved us from getting shot. By the time we were caught in the woods and driven back into the village, only minutes after the Japanese reached Wah Ying, the resistance was over. I doubt it ever really started. Every man seen carrying a gun or even a rake had been quickly shot, and their bodies lay like stepping stones in the streets.

  They put us under guard with about twenty women and children, ordering us to gather by a well at the end of the street. This was the same street that led to Mr. Cheung’s house, and I craned my neck to see what was happening there. Four Japanese soldiers broke open the gate and entered through the front doors; it was a desirable house, and the commander would want it for himself for the night. I heard the soldiers yelling from within, and then Mr. Cheung was dragged by his collar from the house onto the gravel walk. Blood flowed down his chin, and when a young soldier aimed a pistol at the back of his skull and fired, more erupted from his mouth. A moment later there came more shouting from an upstairs window and a large set of shutters opened. Two soldiers appeared in the window. They seemed to be struggling with ornate curtains that fluttered in the wind, made of a heavy cloth brocaded in gold, jade green, and sky blue. Then a pale hand thrust out from the fabric, and I realized it was Mrs. Cheung in her robes. The shutters flew back in the wind, and a soldier pushed them out again and held them open. The old woman’s hand waved madly and clawed the air as though addressing us. Now Mrs. Cheung, her long grey hair unbound and intertwining with her robes against the wind, rose into the frame as the soldiers threw her from the window. Her mouth gaped, a dark hole inside the whirl of silk and hair. She fell headfirst onto the paving stones below.

  The front door opened again. Ling and the gardener ran out, a soldier aiming his rifle at their heads. Ling turned to look at Mrs. Cheung’s body on the ground, but she showed no emotion. The soldier marched them through the gates to join another group of villagers clustered by a fountain, mostly young people. The fountain was in the middle of a small square, visible from the main bedroom window in Mr. Cheung’s house. It wasn’t working now, and Ling and the others stood by its empty basin while the sun beat down on them.

  We walked in a long convoy between army trucks spewing exhaust into the woods. It was very hot on the road and I was thirsty. Wei-Ming complained that she was thirsty, too; fortunately, Leuk had a water bottle and gave her some. She cried the first couple of hours and asked repeatedly where we were going. Yee-Lin kept telling her we didn’t know. Of course, not knowing our destination wasn’t why Wei-Ming cried.

  I thought about Ling and wondered what had happened to her after the fountain. I hoped she was still alive, because I wanted to see her again. I felt bad for her. Her story was far sadder than my own, and thinking about it distracted me a little from dwelling on my own circumstances.

  The Japanese divided us up into groups of twenty, and each group was separated by a truck full of soldiers. How many of us there were in total I didn’t know, because so many had been killed or left behind in Wah Ying to succumb to their injuries. Some of the soldiers marched alongside us, the rest rode in the trucks. After the first couple of hours they began to jeer and taunt us, especially when captives started failing in the heat. A few people had animals with them, ponies and water buffalo, and had managed to strap their belongings to the animals’ backs. The Japanese must have considered our possessions worthless if they let us keep them.

  We rested regularly, but the marching between rests felt long in the heat, and not knowing where we were being taken made it much harder. We marched until just after sunset. Then the Japanese halted and said we would sleep on the road for the night. There was a stream by the road where everyone ran to get water. I knelt and drank. Near me, dozens of Chinese stooped over the stream, lapping like animals or scooping it with their hands or into whatever vessel they had managed to bring with them. I looked around for Ling. We tried to settle as best we could on the roadside. Wei-Ming had fallen asleep long ago as we carried her, and the three of us slept around her.

  The next morning, the Japanese reorganized us into different groups, and the four of us ended up marching with a family of five who had a water buffalo. In the morning shuffle I looked around but didn’t see Kei and Ming, and there was still no sight of Ling.

  The family we walked with had three sons, one of whom was my age. The other two were in their late teens, and I feared their stupidity. The biggest one muttered repeatedly about fighting back, saying he would stick it to the Japs at night or grab their guns. His mother kept whispering harshly at him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Finally, during one of our rests, his father took him off into the bushes and beat him with a stick. Then he stopped bragging.

  The Japanese were watching and called to the father as they returned to the convoy. These idiots had drawn attention to us. I placed my hand over my belt buckle beneath my shirt. It was hot and I feared that the mercury would melt away in the humidity and expose the gold. I looked down very carefully through the top of my shirt and saw it was still tarnished. Leuk watched me and whispered that his was safe.

  The Japanese seemed amused and annoyed by the father loudly beating his son and were eager to exploit the rift. The family had strapped baskets with their belongings over the buffalo’s back. The soldiers rifled through the baskets as they walked alongside and removed a few things for themselves, tossing the rest aside. The soldiers then brought out some ropes from the truck, and loaded the animal with an unwieldy mountain of their own packs, which they tied across its sides and back.

  For the rest of the day, the family walked beside the animal, and the parents took turns leading it by the rope around its neck. As the animal struggled under the heavy and imbalanced load, so that its legs trembled at times, they slowly distanced themselves from the creature they had probably owned since its birth. The father held the rope indifferently in one hand, while the boys and their mother walked ahead with their few remaining goods. When the animal began to slow, the Japanese gave the father a bamboo switch to strike its flanks.

  By the third day of the march, the buffalo was stumbling along the track and its breathing was loud. Unwatched by the Japanese, the father let the switch drag on the ground beside him, and he pulled harder on the rope without looking back at the buffalo. Its flanks and cheeks gleamed with sweat, and long webs of thickened spittle descended from its lips.

  We were walking a few yards behind the buffalo later that day when I noticed the stench. The buffalo’s bulk rocked ahead of us, and I told Leuk and Yee-Lin to take Wei-Ming farther ahead so they wouldn’t be near it.

  After they moved up, I approached the animal with my sleeve over my nose. The Japanese packs leaned heavily to one side and forward, pressing against the animal’s right shoulder. The guide rope dragged along the ground and the farmer walked idly beside it. A cloud of flies hung over the animal.

  Under the weight of the packs, the rope tied by the Japanese had slowly sawn through the thin hide over the buffalo’s spine. Right before me a piece of bone, the tip of the animal’s sacrum, rose through the abraded flesh. The spinal bone was the colour of dull grey marble, and the hide around it was receding farther, like the gums of a diseased mouth. A small bird alighted on the buffalo’s back and pecked diligently at the maggots emerging from the wound.

  I picked up my pace to get ahead of it. The farmer saw me with my nose covered, and this seemed to upset him more t
han his animal’s misery.

  Later that night, I lay on the grass unable to sleep. I touched my cheeks and chest to feel how prominent the bones were becoming. In the dark and not wanting to be noticed, I carefully assessed the integrity of my skin for any flaws or openings, especially the spots with little muscle or fat: my elbows, clavicle, skull, and hips. These and not my mouth and eyes were the real doorways to my body, where the injurious world would strike and enter.

  In old age, grief is the only thing that seems to slow time down. For two years after Alice died, I was nearly always at home. Travel meant the grocery store, the pharmacy, the gas station, and coffee shops I knew our friends would never visit. Evelyn invited me to spend time with her, and I always declined. In the first year my excuse was the pile of legal affairs after Alice’s death, as if being a homemaker involved some immense regulatory burden. In the second year I claimed to be enjoying the discovery of a new routine. Whenever my daughter called, I always commented on how busy she seemed to be.

  I immersed myself in false beginnings. For the first time in my life I discovered a taste for cold breakfast cereal and bought four boxes of it. I examined the nutritional labels, mouthing out riboflavin and beta-glucan over the kitchen table as though pondering a diseased organ. I read about oat bran, psyllium fibre, and ground flaxseed. Standing in the cereal aisle of the twenty-four-hour grocery store, I huffed disdainfully at the health claims on every box. I did so aloud, because I only went there late at night and there was never anyone to hear me.

  In a small notebook that Alice had used for shopping lists, I began a daily record of the exact times of sunrise and sunset, checking these against the predicted times in the Tribune. I circled the errors in red. Round and round. Round in anger, round in disarray, in a muddy groove without direction. Obviously I just wanted to be dead. But what is the point of admitting that? It is easier at times to be a pallid vessel of events and memories, rather than the bearer of a life. And in grief, I felt I must now bear the weight of two lives if hers was not to disappear completely, but never felt competent to do it.

  The park near our house had a duck pond I used to take Evelyn and Chris to when they were little. I got back into walking there every day, to the point where people on the street knew when I’d pass and would come out to wave or chat with me. I’d sit on a bench by the willows, throwing stale bread to the ducks. When I finally admitted that I hated cereal, I began to throw that too. I had a lot of it, and the ducks were tolerable company.

  One fall evening, I was on the bench and a group of boys, mostly about eight years old, were playing on a hill nearby. A disagreement broke out, and one of them, after exchanging insults with another, ran off and stood by the pond. I heard him crying while the other boys resumed playing. After a moment I called him over.

  What’s wrong? I asked him. He didn’t reply, and I asked him again. Then he told me his friends wouldn’t play with him.

  That’s because you’re all the way over here, I said. Just get back in there, it’ll be fine. He shook his head and stayed by the pond.

  I held up a box of Raisin Bran and offered him some to give to the ducks. He took a fistful, digging his hand all the way in so that his jacket sleeve bunched up his arm. He stayed with me by the bench and faced the pond.

  He extended his arm, and with the sleeve pushed up I saw it was streaked in mud from playing on the damp ground. He brushed it clean with his free hand. He dropped a flake of cereal into the water. At once two ducks swam over, and the boy crouched down. He opened his hand and the ducks drew nearer, so close he could almost have touched their beaks. Piece by piece he dropped the cereal into the pond. When he was done, he gave me a funny look.

  Yes, it’s boring, isn’t it, hanging out with an old man, I said. Go back and see your friends.

  He dropped the last of the cereal in and ran back, and it was as though the fight had never happened. How easy that was. I sat and watched them for a while, then sprinkled a little more cereal over the edge of the pond and walked home.

  There’s another boy I always wish I could console, although I’ve failed to. Strange to feel so powerless, like Mrs. Yee at our old dinner table. It’s the boy I was then. He shouldn’t exist anymore. He should have faded away with my teens, as my teenaged self should have faded into adulthood, leaving me unburdened, with just my eighty-six-year-old self to worry over.

  But the boy I was still feels real and separate. He’s there still, always near me but just out of reach. He waits, wanting to be taken home. And I have to sit and watch him, knowing there’s nothing I can do.

  Sometime in the countryside during those years came the moment when I was divided, twinned, and separated by blast waves or the wind from burning fields, or by the sound of boots on dark roads.

  TWENTY-ONE

  We arrived in a town called Tung Koo Chow. It was much larger and older than Tai Fo. As we marched through it, we passed two large temples, a school, and, sitting on large grounds and built in a European style, a Methodist hospital. The words over the gate reminded me of my school: St. Paul’s Hospital, in iron letters inside the arch. Far back from its entrance, the stately white building with its rows of windows gleamed coolly in the sunlight. A small ambulance was parked outside, and I caught a brief glimpse of a nursing sister in a white-and-blue uniform.

  People who asked questions were hit with a rifle butt or ordered to be silent, but we did learn from some of the prisoners that the Japanese had taken the town in the last month. In some places it appeared untouched, in others we marched by damaged buildings and signs of shelling. We shuffled through the town, watched here and there by lean, half-hidden faces in windows or behind crumbling walls.

  We stopped at the far end of the town. There, in a large field, sat six simple, long bamboo buildings. A wooden guard tower stood at one end, and some soldiers were building a heavy fence of wooden posts and barbed wire around the field. The last truck in the convoy pulled up behind us, and when its engine shut off, the air around us seemed to collapse into emptiness. We lined up for water from two large, dirty-looking cisterns with rubber hoses attached. Even in my thirst I winced at the stale, pungent taste of the water, and I prayed that Wei-Ming wouldn’t spit it out. But when it was her turn, she grabbed the hose tightly in her fist and took in all the water she could, and I felt embarrassed for having disliked it. Then we were ordered into a second lineup. Two villagers with bandaged heads handed out small metal bowls, and at the end of the line two women dished out a weak gruel of millet and unhusked rice.

  My family sat on the ground together. Next to me, Leuk quietly counted out the spoonfuls from his bowl. “I want to remember how many make up a bowl.” He reached fifteen. Yee-Lin watched him as he did this. She watched her own bowl carefully and ate a little, then gave the rest to Wei-Ming.

  We sat in the sun and slurped our gruel. None of the farm animals had survived the last day of walking. The Japanese threw them onto the trucks to butcher later. Flies harassed us everywhere. They swarmed over our faces and arms and landed on our bowls and swarmed around a soldiers’ latrine just outside the fence. I imagined they must be thick around the trucks where two dead water buffaloes and some ponies were lying.

  Then we sat and waited. A few soldiers watched over us while the rest disappeared. Soon the smell of roasting meat drifted through the village, and we heard the occasional crack of gunfire.

  Later, the Cantonese-speaking soldier reappeared. He called himself Sergeant Akamatsu. After wiping his greasy lips on his sleeve, he laid out our fate: we would help build the rest of this camp, all of us without exception for age or health, and here we would wait. Nothing else. Immediately, more soldiers appeared. They tipped a large wheelbarrow full of shovels onto the ground and the men and boys were ordered to line up for them, while a few other men were marshalled to collect bamboo from the grove at the town’s edge.

  The soldiers separated the women from the men and then divided the women into two groups. Those in their thirties
or older, or who were sick, were put into one group, and the younger ones were put in the other. Many mothers were taken from their daughters, and the Japanese seemed to enjoy shouting at them to be quiet and stop their wailing. When they started to hit the older women, the younger ones learned to be quiet. Standing next to Leuk in the line for shovels, I glanced repeatedly at Wei-Ming and Yee-Lin and tried to catch Wei-Ming’s eye.

  I was very hot and thirsty. The soldiers ordered us to dig and showed us where, because none of us knew what we were building. It didn’t take long for the soldiers to start lashing out. Next to me was an older man I recognized from the vegetable stalls in Wah Ying. He had a large sore on the side of his head that looked very raw. He winced as the sweat from his bald scalp ran down into the sore, and when he dabbed or covered it with his dirty sleeve, he gasped and shivered. He was very slow and the soldiers took a special interest in him. A lieutenant approached him, kicking dust up into his face. He shouted, “Baka!” repeatedly. The old man stumbled, blinking in the sun and shielding the sore with his arm. He turned to them, and when he saw the rifle, he collapsed in despair, sobbing and bowing to the soldier with the shovel in one hand.

  The soldier shouted back at him, with the explosive syllables and bobbing head that the Japanese often used. The old man muttered back and turned and tried to dig a little more, as if to propitiate the soldier. The shovel head scraped the dry earth and twisted in his hands, achieving nothing. The soldier raised his boot and kicked the old man to the ground. He was rolling onto his side to get up when the soldier raised his leg again and put the sole of his boot on the man’s neck. He shouted something else as he braced his boot against the man’s throat, and then he lunged forward.