The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  I heard a crunch. The man’s tongue protruded and he flailed on the ground, eyes wide in terror. His hands flew up to the boot on his throat and he clutched feebly at it. His lips and face darkened to a bluish shade, and then he was still. The soldier turned and ordered two other prisoners to haul his body away.

  Most of us had stopped to stare at this, but as soon as the man was dead, we were ordered to resume our work. I stared at the sun-baked soil and pushed hard with the shovel, thinking of it as a knife, a spike, a deadly instrument to outdo every other shovel nearby. The hunger in my stomach disappeared and I felt as though I’d been injected with a potion that gave me immense strength. The ground crumbled under the shovel’s tip, and I heaved the dirt away in quick snapping motions. I looked carefully at the others near me, checking to see how fast they dug and making sure I brought my shovel down harder and faster.

  Leuk was in the next row, dragging stacks of bamboo over to another site. I wanted him to look at me, but he was squinting in the sunlight and his hair was sticking to his face. I worried that he wasn’t working hard enough. One of the other boys carrying bamboo was older and very strong, carrying twice as much as my brother. I wanted to hit that boy with my shovel, break his arm to weaken him and get him into trouble. It was the farmer’s son, the braggart who still bore the bruises on his face and arms from his father’s beating.

  In the evening, Sergeant Akamatsu reappeared as we lined up for water and gruel. He picked meat from his teeth ostentatiously, and then he flicked the scraps onto the earth and ground them with his boot. He told us the camp still needed work and that we would sleep in the huts tonight. Anyone seen leaving would be shot, no matter the reason.

  Leuk and I ended up in the same building, and I prayed that Wei-Ming and Yee-Lin were still together. The floor was hard, with a few straw mats over it, and the building was crowded and stank of unwashed bodies. It had been three days since the Japanese attacked Wah Ying, and since then I’d slept on the ground. It was very dark and the windows were shut, but air worked its way between the slats and a cool breeze soon blew away the stench. The soldiers closed the door and fixed it shut with a chain, and under the light shining through the door jamb I saw the shadow of a guard. I heard a cough and thought it was Leuk. I closed my eyes and filtered through the sounds around me to locate where he was.

  That night, I slept and woke a dozen times, maybe more. I doubt if more than half an hour went by before I woke again, hearing sounds around me or dreaming them. Each time, my eyes went to the same spot: the thin stroke of moonlight beneath the door. I tried to count the number of times I woke up but lost track.

  I watched the light closely. Twice the shadows broke it when boots shuffled lightly over the planks.

  The third time I woke — which I guessed was before midnight — I began to wonder if everyone else was also waking up. I sat up very carefully and tried to see in the dark. I was confused and thought Yee-Lin and Wei-Ming were in our building. I worried that Wei-Ming would awake and make a noise or cry. And then what? I doubted Yee-Lin could quiet her fast enough. I ran through it in my head a hundred times, and the scenario changed each time. At first I imagined Yee-Lin and I leaning over her, hushing her to sleep before anyone else awoke. But the story took over. As the night wore on and I woke up again and again, it became a scene of stifled riot. The others around us would wake up when they heard her. They’d be angry. The farmer’s wife would sit up and reach around with clawing hands, looking for something to hit with. We’d be pressed in a corner, kicking out at the attackers. I felt someone try to pull my shoes from me and a dusty hand clawed my belt buckle.

  My heart raced in the dark, and I rubbed my face to rouse myself from the fantasy. My head cleared and I heard only the others breathing dryly. I slowed my breathing down, timing each breath with the hush of the wind in the trees outside the fence. I was the only person awake. When I realized this, I was thrilled to have privacy. I sat straight up with my palms pressed on the floor beside me. No one could see me. The light from the door jamb lit nothing.

  I loved the strange freedom of this moment, and I kept turning my head to listen for the sound of another person moving. I made wild faces in the dark, stretched my jaw and stuck out my tongue, rolled my eyes around, and when my eyes began to ache, I rolled my head around in the dark, flicking my tongue out like a snake.

  I moved my jaw up and down while making no sound. I turned to a man and mouthed wa-wa-wa at him, stretching my jaw wider with every syllable. Then I mouthed silent words. I held my breath deep in my lungs as I sounded out phrases and clicked my tongue against my teeth, directing my lips at everyone in turn: idiot, fatty, loudmouth, frog-face, lumpy.

  Then I mouthed sentences. Over the slumbering bodies I thrilled to the dry clicking in my mouth as I hurled insults at the other prisoners: you snore too loud, you drink nun’s piss, you love Japs, you love farts, you eat chicken shit. I avenged myself against the attackers in my dream. And when they failed to reply, I redoubled my abuse.

  Then I felt dizzy and shivered with exhaustion. It felt like deep night, maybe three in the morning. My head swam until I couldn’t stay awake anymore. It was the last time for months that I’d feel the pleasure of solitude.

  More prisoners arrived over the next few days, and the Japanese ordered us to keep building. We lashed bamboo poles together while the women and girls wove mats out of leaves and grass. The soldiers clustered near where the younger women such as Yee-Lin knelt and wove, talking loudly to each other and leering at them.

  We had eight large huts for the prisoners, who now seemed to number at least a hundred and fifty. A few times I helped put up a wall or helped a woman with some mats, and I’d feel a brief flash of achievement. But I knew these were cages.

  No one had enough to eat and the Japanese worked us relentlessly. Each day our pace slowed and we struggled to complete the work they gave us. I was tired all the time and often dizzy, and even at mealtimes I found it hard to stay awake. By the second week in the camp, the older people started dying. I came across an old woman one afternoon whom I recognized from the village. Her clothes and skin were so permeated with dust that I almost didn’t notice her on the ground. She had lost all her hair, and flies trafficked in and out of her toothless mouth. I thought of an old woman who used to sell candies at a stall near our house in Hong Kong, who used to call me a handsome boy. The old woman’s eyes were still open. I reached down to close them with my fingertips. That was all I could manage.

  When children began to die, the Japanese changed their ways. Most people tried to give an extra share of gruel to their children, as we did with Wei-Ming, but sharing became harder with time. One morning the four of us sat together with our bowls, all of us very thin. Wei-Ming could barely keep her eyes open and was too tired to chase the flies off a sore on her lips. I still remember how I thought, She’s too tired now, she can’t eat anyway.

  Sergeant Akamatsu appeared one afternoon to announce that the rations would be increased. We all knew this was because his supply of workers was dying off, but he made a point of telling us it was because so many villages had been captured that they had more food. He almost smiled as he said this. Vegetable scraps and even beans started appearing in the gruel, and everyone was now allotted a boiled sweet potato with each meal.

  That evening, we stood in one of the lineups for food. It was a very hot evening, my shirt clinging to my back and chest, and the smell of burnt food made me feel slightly sick. A constant murmur of worn voices drifted through the prisoners’ ranks, until an argument broke out between two people in the next line. I wouldn’t have noticed it had I not caught Ling’s voice. I peered through the crowd and saw her standing with her bowl, shouting back at an older woman who’d accused her of trying to push ahead in the line.

  I called to her. She turned, and at first she looked afraid — as though someone were joining in attacking her — but then she saw me and called back. I pointed the way to where we ate and she promised t
o meet us there. I had convinced myself she was dead.

  By the third week, most of us felt a little stronger and had stopped losing weight. With careful washing, the sore on Wei-Ming’s lip slowly disappeared. Each of us made a point of giving her a small portion of our sweet potato. When we sat down after lining up for food, Leuk, Yee-Lin, Ling, and I would compare the quantities of food we had and try to ensure they were equal. One evening Leuk suggested we start saying grace again. Yee-Lin didn’t care and at first I didn’t, either.

  “Don’t you remember the grace we said at our school every evening before supper?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to start saying that.”

  “I’d feel better if we did.” His voice was dreamlike and he seemed to be looking at something in the distance.

  Wei-Ming didn’t join in because our mother didn’t enforce grace, and Yee-Lin just went ahead and ate. Ling found it very strange. But my brother and I bowed our heads over the greyish liquid in our bowls and recited our school grace. The sound of the words in my mouth, our mutual mumbling of them, brought me back in an instant, and in my mind I saw briefly what Leuk had seen: the blank white walls of the school, the old banyan tree where we used to meet, the muted green of the lawns. We prayed for peace and consolation.

  The next day, we finished building our camp.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Sometime in the spring — one of the newer prisoners told me it was the middle of April — we started wondering if the fortunes of the Japanese were changing. They seemed very gloomy. Sergeant Akamatsu and the other officers gave regular speeches to the troops in which they all cheered defiantly and shouted banzai, but the officers’ faces were grim and there was a misery in their demeanour that I hadn’t seen before. They meted out harsh discipline against their own. The newer prisoners whispered about what they’d heard in the news before their capture. They said the war was turning against Japan, and whenever planes flew overhead, it was to reinforce the eastern front, where the Allies were striking hard.

  Akamatsu gathered all the younger male prisoners together one morning. He announced he had an urgent task for some of us. He prefaced this with a long speech about the emperor, his divinity, his descent from the primordial sun god, and, above all, the unbreakable devotion of his subjects. In a small clearing outside the camp, revived drills by the Japanese troops underscored his point.

  “A large number of our heroic injured soldiers will arrive tomorrow morning by train from the north,” he said. “The hospital in Tung Koo Chow will be their new home, and the existing patients must be relocated. The staff will co-operate.”

  It would be our job to help move the patients from this hospital. These were mostly locals and a small number of foreigners — Western missionaries and teachers — and Akamatsu said they would go to a nearby farmhouse.

  The Japanese piled into four trucks while the dozen of us they picked to help marched in the middle of the convoy. I was with Leuk, the farmer’s sons, and a few others prisoners all about our age. A breeze blew over the road, but we still choked on the fumes from the trucks and I walked with my hands cupped over my mouth and nose. Along the road, a burned-out farmhouse gave off its last wisps of smoke, and clusters of crows fought loudly over dark forms on the ground. I thought I heard a child screaming in the distance, so I took my hands from my mouth and covered my ears and coughed until the farm was out of sight.

  Tung Koo Chow was very quiet. If the townspeople had been out earlier in the day, the sound of the trucks must have sent most of them inside. I looked back, and as the trucks passed, people crept out of their houses and the front doors of shops reopened.

  We stopped at the entrance to the grounds of St. Paul’s Hospital. Outside the gates, an officer waited in his car while his driver briskly ran a cloth over the hood and windshield. Three trucks and two ambulances were lined up behind it. As our convoy pulled up, curious faces emerged in the hospital windows. A senior Japanese officer spoke harshly to Sergeant Akamatsu and pointed repeatedly at the hospital’s main door and then went back to his car and was driven off, the ambulances following him.

  Sergeant Akamatsu opened the gates and marched ­ostentatiously down the path with ten soldiers behind him. He ordered us to follow them, and we shuffled behind the neat clip of their boots. As we approached, a doctor in a white coat and a nursing sister came out and stood on the front steps of the hospital. The doctor left one hand resting on the large iron door handle. Akamatsu walked up to him and asked if he was in charge.

  “I am,” he said stiffly. Like the nurse, he looked past the sergeant at us. Maybe he thought we were patients.

  “Many of our soldiers are coming by train this evening. You need to empty the hospital for them. Move your patients out to the village or discharge them, but we need this place emptied out within four hours.”

  “We can’t do that,” said the doctor. “Everyone here is very sick; there’s nowhere else for them to go.”

  Akamatsu’s jaw flexed. The rest of his body was rigid. Only because I stood close to him was I able to see one index finger drop slowly along the length of his riding crop.

  “I said move them,” he answered.

  The nurse fingered the small metal cross that hung from her neck, and the doctor looked at us again. I realized I had been standing with my mouth open and felt stupid. I closed it and my tongue scraped against the dry inside of my mouth.

  “We can’t,” the doctor repeated. “Where on earth could I put them?”

  Akamatsu’s neck and scalp flushed. “You think you can’t? Then we’ll move them,” he answered.

  The doctor’s demeanour broke and he swallowed hard. “I said — I said there is nowhere else they can —”

  Akamatsu turned and shouted orders at the other soldiers. His voice raked the air like gunfire, spittle flying from his lips. I understood none of it, of course, but the meaning was in his body — the fists, the blood vessels on his face, the torrent of words.

  When he was done, the soldiers shouted “Hai!” and marched up the hospital steps. Akamatsu told us to get off the path and wait on the front lawn. Nurses and some patients had been watching the scene from the windows on all three floors, and they retreated when Akamatsu started shouting.

  The doctor and nurse ran after the soldiers, but the last soldier up the steps turned and shoved them back with his rifle and then slammed the door. The doctor got up and turned to Akamatsu, saying they weren’t allowed in. Akamatsu put his right hand on his pistol and shouted at the doctor to step aside. The doctor hesitated when he saw Akamatsu touch his gun. His expression changed and he started to say something. Akamatsu didn’t care. He drew his gun and shot the doctor in the head, and when the nurse turned to run, he shot her twice in the back. He kicked their bodies off the steps into the bushes and went inside.

  Through the windows, I saw and heard the staff and patients trying to keep the soldiers away. One orderly shouted at another to help him block the doors of their ward, and an older nurse pulled a patient from a window. I felt a drumming in my head as though I had been struck from behind. I rested my hand on my burning stomach. Watching the swirling forms of soldiers, staff, and patients through the windows, I felt time slow. Already the months of my exile had felt long and the changing of the seasons delayed, and now the day itself slowed to an inhuman crawl.

  Leuk, the farmer’s sons, the other men and boys, we all stared at the white facade and the three neat rows of windows. The sounds were very clear: the screams, the doors breaking apart, the collision of bodies with solid objects. Two white-clad nurses wheeled patients away from the doors and struggled to stop one patient, who looked as though he was deranged, from leaving. But they were on the first floor. The soldiers were starting at the top.

  They began shooting the patients. Despite all the gunfire we’d heard over the past several months, Leuk and I started at the first shot. On the top floor a window opened, and the shouting became much clearer as all the windows banged violently ope
n. It was like the rising of a curtain at the theatre.

  An old man with a bandaged head appeared suddenly in a window in a tall-backed wheelchair. One of his hands was raised and waving strangely. He lunged forward as the soldier behind him tipped his chair. The old man plummeted to the gravel below. Another man, much younger, followed from the same window. The soldiers disgorged the sick and mutilated into the air, as though unloading bags off a truck. One soldier, a burly man I’d noticed earlier, dragged an injured woman towards a window. The uniformed hands of a nurse seized him by the arm and tried to break his grasp. The patient gripped the window frame with one hand, but her other was pressed over a bloody bandage across her abdomen. The soldier shot the nurse and pushed the woman through the window with his boot. The nurse was the next to fall.

  When she landed, I thought her eyes looked into mine. She had fallen on her back, on top of the others. The bullet had passed through her neck, but her face was untouched. She was pale, young, and wide-eyed, gazing far away as only the newly dead can do. She looked almost alive, but in the staring white of her uniform she seemed already dressed for burial.

  The Japanese started clearing the lower floors. When one man tried to climb through a window, Akamatsu shot him and he fell into the bushes. Behind him, a nurse laughed hysterically. Two soldiers, seeing no one left to deal with, holstered their guns and tore her uniform from her before throwing her to the floor.

  Many survived their falls, even some who had been shot. With the upper floors cleared, the Japanese turned their fury on the survivors outside. They dragged a man from the heap who was smeared with feces from a corpse that had fallen on him. All the while the man cursed them loudly. A soldier took a garden hose off the wall and put the nozzle up between his legs. They turned the water on and he swelled until his belly gleamed and his cursing blazed into a wordless scream. They dragged the last few nurses through the hospital doors and laid them on the ground, and then used them into a despairing silence and shot them all when they were done. When I saw the expression in the nurses’ eyes before they died, I stopped believing that this could ever end.