The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  I felt each blow, each fall, every gunshot exploded in my ears and every scream stretched my jaw. I lost all sensation of myself — the hunger in my stomach, my soaking cheeks, the grass pricking my naked ankles. I felt only what I saw and heard in the glacial crawl of this moment. Beside me, my brother heaved dryly and struggled to stand. I felt the bile burning his throat. I was utterly empty, nothing more. Then, as Leuk retched and the farmer’s son sobbed loudly behind me, I wiped my eyes until I saw clearly that all the victims were finally dead.

  Their stillness cleared my mind. For a moment I heard nothing of the soldiers’ laughter and shouts, or the sobs of those around me. The scene before me disappeared. I wanted only to be gone, to be home, and never hear screaming or gunfire again. I wanted to sit in the garden beside my mother, or run up the cool stairways of my school, smelling its camphor and old paper, and the wild aroma of its orange trees in blossom. But those things were very far away and very old now, memories from another person’s life, and they were fitted to a world I’d left behind.

  Akamatsu stepped forward as some of his soldiers dropped shovels and jerry cans on the ground beside him. He jerked his head to the lawns on our right and looked at us with a mocking smile.

  “Now clean this up.”

  We staggered over the road back to camp. Open calluses bled on my hands from the shovel, and my clothes and hair stank of gasoline and smoke and scorched flesh. We still had to walk between the trucks. They let us stop at a stream on the way, where I sucked in the murky water like a lamprey. I held my brother’s hand, and we were silent all the way back.

  As we returned to the camp, it began to rain. Leuk went inside, but I stood away from the shelter and let the drops land on me. I hung my head and the rain fell over the nape of my neck, and I tried to let its lightness and slow trickle displace the pounding in my brain. Soon I was soaked. The dirt ran from my skin into my clothes. Grey water dripped from my fingertips, and the water stung my calluses. I stared vacantly at my shoes, which had torn open at the toes, though the laces were strangely intact. The lower buttons on my shirt were gone, and when I saw the tarnished belt buckle exposed, I raised a trembling hand to conceal it. Someone called me. Three times I ignored it and stayed standing in the rain.

  “Chung-Man, are you sick?”

  I couldn’t answer Ling. She was as soaked as I was, and yet seemed cleaner, so clean that when she reached out to touch me, I recoiled and moved away, fearing I would destroy her.

  “Come inside,” she said. Her hand was open and her arm clear of its old bruises. I backed away.

  “No, I want to stay out here. I feel hot. The rain, the rain is —” I gasped as though I’d been hit. I looked up to make sure the rain covered my face so that no one, especially Ling, could see the tears pouring down it. I screwed my eyes shut tight and covered them with my hands, but behind them there burned images that I couldn’t look away from. I inhaled hard through my nose, trying to smell something that was real and in front of me, anything but the stench of gasoline. I clutched the buckle and let the pin dig into my palm.

  It rained until long past dark that night. I didn’t line up for the meal, but Ling brought me some food. We sat together outside the shelter and ate, saying nothing to each other.

  TWENTY-THREE

  More and more people were brought into the camp. I tried to guess from their appearance and behaviour what was happening in the war. One afternoon, a Japanese convoy arrived with about two dozen people, and because they were healthier-looking and better dressed than we’d first been, and seemed to be in shock, I guessed that they had been taken from a newly captured town. Other people looked as worn as we had when we were brought here. From one of the newer arrivals, a teacher from a nearby village, I learned it was now the middle of June 1942.

  The hut where Leuk and I slept was badly overcrowded. It now slept forty men and boys. After evening curfew, some of the younger men bossed the other boys around. They forced them to sleep in the far corners of the building, where it was hotter and stuffier. Most of the boys were afraid of being trapped there. The younger men fought to sleep nearer the door, though twice soldiers intervened and beat a few of them for delaying the curfew. Leuk and I had trouble sleeping at night, and we often tried to nap during the day. The skin around Leuk’s eyes was turning grey, and in the evenings there were long periods when he just stared into the distance. At night, he always volunteered to take the corner, partly out of pity for the younger boys, and partly because he found sitting in the corner allowed him to stay awake longer. I think he had a lot of nightmares, and he said he liked listening to the insects at night.

  At mealtimes, I sat with Yee-Lin, Wei-Ming, Leuk, and Ling. We had our spot, as other groups did. It worked out to twenty paces from the north wall of one of the women’s compounds where Yee-Lin and Wei-Ming slept. We sat in a circle with our wooden dishes and learned to manage our hunger by eating as slowly as we could, so that we finished just as the guards shouted at everyone that mealtime was over. I remembered my mother’s old edict, “Chew your rice twenty times before you swallow it.” I’d watched her at the dinner table many times and noted that she never followed this rule herself. But here her wisdom made sense.

  Our habit was to take the bowl of gruel, made from a barely edible unhusked reddish rice and sometimes millet, and put some of the cooked sweet potato into it. This displaced the gruel and made the bowl look fuller. We then sipped it very slowly. At first it was hard to get Wei-Ming to eat more slowly. She was so hungry all the time that we just let her eat as she wanted. When she was done, she’d stare enviously at the rest of us eating and ask us for a share. We always gave her a little, but giving up food was hard, and I sometimes resented doing it. Eventually she learned to slow down with us.

  After slurping the last of the gruel, we’d eat the rest of the potato by breaking it up into small pieces. The first pieces we used to wipe down the sides of the bowl so as to catch every bit of liquid and grain. The charred potato skin stuck between my teeth, along with bits of hard rice bran. Together they formed a bitter, fibrous grit that I ground distractedly between my molars before swallowing. I was always digging fragments of it out of the spaces between my teeth, and the burnt skin was so hard I sometimes cut the tip of my tongue against it.

  Because our clothes were slowly turning to rags, Leuk and I thought constantly of our belt buckles, and worked out a plan to keep them concealed. We saved bits of loose thread, and used these to repair our shirts. Most boys had lost the buttons on their shirts, but we were careful to keep ours and tie them back on if they came off. If I could button up my shirt, then I could cover my buckle. When we had to remove our shirts, because of the heat or because they were being washed, we flipped the tops of our shorts over to hide the belts. We were so thin that even with the belts our shorts didn’t fit, and we had to tighten them around our waists with strips of torn cloth.

  In several corners of the camp, hardy plants crept through the barbed-wire barricades. During the day I would take Wei-Ming to one of these corners, and there we played make-believe games about the thickly growing plants, though we were careful never to sit too close to the fence. I feared the barbs that hung in the wire, and also the Japanese, who had shot people for touching the posts.

  Wei-Ming and I would lie on the ground facing the little plants and pretend we were watching a forest. There were tigers and monkeys in the forest: the dark beetles that roamed the ground were tigers, and the aphids and ants that lived mostly on the stalks were monkeys. We didn’t pick them up or move them around; all we did was lie on our bellies and watch them and make up stories about what they were doing. The monkeys always outsmarted the tigers. Sometimes we took a sprig of weed and poked the beetles or ants away, but they always came back. If Wei-Ming asked me to play this game with her, I never said no, and as the days passed, it saddened me that it distracted her so well. She asked less and less when we would go home, and over time she became quieter. During the game, she ofte
n gazed silently into the spindly stems and leaves, murmuring to herself some story about the animals. Once I lay quietly on the ground beside her with my ear near her mouth, and tried to make out one of these stories, but it was whispered and broken and made little sense to me.

  Games like this filled our time, and the days went by. Without school we had to build a routine for ourselves. We cleaned our bowls; mended, washed, and hung our clothes; stood in line for food; and groomed ourselves as best we could. And we had not just our corner in the yard but corners everywhere: by the fence to play, in the buildings to sit and talk, corners of time when we met, and in our conversations there were corners where we went and others we avoided.

  The natural world around the camp appeared to change. Outside the barbed wire, the bamboo seemed to grow higher and denser each day. I guessed that the animals that normally ate it had been scared away or killed off by the Japanese. Abandoned by predators, the grass grew wild, thick, and dark, and over the weeks I believed I could detect, while lying awake deep in the night, a subtle change in how the wind sounded through its stalks and leaves, from the gentle hushing of younger grass to a deeper sound like that of people sleeping. The grass was the first thing I noticed each morning when I stepped outside, as the world around the camp drew so much nearer and became so much quieter.

  I woke very suddenly from a dream one night. I was confused by the sound of the wind, and for a second I thought there were Chinese soldiers hiding in the grass, waiting to kill the Japanese. Then my mind cleared. I blinked and looked through the cracks in the walls, and outside there was just wind and grass, insects snapping their wings against the lamps, and miles of empty road.

  After the violence at the hospital, I woke often in the night. It seemed as though every sound in the dark was magnified through a speaker. When I lay down, I felt that I was drifting, losing control of my thoughts. I could only fall asleep if I kept my eyes open as long as possible, and stared at the stars through the openings in the walls or the moonlight coming through the thatch. When I awoke with a start from dreams, as I often did, I learned to listen first for the sound of the grass. It masked the heavy sound of my breathing and at times the shouts of others around me as they dreamed. The farmer’s sons often muttered in their sleep about things I tried to forget.

  One morning, Akamatsu summoned all the prisoners to the main yard. It was the first time we had been gathered all together, and there were so many that our ranks spilled over into the spaces between the buildings. Wei-Ming was asleep. Yee-Lin tried to hold her over her shoulder, but she no longer had the strength to lift her. I sat Wei-Ming on the ground and she leaned against my shins and dozed while Akamatsu spoke.

  The idle weeks of governing the camp hadn’t worn his swagger down. He strode out before the crowd with a bamboo switch clutched in one hand, and he beat the air repeatedly in small gestures as though to some music audible only to him. He and the soldiers behind him all looked thinner and dirtier.

  “The progress of the Imperial Army,” he said, “has led to the capture of many more prisoners. This camp will now be used only for prisoners from this area. The rest of you will be moved this afternoon to a new camp. Those of you not from the following villages must be ready by noon.” He then read out the names of several villages, including Wah Ying and Tung Koo Chow. I was surprised at how long the list had grown, though Hong Kong wasn’t on it. I was frightened that we would be singled out for extra mistreatment if it was discovered we were from the city.

  A group of guards moved through the camp accompanied by a trio of Chinese men carrying folders full of documents. I recognized one of them from the market in Wah Ying, a tall man who still had his glasses while most of the prisoners had lost theirs, and who looked well-fed and clean by comparison. The three men all had recent haircuts. The one from Wah Ying marched around the camp with two Japanese soldiers, who handled him roughly to show he was beneath them. They left him alone with long lists on crisp yellowish paper. He pored over these with theatrical care, calling out names and pointing them out to the soldiers when prisoners responded. When he turned his head to point at an elderly couple in one corner of the yard, I noticed that a large part of one his ears was missing, taken off in a clean vertical slice that looked recent.

  He told the old couple to wait by a section of the fence, and then read out more names. As they moved to the fence, he announced they would all go to the new camp. I checked my belt, as did Leuk.

  The soldiers started spreading throughout the camp, brandishing their rifles and harassing people at random. Something in this moment, in this disruption of our routine, filled me with sudden terror, and sweat poured down my face and neck. I ran my hand over my shirt again to check for the buckle. I started to think that it was visible, the tarnished shadow beneath the thin white cotton, like a mark or wound in my centre. The soldiers butted a few prisoners with their rifles. The Chinese collaborators walked behind them and shouted at more prisoners to move to the fence. I thought I heard our family name being called. My hand felt heavy. I looked down at the ground as my head swam, and my right leg trembled violently against the dust.

  Leuk moved beside me. “Chung-Man, what’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t look at him. I put both hands over my buckle and vomited. An orangey puddle of sweet potato flecked with greyish bits of grain lay on the ground between my feet. I heaved again, but nothing came out, and I felt an odd relief at no longer being hungry. Flies gathered quickly over the mass and I stepped back, bumping into Yee-Lin. My stomach settled and I looked up, afraid that I had drawn the soldiers’ attention. I held my hands steady over my buckle. It didn’t seem any of the soldiers had noticed. Yee-Lin took me by the arm, and we joined the others by the fence.

  Only an old woman, wrapped in a tattered flowery gown, stared at me from a few steps away. Her mouth hung open, a toothless hole, and her eyes were sunken so that I couldn’t tell if she even saw me. I stared back, exhausted from the strain of throwing up. Her lips moved slowly, mouthing indeterminate words, while she gestured with her hands. A young woman sat on the ground beside her, resting her forehead on her knees. From time to time she looked over at the old woman, and reached out and touched her arm. This calmed the old woman a little and her hand would sink to her lap before she became agitated again. She seemed to have no sense of why she was moving, or what she was trying to say, or even of where she was.

  The Chinese collaborator awakened me from the strange hypnosis induced by her movements. He finished calling out the prisoners on his list, and the moment he was done, the guards seized him roughly and dragged him away. Akamatsu stood before us. He told us quickly that we would now be moved to the new camp. His speech stayed with me, not because of what it meant for us but because at that moment an ashen veil of clouds had begun to draw across the sky. It made the camp not gloomy but cooler, tempering the light as if to promise we would be sheltered on our walk.

  We had little time to get ready to leave. Yee-Lin took my sister and ran back to their quarters with Ling, while Leuk and I ran back to ours. We grabbed our belongings and met the others at the gate, where a wavering, distorted voice blared out orders through a megaphone.

  In early 1994, I was finding any domestic routine, or any part of life outside my work, chaotic and riddled with errors. Alice had been in and out of hospital for over a month, and it was only after our son Chris flew in to help me that I was free to deal with other pressing family issues.

  My trip to Hong Kong at the end of January seemed doomed from the start. In my rush to leave, I forgot my passport at the house — one of those details Alice always took care of — and at the airport I learned my flight was delayed. As we approached Hong Kong, after I’d spent sixteen sleepless hours in my seat, we had to circle the airport for thirty minutes because of the air traffic, and I found myself feeling resentful about the whole journey. Of course I was ashamed of this feeling. I was healthy then, still working, and I had no business griping when my brother was dying. She
ung’s son, Tat-Choy, had phoned me a week earlier to say the cancer had become more aggressive. I expected this to be my last visit with my brother.

  Of course, there are times like this — overnight flights, long waits in hospitals, sleepless nights — when you are, if not captive, at least bound by some prolonged obligation, with no way out. Then the mind will wander like a spider crawling over the floor of a lightless cellar, heading into every corner imaginable in search of an exit or a home. Sitting in my seat in between two other passengers, my mind ran through a hundred things and in such a disorganized way that at times I felt I was thinking total nonsense. I thought of Sheung, now seventy-five years old, and how little our lives had crossed as adults. I was sixty-four at the time, still feeling that I had much ahead of me, and my brother’s condition made me feel not older, but more distant from him.

  We landed late, and there were delays at customs, and huge lines for taxis, and traffic jams. I decided to delay checking into the hotel and went straight to the hospital with my luggage, hoping to call the hotel from there to hold my room. Something about hauling my luggage around, lifting it, being able to manage last-minute changes to my plans, made me feel even more alive and younger, and thus more distant from the infirmity around me.

  These thoughts disappeared when I got to Sheung’s room. Tat-Choy was waiting for me in the hallway outside.

  Uncle, my father died a few hours ago. My wife and son just left, but Mother is still with him.

  Yee-Lin was sitting beside the bed where her husband lay. Her hair was tied back simply, coming loose around her face in a girlish way, and she seemed thinner than I remembered. She leaned over him, one hand resting on his hands, which were folded over his abdomen. She got up and briefly took my hand before we both sat down at the bed. She put her left hand back over his and carefully slid her right hand under his shoulders and neck.