The Water Beetles

by Michael Kaan

  Akamatsu smirked when he saw us. “Very nice.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

  In my new clothes, I saw even more how dishevelled the Japanese were starting to look. They were leaner, mostly unshaven, and their uniforms were worn and patchy. The house was not well kept.

  “Now, I know you’re both hungry.” Akamatsu brought us into the kitchen. Two other Japanese were there preparing food. A third sat at the kitchen table with his feet up, drinking from a bottle. I didn’t think of the Japanese as being so casual, even though I’d witnessed their easy cruelty. There was something defeated in the soldier’s posture and his eyes.

  There was hot food on the table. The soldier with the bottle eyed us closely but kept his boots where they were. It didn’t disgust me that they were filthy and inches away from the food. My mouth watered. There was a bowl of hot rice, a dish of steamed pork belly, a boiled chicken, and a plate of fried vegetables.

  Akamatsu stood between us and put a hand on each of our shoulders. “Wouldn’t it be nice to stay in a house like this? Hot food, new clothes. Why don’t you sit?”

  I sat down at the table and Leuk sat at the other end. The bottle soldier smiled at him and shifted in his chair. Akamatsu remained standing and leaned into the doorway to the living room.

  “May we eat?” Leuk said.

  Akamatsu smiled and gestured at the food. I went first, but as soon as I touched the spoon, he reached over and seized my wrist.

  I didn’t look up at him. I just stared into the table, not even trying to escape his grasp.

  “Where are the girls?”

  I had no idea what to say. It seemed as if I waited an hour before answering.

  “Sir?” I said stupidly.

  His grip tightened a little, and then he put his other hand on my head and turned my face towards his. “Where did they go?”

  I was cold and sweating. I couldn’t see my brother, but I heard him breathing, a rapid, shallow panting like an injured dog. His chair squeaked and I realized he was shaking. The soldier seated beside me tapped his boots together; dry mud flaked onto the table.

  “They left,” I said.

  “We all know that,” said Akamatsu. “And for some reason you stayed, maybe thinking we wouldn’t notice if you did. That’s honourable, I might even call it very Japanese, except you aren’t. Where are they? Where are they headed?”

  He was badly shaven and there was blood on his collar, which was a greasy black elsewhere along the crease. A few small bits of straw were embedded in the wool of his jacket.

  “Which way did they go?” He curled the fingers resting on my head and started to pull my overgrown hair. He squeezed my wrist hard. “Tell us.”

  The other soldier took his boots off the table, walked around to Leuk, and put his hands on his shoulders. I finally looked at my brother: he was pale and staring fixedly at me, shaking, his hands folded neatly on the table as if he were waiting for school to begin. The minute the soldier touched him, he jumped.

  “They just wanted to go home,” Leuk said in a dry voice.

  “We know that,” said the soldier. We all did, and seeing the truth of it, I began to sob.

  Akamatsu forced my arm behind my back and told me to get up. The pain in my shoulder was terrible, but I couldn’t move, and the other soldier grabbed Leuk the same way. Akamatsu said something in Japanese and the soldier nodded.

  “One more time,” he said. “Tell us where they went. Are they bringing someone back here? To try and kill us all?” He pulled hard on my hair and my scalp burned as though he were branding it.

  “No, it’s true,” I said. “They just want to go back to Hong Kong.”

  Akamatsu didn’t believe me, and he snapped at the soldier. They dragged us away from the table. I caught a last glimpse of the food I’d never eat, and it looked different. The vegetables were sodden, the meat was roughly cut and jumbled, and flies scaled its surfaces, dabbing tentatively at the pooled fat and pinkish juices.

  They dragged us outside and marched us back towards the barn. The door was ajar and the soldier kicked it wide open. It banged against the wall. The horses shifted nervously in their stalls, rattling the harnesses that hung near them.

  To my surprise, one of the Hunan boys was sitting in the barn alone. I knew instantly that he had been alone for a long time because of the look on his face when we came in, an unnerving mix of fear and joy, like a mad animal. He shuffled up against the wall into the light and I saw his lip had recently been split.

  “Tomorrow we’ll talk again,” said Akamatsu. He waited for a moment in the doorway as though he wanted us to take in his silhouette. Then he walked away, the soldier slamming the door shut and pushing the bolt in.

  I wasn’t happy to see the Hunan boy. I doubt he recognized us, and he didn’t speak to us. He rocked backed and forth on the straw and stared at us, emitting something halfway between a moan and a sigh every time he tipped forward. It wasn’t his movement that disturbed me, but the fact that he seemed to find it satisfying to make this strange, subhuman noise.

  Leuk and I sat next to each other, and we put our arms around each other. My shoulder was very sore from the way Akamatsu had twisted my arm, and it felt better to stretch it out. We were against the wall opposite the Hunan boy, who sometimes closed his eyes while rocking in the partial dark.

  Hours passed in silence. The dusty sunset light trickled through the gaps between the planks, and the moon came up. The Hunan boy grew still and Leuk too fell asleep beside me. One of the horses shifted noisily and Leuk started awake in distress.

  “Where are we? Did we get out? Chung-Man!” He was almost shouting and grabbed blindly at me. I took him by the arms and tried to calm him down.

  “We’re still here,” I said as quietly as I could, but Leuk was rambling and couldn’t hear me. He kicked his legs out over the straw and the dust flew into the moonlight.

  “I want to get out! I want to get out!” I couldn’t hold him and didn’t realize he was still half asleep. His shouts disturbed the Hunan boy. He started rocking again and moaning loudly, as though he were screaming with his mouth shut tight.

  “Leuk, I’m right here,” I said. He turned to me as though he were only now waking up. The despair on his face struck me cold.

  “Let’s get out,” he sobbed. Snot and tears ran over his lips. “I don’t want to die in a barn, Chung-Man. I don’t want to die.” I was sobbing too and couldn’t get him to be quiet.

  It didn’t matter. The Hunan boy grabbed his hair and started to scream. I think he was crying too, and he stamped his feet on the ground, his wooden sandals clapping on the hard earth. He pulled on his hair and screamed again.

  The horses started kicking in their stalls. Their hooves hit the barn walls and the whole structure shook. I felt the bangs reverberate against my back. They neighed and kicked, some beginning to rear up. The Hunan boy screamed even louder at the sight. I grabbed Leuk, pulled him closer to me, and moved as far from the stalls as I could. Dust flew from the walls like little explosions every time the horses kicked.

  The stalls had simple wooden gates held shut with rope. As the horses stamped around, they began to come up against the gates. One of the gates made a loud crack as a horse kicked it. I knew what was going to happen next.

  Leuk drew his knees up tightly to his chest and shouted at me to do the same, and we got as close to the walls as we could. The walls were shaking and cracking so much I was afraid the barn would collapse on us. The Hunan boy was sitting right under a stack of wooden shelves that began to rock from side to side. Dust streamed onto his head, turning him a deathly colour in the moonlight, and I felt pity for him even though he had been cruel to us before.

  With a deafening crack, a horse burst the gates of its stall, shattering the frame and sending wood flying over the barn floor. The horse stepped forward and screamed. Then the other horses pushed against their gates and kicked their stalls. The weakened gates cracked open in quick succession like
a strip of firecrackers.

  The horses burst out of their stalls. Right in front of us, they panicked and knocked against each other and the barn doors, until at last the bolt shattered and the doors flew open. The dozen horses felt like a hundred as they broke free just a couple of feet in front of me. The ground shook beneath us and all I could hear was their hooves and the three of us screaming. Hard, pebbly dust struck me in the face and stung my hands.

  I watched the horses tear across the field as two soldiers standing guard outside shouted. They ran after the animals in the moonlight.

  As soon as the soldiers were gone, Leuk grabbed me and we ran out into the darkness. The Hunan boy sat motionless in the corner, a small dusty figure with a lowered head like a temple figurine.

  More soldiers ran from the house after the horses. When we were inside the house earlier, I had noticed a second road behind the farm, and Leuk and I now ran down it.

  I couldn’t help looking back. The road was very straight and the horse farm stayed in sight for what seemed like a long time. Then it shrank suddenly in the distance. The prisoners we’d left behind quickly became faceless to me, as though they’d vanished down a hole. Leuk said he was worried the Japanese would give up on the horses and come after us, but I told him very confidently that they wouldn’t. We found a spot in a clearing and slept for a few hours.

  Leuk shook me awake. He had twigs in his hair and the sun was shining behind him. I panicked, thinking the Japanese had found us, but he said there was no one around. It was long past dawn and we were both starving, but we had no food on us and there was nothing to eat in the clearing. We brushed the leaves off our clothes and out of our hair and continued walking away from the farm. We must have looked very odd on that road, thin and dirty and with wild, uncut hair, dressed in new clothes. Yet when I looked at my brother, wearing a shirt almost like a school uniform, I felt for the first time that we would soon see our mother again.

  Almost a full day had passed since Akamatsu had questioned us in the house. Sunset was only a few hours away, and we guessed that a village must be near. A few miserable-looking workers were pulling carts of goods down the road by hand. The workers were a deep-brown colour from the sun, and all had shaved heads. I asked one of them where we were and if we were near Chung Shan. He looked at me confusedly, almost like an animal.

  “Chung Shan is a couple of days away on foot,” he said. “But our village is a short walk from here.”

  Leuk took me by the arm and we started off down the road again. Then suddenly I was pulled off balance and stumbled backward. My collar tightened and I choked. Leuk was staring at something behind me.

  I turned my head. It was one of the older Hunan boys from the farm. He twisted the collar to choke me, but the button popped off. I twisted around and freed myself just as Leuk grabbed the boy by the hair and pulled him off me. The Hunan boy moved away and brought his other arm out from behind his back. He had a heavy iron bar in his hand.

  He had a black eye, his nose was bruised and crooked, and his upper lip was still swollen from a recent cut. He licked it gingerly and pointed at my feet as he shuffled from side to side, while the workmen by the cart retreated.

  “I like your shoes,” he said. “Give them to me. Come on.” He swung the bar towards us as a warning.

  I knelt down and quickly removed them and stepped back. He reached down and seized them, staring at us all the while, and then swung the bar again a few times in warning. He knelt and quickly put them on.

  “Get lost,” he shouted. “Or I’ll come after you.”

  I stood my ground and stared at the boy. “I can’t walk home like this.”

  “I said get lost!” He lunged forward and swung the bar.

  I knelt quickly and seized a big rock, then took aim and threw it at him. He wasn’t expecting it and moved the wrong way, and I hit him straight in the throat. He cried and clutched his neck with his free hand, coughing violently while making a feeble wave with the bar. I found another rock and picked it up and drew my arm back again.

  “I can’t walk home like this!” I screamed. I was shaking, my heart was pounding, and I gripped the stone so hard I thought my fingers would break. My skull was on fire. I stared at him and let out a long wordless cry as I prepared to throw the second rock. He looked at me, leaning to one side like an old rheumatic.

  He turned to two of the workmen who were standing nearby, watching open-mouthed.

  “You! Give him your shoes!” the boy said. He tried to intimidate them by shouting, but he couldn’t speak properly. He took a few steps towards them and brandished the iron bar. The workmen drew back but stayed with their carts. Then the boy lunged forward and brought the iron down onto the cart handle, just an inch from one man’s hand. The workman cried out and stepped away then quickly kicked off his shoes and brought them to me.

  He approached me crouching, with his free hand raised protectively to his face. He dropped the shoes in front of me. I still had the rock in my hand. The Hunan boy ran as soon as I picked up the shoes.

  The shoes were too small for me. They were made of cloth that stretched only a little, and my heels stuck out over the backs. Leuk offered me his.

  “We can swap every hour,” he said, but I said there was no point in both of us having sore feet.

  It was late and I didn’t think we would get far, so we decided to spend the night in the village. We walked warily through the few streets, looking for someone who might take us in. It began to rain. Leuk wondered if the girls had been here before us. I thought of Wei-Ming and how she used to play in the rain in our courtyard, and I stuck my tongue out to catch a few drops.

  We found a kind of inn, though it was shabby and dirty and there seemed to be no one there. We peered around the building. A small yard held a handful of stunted chickens pecking over a pile of kitchen refuse. An old man stuck his head out a window and scolded us, telling us to leave his birds alone.

  “I’m sorry, Master,” I said. “We’re looking for a place to sleep.”

  He came out a side door and looked at us, trying to make sense of how two unwashed, long-haired boys had been deposited into such neat clothes.

  “You didn’t steal those from this village,” he said watchfully. “Did you steal them from a school?”

  I didn’t like being accused of stealing, but if I told the truth I was afraid he would give us away to the Japanese if they appeared, so I said yes.

  The rain was coming down harder and thunder pealed in the distance. Leuk didn’t like storms. I asked the old man again if he had a place for us to stay. He sized us up again.

  “One night only, and you leave first thing,” he said. “Too many people on the road.”

  I thought of the girls. I described them and asked if he’d seen them. He searched our faces again and brought us in. Once we crossed the threshold, he told us he was called Mr. Ho.

  In the grey-tiled kitchen, he turned to his wife, an old woman whose back curved like a shrub. He asked her about the girls. They muttered back and forth to each other as though disputing an unpleasant task. Then she turned back to the small dome of cabbage she was chopping and he looked at us. He said the girls had passed through and were on their way to the city. He didn’t know their names. He said he’d heard something about a quilt factory, next to a temple where people took refuge.

  That night, it took me a long time to fall asleep and Leuk tossed next to me. All I could think about was the girls. I thought of getting up to ask Mr. Ho if he could tell me more, but he’d already done more for us than I’d expected. We lay on a straw mat under the kitchen table, covered by an old blanket smelling of barn.

  In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of far-off explosions and gunfire. I heard Mr. and Mrs. Ho shuffling around the house and testing the lock on their door, and after that I lay awake until morning.

  Our hosts seemed less forbidding in the morning, even kind. They asked us how we had slept, and we thanked them for taking us in. Then
Leuk said we must be going.

  “Stay one more night,” said Mr. Ho. “There was a lot of fighting close by last night. Nobody knows who or where, but there have been rumours of Chinese guerillas along the river.”

  My heart swelled at the news. In my head I played a scene like a newsreel, of Chinese men in crisp Nationalist uniforms, leaping up riverbanks and through the forest, meting out death to the soldiers of Japan, crushing them like a stampede of wild horses. I asked Mr. Ho where the river was and if we could see it.

  “Don’t be crazy,” he said. “The Japanese will be all over the place now. Stay here another day. You can help us out, and if it clears tomorrow, I’ll show you the way to the ferry. It’s the safest way for you.”

  I didn’t want to delay finding Yee-Lin and the girls, but Leuk was very worried. “Listen to him, Chung-Man. I don’t want to go out there if the Japanese are searching the village.”

  So we stayed another day and night. We helped clean out the chicken coop and Mrs. Ho fed us rice porridge with pickled eggs and sour cabbage. Mr. Ho ate very little and sat at the table watching us as we devoured the food. Leuk said we would help some more with the yardwork. Mr. Ho waved him off.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s late. Have a good sleep, and if it’s safer tomorrow, I’ll show you out.”

  We thanked them, and after Mrs. Ho cleaned up, we pulled our mat under the kitchen table again and fell asleep.

  The next morning, Mr. Ho woke us. He said it had been quiet all night.

  I rolled up the straw mattress, tied it with a string, and put it away in the corner. Mrs. Ho made tea and reheated some of the porridge for Leuk and me. Again, Mr. Ho sat with us but didn’t eat. He had a small cloth bag in one hand.