Once he had caught Jo and Kay at the side door handing food to a woman, a poorly dressed woman who had come silently begging, wet through with rain, hair plastered to her pale, nearly luminous face. He had yelled, “Get her out of here! What do you think this is, a brothel?” And they had seen her belly then, seen it round and firm, her dress so wet and drawn taut against it that they could see the outline of her belly button, turned inside out. They thought it strange that even he would be so vehement, so eager to cast her out into the darkness. The woman had looked at him with something like pity. They say all the great Madonnas were modeled after streetwalkers, after prostitutes paid for their time, to sit placidly with their bastard babies on their laps while painters created images for thousands to adore. This woman could have been one of them. Our Lady of Compassion. Our Lady of Grief. Our Lady of Sorrows.
Be careful of that man—that was all that was said, and then she had disappeared, snatching the roll from Kay’s hand, the apple from Jo’s. It wasn’t the nurses who had spoken, but the stranger, the cold, wet woman. Before she disappeared, she had warned them. She had known him. She had known.
NOT NOW, KAY pleaded with herself. Stop remembering. Stop thinking. Kay walked past the empty classrooms where, back when people had had the energy to achieve boredom, forty-six courses had been offered by interred professors. The library had once been active, with books—already infested with bedbugs—borrowed at five cents a copy; numerous committees had met there—the Health Committee, the Entertainment Committee, the Sanitation Committee with their “Swat-That-Fly” campaign. Kay walked by the rodent shed, now ominously closed by order of the Japanese. Without access to the chemicals and traps that had at least kept the population of vermin stable, it was now exploding. Mice and rats were everywhere, in the wards, in the showers. When Kay found a mouse drowned in her mush, she had just pushed it aside, after first carefully scraping the tiny bits of food off its side and eating them. Was there not enough death already without the Japanese promoting this as well? Rats brought fleas, and fleas carried typhus and plague and God knew what else their scientists had created in their laboratories. Kay shuddered at what the Japanese might consider “medical ethics,” or who might better qualify as “test subjects” for their experiments than expendable, “homesick” prisoners of war.
Kay thought again of the empty assurances made to the American women when they had first left Malinta. “Yes, you will get in truck. Yes, you will be with American GIs,” their captors had said, but then sent them to a civilian internment camp in Manila, away from their men, away from their work. They were ordered to scrub bathrooms like they were common washerwomen until their head nurse had finally made herself understood: they were nurses, highly trained. If the Japanese would not let them perform their duty for the U.S. Army, let them at least help the hundreds of sick civilians caught senselessly in the crossfire of war. This requisitioned college was where Kay and her fellow nurses had served now for three years. But the Japanese had never recognized the women as officers. How could they? They didn’t even recognize them as humans.
It was nearly time for the 1730 roll call when Kay spied a man sneaking surreptitiously from his shanty. She looked away quickly, as if even her gaze might give him away to the Japanese guards. As a primitive form of birth control, married men and women were not allowed in the same shack except between the hours of 1000 and 1400. Partners of pregnant women were either beaten or imprisoned or both.
Kay felt in her pocket and pulled out her meal ticket, a grubby scrap of paper that had to be produced and punched before she could receive her few ounces of food each day. Along the top were three rows divided into twenty columns, each row marked AM, NN, or PM for the morning, noon, and evening meals; along the bottom of the card was room for another twenty days. In the middle of the card, almost obliterated now by dirt and sweat, was a line for her name, her room and ticket numbers, and her signature; to the left of that the words “man” and “child” were neatly crossed out, leaving the single word “woman.” Kay remembered rather than read these words now; for several weeks, letters had either swum meaninglessly before her eyes or darted away quickly when she tried to focus on them.
Kay struggled to focus mentally too, to control her thoughts, but it got harder each day. She thought of Dot now. Of meeting her again when Kay first came to the Philippines. They had been through basic training together back home but hadn’t seen each other in months. Kay had bumped into her just as Dot came barreling out the hospital side door.
“Dottie,” Kay had exclaimed, grabbing on to her arm as the woman seemed intent on storming away. “Dottie Kimble, as I live and breathe.”
The woman looked up startled, almost frightened. Then recognition transformed her face.
“Kayak,” she said, using her pet name, crushing Kay in a massive bear hug.
“Of all the places to run into you,” Kay said, laughing. “What are you doing here?”
The woman’s eyes fell, her face flushed red.
“Where’ve you been?” Dottie changed the subject.
“Hawaii. You?”
“Wasting time out here. Nothing doing. I don’t think there’ll ever be a war.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, don’t you think?” Kay had laughed brightly.
“Depends who you’re fighting for.” Dot’s face had darkened. Then, in a quieter voice, “I’m—I’m headed home, Kay.”
“No! Not now! C’mon,” Kay had cajoled. “There are lots of good positions out here, and you’re the best nurse out of the lot of us. You could run lines with your eyes closed. Do you remember that time—”
A middle-aged nurse had stepped round the corner, her hair kinky in the tropical humidity. She had stared hard at the two women and then walked back deliberately, the way she had come.
The color had risen in Dot’s face again, but Kay hadn’t understood.
“You’ve got to stay in, Dot. We’re both out here now. Even if we never see any action, that doesn’t really matter. We could have a lot of fun together and—”
“Kay, I can’t—”
“Nonsense. I’m stationed here. Find me, and we’ll talk. I’m so glad I found you again.”
Kay gave her friend a hug.
“What’s wrong, Dot?” Kay asked as the tears streamed down the other woman’s face.
“Miss Kimble,” the frazzled, older nurse snapped. Kay hadn’t noticed her return. She had sidled up right next to them.
“Dot?”
“Good-bye, Kay.” Dot pulled herself out of Kay’s arms and ran down the dusty dirt alleyway, through the scrub grasses growing up in between the tire tracks.
Kay stood uncertainly for a moment, following the retreating form of her friend with her eyes.
“Do you know that woman?” the nurse asked. Kay didn’t like the way she emphasized “that woman.”
“Yes, an old friend of mine.”
The older woman snorted.
“And one of the finest nurses I’ve ever worked with.”
“I daresay,” the nurse said loftily.
“Hey, what’s wrong around here?” Kay took hold of the woman’s arm.
“Let go of me,” the woman said icily. “For all I know you’re just like her.”
“Like what?”
“I could have you reported. Have you discharged, like she was. Yes, that’s what your ‘friend’ was here for.”
“Discharged? You mean, dishonorably?”
“Yes. She’s dishonored her uniform and her profession.”
“What are you getting at? Dot’s the best—”
“‘Dot,’” the woman sneered, smoothing down the front of her white uniform. “I know you’re new here, miss, but I wouldn’t push your luck. I don’t care for that kind.”
“What kind?”
“Dykes.”
“What?”
The woman had left Kay there, open-mouthed, standing in the heat of the day. Could it be true, about Dot? You heard of such things�
�here as well as back home. Whispers, really. They said it wasn’t natural. They said they weren’t human. But they were human. Kay knew Dot. Kay loved Dot, everyone in training had. She was a good friend and an excellent nurse. Although imagining the lifestyle was beyond Kay—she couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it; she tried to but it stretched her mind too far—that didn’t change anything for her. She loved Dot. Not like the smug nurse had insinuated, but with a deep friendship. A bond. A type of love that lasted a lifetime. A love she was not ashamed of.
What had happened to Dot? They had sent her home, “weeded” her out, discharged her, dishonorably, tried to destroy her life. But Dot had gone home before the bombings, before the surrender. Dot had never retreated through Bataan, never cowered like a trapped animal in Corregidor. Dot had gotten out before she was shut up in Manila, like Kay, in a courtyard that stank of refuse and unwashed bodies and rotting food.
Kay thought about food. She always thought about food. There was never a moment when she wasn’t thinking about it—about the last thing she had eaten, about the next time she might eat. Last week she had found a banana and eaten it whole, skin and all. She remembered how squeamish she had been back in New York, tentatively touching the pungent anguilla marinata—marinated eel—to her lips. (Jo had brought it along for her to try at lunch break, and laughed at Kay’s screwed-up face and called her a sissy.) Kay thought of all the things she hadn’t previously considered food but would now eat in a heartbeat—tough camotes, an inferior type of sweet potato; dilis, a pathetic little fish, only an inch long; sapsaps, a slightly larger fish but one that rotted right away and was unfit for humans; they used to feed it to starving ducks, but now both sapsaps and ducks were gone. Gone too were all domestic animals and unfortunate strays, all leaves, roots, and weeds, anything organic, anything even remotely edible. The previous summer the Japanese had stopped removing garbage from the camp and the internees had had to bury it; but now it lay out in the open, where people poked at it uncertainly with sticks or the tips of worn shoes, looking for anything they could at least try to eat. People came to the hospital begging the nurses for a tablespoon of castor oil; they would smack their lips in satisfaction after swallowing the awful stuff, they were that starved for fat. The interred children were finally ordered away from the Japanese mess halls, under pain of death; even those callous soldiers did not relish eating their meals under the watchful eyes of tiny living skeletons.
Thinking of food didn’t help Kay, and yet she couldn’t think of anything else. Was there anything else she could do? Was there anything she had that she could barter with? Was there any way she could get a little more food and stay alive a little bit longer?
“You. Nurse. Come.”
Kay turned and saw a small group of her fellow nurses being rounded up by two Japanese soldiers holding rifles with fixed bayonets. She walked slowly up to them, raising her eyes questioningly at her fellow female officers, wondering if the time had finally come for the morphine vials they still carried in their hair.
No onlooker cried out in protest. No passer-by demanded to know where the women were being taken. No one came to their rescue, or even made eye contact with their captors, and the girls didn’t blame them at all. To do so would be foolish, would only hasten their own deaths. There were no heroics, and no heroes, in this internment camp. Or, if there were, they were the people who had the courage to wake up and do their duty every day, without hope of remuneration or rescue or even survival. The people who secretly possessed glass vials of escape but had, as of yet, refused to use them.
“You come with us. Now.”
They came. There was nothing for it. One of the nurses who worked on Kay’s floor reached out her hand and took hold of Kay’s finger, giving it a little squeeze before the guards could see her, dropping her hand almost instantly. Kay understood. She was saying good-bye. They were ushered into the main building, then through the main door, kept always locked, out onto a little lawn, incongruous and green in a city of brown stone and dirt and rubble.
“Line up,” came the barked order. One of the girls crossed herself slowly, as if she really meant it, as if she knew it would be the last time she would make that familiar gesture. They lined up in front of a massive, flowering vine, purple and fuchsia and obscenely beautiful in the slanting sunlight; lined up and squared their shoulders, and resisted the urge to look at the ground, at their feet, but looked up instead and met the unfeeling eyes of the enemy. Then the commander himself came out, walking briskly toward them in dress uniform, with a Filipino photographer following in his wake, clumsily carrying his equipment and apologizing and trying to keep up. So they were destined to become yet one more demoralizing image sent back to America—censored from the newspapers, of course, but seen by the military. News of their deaths might make the front pages but never these images, their bloody female bodies spread out in the green grass, arms and legs splayed awkwardly, tangled together in a mess of death and beauty and a clinging, blossoming vine.
“You will take one each.”
Kay was surprised. The Japanese were not known for distributing blindfolds to block out the sight of a firing squad.
She was handed, instead, a delicately designed china cup.
Each girl, in turn, was given the same; only the pattern differed—Royal Worcester, Wedgwood, Dresden, decorated with miniature roses, embracing nymphs, blues and golds and pinks. And each priceless cup was empty.
“We send a picture to your army, show them how well you are treated. Have tea party with officer.”
The commander came in, right among them, holding his own dainty teacup; he alone held a saucer as well. He looked at the camera, pinky raised slightly, impeccable, flanked by disheveled, starving women looking down into the bottoms of their valuable cups, worthless to them without the tea and cream and sugar that would have felt like a meal in itself, that would have helped keep them alive for another day. The obsequious photographer circled the group, bowing and scraping in between shots, smiling and bowing again and thanking the commander for the honor, for the privilege, for not killing him along with the rest of his family. Kay felt nothing, even as she watched the tears roll down the smiling man’s face. Then they were done; the cups were collected, and the girls herded back into the enclosure. It was over.
Roll was being called as they walked back into the courtyard; they had been gone longer than Kay thought. They took their regular places and stood silently, motionlessly. Around them, their fellow inmates looked at them, questions in their eyes, but even if it had not been roll call, they would not have been able to talk to them. Nurses could not talk to anyone but medical personnel, under penalty of death. Nurses could not wear pants or (worse) shorts, under penalty of death. Nurses could not speak to patients or outsiders or anyone; or do or say or be anything. Everything was forbidden, everything was under pain of death.
For a moment, Kay was angry—angry that she was still alive, listening to the ever-shortening list of familiar names being read and read and read again. Why hadn’t they killed her just now? Why hadn’t they killed her on Corregidor? Why had she been born at all? To know a few weeks’ happiness with a man she would never see again, a man who had made life precious and priceless and now, without him, made it even more pointless and hopeless? The names droned on—“Gallagher, Aimee. Gallagher, Thomas”—and she looked at the people around her—small children with broken arms slung in scraps of an old, patterned dress, since they had no plaster of paris to make casts; another new wet beriberi case she hadn’t noticed at the 0800 roll, the man’s arms nearly bursting through the sleeves of his tattered dress shirt; one of her fellow nurses, two rows away, starting to sway from sheer exhaustion, slumping, being grabbed roughly by the middle-aged women on either side of her, propping her up, holding her in position, trying desperately to avoid drawing attention from the patrolling guards toward themselves, toward their children.
What was the point of it all? Why not let them all go? Or why not ha
ve killed them all upon capture rather than call roll and make them stand like this for hours and hours until they starved to death or collapsed or went mad? It was mad. It was like a bad dream, or like a good dream dreamed by a sadist. The Japanese had found the most effective way to torture, to maim, to destroy the spirit and the body, all at once: filth and squalor and isolation and—above all else, beyond all else—starvation, always starvation. The girls had missed their evening meal while they were having their mock tea party on the lawn; Kay’s one ounce of meat, her five ounces of worthless rice or rancid mush seemed like a feast now that it was denied her. Without it, she was unsure she could survive the night. Or the rest of this day. Or the rest of this roll call. “Jackson, Jacobs, Jamison.” She was dying. She was dying and she couldn’t even sit down, she couldn’t even lie down and die because—why? Why couldn’t she die yet? Why couldn’t she crack open those vials? What fine thread still tethered her to Santo Tomas, to this world, to humanity itself?
An infant’s cry was heard coming from her hospital ward, two stories above. The cry went on and on, interminable, indomitable, floating down to them, the one conscientious objector who could not be silenced, who would defy injustice and inhumanity with his very life, with his unreasonable, reasonable insistence upon being heard, upon being real. The cry continued, resolute, full-throated, and something rose within Kay. She had delivered that baby this morning—among all that death, life had come, and Kay had helped usher it into existence. She had helped that child’s mother—had helped her, and two hundred other humans that day—each one of them equal, each equally deserving of compassion and decency and humane care, even if that was all Kay had left to give them. They were all starving, just as the death certificates had proclaimed. But Kay could see to it that, for as long as their bodies endured, her patients would not starve for goodness or tenderness, not while it was still in her power to lift. Or walk. Or even stand, motionless, for hours at a time. “Lambert, Landon, Langley.” The baby kept crying, and the sound kept Kay alive. It was as if he were screaming and crying and speaking out on her behalf, on behalf of them all, on behalf of all those forced into silence and submission. But not forever—Kay promised herself that—not forever. She could hold on a little bit longer. She would make it through roll after all. They were up to the L’s already.
The Fire by Night Page 9
