Little Lily. Chapter 12. The Beetles

The school had sprung up on the wasteland where their real one had once stood—the First. Girls’. High.

Nothing remained of the former building but a melted, crumbling piece of the brick foundation, half-sunken into the dry grayish-brown soil, and a smell deeply embedded in the earth itself—burnt lime, scorched cement, and some muffled, ancient decay. Yuriko sensed this smell every time she set her bare foot on that scorched patch of earth. It was the scent of memory, the physical trace of what had once been called walls, desks, and blackboards. Touching this place made her heart clench, just as an old, deep bruise aches before the weather turns.

American soldiers had helped stretch a massive khaki canvas tent here, securing it on thick bamboo poles. The tent was old, battered, thoroughly soaked in machine oil, gasoline, and that harsh, bitter army compound that eats into the fabric for years and cannot be weathered away by any ocean storm. During the day, a stifling, thick heat lingered under the canvas, smelling of scorching sailcloth and hot dust, but on rainy days, this rough roof offered protection, and at night, it held in the meager warmth of a campfire. For the village, this tent had become a symbol: a roof meant everything. A roof meant a school. A roof meant the right to a future.

Under the tent, on mats that Kohaku had woven from wild river reeds, sat the children.

There were no longer thirty of them, but nearly fifty. They gathered from all corners of the ruined district—not only from Mawashiasato, but from the neighboring villages: Nishihara, Yaese. Grubby, barefoot, with scratched knees, wearing oversized burlap shirts, they carefully clutched fragments of charcoal in their fists instead of pencils. They arrived at dawn and stayed until dusk. Yuriko and Miko stood before them, turning the chaos of a scorched, war-torn island into orderly, comprehensible rows of numbers and syllables.

Mathematics was savingly honest and straightforward. It held no half-tones and no orders from headquarters.

“Three machine-gun shell casings,” Miko said, holding the dully gleaming brass cylinders Hinata had found by the road in her palm. “And two more machine-gun shell casings. How many is that together?”

“Five!” the children’s chorus exhaled in unison.

“Good. And if the Americans take four out of ten shell casings, how many are left?”

“Six!”

“Hinata, don’t chew on the shell casing.”

“I’m not chewing! I’m checking if it’s real!”

Ringing childish laughter echoed under the tent, along with the patter of bare feet and the dry, rhythmic rustle of fifty pieces of charcoal against gray overseas cardboard. This sound reminded Yuriko of the rustle of the first, long-awaited autumn rain.

Grammar restored to mutilated words their original, peaceful meanings. Water. Home. Rice. Sun. Mother. These were words that the war had filled to the brim with blood, ash, and a cave-dwelling fear. Water, in which people drowned; home, which had burned to the ground; rice, which had been absent for months; the sun, which ruthlessly scorched the wounded on the roads. Now, the children carefully traced the characters with charcoal on cardboard, as if washing these concepts anew of clinging ash and bleach. Mundane normalcy was returning through the tips of the children’s fingers. Yuriko felt how, in this ridiculous, absurd transformation of a wartime wasteland into a classroom, a small but supremely important meaning of her present life was being born—that very anchor holding her here and now.

Yuriko’s brother, Soma, came to the school every day after noon.

In the morning, he worked at home. His wooden prosthesis, bound by a dark iron ring, drove into the damp earth of the vegetable garden with a dull, measured thud: thump… thump… thump. Kohaku, standing on the threshold, often froze, listening to this heavy step. In the sweet potato beds, Soma left deep round holes next to the footprints of his mother’s bare feet. He weeded the soil, repaired the leaky tin roof of their shack, hauled water from the well. He did everything in silence, with that sparse, grim concentration characteristic of people who had forgotten how to speak about their pain. The pain went into his hands, into his tense back, into his movements. He smelled of fresh cedar shavings, cheap tobacco, and a dense, tangible silence. This silence had its own woody, damp scent—like the smell of a board that had been sawn for a long time but never finished, leaving its edges rough and exposed.

After noon, Soma would appear at the school tent. He brought along an ax, a saw, and a hammer, laid them out on the burlap, and began knocking together benches and tables out of sawn-up ammunition crates. His movements were precise, sparse, and frighteningly mechanical.

Soma felt like a restless ghost who, by some tragic mistake, had been given back a solid, heavy body. He was the only adult man with a wooden leg in this fragile world of women and children. Sometimes, sitting on an overturned cartridge box and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the dirty sleeve of his shirt, he would stare at his sister intently for a long time.

He saw Yuriko standing before the children, and he noticed what remained hidden from others. Yuriko’s gaze often slipped past the makeshift blackboard and cardboard—toward Miko. Soma saw how this gaze lingered on her friend’s thin, charcoal-stained fingers, on her short-cropped hair, on her straight, almost stone-like back, on the way the pale light of the canvas fell across her cheekbone. In this long, quiet contemplation, her brother read an absolute, ringing devotion that surpassed ordinary friendship. It was the look of a survivor who, amidst a churning, shattered ocean, had found her single, unbreakable anchor—one specific person for whose sake it was worth continuing to breathe.

Soma noticed this, silently put another nail in his mouth, raised his hammer, and continued to pound the boards. He asked nothing. He knew that the war had melted down and turned to ash all former laws and decencies, leaving people only the right to cling to one another. Every bench he nailed together was his mute way of saying: “I am here. I see it. I accept it.”

But whenever neighbors or the girls themselves tried to question him about the Philippines, about Manila, or about exactly how he had lost his leg, Soma instantly withdrew into himself. His face turned to stone, becoming an impenetrable mask, and his gaze went straight through his interlocutor, fixing upon the horizon where the faded sky merged with the ocean. His lips pressed into a thin white line. The Philippines was a locked, walled-up room in his head, and he had long ago thrown the key to it into the deepest depths.

The October wind was noisily shifting the heavy edges of the canvas when two people arrived at the school.

Yuriko was standing with her back to the entrance, tracing the character for “mountain” with charcoal. Her hand was smoothly drawing the three vertical lines when the air behind her changed. The density of the space faltered, as if a thin trickle of ice-cold water had run between her shoulder blades. She turned around.

At the entrance to the tent stood two girls. Yuriko didn’t recognize them right away. Their faces were gaunt, drawn down to the lines of bone, their skin had taken on an unhealthy, earthy hue, and their hair was chopped into uneven, jagged tufts—as if it had been hacked at with shards of glass or a blunt knife. But both were wearing faded, roughly darned remnants of school hakama. A fabric that Yuriko knew down to the last knot.

Seiko and Usagi. Surviving students from the Himeyuri Corps.

They approached quietly; their bare feet left almost no prints in the dry dust. Yuriko hastily handed the piece of charcoal to a senior student, nodded to Miko, and the four of them stepped aside, into the deep shade of a sprawling, half-burnt banyan tree. The tree trunk was monstrous—three arm-spans wide, with black, cracked bark from whose crevices oozed a thick, viscous white sap, resembling milk. Under the banyan, it smelled of rotting wood, moss, and that specific, unsettling decay that emanates from trees that have survived a fire.

The girls themselves smelled of dampness and a long, lingering fear. It was a cave scent, painfully familiar to Yuriko—sour, with a tinge of bleach, stagnant groundwater, and human despair.

“We found out you were here,” Usagi began quietly, not raising her eyes and nervously twisting the hem of her jacket into a tight spiral. Her fingers were trembling, her nails bitten down to the quick. “You opened a school. That… that is good.”

The word “good” hung in the viscous air like an awkward, alien object. Seiko cast frightened, sidelong glances toward Soma, whose prosthesis dug into the dirt with a dull thud as he leveled another board. Miko silently folded her arms across her chest, her scanning, medical gaze instantly seizing the essence of their visit: these two hadn’t come here for the school, nor for idle chatter.

“What happened?” Miko asked evenly, without emotion.

Seiko swallowed loudly, convulsively, as if a word were stuck in her throat. Her fingers dug into the fabric of her jacket so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

“The teacher,” she exhaled, and that short word dropped onto the red clay like a heavy, ice-cold stone. “Minato Kobayashi. He’s returned.”

Yuriko felt as if the ground had given way beneath her feet. A dry electric wave ran from the back of her head down to her tailbone, paralyzing her muscles. The Ihamigama Cave. The heavy, cool ceramic grenade in her palm. The smell of carbolic acid, of rotting flesh. The mad, feverish glint of round spectacles in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. The voice screaming: “You are daughters of the Emperor! You must die with honor!”

“We know he’s alive,” Miko’s voice remained outwardly calm, but Yuriko saw how tightly her jaw clenched, and how a stubborn vein throbbed on her cheekbone. “The Red Cross informed us while we were still in the camp. He was in the hospital, wounded.”

“He’s not in the hospital anymore,” Usagi shook her head, and in her dark eyes reflected a sticky, unyielding, purely childish panic. “He was discharged. And he lives quite close by. In the village over the hill, with his sister—the one who married a farmer from Nagato. We saw him yesterday by the well.”

The white drops of banyan sap fell slowly, heavily onto the dirt at their feet, leaving round marks on the brown earth that looked like pale, blind stars.

“He leans heavily on a cane,” Usagi continued hurriedly, her voice breaking, as if rushing to rid herself of this information like poison. “He has terrible scars on his face. One massive one—from his forehead straight across his right cheek down to his chin. And his left arm… it doesn’t move at all, he wears it in a sling made of dirty linen. But it’s definitely him. We recognized him by his glasses. He still wears those same round glasses. Only one lens… it’s cracked crisscross.”

Round glasses. Cracked glass. The girls fell silent. Having told this, they seemed to have shifted an unliftable, suffocating burden onto Yuriko and Miko’s shoulders, and now fearfully awaited their reaction. But there was no answer. Hanging in this silence were all the unspoken questions: What do we do now? How do we live near a man who sent them to their deaths, yet survived himself, saved by American doctors? Can this be forgiven?

“Thank you,” Miko cut off the silence dryly. Without judgment, without emotion. She merely registered the fact.

After speaking a little more about trivial things—about the issuance of rationed rice and the new well in the north—Seiko and Usagi left. They dissolved into the evening haze as quietly and unnoticeably as they had appeared, leaving behind only the faint, sour smell of that cave-born fear.

Yuriko and Miko headed home in the thick, blue twilight.

They walked in silence, shoulder to shoulder, barefoot on the cooling clay that still held the heat of the day. The air filled with smoke from the neighbors’ hearths—the peaceful, gray smoke of boiling sweet potatoes. It was as if the island were letting out a slow, agonizing exhale after a long, drawn-out breath. Miko walked with an inscrutable face, and Yuriko knew: her friend was currently drawing mental lines, building a plan, deciding what to do with this news. Yuriko did not rush her. She waited for Miko to speak up herself, when her internal plan was finally ready.

The house met them with the soft, trembling light of a kerosene lamp. The plywood walls, assembled from American crates, creaked softly in the wind, resembling the rustle of an old paper folding screen. Kohaku stood by the table, her broad, calloused hands deftly sorting through damp sweet potato tubers.

“Where’s Hinata?” Yuriko immediately cast a glance at the empty, dark corner where the mattress made from sugar sacks lay. Whenever the boy was not home, the world felt fractured.

Kohaku wiped her palms on her canvas apron and nodded toward the darkness beyond the threshold.

“He ran off somewhere,” her mother replied calmly. “Even before the sun went down.”

“Did he at least eat after classes?” Miko frowned, peering into the tin pot.

“He ate a little, a couple of spoonfuls. Then he dug around in his bag, took a few army hardtacks, and vanished. I shouted after him, asked him not to go near the forest, but can you really hold back our navigator? He’s like the wind.”

Yuriko stepped to the threshold and peered into the blackening jungle. The forest breathed with its immense, hollow, rustling life, ticking with millions of insects. The boy, who had grown up in the thicket, had gone back again to where he felt like the master. There was no anxiety—Hinata knew these thickets better than any cartographer. He would return. He always returned.

“Eat,” Kohaku said quietly, setting the steaming sweet potatoes on the table. “We’ll talk later.”

They ate in utter silence. Chewing and swallowing hot, earth-scented food meant affirming their presence in this world. It was a simple, tangible facet of normalcy: table, mother, lamp, food. Yuriko felt how, with every swallow, the suffocating numbness brought on by the news of Kobayashi receded a little.

In the night, the damp ocean wind was suddenly replaced by a parching, dense heat.

Yuriko lay on the mat between Miko and Hinata, who had returned as imperceptibly as a wild cat does, bringing with him on his clothes the smell of flattened wet grass and forest berries. Yuriko lay with her eyes closed, but sleep would not come. Her body seemed to anticipate the sharp drop in pressure before a typhoon. The two pale scars on her left palm, which had long resembled the healed petals of a white lily, suddenly filled with a leaden, aching heaviness. They pulsated in time with some alien, ancient, furious heart.

Tamar returned instantly, without warning.

Space shifted with a single deep breath. Yuriko no longer felt the plywood walls—her consciousness found itself locked in an unfamiliar, tall body, parched by the heat. A bitter, powdery aftertaste of old salt and scorched bone settled in her throat, causing her lips to crack instantly.

She stood on the very edge of a gigantic, sheer precipice. The stone beneath her bare feet was white-hot; it radiated a dry, mineral heat. The air around her was yellow, murky with raised dust, and the sun overhead seemed like a massive copper disc, smelling of execution and red-hot iron. Down below the cliff gaped a dead, bare gray valley in which there was not a single blade of grass.

And in this valley, the beetles were swarming.

They had returned. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands—bronze, faceless, blindingly glittering under the merciless rays. Yuriko saw them through Tamar’s eyes and suffocated with horror at their terrifying, mechanical, inhuman precision. They did not shout, they did not fuss. They moved like elements of a single colossal mechanism, forming flawless lines and dense squares. Shield to shield, scale to scale—they seemed like the solid chitinous shell of a giant centipede grinding up limestone.

The beetles were building.

In the gray valley grew a monstrous, unnatural stone tongue. They dragged enormous logs, sacks of dirt, rubble, and boulders, piling up a gigantic ramp. The embankment—slowly, inexorably, the way water creeps, the way lava creeps, the way time creeps—rose higher day by day, biting into the flank of their impregnable cliff. The clatter of wood, the iron clank, and the hollow, guttural hum of millions of feet merged into a single vibrating drone that made the stone beneath Tamar’s feet tremble finely and continuously.

The beetles were in no hurry. They knew that time belonged to them. They were building a road to the sky in order to ascend to the summit and devour everyone who had taken shelter there.

There was no salvation.

Suddenly, the yellow sky over the valley split along an invisible seam with a dry crack. Through this fissure poured an unnatural, blinding white light—a sharp, crystalline light. High above hovered two pulsating, ringing white lights. From their inhuman radiance, the shadows on the cliff fell in the opposite direction, and the crescent-moon scars on her palm burned with a crimson, purplish fire. The beetles below froze for a moment like jammed gears, but then resumed their bone-grinding scrape with renewed vigor.

This iron clanking rose ever higher, filling her ears, squeezing the air from her lungs. In Yuriko’s consciousness, it merged in a strange, terrifying way with Usagi’s words from yesterday: “He leans on a cane, he has scars on his face, but it is him.”

The past was building its ramp. The name Kobayashi was growing like this stone embankment.

In terror, Tamar turned and ran deep into the fortress, toward her father, screaming of the impending end, but her cry was entirely swallowed by the hollow, guttural rumble of thousands of marching feet below.

The sharp, piercing cry of a night bird tore through the haze, as though ripping a dried bandage off an open wound.

Yuriko opened her eyes.

A pale, pearlescent morning light barely seeped through the cracks in the plywood walls. The room smelled of cooled ash, dampness, and boiled sweet potatoes. Beside her, Miko was breathing deeply and evenly. A little further away, curled up into a ball on the sugar sacks, slept Hinata—he had returned towards morning, bringing with him the scent of wet grass.

Yuriko sat up on the mat. Her body was wet with a cold, sticky sweat that smelled of iron. The clank of the bronze beetles still echoed in her ears, mingling with reality. The ramp from the past continued to grow. Yuriko looked at her left palm: the crescent moons were slowly fading, turning into pale marks.

At that moment, an absolute, crystal-clear knowledge came to her. The past will not leave on its own. It is building a road. And if they just sit at the top of their plywood shack and wait, this past will rise up, step over the threshold, and devour them alive. Their only chance for salvation was to meet it face to face.

The numbness of the night vanished. Fear gave way to a quiet, firm resolve.

Miko stirred, opened her clear, dark eyes, and looked questioningly at her friend. The morning light softly outlined her calm face.

“We will go see him,” Yuriko said quietly. But so firmly that the sound of her voice made the space within the house freeze.

Miko slowly propped herself up on her elbow, with a familiar gesture brushing a short strand of hair from her forehead. She studied her friend’s face long and intently. In her gaze, there was not a shadow of doubt or fear—only instantaneous, unconditional agreement. Her body, her own memory of the cave hell remembered the very same thing.

“To whom?” Miko asked. She needed this name to be spoken aloud, right here, in their morning house, so the nightmare would finally take on flesh and turn into a target.

Yuriko lowered her hand to the mat and said with certainty:

“To the teacher. To Sensei Kobayashi.”

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