Little Lily. Chapter 14. The Boy

The strangeness began on Tuesday, when the thick smell of freshly planed wood that continuously wafted from the school tent suddenly mixed with the sharp, rusty, metallic scent of an approaching ocean squall.

It happened at the very height of the midday lesson—at the moment when Miko, standing before forty pairs of expectant children’s eyes, was explaining the difference between the numbers “twelve” and “twenty.” Instead of an abacus, she used brass machine-gun casings, laying them out with a dry clink in a neat row on an overturned American ammo crate. The sound of children’s voices filled the canvas tent the way warm, still water fills a terracotta bowl: it was the monotonous, lulling rustle of collective counting, the whispering of characters, and the scrape of charcoal sticks against gray packing cardboard. The sun mercilessly pressed down on the canvas from above, turning the tent into a red-hot, stuffy, heavy-breathing membrane, and the heated tarpaulins gave off the old, bitter smell of machine oil that had eaten into the fabric’s fibers over the years of the war.

Yuriko didn’t notice the absence right away. She was standing at the very edge of the tent, helping the youngest students trace the character for “water” with charcoal—three wavy vertical lines, simple and natural as breath itself. At some point, she felt that the space in the third row, by the farthest bamboo pole, was strangely empty. Usually, Hinata, acting as the self-appointed class monitor, sat there with the most self-important air, and after lessons, he helped gather the casings back into the sack. Now, on the crumpled mat that still held the warmth of his thin body, lay only a piece of charcoal and a pencil stub. Hinata himself was gone. He had slipped away noiselessly, as if dissolving into the hot air.

Yuriko turned to Miko. Their eyes met halfway—this short, mute, instantaneous signal they had learned to catch over their months of living together in the caves. Miko gave a barely noticeable, fleeting shake of her head: not now. Not in front of the children. Later.

But when the story repeated itself the next day, on Wednesday, the anxiety—which had been light and transparent as a morning spiderweb—turned by evening into a sticky, tangible, cold lump at the very bottom of Yuriko’s stomach. The jungle that crept right up to ruined Mawashiasato was no place for children’s strolls. The island was still mortally dangerous: the thickets breathed with hidden threats—unexploded mines in the thick grass, rusted artillery shells, poisonous snakes, and stray dogs maddened by hunger.

“We need to talk to him,” Miko said firmly, washing coal dust from her hands at the stone well just as the sun touched the tops of the hills. Her voice sounded dry and even, like the snip of surgical scissors. “No evasions. A clean slate.”

Yuriko nodded silently, looking at the darkening, quieting edge of the forest.

The four of them waited for him. Kohaku made a point of not lighting the kerosene lamp, and the plywood house was filled to the ceiling with the thick, violet, shifting shadows of the October evening. In the hearth, baked sweet potatoes were slowly cooling with a barely audible hiss, filling the room with a sweetish, dense, domestic aroma that now seemed almost like a mockery of their tense, ringing anticipation. Soma sat by the threshold, his wooden prosthesis—bound with an iron hoop—resting motionless on the packed dirt floor. He methodically, with a barely noticeable scraping sound, sharpened his cleaver against a whetstone without looking up. Miko and Yuriko sat frozen on low benches. The silence in the shack was of such density that it seemed one could hear a solitary carpenter ant crawling along the old rafters.

Hinata appeared when the first sharp and cold stars, like needles, had already broken through the inky sky, and the village was finally steeped in thick blue twilight.

The boy entered sideways, trying to appear unnoticeable, literally rubbing his back against the doorframe. In his hands, he carefully carried something tightly clutched—tiny, white, crumpled. His three-button shirt reeked of damp earth, mold, and a strange, sharp, suffocating smell of rotting forest leaves—the very smell Yuriko remembered all too well from her wanderings. The boy’s knees were covered in fresh, still-wet purple clay, and on his right cheek glared a thin scratch from a thorny bush. His voice, when he spoke, sounded unusually quiet, almost soundless—the way children speak when they know for sure they are guilty and hope that if they speak quietly enough, punishment can be avoided.

“Good evening,” Hinata mumbled without raising his head, and his small dirty heels tapped nervously against each other: tap-tap, tap-tap. An unconscious, frightened rhythm.

“Good evening,” Yuriko answered, sliding off the bench into a crouch to be at his eye level. “Come here. Sit down.”

The boy obediently perched on an overturned ammo box. His bare feet didn’t reach the floor and dangled forlornly in the air.

“Hinata,” Miko took a step forward, her arms strictly crossed over her chest. Her voice remained as even as a taut thread. “You ran away again right in the middle of a lesson. You leave every day and only return in the dark. You don’t say where you go. And you are taking things from the house.”

The boy flinched. His dangling heels instantly stopped. His lower lip jutted out stubbornly, his shoulders tensed, turning his little figure into a small, impregnable fortress.

“Why do you need them?” Yuriko asked quietly, peering into his round, frozen eyes.

Hinata remained silent, frantically crumpling the dirty hem of his shirt with his fingers.

“The bandage,” came a hollow sound from the darkness of the corner. Soma set aside the cleaver. The metal clinked against stone. “You took a clean medical bandage. From those sterile supplies Sergeant Kimura brought for the school. What do you need clean gauze for in the forest, navigator?”

In the child’s huge, dark eyes froze that specific, breathless expression with which wild forest animals look at a hunter: not defiance, not fear, but absolute, concentrated attention, ready at any second to turn into flight.

Then Soma slowly stood up from his place. With a heavy, dull thud—thump—his wooden leg struck the floor, making the boy pull his head into his shoulders. The soldier walked over to Hinata and knelt before him on his healthy knee. Soma smelled of strong tobacco, cedar shavings, and that reliable, tired masculine strength that Hinata lacked so much.

“Listen to me, Hinata. Look at me.” Soma reached out his huge, rough palm and gently touched the boy’s shoulder. “We are your family here. Do you understand? A real, actual new family. And a family shouldn’t have secrets that can get someone killed. The forest is full of iron that explodes. If you’re in trouble, or someone else is in trouble—just tell us. Tell us. We won’t scold you. But we have to know.”

The boy stared unblinkingly at Soma for a long time. Then he shifted his gaze to Yuriko. To Miko. To Kohaku, who stood frozen by the washing block with a wet cup in her hands, nodding encouragingly and understandingly from the darkness. Four pairs of eyes. Four people who hadn’t abandoned him. Who waited for him every evening by this hearth.

Hinata’s little fortress cracked. He let out a heavy, shuddering sigh from his full child’s chest, pulling his thin shirt tight over his protruding collarbones, sniffled, and began to speak. His voice sounded flat, disjointed, with that particular childish incoherence with which one recounts nightmares, confusing cause and effect and not fully understanding exactly which detail might prove dangerous to adults.

“It was recently… a couple of weeks ago,” he began, squeezing the edge of his shirt tighter. “I saw a man. He was very, very skinny and dirty. Really scary. He was climbing around in someone else’s garden, over there on the very edge of the village, where the old grandma with the stick lives. He was digging in the dirt with his hands. By himself. Like this—digging and digging, looking for something. Sweet potatoes, probably. Or radishes. He looked very sick, he was even swaying. I thought it was a thief, so I followed him. Very, very quietly, like a cat. He didn’t hear me, because he kept looking back and limping.”

The boy caught his breath, gathering words like one gathers pebbles scattered on the floor.

“He went deep into the jungle. Out there, past the big vat of rotten water, where the stream comes out from under the rocks. There’s an old, deep pit there under the roots of a big tree. I hid behind the wild pandanus bushes and watched. There are two of them there. Soldiers.”

“Soldiers?” Kohaku echoed quietly, involuntarily pressing her hand to her chest.

“Yes. In uniform, only it’s all torn, black from dirt and smells burnt. One is really bad. He lies on the dry leaves and moans all the time. Softly, like this: ‘oooh-oooh,’ so the Americans don’t hear. His leg is… broken, probably. It’s really, really crooked, swollen, and turned blue like a plum. And it stinks real bad. And the second soldier, the one who was looking for food in the garden, he’s big, with a black beard, but he has white hairs on his head, like a grandpa. He sits next to him. They don’t have anything, just one iron canteen and dirty rags. The one with the beard, he cries sometimes. I heard him. He lies there and cries. And then he stops. And then again.”

Yuriko felt her throat go dry. Miko stood motionless as a stone statue, only her fingers digging slightly harder into her own elbows.

“Are they Japanese soldiers?” Miko asked evenly.

“Yes,” Hinata nodded. “Their clothes are green. And one of them has a little iron knife hanging on his belt. But they aren’t scary, really! They’re just very, very sad. And hungry. I… I didn’t want them to die like the ones in the caves. I know what it’s like… when you’re alone in the forest and it’s scary. So I brought them food. Took it from our supplies. Their hardtacks, the army ones, the hard ones. And carried water in a tin can. I would come, quietly leave the food on a rock next to their pit, and run away right after.”

The boy stumbled, his face twisting convulsively, as if he had caught that forest smell again.

“And then… I got scared his leg would rot completely. I saw that in the forest before. Before you. When a wound rots, the person dies. And I… I took our clean bandage. The gauze. I tried to change his dressing. The old rag was all wet, black, and stinky. I took it off, and underneath… it was very scary. Everything was swollen. He screamed so loud when I touched it! But I said: ‘Don’t scream, mister.’ And he went quiet, because he understood I was helping. I wrapped it with the new bandage. Very, very carefully, just like Miko-nee taught me. She always says: you have to wrap it evenly, not too tight and not too loose, so the blood can flow. That’s what I did. But today, that mister with the beard caught my hand…”

Kohaku set down her cup.

“They caught a bird, a little one, boiled it in a can. And the mister gave me a leg. It was still warm when he caught it… But I didn’t eat it.”

“Why not?” asked Miko quietly, with a barely noticeable tremor in her voice.

“Because I felt sorry for the little bird,” Hinata lowered his head. “It was warm, you know. Alive.”

Yuriko closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, an image rose with frightening clarity: a child, an absolute orphan of war, kneeling in a damp forest pit before an adult man rotting alive, and carefully, with tiny fingers, winding a white gauze bandage. Doing it evenly. Not too tight and not too loose. Because he remembered. Because on this cursed island, he had no other answer to another’s pain.

The silence in the house became thick and heavy, like molasses. Soldiers of a non-existent army. Ghosts who hadn’t surrendered, hadn’t heard the Emperor’s voice on the radio, or were simply madly afraid to surrender to the Americans.

Soma exhaled slowly through his nose as he rose from his knee. His wooden prosthesis thudded dully against the clay once again.

“Tomorrow morning, at dawn,” he said harshly, in a military tone, shifting his gaze to his sister. “Hinata will take me to them. I’ll talk to them. If they’re ours, we have to get them out of the forest before patrols find them.”

“No,” Miko cut in. Her voice sliced through the twilight of the room like a blade. “Yuriko and I will go. If the wounded man has gangrene or an infection, he doesn’t need your conversation, Soma. He needs urgent medical attention. I know how to open, wash, and clean festering wounds; I saw it in the hospital hundreds of times. You have not. If you go alone, you’ll only bring them soldier talk. We will bring them a chance to survive and make it to the village on their own two feet. Hinata will guide us.”

Soma frowned, biting his lip in displeasure and shifting his body weight onto his prosthesis:

“This isn’t women’s work, Miko. They could be armed. Feral, desperate men in the forest are mortally dangerous; they could shoot out of fear.”

“One of them has a rotting leg, he can’t stand,” Miko parried adamantly, looking Yuriko’s brother straight in the eyes. “They won’t shoot. We can handle it. These are our patients, Soma.”

Yuriko stepped forward and stood next to her friend. Their shoulders touched:

“We will go together, brother. It’s the right thing to do. And tomorrow, you’ll be in charge of the school. You’ll run the classes instead of us while we’re in the forest.”

Soma blinked. His mouth opened, then closed, his face expressing the utmost degree of astonishment, as if he had been asked to dance in front of an American general.

“What?!” he practically choked on the air. “At the school? Me? What am I supposed to do with them, Yuriko? I’m not a teacher! I mix up your characters; I’ve forgotten half the signs. I’m a former soldier with a piece of wood instead of a leg. What am I going to tell them? How to dig full-profile trenches or how to clean the bolt of a Type 38 rifle?”

Yuriko allowed herself a brief, soft smile—for the first time during this long, exhausting evening. The tension in the room finally began to ebb.

“No trenches, Soma. Just the opposite,” she said quietly. “Teach them something useful. Something that will actually be handy in this new, broken life. Before the war, you were a cooper’s assistant, I remember. Your hands remember wood. Keep them busy with work. Give them a shop class. Show the boys how to hold a hammer properly so they don’t smash their fingers. How to drive a nail into a board so it doesn’t bend. How to use a hand saw without breaking the blade. How to whittle a sharp stake for a fence, how to tie a strong knot in a rope, how to fix a crumbling wall. All these children live among debris, Soma. If they learn to make at least something tangible with their hands, they’ll stop feeling like helpless victims. Give them this survival skill.”

Soma was silent for a long time. He shifted his gaze from Yuriko to Miko, and on his gaunt, prickly-stubbled face, slowly, with difficulty—as if an old rusty hinge were turning—appeared an expression Yuriko hadn’t seen since the moment of his return from captivity. It wasn’t a smile—it was something far more important. A tiny, barely discernible glimmer of newfound meaning. He had always worked with his hands, but he had worked silently, sullenly, seeing labor only as a heavy, loathsome necessity. And now his sister was telling him: these children need your hands. Your skill is not a relic of the past. It is their salvation.

“All right,” Soma grumbled hollowly, sheathing his cleaver. “All right. I’ll try. But if this kindergarten tears the tent apart or scatters into the bushes—don’t blame me.”

“They won’t scatter,” Miko replied confidently. “They have nowhere to run.”

Soma let out a short, dry chuckle. There was more warmth in that sound than in all the paragraphs of school textbooks. He looked at Hinata, who was sitting on the box, shifting his gaze from one adult to the other like a spectator at a tennis match. The boy’s shoulders finally relaxed completely, his back uncoiled. He had carried this colossal, unliftable burden—the secret of two men hiding in the dirt—for several weeks. And now he had finally shifted it onto strong, reliable adult hands.

Kohaku, standing by the well, wiped her hands on her apron, walked over to the boy, and gently took his tiny palm, drawing him inside the house:

“Go wash up, navigator. Wipe your feet clean. Then eat, and go to sleep. You have to get up early tomorrow—you’re leading the girls into the jungle.”

Hinata obediently followed her. At the very threshold, he turned and looked at Yuriko—with a long, deep, very unchildlike gaze, in which there was no longer any fear, nor guilt for the stolen bandages. Only absolute, pure trust: I told you everything. Now you know. Now everything will be right.

That night, Yuriko lay on the thin mat between Miko and Hinata and couldn’t close her eyes. The boy slept soundly, evenly, and deeply, curled up in a ball. In his sleep, his little fingers had firmly, convulsively grasped her index finger—this familiar, nocturnal, unconscious child’s gesture made Yuriko’s heart clench every time with aching tenderness. A six-year-old child who couldn’t walk past another’s suffering. A child who felt sorry for a warm, living bird. A child who had bandaged the rotting flesh of an adult man the way Miko-nee had taught him.

She thought about those two men who were currently freezing in a damp pit under the roots of a tree beyond the far hill. About the fact that tomorrow at dawn, she would see their faces. What would she feel? Anger? Pity? Sticky fear? These were Japanese soldiers. The very ones who had shot at Americans down to their last bullet, whom artillery had ground into mince on the island’s southern cliffs—and at the same time, the ones who had once been little boys just exactly like Hinata. With mothers exactly like theirs, who had once waited for them on the thresholds of distant paper houses in the prefectures of Yamagata or Kumamoto.

Next to her, Miko lay absolutely motionless, staring at the ceiling, and Yuriko knew for a fact: she wasn’t sleeping either. Miko never slept on the eve of something that required quick and precise decisions. She lay there, tensely listening to the night sounds of the island, mentally going through the contents of the school’s first aid kit: gauze squares, scissors, permanganate solution, clean soap, Hisa’s dry herbs. She was building geometry out of chaos, drawing up a clear plan of action. Because tomorrow morning she wouldn’t need to think or cry. Tomorrow, she would need to act.

Yuriko closed her eyes. The crescent-scars on her left palm remained silent. Outside the thin plywood walls of the house, the jungle rustled with its vast, damp, deep life, absolutely indifferent to human grief.

And out there somewhere, in the darkness beneath the roots, two men were waiting for dawn. They were eating dirty sweet potatoes dug up from a stranger’s garden, crying quietly so no one would hear. They didn’t yet know that the boy had told everything. They didn’t know that someone was already coming to them.

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