Little Lily. Chapter 15. The Lizard, the Soldier, and the Sentinel

The stone remembered the morning.

It lay on the very edge of the barely discernible path, ingrown into the rich red earth on one side, and on the other—flat, broad—facing the rising sun. The boulder absorbed the first ray with the same greedy, silent, all-consuming avarice with which it had absorbed all previous mornings here on this island, thousands of dawns before people appeared in the jungle, and thousands of dawns after they would leave. The stone was cut through with veins of white quartz, looking like lightning bolts frozen in time. Its surface—rough, covered with microscopic pits and grooves—still held the deep cold of the night, but deep inside it, the underlying, heavy heat of past days was already waking up.

On the stone lay a lizard.

It was small, gray-brown, with a long, elegant tail that curved away from its body in a perfect arc, like a phrase the observer hadn’t managed to finish. The emerald scales on its back caught the first slanting rays and turned them into dull, shimmering sparks, resembling scattered green sand. It lay absolutely motionless, spreading its mottled belly across the quartz fracture with that stoic, trusting diligence accessible only to creatures with cold blood. The lizard let the dawn into itself through its scales, through the thinnest bone plates of its skull, turning the solar heat into pure life, into an underlying readiness to vanish into a crevice in an instant if the world around it suddenly became unsafe.

But for now, the world was not unsafe. The forest breathed.

The lizard warmed itself and watched. Its round, bulging, amber eyes with vertical pupils registered reality with frightening, almost painful clarity. It saw every heavy drop of dew on the fuzzy underside of a wild pandanus leaf; it saw how a dry stalk of forest ginger slowly straightened after an invisible creature had passed over it; it saw the finest thread of a spiderweb on which three dried mosquitoes shimmered.

Suddenly, the vibration of the earth changed its usual rhythm. The lizard raised its head on thin little legs. It saw them.

Three figures were moving along the path below, in the green, wet cleft between the rocks, parting the heavy, damp leaves. They walked single file, bare feet stepping noiselessly on the soft, springy moss. First came the human cub—Hinata. He smelled of fresh dust, dry grass, and bird tracks. He moved confidently, like a beast born in these shadows. Behind him came two females. Their scents were much more complex—a mixture of wood smoke, iodine, bitter soap, and a strange, metallic human tension.

On the path, overgrown with creeping fern, the female with long dark hair—Yuriko—suddenly reached her hand backward. Without turning around, simply reached out, knowing exactly where the second one was. Her fingers softly but confidently clasped the wrist of Miko—the one following behind with a heavy canvas sack on her shoulders. In this touch, there was no fear of the forest. It was the movement of two branches intertwining for stability in the face of a storm. For a second, their steps slowed. Their eyes met—long, deep, full of unspoken, thick human meanings that were inaccessible to the lizard, but it felt an instantaneous change of heat in the air. The heat around them became denser, sharper. Miko did not pull her hand away. She squeezed Yuriko’s fingers a little harder, convulsively, answering this fleeting confession, and they walked on, through the green, stifling twilight, holding on to each other.

The lizard blinked its transparent membrane, absorbing the heat of the growing day, and froze again, becoming part of the stone. The world was simply the world.

The path finally disappeared at the third kilometer, dissolving into a sea of ferns.

The air here was different—thicker, darker, wetter. The crowns of the banyan trees closed overhead in a dense, impenetrable dome, and the sun penetrated inside only in rare rays, thin as needles, dropping golden spots like coins onto the wet moss. There was a draft of rotting leaves, wet purple clay, and something else—thin, sour, cave-like. Yuriko knew this smell all too well: the smell of a human body that hadn’t seen clean water or a roof in a long time. The smell of fear, eaten into the pores like paint.

“Quiet,” whispered Hinata, stopping by a huge, uprooted tree where the roots had formed a sort of cave. From above, the pit was covered by the thorny hide of a shrub. “It’s here.”

The boy parted the bushes. In that very second, a dry, distinct metallic clank tore through the damp silence of the jungle. It was the sound of a rifle bolt being cocked.

“Halt! Don’t move!” a hoarse, guttural voice, breaking into a falsetto, cut through the gloom. “Who goes there?! Answer, or I shoot!”

From the green thickets appeared the faceted barrel of an Arisaka. Long, thin, with the dark, flat tip of a bayonet-knife, which gleamed faintly and menacingly in the wet air. The blade trembled finely. Behind the barrel appeared a face—an obscenely thin man with sunken cheeks, covered by a stiff black beard in which rare white hairs glinted. His military shirt hung on him as if on a scarecrow. His eyes, inflamed and mad, darted between Yuriko and Miko.

Behind his back, on a bedding of dry leaves, lay a second soldier, motionless. From there, from the depths of the pit, came the heavy, sweetish, nauseating smell of rotting flesh.

“Don’t be afraid, Mr. Ozawa!” Hinata shouted ringingly, running forward and spreading his arms to the sides, like a small, dirty shield. “Lower your gun! They’re with me. These are my new moms! They will help. They were nurses.”

“Moms.”

Yuriko felt a thick, hot flush rapidly flood her cheeks, reaching all the way to her ears. Next to her, Miko froze, and on her pale cheekbones appeared the same unaccustomed, bright blush. They exchanged glances for a fraction of a second—frightened, embarrassed, but in this brief look there was so much warmth that Yuriko for a moment forgot about the bayonet in front of her face.

The rifle in the hands of the bearded soldier trembled. He slowly lowered the barrel, as if the weapon had lost all meaning in front of these girls. The dry, cracked lips of the military man parted:

“Are you… the Lily Princesses? From Himeyuri?”

“Yes,” answered Miko, instantly collecting herself. She dropped the canvas sack to the ground and knelt by the edge of the pit. “We are from the First Women’s Division. Our names are Miko Nishida and Yuriko Nakayama. We were nurses in the hospital at the Ihamigama cave. Sit down, Sergeant Major.”

The bearded soldier slowly sank to the ground, leaning his rifle against a root. His hands were shaking violently.

“I am Temotsu Ozawa,” he introduced himself hoarsely, rubbing his pus-filled eyes with dirty fingers. “Sergeant Major Temotsu Ozawa. And this is… Private Shiro Sakai. He broke his leg here in the forest three weeks ago. Fell off a rock when we were looking for water. Hasn’t gotten up since.”

Without a single word, Miko reached into the sack. Out came rolls of clean bandage, a bottle of potassium permanganate, soap, scissors, and wooden splints that Soma had carefully whittled the previous evening from a shell crate. With neat movements, she cut the black trouser fabric, stiff with dirt and blood, on Sakai’s leg.

Yuriko suppressed the nausea rising to her throat, helping her friend. The wound that opened up was terrifying. The fracture was compound; the shin was swollen up to the knee, the skin had taken on a violet-blue, dead hue, and thick greenish-yellow pus oozed from the torn, inflamed leg. Sakai groaned without opening his eyes, his body convulsing at the touch of the gauze soaked in potassium permanganate. The liquid turned into a brown, murky foam.

“We will wash it and apply a splint,” Miko said quietly, in an even voice, methodically placing clean gauze soaked in Hisa’s herbal ointment onto the wound.

“But without penicillin…” she said slowly. “A scalpel and potassium permanganate will only delay the inevitable. Sepsis has begun. Without a real hospital, he will lose his leg. And in a few days, his life.”

Ozawa remained silent, clutching his head with dirty hands bearing black nails.

“He needs surgery,” Yuriko added, approaching the Sergeant Major. “A real hospital with an X-ray and surgeons. The war is over, Ozawa-san. You know that. The Americans will cure him and feed him. They won’t torture you, we saw it ourselves. We were also found in the jungle. It’s better to surrender… But you are the senior officer—you decide.”

The Sergeant Major didn’t raise his head. He looked at Miko’s hands. She was applying the even splints to the shin on both sides of the fracture, binding them with white bandage—evenly, not too tight, not too loose, the way only she knew how. And with every turn of the clean gauze, the mangled leg slowly began to resemble something that belongs to a living person. This whiteness of the bandage was the most peaceful, cleanest sight Ozawa had seen in the last year.

“All right,” he said after several long minutes. His voice was absolutely empty, burned out from the inside. “We will surrender.”

Yuriko slowly exhaled the air she had been unconsciously holding. Miko tied the last knot on the bandage and stood up, brushing off her knees.

“Are you alone here?” she asked, wiping her fingers with a clean rag.

“Yes,” the Sergeant Major answered quietly. He slowly raised his hand and pointed somewhere deep into the thicket, behind the bushes of wild ginger. “The rest are over there…”

Among the fern thickets, ten paces from the pit, the ground was uneven. Four neat, even mounds of red earth stood out against the dark forest humus. Graves. Small, abandoned, without names or markers—just four mounds on which lay rusted, shrapnel-pierced Japanese helmets. The young, juicy-green forest grass was already beginning to eagerly sprout through them, taking the dead back into the earth.

Ozawa turned away, hiding his eyes.

“Let’s carry him,” Miko said curtly, grabbing the canvas bag.

Private Peterson was chewing gum, leaning his back against a sandbag heated by the evening sun at the entrance to the American military commandant’s office. The day dragged on lazily, dusty and unbearably boring. The war on Okinawa had ended long ago, and his only task was to stand at this checkpoint and make sure heavy army trucks didn’t run over locals on the sharp turn of the road. From the heat and dust, his shirt clung to his shoulder blades; it smelled of rusted iron and dry grass.

Peterson lazily slid his gaze along the empty dirt road and suddenly froze, stopping chewing. Out of the shimmering, dusty haze, a strange, almost ghostly procession was approaching the post.

In front walked a small barefoot boy in a torn shirt, who spun underfoot like a loyal puppy. Behind him moved three people, heavily, dragging their feet with difficulty. A girl in a green work coverall—too large for her, with the rough letters USACE on the back—and a dirty Japanese soldier with a thick black beard were carrying a third person. The wounded soldier could barely stay upright; his face was the color of wet cement, and he dragged one leg, which was fitted with a crude wooden splint wrapped in a surprisingly clean white bandage. Even from several dozen yards away, a heavy, sour smell of pus and rotting leaves came from this group.

Bringing up the rear was a second girl. Peterson instinctively straightened up and took his rifle off his shoulder, feeling his partner in the bed of the jeep tense up.

This second girl—thin, pale, with short, unevenly cut hair and a straight, almost unbending back—carried a heavy bundle on her shoulder. Behind her back, secured by a canvas strap, dangled several Japanese Arisaka rifles with fixed bayonets.

The procession stopped three meters from the checkpoint. Yuriko, who was bringing up the rear, slowly, without sudden movements, with a groan of relief, threw the bundle off her shoulder. The weapons fell with a dull, heavy metallic clank right into the red roadside dust at Peterson’s feet. The bayonets gleamed faintly in the sun.

“We are not leaving them in the jungle,” Yuriko said in broken but distinct English, breathing heavily and wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She pointed to the wounded Sakai: “He needs hospital. Broken leg. Very bad infection.”

Peterson was taken aback. He shifted his gaze from the dropped rifles to the exhausted, half-dead Japanese soldiers who stood with their eyes fixed on the ground, and to these two Okinawan girls who looked at him without fear.

“We are from Mawashiasato,” added Miko, whose trembling, tired voice sounded surprisingly soft, with neat, bookish intonations. “Sergeant Ren Kimura and Miss Umi Sanchez know us. We are the schoolteachers.”

The sentry blinked, digesting what he had heard, and then quickly turned and shouted to the duty medic sitting in the shade on the porch of the commandant’s office building:

“Hey, Doc! Drag the damn stretcher and the guys with water out here! We got… surrenderers here. And it looks like it’s the teachers from the local school!”

They returned home late in the evening, when the red-hot sun had finally slid behind the line of hills, leaving behind only a thick, violet twilight and the smell of cooling clay. Kohaku was waiting for them on the threshold of the shack; the house smelled deliciously of boiled rice and smoke from the hearth. Hinata, unbearably tired from the forest trek but proud of a duty fulfilled, collapsed onto the sugar sacks in the corner and fell asleep instantly, not even taking off his shoes or waiting for dinner.

Soma sat on the threshold. He measuredly ran a whetstone along the blade of his cleaver and waited silently. He didn’t ask what had happened in the forest. He simply raised his eyes, looked at his sister, at Miko, at their tired but calm faces—and his hand with the whetstone froze for a second. This silent understanding was more than enough.

At dinner, Yuriko barely touched her food. She slowly chewed the bland rice, looking at the kerosene lamp that trembled and smoked, casting long, moving shadows on the plywood walls of their house. Before her eyes still stood those four uneven mounds of red earth among the tall forest ferns, on which rusted helmets lay.

After dinner, when Kohaku went to wash the cups at the well, Soma remained sitting on the threshold, peering into the darkness. Miko settled on the edge of the wooden bench, methodically washing the medical instruments in a weak iodine solution. Yuriko walked over to her and stopped, looking at the darkening wall of the jungle outside the window.

“Four mounds,” Yuriko said quietly but firmly. Her left palm with the deep crescent-scars instinctively clenched into a fist. “Without names. Without crosses. Just wild earth that takes away their memory. And grass.”

Miko stopped sorting the scissors. The water in the jar splashed quietly.

“There could be a dozen of them. A hundred. Thousands all over the island,” Yuriko continued, and a string, stretched to the limit, rang in her voice. “In the jungles, in the fields, in the caves, at the bottom of the ocean. Okinawans. Japanese. Americans… What difference does it make now? They all stayed here, under this brown clay. Without names, without memory. A year will pass, and nothing will be left of them but white bones in the grass.”

She turned to her brother and friend:

“We have to bury them. For real. Not the way this indifferent forest buries them. With names—if we can find out from the survivors. With stones instead of headstones—if names can’t be found. Okinawans, Japanese, Americans—everyone we can find in these thickets. Every person… Every single one. We can’t let them remain just mounds that people trample underfoot.”

Soma raised his head. His stern face in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp seemed heavy, hewn from stone, but deep in his dark eyes something shifted painfully. He remembered the Philippines. Manila. Another red-hot land, other jungles and the graves of his comrades, which there was no one to dig back then.

“Who’s going to look for them and dig the earth?” he asked hollowly, shifting his weight onto his wooden prosthesis.

“We will,” Yuriko answered, looking her brother straight in the eyes. “And the children. We will make it part of our school. It will be our main lesson. A lesson in memory. Let them know that under every path they run barefoot on today, lies someone who was once alive and loved this world too. We will teach them to respect death.”

Soma was silent for a long time, listening to the pandanus leaves rustling in the wind. Then he slowly, heavily nodded:

“All right. I’ll get good shovels and spades. Saw some at the resellers at the Makishi market. I’ll bring them by the end of the week.”

Miko raised her eyes from the first aid kit. She looked at Yuriko—openly, evenly, with all that deep, ringing tenderness that was born between them on the morning path. Miko reached out and confidently placed her palm over Yuriko’s clenched fist. It was a silent agreement that required no extra words.

“I’ll help,” Miko said quietly. “We will write down every name Ozawa or the others manage to remember. On white paper. In clear characters. So they don’t disappear in the dark.”

Yuriko nodded and sank onto the bench next to her. Their shoulders pressed tightly together, giving each other long-awaited warmth. Behind the plywood wall of the paper house, the sleeping Hinata breathed evenly and deeply. And on the sweet potato beds, the night ocean wind rustled quietly.

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