Little Lily. Chapter 4. The Anatomy of Pain

The first thing she felt was a hand.

Not a familiar one. Not the palm she knew better than anything in the world—thin, dry, hot—not Miko’s hand. This hand was different: large, heavy, in a thick cotton glove. It moved methodically, professionally, without hesitation and without pity: along her ribs, over her hips, across the folds of her dirty school skirt. The movements were functional. The hand was checking. The hand was searching for a hidden threat—ceramic death, a steel sphere. It didn’t care what the body beneath it felt. It had a task.

Yuriko threw her eyes open, preparing to scream, but the air stuck in her throat.

Above her, a couple of handspans away, a face loomed. And it was black. Not just swarthy or tanned—it was a deep, impenetrable black, gleaming with a violet bronze tint. The face was crowned with a netted steel helmet, from under which stiff curls escaped. The whites of his eyes against this skin seemed unbearably, frighteningly white. They looked at Yuriko with a calm, military attention.

Yuriko froze like a butterfly on a pin. The black man stopped searching the pockets of her hakama. With his teeth, he pulled the glove off by the fingertips, raised a bare dark index finger, and pressed it to his lips.

Quiet.

This gesture, ancient and universal, understood before the invention of the Tower of Babel, crossed the ocean between them. A finger to the lips meant “be quiet,” and “be quiet” right now meant “you are still alive.”

The soldier turned his head toward the exit of the shed and said hollowly in a guttural, barking language: “She’s clean too.”

Yuriko sat up slowly. Her hands went up on their own—palms open, fingers spread and trembling finely.

In the far corner of the shed, huddled against each other, sat Miko and Hinata. Miko was hugging the boy, hiding his face against her chest, her eyes empty from extreme tension. Around them stood three more men in green helmets. Their rifles pointed at the ground, but their figures alone filled the shed with a suffocating weight. Yuriko looked at their faces—young, pale, with beads of sweat on the bridges of their noses. And through her shock, she saw the main thing: the devils were afraid. Their shoulders were tense; they peered into the darkness of the corners as hunted as the girls themselves.

One of the soldiers, chewing something invisible, stepped toward the cold hearth. There, on a piece of roofing tile, lay the two sweet potatoes hidden away since the evening—their morning talisman. The soldier carelessly lowered his rifle and poked the potatoes with the blade of his bayonet. The charred crust burst with a crack; the soft, golden flesh spilled out into the gray dirt and cold embers. It was a quick, mundane destruction of their small shrine.

Hinata, seeing the death of his only breakfast, couldn’t hold it in. He didn’t scream, but from his huge eyes large, hot tears rolled down instantly, all at once. Two clean tracks broke through the crust of dust on his cheeks. He looked at the crushed sweet potato with a silent, absolute loss.

The soldier with the bayonet froze. He shifted his gaze from the ruined root vegetable to the crying boy. The American’s face—freckled, with soft fuzz above his lip—suddenly trembled and stretched into an incredibly wide, ridiculous, white-toothed smile. It was the embarrassed smile of a man who doesn’t know how to handle other people’s crying children.

He slung his rifle over his shoulder, dropped to one knee, and flipped open the flap of a heavy canvas duffel bag. Yuriko watched his hands, clenching her teeth. The soldier pulled out a small, oblong, khaki-colored tin with white letters. C-Ration, M-Unit. He inserted a tiny key into the slot on the lid and, with a metallic crunch, rolled back the strip of tin.

Instantly, the thick, aggressively hearty smell of stewed meat and vegetables in a dense sauce filled the shed. It smelled of an alien, well-fed, unattainable planet. Yuriko’s mouth immediately filled with thick, hot saliva.

The soldier held out the open tin to Hinata. “Here, kid. Eat. Don’t be afraid.”

Familiar English phonemes broke through the veil of terror—this language had been taught in school before it was declared the language of the enemy. “He says… you can eat. Don’t be afraid,” Yuriko rasped. Her voice was dry and foreign.

Miko gave a short nod. Hinata took the can with his dirty little fingers, breathed in the smell, and began to eat. He dipped his fingers into the sauce, licked them, the jelly-like broth smearing his chin, and in the shed all that could be heard was his quiet, greedy, childish smacking. The freckled soldier squatted and smiled—warmly and calmly now.

They were taken away. Not roughly, but confidently, ordering them with gestures to walk along the muddy path. Yuriko walked and felt like a character in someone else’s dream.

Soon the jungle parted, and they found themselves in a company encampment. It was a small, noisy anthill of olive tents looking like compressed clouds, a couple of jeeps, a roaring radio station, and the sharp smells of gasoline, wet canvas, and burnt coffee. Between the tents, wounded men lay on stretchers—they smelled of blood and the sour sweat of pain. Soldiers passing by stopped and simply stared at the two short figures in the dirty uniform of the First Girls’ School and the boy standing with them. Not hostile. Not pitying. Just looking, the way one looks at things that don’t fit into any category: not soldiers, not prisoners, not refugees, not children—something that has no name, no place in the manual, no instructions.

They were seated on wooden ammo crates. A young sergeant without a rifle approached them. He had high, chiseled cheekbones and dark, slightly slanted eyes.

“Relax, everything is alright,” he said in pure, soft Japanese, with a slight bookish accent. “My name is Ren Kimura. I am a translator for the United States Army. There is nothing to fear. My father is from Hawaii, Japanese… well, and my mother is Navajo. It’s an Indian tribe. Anyway, long story.”

Ren looked at Hinata, who was still clutching the empty tin. The translator took a flat rectangle in a purple wrapper from his breast pocket, unwrapped the foil, and handed it to the boy. Chocolate. Hinata grabbed it and sank his teeth in with the greed of a little animal, smearing his cheeks.

But then Ren Kimura reached out and gently but firmly took the bar back from the child’s mouth. Hinata froze with his mouth open. Yuriko tensed, ready to jump up.

The translator paid no attention to this. He neatly, with a snap, broke the chocolate along the perforated lines into equal pieces. And he handed one piece to Yuriko, and the second to Miko.

“Don’t forget about yourselves,” he said quietly. “You eat too.”

Yuriko placed the piece on her tongue. The air filled richly with cocoa—the smell of the “before” world, the smell of normalcy. The chocolate melted, filling her mouth with a slightly bitter, enveloping sweetness, and from this warmth, it seemed to Yuriko for a moment that the world had ceased to be divided into demons and humans. The sweetness was shared.

Ren pulled out a small, worn notepad. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

Yuriko swallowed the chocolate. A lie right now would be a house of cards. “We are… students of the First School. We were assigned to the hospital in the Ihamigama cave. As nurses. When the order came to die, we ran away. And we found the boy in the forest. He lost his mom in the shelling.”

Ren Kimura wrote down her words. Yuriko saw his dark hand tracing angular, foreign signs on the paper. Because of this, her story ceased being a nightmare, turning into a document. A testimony.

The translator closed the notepad, turned to a tall officer with a cigar who had walked up, and spoke rapidly in English. The officer frowned, looking at the exhausted girls, then pointed at Hinata: “What about the kid?”

Yuriko lunged forward, almost shouting in the translator’s face: “He stays with us! We won’t give him up. We’ll look after him!”

Ren Kimura chuckled with just the corners of his eyes and translated. The tall officer shrugged, making a simple logistical decision: “Fine. Tell them to get on the truck with our wounded. They were nurses, right? They can keep an eye on them on the way to the sorting camp. I need my medic here.”

Ren turned to the girls: “The officer decided you will be sent to the sorting camp on a truck. You were nurses, so the lieutenant said, ‘They know what to do with the wounded.’ You will ride with ours. And you can keep an eye on them on the way.”

The medical truck was covered with a thick green tarpaulin; light poured through the ventilation slits in uneven stripes, resembling streams of rain. Inside smelled of iodine, carbolic acid, clotted blood, and heavy, sour human sweat.

Yuriko climbed in first. Hinata followed Miko, holding tightly to the fabric of her hakama.

The canvas flap closed behind them, finally cutting off the wet tropical world.

The truck bed swayed rhythmically on the rutted tracks. Along the sides, four men lay on stretchers in two rows. Four men in green uniforms. When Yuriko’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, the figures of the demons vanished. On the stretchers lay large, very young, frightened boys.

One of them had a bandage on his head covering his right eye, and a thick, rusty-red stain seeped through the gauze—exactly the same kind of stain that blossomed on the shirts of the Japanese soldiers in the caves. Another wounded man, with an arm in a cast resting at an awkward angle, breathed hoarsely, with a whistle, clutching the edge of the tarpaulin with whitened fingers. The third stared motionless at the ceiling of the truck, and in his pupils reflected that same ultimate, bottomless exhaustion that has no nationality, language, or shape of face.

The wounded man with the eye bandage turned his head. He looked for a long time, uncomprehendingly, at the three figures in the dirty school uniforms. The truck bounced hard over a pothole; the American winced from a flash of pain, caught Yuriko’s gaze, and… smiled at her. Crookedly, weakly. As if apologizing for lying there and scaring them.

His neighbor, the boy with the cast, slowly raised his good arm and gave a small wave with his hand.

Yuriko looked at this apologetic smile through the hum of the engine. In her ears, the screams from the cave and the teacher’s orders still echoed, but before her eyes there was only a stranger’s dirtied cheek and trembling lips. She didn’t smile back—nothing inside had come back to life enough for that yet. But she stepped forward, leaned over the stretcher, and carefully straightened the gray wool blanket that had slipped from the wounded American’s shoulder. He exhaled quietly and closed his eyes.

The truck bed swayed, the tires thumped through the mud, and this rhythm became like the rocking of a cradle, carrying them away into complete uncertainty.

Yuriko sat on the floor; Hinata was asleep on her lap, his nose buried in the fabric. Miko settled next to her—shoulder to shoulder—and her warmth returned Yuriko’s sense of reality. They were riding.

The three of them.

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Chapter 5. The String →