Little Lily. Chapter 5. The String

Sleep came in broad daylight, in the middle of the suffocating midday stupor of the camp anthill, through the buzzing of flies, the creaking of wheelbarrows, and the clanking of tin buckets.

It was not a falling asleep, but a falling: one moment the white canvas of an American tent billowed overhead, and the next—Yuriko was blinded by an entirely different sun. An ancient, angry, scorching sun that remembered the world when it was young.

In this space, she was split in two. Schoolgirl Yuriko lay on a mat in the Shimabuku camp, feeling the crescent-moon scars on her palms throb in time with her heart. But simultaneously she was her—a grown-up girl from an alien world, whose body had become heavier, stronger, more angular. Yuriko felt the hot, dry wind scorch her skin, and the rough leather straps of her sandals rub her feet until they bled.

They stood on a flat roof towering over a massive city of blindingly white stone. The city was rejoicing. The air was thick with the smells of roasting meat, incense, and fresh blood that hadn’t yet had time to cool. The streets, squeezed between stone walls, were seething. Thousands of people shouted, wept, and embraced in some terrifying, frenzied ecstasy.

Below, on a round square by a dried-up stone pool, lay the dead. There were not many of them—five or seven bodies. Yuriko didn’t know who they were. They wore strange clothes of thick leather with iron plates, and on their heads—round helmets with scarlet crests on top. They resembled the warriors from the ancient, darkened pictures Yuriko had seen in school: like samurai, but different. Foreign. Their armor was crumpled, their swords broken, and blood flowed lazily across the white slabs.

Her father turned to her. His face, dried by desert winds, shone with a terrifying, triumphant joy. His hands, remembering the weight of weapons, he raised to the sky.

“We are cleansed!” he shouted, and the roar of the crowd picked up his voice. “The defilement is washed from the stones. We are clean again! And now the Promised One will come. The Messiah will come soon!”

He stepped toward her and opened his hand. Flat silver coins lay on the calloused skin. Stamped into the metal was a chalice and the prickly, angular signs of an alien, incomprehensible alphabet, carved with fury and pride.

“Look,” her father shook from the words overwhelming him. “It is stamped here: ‘Herut Zion.’ We are free!”

Yuriko looked at his shining face, and in her chest—foreign and yet her own—stirred a quiet, deep, inexplicable anxiety that had no words, but had a weight: heavy, pressing, like a stone. And in this jubilant cry of her father, in the roar of the crowd, she heard another, quiet voice. The very one from the limestone cave of Ihamigama, when the teacher had handed out the grenades and spoken of the daughters of the Emperor.

And she thought—she, not Yuriko, but that other one, the one whose name was Tamar—she thought: were those I saw dead cleansed? They too were clean when they came here. They too believed their god was right. They too were loved by their fathers.

Those on the square, in the iron armor of beetles—did they not believe their god was right? Were they not loved by their fathers?

But she stayed silent. Her father jerked, a silver coin slipped from his fingers and rolled with a ring across the stone step.

Plink.

Yuriko opened her eyes.

The ringing continued, resonating in the hot air of the camp.

“Hold it tighter, Hinata,” Miko said quietly. “If the neck wobbles, the copper wire will just fray against the edge.”

The white stone city vanished. In its place, stretching to the very horizon, was the canvas sea of Shimabuku—a civilian camp where American trucks brought survivors from all over the south of the island every day. The camp lived by the laws of a ragged rhythm. It smelled of salted fish, bleaching powder, powdered milk, and dirt. Time had gotten stuck somewhere at the end of June 1945.

Plink.

Miko struck the taut string again with her thumb. The string was a piece of copper wire pulled from a broken field telephone; the neck was a fragment of board from an ammo crate, and the resonator was an empty olive-drab tin of American stew with neat white letters.

It was a kankara-sanshin. A musical instrument—an instrument of despair, an Okinawan lute born from trash, tin, and war. Its sound was rattling, thin, a bit nasal, but it was a living sound. And it was music. Real music.

Because this sound—the sound of an empty tin can with three pieces of copper wire—was the sound of peace. Of a world that existed before the cave, before the grenades, before the war—a world in which there was a festival, and the sanshin, and the night, and crickets, and stars—and this world had not ended. It was hiding. In the can. In the wire. In the fingers of a six-year-old boy.

By evening, six sanshins had been made.

Miko made them faster and more precisely than Yuriko: her hands were more accustomed to the work—to bandages, to scissors, to doing something small and exact in the midst of chaos—and the cans under her fingers turned into instruments with some kind of domestic, familiar dexterity, the way things transform in the hands of someone who knows how to create order out of disorder.

The children came to the sound.

In the evening, around Miko, right in the camp dust, sat about twenty children. Dirty, thin, in ragged clothes, some with gray army bandages on their heads, they looked at the tin cans as if the sun were hiding inside them. Six-year-old Hinata sat closest of all, jealously clutching the folds of Miko’s hakama with his free hand.

And in the camp, people said different things. News flowed from tent to tent faster than the American patrols moved. Yesterday, jeeps had brought Colonel Yahara—the only surviving officer from the high command. Generals Ushijima and Cho themselves had committed ritual seppuku in the caves of Mabuni. The Japanese garrison had surrendered. Officially, there was no more war on the island, although somewhere in the mountains and jungles shots still rang out—those who refused to believe in the death of the Empire were hiding there.

The old world had collapsed, but at ten in the morning the Americans still handed out rice rations, and the wounded on the stretchers continued to moan. Life was adapting to the emptiness.

A woman with a Red Cross on her sleeve came to them a few days later.

She was neither old nor young: maybe forty, forty-five years old, with a face dried to a parchment transparency by the sun and tears—and her eyes were dark, deep, with little wrinkles at the outer corners, and these wrinkles were not from laughing, but from squinting too often while looking at the sun, or at the fire, or into the emptiness.

She stood before Yuriko and Miko and looked—appraisingly, calmly, the way one looks at a thing one wants to use.

“Are you from Himeyuri?” she asked in a tired voice.

“Yes,” Miko answered.

“Were you nurses?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have experience dealing with children?”

They stayed silent.

“The Americans have decided to keep you busy,” she continued. “Organize the children. Make something like a school so they don’t get under the wheels of the trucks.”

Miko looked at Yuriko. Yuriko looked at Miko. In this look was—everything: both “we don’t know,” and “we are children ourselves,” and “but something must be done,” and “Hinata is alive,” and “we will manage”—and all of this was said without words, because between them words were unnecessary.

“We…” Miko started. And stopped. Because Hinata, who stood nearby holding onto the edge of her hakama, raised his head and looked at the strange woman—with huge, round, black eyes, and in that look there was no fear—it was protection: he was protecting Miko. Small, silent—he was protecting his Miko from the strange woman asking too many questions.

“We will try,” Yuriko said.

And they did. The first open-air school on a dusty patch between the tents.

First, they ate.

Not the camp porridge, not rice, not canned fish, but what Yuriko and Miko gathered in the evenings: roasted peanuts traded at the camp kitchen, dried bananas, pieces of sugarcane—and they handed it out to the children, and the children ate, and from the food their eyes changed: they didn’t become joyful, they didn’t become happy, but they settled. They stopped jumping, darting, looking for danger. They settled and looked at what was in front of them.

Then the kankara-sanshin.

Yuriko showed them: how to stretch the string, how to press it, how to pluck. And the children—one by one, hesitantly, quietly plucked. And smiled. Not the way Hinata smiled: broadly, showing teeth, but differently: with the corners of their mouths, just the corners, the way those who have forgotten how to do it smile, and are now remembering.

Then English.

One word. Every day—one word. Yuriko wrote it on a can (the letters were crooked, sticking out like sticks in a fire), and the children repeated—in a chorus, quietly, hesitantly.

“Repeat after me,” she would say. “Hello.”

“Ha-ro-o…” the children responded unevenly, like frightened sparrows.

“Thank you.”

“San-kyu…”

“I am hungry.”

“I am han-gu-ri,” the camp class repeated in a chorus.

And there was something absurd and terrifying in this scene. The children of Okinawa, whose homes had burned down, sat in the dust under the scorching sun and chanted in chorus, like a prayer, the phrase “I am hungry” in the language of the people who just yesterday were devils to them. But in this spell lay the great magic of survival: a child who could say “I am hungry” to a soldier by a truck would get a cracker or a piece of chocolate. The girls were teaching them to live in a new world, where there was no longer an Emperor, but there were jeeps, canned goods, and bread.

After English came the turn of the letters. Miko drew them with a piece of charcoal on the back of the ammo crates. A, I, U, E, O… The children repeated the sounds, and from this simple “A” the world around them seemed to become slightly more solid. After all, the world is when a child learns the alphabet, and nothing explodes because of it.

Then came arithmetic. Two fingers and three fingers is five fingers. Five tin cans lined up in a row. Five bananas. Five steps to the teacher. Five is a number, and a number is safe, because a number doesn’t shoot.

And at the end, Yuriko would take out a piece of gray packaging cardboard. With a stub of a pencil, she would draw a long, curved line on it, resembling a bamboo stalk or a crawling worm.

“This is our island,” she would say quietly, and the children fell silent. “Right here, in the very south—that’s us. This is Shimabuku. And right here…” her finger hovered over the empty gray surface of the cardboard.

There, beyond the hills, just a few hours’ walk away, lay their home villages. Mawashiasato. Naha. Shuri.

Neither Yuriko nor Miko had once spoken the words “mom,” “dad,” or “home” aloud since leaving the cave. These words were too dangerous. As long as they remained unnamed, their loved ones existed in the vulnerable state of camp hope—they were neither dead nor alive. They were simply waiting for someone to return to the ashes and check. What was left of their homes? Charred beams? Black ash?

The children looked at the gray cardboard and were silent. In this silence there was no lack of understanding—in it was a shared, adult, unbearable longing for the places that had now turned into pencil outlines.

And in that moment, to drown out this silence, Miko struck the copper strings of the kankara-sanshin again, setting a fast, syncopated island rhythm. The children picked it up, began to stomp their dirty little feet, and the rattling sound of the empty cans filled the tent, returning to them the right to play. The right to be children.

In the evening, when the inflamed red sun sank behind the barbed wire, the camp fell quiet. The rare lights of patrols flickered on.

Yuriko sat on the edge of the mat. Hinata was already asleep in her lap, breathing heavily in his sleep and tightly gripping her finger with his small hands. Miko sat nearby, darning the torn hem of her school hakama with a thread pulled from the suspension line of an American parachute.

“You know,” Miko said quietly, not lifting her eyes from her work. “The string on the sanshin is going to snap tomorrow. It has frayed completely against the edge of the tin. We’ll need to ask Mr. Kimura for a new wire tomorrow.”

Yuriko rose from the mat and went over to her. Miko raised her eyes to her and smiled—faintly, tiredly, and a little sadly. Yuriko felt a sweet and painful tug in her chest. She wanted unbearably to sit beside her, to touch Miko’s shoulder, to take her away from these children, to leave together for somewhere they wouldn’t be found. But Hinata was everywhere.

The boy had become their shared shadow. He slept between them, burying his nose in Miko’s side, ate from their mess tin, followed them step by step. At night, Yuriko clenched her fists until they hurt in the darkness of the tent, listening to his gentle, peaceful breathing. He had taken Miko from her. Taken the chance to talk, to cuddle close, just to be alone after all the horror of the jungle. Dividing their silence three ways. But it was impossible to be angry at him. He was protecting them the only way he knew how—by not letting go for a second.

And yet, when she spoke of the wire, Yuriko heard something else: tomorrow there will be a day. We will wake up, we will need a string, and we will play.

This was her promise of life…

Yuriko did not answer. She simply lowered her free left palm onto the warm earth between them. Miko, without stopping her sewing, fleetingly, barely perceptibly, covered Yuriko’s fingers with her hand. The touch lasted only a second, but in this second of closeness, in the middle of a canvas city and a foreign land, there was more warmth than in the entire Empire.

Later, when Miko lay down and covered Hinata with the edge of the blanket, Yuriko stared for a long time into the darkness of the ceiling.

The little crescent-moon scars on her palm ached softly, barely perceptibly. She knew that tonight Tamar would come again. She would see the ancient girl standing on the stone wall, looking at the campfires of foreign armies in the valley. Yuriko didn’t understand why their fates had intertwined across thousands of years, but she felt it: that other girl on her wall, just like she herself, was looking into the darkness and waiting for the dawn.

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