Little Lily. Chapter 9. September Dates

By the beginning of September, the air in Shimabuku had changed.

The stifled, ringing, deathly vibration was gone—the one with which people had stared at the sky for months, expecting a fresh portion of fire. The heat became drier, the nights more transparent, and the wind blowing in from the south no longer smelled of the suffocating fumes of burning phosphorus; now it carried the bitter, cooled scent of ash and dry salt.

The camp was no longer a dead end where one waited for the end of the world. It had turned into a large, pulsating, temporary transit station on the way to something new.

The rules of this station changed every day, gradually and imperceptibly—the way morning fog dissipates, turning yesterday’s solid wall into an open passageway. The American administration began issuing passes. The barbed wire between the sectors wasn’t removed or cut down—simply, one morning, the gates were thrown wide open, and people who had been locked up for weeks walked out to meet one another. The camp ceased to be a camp; it boiled over, buzzing with intersections, voices, pushing crowds, and the smells of foreign field rations.

Some were already being released for good. Young men were sent south—to clear mines from roads, to clear debris, to build temporary wooden bridges. Women with infants were directed to other points, closer to their surviving hometowns. The elderly were let go just like that: leave, if you have somewhere to go.

But people didn’t just flow out of the camp—they flowed into it, too. From the north, from the wild mountain jungles, came those who had been hiding in caves all these months. They arrived in such a state that one wanted to look away: emaciated, overgrown with hair, in rotting rags, with huge black eyes that held nothing but a feral alertness. They smelled of dampness, of prolonged fear, and of that specific, sweet-and-sour odor that appears when the human body begins to consume itself from starvation. The entire island beyond the barbed wire lay in ruins—a lunar landscape, covered in red earth and strewn with crushed stone. The villages of Naha, Mawashi, and Shuri had been erased by bulldozer tracks so thoroughly that returning peasants could not even locate the foundations of their homes.

And so, the canvas city of Shimabuku, with its strict lines for rice, rationed soap, and humming water towers, paradoxically remained the only bastion of order on Okinawa. Here, at least, there was predictability. Here there was a geometry to life.

Ren Kimura sat on the hood of his dusty army jeep, parked in the shade of a massive century-old banyan tree at the very edge of the square, watching the school.

He smoked a “Lucky Strike,” the bitter, strong smoke rising in the still air in a thin, dove-gray thread. Ren’s fingers mechanically, out of an old American habit, wove a long blade of dry grass into yet another Indian knot. Before him, on a trampled patch of earth, thirty barefoot children sat in a circle on woven mats. Yuriko and Miko—in their oversized American coveralls, painstakingly altered with neat white stitches—were leading an arithmetic lesson.

In the center of the children’s circle gleamed a pile of empty brass machine-gun casings. Out of these casings, they had built their world.

“Five and three,” Miko said loudly and distinctly, setting aside five spent casings to the left and three to the right. “How many is that altogether? Count them.”

“Ni, san, shi, go…” the children’s voices chimed out of sync, and Hinata, sitting closest to the plywood board, self-importantly scooped the brass into one common pile, confirming the math. “Eight! Eight, sensei!”

Ren watched Yuriko. She was crouching, using a piece of charcoal to straighten out crooked numbers on a scrap of plywood. In profile, her face, gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes, looked as if it had been carved from faded, brittle wood.

The translator took a drag, and his paternal, Japanese blood asked him the same agonizing question for the hundredth time: “How?”

How did it happen that these ordinary, normal people, these thin-skinned schoolgirls, whose biggest worry back in the spring should have been their calligraphy grades and the color of the ribbons in their hair, ended up at the very bottom of this inhuman hell? Who drove them into the damp caves of Ihamigama? Who placed heavy ceramic grenades into their childlike fingers? And how do they now, in the midst of this ringing void, find the strength to smile with the corners of their lips, straighten orphans’ collars, and stack empty machine-gun casings to teach children math?

In Sacramento, when Ren was leaving for the front, the American newspapers wrote that they were going to fight a fanatical, faceless, ruthless horde. But here, on this dusty square, there was no fanaticism. There were only two girls who, out of tin cans, scraps of parachute silk, and spent shell casings, were stubbornly, stitch by stitch, sewing a torn universe back together. Not because they were heroes. But because the body wanted to live, hands wanted to work, and children wanted to count.

Ren took a deep breath, tossed his cigarette butt into the brown dust, and slowly, heavily crushed it beneath the sole of his army boot. In his breast pocket, right over his heart, lay a piece of paper folded in four bearing the Red Cross letterhead. The answers to their notes from the Wall of Names.

The lesson ended. With noise and shouts, the children scattered toward the field kitchen, where they had just started handing out hardtack biscuits. Yuriko and Miko, brushing coal and dust from their knees, walked over to the jeep.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Kimura,” Yuriko bowed slightly, her back remaining straight. Miko simply nodded, her gaze, as always, scanning, medical, ready for defense.

Ren straightened up, leaning against the hood.

“Good afternoon.” He glanced briefly at Hinata, who was still fussing on the mat, building a long, even path out of the remaining casings. Lowering his voice, Ren said, “I need to speak with you both. Without the boy. Please.”

The smile that had barely begun to form on Yuriko’s lips vanished instantly. The space between them contracted in a second, becoming dense and heavy. The very molecules of air seemed to freeze. That ancient mechanism of premonition, which had saved Yuriko in the jungle, stirred dully inside her. Miko did not ask a single question. She simply turned and shouted:

“Hinata! Go to the cauldrons, save us a spot in line for the biscuits! Quickly!”

The boy frowned, casting a suspicious look from Miko to the tall translator in a foreign uniform, but obediently took off running. His dirty bare feet with cracked soles pattered across the sun-baked clay. Yuriko watched him go with a sudden, sharp pain inside—not from pity, but from a deep, unconditional love for this little creature in a three-button shirt.

Ren waited until Hinata’s cowlicked head disappeared behind the canvas flap of the mess tent. He slowly pulled the paper from his pocket, but did not unfold it. He knew the text by heart. Every word. Every number.

“The paper birds have reached their destination,” Ren said quietly. He turned to Miko. She had to be spoken to the way one speaks to surviving soldiers—briefly, honestly, without mercy. “Nishida-san. The lists from Itoman and the Red Cross filtration data have been cross-checked. It’s official. Your parents… they were killed. Under artillery fire at an intersection near Shuri. In early June. They never made it to the caves.”

Silence.

Not the silence that follows words, but another kind—an absolute void in which the world ceases to exist. Miko did not flinch. Not a single muscle twitched on her face, which was as white as camp lime. Her face instantly transformed into a mask that Ren had seen hundreds of times in this war—the mask of a person who had prepared to hear the worst and had now taken the blow without bending. Only her hands, shoved deep in the pockets of her coveralls, slowly clenched into fists until the joints cracked. She had known. She had carried this knowledge within her from the very second she threw away the grenade in the jungle; only now, the box was opened.

“I understand,” her voice was steady. Frighteningly steady, dry as sand. “Thank you for your work, Mr. Kimura.”

Ren caught his breath, feeling everything inside him clench at her composure, and turned to Yuriko. Yuriko was watching his lips, afraid to take a breath.

“Nakayama-san,” Ren paused and suddenly said her name differently, softly, without official suffixes, simply: “Yuriko. Your father, Jiro Nakayama… he was killed. At the very end of the fighting for Okinawa.”

Yuriko’s knees sharply buckled, the ground slipping out from under her feet, but Miko instantly grabbed her elbow with an iron grip, holding her up, dividing her weight between the two of them.

“He was trying to reach your cave,” Ren’s voice grew quieter, as if he himself were walking barefoot on broken glass. “He was looking for Ihamigama. He wanted to get you out. They found him on the trail. Two hundred meters from the cave entrance.”

“Two hundred meters.”

This number struck Yuriko in the chest. Two hundred meters—that was a three-minute unhurried walk. It was nothing. It was the distance from her tent to the water standpipe. A distance she walked several times every day without noticing. And her father had not walked it. He fell, covered in shrapnel, three minutes away from the place where his daughter lay on a wet stone, listening to water dripping in the darkness. The tears did not flow—the subterranean river of her grief was still too deep; it caught like a dry lump in her throat. Yuriko simply allowed this fact to be. Allowed the world to be this way—broken, unjust, where a three-minute walk transforms into an insurmountable eternity.

“But your mother is alive,” Ren quickly continued, his voice growing warmer. “Kohaku Nakayama is currently in the Haebaru camp, north of Naha. She is fine. She is looking for you… And your brother…”

Yuriko swallowed convulsively, peering into his eyes:

“Soma?”

“He is alive,” Ren replied. “In the Philippines. He was severely wounded defending the garrison, lost his foot. They amputated part of his leg in a hospital in Manila, which is why he wasn’t sent here. But he can walk, on a prosthetic. I submitted a request, and the Red Cross confirmed: flights for the wounded will be organized in the coming weeks. He will be sent home, to Okinawa.”

Lost his foot.

An old, pre-war image instantly flashed in Yuriko’s memory: Soma running along the yellow sand of the coast, sand flying from beneath his feet, her brother laughing, the wind tousling his hair, and he runs lightly, quickly, on two whole, strong legs. Now, one leg is gone. It was left there, in a foreign land.

But he is alive. Mother is alive. Brother is alive.

Yuriko closed her eyes, and in the darkness behind her eyelids, her father’s face—tired, with a three-day stubble—finally let her go.

Ren remained silent, putting the paper back in his pocket. Then, quietly, no longer sounding at all like a translator for the American army, he said:

“You will both need to go home soon. Your loved ones are waiting for you.”

He fell silent, instantly realizing what a foolish thing he had done. Toward Miko, whose parents had just officially been turned into the ashes of Shuri, the phrase “your loved ones are waiting for you” sounded like an exquisite, involuntary violence. Ren swallowed and looked away.

But Miko seemed not to notice. Her face remained a flawless, impenetrable mask, through which only her dark, wet eyes lived. These girls had already crossed the boundary beyond which words could kill. They had seen death, had seen the betrayal of the Living God from a radio receiver, and the death of loved ones was just another harsh coordinate in their new reality.

Miko, still not letting go of Yuriko’s elbow, looked Ren straight in the eyes:

“Mr. Kimura. And what about Hinata’s mother?”

Ren shook his head:

“Nothing is known. We checked all the filtration camps, all the civilian lists. The boy doesn’t remember his last name, and without a last name, searching is impossible. Those who were on that road the night of the bombing… there was almost no chance. She most likely perished. But if she is alive, Mrs. Sanchez from the family reunification service will find her. That’s their job.”

“Family reunification.” For Yuriko, these words had lost their previous meaning. A family is not a broken bowl that can be glued back together from shards. The fabric is torn; it cannot be sewn up with an old thread. You can only weave something entirely new.

“So they will send us home?” Yuriko asked, looking at the neat rows of canvas tents.

And then immediately, in one voice, synchronized like schoolgirls in class, they asked together:

“And what about our school?!”

Ren chuckled sadly and touchingly with a barely noticeable smile. These two, having learned of the collapse of their past lives, asked first and foremost about the place they had built from nothing—from charcoal letters, tin cans, and machine-gun casings. There was more strength in this question than in everything they had survived.

“Mrs. Sanchez said that in a couple of weeks they will start dismantling this sector of the camp,” Ren replied. “People will be transported to the surviving areas. That means your school here will be closed. But…” he looked at them with undisguised respect, “you are awaited at home by more than just your loved ones. Out there, in the ruins of the villages, there are other children. Other schools. Your work isn’t over, girls. It’s only just beginning.”

This word—“beginning”—fell into the silence between them like a stone into deep water. Ripples spread from it. Yuriko suddenly felt something she could not find a name for. Not hope and not a plan—something else. The sensation that when you stand on the edge of a cliff, what opens up before you is not an abyss, but a new road. A difficult, muddy road, but a road nonetheless.

“And when can we…” Miko stopped, collected herself, and firmly corrected: “When must we leave?”

She said “must.” Not “can,” not “want.” Like a soldier asking for the timeframe of a new order. Miko was the one who turned chaos into geometry, and geometry into life.

“There is no exact date,” Ren answered. “I think we are talking about two or three weeks, until the engineering units clear the roads south for the trucks.”

He turned and looked toward the field kitchen. There, among the gray and green pant legs of adult refugees, a small cowlicked head was bobbing. Hinata was standing on his tiptoes, stretching out dirty hands to take three ration biscuits—for himself, for Yuriko, and for Miko.

Ren’s heart contracted at the sight of this slender silhouette against the backdrop of barbed wire.

“Is the boy going with you?” he asked.

Yuriko looked at Miko. Miko looked at Yuriko. In this dual gaze, there was no doubt. There was the instantaneous, absolute agreement of those for whom the question didn’t even exist. Hinata was their third fulcrum. A part of their indivisible triangle. Without him, their entire world would collapse again. Hinata’s paper birds had burned in the June sky, and now Yuriko herself had to become that bird for him.

“Yes,” Yuriko said firmly, and her voice no longer held that childlike fragility Ren remembered from the jungle. “He’s going with us.”

“We’ll talk to him tonight,” Miko added. “We’ll explain everything.”

Ren Kimura slowly nodded. He stood up, dusted off his uniform trousers, turned to leave, but stopped.

“Yuriko,” he said quietly, looking back. His gaze was entirely defenseless, human. “I am very glad… glad that your mother is alive… Miko, I’m sorry.”

And he walked away quickly without looking back. He knew: if he turned around and saw the tears finally flowing down her cheeks, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from walking over, wouldn’t be able to stop himself from touching her thin wrist, wouldn’t be able to remain just a translator for a foreign army.

Yuriko and Miko remained sitting on the dry earth. Side by side. The space between them, which had once been a safe distance, had now shrunk to zero. They sat in silence, breathing in the same rhythm, and from this shared, rhythmic breathing, the vast destroyed world around them momentarily became small and comforting.

And ahead, in the square, Hinata was already running toward them, clutching the three biscuits to his chest. His bare, quick feet kicked up little clouds of reddish dust; he stumbled, threw his head back, and shouted:

“Yuriko-nee! Miko-nee! Look, I got our spot! I brought them!”

The camp around him was transforming back into a schoolyard. And the schoolyard was their only home.

Yuriko turned to her friend. Miko was looking straight ahead at the running boy. Her face remained white and motionless, like a shard of the white temple from the dream, but her eyes were alive. Within them flowed the deep, unstoppable movement of roots breaking through stone.

“Miko,” Yuriko said quietly, almost soundlessly over the camp noise. “I am so, so sorry.”

Miko slowly turned her head. She looked at Yuriko with a long, open, unguarded gaze. There was no hysteria in this look. There was a final, adult acceptance of the fact that the world was destroyed, parents were dead, and the camp would be disbanded. And none of this could be fixed. The only thing they could do was to keep going. Alter coveralls, count shell casings, feed the child, and live on.

“I know,” Miko replied. “I know, Yuriko.”

The corners of her lips twitched, and she smiled. Fully. Openly.

It was that rare, genuine smile that Yuriko had seen only a couple of times in her life. The smile of a person who had walked through the crucible of hell, left everything behind, but emerged on the other side—wounded, altered, but alive.

Yuriko sniffled, swallowed her rising tears, and smiled back at her. With the same crooked, unpracticed, but absolutely genuine smile of September.

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