Юрий Мельников – Little Lily (страница 3)
“This is a grenade,” the sensei said quietly, almost soundlessly. “Type 4. You know how to use it. A weapon of despair.”
It was not made of iron. It was a round orb of coarse, baked, dark-brown clay, covered in a thin layer of rough glaze, about the size of a large Okinawan orange. They weren't made in military factories, but in pottery workshops, by hand, when the Empire ran out of metal.
“And one more thing,” the teacher pulled small paper packets from his pocket, rustling in his trembling fingers. “This is cyanide. In case the grenade misfires. Over there, by the exit, in the kitchen, there are two milk cans with condensed milk left. You can... add this in. Stir it. And drink it. It will be easier that way.”
No one cried. The word “milk” – the only peaceful, sweet word from a past life – sounded here like a terrible, absurd joke.
“Teacher...” the voice of a girl from the corner of the cave, where the most severely wounded, the amputees, lay, trembled so violently that her words broke. “What about the wounded? Are we leaving them? What will happen to them?”
Minato Kobayashi froze for a second. His hands, holding a ceramic orb, shook harder, but he did not turn his head toward the gloom, toward the pus-oozing mats where people with torn-open bellies were wheezing.
“They,” he replied dryly and abruptly, “will have their own choice too.”
Yuriko looked down at her uniform. Her fingers automatically, with a sort of domestic neatness, began to smooth out the crumpled sailor collar, to button the surviving buttons of her blouse. It was unbearably absurd: the world was collapsing, the walls of the cave were shuddering from the distant strikes of naval artillery, and they were straightening their clothes as if preparing for a calligraphy lesson. Beside her, without uttering a word, Miko hid her ceramic grenade in the deep pocket of her dark hakama. The white ribbon in her hair was gray with dust, but tied in a perfect, precise bow.
“Let’s go,” the sensei ordered.
And they ran.
The exit from the Ihamigama cave didn't just let them out – it literally spat them outside, right into the gaping, boiling maw of hell. The sky over Okinawa wasn't blue; it was the color of clotted, baked blood, ripped open by black pillars of greasy smoke. The entire island shook, shuddering beneath their bare soles like a giant wounded whale that had just taken a thousand harpoons in the back all at once.
The jungle absorbed them instantly, swallowing them whole as muddy water swallows a thrown stone. The air outside proved stifling, hot as tropical broth; it was so humid that Yuriko’s blouse was soaked in seconds, turning into a thin, sticky film glued to her body. This air smelled of ash, cordite, shredded pandanus wood, and the sweet, suffocating, nauseating stench of rot – the stench of hundreds of bodies that had been lying in these thickets for days. The sounds of explosions merged into one continuous, droning metallic chord that vibrated their teeth and bones.
They dashed through the chaos of greenery. Enormous fern leaves, resembling the bony ribs of prehistoric fish, violently whipped their faces, leaving sticky green streaks. Time here lost its linearity: it would stretch, turning every step into an endless, viscous torture, then race at a gallop, confusing yesterday, when the birds still sang, with today, where there was nothing but death.
The girls scattered through the brush like pearls from a snapped thread. Yuriko saw it happen ahead, some twenty meters away: right on the path, a blindingly white, silent sphere of an artillery shell flared up. Two fleeing figures in school skirts simply dissolved into that flash, ascending to the zenith along with a pillar of red Okinawan clay, turning into dust, into nothing, in a split-second of pure destruction of life. Yuriko didn't even have time to feel afraid. She merely registered it with her eyes and kept running, feeling the two grenades in the pockets of her hakama battering her thighs – heavy, rhythmic, like a second and third heart.
They stopped only when their lungs began burning from the inside with live fire, and the air in their chests felt like crushed glass. The roar of the artillery here, on the slope of the hill, had become slightly muffled, bogged down in the dense thickets of banyan trees.
They were left alone. Only Yuriko and Miko. The other silhouettes had melted away into the green hell.
Breathing heavily, with a rasp, Miko leaned against the trunk of a tree through a fissure in its trunk, white sap resembling milk slowly oozed. Her face was completely covered in black soot and grime, making the whites of her eyes look unnaturally enormous, almost bottomless. She thrust her hand into her hakama pocket and slowly, as if disbelieving her own fingers, withdrew the ceramic orb of the grenade.
Yuriko froze, pressing her back against a wet stone. Her heart pounded right in her ears.
“Miko,” she whispered, barely audible. She knew what was supposed to happen next.
Miko looked at the brown, baked clay in her hand for a long, endlessly long time. In her huge eyes, there was neither the teacher’s fanaticism, nor patriotic ecstasy, nor even fear. There was a strange, frightening, adult transparency. Devastation. Suddenly, she swung her arm – not at all the way soldiers are taught, but simply, childishly – and threw the grenade. Not at her own feet. Not at a rock. She hurled it far away, into the dense, squelching pandanus thickets, right into the mud.
The shell traced an absurd arc, plopped softly into the muck, and vanished. No explosion. No honor. No flash of a chrysanthemum. Just a piece of scorched earth returning back to the earth. And following the first, Miko pulled out and threw the second.
Yuriko stared at the spot where the mud had closed over, feeling as if some invisible string that had held her up all her life was snapping inside her with a deafening, glassy ringing. Miko turned to her, held out her empty, soot-stained hands, and looked silently into her eyes. And in that gaze was everything:
Slowly, as if someone else’s hand were controlling her body, Yuriko lowered her fingers into her own pocket. Her palm closed around the rough body of the Type 4 ceramic grenade.
And in that moment, the world around her seemed to fall silent. Yuriko felt it with her entire being, with every microscopic receptor of her skin. The clay was heavy, dense, and surprisingly, absurdly warm. But it wasn't the warmth of the midday sun from her dream, nor the warmth of a mother’s hand – the grenade had heated up from her own body, absorbing the fever of her frantically beating blood, her sweat, and her life. To the touch, the surface was porous, uneven, bearing the fingerprints of an unknown master potter who had fired it in an oven. On the side of the sphere, Yuriko distinctly felt a thin, sharp seam from the mold – it dug into the tender skin of her palm, leaving a deep mark. If you rubbed it just a little, the dry, poorly fired clay began to crumble, leaving a fine, brown powder smelling of the kiln on her fingertips. A thin crack ran near the very base of the fuse – like a life line on a hand that abruptly ends. There was no steel majesty in this object, no military pride. It was simply dead, cold earth packed into a mold, stuffed with explosives, and forced to make human warmth work for destruction. This clay weight weighed too much – it was pulling her down, down to the graves of the cave, to the teacher's order, to someone else's forced death.
Yuriko pulled her hand from her pocket. She brought the grenade right up to her face, peering one last time into its wretched, brown simplicity, feeling her fingers cramp from its weight. And then – she simply opened her fingers. Without a swing. Without effort.
The ceramic orb hit a thick banyan root with a dull, dry thud, rolled over the wet, slimy moss, smearing itself in the white tree sap, and came to a stop in the grass at her feet. The second grenade followed the first.
Yuriko felt a strange, deafening emptiness. The palm that had just gripped death remained open, damp with sweat. On her skin, right across the lines of fate – from the base of her thumb to her pinky – two crimson, indented stripes burned from the ceramic seams. They looked like scars. Or like new, clean roads she had yet to walk. Her hand still remembered the weight, her muscles still remembered the shape of the sphere, but there was nothing left in it. It was empty.
Miko stepped closer and took that empty, trembling palm. Silently. Tightly. The way one grasps at life. Miko's fingers were thin, dry, and hot, and when their palms joined, Yuriko went perfectly still.
And so they stood – two girls in filthy school uniforms, with clean, empty hands on their island, in the middle of someone else’s war. And neither of them knew what to do next.