Юрий Мельников – Little Lily (страница 9)

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.

Chapter 6. The Wall of Paper Birds

By the end of the second week, the Shimabuku camp had acquired its steady, frightening geography. In the center, where rain-washed brown Okinawan clay had once been, the distribution square now gleamed white – it always smelled of bleaching powder, rusty iron, and sweet powdered milk. From it, “streets” radiated in regular spokes, formed by endless rows of green canvas tents.

Each sector had its own ritual, its own hierarchy, and its own sound. Near the medical tent, it smelled of iodine, gangrene, and death; there, lying on stretchers, were those whose survival the American doctors measured in hours. In the northern part of the camp, where fishermen and old people from the destroyed village of Itoman had settled, Buddhist memorial prayers hummed monotonously in the evenings, like the surf. And here, on the southern outskirts, between the field kitchen and the engineer supply depot, Miko’s kankara-sanshin chimed, and forty orphaned voices shouted alien, angular words in unison.

The camp’s morning began at six with a sluggish line at the water standpipe. The water ran brackish and warm, but women and children stood for it for hours, carefully holding aluminum buckets. At seven – the distribution of gray, sticky porridge. At eight – inspection, when American patrols made the rounds, counting heads and checking lists as if tallying surviving livestock. And at nine, school began.

This fragile little world, built from tin cans and English phrases, was interrupted by a new sound.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

Not the sound the ears of Shimabuku were used to – not the flapping of storm canvas, nor the clanking of water drums – but a frequent, dry, wooden tapping. A hammer. A real iron hammer with a wooden handle. The sound was so domestic, so peaceful, and therefore so impossible in the middle of the camp, that the children on the mats fell silent all at once and turned their heads – like a flock of birds – toward the square.

There, four American soldiers in green shirts with rolled-up sleeves were digging heavy wooden posts into the ground. To the posts, methodically and with cheerful banter, they nailed wide, smooth, freshly sawn boards. Bulletins. Ten. Twenty. Thirty… White wooden walls smelling of fresh timber and damp forest. They lined up in a long, even row along the entire square, and their clean, untouched whiteness exuded something frighteningly new. In the camp air, possibility appeared.

Kimura sat on an overturned wooden ammo crate, a notebook resting on his knee, and watched. Not the soldiers. Not the boards. Them.

For Ren, this war had long turned into a surreal immersion into the hell of an alien, fractured consciousness. He was a Nisei – a hafu, half-blood, from Sacramento – a man stuck in between. In America, boys had called him a “Jap,” while in the POW camp, Japanese officers spat at his feet, viewing him as a traitor to his blood. At home, his mother always spoke a language his father was ashamed of, and prayed into her pillow. Out of this eternal loneliness, Ren had learned the main thing – to look and notice what others missed.

Every day, thousands of tragedies passed through his translations, but these two girls from the Himeyuri corps made his heart squeeze differently.

Miko frightened him. In her was steel – the very absolute, unyielding bearing that the Imperial newspapers trumpeted, but directed not toward a glorious death, but toward fierce, stubborn survival. She moved steadily, her back a bastion protecting her small school from the entire world. She was a fortress without a single visible crack.

And Yuriko... Yuriko was different. Ren caught himself following her with his eyes as soon as the staff jeep drove into the southern sector. In Yuriko there was no such efficient armor. She moved hesitantly, nervously, as if afraid to take up space, as if constantly trying to make herself invisible, to shield some inner, ringing brittleness. Dark, tangled hair, thin wrists, a pale collarbone protruding from under a bunch of washed-out school uniform... She seemed to Ren like a glass furin wind chime that had miraculously survived at the epicenter of a typhoon. In her defenselessness lay the beauty of an open palm – honest, wounded, unable to hide pain – and strong. And he felt a desire – painfully, to the point of clenching his teeth – to walk up to her. Not because she was beautiful – he had seen beautiful women in Sacramento, in San Francisco, in hospitals. And not as an employee, a junior officer of the US Army, but simply – to walk up, push back a strand of hair fallen over her face, and do something that would make her thin lips quiver into a smile.