9
The ZooAttack (or, A Clumsy Massacre)
* Nutmeg Akasaka told the story of the tigers, the leopards, the wolves, and the bears that were shot by soldiers on a miserably hot afternoon in August 1945. She narrated with the order and clarity of a documentary film projected on a stark white screen. She left nothing vague. Yet she herself had not actually witnessed the spectacle. While it was happening, she was standing on the deck of a transport ship carrying refugee settlers home to Japan from Manchuria. What she had actually witnessed was the surfacing of an American submarine.
Like everyone else, she and the other children had come up from the unbearable steam bath of the ships hold to lean against the deck rail and enjoy the gentle breezes that moved across the calm, unbroken sea, when, all at once, the submarine came floating to the surface as if it were part of a dream. First the antenna and the radar beacon and periscope broke the surface. Then the conning tower came up, raising a wake as it cut through the water. And finally, the entire dripping mass of steel exposed its graceful nakedness to the summer sun.
Although in form and shape the thing before her could have been nothing but a submarine, it looked instead like some kind of symbolic sign-or an incomprehensible metaphor.
The submarine ran parallel to the ship for a while, as if stalking its prey. Soon a hatch opened, and one crew member, then another and another, climbed onto the deck, moving slowly, almost sluggishly. From the conning tower deck, the officers examined every detail of the transport ship through enormous binoculars, the lenses of which would flash every now and then in the sunlight. The transport ship was full of civilians heading back to Japan, their destination the port of Sasebo. The majority were women and children, the families of Japanese officials in the puppet Manchukuo government and of high-ranking personnel of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, fleeing to the homeland from the chaos that would follow the impending defeat of Japan in the war. Rather than face the inevitable horror, they were willing to accept the risk of attack by an American submarine on the open sea-until now, at least.
The submarine officers were checking to see if the transport ship was unarmed and without a naval escort. They had nothing to fear. The Americans now had full command of the air as well. Okinawa had fallen, and few if any fighter planes remained on Japanese soil. No need to panic: time was on their side. A petty officer barked orders, and three sailors spun the cranks that turned the deck gun until it was aimed at the transport ship. Two other crewmen opened the rear-deck hatch and hauled up heavy shells to feed the gun. Yet another squad of crewmen, with practiced movements, were loading a machine gun they had set on a raised part of the deck near the conning tower. All the crewmen preparing for the attack wore combat helmets, although a few of the men were naked from the waist up and nearly half were wearing short pants. If she stared hard at them, Nutmeg could see brilliant tattoos inscribed on their arms. If she stared hard, she could see lots of things.
One deck gun and one machine gun constituted the submarines total firepower, but this was more than enough to sink the rotting old freighter that had been refitted as a transport ship. The submarine carried only a limited number of torpedoes, and these had to be reserved for encounters with armed convoys-assuming there were armed convoys left in Japan. This was the ironclad rule.
Nutmeg clung to the ships handrail and watched as the deck guns black barrel pivoted in her direction. Dripping wet only moments earlier, it had been baked dry in the summer sun. She had never seen such an enormous gun before. Back in Hsin-ching, she had often seen some kind of regimental gun belonging to the Japanese Army, but there was no comparison between it and the submarines enormous deck gun. The submarine flashed a signal lamp at the freighter: Heave to. Attack to commence. Immediately evacuate all passengers to lifeboats. (Nutmeg could not read the signal lamp, of course, but in retrospect she understood it perfectly.) Aboard the transport ship, which had undergone minimal conversion from an old freighter on army orders in the chaos of war, there were not enough lifeboats. In fact, there were only two small boats for more than five hundred passengers and crew. There were hardly any life vests or life buoys aboard.
Gripping the rail, holding her breath, Nutmeg stared transfixed at the streamlined submarine. It shone as if brand-new, without a speck of rust. She saw the white-painted numerals on the conning tower. She saw the radar antenna rotating above it. She saw the sandy-haired officer with dark glasses. This submarine has come up from the bottom of the ocean to kill us all, she thought, but theres nothing strange about that, it could happen anytime. It has nothing to do with the war; it could happen to anyone anywhere. Everybody thinks its happening because of the war. But thats not true. The war is just one of the things that could happen.
Face-to-face with the submarine and its huge gun, Nutmeg felt no trace of fear. Her mother was shouting at her, but the words made no sense. Then she felt something grab her wrists and pull on them. But her hands stayed locked on the rail. The roar of voices all around her began to move far away, as if someone were turning down the volume on a radio. Im so sleepy, she thought. So sleepy. Why am I so sleepy? She closed her eyes, and her consciousness rushed away, leaving the deck far behind.
Nutmeg was seeing Japanese soldiers as they moved through the extensive zoo shooting any animal that could attack human beings. The officer gave his order, and the bullets from the Model 38 rifles ripped through the smooth hide of a tiger, tearing at the animals guts. The summer sky was blue, and from the surrounding trees the screams of cicadas rained down like a sudden shower.
The soldiers never spoke. The blood was gone from their sunburned faces, which made them look like pictures painted on ancient urns. A few days from now-at most, a week from now-the main force of the Soviet Far East Command would arrive in Hsin-ching. There was no way to stop the advance. Ever since the war began, the crack troops and once abundant equipment of the Kwantung Army had been drained away to support the widening southern front, and now the greater part of both had sunk to the bottom of the sea or was rotting in the depths of the jungle. The tanks were gone. The anti-tank guns were gone. All but a handful of the troop transport trucks had broken down, and there were no spare parts. A general mobilization could still bring together large numbers of troops, but there were not even enough old-model rifles left to arm every man, or bullets enough to load every rifle. And so the great Kwantung Army, Bulwark of the North, had been reduced to a paper tiger. The proud Soviet mechanized units that had crushed the German Army were completing their transfer by rail to the Far Eastern front, with plenty of equipment and with spirits high. The collapse of Manchukuo was imminent.
Everyone knew this to be the truth, the Kwantung Army Command most of all. And so they evacuated their main force to the rear, in effect abandoning both the small border garrisons and the Japanese civilian homesteaders. These unarmed farmers were slaughtered by the Soviet Army, which was advancing too rapidly to take prisoners. Many women chose- or were forced to choose-mass suicide over rape. The border garrisons locked themselves into the concrete bunker dubbed Fortress for the Ages and put up a fierce resistance, but without support from the rear, they were annihilated by the Soviets overwhelming firepower. Members of the general staff and other high-ranking officers arranged to have themselves transferred to new headquarters in Tonghua, near the Korean border, and the puppet emperor Henry Pu-yi and his family threw their possessions together and escaped from the capital by private train. Most of the Chinese soldiers in the Manchukuo Army assigned to defend the capital deserted as soon as they heard the Soviets were invading, or else they staged revolts and shot their Japanese commanding officers. They had no intention of laying down their lives for Japan in a struggle against superior Soviet troops.
As a result of these interrelated developments, the capital city of Manchukuo, the Special New Capital City, Hsin-ching, which the modern Japanese state had staked its reputation on to construct in the wilderness, was left floating in a strange political vacuum. In order to avoid needless chaos and bloodshed, the high-ranking Chinese bureaucrats of Manchukuo argued that Hsin-ching should be declared an open city and surrendered without armed resistance, but the Kwantung Army rejected this.
The soldiers dispatched to the zoo had resigned themselves to their fate. In a mere few days, they assumed, they would die fighting the Soviet Army (though in fact, after disarmament, they would be sent to work-and, in the case of three of the men, to die-in Siberian coal mines). All they could do was pray that their deaths would not be too painful. None of them wanted to be crushed under the treads of a slow-moving tank or roasted in a trench by flamethrowers or die by degrees with a bullet in the stomach. Better to be shot in the head or the heart. But first they had to kill these zoo animals.
If possible, they were to kill the animals with poison in order to conserve what few bullets they had left. The young lieutenant in charge of the operation had been so instructed by his superior officer and told that the zoo had been given enough poison to do the job. The lieutenant led eight fully armed men to the zoo, a twenty-minute walk from headquarters. The zoo gates had been closed since the Soviet invasion, and two soldiers were standing guard at the entrance, with bayonets on their rifles. The lieutenant showed them his orders and led his men inside.
The zoos director confirmed that he had indeed been ordered to liquidate the fiercer animals in case of an emergency and to use poison, but the shipment of poison, he said, had never arrived. When the lieutenant heard this, he became confused. He was an accountant, assigned to the paymasters office, and until he was dragged away from his desk at head- quarters for this emergency detail, he had never once been put in charge of a detachment of men. He had had to rummage through his drawer to find his pistol, on which he had done no maintenance for years now, and he was not even sure it would fire.
Bureaucratic work is always like this, Lieutenant, said the zoo director, a man several years his senior, who looked at him with a touch of pity. The things you need are never there.
To inquire further into the matter, the director called in the zoos chief veterinarian, who told the lieutenant that the zoo had only a very small amount of poison, probably not enough to kill a horse. The veterinarian was a tall, handsome man in his late thirties, with a blue-black mark on his right cheek, the size and shape of a babys palm. The lieutenant imagined it had been there since birth.
From the zoo directors office, the lieutenant telephoned headquarters, seeking further instructions, but Kwantung Army Headquarters had been in a state of extreme confusion ever since the Soviet Army crossed the border several days earlier, and most of the high-ranking officers had disappeared. The few remaining officers had their hands full, burning stacks of important documents in the courtyard or leading troops to the edge of town to dig antitank trenches. The major who had given the lieutenant his orders was nowhere to be found. So now the lieutenant had no idea where they were to obtain the poison they needed. Who in the Kwantung Army would have been in charge of poisons? His call was transferred from one office to another, until a medical corps colonel got on the line, only to scream at the lieutenant, You stupid son of a bitch! The whole goddamn countrys going down the drain, and youre asking me about a goddamn fucking zoo?! Who gives a shit?
Who indeed, thought the lieutenant. Certainly not the lieutenant himself. With a dejected look, he cut the connection and decided to give up on laying in a stock of poison. Now he was faced with two options. He could forget about killing any animals and lead his men out of there, or they could use bullets to do the job. Either way would be a violation of the orders he had been given, but in the end he decided to do the shooting. That way, he might later be chewed out for having wasted valuable ammunition, but at least the goal of liquidating the more dangerous animals would have been met. If, on the other hand, he chose not to kill the animals, he might be court-martialed for having failed to carry out orders. There was some doubt whether there would even be any courts-martial at this late stage of the war, but finally, orders were orders. So long as the army continued to exist, its orders had to be carried out.
If possible, Id rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself, in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from chronic starvation. Things could only get worse-or at least they were not going to get any better. Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves-a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
The director handed the lieutenant a list of animals for emergency liquidation that he had been instructed to compile, along with a map of the zoo. The veterinarian with the mark on his cheek and two Chinese workers were assigned to accompany the firing squad. The lieutenant glanced at the list and was relieved to find it shorter than he had imagined. Among the animals slated for liquidation, though, were two Indian elephants. Elephants? the lieutenant thought with a frown. How in the hell are we supposed to kill elephants?
Given the layout of the zoo, the first animals to be liquidated were the tigers. The elephants would be left for last, in any case. The plaque on the tiger cage explained that the pair had been captured in Manchuria in the Greater Khingan Mountains. The lieutenant assigned four men to each tiger and told them to aim for the heart-the whereabouts of which was just another mystery to him. Oh, well, at least one bullet was bound to hit home. When eight men together pulled back on the levers of their Model 38s and loaded a cartridge into each chamber, the ominous dry clicking transformed the whole atmosphere of the place. The tigers stood up at the sound. Glaring at the soldiers through the iron bars, they let out huge roars. As an extra precaution, the lieutenant drew his automatic pistol and released the safety. To calm himself, he cleared his throat. This is nothing, he tried to tell himself. Everybody does stuff like this all the time.
The soldiers knelt down, took careful aim, and, at the lieutenants command, pulled their triggers. The recoil shook their shoulders, and for a moment their minds went empty, as if flicked away. The roar of the simultaneous shots reverberated through the deserted zoo, echoing from building to building, wall to wall, slicing through wooded areas, crossing water surfaces, a stab to the hearts of all who heard it, like distant thunder. The animals held their breath. Even the cicadas stopped crying. Long after the echo of gunfire faded into the distance, there was not a sound to be heard. As if they had been whacked with a huge club by an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air for a moment, then landed on the floor of the cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers had failed to finish the tigers off with a single volley. Snapping out of their trance, the soldiers pulled back on their rifle levers, ejecting spent shells, and took aim again.
The lieutenant sent one of his men into the cage to be certain that both tigers were dead. They certainly looked dead-eyes closed, teeth bared, all movement gone. But it was important to make sure. The veterinarian unlocked the cage, and the young soldier (he had just turned twenty) stepped inside fearfully, thrusting his bayonet ahead of him. It was an odd performance, but no one laughed. He gave a slight kick to one tigers hindquarters with the heel of his boot. The tiger remained motionless. He kicked the same spot again, this time a little harder. The tiger was dead without a doubt. The other tiger (the female) lay equally still. The young soldier had never visited a zoo in his life, nor had he ever seen a real tiger before. Which was partly why he couldnt quite believe that they had just succeeded in killing a real, live tiger. He felt only that he had been dragged into a place that had nothing to do with him and had there been forced to perform an act that had nothing to do with him. Standing in an ocean of black blood, he stared down at the tigers corpses, entranced. They looked much bigger dead than they had when alive. Why should that be? he asked himself, mystified.
The cages concrete floor was suffused with the piercing smell of the big cats urine, and mixed with it was the warm odor of blood. Blood was still gushing from the holes torn in the tigers bodies, forming a sticky black pond around his feet. All of a sudden, the rifle in his hands felt heavy and cold. He wanted to fling it away, bend down, and vomit the entire contents of his stomach onto the floor. What a relief it would have been! But vomiting was out of the question-the squad leader would beat his face out of shape. (Of course, this soldier had no idea that he would die seventeen months later when a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk would split his skull open with a shovel.) He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. His helmet was weighing down upon him. One cicada, then another, began to cry again, as if finally revived. Soon their cries were joined by those of a bird- strangely distinctive cries, like the winding of a spring: Creeeak. Creeeak. The young soldier had moved from a mountain village in Hokkaido across the sea to China with his parents at the age of twelve, and together they had tilled the soil of a frontier village in Beian until a year ago, when he had been drafted into the army. Thus he knew all the birds of Manchuria, but strangely, he had never heard a bird with that particular cry. Perhaps it was a bird imported from a distant land, crying in its cage in another part of the zoo. Yet the sound seemed to come from the upper branches of a nearby tree. He turned and squinted in the direction of the sound, but he could see nothing. A huge elm tree with dense leaves cast its cool, sharp shadow on the ground below.
He looked toward the lieutenant, as if requesting instructions. The lieutenant nodded, ordered him out of the cage, and spread open the zoo map again. So much for the tigers. Next well do the leopards. Then maybe the wolves. Weve got bears to deal with too. Well think about the elephants when the others are finished off, he thought. And then he realized how hot it was. Take a breather, he said to his men. Have some water. They drank from their canteens. Then they shouldered their rifles, took their places in formation, and headed for the leopard cage. Up in a tree, the unknown bird with the insistent call went on winding its spring. The chests and backs of the mens short-sleeved military shirts were stained black with sweat. As this formation of fully armed soldiers strode along, the clanking of all kinds of metallic objects sent hollow echoes throughout the deserted zoo. The monkeys clinging to the bars of their cages rent the air with ominous screams, sending frantic warnings to all the other animals in the zoo, who in turn joined the chorus in their own distinctive ways. The wolves sent long howls skyward, the birds contributed a wild flapping of wings, some large animal somewhere was slamming itself against its cage, as if to send out a threat. A chunk of cloud shaped like a fist appeared out of nowhere and hid the sun for a time. On that August afternoon, people, animals-everyone was thinking about death. Today the men would be killing animals; tomorrow Soviet troops would be killing the men. Probably.
We always sat across from each other at the same table in the same restaurant, talking. She was a regular there, and of course she always picked up the tab. The back part of the restaurant was divided into private compartments, so that the conversation at any one table could not be heard at another. There was only one seating per evening, which meant that we could talk at our leisure, right up to closing time, without interference from anyone-including the waiters, who approached the table only to bring or clear a dish. She would always order a bottle of Burgundy of one particular vintage and always leave half the bottle unconsumed.
A bird that winds a spring? I asked, looking up from my food.
A bird that winds a spring? said Nutmeg, repeating the words exactly as I had said them, then curling her lips just a little. I dont understand what youre saying. What are you talking about?
Didnt you just say something about a bird that winds a spring?
She shook her head slowly. Hmm. Now I cant remember. I dont think I said anything about a bird.
I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this. I didnt ask her about the mark, either.
So you were born in Manchuria, then? I asked.
She shook her head again. I was born in Yokohama. My parents took me to Manchuria when I was three. My father was teaching at a school of veterinary medicine, but when the Hsin-ching city administrators wanted someone sent over from Japan as chief veterinarian for the new zoo they were going to build, he volunteered for the job. My mother didnt want to abandon the settled life they had in Japan and go off to the ends of the earth, but my father insisted. Maybe he wanted to test himself in someplace bigger and more open than Japan. I was so young, it didnt matter where I was, but I really enjoyed living at the zoo. It was a wonderful life. My father always smelled like the animals. All the different animal smells would mix together into one, and it would be a little different each day, like changing the blend of ingredients in a perfume. Id climb up onto his lap when he came home and make him sit still while I smelled him.
But then the war took a bad turn, and we were in danger, so my father decided to send my mother and me back to Japan before it was too late. We went with a lot of other people, taking the train from Hsin-ching to Korea, where a special boat was waiting for us. My father stayed behind in Hsin-ching. The last I ever saw him, he was standing in the station, waving to us. I stuck my head out the window and watched him growing smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the crowd on the platform. No one knows what happened to him after that. I think he must have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and sent to Siberia to do forced labor and, like so many others, died over there. Hes probably buried in some cold, lonely patch of earth without anything to mark his grave.
I still remember everything about the Hsin-ching zoo in perfect detail. I can bring it all back inside my head-every pathway, every animal. We lived in the chief veterinarians official residence, inside the grounds. All the zoo workers knew me, and they let me go anywhere I wanted- even on holidays, when the zoo was closed.
Nutmeg closed her eyes to bring back the scene inside her mind. I waited, without speaking, for her to continue her story.
Still, though, I cant be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that its too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if Ive wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?
It had not. Do you know if the zoo is still there in Hsin-ching? I asked.
I wonder, said Nutmeg, touching the end of her earring. I heard that the place was closed up after the war, but I have no idea if its still closed.
For a very long time, Nutmeg Akasaka was the only person in the world that I could talk to. We would meet once or twice a week and talk to each other across the table at the restaurant. After we had met several times like that, I discovered that she was an extremely accomplished listener. She was quick on the uptake, and she knew how to direct the flow of the story by means of skillfully inserted questions and responses.
So as to avoid upsetting her in any way, I always took great care whenever we met to see that my outfit was neat and clean and well chosen. I would put on a shirt fresh from the cleaners and choose the tie that best matched it in color. My shoes were always shined and spotless. The first thing she would do when she saw me was examine me top to bottom, with the eyes of a chef choosing vegetables. If anything displeased her, she would take me straight to a boutique and buy me the proper article of clothing. If possible, she would have me change into it then and there. When it came to clothing, she would accept nothing less than perfection.
As a result, my closet began to fill up almost before I knew it. Slowly but steadily, new suits, new jackets, and new shirts were invading the territory that had once been occupied by Kumikos skirts and dresses. Before long, the closet was becoming cramped, and so I folded Kumikos things, packed them in cartons with mothballs, and put them in a storage area. If she ever came back, I knew, she would have to wonder what in the world had happened in her absence.
I took a long time to explain about Kumiko to Nutmeg, little by little- that I had to save her and bring her back here. She put her elbow on the table, propping her chin in her hand, and looked at me for a while.
So where is it that youre going to save Kumiko from? Does the place have a name or something?
I searched for the words in space. But they were not there in space. Neither were they underground. Someplace far away, I said.
Nutmeg smiled. Its kind of like The Magic Flute. You know: Mozart. Using a magic flute and magic bells, they have to save a princess whos being held captive in a faraway castle. I love that opera. I dont know how many times Ive seen it. I know the lines by heart: Im the birdcatcher, Papageno, known throughout the land. Ever seen it?
I shook my head. I had never seen it.
In the opera, the prince and the birdcatcher are led to the castle by three children riding on a cloud. But whats really happening is a battle between the land of day and the land of night. The land of night is trying to recapture the princess from the land of day. Midway through the opera, the heroes cant tell any longer which side is right- who is being held captive and who is not. Of course, at the end, the prince gets the princess, Papageno gets Papagena, and the villains fall into hell. Nutmeg ran her finger along the rim of her glass. Anyhow, at this point you dont have a birdcatcher or a magic flute or bells.
But I do have a well, I said.
Whenever I grew tired from talking or I was unable to go on telling my story because I lost track of the words I needed, Nutmeg would give me a rest by talking about her own early life, and her stories turned out to be far more lengthy and convoluted than mine. And also, unlike me, she would impose no order on her stories but would leap from topic to topic as her feelings dictated. Without explanation, she would reverse chronological order or suddenly introduce as a major character someone she had never mentioned to me before. In order to know to which period of her life the fragment belonged that she was presently narrating, it was necessary to make careful deductions, though no amount of deduction could work in some cases. She would narrate events she had witnessed with her own eyes, as well as events that she had never witnessed.
They killed the leopards. They killed the wolves. They killed the bears. Shooting the bears took the most time. Even after the two gigantic animals had taken dozens of rifle slugs, they continued to crash against the bars of their cage, roaring at the men and slobbering, fangs bared. Unlike the cats, who were more willing to accept their fate (or who at least appeared to accept it), the bears seemed unable to comprehend the fact that they were being killed. Possibly for that reason, it took them far longer than was necessary to reach a final parting with that temporary condition known as life. When the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse on the spot. The lieutenant reset his pistols safety catch and used his hat to wipe the sweat dripping down his brow. In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. Their ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles. The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem-or perhaps it does not seem so strange-they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself. Those animals that were now nothing but corpses were dragged from their cages by the Chinese workers, loaded onto carts, and hauled to an empty warehouse. There, the animals, which came in so many shapes and sizes, were laid out on the floor. Once he had seen the operation through to its end, the lieutenant returned to the zoo directors office and had the man sign the necessary documents. Then the soldiers lined up and marched away in formation, with the same metallic clanking they had made when they came. The Chinese workers used hoses to wash off the black stains of blood on the floors of the cages, and with brushes they scrubbed away the occasional chunk of animal flesh that clung to the walls. When this job was finished, the workers asked the veterinarian with the blue-black mark on his cheek how he intended to dispose of the corpses. The doctor was at a loss for an answer. Ordinarily, when an animal died at the zoo, he would call a professional to do the job. But with the capital now bracing for a bloody battle, with people now struggling to be the first to leave this doomed city, you couldnt just make a phone call and get someone to run over to dispose of an animal corpse for you. Summer was at its height, though, and the corpses would begin to decompose quickly. Even now, black swarms of flies were massing. The best thing would be to bury them-an enormous job even if the zoo had access to heavy equipment, but with the limited help available to them now, it would obviously be impossible to dig holes large enough to take all the corpses.
The Chinese workers said to the veterinarian: Doctor, if you will let us take the corpses whole, we will dispose of them for you. We have plenty of friends to help us, and we know exactly where to do the job. We will haul them outside the city and get rid of every last speck. We will not cause you any problems. But in exchange, we want the hides and meat. Especially the bear meat: everybody will want that. Parts of bear and tiger are good for medicine-they will command a high price. And though its too late now to say this, we wish you had aimed only at their heads. Then the hides would have been worth a good deal more. The soldiers were such amateurs! If only you had let us take care of it from the beginning, we wouldnt have done such a clumsy job. The veterinarian agreed to the bargain. He had no choice. After all, it was their country.
Before long, ten Chinese appeared, pulling several empty carts behind them. They dragged the animals corpses out of the warehouse, piled them onto the carts, tied them down, and covered them with straw mats. They hardly said a word to each other the whole time. Their faces were expressionless. When they had finished loading the carts, they dragged them off somewhere. The old carts creaked with the strain of supporting the animals weight. And so ended the massacre- what the Chinese workers called a clumsy massacre- of zoo animals on a hot August afternoon. All that was left were several clean-and empty-cages. Still in an agitated state, the monkeys kept calling out to one another in their incomprehensible language. The badgers rushed back and forth in their narrow cage. The birds flapped their wings in desperation, scattering feathers all around. And the cicadas kept up their grating cry.
After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last two Chinese workers had disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and watched the group of hard- edged clouds that were floating there. Then he listened to the cicadas crying. The wind-up bird was no longer calling, but the veterinarian did not notice that. He had never heard the wind-up bird to begin with. The only one who had heard it was the poor young soldier who would be beaten to death in a Siberian coal mine.
The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was trembling-so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been liquidated in a mo- ment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.
He sat there for a while, watching the smoke curl upward from his cigarette and trying to sort out his feelings. He stared at his hands resting on his lap, then looked once again at the clouds in the sky. The world he saw before him looked as it always had. He could find in it no signs of change. And yet it ought to have been a world distinctly different from the one he had known until then. After all, the world that held him now was a world in which bears and tigers and leopards and wolves had been liquidated. Those animals had existed this morning, but now, at four oclock in the afternoon, they had ceased to exist. They had been massacred by soldiers, and even their dead bodies were gone.
There should have been a decisive gap separating those two different worlds. There had to be a gap. But he could not find it. The world looked the same to him as it always had. What most puzzled the veterinarian was the unfamiliar lack of feeling inside himself.
Suddenly he realized that he was exhausted. Come to think of it, he had hardly slept at all the night before. How wonderful it would be, he thought, if I could find the cool shade of a tree somewhere, to stretch out and sleep, if only for a little while-to stop thinking, to sink into the silent darkness of unconsciousness. He glanced at his watch. He had to secure food for the surviving animals. He had to treat the baboon that was running a high fever. There were a thousand things he had to do. But now, more than anything, he had to sleep. What came afterward he could think about afterward.
The veterinarian walked into the neighboring wooded area and stretched out on the grass where no one would notice him. The shaded grass felt cool and good. The smell was something he remembered fondly from childhood. Several large Manchurian grasshoppers bounded over his face with a nice strong hum. He lit another cigarette as he lay there, and he was pleased to see that his hands were no longer trembling so badly. Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he pictured the Chinese men stripping the hides off all those freshly killed animals somewhere and cutting up the meat. He had often seen Chinese doing work like that, and he knew they were anything but clumsy. In a matter of moments, an animal would be reduced to hide, meat, organs, and bones, as if those elements had originally been quite separate and had just happened to come together for a little while. By the time I wake from my nap, Im sure, those pieces of meat will be out there in the marketplace. Thats reality for you: quick and efficient. He tore off a handful of grass and toyed with its softness awhile. Then he crushed his cigarette and, with a deep sigh, expelled all the smoke left in his lungs. When he closed his eyes, the grasshoppers wings sounded much louder in the darkness. The veterinarian was overtaken by the illusion that huge grasshoppers the size of bullfrogs were leaping all around him.
Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall. There were tigers in one section, but no tigers in another. Maybe it was as simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didnt mean very much. Wasnt that why he couldnt feel the gap between one world and another? But that was as far as his thoughts would go. He wasnt able to think more deeply than that. The fatigue in his body was as heavy and suffocating as a sodden blanket. No more thoughts came to him, and he just lay there, inhaling the aroma of the grass, listening to the grasshoppers wings, and feeling through his skin the dense membrane of shadow that covered him.
And in the end his mind was sucked into the deep sleep of afternoon.
The transport ship cut its engines as ordered, and soon it had come to a standstill on the surface of the ocean. There was less than one chance in ten thousand that it could have outrun such a swift, modern submarine. The submarines deck gun and machine gun were still trained on the transport ship, its crew in a state of readiness to attack. Yet a strange sense of tranquillity hovered between the two ships. The submarines crew stood in full view on deck, lined up and watching the transport ship with an air of having time to kill. Many of them had not even bothered to strap on battle helmets. There was hardly any wind that summer after- noon, and now, with both engines cut, the only sound was the languid slap of waves against the two ships hulls. The transport ship signaled to the submarine: We are a transport ship carrying unarmed civilians. We have neither munitions nor military personnel on board. We have few lifeboats. To this the submarine responded brusquely: That is not our problem. Evacuation or no, we commence firing in precisely ten minutes. This ended the exchange of signal messages between the two ships. The captain of the transport ship decided not to convey the communication to his passengers. What good would it do? A few of them might be lucky enough to survive, but most would be dragged to the bottom of the sea with this miserable old washtub. The captain longed for one last drink, but the whiskey bottle- some fine old scotch he had been saving-was in a desk drawer in his cabin, and there was no time to get it now. He took off his hat and looked up at the sky, hoping that, through some miracle, a squadron of Japanese fighter planes might suddenly appear there. But this was not to be a day for miracles. The captain had done all he could. He thought about his whiskey again.
As the ten-minute grace period was running out, strange movement began on the deck of the submarine. There were hurried exchanges among the officers lined up on the conning- tower deck, and one of the officers scrambled down to the main deck and ran among the crew, shouting some kind of order. Wherever he went, ripples of movement spread among the men at their battle stations. One sailor shook his head from side to side and punched the barrel of the deck gun with a clenched fist. Another took his helmet off and stared up at the sky. The mens actions might have been expressing anger or joy or disappointment or excitement. The passengers on the transport ship found it impossible to tell what was happening or what this was leading up to. Like an audience watching a pantomime for which there was no program (but which contained a very important message), they held their breaths and kept their eyes locked on the sailors every movement, hoping to find some small hint of meaning. Eventually, the waves of confusion that had spread among the sailors began to subside, and in response to an order from the bridge, the shells were removed from the deck gun with great dispatch. The men turned cranks and swung the barrel away from the transport ship until the gun was pointing straight ahead again, then they plugged the horrid black hole of the muzzle. The gun shells were returned be-lowdecks, and the crew ran for the hatches. In contrast to their earlier movements, they did everything now with speed and efficiency. There was no chatting or wasted motion.
The submarines engines started with a definite growl, and at almost the same moment the siren screeched to signal All hands belowdecks! The submarine began to move forward, and a moment later it was plunging downward, churning up a great white patch of foam, as if it had hardly been able to wait for the men to get below and fasten the hatches. A membrane of seawater swallowed the long, narrow deck from front to rear, the gun sank below the surface, the conning tower slipped downward, cutting through the dark-blue water, and finally the antenna and the periscope plunged out of sight, as if to rip the air clean of any evidence they had ever been there. Ripples disturbed the surface of the ocean for a short while, but soon they also subsided, leaving only the weirdly calm afternoon sea.
Even after the submarine had plunged beneath the surface, with the same amazing suddenness that had marked its appearance, the passengers stood frozen on the deck, staring at the watery expanse. Not a throat was cleared among them. The captain recovered his presence of mind and gave his order to the navigator, who passed it on to the engine room, and eventually, after a long fit of grinding, the antique engine started up like a sleeping dog kicked by its master.
The crew of the transport ship held their breaths, waiting for a torpedo attack. The Americans might have simply changed their plans, deciding that sinking the ship with a torpedo would be faster and easier than a time-consuming volley from the gun. The ship ran in short zigzags, the captain and navigator scanning the oceans surface with their binoculars, searching for the deadly white wake of a torpedo. But there was no torpedo. Twenty minutes after the submarine had disappeared beneath the waves, people at last began to break free of the death curse that had hung over them. They could only half believe it at first, but little by little they came to feel that it was true: they had come back alive from the verge of death. Not even the captain knew why the Americans had suddenly abandoned their attack. What could have changed their minds? (Only later did it become clear that instructions had arrived from headquarters just moments before the attack was to have begun, advising them to suspend all hostilities unless attacked by the enemy. The Japanese government had telegraphed the Allied powers that they were prepared to accept the Potsdam Declaration and surrender unconditionally.) Released now from the unbearable tension, several passengers plopped down on the deck where they stood and began to wail, but most of them could neither cry nor laugh. For several hours-and, in the case of some, for several days-they remained in a state of total abstraction, the spike of a long and twisted nightmare thrust unmercifully into their lungs, their hearts, their spines, their brains, their wombs.
Little Nutmeg Akasaka remained sound asleep in her mothers arms all the while this was happening. She slept for a solid twenty hours, as if she had been knocked unconscious. Her mother shouted and slapped her cheeks to no avail. She might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea. The intervals between her breaths grew longer and longer, and her pulse slowed.
Her breathing was all but inaudible. But when the ship arrived in Sasebo, she woke without warning, as if some great power had dragged her back into this world. And so Nutmeg did not herself witness the events surrounding the aborted attack and disappearance of the American submarine. She heard everything much later, from her mother.
The freighter finally limped into the port of Sasebo a little past ten in the morning on August 16, the day after the nonattack. The port was weirdly silent, and no one came out to greet the ship. Not even at the antiaircraft emplacement by the harbor mouth were there signs of humanity. The summer sunlight baked the ground with dumb intensity. The whole world seemed caught in a deep paralysis, and some on board felt as if they had stumbled by accident into the land of the dead. After years spent abroad, they could only stare in silence at the country of their ancestors. At noon on August 15, the radio had broadcast the Emperors announcement of the wars end. Six days before that, the nearby city of Nagasaki had been incinerated by a single atomic bomb. The phantom empire of Manchukuo was disappearing into history. And caught unawares in the wrong section of the revolving door, the veterinarian with the mark on his cheek would share the fate of Manchukuo.