30
Malta Kanos Tail
* Boris the Manskinner In my dream (though I didnt know it was a dream), I was seated across the table from Malta Kano, drinking tea. The rectangular room was too long and wide to see from end to end, and arranged in it in perfectly straight lines were five hundred or more square tables. We sat at one of the tables in the middle, the only people there. Across the ceiling, as high as that of a Buddhist temple, stretched countless heavy beams, from all points of which there hung, like potted plants, objects that appeared to be toupees. A closer look showed me that they were actual human scalps. I could tell from the black blood on their undersides. They were newly taken scalps that had been hung from the beams to dry. I was afraid that the still-fresh blood might drip into our tea. Blood was dripping all around us like raindrops, the sound reverberating in the cavernous room. Only the scalps hanging above our table seemed to have dried enough so that there was no sign of blood dripping down from them.
The tea was boiling hot. Placed beside the teaspoons in each of our saucers were three lurid green lumps of sugar. Malta Kano dropped two of the lumps into her tea and stirred, but they would not melt. A dog appeared from nowhere and sat down beside our table. Its face was that of Ushikawa. It was a big dog, with a chunky black body, but from the neck up it was Ushikawa, only the shaggy black fur that covered the body also grew on the face and head. Well, well, if it isnt Mr. Okada, said the dog-shaped Ushikawa. And will you look at this: a full head of hair. It grew there the second I turned into a dog. Amazing. Ive got much bigger balls now than I used to have, and my stomach doesnt hurt anymore. And look: No glasses! No clothes! Im so happy! I cant believe I didnt think of this before. If only I had become a dog a long time ago! How about you, Mr. Okada? Why dont you give it a try?
Malta Kano picked up her one remaining green sugar lump and hurled it at the dog. The lump thudded into Ushikawas forehead and drew ink-black blood that ran down Ushikawas face. This seemed to cause Ushikawa no pain. Still smiling, without a word, he raised his tail and strode away. It was true: his testicles were grotesquely huge.
Malta Kano was wearing a trench coat. The lapels were closed tightly across the front, but from the subtle fragrance of a womans naked flesh I could tell she was wearing nothing underneath. She had her red vinyl hat on, of course. I lifted my cup and took a sip of tea, but it had no taste. It was hot, nothing more.
I am so glad you could come, said Malta Kano, sounding genuinely relieved. Hearing it for the first time in quite a while, I thought her voice seemed somewhat brighter than it had before. I was calling you for days, but you always seemed to be out. I was beginning to worry that something might have happened to you. Thank goodness you are all right. What a relief it was to hear your voice! In any case, I must apologize for having been out of touch so long. I cant go into detail on everything that has occurred in my life in the meantime, especially on the phone like this, so I will just summarize the important points. The main thing is that I have been traveling all this time. I came back a week ago. Mr. Okada? Mr. Okada? Can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you, I said, suddenly realizing that I was holding a phone to my ear. Malta Kano, on her side of the table, was also holding a receiver. Her voice sounded as if it were coming through a bad connection on an international call.
I was away from Japan the whole time, on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. All of a sudden one day, the thought crossed my mind, Oh, yes! I must return to Malta and bring myself near its water. The time for that has come! This happened just after I last talked to you, Mr. Okada. Do you remember that conversation? I was looking for Creta at the time. In any case, I really did not mean to be away from Japan so long. I was planning on two weeks or so. Which is why I did not contact you.
I told hardly anyone I was going, just boarded the plane with little more than the clothes I was wearing. Once I arrived, however, I found myself unable to leave. Have you ever been to Malta, Mr. Okada?
I said that I had not. I remembered having had virtually the same conversation with this same person some years before.
Mr. Okada? Mr. Okada? Yes, Im still here, I said. It seemed to me there was something I had to tell Malta Kano, but I could not remember what it was. It finally came back to me after I cocked my head and thought about it for a while. I switched hands on the receiver and said, Oh, yes, theres something Ive been meaning to call you about for a long time. The cat came back.
After four or five seconds of silence, Malta Kano said, The cat came back?
Yes. Cat hunting was more or less what brought us together originally, so I thought Id better let you know.
When did the cat come back? Early this spring. Its been with me ever since. Is there anything different about its appearance? Anything that has changed since before it disappeared? Changed?
Come to think of it, I kind of had the feeling that the shape of the tail was a little different, I said. When I petted the cat the day it came back, it seemed to me the tail used to have more of a bend in it. I could be wrong, though. I mean, it was gone close to a year.
You are sure it is the same cat?
Absolutely sure. I had that cat for a very long time. Id know if it was the same one or not.
I see, said Malta Kano. To tell you the truth, though, I am sorry, but I have the cats real tail right here.
Malta Kano put the receiver down on the table, then she stood and stripped off her coat. As I had suspected, she was wearing nothing underneath. The size of her breasts and the shape of her pubic hair were much the same as Creta Kanos. She did not remove her red vinyl hat. She turned and showed her back to me.. There, to be sure, attached above her buttocks, was a cats tail. Proportioned to her body, it was much larger than the original, but its shape was the same as Mackerels tail. It had the same sharp bend at the tip, but this one was far more convincingly real than Mackerels.
Please take a close look, said Malta Kano. This is the actual tail of the cat that disappeared. The one the cat has now is an imitation. It may look the same, but if you examine it closely, you will find that it is different.
I reached out to touch her tail, but she whipped it away from my hand. Then, still naked, she jumped up onto one of the tables. Into my extended palm fell a drop of blood from the ceiling. It was the same intense red as Malta Kanos vinyl hat.
Creta Kanos babys name is Corsica, Mr. Okada, said Malta Kano from atop her table, her tail twitching sharply.
Corsica?
No man is an island. That Corsica, piped up the black dog, Ushikawa, from somewhere.
Kanos baby? I woke up, soaked in sweat.
It had been a very long time since I last had a dream so long and vivid and unified. And strange. My heart went on pounding audibly for a while after I woke up. I took a hot shower and changed into fresh pajamas. The time was something after one in the morning, but I no longer felt sleepy. To calm myself, I took an old bottle of brandy from the back of the kitchen cabinet, poured a glass, and drank it down.
Then I went to the bedroom to look for Mackerel. The cat was curled up under the quilt, sound asleep. I peeled back the quilt and took the cats tail in my hand to study its shape. I ran my fingers over it, trying to recall the exact angle of the bent tip, when the cat gave an annoyed stretch and went back to sleep. I could no longer say for sure that this was the same exact tail the cat had had when it was called Noboru Wataya. Somehow, the tail on Malta Kanos bottom seemed far more like the real Noboru Wataya cats tail. I could still vividly recall its shape and color in the dream.
Kanos babys name is Corsica, Malta Kano had said in my dream.
I did not stray far from the house the next day. In the morning, I stocked up on food at the supermarket by the station and made myself lunch. I fed the cat some large fresh sardines. In the afternoon, I took a long-delayed swim in the ward pool. Not many people were there. They were probably busy with New Years preparations. The ceiling speakers were playing Christmas music. I had swum a leisurely thousand meters, when I got a cramp in my instep and decided to quit. The wall over the pool had a large Christmas ornament.
At home, I was surprised to find a letter in the mailbox-a thick one. I knew who had sent it without having to look at the return address. The only person who wrote to me in such a fine hand with an old-fashioned writing brush was Lieutenant Mamiya.
His letter opened with profuse apologies for his having allowed so much time to go by since his last letter. He expressed himself with such extreme politeness that I almost felt I was the one who ought to apologize.
I have been wanting to tell you another part of my story and have thought for months about writing to you, but many things have come up to prevent me from sitting at my desk and taking pen in hand. Now, almost before I realized it, the year has nearly run its course. I am growing old, however, and could die at any moment. I cant postpone the task indefinitely. This letter might be a long one- not too long for you, I hope, Mr. Okada.
When I delivered Mr. Hondos memento to you last summer, I told you a long story about my time in Mongolia, but in fact there is even more to tell- a sequel, as it were. There were several reasons for my not having included this part when I told you my story last year. First of all, it would have made the tale too long if I had related it in its entirety. You may recall that I had some pressing business, and there simply wasnt time for me to tell you everything. Perhaps more important, I was still not emotionally prepared then to tell the rest of my story to anyone, to relate it fully and honestly.
After I left you, however, I realized that I should not have allowed practical matters to stand in the way. I should have told you everything to the very end without concealment.
I took a machine gun bullet during the fierce battle of August 13, 1945, on the outskirts of Hailar, and as I lay on the ground I lost my left hand under the treads of a Soviet T34 tank. They transferred me, unconscious, to the Soviet military hospital in Chita, where the surgeons managed to save my life. As I mentioned before, I had been attached to the Military Survey Corps of the Kwantung Army General Staff in Hsin-ching, which had been slated to withdraw to the rear as soon as the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Determined to die, however, I had had myself transferred to the Hailar unit, near the border, where I offered myself up as a human bullet, attacking a Soviet tank with a land mine in my arms. As Mr. Honda had prophesied on the banks of the Khalkha River, though, I was not able to die so easily. I lost only my hand, not my life. All the men under my command, I believe, were killed, however. We may have been acting under orders, but it was a stupid, suicidal attack. Our little portable mines couldnt have done a thing to a huge T34.
The only reason the Soviet Army took such good care of me was that, as I lay delirious, I said something in Russian. Or so they told me afterward. I had studied basic Russian, as I have mentioned to you, and my post in the Hsin-ching General Staff Office gave me so much spare time, I used it to polish what I knew. I worked hard, so that by the time the war was winding down, I could carry on a fluent conversation in Russian. Many White Russians lived in Hsin-ching, and I knew a few Russian waitresses, so I was never at a loss for people to practice on. My Russian seems to have slipped out quite naturally while I was unconscious.
The Soviet Army was planning from the outset to send to Siberia any Japanese prisoners of war they took in occupying Manchuria, to use them as forced laborers as they had done with German soldiers after the fighting ended in Europe. The Soviets may have been on the winning side, but their economy was in a critical state after the long war, and the shortage of workers was a problem everywhere. Securing an adult male workforce in the form of prisoners of war was one of their top priorities. For this, they would need interpreters, and the number of these was severely limited. When they saw that I seemed to be able to speak Russian, they shipped me to the hospital in Chita instead of letting me die. If I hadnt babbled something in Russian, I would have been left out there to die on the banks of the Hailar, and that would have been that. I would have been buried in an unmarked grave. Fate is such a mysterious thing!
After that, I was subjected to a grueling investigation and given several months of ideological training before being sent to a Siberian coal mine to serve as an interpreter. I will omit the details of that period, but let me say this about my ideological training. As a student before the war, I had read several banned Marxist books, taking care to hide them from the police, and I was not entirely unsympathetic to the communist line, but I had seen too much to swallow it whole. Thanks to my work with intelligence, I knew very well the bloody history of oppression in Mongolia carried out by Stalin and his puppet dictators. Ever since the Revolution, they had sent tens of thousands of Lamaist priests and landowners and other forces of opposition to concentration camps, where they were cruelly liquidated. And the same kind of thing had happened in the Soviet Union itself. Even if I could have believed in the communist ideology, I could no longer believe in the people or the system that was responsible for putting that ideology and those principles into practice. I felt the same way about what we Japanese had done in Manchuria. Im sure you cant imagine the number of Chinese laborers killed in the course of constructing the secret base at Hailar- killed purposely so as to shut them up, to protect the secrecy of the bases construction plans.
Besides, I had witnessed that hellish skinning carried out by the Russian officer and his Mongolian subordinates. I had been thrown into a Mongolian well, and in that strange, intense light I had lost any passion for living. How could someone like me believe in ideology and politics? As an interpreter, I worked as a liaison between Japanese prisoners of war in the mine and their Soviet captors. I dont know what it was like in the other Siberian concentration camps, but in the mine where I worked, streams of people were dying every day. Not that there was any dearth of causes: malnutrition, overwork, cave-ins, floods, unsanitary conditions that gave rise to epidemics, winter cold of unbelievable harshness, violent guards, the brutal suppression of the mildest resistance. There were cases, too, of lynchings of Japanese by their fellow Japanese. What people felt for each other under such circumstances was hatred and doubt and fear and despair.
Whenever the number of deaths increased to the point where the labor force was declining, they would bring in whole trainloads of new prisoners of war. The men would be dressed in rags, emaciated, and a good quarter of them would die within the first few weeks, unable to withstand the harsh conditions in the mine. The dead would be thrown into abandoned mine shafts. There was no way to dig graves for them all. The earth was frozen solid there year round. Shovels couldnt dent it. So the abandoned mine shafts were perfect for disposing of the dead. They were deep and dark, and because of the cold, there was no smell. Now and then, we would put a layer of coal over the bodies. When a shaft filled up, they would cap it with dirt and rocks, then move on to the next shaft.
The dead were not the only ones thrown into the shafts. Sometimes living men would be thrown in to teach the rest of us a lesson. Any Japanese soldier who showed signs of resistance would be taken out by Soviet guards and beaten to a pulp, his arms and legs broken before they dropped him to the bottom of the pit. To this day, I can still hear their pitiful screams. It was a literal living hell.
The mine was run as a major strategic facility by politburo members dispatched from Party Central and policed by the army with maximum security. The top man was said to be from Stalins own hometown, a cold, hard party functionary still young and full of ambition. His only concern was to raise production figures. The consumption of laborers was a matter of indifference to him. As long as the production figures went up, Party Central would recognize his mine as exemplary and reward him with an expanded labor force. No matter how many workers died, they would always be replaced. To keep the figures rising, he would authorize the digging of veins that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been considered too dangerous to work. Naturally, the number of accidents continued to rise as well, but he didnt care about that.
The director was not the only coldhearted individual running the mine. Most of the guards inside the mine were former convicts, uneducated men of shocking cruelty and vindictiveness. They displayed no sign of sympathy or affection, as if, living out here on the edge of the earth, they had been transformed over the years by the frigid Siberian air into some kind of subhuman creatures. They had committed crimes and been sent to Siberian prisons, but now that they had served out their long sentences, they no longer had homes or families to go back to. They had taken local wives, made children with them, and settled into the Siberian soil.
Japanese prisoners of war were not the only ones sent to work in the mine. There were many Russian criminals as well, political prisoners and former military officers who had encountered Stalins purges. Not a few of these men were well-educated, highly refined individuals. Among the Russians were a very few women and children, probably the scattered remains of political prisoners families. They would be put to work collecting garbage, washing clothes, and other such tasks. Young women were often used as prostitutes. Besides the Russians, the trains would bring Poles, Hungarians, and other foreigners, some with dusky skins (Armenians and Kurds, I should imagine). The camp was partitioned into three living areas: the largest one, where Japanese prisoners of war were kept together; the area for other criminals and prisoners of war; and the area of noncriminals. In this last there lived regular miners and mining professionals, officers and guards of the military guard detachment, some with families, and ordinary Russian citizens. There was also a large army post near the station. Prisoners of war and other prisoners were forbidden to leave their assigned areas. The areas were divided from each other by massive barbed-wire fences and patrolled by soldiers carrying machine guns.
As a translator with liaison duties, 1 had to visit headquarters each day and was basically free to move from area to area as long as I showed my pass. Near headquarters was the train station, and a kind of one-street town with a few shabby stores, a bar, and an inn for officials and high-ranking officers on inspection tours. The square was lined with horse troughs, and a big red flag of the USSR flew from a flagpole in the center. Beneath the flag was parked an armored vehicle, with a machine gun, against which there was always leaning a bored- looking young soldier in full military gear. The newly built military hospital was situated at the far end of the square, with a large statue of Joseph Stalin at its entrance.
There is a man I must tell you about now. I encountered him in the spring of 1947, probably around the beginning of May, when the snow had finally melted. A year and a half had already passed since I was sent to the mine. When I first saw him, the man was wearing the kind of uniform they gave to all the Russian prisoners. He was involved in repair work at the station with a group of some ten of his compatriots. They were breaking up rocks with sledgehammers and spreading the crushed rock over the roadway. The clanging of the hammers against the hard rocks reverberated throughout the area. I was on my way back from delivering a report to the mine headquarters when I passed the station. The noncommissioned officer directing the work stopped me and ordered me to show my pass. I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. The sergeant, a large man, focused a deeply suspicious gaze on the pass for some time, but he was obviously illiterate. He called over one of the prisoners at work on the road and told the man to read it aloud. This particular prisoner was different from the others in his group: he had the look of a well-educated man. And it was him. When I saw him, I could feel the blood drain from my face. I could hardly breathe- literally. I felt as if I were underwater, drowning. My breath would not come.
This educated prisoner was none other than the Russian officer who had ordered the Mongolian soldiers to skin Yamamoto alive on the bank of the Khalkha River. He was emaciated now, largely bald, and missing a tooth in front. Instead of his spotless officers uniform, he wore filthy prison garb, and instead of shiny boots, he wore cloth shoes that were full of holes. The lenses of his eyeglasses were dirty and scratched, the frame was twisted. But it was the same man, without a doubt. There was no way I could have failed to recognize him. And he, in turn, was staring hard at me, his curiosity first aroused, no doubt, by my own stunned expression. Like him, I had also aged and wasted away in the nine intervening years. I even had a few white hairs now. But he seemed to recognize me nonetheless. A look of astonishment crossed his face. He must have assumed that I had rotted away in the bottom of a Mongolian well. And I, of course, never dreamed that I would run across him in a Siberian mining camp, wearing prisoners garb.
A moment was all it took him to regain his composure and begin reading my pass in calm tones to the illiterate sergeant, who had a machine gun slung from his neck. He read my name, my job as translator, my qualification to move among camp areas, and so on. The sergeant returned my pass and signaled me with a jerk of the chin to go. I walked on a short way and turned around. The man was looking at me. He seemed to be wearing a faint smile, though it might have been my imagination. The way my legs were shaking, I couldnt walk straight for a while. All the terror I had experienced nine years before had come back to me in an instant.
I imagined that the man had fallen from grace and been sent to this Siberian prison camp. Such things were not at all rare in the Soviet Union back then. Vicious struggles were going on within the government, the party, and the military services, and Stalins pathological suspiciousness pursued the losers without mercy stripped of their positions, such men would be tried in kangaroo courts and either summarily executed or sent to the concentration camps, though finally which group was the more fortunate only a god could say. An escape from death led only to slave labor of unimaginable cruelty. We Japanese prisoners of war could at least hope to return to our homeland if we survived, but exiled Russians knew no such hope. Like the others, this man would end with his bones rotting in the soil of Siberia.
Only one thing bothered me about him, though, and that was that he now knew my name and where to find me. Before the war, I had participated (all unknowingly, to be sure) in that secret operation with the spy Yamamoto, crossing the Khalkha River into Mongolian territory for espionage activities. If the man should leak this information, it could put me in a very uncomfortable position. Finally, however, he did not inform on me. No, as I was to discover later, he had far more grandiose plans for me.
I spotted him a week later, outside the station. He was in chains still, wearing the same filthy prison clothes and cracking rocks with a hammer. I looked at him, and he looked at me. He rested his hammer on the ground and turned my way, standing as tall and straight as he had when in military uniform. This time, unmistakably, he wore a smile on his face- a faint smile, but still a smile, one suggesting a streak of cruelty that sent chills up my spine. It was the same expression he had worn as he watched Yamamoto being skinned alive. I said nothing and passed on.
I had one friend at the time among the officers in the camps Soviet Army headquarters. Like me, he had majored in geography in college (in Leningrad). We were the same age, and both of us were interested in making maps, so we would find pretexts now and then for sharing a little shoptalk. He had a personal interest in the strategic maps of Manchuria that the Kwantung Army had been making. Of course, we couldnt have such conversations when his superiors were around. We had to snatch opportunities to enjoy this professional patter in their absence. Sometimes he would give me food or show me pictures of the wife and children he had left behind in Kiev. He was the only Russian I felt at all close to during the period I was interned in the Soviet Union.
One time, in an offhand manner, I asked him about the convicts working by the station. One man in particular had struck me as different from the usual inmate, I said; he looked as if he might once have held an important post. I described his appearance. The officer-whose name was Nikolai-said to me with a scowl, That would be Boris the Manskinner. Youd better not have anything to do with him.
Why was that? I asked. Nikolai seemed hesitant to say more, but he knew I was in a position to do him favors, so finally, and reluctantly, he told me how Boris the Manskinner had been sent to this mine. Now, dont tell anyone I told you, he warned me. That guy can be dangerous. Im not kidding--they dont come any worse. I wouldnt touch him with a ten- foot pole.
This is what Nikolai told me. The real name of Boris the Manskinner was Boris Gromov. Just as I had imagined, he had been a major in the NKVD. They had assigned him to Ulan Bator as a military adviser in 1938, the year Choybal-san took power as prime minister. There he organized the Mongolian secret police, modeling it after Berias NKVD, and he distinguished himself in suppressing counterrevolutionary forces. They would round people up, throw them into concentration camps, and torture them, liquidating anyone of whom they had the slightest suspicion.
As soon as the battle of Nomonhan ended and the Far Eastern crisis was averted, Boris was called back to Moscow and reassigned to Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, where he worked on the purging of the old Polish Army. That is where he earned the nickname Boris the Manskinner. Skinning people alive, using a man they said he brought with him from Mongolia, was his special form of torture. The Poles were scared to death of him, needless to say. Anyone forced to watch a skinning would confess everything without fail. When the German Army suddenly burst across the border and the war started with Germany, he pulled back from Poland to Moscow. Lots of people were arrested then on suspicion of having colluded with Hitler. They would be executed or sent to prison camps. Here, again, Boris dis- tinguished himself as Berias right-hand man, employing his special torture. Stalin and Beria had to cook up their internal-conspiracy theory, covering up their own responsibility for having failed to predict the Nazi invasion in order to solidify their positions of leadership. A lot of people died for nothing while being cruelly tortured. Boris and his man were said to have skinned at least five people then, and rumor had it that he proudly displayed the skins on the walls of his office.
Boris may have been cruel, but he was also very careful, which is how he survived all the plots and purges. Beria loved him as a son. But this may have been what led him to become a little too sure of himself and to overstep his bounds. The mistake he made was a fatal one. He arrested the commander of an armored battalion on suspicion of his having communicated secretly with one of Hitlers SS armored battalions during a battle in the Ukraine. He killed the man with torture, poking hot irons into every opening- ears, nostrils, rectum, penis, whatever. But the officer turned out to be the nephew of a high-ranking Communist Party official. Whats more, a thoroughgoing investigation by the Red Army General Staff showed the man to have been absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. The party official blew up, of course, nor was the Red Army just going to withdraw quietly after such a blot on its honor. Not even Beria was able to protect Boris this time. They stripped him of his rank, put him on trial, and sentenced both him and his Mongolian adjutant to death. The NKVD went to work, though, and got his sentence reduced to hard labor in a concentration camp (though the Mongolian was hanged). Beria sent a secret message to Boris in prison, promising to pull strings in the army and the party: he would get him out and restore him to power after he had served a year in the camp. At least this was how Nikolai had heard it.
So you see, Mamiya, Nikolai said to me, keeping his voice low, everybody thinks Boris is going back to Moscow someday, that Beria is sure to save him before too long. Its true that Beria has to be careful: this camp is still run by the party and the army. But none of us can relax. The wind direction can shift just like that. And when it does, anybody whos given him a tough time here is in for it. The world may be full of idiots, but nobodys stupid enough to sign his own death warrant. We have to tiptoe around him. Hes an honored guest here. Of course, we cant give him servants and treat him as if he were in a hotel. For appearance sake, we have to put chains on his leg and give him a few rocks to crack, but in fact he has his own room and all the alcohol and tobacco he wants. If you ask me, hes like a poison snake. Keeping him alive is not going to do anybody any good. Somebody ought to sneak in there one night and slash his throat for him.
Another day when I was walking by the station, that big sergeant stopped me again. I started to take out my pass, but he shook his head and told me to go instead to the stationmasters office. Puzzled, I did as I was told and found in the office not the stationmaster but Boris Gromov. He sat at the desk, drinking tea and obviously waiting for me to arrive. I froze in the doorway. He no longer had leg irons on. With his hand, he gestured for me to come in.
Nice to see you, Lieutenant Mamiya. Its been years, he said cheerily, flashing a big smile. He offered me a cigarette, but I shook my head.
Nine years, to be precise, he continued, lighting up himself. Or is it eight? Anyhow, its wonderful to see you alive and well. What a joy to meet old friends! Especially after such a brutal war. Dont you agree? And how did you manage to get out of that well?
I just stood there, saying nothing.
All right, then, never mind. The important thing is that you did get out. And then you lost a hand somewhere. And then you learned to speak such fluent Russian! Wonderful, wonderful. You can always make do without a hand. What matters most is that youre alive.
Not by choice, I replied.
Boris laughed aloud. Youre such an interesting fellow, Lieutenant Mamiya. You would choose not to live, and yet here you are, very much alive. Yes, a truly interesting fellow. But I am not so easily fooled. No ordinary man could have escaped from that deep well by himself- escaped and found his way back across the river to Manchuria. But dont worry. I wont tell anyone.
Enough about you, though. Let me tell you about myself. As you can see, I lost my former position and am now a mere prisoner in a concentration camp. But I do not intend to stay here on the edge of the earth forever, breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. I am as powerful as ever back at Party Central, and I am using that power to increase my power here day by day. And so I will tell you in all frankness that I want to have good relations with you Japanese prisoners of war. Finally, the productivity of this mine depends on you men- on your numbers and your hard work. We can accomplish nothing if we ignore your power, and that includes your own individual power, Lieutenant Mamiya. I want you to lend me some of what you have. You are a former intelligence officer of the Kwantung Army and a very brave man. You speak fluent Russian. If you would act as my liaison, I am in a position to do favors for yourself and your comrades. This is not a bad deal that I am offering you.
I have never been a spy, I declared, and I have no intention of becoming one now.
I am not asking you to become a spy, Boris said, as if to calm me down. All Im saying is that I can make things easier for your people. Im offering to improve relations, and I want you to be the go-between. Together, we can knock that shit-eating Georgian politburo son of a bitch out of his chair. I can do it, dont kid yourself. Im sure you Japanese hate his guts. Once we get rid of him, you people will be able to have partial autonomy, you can form committees, you can run your own organization. Then at least youll be able to stop the guards from dishing out brutal treatment anytime they like. Thats what youve all been hoping for, isnt it?
Boris was right about that. We had been appealing to the camp authorities about these matters for a long time, and they would always turn us down flat.
And what do you want in return? I asked.
Almost nothing, he said, with a big smile, holding both arms out. All I am looking for is close, friendly relations with you Japanese prisoners of war. I want to eliminate a few of my party comrades, my tovarishes, with whom it seems I am unable to achieve any understanding, and I need your peoples cooperation to accomplish that. We have many interests in common, so why dont we join hands for our mutual benefit? What is it the Americans say? Give-and-take? If you cooperate with me, I wont do anything to your disadvantage. I have no tricks up my sleeve. I know, of course, that I am in no position to ask you to like me. You and I share some unpleasant memories, to be sure. But appearances aside, I am a man of honor. I always keep my promises. So why dont we let bygones be bygones?
Take a few days, think about my offer, and let me have a firm reply. I believe its worth a try. You men have nothing to lose, dont you agree? Now, make sure you mention this only to people you are absolutely sure you can trust. A few of your men are informers working with the politburo member. Make sure they dont catch wind of this. Things could turn sour if they found out. My power here is still somewhat limited.
I went back to my area and took one man aside to discuss Boriss offer. This fellow had been a lieutenant colonel in the army. He was a tough man with a sharp mind. Commander of a unit that had shut itself up in a Khingan Mountain fortress and refused to raise the white flag even after Japans surrender, he was now the unofficial leader of the camps Japanese prisoners of war, a force the Russians had to reckon with. Concealing the incident with Yamamoto on the banks of the Khalkha, I told him that Boris had been a high-ranking officer in the secret police and explained his offer. The colonel seemed interested in the idea of eliminating the present politburo member and securing some autonomy for the Japanese prisoners of war. I stressed that Boris was a cold-blooded and dangerous man, a past master of deceit and trickery who could not be taken at face value. You may be right, said the colonel, but so is our politburo friend: we have nothing to lose. And he was right. If something came out of the deal, it couldnt make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldnt have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.
A few days later, I was able to arrange a private meeting between the colonel and Boris in a place away from prying eyes. I acted as interpreter. A secret pact resulted from their thirty- minute discussion, and the two shook hands. I have no way of knowing exactly what happened after that. The two avoided direct contact so as not to attract attention, and instead they seem to have engaged in a constant exchange of coded messages using some kind of secret means of communication. This ended my role as intermediary. Which was fine with me. If possible, I wanted nothing more to do with Boris. Only later would I realize that such a thing was anything but possible.
As Boris had promised, about a month later, Party Central removed the Georgian politburo member from office and sent a new member to take his place two days after that.
Another two days went by, and three Japanese prisoners of war were strangled during the night. They were found hanging from beams to make the deaths look like suicides, but these were clearly lynchings carried out by other Japanese. The three must have been the informers Boris had mentioned. There was never any investigation. By then, Boris practically had the camp in the palm of his hand.