The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (85 page)

The lieutenant ordered the four Chinese who had dug the hole to
throw the bodies into it. Without a word, faces blank, the men took the bodies out of the wagon and threw them, one at a time, into the hole. Each corpse landed with a dull thud. The numbers on the dead men’s uniforms were 2, 5, 6, and 8. The veterinarian committed them to memory.

When the four Chinese had finished throwing the bodies into the hole, the soldiers tied each man to a nearby tree. The lieutenant held up his wrist and studied his watch with a grim expression. Then he looked up toward a spot in the sky for a while, as if searching for something there. He looked like a stationmaster standing on the platform and waiting for a hopelessly overdue train. But in fact he was looking at nothing at all. He was just allowing a certain amount of time to go by. Once he had accomplished that, he turned to the corporal and gave him curt orders to bayonet three of the four prisoners (numbers 1, 7, and 9).

Three soldiers were chosen and took up their positions in front of the three Chinese. The soldiers looked paler than the men they were about to kill. The Chinese looked too tired to hope for anything. The corporal offered each of them a smoke, but they refused. He put his cigarettes back into his shirt pocket.

Taking the veterinarian with him, the lieutenant went to stand somewhat apart from the other soldiers. “You’d better watch this,” he said. “This is another way to die.”

The veterinarian nodded. The lieutenant is not saying this to me, he thought. He’s saying it to himself.

In a gentle voice, the lieutenant explained, “Shooting them would be the simplest and most efficient way to kill them, but we have orders not to waste a single bullet—and certainly not to waste bullets killing Chinese. We’re supposed to save our ammunition for the Russians. We’ll just bayonet them, I suppose, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. By the way, Doctor, did they teach you how to use a bayonet in the army?”

The doctor explained that as a cavalry veterinarian, he had not been trained to use a bayonet.

“Well, the proper way to kill a man with a bayonet is this: First you thrust it in under the ribs—here.” The lieutenant pointed to his own torso just above the stomach. “Then you drag the point in a big, deep circle inside him, to scramble the organs. Then you thrust upward to puncture the heart. You can’t just stick it in and expect him to die. We soldiers have this drummed into us. Hand-to-hand combat using bayonets ranks right up there along with night assaults as the pride of the Imperial Army—though mainly, it’s a lot cheaper than tanks and planes and
cannons. Of course, you can train all you want, but finally what you’re stabbing is a straw doll, not a live human being. It doesn’t bleed or scream or spill its guts on the ground. These soldiers have never actually killed a human being that way. And neither have I.”

The lieutenant looked at the corporal and gave him a nod. The corporal barked his order to the three soldiers, who snapped to attention. Then they took a half-step back and thrust out their bayonets, each man aiming his blade at his prisoner. One of the young men (number 7) growled something in Chinese that sounded like a curse and gave a defiant spit—which never reached the ground but dribbled down the front of his baseball uniform.

At the sound of the next order, the three soldiers thrust their bayonets into the Chinese men with tremendous force. Then, as the lieutenant had said, they twisted the blades so as to rip the men’s internal organs, and thrust the tips upward. The cries of the Chinese men were not very loud—more like deep sobs than screams, as if they were heaving out the breath left in their bodies all at once through a single opening. The soldiers pulled out their bayonets and stepped back. The corporal barked his order again, and the men repeated the procedure exactly as before—stabbing, twisting, thrusting upward, withdrawing. The veterinarian watched in numbed silence, overtaken by the sense that he was beginning to split in two. He became simultaneously the stabber and the stabbed. He could feel both the impact of the bayonet as it entered his victim’s body and the pain of having his internal organs slashed to bits.

It took much longer than he would have imagined for the Chinese men to die. Their sliced-up bodies poured prodigious amounts of blood on the ground, but even with their organs shredded, they went on twitching slightly for quite some time. The corporal used his own bayonet to cut the ropes that bound the men to the trees, and then he had the soldiers who had not participated in the killing help drag the fallen bodies to the hole and throw them in. These corpses also made a dull thud on impact, but the doctor couldn’t help feeling that the sound was different from that made by the earlier corpses—probably because they were not entirely dead yet.

Now only the young Chinese prisoner with the number 4 on his shirt was left. The three pale-faced soldiers tore broad leaves from plants at their feet and proceeded to wipe their bloody bayonets. Not only blood but strange-colored body fluids and chunks of flesh adhered to the blades. The men had to use many leaves to return the bayonets to their original bare-metal shine.

The veterinarian wondered why only the one man, number 4, had been left alive, but he was not going to ask questions. The lieutenant took out another cigarette and lit up. He then offered a smoke to the veterinarian, who accepted it in silence and, after putting it between his lips, struck his own match. His hand did not tremble, but it seemed to have lost all feeling, as if he were wearing thick gloves.

“These men were cadets in the Manchukuo Army officer candidate school,” said the lieutenant. “They refused to participate in the defense of Hsin-ching. They killed two of their Japanese instructors last night and tried to run away. We caught them during night patrol, killed four of them on the spot and captured the other four. Two more escaped in the dark.” The lieutenant rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand. “They were trying to make their getaway in baseball uniforms. I guess they figured they’d be arrested as deserters if they wore their military uniforms. Or maybe they were afraid of what communist troops would do to them if they were caught in their Manchukuo uniforms. Anyway, all they had in their barracks to wear besides their cadet outfits were uniforms of the officer candidate school baseball team. So they tore off the names and tried to get away wearing these. I don’t know if you know, but the school had a great team. They used to go to Taiwan and Korea for friendship games. That guy”—and here the lieutenant motioned toward the man tied to the tree—“was captain of the team and batted cleanup. We think he was the one who organized the getaway. He killed the two instructors with a bat. The instructors knew there was trouble in the barracks and weren’t going to distribute weapons to the cadets until it was an absolute emergency. But they forgot about the baseball bats. Both of them had their skulls cracked open. They probably died instantly. Two perfect home runs. This is the bat.”

The lieutenant had the corporal bring the bat to him. He passed the bat to the veterinarian. The doctor took it in both hands and held it up in front of his face the way a player does when stepping into the batter’s box. It was just an ordinary bat, not very well made, with a rough finish and an uneven grain. It was heavy, though, and well broken in. The handle was black with sweat. It didn’t look like a bat that had been used recently to kill two human beings. After getting a feel for its weight, the veterinarian handed it back to the lieutenant, who gave it a few easy swings, handling it like an expert.

“Do you play baseball?” the lieutenant asked the veterinarian.

“All the time when I was a kid.”

“Too grown up now?”

“No more baseball for me,” the veterinarian said, and he was on the verge of asking, “How about you, Lieutenant?” when he swallowed the words.

“I’ve been ordered to beat this guy to death with the same bat he used,” the lieutenant said in a dry voice as he tapped the ground with the tip of the bat. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Just between you and me, I think the order stinks. What the hell good is it going to do to kill these guys? We don’t have any planes left, we don’t have any warships, our best troops are dead. Some kind of special new bomb wiped out the whole city of Hiroshima in a split second. We’re either going to be swept out of Manchuria or we’ll all be killed, and China will belong to the Chinese again. We’ve already killed a lot of Chinese, and adding a few bodies to the count isn’t going to make any difference. But orders are orders. I’m a soldier, and I have to follow orders. We killed the tigers and leopards yesterday, and today we have to kill these guys. So take a good look, Doctor. This is another way for people to die. You’re a doctor, so you’re probably used to knives and blood and guts, but you’ve probably never seen anyone beaten to death with a baseball bat.”

The lieutenant ordered the corporal to bring player number 4, the cleanup batter, to the edge of the hole. Once again they tied his hands behind his back, then they blindfolded him and had him kneel down on the ground. He was a tall, strongly built young man with massive arms the size of most people’s thighs. The lieutenant called over one young soldier and handed him the bat. “Kill him with this,” he said. The young soldier stood at attention and saluted before taking the bat, but having taken it in his hands, he just went on standing there, as if stupefied. He seemed unable to grasp the concept of beating a Chinese man to death with a baseball bat.

“Have you ever played baseball?” the lieutenant asked the young soldier (the one who would eventually have his skull split open with a shovel by a Soviet guard in a mine near Irkutsk).

“No, sir, never,” replied the soldier, in a loud voice. Both the village in Hokkaido where he was born and the village in Manchuria where he grew up had been so poor that no family in either place could have afforded the luxury of a baseball or a bat. He had spent his boyhood running around the fields, catching dragonflies and playing at sword fighting with sticks. He had never in his life played baseball or even seen a game. This was the first time he had ever held a bat.

The lieutenant showed him how to hold the bat and taught him the basics of the swing, demonstrating himself a few times. “See? It’s all in
the hips,” he grunted through clenched teeth. “Starting from the backswing, you twist from the waist down. The tip of the bat follows through naturally. Understand? If you concentrate too much on swinging the bat, your arms do all the work and you lose power. Swing from the hips.”

The soldier didn’t seem fully to comprehend the lieutenant’s instructions, but he took off his heavy gear as ordered and practiced his swing for a while. Everyone was watching him. The lieutenant placed his hands over the soldier’s to help him adjust his grip. He was a good teacher. Before long, the soldier’s swing, though somewhat awkward, was swishing through the air. What the young soldier lacked in skill he made up for in muscle power, having spent his days working on the farm.

“That’s good enough,” said the lieutenant, using his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow. “OK, now,’ try to do it in one good, clean swing. Don’t let him suffer.”

What he really wanted to say was, “I don’t want to do this any more than you do. Who the hell could have thought of anything so stupid? Killing a guy with a baseball bat …” But an officer could never say such a thing to an enlisted man.

The soldier stepped up behind the blindfolded Chinese man where he knelt on the ground. When the soldier raised the bat, the strong rays of the setting sun cast the bat’s long, thick shadow on the earth. This is so weird, thought the veterinarian. The lieutenant was right: I’ve never seen a man killed with a baseball bat. The young soldier held the bat aloft for a long time. The doctor saw its tip shaking.

The lieutenant nodded to the soldier. With a deep breath, the soldier took a backswing, then smashed the bat with all his strength into the back of the Chinese cadet’s head. He did it amazingly well. He swung his hips exactly as the lieutenant had taught him to, the brand of the bat made a direct hit behind the man’s ear, and the bat followed through perfectly. There was a dull crushing sound as the skull shattered. The man himself made no sound. His body hung in the air for a moment in a strange pose, then flopped forward. He lay with his cheek on the ground, blood flowing from one ear. He did not move. The lieutenant looked at his watch. Still gripping the bat, the young soldier stared off into space, his mouth agape.

The lieutenant was a person who did things with great care. He waited for a full minute. When he was certain that the young Chinese man was not moving at all, he said to the veterinarian, “Could you do me a favor and check to see that he’s really dead?”

The veterinarian nodded, walked over to where the young Chinese lay,
knelt down, and removed his blindfold. The man’s eyes were open wide, the pupils turned upward, and bright-red blood was flowing from his ear. His half-opened mouth revealed the tongue lying tangled inside. The impact had left his neck twisted at a strange angle. The man’s nostrils had expelled thick gobs of blood, making black stains on the dry ground. One particularly alert—and large—fly had already burrowed its way into a nostril to lay eggs. Just to make sure, the veterinarian took the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse. There was no pulse—certainly not where there was supposed to be one. The young soldier had ended this burly man’s life with a single swing of a bat—indeed, his first-ever swing of a bat. The veterinarian glanced toward the lieutenant and nodded to signal that the man was, without a doubt, dead. Having completed his assigned task, he was beginning slowly to rise to his full height, when it seemed to him that the sun shining on his back suddenly increased in intensity.

At that very moment, the young Chinese batter in uniform number 4 rose up into a sitting position, as if he had just come fully awake. Without the slightest uncertainty or hesitation—or so it seemed to those watching—he grabbed the doctor’s wrist. It all happened in a split second. The veterinarian could not understand: this man was dead, he was sure of it. But now, thanks to one last drop of life that seemed to well up from nowhere, the man was gripping the doctor’s wrist with the strength of a steel vise. Eyelids stretched open to the limit, pupils still glaring upward, the man fell forward into the hole, dragging the doctor in after him. The doctor fell in on top of him and heard one of the man’s ribs crack as his weight came down. Still the Chinese ballplayer continued to grip his wrist. The soldiers saw all this happening, but they were too stunned to do anything more than stand and watch. The lieutenant recovered first and leaped into the hole. He drew his pistol from his holster, set the muzzle against the Chinese man’s head, and pulled the trigger twice. Two sharp, overlapping cracks rang out, and a large black hole opened in the man’s temple. Now his life was completely gone, but still he refused to release the doctor’s wrist. The lieutenant knelt down and, pistol in one hand, began the painstaking process of prying open the corpse’s fingers one at a time. The veterinarian lay there in the hole, surrounded by eight silent Chinese corpses in baseball uniforms. Down in the hole, the screeching of cicadas sounded very different from the way it sounded aboveground.