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. I’m 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 animal’s 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 zoo’s 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 paymaster’s office, and until he was dragged away from his desk at headquarters 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 zoo’s 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 baby’s palm. The lieutenant imagined it had been there since birth.
From the zoo director’s 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 country’s going down the drain, and you’re 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, I’d 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 lieutenant’s 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 tiger’s 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 couldn’t 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 cage’s 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 Bei’an 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 we’ll do the leopards. Then maybe the wolves. We’ve got bears to deal with too. We’ll 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 men’s 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 don’t understand what you’re saying. What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you just say something about a bird that winds a spring?”
She shook her head slowly. “Hmm. Now I can’t remember. I don’t think I said anything about a bird.”
I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this. I didn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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. I’d 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. He’s 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 veterinarian’s 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 can’t be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it’s 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 I’ve wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?”