I abruptly regained consciousness. My left arm hurts. I turn up my sleeves and find a diamond-shaped bandage stuck on both arms. When a guard on his round notices, he grabs my wrist with his sticky tepid hands. I’d assumed he was taking my pulse, but a moment later I noticed it; antipathy was welling up within me, surprisingly irrepressible. Looking up from below at his whisker-dappled chin, with great force I broke free of his grasp.
“Injection for Kitamura Mitsuyo, one syringe, 8:30 p.m.”
“Fine.”
The sound of young women’s voices flirted with the swishing of the moths in the dark air, moving back and forth like a bell. The boing of the spring on the syringe case closing reverberated forcefully.
Enema syringes the size of large candles to insert into the anuses of the palsy sufferers were sitting on the nurses’ station.
“I’m sorry, day nurse, ma’am. Can we request enemas today? I’m so glad. It’s been five whole days that I’ve been unable to go. Since June my abdomen has been so bloated . . . “
Without apparent reason, the delusional woman accompanied the old woman, angrily chanting “glad, glad.”
“Oy! Lady, lady. You keep shouting like that and I send you to the morgue!” the former prostitute taunted the delusional woman. The two women with palsy both made displeased faces and got quiet. They both believe whole cloth a newspaper article accusing the clinic director of carrying a long-troublesome and still alive patient into the morgue and locking it from the outside. Anyone who’s been troubled by the director for past three months knows that at least once, when you meet your final moments, you’ll find yourself in the same room. There are no strangers to the morgue in the corner of the garden.
Fine leaves of an acacia tree shroud the masonry of the wide, windowless morgue as though shielded by hands. In front, blue mold grows over a river of ragged sandals, haphazardly removed. The sound of water dripping slowly from a leaky tap onto the stone of the autopsy table is unceasing. The shape of a buttocks, arm, head, and shoulders is carved scrupulously onto the surface of the fake stone autopsy table, about twenty square feet in area. Owing to the ceaseless drip of water, a single thread of rust grows on the front of that artificial stone made to look like granite, and somehow, you can always tell by smell when they’ve just chopped up some human flesh. For those defeated in life’s long battle, those who have dragged their chains of life down to this basement, more even than the prospect of a protracted death in the clinic, in the moment of your death imagining yourself on this autopsy table is the hardest to bear. On top of that cold stone, instead of paying the hospital fees of the living, your body is cut into shreds. How can you believe in a peaceful transition, laid out on the autopsy table like that, forehead covered in dust?
“Oy Oy! It was just a bad joke I tell you. Doesn’t this place just rot your spirit?” the former prostitute said without actually saying it, shrinking her neck down and thrusting her tongue out like a turtle. In order to avoid dealing with the persnickety palsy sufferers, she began telling fortunes with playing cards.
“Hearts, huh? Good, good. Oh my! It’s a diamond, isn’t it? Look again, is it a diamond? A good sign, I tell you!”
As I listened to the former prostitute’s hysteric voice, I turned toward my child’s face and nodded off.
As it turned to afternoon, a pain came over me as though my breasts were two bags dangling from my shoulders. Pulling down my chin, I stare for a while at my own breasts, ugly, swollen and darkened like winter melons.
Milk—the problem of milk. No warmth flows. I’ve worked together with the other women with children who’d been laid off from the brick factory and who, with eyes heavily swollen, were afflicted with beriberi and trying to get their children to swallow the milk. It was the rainy season in late autumn; day by day the diarrhea caused them to lose weight and shrivel. Whenever they separated from the breast, they would cry like baby birds. They won’t look after sick children in the nursery. Those women came to work with their bodies tied up with cord, slipping the janitors a little bit of money to let the children sleep in the janitor’s closet. The sight of those emaciated children in comparison to the size of their pillows brought people to tears. The factory was shut down during the recession, but I’d heard that among the children with infantile beriberi, a number of them had died. My beriberi too seems to have originated from my time spent working at the factory.
Whatever will be, will be. In this case at least, I don’t know what else to tell myself.
If I pinch my nipple between my forefinger and thumb and press a little, so many curved streaks of white milk like hair ribbons go flying over the pillowcase. Suddenly it hits me; I wash my index finger in a teacup at my bedside and bring it to my child’s peach-colored lips, and she purses them like a wheel and begins to suck. When I pull my finger back she draws near it and begins to cry.
At dusk, an unusual aburazemi1stopped along the wooden fence of the pharmaceutical warehouse and chirped loudly, making the sound of boiling oil. Outside the window, the thin leaves of the acacia catch the weak light cast sideways by the sunset and rustle softly in the wind. Off in the distance, the lingering sound of a rickshaw horn seems to flow.
“We’re taking temperatures!” the nurse shouts towards the boys’ ward, swinging a silver pocketwatch as she stands up from the nurse’s station. Thick, bare voices rattle polyphonously down to the ends of the narrow hallway. I look listlessly up at the clock on the wall and pinch the cold thermometer in my armpit. It’s milk! With just six ounces of milk each day, this problem would resolve itself I’m sure. Children mustn’t drink beriberi-tainted milk.
My chest hurts as though tied down with thread, and when I touch it, milk gushes out onto the faint pattern on my yukata. The sleeve of my kimono touches my child’s chin and she cries as she follows it. She must be seeking the breast.
I looked through the window at the temperature on the thermometer. The mercury has climbed to 38.5 degrees. That means it’s up 2.5 degrees. I tried pressing lightly on my forehead.
“Rounds! Rounds!” A young nurse ran by, her white hat fluttering, carrying a tin bedpan and heading toward the hall. The bedpan belonged to the bedbound old woman who resembled a squid. When the lid was removed, flies fluttered out vigorously like scattered sesame seeds.
Shortly thereafter, the director and his wife entered through the west entrance. The rubber tube of the stethoscope bounced vigorously in the head nurse’s hand. The director followed her, his veiny hands threaded together over the seat of his pants. Visible through the weak prescription lenses of his glasses, behind his eyelids those two discerning eyes were bloodshot from tedium. Or maybe he was drinking sake last night.
“O Lord, thank you for bestowing these unfortunate ailing people again today with more time together.”
“Amen,” added the former prostitute in a nasally voice.
I thought about how I should broach the subject of milk with the director. Discussing the idea with her, I found myself revolted by the former prostitute’s nasally voice. I felt myself sharply on guard like a cat. Lying on my back, I shut my eyes.
I could hear the sound of the second hand on the nurse’s watch as she approached, so I snapped my eyes opened as though I’d just awoken from a long sleep
“Ah, what a lovely sleeping face!” The nurse removed the gauze meant to protect the child’s face from insects. Afterwards, the director followed behind her
“Noda, what did you use this bottle for?” The director turned toward the nurse who was rifling through the pages of the patient roster balanced on her arm and pointed to a small bottle. I hadn’t noticed, but it was on my bedside table
“Yes?” The nurse made an inscrutable face as she took the bottle, raised it up to eye level, and carefully read the label. “Ah yes. This is the medicine we injected her with this morning.
“Injected? Did you ask the head nurse’s permission?”
“No, well . . . it was just that she fainted. She’s always getting cerebral anemia, so I skipped getting permission this time.”
“You goddamn fool!”
Suddenly, the blue glass shattered against the floor, sending the pieces flying in all directions andthe cork bouncing almost four meters.
“You’ve been a nurse here for two years now, you ought to be able to read German like this. This G— medicine, you give it by mouth once and then you can’t use it again. Don’t you know how much a gram is? Do you think that this impoverished hospital can afford to use such medicine for each and every case of cerebral anemia?”
Hearing the sound of poor German spoken garrulously coming from above my pillow, I laughed through my nostrils. The price of a bottle of medicine compared to the life of a despised female patient. The decision to feed my child corrupted milk bounced around my lonely heart like a brisk wind.
Milk gushes out with incredible force. The pain attached to the milk, by morning it reaches up to my shoulders. I feel as though my body is partially filled with pus. Overnight I give the child the nipple three times. The milk being lured out by the sucking of her throat and tongue is pleasant, like being teased by drowsiness. This must be the beginning of motherly love. A terribly pleasant morning is on its way. From below my breasts a numbness rises through my body; it is as smooth as a perfectly fitted silk shirt against the skin.
“Milk, milk,” I can’t help but hear over and over in a voice as charmless as smoked herring, but it’s easy to cast aside. Whether its beriberi-tainted milk or pus, isn’t that what my beloved child is crying out to drink? Both my grandfather, a poor farmer, and my father, a craftsman, died after wearing themselves down, working themselves to death their whole lives to feed their children, like maggots with so many mouths. The strong desire to feed children is a tradition that has pierced the poor the like wire since time immemorial.
I feel cut off from the past and the future, flat like a sheet of paper. At any rate, ours is only for a short while the relationship between parent and child. Prison is the wall standing in my way. Once she grows up a little, I’ll be separated from her. I must never let her know of the miserable life of prison. The sin of the parent is not the sin of the child; they have been illegally imprisoned—that’s why children are expelled. But in this individualist world, how can a child torn from its mother ever be free? The law requires that imprisoned mothers lose the baggage of their beloved children. Having been born in prison does not mean their own imprisonment. Ah, my thoughts arriving to this point, without having noticed I’ve discovered within myself an unmanageable nihilism.
I, a socialist, have withered before the fact of imprisonment. I have certainly withered. Ah, and moreover, this pitiful self-awareness makes me long for myself. Woman no, have faith in the future! My love for my child is deep, and because of that depth, I vow to fight.
What a truly refreshing morning it is.
The sound of a tuberculous cough from the men’s ward and a sheet of pink paper were blown around my bed, near the window, by the relentless wind. The former prostitute was crying hysterically, the bright white soles of her shoes visible at the edge of her futon. Sprouting up around her long ears, a suppressed pink innocence is visible. She must’ve been a beautiful young woman.
Just as I began nodding off, the clamor running in the hallway caused me to open my eyes. Their white uniforms fluttering in the commotion, a number of nurses come running by.
“They’ve died!” I heard a voice say.
“What? Dead?” Surprised at even my own surprise, I lifted my head. Then, the dimpled apprentice nurse jumped in as if she were lost, covered her face with her arm, and let out a deep sigh as though she were vomiting out her surprise.
The person in the intensive care with beriberi-induced heart failure, because, I don’t know, when they died, the flies were covering their face like this . . .” The nurse put her red ruby-adorned left hand over her eye and showed her face.
“What? Flies?”
Recalling the cold, unpleasant sensation of a fly landing on my face, I waved my hand through the flies swarming around my child’s face. As she sleeps, she moves her eyebrows up and down. Before long, a crude stretcher made of canvas suspended between two rods of bamboo passed through the dark corridor against the background of the bright green leaves outside. From underneath the dirty flannel blanket, one leg, swollen like an oriental melon, was visible.
The stretcher was circling the garden and headed toward the morgue. From my position on the bed, I could just make out the shape of the Chinese man carrying the stretcher, his Manchu queue bouncing up and down vigorously with every step. On the ground near where the Chinese man steps, I can see the yellow blooms of the dandelions that have been crushed by stones.
In the corner of the room, so dark that no matter where you look is black, the delusional mad woman repeated “Hail Amitabha Buddha, Hail Amitabha Buddha,” moving her mouth to laugh.
“Ms. Kitamura. That person just now, they were alive.”
“Huh?”
I couldn’t make sense of it. I listened more.
“That person going by on the stretcher. They were alive I tell you.”
“No chance . . .”
“No, they were alive, they were alive.”
While saying it she made a funny face and turned her knee, sticking out one foot and wiggling it around, showing her sagging flesh beneath the unbecoming red frock.
“I could see it perfectly from here. Her foot was moving around like this!
“Why are you saying such rotten things?”
Suddenly, a woman with palsy threw an apple skin.
When the three o’clock rounds finished, they wrap the body tightly in a white apron. The doctors puffed tobacco smoke as they walked towards the morgue. In addition to the two professors, there were three students from the Port Arthur Medical School who’d previously examined me.
