Above the East China Sea: A novel by Sarah Bird

Author:Sarah Bird [Bird, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385350129
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Over the next few weeks, Lieutenant Nakamura became a regular visitor to our cave. We needed the bit of cheer he offered, because our work in the wards grew ever more difficult and distasteful. The rooms carved into rock became crowded with patients, both those who had been wounded in battle and the far greater numbers disabled by typhus, dysentery, malaria, and dengue fever. When all the bed planks had been filled, patients were laid directly on the rocky ground. There was no medicine for any of them. No sulfa for infections. No morphine for pain.

They all suffered, but the worst were the tetanus and gangrene patients. Those afflicted with tetanus would bite anything they could lay their hands on, whether it was a rag or another soldier. In the end, their jaws locked together so tightly that it was a struggle to pour a thin stream of water into their mouths, and they groaned deep in their throats as thirst drove them mad. The gangrene patients screamed in unbearable agony as their limbs turned dark and swelled grotesquely, before they finally went rigid and silent.

Even as conditions deteriorated, and their patients needed them more than ever, the regular army nurses from Japan, like Tanaka, took to disappearing with greater and greater frequency. While their patients suffered unendurable agonies, those nurses simply left the wards and gathered secretly in a distant supply closet to smoke cigarettes that they rolled out of newspaper and pine needles. If one of us had the temerity to disturb them to ask whether they would administer an injection or change a dressing, these hard women, many of whom had been prostitutes before enlisting, would subject us to the harshest of tongue-lashings. None harsher than the ones delivered by Head Nurse Tanaka.

No one dared bother Tanaka because of the rumors that she poisoned patients she found too disruptive. I tried not to believe this, but couldn’t help thinking of how the young private with dysentery who couldn’t control his bowels and constantly soiled himself had died so suddenly in his sleep. As had the gruff old sergeant who bellowed all day long for bedpans, water, food. As had the haughty captain who called Head Nurse a fat slob because, while all her patients were wasting away, she kept getting suspiciously plumper and plumper. He accused her of stealing her patients’ food and threatened to have her investigated. That night he, too, died in his sleep.

I could dismiss the rumors that Head Nurse Tanaka was the cause of these deaths, until the roof of our cave collapsed. All of us escaped the cave-in except for a senior girl, Hanashiro, who was one of our best student nurses, renowned for her unfailing cheerfulness. We all worked furiously, bloodying our hands dragging rocks off of her, and, though we did succeed in saving our friend’s life, her brain had been damaged. From then on, Hanashiro would wander around with a vacant smile on her face, unable to work or even speak, squatting in front of us with no shame and relieving herself whenever she felt the need.

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