The Fire by Night

Author:Teresa Messineo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

10

Kay Elliott

February 1945, Santo Tomas Internment Camp,

Manila, Philippines

Planes today. American. Could tell from the sound. Please, God, let them come in time.

KAY AND THE other nurses jumped off the back of the truck and stood outside the impressive-looking building. “That’s Santo Tomas,” Sandy said brightly, tucking in a stray curl with a bent hairpin. “The big university here. I read about it in a travel brochure once. Imagine actually wanting to come here, Kay.” Sandy looked worriedly at her friend, who was gazing up blankly at the balconies, the clock tower, the cross rising high above it all.

“Why is the cross still there? Why haven’t the Japanese taken down the cross?” Kay asked, squinting now in the sun. Maybe it’s too high. Maybe they can’t get to it yet.

The girls stepped toward the main entrance, but the Japanese motioned with their bayonets for them to turn around, to go to another building across the street. SANTA CATALINA, the sign read. GIRLS’ DORMITORY. The nurses entered the main floor. Before being rushed upstairs, Kay caught a glimpse of figures in long linen gowns, smooth-looking and cool, worn by some native women perhaps, but for what purpose? What was there to celebrate in wartime? Who would dress up like that to go to hell? A moment later, it registered: of course, they were nuns, sequestered and imprisoned, just like everyone. Nuns never have anything else to wear.

The officers confiscated their musette bags, their belongings—they searched them and returned them, then questioned the women one by one.

“I need to come with this one,” Sandy said, helping Kay to her feet.

“Why? What is wrong with this one?” the guard asked, motioning, pointing at Kay’s belly, at her head.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” Sandy replied, her red lips smiling sweetly. “I’m her best friend, I can answer any questions you have for her. She was born in Mount Carmel—”

“What wrong with her? Why she not talk for herself?”

Sandy bit her painted lip to keep from saying, Because you bastards killed her husband, killed her baby’s father, you probably ran him through the middle and left him to bleed to death in the jungle, you sons of bitches.

All that came out was, “She’s a little tired out from the trip, that’s all.”

They stayed in the dormitory six weeks. They were allowed downstairs to eat twice a day—never with the nuns, they never saw the nuns again—usually rice and carabao and papaya, the first fresh fruit they had had since before the tunnel. No one came in and no one went out—the thatched sawali surrounding their building made them an isolated island, cut off from the rest of Manila, from the rest of the world.

“Why do you think they’re keeping us here like this?” one of the nurses asked, worriedly. “Do you think they’re saving us for concubines?”

“I don’t think so,” Sandy said practically, rearranging her victory rolls, which were limp from the humidity. “More like a ‘silent debriefing,’ I’d say. I don’t think they want us going into the big camp right away, telling everyone what we saw out there.

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