This is going to be the longest night of my life, Takeda thinks. It’s pouring outside the motel. He’s lying in bed. He shifts his right arm from behind his head and turns. He has pins and needles in his elbow. This night is never going to end, he thinks. Is it because he’s bored? Powerless? He’s definitely uneasy, no question about that, and not only because of the meeting he’s hoping to have the following morning with the Public Security Commission. But for some reason he can’t get the memory of the events that took place twenty years earlier out of his head, and they’re only making things worse.
What now irks him most is the awareness that he always denied the role of fate in what happened to Masajiro Amitani.
Was it an accident, he asks himself so many years later, that his wife told him when he got back from his first meeting with Masajiro that her confused mother, a diabetes patient, had been admitted to hospital after injecting too much insulin and had sunk into a coma. Her doctor had only recently prescribed R-Regular U-500 Humilin, a new concentrated form of insulin, but his mother-in-law had used the same old dose she had been injecting for years. It could easily have been fatal. Takeda and his wife visited her in hospital that same evening. He wasn’t usually so interested in his mother-in-law, but this time he was curious for some reason and asked the old lady what had happened. She had injected twenty units of the new insulin concentrate, and the overdose had almost killed her.
Sitting in his car the following morning in front of the home, Takeda put on his horn-rimmed glasses, cloth cap and civil servant face. Less than ten minutes later he was sitting opposite Masajiro Amitani. This time the man seemed a little uncomfortable.
“Why do you want to know about the camp? They didn’t conduct secret experiments there as they did in Xinjing. It was a camp for women, nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Why were you transferred from the camp to Xinjing?”
Masajiro tried to straighten his back: “The answer to that is simple: my superiors had taken note of my patriotism and my readiness to follow orders to the letter.”
Takeda peered deep into the man’s sunken eyes and asked himself if Masajiro could sense a bond between them. He looked at the soldier’s hands: long fingers with surprisingly coarse knuckles, as if his skeleton had already gone to war with the skin covering it. Takeda noted that the fingers were tense and twisted.
“Your readiness to follow orders to the letter… Tell me, Mr Masajiro, how were the women in the camp treated?”
“According to the regulations of the imperial Japanese army.”
“So the prisoners of war had to be productive.”
The man’s fingers relaxed and he rested his hands on his thighs. “There were production quotas, that’s true.”
“I mean: productive in another way.”
“I’m not following.”
“Did they have to produce babies?”
The fingers tensed. His nails were clean and neatly cut, but his hands appeared to be covered with patches of dirt, or was it subcutaneous bleeding?
“Where did you get such strange ideas?”
“What were the nationalities of the women in the camp?”
“English, America…”
“Dutch?”
“Yes, Dutch too. There were a lot of Dutch people in Sumatra when the war broke out.”
“They have beautiful women in the Netherlands, don’t you think? Tall, sturdy, blonde.”
“They disgusted me. Graceless peasants, smelled of… ”
“Milk and honey?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Did you enjoy raping them?”
“I…”
“Was there a tall woman, half-blonde, half-redhead?”
A shudder ran through Masajiro Amitani’s body.
“I think it would be better if you…”
“No, it would be better if you confessed.” Takeda took off his glasses. The man opposite him blinked.
“Who…?”
“I’m the son of Barbara Gerressen. Does the name ring a bell?”
“No.”
“A Dutch woman.” For the first time in the conversation Takeda removed his cap. Masajiro had made nothing of Takeda’s impoliteness during their last meeting and had seemed equally indifferent on this occasion.
“A Dutch woman with red hair.”
Did Takeda catch a glimpse of recognition, a memory, a flash of guilt, or a dark shimmer of incomprehension?
“I don’t know any Dutch women with red hair.”
“You’re lying. Or should I say: father, you’re lying?”
The man’s lips stiffened. Takeda noticed his left hand tighten around the wheel of his chair, its knuckles white. “Are you mad? I’m not your…”
“What was it like when you raped her? When you penetrated her sumptuous flesh with your war-crazed prick?” The exhilaration felt good, a glorious liberation.
“You’re not my son. I was a soldier. I was following orders.”
“Ah so. Then your superior was to blame. Did he hold your prick and use it as a bayonet to stab the enemy? Is that what you’re saying?”
Masajiro moistened his dry lips. “Of course not. We were soldiers. We had to follow…” His eyes turned towards the door. Takeda was afraid and angry: he didn’t feel the satisfaction he had predicted, at least not as much as he had expected. He felt less and less at ease with the situation. He didn’t know the routine followed by the nursing staff. The previous day he had spent more than an hour with Masajiro without being disturbed. He hadn’t seen a call bell in the room. But who could guarantee that they wouldn’t interrupt them this time round?
“Filthy dog,” said Masajiro from deep in his throat, shaking in his wheelchair with helpless rage. “You are not my…”
Takeda lost control of himself, pulled a syringe from his pocket, waved it in a circle as if it was a dagger and thrust it into Masajiro’s neck. In almost the same movement he jumped to his feet and covered Masajiro’s mouth with his right hand. Masajiro did his best to fight for his life and break free, but his feeble frame was no match for Takeda’s muscle power. The night before, Takeda had taken his wife’s key to her mother’s apartment and filled a syringe with sixty units of insulin from the ampoules in the fridge. On his way out he hesitated, returned to his mother-in-law’s fridge, and added another twenty units. He hid the syringe in his own fridge at home and crept into bed next to his sleeping wife, who was used to his nocturnal escapades. The entire night he had fantasised a hint of recognition, of guilt and regret and panic in Masajiro’s eyes before he put the man out of his misery.
Masajiro’s eyes closed and his body slumped. He was still alive, but his brain cells were disoriented, dying in their droves in the hypoglycaemic shock brought on by the massive overdoses of insulin. He would be dead in minutes.
“Father,” Takeda rasped as he let the man go. “Say something before you die, show some remorse… it’s your last chance.”
Masajiro rolled his eyes and babbled: “The latrines were full of vermin, mostly maggots and… tiny, tiny bodies.” His head fell to his chest as he sunk into a lethal coma.
Takeda started to panic. How long did he have to wait to be sure Masajiro didn’t wake from the coma? What if someone came into the room? He sat down in a chair in front of Masajiro. He had to wait, had to be sure. If anyone came in he would say he was astonished: Masajiro Amitani had fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence. Sweat trickled down Takeda’s forehead. His body seemed to be energized with electricity. He was alone in the world, alone with the man who had robbed him so many years ago of the possibility of enjoying the pleasures of life. The seconds ticked by and felt like hours.