The Man Who Killed the Boy Who Died
It was all quiet on the enemy front, nothing was heard except for the occasional sniper fire and the occasional spray of dirt over some neighboring trench. The rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire was low and steady; Ijima was at the controls again for the fifth time this week, and he was doing an admirable job of keeping the enemy's heads down. Cunningly he shot recklessly and rather aimlessly, choosing random spots to fire away at. Often they were the doorways to the trenches that could be seen from here with binoculars, and when he shot those it would send down a shower of dirt over the trench. It happened here too, except far less - the enemy was more content to sit on their heels rather than take any offensive action. Still, we didn't mind that. If we had to do all the initiating, that just meant that we would take more enemy men by surprise, that's all.
It was almost the end of the week. By Saturday our team would return behind the front lines to rest and recuperate while the enemy imported more of those farmer boys and peasant lads to get killed on the frontlines. The new recruits that they were bringing in were no better trained than a horse who had to fire a machine gun; utterly useless. They would listen when we explained to them about the shells and how the different blasts sounded differently so that they would know which was which - but once they hit the battlefield, the only thing they were good for was dying. To every experienced soldier, five peasant-boys fell. They seemed completely devoid of brains once they were on the battlefield: they ran into the barbed wire as if it were an oasis in the middle of the desert, disregarded the shells until they were dead or on their way to hell, and forgot to put on their gas masks. We stumbled on a dugout full of recruits the other day, their lips blue and their eyes milked over; they had taken their gas masks off too soon, they had forgotten that we had told them that gas stays down in the dugouts the longest. When they saw the soldiers up top taking off their masks, they did too. How painful it would have been to be one of those, your lungs filling up with water and your insides slowly disinigrating.
We had lost Ochi only last night, he had been caught out in the open when we were supposed to be retreating and the enemy had found him a shell- hole and bayoneted him to death. When we found him again, he was halfway under the mud; it had rained earlier this morning. We took off his ID tags and then took his fine English boots. Good boots were hard to come by out here on the frontlines and we had to conserve whatever we got. Since Ijima found the corpse of Ochi first, we all decided that he should be the one to have the boots. They fitted him well, so he kept them. Don't get him wrong - if Ochi had been alive and if his legs had still been well-attached to the rest of his body, Ijima wouldn't have taken those boots. He would have jumped barbed wire in his pajamas and barefoot instead. If there is something that we have learned out of all this fighting, it is comradeship. We have learned to stick together as brothers.
We were supposed to be getting a new teammate today, but he hadn't arrived yet. We sat around in the doorway of the dugout, smoking the few cigarettes we had left from our rations behind the front, and some of us played cards if we had some. There were five of us, all from the same class. We all volunteered at the same time, so we got put into the same team. The army was split up in a very complicated way: the king, his general, then the colonels, and then the captains, and then the head of the teams. If you had asked Ochi what he thought of this, he would have answered that it was the very reason that this war was still going on. The generals all got caught up in their fame and power that they forgot that the people they controlled were still people that had families elsewhere and could live and die according to him. And now Ochi was dead. I guess we should have been stunned or grieving, but we did nothing of the sort. We had lost other classmates before. We did not cry like little boys anymore.
We had grown up too fast. Once we had stood on the threshold of life, ready for opportunity and a perfect job and an amazing place in the world where we would like to work and live; now there was only the graves that awaited us. We expected to be soldiers for the rest of our lives, now, because we could not see what our future was anymore. How could we go back to our parents and tell them that we had died somewhere on the way? How could we returned to those dreams that were dead now, had died when we killed our first enemy?
Never could I touch that umbrella and that cap and pretend that I could go to a party and swing-dance like the rebel that I longed to be, burning the way for a new generation behind me. Never could Ochi touch those books and read them silently and thoughtfully as he was prone to doing when the rain pattered outside and we all laughed together when the drool began to dribbled down the side of his mouth unnoticed from his concentration on the letters. Never could Hikaru pick up that chess game and ask Anyone want a game? I know I'll win but let's play anyway. Never could Ijima push his glasses up in that annoying way of his and start dictating math problems like our barmy old professor. Those days seemed so far away. They seemed like an entirely different lifetime of dream, forever unreachable to us. And as much as we would like to return to them, they could not be touched anymore. They weren't us anymore, not when we had changed into these mindless monsters that still carried the baby-face of childhood while we killed.
Ah, there he was now. A lone figure wound its way in the trenches, bringing a bicycle behind him. Around him, people passed as if they had never seen a bicycle before - but in fact, none of us had for many months. A bicycle was a sign of better times when we hadn't seen war and death yet. It was a peaceful thing, made for cool wind whipping in hair, for smiles and for laughter and for the blissful ignorance of the fact that people killed and how people felt when they killed. I turned away from the wall and went inside as the others exclaimed at the doorway at his arrival. Lying down on my cot, I waited for him to come to me.
It took less time than I would have expected to ward off the others excitement. I eyed the bicycle as he wheeled it down the steps, careful not to let it bounce so loudly so that everyone knew where it was. Of course, everyone probably already knew he was moving to this team because of the bicycle anyway, so there probably wouldn't be any point in trying to hide it. We would be out of here by the day after the next anyway. He was a veteran, that I was sure of by the darkness that shaded his eyes even from the dim lighting. I was grateful for that; I had no desire for Ochi to be succeeded by some nameless rookie who knew nothing about the way battles were fought. I swung my feet over the side, seeing eye-to-eye with him for the first time. He was a tall, beautiful boy with dark hair and mysteriously darker eyes. His skin looked faintly luminescent, as if it were cool to the touch even when the noonday sun beat down on him and rouged his cheeks with risen blood. He gave me a crisp salute, eyes unreadable.
I smiled at him. "I think the only reason we're losing this war is because we can salute too well."
To my satisfaction (and surprise), he did not relax or attempt to "buddy" me. "What the generals decide to teach has its uses" was his polite answer. The others in the doorway and the stairs were smiling, but they weren't laughing. This was our new teammate. If this cool courtesy was what he was usually like, then I wondered if he ever relaxed at all. Standing up to him, I slapped him as hard as I possibly could across the left side of his face. His face whipped in the opposite direction, he staggered but did not fall. He turned back to me and his face broke into a chilly smile that didn't reach even halfway to his eyes. "I hope I have proven satisfactory", he said, then pivoted heel and saluted. His steps rang hollowly on the stone stairs. All eyes turned to watch him leave.
When he had left, Hikaru gave me a look that clearly said "I-know- something-you-don't-know" and vocalized his concerns for our new teammate. "It's just our luck", he said dramatically, passing a hand over his brow. Clearly he was trying to prod us into asking him just what he was getting at, but all of us knew that he would tell us in his own due time. "We've got him, Shinichirou Isumi, probably the most stick-up-his-ass than the rest of our teachers, and on top of that we've got a curse." We were all listening now, and he beamed that now that he had grabbed our attentions. "He's been called the Grim Reaper by everyone because after the first battle, all of his teammates have died. He's gone through fifteen teams, and all of them have died except for him! Like there was this one where that night they found his teammates stuck in a tree with their arms blown off and hanging off of a nearby tree."
I snorted. The others turned to look at me, but I waved them off. Curse, indeed! Those must have been rookies he'd been with, then, if they were careless enough to get die by their first battle. I wondered what other little secrets Mr. Stick-Up-His-Ass, as Hikaru so delicately put it, was hiding. But certainly I didn't care, if he died it was his own fault for not hiding well enough. A burst of anger lit my temper for some unknown reason, and I stormed out of the dugout. The little emotional side of me was whining again that everyone was treating this Shinichirou character too cruelly.
* * *
By Sunday, all of us had gotten used to having him around, him and his brooding character who loved to read Goethe's "Faust" time and time again. He had his uses, though - on Saturday, the canteen cook refused to open because there wasn't enough food to feed both the second and the third companies. So while we all sat around nursing our empty stomachs, suddenly he put on his hat and walked out. Twenty minutes later he returned with a sack that held horse meat, hay for to beef up our stringy wire beds, and two loaves of bread, still warm. He distributed it out all wordlessly, taking only a meager portion for himself. He drew back into his corner even when we cajoled him to tell us where he had gotten the good fare. I found it strange that he had still been able to keep his morals this far; assumingly, he wasn't willing to admit that he had stolen the stuff. I found it childish and immature of him to act such; here, we were glad for such a man on our team, what he could provide was always welcome.
All the while, I was noticing sidelong, surreptitious glances to the rest of us. I knew he was gay; not only had Hikaru especially pointed that out that particular fact while he had been away, but also he did not like touching any of us, even to brush a careless hand against a comrade's shoulder. Instead, I focused on the dark eyes, the sway of his hair when the heat lifted and the cold air from the sea only a few miles away blew the childish blush of his cheeks away, leaving a stone-cold chiseled mask behind, made of smooth granite. He rarely said anything other than to answer a question, and wrote notes on scraps of paper when he could get away from it. But above all, there was a sad, tragically lovely air around him. He seemed so lonely, knowing that we would die too. And seeing the rest of my team all trying to enjoy their "last days", it made me afraid too. But I would never admit that to anyone out loud.
It was Tuesday again when anything exceptionally out of the ordinary happened. This time, it was vice versa: Shinichirou needed OUR help.
In our company, we were the twenty-third team. As tradition would have it, the thirteenth team were our rivals; they had been from a rival school in our little town before, and so they remained that way here. Perhaps on the battlefield we were reluctant brothers, but two miles outside of the line of fire, we hated each other's guts. I had just been making my way up to relieve Ijima of the machine gun when there came the unmistakable sound of a blow hitting flesh. Turning around, I peered into the dugout where I had heard it from. Two figures were struggling while around them a ring had gathered, some betting cigarettes and other betting chew tobacco and other betting still more precious items out here. A flash of silver told me one had drawn his dagger. A slash and the other had a cut on one cheek that he barely avoided. A hesitant hand came up to feel the cut. The dark eyes were distant and hazy, as if they had not seen his attacker as an enemy at all.
I shoved past them all, knocking the knife out of the attacker's hands, then literally began to drag Shinichirou out of the dugout. I passed a few spectators before one grabbed my arm and began shouting. I gave him a clout in the mouth and he fell down the stairs. I glanced at my hand and found it was bleeding where it had hit the man's teeth. I gritted it and pulled Shinichirou along to where Ijima was posted.
"There you are", he growled as he shot off an enemy wandering hand above the line. The owner gave a scream as it came off wiggling, and Ijima surrendered the post to me.
"Take it again", I grunted, and he gave me an appraising look. "I'll do yours double tomorrow. I need to talk with Food Mongrel here", I pointed to Shinichirou, who looked from Ijima to me with his normal mysterious eyes settled back in place. Ijima gave a reluctant murmur in reply to tell me that he'd just do it anyway and went back to the post. I knew that he had been trying to shoot for a ribbon around his button for the entire week now. If a sniper got five clear shots in his turn at the gun, then he would be given a little strip of ribbon to put around his first button on his uniform. Sometimes the snipers would compare how high the man would jump as they got hit. More often, though, they swapped guns when they found one particular place had more people than the other, or one place had begun with a bombardment.
We walked back down to our dugout, my throat tight and my body constricted even to look at him. His face was cool and smooth, still, seemingly untouched by age or by pain. Absently I began to explain to him that the should never go near that dugout because they were our rivals, so to speak, just like the third company was always our rivals as well, especially in the food area. Carrots, our cook, often refused to tote his pans up close to the front because there was more risk of getting shot. However, Fat Hamster, the third company's cook, was willing to carry his pans all the way up to the front lines if need be, so that the soldiers got hot soup instead of cold sea brine. They were adding everything from rotten turnips to horse dung in the soups these days, at least that's what it tasted like. It was a miracle for our team to be blessed with Shinichirou. We only had to say what we wanted and he would put on his cap and go out and find it, as if he had a compass to lead him. On Monday he had carried back an entire box of lobsters. We would have rather had steak, though.
By the time we reached the dugout, the rest of the team had come to scold Shinichirou about his rash actions. When he was asked what provoked it, he only gave Hikaru a deep look, as if it were better the blonde boy didn't ask. Again I watched him avoid hands that tried to swipe disinfectant at the clotted cut on his cheek. He seemed to have the patience of several thousand saints to put up with Hikaru, Fuku and Tsutui all at once clambering around him. When finally I grabbed the handkerchief out of Hikaru's hands and cleaned the cut myself (Isumi managed to hold still), they were finally satisfied and dragged Isumi into the dugout so that they could keep an eye out for him. It wasn't as if they would come back to get revenge or anything, though, they would wait a little while and wait until everything had simmered down before they struck again.
Finally when the three others got bored and went back up, I lit up a cigarette and handed another one to him. He motioned a negative, and I gave him a rather strange look. What would a soldier do with his time if he didn't smoke cigarettes? I shrugged, tucked the cylinder back into my pocket, and breathed out the gray smoke. "What'd they say?", I said as conversationally as I could.
"Grim Reaper", he said tonelessly. I mentally applauded him for his show of apathy. That was a good quality in a soldier.
"Still, words are only words", I argued. "You shouldn't have been so affected by them." He looked down at this. "I don't believe in curses", I said bluntly, and he looked up at me in disbelief, "not even if you've killed off your other ninety or so teammates. They were probably too busy staring at your pretty little face and got distracted and careless." I gave a harsh laugh at that, one that unsettled most people. But he just continued to stare at me, unblinkingly, and somehow that unsettled me more than anything else I had ever seen. And just when I was starting to get used to it, he turned away and the intense moment was over. Abruptly he got up and went into the dugout, probably intent on avoiding any other people who wanted to beat him up that were coming up the trenchway now.
* * *
The next evening, he almost got himself killed.
Again, we were back on the front lines, and the bombardment overhead didn't look like it was going to abate anytime soon. We already had stacked the hand grenades and the coils of barbed wire ready beside us to shoot out of the trench when the bombardment let up to throw over to the enemy. Already Fuku and Hikaru were betting to see who would throw their grenades the farthest. But Shinichirou just remained stone-cold, watching the skies overhead alight with an unholy red glare. Ijima was against pattering at the machine guns, aiming in no particular order at all. Shells rocked the dugouts, and the very ground under us trembled and groaned under the might of manmade machines. The bombardment was so thick that not even a flea would have been able to get through it. Overhead, a hot air balloon sailed, its basket painted black and its silk tied on with thick ropes. A plane shot it down abruptly over the forest that we were at. A machine-gunner hesitated as the hot air balloon blasted into a mushroom of flame among the trees. Instantly he fell, bullets penetrating into his brain and riddling his body.
Suddenly the bombardment ceased. Immediately I waved an arm and we all climbed up in the brief pause. We threw grenade after grenade; the shells whistled above us like a cheering crowd, the blasts roared like a growing tide. I couldn't hear anything - finally I felt someone shaking my shoulder, helping me pull my mask over my head, and I saw Shinichirou's mouth moving in one syllable over and over - gas, gggaaaaassss. We ducked and wove over to a shell hole and climbed in. Shells rarely fell in the same places twice. When we climbed in, there were already two people inside. I tensed, then saw that it was only Hikaru and another injured man that I did not know. We waited for the bombardment to cease again so that we could return to our trench.
Then the gas came, swirling into our little shell hole like ghostly hands that felt us through out clothes. Rolling like waves, it came, green and neon-colored, looking more sickly than the people it infected. It seemed to pause at each of our faces, sniffing it, tasting it, seeing if it was to its liking and then moving on. Before it had completely passed, we had climbed out again amidst the regular machine-gun fire and sporadic shell-blasts, bringing the injured man to an orderly who bustled by. At first we weren't sure if it was even our trench - my sense of direction had been completely whacked when we went into the shell-hole - but then we saw the cap and the pin and they were indeed our men. We handed him over and he told us that we were going to abandon the front trenches. It was about then that I noticed that Shinichirou was gone. Telling Hikaru to wait ten minutes (he had a watch) and use the remaining bullets in the machine guns, then to start throwing bombs when the time came and uncoiling the barbed wire without me, I hurried into the woods that were nearby, shouting for Shinichirou. Several times I almost got caught with machine gun bursts, but the woods hid me well and there was no moon. Of course, I could not see the barbed wire either.
I found him finally at the sight of the wreck of the hot air balloon. He was cutting away at a piece of silk - the only thing of value that ever came regularly around us - black in the night, but it would be red when I saw it in the daylight that was approaching fast. He was cutting carefully around all the places where the barbed wire had pierced it. It was a pretty big piece, and if he sold it somewhere it would have fetched a good price.
He gave me a look as I approached, his eyes taking in my cap and my uniform and last of all my face, then recognized me and started to cut faster. I explained to him over the rattle of machine-gun fire that we were abandoning the front trenches and that I had probably spent seven minutes looking for him already. I must have screamed What the hell do you think you're doing? several million times in his ear, but he didn't seem to mind at all. Finally I joined in and together we hacked off the first piece he had been cutting as well as another unburnt section that I'd found a little ways off. We arrived back at the trench with a minute to spare, and together we three left pulled hand-grenades behind us as well as barbed wire. The trenches didn't look like trenches anymore, more like lumps of mud and dirt. The explosions pounded in our feet and in our heads as we threw bombs one after the other behind us. Even if my own dead father came over that enemy line now, I would not have hesitated to throw a bomb at him.
* * *
He wrapped the silk up in linen so that it would look like nothing special, and then stuffed the cloth into a brown package. In truth, the linen cost more than the silk; the silk was free, and the linen cost much more at the scrabbly store town that was nearby. The two pieces we had cut together would have enough to make a blouse or maybe even a small skirt. I gave him the one I had cut with no questions except for one.
"Who is it for?"
"My sister", he answered. "She likes pretty things."
We had been sent back to the two-miles away dugout after we returned to the trenches that we had evacuated to. Out of a hundred and twenty-one men, only thirty-three remained. Thankfully, my entire team was still alive. Ijima had gotten an earlobe shot off when he was careless enough to peek his head over the parapet to aim. You did not aim with a machine gun. You just fed it bullets and directed it as you pleased. Tsutui, the philosopher of our team, got a bad wound in his side, though it would not affect his walking. Still, he was being sent home. We were happy for him. He would be out of this hellhole. Shinichirou had even shook his hand before he left.
But it had been broken, hadn't it? It had been after the first battle, and the entire team was still alive. Shinichirou looked happier than he had been in days, his eyes filling with a mysterious warmth that I found both endearing and sweet, if anything could be sweet in a war like this. Already he went out every night and brought back things for us: more sweet-smelling hay for our rusty cots, new sheets and blankets, bread and cognac aplenty, cigarettes (though he smoked none and kept none for himself), meat, nice tinned beans (we all suspected he actually went over enemy lines and robbed an enemy dugout for those; they had Swedish writing on them), and even popcorn. In all the fifteen months we had been on the front, we had never seen such fare. More than ever we found ourselves warming up to him.
He spoke little, but now he liked to sit among us more and listen to our jokes, our funny stories and to our laughter. In the firelight his eyes would seem more red than blue, more warm than the chilly coolness of his skin even when it was flushed in the sun. Yes, he was beautiful, we all decided once when he was out looking for more hay. And when he smiled he could charm any person into doing anything, even doing a chicken dance in front of our old math professor.
More than ever I found myself looking at him, trying to ponder how sweet his sweat would taste as it rolled down the curve of his collarbones, how soft his hair would feel on my fingertips. I didn't love him - love was too idealistic in this place, I doubted that I would ever feel love again because already war had killed all emotion within me - but I wanted him, wanted to touch him where the skin turned paler underneath his clothes and where his skin would heat where I touched it. How would I seem to him, his head-of-team, coming to him for sexual pleasure? I would probably seem the coarsest of beasts, since it was well-known that I was the only one in the second company (or what remained of the second company) to never masturbate after hours.
Still, I found myself walking with him after one of his forage trips, carrying a sack of horse meat, looking up at his white face in the moonlight that shot right down to his eyes, making them seem luminous and strange. And then as if he felt my eyes on him, he turned to meet my own eyes, watching me as I stared right back at him, too entranced to pull my eyes apart. His voice was soft, sensuous as he spoke, and I thought of the high stringing of a violin, so pure and so beautiful that it hung in the air like an invisible, imaginary thing called hope.
"Do you find me beautiful?"
"Yes", I breathed, then I plunged on ahead, "it's not only the Grim Reaper curse that you were afraid of, was it? You were afraid of yourself, you were afraid of what you could do with that terrible beauty that could make people like you, love you, lower their defenses to you before you killed them or destroyed them so completely that they would never come back to haunt you again. You were afraid that if we got too close to you, your curse would kill us too, isn't it?" He lowered his head, but I still had more to say, "You are not what is going to kill us. Chance is what saved us that day, not your apathy to us. Fate is what is finally going to kill us, or maybe a shell or a bullet. But certainly it wasn't you. Don't give yourself so much credit on killing your other dead teammates. You're not God. You can't decide who lives and who dies, so don't try and pretend you have that power."
He looked at me then, really looked at me, and his smile was more sad and lonely than I had ever seen it. Slowly the wind dragged itself into his hair as if it were painful, as if it were the last thing that it would ever experience. His eyes reflected so many dark waters, but his chiefly only saw one kind now: the murky waters of this war, wherein the corpses were left behind in for the rats to gnaw and the maggots to digest. He hated this war, I could see that, but in his eyes there was a sad melancholy that told me that he pitied those others, the others who had to fight on the other side. In another world, I might have had a job, I might have met Shinichirou Isumi somewhere else and I might have become his friend or even loved him, just as I might have met one of the soldiers I had killed the night before, or maybe the bombardment before that, or maybe the first man I gunned down with a sniper gun in my hands. We could have been friends. There wouldn't have been such a gulf between us.
"Are you still afraid of me?", I asked. "You know there is no curse. You know that we have broken your bad luck. Now tell me: are you afraid of me? Are you afraid of what I might do right now to you?"
His eyes were unreadable. "You could kill me", he breathed. "You could destroy me as I have destroyed all the others that have been my teammates, so completely that I would never come back to haunt you. You could say that you loved me even when I know that's not possible in a place like this, and if I believed you, then you could break me into a million pieces with three words, every time you said them. You could kill me, I mean." He seemed to breathe in deeply then, almost as if he needed the courage for his next words, "and then you could bury me and then you could forget me, and to me that would be the greatest sorrow of all."
"You are close", I ventured. We were now back in front of our dug out. I took the sack, threw it inside, and then took the crate of hay and rolled it down the steps. Last of all, I rolled the bread and the cans of soup and beans in the blanket we had found and rolled that down the steps as well. There were exclamations of surprise from inside, but I was not listening. I was pulling him along, all the way into an old abandoned dugout that nobody used because some new recruits had died there when they took off their gas masks too fast. Their bodies had been removed, of course, but still no one lived there. A faint odor of the gas still remained, but most of it been aired out by the wind. I pushed him down onto one of the cots; thankfully it still had a sheet over it, and hay under that. "Perhaps too close to the truth", I continued.
"What do you want with me?" His breathing had become faster now.
"I will not say I love you. But I will say that I desire you. What would you say to that? I do not love you, I could still despise you and yet still desire your body against mine, under my searching fingers." I saw him shudder at the picture I made for him. "I could still make you rise up against me gently and give me pleasure." His trembling increased as I trailed an absent finger down his cheek. I could see him trying to turn away but unable to. "I don't love you, and yet I'll use you. That loveless action will kill you, do you understand? I do not love you, and yet I am willing to fuck you into the depths of oblivion."
His breathing was uneven, hitched even as I ran a hand in his hair. Ah, like silk. Just as I imagined. "How you say that word", he murmured slightly, almost too low for me to catch, "you say that curse word like a blessing."
"Hmm? You mean 'fuck'? Well, then I say now that I will fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you some more. Is that a deal, now? You want to die, don't you? That's why you're agreeing to this", I said those words with gentle intensity, lost in the swirl of his dark eyes.
"I am dead. I am already cold in my grave. I have lost all emotion already." And as I watched, a lone tear streaked silver over his pale cheekbone.
I licked it away. "No, let me prove to you that you are warm."
* * *
Two days later he was dead.
I and him had a sort of truce: I would agree to whatever request he had during the day to occupy his time (including reading parts of "Faust" aloud to me, then playing with my hair, then going out with him on his endless forage trips), and then he would agree to mine by night. Of course, our other team member noticed our increased interaction with each other - but they treated it as nothing, we had all seen such before here on the front lines, and so they found it no more interesting than a rat that liked bread. It seemed all rats liked bread here, especially by the way they got into our bread supply by day and by night. Finally we had to cut off the gnawed pieces and throw them over the parapet so that the machine gunners would finish them off somehow.
We got sent back up to the front lines, and we had been throwing hand- grenades like we were used to doing when the bombardment ceased when he looked at me calmly and plainly, and then fell, scattering the hand grenades. He had been wounded in the shin, and even as we all stood over him, trying to avoid blasts by hiding behind the rail posts, watching him suffer as he clutched his leg to himself and looked at us with wide eyes as if to ask, Am I going to die?. Finally the others continued without us and I started to lead him back, one footed, to our trench. But halfway through the bombardment started again and I placed him into a shell-hole before going in myself. We had to wait it out. An hour passed and I could see that the shock was starting to wear off and the pain was starting to really act up. Finally the bombardment ceased and we started off again, a three-legged monster. When finally we got to an orderly, the man took one look at Shinichirou and said quite calmly, "You shouldn't have done that. You were wasting your time."
I looked down at Shinichirou, who was sitting on the bench, his face down and his hands composed neatly in his lap. "What do you mean?"
The orderly looked at him, lifted his chin and then dropped it again back to his chest. "He's dead." I looked at Shinichirou, then at the orderly who laid him out and felt the neck for a pulse. The orderly shook his head at me. "Dead."
I frowned at him, not comprehending the word. "Dead? He has only fainted. He and I were talking only five minutes ago. About the life of Goethe and how it affected "Faust"." Though the last part was probably beside the point.
The orderly looked at me, ripped open Shinichirou's uniform and pulled out the black pocketbook that he always carried. "You want this?", the orderly asked. I accepted it numbly. Then he shooed me out and the last thing I saw of Shinichirou was the orderly standing over him, taking off his ID tag. I looked back at the pocketbook and opened it. A few pictures and letters fell out. I picked them up, looking at Shinichirou's sister. And suddenly it crashed down upon my head just what had happened. He was dead. dead Dead DEAD. My hands were itching to write, suddenly, write this entire tragic love story down on a paper and mail it to a publishing company somewhere. It was a sensation that I hadn't felt for nearly two years, the want to write. Shinichirou would he liked to see me do it. But first I had to write to his sister before the orderlies sent out his papers. I had to tell her that it wasn't the enemy that killed her brother, nor was it blood loss. I had to tell her who really killed her brother.
/ \ / \ / \ / \ /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ Author's note:
Well, that was interesting. This was halfway based on the book "All Quiet on the Western Front", set in WWI in 1916 on the French coast. I'm sorry if I didn't make it clearer that this is Waya talking. Yes, I changed around their ages and I changed around them themselves, I apologize for not putting more Touya or more Hikaru in here, but this was strictly a Waya/Isumi thing, so I wanted to keep it that way. No, I don't know why I wrote this. Yes, I know it's stupid. Please, blame it on the ruses. I just couldn't get the damn bloody idea out of my head.
Andrea Weiling
It was all quiet on the enemy front, nothing was heard except for the occasional sniper fire and the occasional spray of dirt over some neighboring trench. The rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire was low and steady; Ijima was at the controls again for the fifth time this week, and he was doing an admirable job of keeping the enemy's heads down. Cunningly he shot recklessly and rather aimlessly, choosing random spots to fire away at. Often they were the doorways to the trenches that could be seen from here with binoculars, and when he shot those it would send down a shower of dirt over the trench. It happened here too, except far less - the enemy was more content to sit on their heels rather than take any offensive action. Still, we didn't mind that. If we had to do all the initiating, that just meant that we would take more enemy men by surprise, that's all.
It was almost the end of the week. By Saturday our team would return behind the front lines to rest and recuperate while the enemy imported more of those farmer boys and peasant lads to get killed on the frontlines. The new recruits that they were bringing in were no better trained than a horse who had to fire a machine gun; utterly useless. They would listen when we explained to them about the shells and how the different blasts sounded differently so that they would know which was which - but once they hit the battlefield, the only thing they were good for was dying. To every experienced soldier, five peasant-boys fell. They seemed completely devoid of brains once they were on the battlefield: they ran into the barbed wire as if it were an oasis in the middle of the desert, disregarded the shells until they were dead or on their way to hell, and forgot to put on their gas masks. We stumbled on a dugout full of recruits the other day, their lips blue and their eyes milked over; they had taken their gas masks off too soon, they had forgotten that we had told them that gas stays down in the dugouts the longest. When they saw the soldiers up top taking off their masks, they did too. How painful it would have been to be one of those, your lungs filling up with water and your insides slowly disinigrating.
We had lost Ochi only last night, he had been caught out in the open when we were supposed to be retreating and the enemy had found him a shell- hole and bayoneted him to death. When we found him again, he was halfway under the mud; it had rained earlier this morning. We took off his ID tags and then took his fine English boots. Good boots were hard to come by out here on the frontlines and we had to conserve whatever we got. Since Ijima found the corpse of Ochi first, we all decided that he should be the one to have the boots. They fitted him well, so he kept them. Don't get him wrong - if Ochi had been alive and if his legs had still been well-attached to the rest of his body, Ijima wouldn't have taken those boots. He would have jumped barbed wire in his pajamas and barefoot instead. If there is something that we have learned out of all this fighting, it is comradeship. We have learned to stick together as brothers.
We were supposed to be getting a new teammate today, but he hadn't arrived yet. We sat around in the doorway of the dugout, smoking the few cigarettes we had left from our rations behind the front, and some of us played cards if we had some. There were five of us, all from the same class. We all volunteered at the same time, so we got put into the same team. The army was split up in a very complicated way: the king, his general, then the colonels, and then the captains, and then the head of the teams. If you had asked Ochi what he thought of this, he would have answered that it was the very reason that this war was still going on. The generals all got caught up in their fame and power that they forgot that the people they controlled were still people that had families elsewhere and could live and die according to him. And now Ochi was dead. I guess we should have been stunned or grieving, but we did nothing of the sort. We had lost other classmates before. We did not cry like little boys anymore.
We had grown up too fast. Once we had stood on the threshold of life, ready for opportunity and a perfect job and an amazing place in the world where we would like to work and live; now there was only the graves that awaited us. We expected to be soldiers for the rest of our lives, now, because we could not see what our future was anymore. How could we go back to our parents and tell them that we had died somewhere on the way? How could we returned to those dreams that were dead now, had died when we killed our first enemy?
Never could I touch that umbrella and that cap and pretend that I could go to a party and swing-dance like the rebel that I longed to be, burning the way for a new generation behind me. Never could Ochi touch those books and read them silently and thoughtfully as he was prone to doing when the rain pattered outside and we all laughed together when the drool began to dribbled down the side of his mouth unnoticed from his concentration on the letters. Never could Hikaru pick up that chess game and ask Anyone want a game? I know I'll win but let's play anyway. Never could Ijima push his glasses up in that annoying way of his and start dictating math problems like our barmy old professor. Those days seemed so far away. They seemed like an entirely different lifetime of dream, forever unreachable to us. And as much as we would like to return to them, they could not be touched anymore. They weren't us anymore, not when we had changed into these mindless monsters that still carried the baby-face of childhood while we killed.
Ah, there he was now. A lone figure wound its way in the trenches, bringing a bicycle behind him. Around him, people passed as if they had never seen a bicycle before - but in fact, none of us had for many months. A bicycle was a sign of better times when we hadn't seen war and death yet. It was a peaceful thing, made for cool wind whipping in hair, for smiles and for laughter and for the blissful ignorance of the fact that people killed and how people felt when they killed. I turned away from the wall and went inside as the others exclaimed at the doorway at his arrival. Lying down on my cot, I waited for him to come to me.
It took less time than I would have expected to ward off the others excitement. I eyed the bicycle as he wheeled it down the steps, careful not to let it bounce so loudly so that everyone knew where it was. Of course, everyone probably already knew he was moving to this team because of the bicycle anyway, so there probably wouldn't be any point in trying to hide it. We would be out of here by the day after the next anyway. He was a veteran, that I was sure of by the darkness that shaded his eyes even from the dim lighting. I was grateful for that; I had no desire for Ochi to be succeeded by some nameless rookie who knew nothing about the way battles were fought. I swung my feet over the side, seeing eye-to-eye with him for the first time. He was a tall, beautiful boy with dark hair and mysteriously darker eyes. His skin looked faintly luminescent, as if it were cool to the touch even when the noonday sun beat down on him and rouged his cheeks with risen blood. He gave me a crisp salute, eyes unreadable.
I smiled at him. "I think the only reason we're losing this war is because we can salute too well."
To my satisfaction (and surprise), he did not relax or attempt to "buddy" me. "What the generals decide to teach has its uses" was his polite answer. The others in the doorway and the stairs were smiling, but they weren't laughing. This was our new teammate. If this cool courtesy was what he was usually like, then I wondered if he ever relaxed at all. Standing up to him, I slapped him as hard as I possibly could across the left side of his face. His face whipped in the opposite direction, he staggered but did not fall. He turned back to me and his face broke into a chilly smile that didn't reach even halfway to his eyes. "I hope I have proven satisfactory", he said, then pivoted heel and saluted. His steps rang hollowly on the stone stairs. All eyes turned to watch him leave.
When he had left, Hikaru gave me a look that clearly said "I-know- something-you-don't-know" and vocalized his concerns for our new teammate. "It's just our luck", he said dramatically, passing a hand over his brow. Clearly he was trying to prod us into asking him just what he was getting at, but all of us knew that he would tell us in his own due time. "We've got him, Shinichirou Isumi, probably the most stick-up-his-ass than the rest of our teachers, and on top of that we've got a curse." We were all listening now, and he beamed that now that he had grabbed our attentions. "He's been called the Grim Reaper by everyone because after the first battle, all of his teammates have died. He's gone through fifteen teams, and all of them have died except for him! Like there was this one where that night they found his teammates stuck in a tree with their arms blown off and hanging off of a nearby tree."
I snorted. The others turned to look at me, but I waved them off. Curse, indeed! Those must have been rookies he'd been with, then, if they were careless enough to get die by their first battle. I wondered what other little secrets Mr. Stick-Up-His-Ass, as Hikaru so delicately put it, was hiding. But certainly I didn't care, if he died it was his own fault for not hiding well enough. A burst of anger lit my temper for some unknown reason, and I stormed out of the dugout. The little emotional side of me was whining again that everyone was treating this Shinichirou character too cruelly.
* * *
By Sunday, all of us had gotten used to having him around, him and his brooding character who loved to read Goethe's "Faust" time and time again. He had his uses, though - on Saturday, the canteen cook refused to open because there wasn't enough food to feed both the second and the third companies. So while we all sat around nursing our empty stomachs, suddenly he put on his hat and walked out. Twenty minutes later he returned with a sack that held horse meat, hay for to beef up our stringy wire beds, and two loaves of bread, still warm. He distributed it out all wordlessly, taking only a meager portion for himself. He drew back into his corner even when we cajoled him to tell us where he had gotten the good fare. I found it strange that he had still been able to keep his morals this far; assumingly, he wasn't willing to admit that he had stolen the stuff. I found it childish and immature of him to act such; here, we were glad for such a man on our team, what he could provide was always welcome.
All the while, I was noticing sidelong, surreptitious glances to the rest of us. I knew he was gay; not only had Hikaru especially pointed that out that particular fact while he had been away, but also he did not like touching any of us, even to brush a careless hand against a comrade's shoulder. Instead, I focused on the dark eyes, the sway of his hair when the heat lifted and the cold air from the sea only a few miles away blew the childish blush of his cheeks away, leaving a stone-cold chiseled mask behind, made of smooth granite. He rarely said anything other than to answer a question, and wrote notes on scraps of paper when he could get away from it. But above all, there was a sad, tragically lovely air around him. He seemed so lonely, knowing that we would die too. And seeing the rest of my team all trying to enjoy their "last days", it made me afraid too. But I would never admit that to anyone out loud.
It was Tuesday again when anything exceptionally out of the ordinary happened. This time, it was vice versa: Shinichirou needed OUR help.
In our company, we were the twenty-third team. As tradition would have it, the thirteenth team were our rivals; they had been from a rival school in our little town before, and so they remained that way here. Perhaps on the battlefield we were reluctant brothers, but two miles outside of the line of fire, we hated each other's guts. I had just been making my way up to relieve Ijima of the machine gun when there came the unmistakable sound of a blow hitting flesh. Turning around, I peered into the dugout where I had heard it from. Two figures were struggling while around them a ring had gathered, some betting cigarettes and other betting chew tobacco and other betting still more precious items out here. A flash of silver told me one had drawn his dagger. A slash and the other had a cut on one cheek that he barely avoided. A hesitant hand came up to feel the cut. The dark eyes were distant and hazy, as if they had not seen his attacker as an enemy at all.
I shoved past them all, knocking the knife out of the attacker's hands, then literally began to drag Shinichirou out of the dugout. I passed a few spectators before one grabbed my arm and began shouting. I gave him a clout in the mouth and he fell down the stairs. I glanced at my hand and found it was bleeding where it had hit the man's teeth. I gritted it and pulled Shinichirou along to where Ijima was posted.
"There you are", he growled as he shot off an enemy wandering hand above the line. The owner gave a scream as it came off wiggling, and Ijima surrendered the post to me.
"Take it again", I grunted, and he gave me an appraising look. "I'll do yours double tomorrow. I need to talk with Food Mongrel here", I pointed to Shinichirou, who looked from Ijima to me with his normal mysterious eyes settled back in place. Ijima gave a reluctant murmur in reply to tell me that he'd just do it anyway and went back to the post. I knew that he had been trying to shoot for a ribbon around his button for the entire week now. If a sniper got five clear shots in his turn at the gun, then he would be given a little strip of ribbon to put around his first button on his uniform. Sometimes the snipers would compare how high the man would jump as they got hit. More often, though, they swapped guns when they found one particular place had more people than the other, or one place had begun with a bombardment.
We walked back down to our dugout, my throat tight and my body constricted even to look at him. His face was cool and smooth, still, seemingly untouched by age or by pain. Absently I began to explain to him that the should never go near that dugout because they were our rivals, so to speak, just like the third company was always our rivals as well, especially in the food area. Carrots, our cook, often refused to tote his pans up close to the front because there was more risk of getting shot. However, Fat Hamster, the third company's cook, was willing to carry his pans all the way up to the front lines if need be, so that the soldiers got hot soup instead of cold sea brine. They were adding everything from rotten turnips to horse dung in the soups these days, at least that's what it tasted like. It was a miracle for our team to be blessed with Shinichirou. We only had to say what we wanted and he would put on his cap and go out and find it, as if he had a compass to lead him. On Monday he had carried back an entire box of lobsters. We would have rather had steak, though.
By the time we reached the dugout, the rest of the team had come to scold Shinichirou about his rash actions. When he was asked what provoked it, he only gave Hikaru a deep look, as if it were better the blonde boy didn't ask. Again I watched him avoid hands that tried to swipe disinfectant at the clotted cut on his cheek. He seemed to have the patience of several thousand saints to put up with Hikaru, Fuku and Tsutui all at once clambering around him. When finally I grabbed the handkerchief out of Hikaru's hands and cleaned the cut myself (Isumi managed to hold still), they were finally satisfied and dragged Isumi into the dugout so that they could keep an eye out for him. It wasn't as if they would come back to get revenge or anything, though, they would wait a little while and wait until everything had simmered down before they struck again.
Finally when the three others got bored and went back up, I lit up a cigarette and handed another one to him. He motioned a negative, and I gave him a rather strange look. What would a soldier do with his time if he didn't smoke cigarettes? I shrugged, tucked the cylinder back into my pocket, and breathed out the gray smoke. "What'd they say?", I said as conversationally as I could.
"Grim Reaper", he said tonelessly. I mentally applauded him for his show of apathy. That was a good quality in a soldier.
"Still, words are only words", I argued. "You shouldn't have been so affected by them." He looked down at this. "I don't believe in curses", I said bluntly, and he looked up at me in disbelief, "not even if you've killed off your other ninety or so teammates. They were probably too busy staring at your pretty little face and got distracted and careless." I gave a harsh laugh at that, one that unsettled most people. But he just continued to stare at me, unblinkingly, and somehow that unsettled me more than anything else I had ever seen. And just when I was starting to get used to it, he turned away and the intense moment was over. Abruptly he got up and went into the dugout, probably intent on avoiding any other people who wanted to beat him up that were coming up the trenchway now.
* * *
The next evening, he almost got himself killed.
Again, we were back on the front lines, and the bombardment overhead didn't look like it was going to abate anytime soon. We already had stacked the hand grenades and the coils of barbed wire ready beside us to shoot out of the trench when the bombardment let up to throw over to the enemy. Already Fuku and Hikaru were betting to see who would throw their grenades the farthest. But Shinichirou just remained stone-cold, watching the skies overhead alight with an unholy red glare. Ijima was against pattering at the machine guns, aiming in no particular order at all. Shells rocked the dugouts, and the very ground under us trembled and groaned under the might of manmade machines. The bombardment was so thick that not even a flea would have been able to get through it. Overhead, a hot air balloon sailed, its basket painted black and its silk tied on with thick ropes. A plane shot it down abruptly over the forest that we were at. A machine-gunner hesitated as the hot air balloon blasted into a mushroom of flame among the trees. Instantly he fell, bullets penetrating into his brain and riddling his body.
Suddenly the bombardment ceased. Immediately I waved an arm and we all climbed up in the brief pause. We threw grenade after grenade; the shells whistled above us like a cheering crowd, the blasts roared like a growing tide. I couldn't hear anything - finally I felt someone shaking my shoulder, helping me pull my mask over my head, and I saw Shinichirou's mouth moving in one syllable over and over - gas, gggaaaaassss. We ducked and wove over to a shell hole and climbed in. Shells rarely fell in the same places twice. When we climbed in, there were already two people inside. I tensed, then saw that it was only Hikaru and another injured man that I did not know. We waited for the bombardment to cease again so that we could return to our trench.
Then the gas came, swirling into our little shell hole like ghostly hands that felt us through out clothes. Rolling like waves, it came, green and neon-colored, looking more sickly than the people it infected. It seemed to pause at each of our faces, sniffing it, tasting it, seeing if it was to its liking and then moving on. Before it had completely passed, we had climbed out again amidst the regular machine-gun fire and sporadic shell-blasts, bringing the injured man to an orderly who bustled by. At first we weren't sure if it was even our trench - my sense of direction had been completely whacked when we went into the shell-hole - but then we saw the cap and the pin and they were indeed our men. We handed him over and he told us that we were going to abandon the front trenches. It was about then that I noticed that Shinichirou was gone. Telling Hikaru to wait ten minutes (he had a watch) and use the remaining bullets in the machine guns, then to start throwing bombs when the time came and uncoiling the barbed wire without me, I hurried into the woods that were nearby, shouting for Shinichirou. Several times I almost got caught with machine gun bursts, but the woods hid me well and there was no moon. Of course, I could not see the barbed wire either.
I found him finally at the sight of the wreck of the hot air balloon. He was cutting away at a piece of silk - the only thing of value that ever came regularly around us - black in the night, but it would be red when I saw it in the daylight that was approaching fast. He was cutting carefully around all the places where the barbed wire had pierced it. It was a pretty big piece, and if he sold it somewhere it would have fetched a good price.
He gave me a look as I approached, his eyes taking in my cap and my uniform and last of all my face, then recognized me and started to cut faster. I explained to him over the rattle of machine-gun fire that we were abandoning the front trenches and that I had probably spent seven minutes looking for him already. I must have screamed What the hell do you think you're doing? several million times in his ear, but he didn't seem to mind at all. Finally I joined in and together we hacked off the first piece he had been cutting as well as another unburnt section that I'd found a little ways off. We arrived back at the trench with a minute to spare, and together we three left pulled hand-grenades behind us as well as barbed wire. The trenches didn't look like trenches anymore, more like lumps of mud and dirt. The explosions pounded in our feet and in our heads as we threw bombs one after the other behind us. Even if my own dead father came over that enemy line now, I would not have hesitated to throw a bomb at him.
* * *
He wrapped the silk up in linen so that it would look like nothing special, and then stuffed the cloth into a brown package. In truth, the linen cost more than the silk; the silk was free, and the linen cost much more at the scrabbly store town that was nearby. The two pieces we had cut together would have enough to make a blouse or maybe even a small skirt. I gave him the one I had cut with no questions except for one.
"Who is it for?"
"My sister", he answered. "She likes pretty things."
We had been sent back to the two-miles away dugout after we returned to the trenches that we had evacuated to. Out of a hundred and twenty-one men, only thirty-three remained. Thankfully, my entire team was still alive. Ijima had gotten an earlobe shot off when he was careless enough to peek his head over the parapet to aim. You did not aim with a machine gun. You just fed it bullets and directed it as you pleased. Tsutui, the philosopher of our team, got a bad wound in his side, though it would not affect his walking. Still, he was being sent home. We were happy for him. He would be out of this hellhole. Shinichirou had even shook his hand before he left.
But it had been broken, hadn't it? It had been after the first battle, and the entire team was still alive. Shinichirou looked happier than he had been in days, his eyes filling with a mysterious warmth that I found both endearing and sweet, if anything could be sweet in a war like this. Already he went out every night and brought back things for us: more sweet-smelling hay for our rusty cots, new sheets and blankets, bread and cognac aplenty, cigarettes (though he smoked none and kept none for himself), meat, nice tinned beans (we all suspected he actually went over enemy lines and robbed an enemy dugout for those; they had Swedish writing on them), and even popcorn. In all the fifteen months we had been on the front, we had never seen such fare. More than ever we found ourselves warming up to him.
He spoke little, but now he liked to sit among us more and listen to our jokes, our funny stories and to our laughter. In the firelight his eyes would seem more red than blue, more warm than the chilly coolness of his skin even when it was flushed in the sun. Yes, he was beautiful, we all decided once when he was out looking for more hay. And when he smiled he could charm any person into doing anything, even doing a chicken dance in front of our old math professor.
More than ever I found myself looking at him, trying to ponder how sweet his sweat would taste as it rolled down the curve of his collarbones, how soft his hair would feel on my fingertips. I didn't love him - love was too idealistic in this place, I doubted that I would ever feel love again because already war had killed all emotion within me - but I wanted him, wanted to touch him where the skin turned paler underneath his clothes and where his skin would heat where I touched it. How would I seem to him, his head-of-team, coming to him for sexual pleasure? I would probably seem the coarsest of beasts, since it was well-known that I was the only one in the second company (or what remained of the second company) to never masturbate after hours.
Still, I found myself walking with him after one of his forage trips, carrying a sack of horse meat, looking up at his white face in the moonlight that shot right down to his eyes, making them seem luminous and strange. And then as if he felt my eyes on him, he turned to meet my own eyes, watching me as I stared right back at him, too entranced to pull my eyes apart. His voice was soft, sensuous as he spoke, and I thought of the high stringing of a violin, so pure and so beautiful that it hung in the air like an invisible, imaginary thing called hope.
"Do you find me beautiful?"
"Yes", I breathed, then I plunged on ahead, "it's not only the Grim Reaper curse that you were afraid of, was it? You were afraid of yourself, you were afraid of what you could do with that terrible beauty that could make people like you, love you, lower their defenses to you before you killed them or destroyed them so completely that they would never come back to haunt you again. You were afraid that if we got too close to you, your curse would kill us too, isn't it?" He lowered his head, but I still had more to say, "You are not what is going to kill us. Chance is what saved us that day, not your apathy to us. Fate is what is finally going to kill us, or maybe a shell or a bullet. But certainly it wasn't you. Don't give yourself so much credit on killing your other dead teammates. You're not God. You can't decide who lives and who dies, so don't try and pretend you have that power."
He looked at me then, really looked at me, and his smile was more sad and lonely than I had ever seen it. Slowly the wind dragged itself into his hair as if it were painful, as if it were the last thing that it would ever experience. His eyes reflected so many dark waters, but his chiefly only saw one kind now: the murky waters of this war, wherein the corpses were left behind in for the rats to gnaw and the maggots to digest. He hated this war, I could see that, but in his eyes there was a sad melancholy that told me that he pitied those others, the others who had to fight on the other side. In another world, I might have had a job, I might have met Shinichirou Isumi somewhere else and I might have become his friend or even loved him, just as I might have met one of the soldiers I had killed the night before, or maybe the bombardment before that, or maybe the first man I gunned down with a sniper gun in my hands. We could have been friends. There wouldn't have been such a gulf between us.
"Are you still afraid of me?", I asked. "You know there is no curse. You know that we have broken your bad luck. Now tell me: are you afraid of me? Are you afraid of what I might do right now to you?"
His eyes were unreadable. "You could kill me", he breathed. "You could destroy me as I have destroyed all the others that have been my teammates, so completely that I would never come back to haunt you. You could say that you loved me even when I know that's not possible in a place like this, and if I believed you, then you could break me into a million pieces with three words, every time you said them. You could kill me, I mean." He seemed to breathe in deeply then, almost as if he needed the courage for his next words, "and then you could bury me and then you could forget me, and to me that would be the greatest sorrow of all."
"You are close", I ventured. We were now back in front of our dug out. I took the sack, threw it inside, and then took the crate of hay and rolled it down the steps. Last of all, I rolled the bread and the cans of soup and beans in the blanket we had found and rolled that down the steps as well. There were exclamations of surprise from inside, but I was not listening. I was pulling him along, all the way into an old abandoned dugout that nobody used because some new recruits had died there when they took off their gas masks too fast. Their bodies had been removed, of course, but still no one lived there. A faint odor of the gas still remained, but most of it been aired out by the wind. I pushed him down onto one of the cots; thankfully it still had a sheet over it, and hay under that. "Perhaps too close to the truth", I continued.
"What do you want with me?" His breathing had become faster now.
"I will not say I love you. But I will say that I desire you. What would you say to that? I do not love you, I could still despise you and yet still desire your body against mine, under my searching fingers." I saw him shudder at the picture I made for him. "I could still make you rise up against me gently and give me pleasure." His trembling increased as I trailed an absent finger down his cheek. I could see him trying to turn away but unable to. "I don't love you, and yet I'll use you. That loveless action will kill you, do you understand? I do not love you, and yet I am willing to fuck you into the depths of oblivion."
His breathing was uneven, hitched even as I ran a hand in his hair. Ah, like silk. Just as I imagined. "How you say that word", he murmured slightly, almost too low for me to catch, "you say that curse word like a blessing."
"Hmm? You mean 'fuck'? Well, then I say now that I will fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you some more. Is that a deal, now? You want to die, don't you? That's why you're agreeing to this", I said those words with gentle intensity, lost in the swirl of his dark eyes.
"I am dead. I am already cold in my grave. I have lost all emotion already." And as I watched, a lone tear streaked silver over his pale cheekbone.
I licked it away. "No, let me prove to you that you are warm."
* * *
Two days later he was dead.
I and him had a sort of truce: I would agree to whatever request he had during the day to occupy his time (including reading parts of "Faust" aloud to me, then playing with my hair, then going out with him on his endless forage trips), and then he would agree to mine by night. Of course, our other team member noticed our increased interaction with each other - but they treated it as nothing, we had all seen such before here on the front lines, and so they found it no more interesting than a rat that liked bread. It seemed all rats liked bread here, especially by the way they got into our bread supply by day and by night. Finally we had to cut off the gnawed pieces and throw them over the parapet so that the machine gunners would finish them off somehow.
We got sent back up to the front lines, and we had been throwing hand- grenades like we were used to doing when the bombardment ceased when he looked at me calmly and plainly, and then fell, scattering the hand grenades. He had been wounded in the shin, and even as we all stood over him, trying to avoid blasts by hiding behind the rail posts, watching him suffer as he clutched his leg to himself and looked at us with wide eyes as if to ask, Am I going to die?. Finally the others continued without us and I started to lead him back, one footed, to our trench. But halfway through the bombardment started again and I placed him into a shell-hole before going in myself. We had to wait it out. An hour passed and I could see that the shock was starting to wear off and the pain was starting to really act up. Finally the bombardment ceased and we started off again, a three-legged monster. When finally we got to an orderly, the man took one look at Shinichirou and said quite calmly, "You shouldn't have done that. You were wasting your time."
I looked down at Shinichirou, who was sitting on the bench, his face down and his hands composed neatly in his lap. "What do you mean?"
The orderly looked at him, lifted his chin and then dropped it again back to his chest. "He's dead." I looked at Shinichirou, then at the orderly who laid him out and felt the neck for a pulse. The orderly shook his head at me. "Dead."
I frowned at him, not comprehending the word. "Dead? He has only fainted. He and I were talking only five minutes ago. About the life of Goethe and how it affected "Faust"." Though the last part was probably beside the point.
The orderly looked at me, ripped open Shinichirou's uniform and pulled out the black pocketbook that he always carried. "You want this?", the orderly asked. I accepted it numbly. Then he shooed me out and the last thing I saw of Shinichirou was the orderly standing over him, taking off his ID tag. I looked back at the pocketbook and opened it. A few pictures and letters fell out. I picked them up, looking at Shinichirou's sister. And suddenly it crashed down upon my head just what had happened. He was dead. dead Dead DEAD. My hands were itching to write, suddenly, write this entire tragic love story down on a paper and mail it to a publishing company somewhere. It was a sensation that I hadn't felt for nearly two years, the want to write. Shinichirou would he liked to see me do it. But first I had to write to his sister before the orderlies sent out his papers. I had to tell her that it wasn't the enemy that killed her brother, nor was it blood loss. I had to tell her who really killed her brother.
/ \ / \ / \ / \ /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ Author's note:
Well, that was interesting. This was halfway based on the book "All Quiet on the Western Front", set in WWI in 1916 on the French coast. I'm sorry if I didn't make it clearer that this is Waya talking. Yes, I changed around their ages and I changed around them themselves, I apologize for not putting more Touya or more Hikaru in here, but this was strictly a Waya/Isumi thing, so I wanted to keep it that way. No, I don't know why I wrote this. Yes, I know it's stupid. Please, blame it on the ruses. I just couldn't get the damn bloody idea out of my head.
Andrea Weiling