By three o’clock, the Japs had become desperate, and were killing every male in sight. We hid Papa and Paby under some pillows and bed clothes and sat on them till they complained that our weight would kill them faster than the Jap. Leo [my brother] was nowhere in sight, gone on some foolish errand of mercy with a bottle of disinfectant and swab of gauze. Through a gap in the door, we could see the street strewn with corpses like so many dolls. A Jap stalked by with a fixed bayonet and his foot tripped on a mattress rolled against a fence. With both hands, the Jap lifted the matress and found an old man underneath. Tomadachi! Tomadachi! the man babbled, going down on his knees to hug the Jap’s legs, and the Jap lifted his bayonet and buried it into the man’s neck.

Soon after, several women whom the slaughtering had turned into jabbering idiots, burst through the door of the garage. They were wild-eyed and barefoot and restlessly paced the garage. They’ve killed every one of our husbands, Mrs. Rosal who was among them said, we are looking for some cloth to make a flag. If we make a Japanese flag, another woman said, Do you think they will have mercy on us? Look! a fat woman said, coming up with a red tablecloth from a laundry bag. It’s just what we need. She inverted a plate on it and drew a circle which she cut out with scissors from my mother’s bag. The other woman helped her pin the red circle on one of the baby diapers and they tied it to the end of a ceiling broom. Up and down the streets they marched in a crazy parade, waving the flag above their heads and singing a Japanese song, and other women poured out of the neighboring houses to sing and join in the parade. At the corner they encountered a squad of Japs, who machine-gunned every single woman in the group.

Then someone outside screamed, Mrs. Sonido, your son Leo’s been hit.

Where, where is he? My mother cried, getting up suddenly, dropping the scissors and the tablecloth, and pointed, there—over there! And we ran. And my father ran, the whirring of the shells over us, and a grenade rocked the ground as we fell flat on it, feeling it trembling under us and the people screaming, and the houses in smoke, and the Japs gone berserk…

My brother lay on the earth, staring up at the petrified trees with eyes of glass. There was a bullet hole in his cheek and my father felt the back of Leo’s head where the bullet had plowed through, and it was matted with blood. The smoke hung upon the sky like an awful fog and the noonday sun was a dim orange ball far away in the kingdom of God.

The bombs rained silently upon the burning world, and I sat upon my haunches and watched my father grow wild with terrible grief. There was no sun and there was no wind…

Gilda Cordero-Fernando, from A Wilderness of Sweets (a short story of the tragedy of the Liberation of Manila in 1945).

I was close to tears when the author was reading this at the Philippine PEN Congress yesterday.

20 Notes/ Hide

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  4. thirdworldsturmunddrang said: this is a sad story indeed. but as i read it, i can’t help but think that we’re a nation of cowards. the brits never folded in the face of german attack. the japs also did the same to the americans in 1945. that’s what sets them apart from us.
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