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Vasily arrives too late.
This had been his foremost fear after realizing he wouldn't get on the train on time. He was slowed down by his wounded leg (another loss, another display of Ogata's superior skill), and by the time Vasily had roughly patched himself up and found a lost horse, there was little else to do besides following the train tracks and hoping to catch up to Ogata somehow.
He eventually does, but not in the way he'd like to.
At first, he finds bodies of Japanese soldiers strewn around the tracks at random intervals, as if they'd been pushed off the train. He doesn’t stick around for long enough to verify if there are any survivors. Doesn’t care for it, either way.
There’s a skip in his heartbeat when he identifies the sniper’s cloak a few meters ahead. He could’ve missed it if he had been moving any faster – there’s only a little bit of it visible, the rest obscured by the tall grass that flanks the train’s path.
The fresh red blood marring white cloth feels indecent.
Vasily dismounts from the horse and limps towards the body, pushing away wild weeds to see for himself – to witness Ogata’s demise. A demise that should’ve been by Vasily’s hands, but wasn’t. Their tally will forever be stuck in Ogata’s favour, and there’s nothing Vasily can do about it anymore.
Similarly to the soldiers thrown from the train before, the fall did a number on Ogata’s body – his right leg is bent at an unnatural angle, obviously broken in a few places, and scrapes and cuts mar his skin. Cuts that didn’t bleed – so they were inflicted after death. His right hand loosely clutches at the Type 38 rifle atop his chest, holding it by the end of the barrel pointed at himself, a bizarre position for a sniper.
There’s a sickening wide smile frozen on Ogata’s face, soaked by the blood that came from his nose and what had been his left eye.
(Did you die happily, by a hand that wasn’t mine?)
Vasily falls to his knees next to the body, trying to make sense of the situation. The killing shot was right inside the orbit, so there’s no entry wound to speak of. There are black specks of gunpowder tattooed into the skin of his brow, of his cheek – the shot had been from extremely close up, then. Maybe the muzzle even touched the surface of Ogata's eye when it fired. Vasily is sure of what he’ll find if the lifts Ogata’s head – not much at all, for the exit wound from that close a distance was sure to have blown off half his skull. There are bits of greyish-red brain matter scattered on the ground like limp, mutilated worms. What had once been the perfect strategic machine that bested him is now just gore that’s soon to rot under the sun.
The circumstances all point to Ogata having inflicted this upon himself, by choice. Vasily picks up the Type 38 rifle, which slips easily from Ogata’s hand. He had never actually held one of those before, and he finds that he likes the feel of it. It’s immaculately kept – Vasily is sure that, if he opens Ogata’s belt pouch right now, he’ll find all his rifle cleaning supplies in perfect working order. He knows that because his own supplies are organized this way, and because he knows Ogata is a man after his own heart.
Was.
Ogata was.
(How could you have done this; this kill was supposed to be mine)
It’s strange, the emptiness that caves inside Vasily’s chest. There’s nothing left anymore – not in this country, and not in his homeland. He had survived what should have been a fatal wound, deserted the army and left everything behind to chase after the man who had held his fate in his hand. Their last confrontation up in the trees, just a short while ago, had felt like an appetizer – a prelude to what should have been the defining moment of both their lives.
Ogata's dull glass eye stares blindly at the sky. Vasily had felt disappointed when he found out the little girl and the Japanese soldier had gouged Ogata’s eye out just days after their first duel. Had felt angry, even, knowing that Ogata wouldn’t be in top conditions during their rematch. However, these fears were assuaged when Vasily finally met him again and found that missing one eye wasn’t necessarily a handicap. Not to Ogata, anyway.
Vasily considers what to do next. His leg hurts, but the bleeding has mostly stopped – he’ll pull through this. His pack is relatively full, he’s got ammo and a horse. The horse is kind of skittish, but Vasily’s always been good at handling horses of all kinds – just taking it out of the war zone would make it behave a lot better. There’s no one looking for him, the only people who know of his existence in Japan are either dead or on board of a train going far, far away. He knows that, if he heads north, eventually he’ll reach Sakhalin again. Reaching Sakhalin, he can at least find a place where he understands the language. This is his most promising option, right now.
He’s got one last thing to do before he leaves this foreign land, though.
***
Vasily loots a shovel from one of the fallen Japanese soldiers’ packs, on his way to the nearby woods. The horse is slower, this time, carrying the weight of two men.
Ogata’s body is wrapped in its own cloak, Vasily having done the best he could to wrap it in such a way that the back of his skull would not fall apart any more than it already has. He’d closed the glass eye, and if one ignored the mess on the left side of Ogata’s face, one could be convinced that he was only sleeping, his frozen smile giving his expression a playful quality.
(Did you think of me, at least, before deciding to do this?)
Vasily will have to live the rest of his days unsatisfied, stolen of any climatic closure to their connection – he at least hopes Ogata died happy that he bested Vasily more than once.
Deep into the woods seems like a good enough place for the burial – it’s out of the way, relatively peaceful. Vasily chooses a tall tree, the type he’d favour climbing on a stakeout, and sets Ogata’s wrapped body on the ground near the roots. As the horse rests and grazes nearby, Vasily gets to work digging the grave, ignoring how much his wounded leg aches with the effort.
It takes a while, wounded like this, and by the time Vasily is done it’s already past sunset, and getting increasingly dark. The burial could wait till sunrise, he thinks – burying a body at night reminds him too much of how it was in the war, when they retrieved their compatriots’ bodies under the cover of darkness. Vasily and Ogata’s own private war was different from that mess – it deserved a conclusion in broad daylight.
He gathers nearby twigs and branches and makes a small fire near the pitch-black grave and the body shrouded in white. Eats a bit of food from his pack, propped against the tree trunk.
Back in his home village, Vasily had seen plenty of burials. Proper ones, not the hurried, frightened disposals he’d witnessed in the war. He had watched his mother wash his grandfather's body before dressing him in good clothes and setting him on the dinner table for the wake, when Vasily was only a child unaware of how violent a death could get
It’s going to be a lonely vigil, but given the circumstances, he figures it’s better than nothing.
He unwraps Ogata, just his face, and examines him. He's dirty with dried blood and congealed, slimy gore, white as a sheet and turning purple around the edges. Vasily takes a rag and douses it with water from his canteen, using it to clean up Ogata’s face as best he can.
Vasily doesn’t have enough water to clean the whole body, or new clothes to dress it in, so he focuses his efforts on cleaning Ogata’s face, neck and hands. Slicks his hair back as best he can without a hair comb, tries not to think of how touching the greased strands would feel like in a better context. He really arrived too late.
Now, after a few hours, Ogata looks undeniably dead. There’s no way to look at him and pretend that he’s merely asleep, not with the way his skin turned waxen and blotchy, sunken around bone. It should startle Vasily that he still finds Ogata impossibly beautiful, even like this.
It’s his last opportunity, it strikes him suddenly. Vasily reaches into his pack again, grabs his notebook and pencil. Tries to find a good angle, where the flickering light from the fire doesn’t enhance the eerie shadows of Ogata’s face. He gets up, finds more firewood and tree leaves and whatever he can use, makes the fire bigger, brighter. After he’s satisfied with the light source, Vasily sits back down and goes to work on drawing Ogata’s last portrait.
He draws different versions of it, taking up pages and pages of the notebook on different approaches, sharpens his lines and slowly approaches something that Vasily feels can properly express the unnamed feelings that fill up his chest, that burrow themselves into the hollow of his throat. He only stops once he runs out of paper hours later, hands hurting and blistered from the digging and from drawing too much, a dull ache that tightens his bones.
The fire slowly dies as Vasily curls up next to Ogata, on their first and only night together.
**
Ogata seems so small in the daylight, stretched out next to the open grave, like a child wrapped in blankets. The sun is rising up in the east, and the only witness to his makeshift funeral is Vasily and the horse.
There are prayers for occasions like this, hymns and psalms, Vasily knows. He'd never bothered to properly learn them – Vasily never truly believed in the divine, made his way through life only following what could be felt with his own hands and seen with his own eyes. And the Japanese don’t pray like the Russians do, he’d been told – their pagan gods’ demands are different. Ogata probably doesn’t even need – or want – a prayer, for men like he and Vasily are sure to go to Hell when they die.
Even the Japanese must believe in some sort of Hell, Vasily thinks.
He mumbles a random psalm that had been drilled into him by his grandmother a long time ago, just for the sake of saying something, anything. Ogata had stolen his own words from him when he shattered his jaw and seized his life, and even though his wound was mostly healed they still hadn’t come back to him.
So Vasily recites the near-incomprehensible psalm, eyes fixed on Ogata’s closed eye. He kneels and kisses Ogata’s cold forehead, kisses his cold hands that are crossed atop his chest. It’s their last farewell.
Vasily covers Ogata’s face with the cloak, in lieu of a proper shroud. Before he can think and talk himself out of it, Vasily quickly reaches under the cloth, his gloved fingers digging into Ogata’s eye socket to retrieve his glass eye.
Maybe it’s a sin, to steal something like this from a corpse. However, Vasily argues to himself, it was the eye he was supposed to have taken in the first place, as payback. Vasily was its rightful owner, in that sense.
Vasily pockets the slippery eye in his ammo pouch, gets up and begins lowering Ogata into his final resting place.
***
Afterwards, on the back of the horse riding north, Vasily looks back. The morning sun beats down on his right side, and in the distance, he can see Ogata’s makeshift tombstone - his Type 38 rifle, stuck upright in the ground, fully loaded and glinting in the sun.
It’s the last Vasily sees of him.