The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  Anyway, once the firemen got their hoses on it the flames died and the smoke turned heavy and black, and I went back to the bus stop and everyone who had been there before was still waiting – maybe the fire engine had held up the traffic or something – and it seemed as if nothing had happened at all. I was late for the lesson of course. I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep up this English teaching. I waste a lot of time travelling that I don’t get paid for. I need to get some photography work but it’s hard to make the contacts without speaking the language.

  He folded the fine blue paper. How flimsy everything was, how thin his words. How light and without weight.

  You chose the words and you chose the significance to attach to them but you could not control the other significances that came to mind even when you did not give them words. You saw the house burn down and you wrote of the stubble burning. You consciously brought up the memory of yourself and Richard setting fire to the stubble after harvest, Richard there with his gun to shoot the running vermin and yourself with the camera, the white smoke rising into the September sky and the whole event controlled so that the fire did not spread, you tried to flick a switch in your memory and you wrote of that, but there was quite another memory vivid in your mind. There were the images of burning and there were the sounds that went with them, the crackle of stubble, the falling-in of the pieces of a house, and behind and above them a roar that was like wind but that was not wind, that was made of the fire and the rush and the screams.

  He felt shaken inside, even as he licked the glued edges of the paper to close the letter and hold down the airy words within it. He took a sip of his coffee but it had gone cold. The dainty cake he had ordered was something to look at rather than to eat. He looked about the coffee shop that was a bland imitation of some European cafe with its little white tables and white-painted bentwood chairs and plasterwork like the icing on the cake. The trio of girls at the next table noticed him looking, and lowered their heads now like geisha and giggled behind their hands. Things in this place were so light, hollow, none of them quite real. He thought that he might stay a long time.

  He began to get his pictures of Tokyo developed at the lab she found for him. He didn’t get them done in any particular order. He hadn’t dated or labelled the rolls. He took in a few at a time, when he had the money for it, and got the contact sheets done but had only a handful of images printed. The lab was close to the language school so when he came there he had the envelopes in his hand.

  He showed her the first lot of prints and she asked to see the contacts as well. These were not meant for people to see, he said. Most of them were rubbish, images that came before and after and beside whatever it was that would make a photograph.

  But won’t you let me see them?

  OK. They were random, did she not know that? He felt vulnerable showing them, as if he were exposing to her his flawed thoughts.

  These are from when I first arrived.

  * * *

  Kumiko held one sheet in her hand and then another, and looked them over. You took a lot, she said, with her big warm smile. Yet he could see that she was not impressed with the pictures he had taken of the city. Their subjects must be things that she took for granted, surfaces and nothing more, and their composition must then seem imperfect, off-centre, unsatisfying. So he showed her what was pretty. He showed her what she wanted to see. He showed her the self that he wanted her to see and put away the rest.

  She liked his flowers best. The sheets of flowers she laid down on the table and he gave her a glass so that she could look more closely. He had taken a complete roll of cherry blossom, first whole trees and then frame after frame filled only with flowers, a fine black framework of branches and a luminous mass of petals like spray across them.

  Why do you take them in black and white?

  To show their form, he said. And because of the way the flowers take the light. See how the light seems almost to come through them.

  The cumulative effect in the contact sheets was powerful. She moved with the glass from one image to the next. How do you choose, she asked, which one you will print? He took the glass from her hand. He moved the glass to another frame, stood back to let her see. She bent forward, taking the glass again from his fingers. There were things a photographer looked for, he said, subtle variations between the shots, alterations in shutter setting, contrast, depth of field. She did not have the eye for it, she told him. He was aware of her closeness beside him, her small smooth hand with the glass in it resting beside his on the glossy sheets in the sunlight. He was aware of the delicacy of her hand, the tone and texture of her Japanese skin that was so very different from his own. The fine line of difference ran between their two hands on the table.

  You should take more in colour, she said.

  I have some in colour. I’ll show you another time. I have another series of flowers, of the wisteria at Hama Rikyu, but I don’t have them developed yet. I went back, after that day when we went together, and took some more.

  They went out together again that evening. In the restaurant it was easy to talk. It was a noisy place and full of action. Then they left and there were just the two of them, and they fell silent. They walked to the subway and he put his arm beneath her jacket to her waist. They kissed in the dark of the street, and again when they parted in the bright light of the station. When they did that, they closed their eyes to make it dark.

  He took colour film when they went to Kamakura but the photographs should have been black and white. It was a day for black and white. Only the shiny red of her raincoat justifies his use of colour, seeming to glow against the grey and the wet. From all of that day there is perhaps just one picture of her that is worth keeping, and even that one isn’t as good as it might be. The image would not stand alone without what his memory can add to it.

  They looked out from the train and saw suburban Tokyo stretching away in the rain, black-tiled roofs and sometimes red and blue roofs shining with the wet, the sky a nothingness above them.

  It’s the rainy season, she said. It will rain like this for weeks. Her face was soft in the smeary light that came through the window of the train.

  Kamakura’s streets were full of umbrellas. They walked up to the hydrangea temple. The wood of the temple buildings was dark with the wet. They were too early for the flowers. The leaves of the hydrangeas were prolific, green and weighted with moisture, but the flowers had only begun to bud.

  You will have to come back and take pictures when they come out. Then there are so many people here, it’s like Tokyo station, and everyone taking pictures.

  It’s fine, he said. It’s nice like this. He was happy to see it as it was. There was just a scattering of visitors, and their umbrellas did not so much as reach to the knee of the giant seated Buddha, monumental above them with the rain streaming down the folds of his robes and his head dissolving blackly into the mist. Elsewhere, in the surrounding gardens, there was no one but themselves. They walked up steps and along pathways and found shelter for a while beneath a temple gateway, watching the rain fall beyond the overhanging curve of roof. It was a fine rain but constant.

  It doesn’t stop, this rain.

  I told you, she said, it goes on for weeks.

  It must stop sometimes.

  OK, sometimes it does. But you’ll see, nothing ever gets dry.

  She pointed out that one shoulder of his leather jacket was wet where he had held the umbrella over her more than over himself.

  Now we shall go and see my grandparents, she said, and they walked downhill and along backstreets. Her grandparents were getting old so she tried to see them often.

  My grandfather is losing his memory, she said. I like to get him to talk, to have him say things so that I can remember for him.

  What does he talk about?

  Oh, the past. How things used to be. You will see, he is an old man. He wears a kimono like old men do and he grows bonsai. You must ask him about his bonsai.


  He thought, he could not find his way back if she were not to come with him. They had come through so many small streets and turnings, down and then up and around the back of the hill, and all of the streets looked similar in the rain, the view narrow with the umbrella low over their heads, a view of dripping eaves and wet pavement, and other people with umbrellas, stepping aside, and a woman on a bicycle, wearing a transparent plastic cape and a flowery sou’wester, gliding by.

  My grandmother will be lonely when he forgets.

  He looked at her face that was different that day with the heavy hair down across it, and a touch of lipstick and the collar of her red raincoat turned up to her chin. Stop there a moment, he said, and he took a picture of her, at that angle, so close to him, but already the look on her face had changed. Japanese girls had a way of showing you the child in them at the same time as the woman, that captivated, that he didn’t know how he’d catch in a single picture.

  They came to the house and it was an old one built of darkened wood and set back from the road behind a sliding wooden gate, and there were three bonsai trees in glazed pots before the entrance. Later he would understand that they were very good ones but he did not pay them much attention because he had not yet learned the particularities of bonsai. Kumiko called out and her grandmother came to the door as they took off their shoes, the old woman in a dull-green kimono kneeling on the threshold and bowing to him in greeting, all in Japanese, pointing to the rack where he must put his shoes and the slippers that he might take instead, he feeling suddenly ungainly, his feet too large and his socks holed, too foreign and brutish for this delicate setting. He bowed as low as he could, and Kumiko’s look suggested that she found his actions comical, and then he went through into the house and bowed to the old man, and the four of them sat on the floor and drank tea from small brown cups about a low table, the three others speaking and himself silent, sipping the sharply flavoured green tea. Even Kumiko looked somehow misplaced, bigger than the old people, too bright and modern, so that you would think they must each time they saw her be surprised to know that she was the child of their child. The old woman had a neatness of movement and a fineness of feature beneath her thin white hair that would always have been there, even when she was young, but the old man seemed to have shrivelled back on his frame, stooped and slow-moving, bony head and hands almost out of scale with the rest of him.

  Jonathan looked at him and thought that when he was shown the bonsai, stepping down from the veranda at the back of the house when there was an interval in the rain, nodding as if he understood what the old man said as they passed from one wizened tree to the next. Instead of seeing them for what they were, as plants root-pruned and restrained from the start as they grew, he had a sense of trees that had once been tall but that had reduced with the years, contracted year by year into thick-barked miniatures of themselves. Then they went on past the line of bonsai into the garden, while the women remained indoors talking. The garden too was controlled, clipped, miniature if not in its plants then in its imitation of landscape. Again he felt clumsy as he followed the old man along a twisting little path, his clothes becoming wet from brushing against the clipped green shapes. He took out his camera and crouched down, and photographed the vistas of the design, each angle too contrived to his eye, intensely artificial though he could not but appreciate the craftsmanship of the gardener. He took a couple of shots, and then stood, but the old man stayed watching him, so he took other shots, and walked back to the steps of the house and took a general picture of the bushes like posed figures, and the old man posing equally still among them.

  It was good that you spent so much time in his garden, Kumiko said when they left. He loves it when people admire his garden.

  It was raining again as if it had never ceased. Then there was the train again, the roofs that seemed to stretch all the way from Kamakura into Tokyo. The thing that my grandfather cannot forget, she said, is the war. My grandmother was saying that he remembers that now and forgets everything else. He was in the jungle and it was very terrible. Sometimes I think that that is why he likes to make his garden so tidy like it is.

  There was a pause then as they listened to the train, and the train stopped at a station and passengers moved past them and got out, and others got in. And then she said, He fought against the British.

  In Burma?

  She nodded, head straight up and down like a toy. She was not to know there was any emotional significance in that for him.

  Did it make them closer, or further apart?

  She sat with the red raincoat open and falling back from her clothes, warm as he was warm from being wrapped up in the warm rain.

  When we get to Shinjuku, will you come home with me?

  The windows were open all through the house. The rain outside fell light and straight as it had fallen through almost all of the day. The street was shiny and black with the wet. In the gardens the bamboos sagged with the weight of water, even the hard leaves of shrubs had drooped and softened. The rain was so pervasive that within the house all of the surfaces, the paper of the screens and the straw of the tatami, had soaked up moisture. Everything was soft, moist. They made love with the windows slid open and the rain falling, and their bodies were hot and damp. They heard the softened sounds of the world outside in the rain, the hush of the rain falling and their own breaths loud against it. They would have liked to have gone out into the rain and felt it on their skins, cooler than the dew of their sweat, streaming off their bodies as it had streamed from the stone folds on the Great Buddha, soaking into their skin, not pouring off it, because they were made of porous flesh and not of stone, washing them away.

  Rain

  In Kamakura also the rain kept falling, pouring down the roof and coming off it like a veil, running in streams between the little trees and down the twisting path. That rain that seemed so good to them had no mercy on the old people. It soaked into their kimonos, plastered their thin hair to their skulls and made them cold inside. The old man went out into it, and his wife followed when she saw that he was gone, she in her alarm going out without a coat, as he had gone without a coat in his vagueness, though at least, she would say, she could put on the gumboots she kept on the platform by the garden door.

  My grandfather was strange after we left that day, Kumiko would tell him. She would not tell him this until some time later, after she had gone there when her grandfather was ill. Perhaps we stayed too long. We made him too excited. My grandmother says that he has the same schedule every day, a long sleep in the afternoon, but our visit had kept him up, and then after we had gone he would not sleep. You must be tired, she said, those young people will have tired you out. But no, he must go into the garden. It’s raining again, she said. Have a sleep now and I’ll go out with you later. We can go out together when the rain stops.

  The old woman persuaded him into his chair, and left him with the television on for company, but later on she looked in and found the room empty and the doors pushed wide open to the pouring rain. She told her granddaughter how she found him then, kneeling among the bushes with his hands full of soil, staring at his muddy hands and then tipping them over to see the soil fall back from his fingers, how there was mud on his face washed down it by the rain, and when she made him stand there was mud on his knees, and then all down his wet clothes when he wiped his hands on them. How she was soon as wet as he was, wet through as she chivvied him in, tugging him alongside her, her delicate frame alongside his bony one, matching her quick small steps to his slow ones, helping him indoors, making him change out of his clothes before she could change her own.

  It must have been full day when they woke but they would hardly have known it. The slight movement of the wind chimes outside sounded thinly through the paper screens before the windows. Even when she pushed back the screens the light was veiled by the moisture in the air.

  She stood, naked, and looked about his room. He watched her from the bed on the floor.

  It’s v
ery empty, she said. You have no things. Only the camera.

  I was travelling. You don’t want too many things when you’re travelling.

  Then she pushed open the door to a cupboard that was full of a woman’s clothes.

  Whose clothes are these?

  Laura’s. I said I didn’t need the cupboards so she could leave her stuff where it was.

  She is your girlfriend?

  No. He reached out for her.

  If you have no things, then how do I know who you are?

  She pulled back the sheet that covered him. She would know him in that moment only by his skin. She touched him then. She touched the paleness of his body, the faint lines of his tan which seemed to make him more naked than herself, the proof on him that there were places which she might touch where the sun had not.

  Tell me what it’s like where you come from.

  I said before, it’s flat countryside, you wouldn’t think anything of it. No mountains. I don’t know if you have any places in Japan like that.

  Maybe some places in Hokkaido.

  Have you been to Hokkaido?

  I don’t want to talk about Hokkaido. I want to know about you.

  He spoke softly. She was lying on his chest. He had his hand on her hair. She would know the breath and the vibration of his words besides the sounds.

  I have a brother and a mother and we live on a farm out in the countryside in the east of England. My brother does the farming –