The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  In the morning he said, How is your grandfather?

  He’s not well. He was in the hospital.

  You didn’t tell me.

  It was after we were there. He caught a chill from going out in the rain.

  She told him how he had gone out after they left and inexplicably filled his hands with soil.

  He’s back home now. My mother has gone to help look after him.

  And his trees?

  Oh yes, she will look after his trees.

  Thunder

  Usually it was Richard he played soldiers with. But Richard was at school, and his mother had gone to fetch him. The thunder cracked above the house.

  Quick, Japs!

  His father pushed him under the table. A big rough hand on top of his head pushing him down, hectically so that he bashed his elbow against the table leg. Then his father crouching beside him, and the dog, standing, agitated. It was the big table in the kitchen, a pine table with turned blue-painted legs, and the paint on them was scuffed, and there was a single wide drawer at one end that hung down below the table top. He fitted under it easily, even where the drawer was. Often he shared the space with the dog. It was warm and close to the Aga, and there was a blanket for the dog, and no one trod on you there. But now the dog was standing and moving round and round and whining, mewling, and his father was too big. His father under the table was hunched like the picture he had seen of Alice when she drank the DRINK ME bottle and grew too tall and pressed against the ceiling, but more so, all too-big and bent, and crushed at the same time, his knees bent, his head down beneath his shoulders, crowding out the space with the size of his body and with his smell, which was sharper than the smell of the dog, not comforting like the smell of the dog but the opposite of comforting. His father held his two arms tight in his hands. Let go. You’re hurting me. But he didn’t let go, and they listened to the thunder again, so close to the house. And when the thunder had been gone some time his father’s hands loosened. Can I go now? I want to pee. He did, terribly, want to pee. And he did not want to play this game, whatever it was that they were doing there, underneath the kitchen table. He got up, and the dog moved with him, brushing against his legs. He was in a terrible hurry so he only glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye as he ran out, the giant’s body unravelling itself from under the table.

  They each took a few days’ holiday and went to the sea. Kumiko’s uncle had a house in a village on the Izu peninsula. It was a long journey from Tokyo, first on a train and then on a bus, in and out of bays and villages along the rocky coastline, with the sea appearing to their right and occasionally a view across it to the mainland and to Fuji there. The villages were fishing villages, and there were boats and the people gathered seaweed and spread it on the beaches to dry, but they were farmers as well and worked small terraced fields where the land rose steeply behind. He saw them from the bus. He saw modern Japanese on holiday in Western casual clothes, and most of them were young, and he saw the fishermen and the farmers, who were almost all of them small and old and bent, old Japanese wearing patterned indigo-dyed pyjamas bent further under bamboo baskets which they carried on their backs, the young and the old threading between each other as if the other did not exist. He saw that he could take some very different pictures here. And the light, even though it was summer, was good, free of the haze of pollution.

  The house was a modern one set up above the old village which clustered close to the shore. Kumiko’s uncle was a successful businessman and had built the house as his company’s holiday home. It seemed to have been scarcely touched by whoever had come there before them. There were fresh tatami rooms smelling of straw, and a balcony with a view to the sea, very few things in it but only clean bare space.

  It’s beautiful here, he said. He walked onto the balcony with his camera and took a first shot of the village roofs sloping steeply below, and across them the deep blue of the sea, and two great rocks that stood out of the sea in the centre of the little bay with a shrine upon them; a tall red torii on the summit of one of them and a swag of sacred rope slung across to the other. The mainland beyond was barely visible. Fuji should be there, Kumiko had said, but Fuji had quite gone. Perhaps in the morning when the air was fresh he would see it, and then he would take the shot again, and then the picture, with the foreground of roofs, and the positioning of the rocks and the rope and the torii, and Fuji in the far distance, would be a perfect view of Japan like one of Hiroshige’s views.

  Or they might swim to the rocks. She said that you could swim to the rocks, if you were a strong swimmer, and there were steps so that you could climb to the torii or to where the rope was fastened and dive back into the sea.

  Then they went down into the village to buy some food, and he stopped on the path and took other Hiroshige views, of the houses and the bay, and the mountain at the end of the bay that jutted out into the sea as a single vast black and jagged rock, and which also had a shrine and a torii on its summit. After they had eaten, very late, they went out again and walked all the way up there. They walked again through the village that was empty and silent, and if Kumiko had not known the way they would not have found it. There was a narrow path between trees and stone lanterns, and then steps up steeply through a series of torii, and the path wound about and they could barely see the steps in the night. When they got to the top the moon was high and bright, though far from full, and they stood in the warm black night at the edge of the rock and looked down on three sides to the sea, and the sound of it came to them, and the far splash of white where it broke against the rock perpendicularly below.

  Always she slept longer than he did. He had heard it said that it was a part of the art of being Japanese, the ability to sleep so easily. That a Japanese can get onto an underground train and be asleep before the first stop and yet wake in time for his or her destination. He did not know if that was true, he thought that sometimes they must sleep overlong, miss their stop and wake dazed and rush out and cross the platform and return down the line, but certainly they slept, that he had seen. Kumiko slept easily, and loved to sleep, and he loved her while she was sleeping. He loved the arrangement of her limbs, small, neat limbs neatly arranged even when she was unconscious, and the confusion of her hair falling across them.

  He was sitting up, one foot off the mattress to the floor. Her hand caught his arm. I am not asleep, she said but her words were drowsy. Why must you get up so soon?

  I’ve never been here before, he said. I want to go out, see the place.

  Wait a little. Then I’ll come with you.

  He pushed back the paper screens from the window. There was the slope of the roofs once more, and the sea and the rocks and the torii, and in the far distance the tip of Fuji above the horizon where it seemed disconnected from the land.

  It’s very clear, he said.

  It’s too bright.

  She had her arm across her eyes. The light from the open window streaked across the floor to where she lay. He pushed the screen halfway back.

  That’s better.

  There are so many early-morning pictures. It is hard to distinguish, except by looking at the sequences in the negatives, when or in what order they were taken. The ones from Izu can often be identified by the crispness of their surroundings: in the new house the translucent paper of the screens is a brighter white, the tatami more golden, the bedding new and smooth, the light seeming brighter, all the contrasts sharper than in his old worn Tokyo flat. But the subject and the compositions remain the same. Kumiko sleeping. Kumiko fully asleep or half awake. Skin and hair and shadow. Her bare feet, her shoulder, her outstretched arm, her breast exposed by the fall of the cotton yukata which she has put on to go and make tea and in which she has gone back to sleep; her hand reached out at the edge of the mattress and the white porcelain cup in a stripe of sunlight on the floor beside it. Looking back, looking over them, he can almost smell the tatami again and he can almost smell the sex.

  She made breakfast. It was ver
y simple, consisting of what they had brought with them or what they could buy in the shop in the village: juice, fresh peaches that she sliced, coffee, toast, English marmalade which she had bought in Tokyo. For you, she said, placing the jar on the table on the balcony. You do like marmalade, don’t you? She was still wearing the yukata, which was not hers but belonged in the house. It was a typical summer kimono, white with a traditional printed pattern of blue flowers. But her Japanese-ness went so much deeper than that. It was in her bones, in the precision in her movement, in the way she placed her feet on the floor and in the way she moved her hands and the way she held her cup in them. And in her eyes. It was as if he could see where she ended, in what she was contained, where some line was drawn or some invisible glass case was set about her, defining and separating so that something within her remained intact which he would never quite touch. It made her the more beautiful to him in her separateness, and it kept him intact also, also untouchable; each of them within themselves and apart from the other. He picked up the camera from the table top and took pictures of her again, even when she sat down to eat. Don’t do that now, she said, and though she spoke with a smile he saw that she meant it, deeply. The lens separated them further.

  You always take pictures of me.

  But I like to take pictures of you.

  He put the camera down on the table beside the orange juice and the marmalade. She put her hand on it, fingers spread, as if it were a threat to be gently covered over.

  You take them all the time. You are always looking.

  What else should I do?

  I don’t know, she said, removing her hand. Just be. Don’t look, just be. And she turned her head down, away from him, and began to take the plates from the table and carry them inside.

  When we go to the beach today, please don’t take your camera.

  So they went to the beach camera-less, and they were there before almost anyone else. And they went swimming together, and they found that they each of them swam well, and they swam out to the rocks in the centre of the bay, and they sat there for some time, high on one of the rocks, and watched as others came out and spread their towels on the beach, and Jonathan was glad that his camera was in the house and that he did not have to worry that anyone would come and steal it, for all that this was Japan and that things did not get stolen here. Then they swam back, and dried in the sun and put on their clothes and went for walk. She said they could walk to a cove along the coast where they might have the sea all to themselves. They walked out through the village along a concrete road until the road ended, and then along a track, up between terraced orange groves. The day was hot and yet the heat was not oppressive as in the city. There was a breeze, and there was the open sky and the sight of the sea behind them.

  They met a farmer on the path, old, bent, bow-legged.

  You don’t see young farmers, he said. Don’t these people have children?

  Of course they have children.

  Then why is it the only the old people we see working?

  I guess the young ones have gone to the city.

  So what happens when the old people get too old and die?

  They come back, I guess.

  They come back and get like their parents?

  I don’t know. I guess so.

  Once there had been more fields than there were now. As they went on up the path he saw that they were walking between the outlines of abandoned terraces, overgrown now with cane and dry summer grass, and loud with crickets. They walked on in the heightened sound of the crickets and met no one else until they came upon the monkey. They had come to a dip in the land, and then there was a steep and rocky rise towards the ridge above the sea. There was a colony of monkeys that lived there on the ridge, and they saw the monkeys up ahead, grey forms moving among the rocks, and he thought nothing of it, and they walked past a group of them, and the monkeys were just being monkeys, playing, chewing cane, picking with their long fingers in the stones, a mother running with a baby clinging to the fur of her back, but then they came upon this particular monkey, and coming upon it was not like seeing an animal, it was like a meeting. The monkey stood across their path and glared at them, and there was intelligence in his eyes, and he seemed to challenge them on a human level, eye to eye, teeth bared in his long pink face.

  For a moment, they stopped.

  I don’t like it, she said.

  They took another step forward, and the monkey let them pass.

  It was the one jarring moment in the day, which until then had been so beautiful. It was only a moment – they stopped for that moment and then they walked on, together, and the monkey ambled sullenly aside – but it stayed with them. They walked on and went down to the cove she had mentioned, and it was spectacular, and if he had had his camera he might have taken spectacular if clichéd photographs, such as so many others would have taken before him, of the sea and the spray on the rocks, and a huge rock out in the bay that had a tunnel through it where they saw a speedboat pass, and the speedboat’s wake fanning behind. But he didn’t have his camera, and they didn’t remain there. There were too many monkeys around, and the monkeys made it ugly. They only looked, and then they climbed back up the cliff, and walked on, further than they had planned, and it became a long hot circular walk that took them eventually back to the village late in the afternoon.

  * * *

  I don’t like those monkeys, she said. Of all the things they talked about that day, this was the conversation he would remember. There’s that selection process at work always: what you see and what you listen to, and what you remember, and so often what you select reflects what is already seen or heard or remembered somewhere in your mind. They were coming down through orange groves again, the sea before them. She walked sometimes ahead of him, sometimes alongside. They had been walking too long, longer than they had meant to, and they were thirsty and hot. She was wearing brief denim shorts and a pink T-shirt with something meaningless written on it in English: Live Human Life. She had her hair knotted away from her face but strands came loose and fell forward across her forehead or her cheek, and now and then she put up her hand to push them back, and sometimes they clung because her forehead was sweating. My grandfather won’t come here any more because of the monkeys. He used to come here, and he liked it then and didn’t mind, but he won’t come any more. My uncle wanted him to come last year for Golden Week. He wasn’t so sick then, it would have been easy for him to come. He would have come with my grandmother, so that it would be a rest for her, and my cousins would be here, all their other grandchildren, and they would have a holiday together, but suddenly my grandfather was afraid of the monkeys.

  They remind him of the jungle, she said.

  She said many other things but this was what he would remember. He would remember it in another layer of his mind, apart from everything else to do with her.

  My grandfather was old to be in the army. He was older, so maybe he saw more, saw the truth. And where he was, it was very bad. I think that he knew before the rest of the Japanese that Japan would lose the war. They lost in a terrible battle. Then they walked for weeks through the jungle in the rain, cutting through it and crossing great stormy rivers. Now, he speaks sometimes of this. He did not speak of it before. I know that it rained and rained, and they were sick and starving, and thousands of them died.

  Did I tell you, when I went to see him last week he thought I was my mother? He called me by my mother’s name, and my grandmother had to tell him who I was, that I wasn’t Noriko but Noriko’s daughter. It’s me, Kumiko, I said. Then he said of course it was. He said it was just a slip of the tongue, he knew all along. It wasn’t true. He didn’t know. He had forgotten. He forgets who we are, but he remembers the war.

  He didn’t speak. He walked alongside as she spoke, walked in step, listened to her voice, felt her beside him and let his own thoughts run.

  That’s it, he thought. War is the most concrete thing. The memory of war will stay with a man lon
ger than anything else. Hard and vivid. Stronger, so much stronger, than anything else he will ever know.

  He paused a few moments to look at the view, fell back as she walked on. Her pink T-shirt waited for him beside a rock, her smile a challenge when he reached her. She ran then, and he must run after her, down the steep path through the terraces. They stopped where the path became steps and there was a little shrine, a standing rock and a stone figure of a god, and a small everyday sake jar with wilted flowers in it before the god, and a long way below them was the village, and beyond it the sea.

  Shall we go for a swim?

  No, he said. He felt dull, drained, his head beginning to throb. Let’s just go home.

  But she turned to him with her bright smile. There was such brightness in her even after the too-long walk, persuading him.

  But they will all be going from the beach now. We’ll have it to ourselves.

  The beach was almost empty again, and the sea was soft in the evening and washed away the dullness and the sweat, and when they went back and made love later they could taste the salt on each other’s skin. As if they were shells, she said, licking the hollows of shells.

  Jungle

  The night was oppressively hot, even with the screens wide open on two sides of the room. He woke. At times they each of them woke, and tossed about. He got up at some point when all the room was grey, and went to the window to breathe a fresher air and look out to the paling sky and the glimmer of the sea, and when he went back to the bed she had spread further across it in her sleep. He couldn’t see her face. There was the grey of the sheet, and against it the darkness of her hair and of her legs splayed across the bed, and he lay down on his side in the narrow space remaining to him and wanted to lift the sheet from her middle and see that there was no red wound there and see that she was whole. But that would wake her. He put his hand tentatively to the sheet over the place where the wound would have been.