The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  Whatever he could imagine must be so much less than what was. The old man’s horrors. The monkeys. What was it that made him afraid? That there were monkeys in the jungle? That men fought with teeth bared like monkeys. That he had seen teeth bared in anger or later bared in death on the jungle paths as lips drew back, so swiftly in the tropics, and decayed on other men’s skulls. He lay there and thought of the horror. He had gone to find it for himself. He found another war in the jungle, a different war with its own, different horrors. He had meant to go in close, to see the eyes. That was what Capa said you had to do, to go in close. That was how you took the best pictures.

  But you cannot photograph war, Capa said that too. (And Capa should know because Capa was the greatest war photographer of them all.) You could not photograph war because war was an emotion. How could you photograph an emotion?

  She curled now in her sleep and gave him space. She was whole, and she slept deeply, and she had no knowledge of those things he had seen even when he saw them beside her. He fitted his body along the outline of hers, tried to breathe with her slow sleeping breaths.

  The photographs she has taken of him show nothing of his dreams. The dreams must have passed with the night and now that it is morning he does not dream any more. He lies on his stomach and angled across the bed, taking up the whole of it so that it would seem that she had got up some time before and he has moved across and settled deeper into dreamless sleep since she had gone. He is naked – or possibly she has picked away the last of the sheet that covered him, and that is a part of the mischief he will see on her face when eventually he wakes. One leg is stretched straight behind him, the other bent as if in running, the rise of his buttocks catching light and giving shade (even in close-up their maleness evident by the flatness of them and the dents in their sides). His body is turned a little in the direction of the running leg, the left shoulder blade angled and raised, the left arm falling to the edge of the mattress, the hand loose as if something has just dropped from it, the right arm flat and bent above his head upon the pillow. His face is turned to the left, to the sunlight which in the first of the pictures has just touched his forehead but which by the end of the series reaches all of his head and his chest. He must have been sleeping very heavily at last if he has not been woken by the light.

  He looks very young, even to himself when he sees the pictures developed. Perhaps it was the sleep. Sleep makes a person look younger. He seems strange to himself, like some boy he does not know. His body in repose seems that of a boy: the slight build, the tousle of brown hair, the defenceless back; his face in sleep a boy’s face, pouting into the pillow. He had taken pictures of her like this, and she was both girl and woman in them, but in these pictures when nothing in him is tensed, nothing closed, he seems exposed as no more than a boy.

  For once she has been awake before him, and she has taken up the camera and taken pictures ruthlessly, not only of what she finds beautiful in him, his English profile or the line of his spine, or his blunt, dangling hand, but also of his oddities, the freckles and moles and marks on his skin, all the tidelines of sunburn on him, where his swimming trunks ended, where his arms and the back of his neck were burned above his T-shirt on the previous day’s walk.

  He heard her moving, bare feet on tatami. He felt her shadow moving across him and heard the click of the camera. How long had she been doing this before he woke? For a moment more he indulged his passivity, abandoning himself to her eye as to the light. Then he reached for her. His hand so close to the edge of the mattress grabbed for her ankle. But she was too quick. She must have seen the thought coiling in him and dodged away. He stood up, growling, and she laughed and flitted out of the room, down the stairs and out of the door on to the balcony and into the sunlight where all of the village could see her. He couldn’t follow because he had no clothes on, and she took more pictures of him at the door, half hidden behind it, reaching out one arm, laughing and calling her in.

  There is that picture too, a whole strip of them, he looking absurd, his nudity and his erection variously hidden or not hidden by shadows and the door.

  Later she made him let her take up the camera again. They had gone down to the beach together and had swum together, and then she had come back and lain on her towel while he stayed out in the water, swimming a long way out into the bay. When he came in she was lying there still, flat in the sun, and he took the camera from the bag beside her and went off down the beach taking pictures of the place. He had been thinking of that when he was in the water looking back at the shore, of the pictures he would take and the patterns that people made across the sand.

  Let me take some pictures now.

  Not of me, he said, holding the camera back. No more pictures of me.

  Why not?

  I don’t like pictures of me.

  OK, I won’t take pictures of you.

  So she took the camera and wandered off and she too took pictures of the waves, and of children playing with a ball, and when he wasn’t watching her any more she came back and took some of him, using the lens to go closer. They wouldn’t be much good as pictures. It was midday by then and the light was dazzling.

  5

  The American

  The American’s hair is so blond that the Japanese turn to look at him in the street. Walking behind him it was possible to catch the stares. Two schoolgirls in their bulky long-skirted uniforms giggle and clutch one another at the elbow as if they see a film star pass. A small boy, too young to have been trained not to, points, and his mother crouches and gently wraps her hand over his pointing one. He walks straight ahead, looking at no one, one thumb under the strap of the rucksack slung over his shoulder, his bright head above the crowd. He is tall and broad-shouldered. He has strong regular features. His look is fixed before him, tight, seeming to have no relation to the crowd. If it were not for those surroundings, the passing cars and the shop signs, he might be an athlete striding towards the gate at some sporting event – a rower, a tennis player, a thrower of the javelin, walking closed to the moment, within himself, psyching himself for the test ahead.

  There are other pictures of him, a series of snapshots from the time they went hiking in the mountains, along the gorge at Chichibu Tama: more relaxed here, smiling – and yet isn’t there still some restraint in the smile? – standing golden and alone before the jagged mountainside and the deep blue sky; or with Kumiko and the pretty girl he had brought with him whose name Jonathan couldn’t remember, the two Japanese girls smiling beside him and the waterfalls behind; then in the crowded Sunday-evening train coming back into Tokyo, in more of the subway pictures, again the tall fair gaijin among the Japanese, followed through the maze of Shinjuku station as at the time when they first met.

  The last photo shows him again with two girls, with the other girl Akiho and with Kumiko, beneath an umbrella at the hot spring that third and last of the days they spent together. He holds the umbrella over his head, tall above the girls who lean in close on either side of him. They are standing in front of the hotel, and the mountain landscape they had gone to see is lost in the rain.

  There had been an inevitability to it, or so it seems to him now, looking back, looking through the photos: that they had each found their way to this city, which was a city to hide in and yet a city in which they found each other hiding. It was the biggest city in the world, a city of eleven million people, but gaijin made thin paths within it like the paths that animals make in the wild, and followed one another along them.

  It had been one of those slow days. A Friday. Kumiko was going that evening to her grandparents’. The old man’s condition had not improved but neither had it worsened, and Kumiko was going for the weekend to give her mother a break. He had no lessons scheduled so he had been in the flat much of the time, dully sorting things out, planning his teaching for the following week. Though he had the fan going and all the windows open it had been stifling. The outside air seemed drained of life as it was of colour, no movement
in it to stir the wind chimes or to carry any specific sound out of the blur of the city. Inside, he had found himself doing little more than listening to the fan as it turned on its stem, waiting for it to direct its blast of air to where he sat. When at last he went out he switched off the fan but he left the windows open for the night to enter. To come back into the stale room would be to step back into his own boredom.

  He went to the cinema. He saw the first English-language film he could find, a run-of-the-mill thriller just compelling enough to transport him into a clichéd urban America. When he came out it was dark. He had the images of the film still strong in his head so that the lights and the people on the streets and all the chaos of signs, the now-familiar disorientation of the Tokyo night, was overlaid by that of Los Angeles or whatever city it had been in the film.

  A tall gaijin was walking ahead of him. Gaijin were so rare outside of Roppongi that he always noticed them. He would see them and wonder what had brought them, and be aware that they also would see him. Most gaijin were taller than the Japanese and stood out a long way off. He wasn’t tall and yet he knew that sooner or later they saw him too. This man must have been sitting a few rows behind him in the film. He had stood up first, and gone before him down the aisle and out of the cinema doors, and now he found that he was following him in the street, realising that because of his height he might follow him through this city a long way, but it happened that he was going that way anyhow, going the same way that he was, following the blond head to the station entrance and down to the same platform, seeing him stop further along the platform to wait for the same train. An American, most likely, another English teacher. His hair was too long for a businessman, hair that was straw-blond in the lights of the station, that made his figure very distinctive. He looked, and the other looked back, and the sort of wordless acknowledgement passed between them that passed between gaijin, and it came to Jonathan that he must have seen him before but he couldn’t think where. That bright hair was so distinctive.

  The wait seemed longer than usual. There weren’t many people on their platform. The platform opposite was crowded, then a train came in and it was left empty, and they stood and waited as others came and again filled the space. If the train had come sooner his thought might have passed and been forgotten.

  They got on at different ends of the same carriage. He sat where he could see the other man down the carriage, sat opposite a prim girl and, beside her, the usual sleeping salaryman – grey suit, lolling head and open mouth, legs apart, slip-on shoes and white nylon socks. When he first arrived he might have taken the picture, the upright girl and the lolling man, a typical image of Tokyo underground, but by now he had a dozen variations on the theme. Eight stops to Kichijoji. The girl got up and left. Each time they came to a stop the sleeping man seemed about to wake but settled back again. Along the carriage, the gaijin also seemed to be travelling all down the line, sitting still, head raised, looking ahead, looking at nothing. Around the seventh stop it came to him who he was.

  He let him go first out of the carriage, down the platform, up the stairs and through the turnstile. He had intended to go straight home, which would have meant turning left when he got out of the station, but the other man turned towards the entertainment district and he followed. He had no plan in his mind, he just followed. He meant, he supposed, to know where the other man was going, just to know something, anything, about him. If they had coincided like this, then he must follow and not let him go without knowing something about him. He was walking down one of the narrow streets of the entertainment district, and following was easy. The street was full of pedestrians on a Friday night but the American was tall, head above the rest, and though it was night there were lights all down the street, neon lights and gleaming signs and red and white lanterns, and the golden head was easy to make out above the stream of black ones. He knew the street well, he walked it often, it was familiar ground. He might have walked it with his eyes closed and known where he was by the sounds and the smells of it, the bars he walked by and the games parlours and the restaurants. This must be familiar ground to the American also, he thought. He too must know where he was going because he didn’t slow or look about him, for all the lights and the people and the things going on. He cut through the crowd smooth and fast and directed, and Jonathan followed, and then there was a moment when a knot of men reeled out drunk from the door of a restaurant and separated them, and in that moment Jonathan felt panic. He did not want to lose sight of this man, who suddenly meant so much to him. He pushed his way through, getting shocked looks from the Japanese as he did so. And just when he thought he had lost him, there he was. He had stopped at a doorway, and the two of them found themselves suddenly alongside one another, and they were looking at one another and speaking. The American spoke, and he replied. Hi, I saw you at the movie. Do you want to have a drink? I was going to go into this bar here but it looks pretty crowded. Yes, he said, and then he said, no. He said there was a quieter place up the street where he kept a bottle. He suggested they went there instead.

  What did you think of the movie?

  It passed the time.

  Not much choice here.

  You been here long?

  A few months. And you? How long have you been here?

  Since March.

  I think I saw you once, the American said. In the park.

  Maybe that was it. That was all it was. Maybe he had just seen him in the park.

  I came here once before, the American said, looking around. Tried to find it again but I couldn’t. There are so many of these little places hidden away.

  Then they sat face-to-face, and he was sure. They sat down at one of the tables by the window, and the barman brought his bottle and two glasses, and set out crackers and water and ice before them. The hair was a distraction. It was the hair that had put him off. He hadn’t seen the hair that first time, only the face, under the helmet. The face blackened and smeared with war.

  My name’s Jim, the American was saying. What’s yours?

  His face blackened and shocked and unshaven, his eyes blank.

  Jonathan, he said. He had not thought until now that the man in his photograph had a name. Men in such photographs don’t have names. They have some other meaning.

  Is that what is says there on the bottle, in Japanese? jo-na-tha-nu?

  I thought it would stick out in English.

  They can read it, you know.

  What? He had lost track of the conversation.

  You can’t read it, but they can. They can read it’s an English name. Writing it in Japanese doesn’t make you any more anonymous.

  No, I suppose it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. I didn’t think of that.

  Yet he was. He was anonymous. He knew the American but the American didn’t know him. Perhaps those eyes just weren’t seeing anything when he stood before them and took the picture. Perhaps he wasn’t seeing anything at all, or what he was seeing was what he had seen already, sights so much stronger than what was in front of him in that moment, than a man with a camera first standing, then crouching, before him. Or perhaps he saw the camera, but that was all that he saw. That’s what people say sometimes, that the camera makes the photographer behind it invisible. And now the two of them had met, and one knew and the other didn’t. One had stalked the other down the street, because there was something he needed to know, but now that they had met he didn’t know what it was. He had the urge to leave, then and there, leave the bar and not come back to it again.

  There had been no reason to stay so long. No reason to top up the American’s glass, to drink to the end of that bottle and accept a glass then from the bottle that the American bought and on which he put his own name. (I’ll write it, he said to the barman and gave it to him on a scrap of paper. It was a complicated spelling, Norwegian or Swedish, Jonathan thought, like his hair.) Even if that had been only politeness, and staying so late, inertia, an effect of the heaviness of the weather and the drink,
and the purposelessness of the day just passed and of the weekend that was to follow, he need not have arranged to see him again.

  What do you do? he had asked.

  Teach English.

  Same as he did. That signified nothing. It was what so many of them were doing – just a way of being there, or a way of not being somewhere else.

  Why Tokyo?

  A shrug. I’d been in Asia before. It’s easy to find work here. How about you?

  He might have said that he took pictures, but he had held back from saying that, in the circumstances. Jim was looking away, lighting a cigarette. The bar was busy on a Friday night, full of dark heads and smoke, a hum of voices, jazz playing; it wasn’t necessary for them to talk all the time. Only the two seats beside them at the table were empty, a space the world put around them, and when they did talk it was as if they were talking over a well or into a cave, some black echoing space which expanded the significance of their words. He wished that someone would come and fill the empty seats, crowd them out. Jim was holding his glass, not drinking, his eyes looking somewhere across the bar. The light caught the pale whisky, the glass, the dark heads, the smoke, his golden hair, his blue eyes. Was the memory there in that moment, behind his eyes? Always there, like a kind of tinnitus? Or did it come only sometimes, in waves or in the night?

  Are you from the city? I’m not from the city, Jim had said. His glass was back on the table, his cigarette almost burned down in his fingers, his eyes on the crowd. I don’t think I could live in a city for ever.

  Where are you from then?