The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  Rural Iowa. He rolled the rrs to emphasise the strangeness of the rural here.

  Are you farmers?

  My father’s a pastor.

  Out in the countryside?

  That’s right. He stubbed out his cigarette and spoke as if there was something sad about it. Big skies, flat land. No people. Or just a few people and you know who they all are.

  My family has a farm.

  They’re all farmers round where I come from.

  Do you like it?

  Yeah, I liked it. He looked around him. I liked the space.

  I don’t know, Jonathan said, I think I like it better here. They’re small, aren’t they, those places, even when the skies are so big? You know everyone but everyone knows you and everything that’s ever happened to you.

  Yeah, that’s right.

  They hadn’t left until sometime after midnight. They parted casually. They exchanged numbers, and they said something about meeting on Sunday. They came down the stairs from the bar and turned in their opposite directions when they reached the street.

  Once he was gone, he had wanted to turn back. He wanted to go back after him, and turn him around and touch him. Hold him between his two hands and tear. Tear him open and see what was inside, as if he would come apart in his hands like paper, torn white edges to him and nothing more. Then he would tear and tear again, taking the torn pieces, the coloured pieces from tonight and the black-and-white pieces from before, taking them again in his fingers and putting them together, and tearing them into ever smaller pieces, scattering them so that the images in them might never be reconstructed from the scraps. But he didn’t go back. He just made his quiet way home. He walked through Kichijoji to the park, and he walked through the park, down the wide path beneath the trees, past the police box and over the bridge, a humpbacked oriental bridge of concrete cast in imitation of rustic wood, a toy bridge and a toy police box, with a toy policeman standing straight in his uniform with white gloves and white belt and strap across his chest and holster at his hip. If the other was true, then this wasn’t. If this was true, then how could the other be? In peace it is best to believe that war does not exist. Toy street, toy houses, toy steps to his door, hot room with windows open. Turning on the fan. Lying on his bed on the floor, waiting for the moving air to brush him in the dark.

  Where were you before you came here? He had dared to ask that.

  I did a tour in Vietnam. Went home for a couple of months. Couldn’t hack it back in the States. Came here.

  There were lots of Vets in Tokyo, he said. An English person probably wouldn’t notice that, but he did. He didn’t seek them out but he knew them when he saw them.

  His face was strong. That bone structure was why he had made such a good picture. His look should have been strong but it was evasive, never meeting yours for long. He looked away again, took a sip and swallowed as if the whisky was bitter, his hand tight on the glass.

  They come here because it’s halfway. It’s still Asia but you can live in it. They come for the women. They want to be with Asian women. And they come because they can’t face the people back home. They can’t take the way people back home look at them.

  He had thought he might have the dream again. But he didn’t have the dream. Maybe he had had too much whisky for any dream. In the morning he took a picture of himself. Now and then he took these self-portraits, focusing the camera and then holding it beside or below his head, or sometimes before him across his face as he must appear to those others whose pictures he took. He could not have said precisely what moved him to do this at any particular time, only perhaps that they represented moments of introspection, that they were a sort of outward introspection. But he had not taken a picture of himself in a while – not, he thought, since he had been with Kumiko. With Kumiko, there was someone else to see him, to see him first and then sometimes, though they no longer mattered because of course she was there and he was no longer alone, to take the pictures. Perhaps he took the pictures at those moments when his identity was most unsure, when he was losing the sense of himself; as this morning, hung-over and unshaven, unsure of himself because he had made friends with a man he didn’t want ever to have met, and moreover he had wanted for some reason to be liked by this man, or he had some need of him, so he had presented himself with part of himself omitted; he had presented only a surface to the man like the surface his lens recorded in the mirror. He put the camera before his face. It was no wonder the man did not know him. The camera hid him. And as soon as it did not hide him, he had turned away and run for the chopper. He had never looked at the soldier eye to eye but only through the viewfinder, compressed, reduced; as object rather than man.

  There is the picture, himself in the cramped bathroom of the flat. The mirror is set low, at a Japanese height. If he were tall like Jim he would have had to bend his knees to get his head in. A slight, bleary figure. Undistinguished, insignificant. A non-combatant. Who would notice him?

  I met a guy here, Jim had said, a Vet, with a terribly scarred face. I guess he’d had surgery, skin grafts, but still you could see that his face had been ripped apart. It was scarred on one side and perfect the other. One of his eyes was glass, but well made so you didn’t see it at first. He liked it here. He said this place was kind to him. And it was. They didn’t stare because of the scars, they stared only because he was a gaijin. He thought they accepted the way he looked along with the rest of him. That’s a good thing about Japan. They don’t see you here. You think they stare at you but they don’t see you like they do back home. They don’t question who or what you are.

  * * *

  You’re free here. Back home you have to carry the war with you all of the time. People see you and they think they know something about you. You’ve got the war inside of you and you want to forget it and be like them, but you can’t be like them and they aren’t gonna let you anyways. Going home to people who only know peace might be the worst thing you can do when you have that inside of you.

  He took the morning slowly. He did not have to meet him again. There had been that vague arrangement to meet to go to the museum in Ueno the following day, but he did not have to turn up. That would be best, he thought, if he just didn’t go – or kinder to phone first and make some excuse – and then he wouldn’t see him again. He went out to the shops, came back. Mrs Ozawa was watering the plants at the door to her house. Ohayu. He bowed to her and admired the morning glories that were trained up the wall beside his staircase. His mother planted the same variety. Heavenly Blue, they were called. Mrs Ozawa had trained them exquisitely, the stems on separate strings so that each flower stood out individual and perfect when its trumpet opened to the light. Back in his little kitchen he unpacked his simple groceries, lit the gas ring and boiled water for coffee. The kitchen just fitted a person on his own. Its window was a narrow rectangle onto a precise and orderly world. He took the coffee into the main room. He might have looked at the Vietnam pictures again but he didn’t need to. He knew them well enough already. Now and then he heard the village burning, felt it like a hot wind, or he took a breath and caught the smell of it as if it was some smell he had brought in from outside on his shoe, only he wasn’t wearing shoes. The Japanese took their shoes off when they came in from outside. How sensible that was. After he had drunk his coffee he put on his shoes and took up his camera and went out.

  He walked where the streets were quiet and he took pictures of things. He looked for what was beautiful, for those details where the Japanese aesthetic stood out perfect and calm, that you could almost always find if you looked, in the corners of the city. Mrs Ozawa’s morning glories that set the colour of the sky against the dark wood of the wall. A neighbour’s bamboo fence. Another bamboo fence with a workman’s canvas footwear stuck on two posts to dry as if someone’s feet were in the air. Blue and white yukata hung to dry on poles inserted through their sleeves like a line of cut-paper figures swaying in the breeze. There are many things a person sees, he thought,
but a person has the choice of what he looks at. If he could train his eye, could he not see a different world?

  I take pictures, he would tell the American the next day when they met. He would take his camera with him and go to meet him as they had planned – as perhaps he had meant to all the time, though he had been telling himself otherwise – and this time he would tell the American what it was that he did. Tokyo’s a great place to take pictures. I take a lot in black and white. Tokyo’s great in black and white. I take street pictures, and I take pictures of gardens. At the place where I live, my window looks out across gardens. I take a picture from that window every morning, every morning I look for the difference in the light. The light in the early mornings this time of year is much clearer than the light in the day. It throws long shadows, and some mornings more than others there’s dew on the leaves. I like to take pictures in the early morning – like this morning, I went out very early, I was awake early, I didn’t sleep very much last night, I had a lot on my mind. On mornings like today, I go out and I take pictures of the little gardens in the neighbourhood, where you can see in through the fences, and the fences are beautiful so I take pictures of those too. I take pictures in the park where you said you saw me – was I taking pictures then? That’s a great place for pictures. You know those little turtles in the pond there? Have you seen how sometimes the turtles rest on the posts that jut from the water by the bridge and sunbathe with their legs sticking out from their shells? So relaxed they look like that, and safe, with the water all around them. And I go to the other parks, and the public gardens. There’s a lovely garden at the Nezu Gallery. Have you been there? I have a girlfriend who takes me to gardens. She took me to view the irises in the gardens by the Meiji Shrine. She’s in Kamakura this weekend. Her grandparents live in Kamakura. She took me to the Hydrangea Temple there but we were too early and they hadn’t flowered yet. He would tell him all sorts of things like that.

  It was an old museum of big rooms and small objects under glass in brown wooden cases. There was an exhibition of utensils used in the tea ceremony, people crowding round a case in the centre of a great room that held only a single cup, a brown cup so small that you might hold and hide it in the fingers of your hand, that looked as if it was formed in the fires of the earth. In another case, a teapot; a bamboo whisk. The objects were small and the ceilings were high, hung with calligraphy scrolls, whole poems or single inked words, black ink on white paper, mute and exquisite.

  For a long time they stood before a screen that was painted with pine trees in a mist. And just when he felt that he had looked enough, when he had seen how the mist seemed to cling to the surface of the screen and the pines to recede into it, when he had taken in the composition, the relationship between each spare vertical on the long horizontal plane, when he had looked at the caption on the wall that was all in Japanese but he could read the era in which the screen was made if nothing else, just at that same moment Jim began to move on, and the two of them moved on together. It was not the sort of art about which he had anything to say, and neither of them said anything about it. He did not know if Jim had been drawn into contemplation as he had, or even whether he was interested, or whether he was only accompanying him, moving only as he anticipated his movement. What did he see, what did he like, what had he seen? He also was indecipherable. His eyes were alert, alive, and yet there was a stillness in his face. He could not tell if Jim was thinking of the pictures or of some other thing, something in his surroundings or something within himself.

  And the air did not move in the great space of the gallery where they walked. The air seemed old as the things within it.

  It’s hot here, was all that he said.

  Let’s go out into the park.

  He has a sheet of contacts from that visit to the park. He didn’t take many shots that day and those that he did take weren’t much good. There are a few of Jim. There is one of him by the lake in the park, then there are the ones he took in the street as they walked to the Asakusa Temple. He looks very handsome in the pictures. Kumiko would say how handsome his new friend was, when they met. That his friend looked like Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Peter Fonda rolled into one. Plus a touch of Clint Eastwood, she added, that cool shut-away look in him that was so sexy and male, and pulled the girls.

  What did you do? she asked after that weekend she had spent away. They were walking down the street on their way to a restaurant for dinner.

  I met someone, he said.

  A girl? she said, her dark eyes on his, her little hands halted as she reached into her handbag for cigarettes.

  No, not a girl.

  Daijoubu. That’s OK then. She tapped a cigarette from the packet and put her Mickey Mouse lighter to it. It wasn’t conventional for a Japanese girl to smoke in the street. It was a mark of her freedom, like going out with a gaijin.

  An American. We went to the museum at Ueno.

  Ah, she said. It was clear that she thought the museum was boring. And would I like this American?

  He’s very handsome. Perhaps I shouldn’t introduce you.

  Doesn’t he have a girlfriend of his own?

  I think he does.

  Then let’s go somewhere together.

  The next time they went on a trip they went with the American and the pretty, forgettable girl he brought along. It was Kumiko’s idea. They took a train out of the city to Chichibu Tama. It was a pleasant day and they all said that they would come back in the autumn and do the hike again to see the colours for which the gorge was famous – though as it turned out they would have stopped seeing each other by then.

  So what did you think of him? he said to her later.

  She shrugged. I don’t know. I don’t know much about him. He’s cool.

  Her big teasing smile.

  Am I not cool?

  She laughed. And teased him then about the film stars.

  On a shelf up behind the bar their keep-bottles stood alongside one another, two English names among the Japanese. Sometimes one bottle was taken down, sometimes the other. Sometimes they met there; other times they went alone. If he had not wanted to see Jim he would have had to find a new place, but he told himself that he liked this one, he was accustomed to it and he liked the kind of music they played. And perhaps when he came now it was even partly in the hope of seeing him, though they would speak now about no more than what he would speak about to other regulars, about the typhoon whose course was predicted to pass out beyond Tokyo Bay, or the form of the various star wrestlers in advance of the autumn sumo tournament. It often happens like that, he thought, that the first time you meet someone you talk hard and begin to tell one another about yourselves, and then once you know them a little you draw back into the day-to-day, which is so much easier said and reveals less.

  The more that he saw of him, the less he felt that he knew him. In all their brief acquaintance, in the meetings in the bar, the couple of times they went to see films together, the two trips they took out with their girlfriends, he never learned so much about Jim as on that first night, when they had met by chance and had the freedom with each other of strangers who might never have to meet again. He saw that Jim had moods. He saw him talkative and full of charm one night, lighting up the bar with his blue eyes and his American smile, and silent another. On the nights when he was silent he looked into his glass, and stayed in the bar longer, drank longer. Don’t you have to work tomorrow? he would ask, as he himself got up to leave, and Jim would be putting more ice in his glass or reaching for the bottle or lighting another cigarette. Only very rarely, as he remembered it, did Jim speak about what he did elsewhere, or about his work or his students, so that at times he wondered if there were any, or if Jim spent all of his days only drifting across Tokyo. But there was money in his wallet, and his clothes were good, and he kept a car which was more than most English teachers did, and once he mentioned a corporate language course in Nagoya, so there must have been work some of the time. What did it matter, he
asked himself, what Jim did? Wasn’t he drifting too?

  The city improved as the humidity lifted. Places that had seemed a long walk away weren’t far to go to any more. The sky cleared and even the sounds seemed clearer, that had been muffled before by the weight in the air. He began to roam the streets again as he had when he had first arrived, and took a mass of pictures, and looked ahead to the winter and thought how long it had been since he had come there, and wondered if he would spend a whole year in this city.

  A postcard had appeared from Laura at the beginning of September. It had been posted a month earlier and it came from Nepal. She said she was living in Kathmandu now so he could stay in the flat indefinitely. I hope you’re getting along with my little gokiburi? The Japanese cockroaches weren’t little at all; they were the biggest cockroaches he had ever seen. She would think it bad karma but he had been setting traps for them since the day he’d moved in. He wrote to Kathmandu that he would keep the flat at least until Christmas. He said, if he was staying so long, he hoped she wouldn’t mind if he moved some of her things.

  He wrote to Laura and then he took up a second airmail form and wrote to his mother as well. It was the first time that he had written home in weeks but he said nothing about his plans. The summer was hot, he wrote. I went to the seaside. I saw a school of porpoises in the ocean. There are fishing villages in coves by the sea, and the land behind is cut into steep terraces. They grow rice and oranges, and sometimes they grow chamomile. Going up the steep paths I met little old women bent beneath baskets of chamomile on their backs. He wrote whatever he could write to make the place sound sweet. I’ve been taking pictures of gardens. He looked for the subjects where he could best connect with her. Gardens were one. Too many others were closed. He told how the Japanese gardens lent themselves beautifully to photography, the controlled vistas, the variations in level, the paths that moved through them. Photography in the gardens was about stillness, and angles and depths, stone lanterns and bamboos and maple leaves rising behind. It was quite different from photographing war: no movement, no action, no surprises to it except those that were designed; nothing unexpected. The paths lead you through. In his mother’s garden the emphasis was on flowers rather than form, textures and colours and scents. That was because she had been first an arranger of flowers before she was a gardener, and still she grew flowers for cutting, for the house. She had gone to the garden after his father died, as if in consolation or grief she had transferred to herself his father’s brooding relationship with the soil. He pictured his mother out in the garden; somehow she always remained neat in the garden, her nails kept trim beneath gardening gloves and her hair carefully arranged, running in as soon as it began to rain with her old brown gardening coat held over her head. There would be a last flush of flowers now before the autumn, yellows and pinks and purples intense in the low light, the first leaves beginning to turn.