The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  The sun was bright on her face, the sky cloudless behind her, the day a very clear one after the rain.

  We’d better just go, he said.

  They spent a lot of money on a taxi to take them to a station from which they could get a train back to Tokyo. It seemed a great pity to leave that morning when everything was so dazzling, the light and the shade sharp on the road as they went from forest into the open and into forest and out again, the driver taking the bends smoothly as he knew the road well, they sitting in the back seat, apart, each looking out their own side, listening to the smoothly driven car. The bends were tight, the landscape was tight, the mountains small, the views between them narrow, lovely vistas of forest and groves of bamboo and deep ravines, which they must have passed in the dark on their way there, and they could see them now that it was daylight but they had no interest in them any more. Kumiko and the driver had the briefest of conversations, one so simple that even he could follow it, with his basic Japanese and a bit of guesswork. The driver was surprised that they were leaving at such a time, so early on this beautiful Sunday morning. We came with friends, she said, but our friends were called away. Our friends drove back to Tokyo last night. He thought it must seem odd that they hadn’t all driven back together – or perhaps it wasn’t odd, perhaps it was a reasonable thing that they had chosen to spend the night at the hotel, for which they had after all already paid, and not to leave until the following day. The driver nodded as he raised his eyes to Kumiko’s in the mirror. She said how they had thought that they should leave early since they didn’t know how long the journey would take. Yes, that was reasonable. The driver nodded again. There were not so many trains, on a Sunday in particular.

  They came to the town and the station, and it was a small station on a branch line. They waited almost an hour for a small train that was just two carriages long, and got off it at a big station in a big town, and there was another wait as they changed onto an express, and they reached Tokyo late in the afternoon. He looked out over the expanse of rooftops as they came into the city. It was too soon, he thought. By that time he knew that he had wanted the journey to take longer, to take up all of the day with its immanence, to run on into the night, so that they would not have arrived until so late that she would have had to go home, directly, to be ready for work on the following morning, and she would not be able to come with him out to his flat to see the pictures that she said she must see.

  Why don’t you go straight home? I can show you some other time.

  They sat side by side, subdued. They had not talked much at any point of the journey. The roofs went by them, roofs stretching into the far distance.

  No, she said gently. I’d like to see them now.

  The buildings got taller about the tracks, closing over them. They were coming in to Tokyo station.

  It took quite a while to find the pictures. In one of the few cupboards he had taken for himself was a pile of boxes, prints and contacts and negatives. He had meant, one of those idle summer days, to sort them, but had remained too idle to do more than begin on the task. Wide flat yellow Kodak boxes and green Fujifilm ones, small plastic boxes of slides. A mass of unlabelled negative sleeves. Loose prints, some of them beginning to curl; others in envelopes, named and dated. White envelopes, bigger brown envelopes, some of them bundled together with elastic bands. Thailand. Thailand beach shots. Temples. Borobudur. Other Java. Individual strips of negatives slipping to the floor as he took out the envelopes and the boxes, slipping out of them or from between them, he didn’t know.

  They’ll be in one of these.

  He pulled out the yellow Kodak boxes, looked for the labels from the Chinese processors, but there were many even of these. Hong Kong was the one place on his travels where he had actually had commercial work, and there were boxes of this, when he looked, pictures he had taken of buildings for a firm of Kowloon architects, of windsurfers for the brochure of a rental shop on Lantau.

  I don’t know why I keep all of this stuff.

  She had made coffee. She stood drinking the coffee, watching.

  Can I see some of them?

  Look through these. Borobudur. It’s beautiful. I was up there a full day, from dawn till sunset. Or I came down, and went back up. A vast stupa itself, and all of it carved, and on top of it a crowd of small stupas like so many meditating Buddhas. Look how the light on them changes through the day, their shadows, the view all round, the view of the volcano that emerges as the sun begins to go down. No, I have them in the wrong order. These are the first ones, very early with the mist breaking, when I first got up there.

  Where is it?

  You never heard of Borobudur?

  But he found it then, in one of the yellow boxes, the magazine. Jim’s face stared from the cover.

  Here.

  She looked. She sat on a cushion before the low table and put the coffee on the table and looked at the cover, and then opened the magazine, smoothing down each page as she turned it, and looked at the pictures inside, and began to read the article that went with them.

  * * *

  Yes, here they all are.

  He brought the contact sheets to her where she sat on the floor. Now that she was here he knew that he would show her all of it. He would keep nothing back. He had not intended to do that, he had intended to show her only what had been considered suitable to be published, but this was suddenly a moment in which he could hand it over, all of it, all that had been in his eyes. He knelt beside her at the table. She was still reading the magazine, her two elbows on the table and her hair falling in a curtain about her face. He had first to take away the empty coffee cup, and bring a cloth and wipe the ring that it had made, before he laid out the sheets. He left them on the tatami beside her while he did that, then came back and took them up and placed them across the table chronologically, in the order of their numbered frames. She pushed back the curtain of hair with one hand. The other rested on the magazine, her small careful hand with tapered white-tipped nails, at the edge of the shiny page. He saw that the hand was shaking. It was too late by then. That’s the lot, he said. That’s everything. I’m sorry, you did say you wanted to see. She had asked to see but he was the one doing the showing; it was his responsibility, not hers. He adjusted the lamp above the spread of pictures. He went to a drawer and took out a magnifying glass, and came back and leaned over her, his hand light on her shoulder, on her black hair, smelling the smell of her and looking over her head as if he were a teacher and she were a child, knowing now that he was doing wrong. He placed the glass on an image some way down one of the sheets, on the first picture that he had taken after the helicopter landed, which was his first imperfect shot of the soldier. When he straightened up he felt dizzy, as if he were standing at the top of a high cliff looking down at a glossy black-and-white sea.

  Kumiko had looked at the pictures inside, read the captions on the photographs, and then she had read the piece. She read the horror and then she went back to that picture of Jim on the cover.

  He is still there, isn’t he? He is still seeing it.

  She didn’t look up to him though he was standing just behind her, looking down. Perhaps she didn’t trust herself to.

  He knew what she meant but he didn’t answer.

  Could that be so?

  Perhaps. It happens like that, doesn’t it, to soldiers who see wars?

  And you saw it?

  I just took pictures. I had the camera. I only saw it through the camera. I was there half an hour, an hour, whatever. That was all.

  She had not yet begun to view the contacts which he had put before her. She moved now to a kneeling position before the table so that she could bend down across it to see them closely. They were small and it took concentration to make all of them out. She moved the glass along from that first rough shot of the soldier by the wall, into the village, to those confused shots of running people and not-running people and burning houses. Along, from frame to frame. I do not want to see this,
she said, yet as she spoke her hand with the glass moved on, mechanically as if it could only go that way and could not be stopped, and she looked at the next. He looked on helplessly. The room was silent except that they could hear light women’s voices downstairs. It was Sunday evening, he thought, Mrs Ozawa’s daughter came to visit her on Sunday evenings. When Kumiko had got to the end of one strip she went back and started on the strip below it. When she got to the bottom of one sheet, she moved on to the next one.

  I shouldn’t have done this, he said. I shouldn’t have shown you.

  But you have.

  She did not pause, but went on, the tears falling from her eyes now, onto the glass and onto the sheet. She wiped them away with her hand, wiped the glass on the hem of her sweater when it smudged. Image after image. Moment after moment. Fragments of time that he had experienced, that she was now putting together. She got to the ones he had taken in the fields, the one of the bodies in the ditch – but she did not stop long on that one because it was one of those that had been reproduced in the magazine and she had seen it already – and then the woman on the path.

  I think she had a baby, he said. You see, she has a sling to carry her baby in. I looked for the baby but I couldn’t find it.

  Were you going to take a picture of the baby?

  I don’t know, he said, and really in that moment he told himself that he didn’t. He didn’t know why he had looked for the baby or what he would have done if he had found it. Or did he? Would he not have taken the baby’s picture as he had taken pictures of everything else? And if it was alive, would he have picked it up, carried it with him, to where, crying in his arms? But there was no crying. He had heard no crying. Then the baby, if there had been a baby, was already silenced. He turned away, and looked out of the window until she was finished with the photos. It was dark and there were lights in the windows of the houses across the gardens, the rectangles of light yellow and soft, and the rounded forms of the bushes showed black before them, and it was quiet, apart from the voices of the two women downstairs, a suburban quiet that somehow only emphasised the vastness of the city that he knew was beyond. There wasn’t much more for her to see, if she had got to those ones in the rice fields. Only that last one of Jim, and that too she had seen already. Yet she kept the glass to it for a long time.

  Suddenly she stood. Her elbow swept one of the sheets to the floor.

  I have to go.

  She was halfway to the door. She had gone to take some tissues from her bag – one of those silly little packs of tissues Japanese girls always carried around, printed with cute characters or flowers as if everything in the world must be pretty and nice.

  No. Stay a bit. You must stay a bit now.

  The tissue was already a wet ball. She fumbled for another. Her eyes and mouth were soft from crying but her voice when it came was hard.

  You shouldn’t have done it.

  No. I’m sorry, I told you that. I didn’t want you to see.

  Not me, she said. It’s not me that matters.

  Jim’s not guilty. He didn’t do anything. He was just sitting there.

  He said that, though he didn’t know it entirely. He talked. She stood there in the middle of the room with her fingers twitching at the tissues they held and she watched him talk. He knew she was watching though he didn’t know if she was listening. Nothing in her expression told him that, though her crying stalled. The table was low between them with the light on the photographs, shining black and white, the fallen sheet in shadow beside the cushion on the floor.

  He heard himself telling the story, trying to make it simple. He wanted to apportion blame. Blame this man and not that one, even if they were together, even if the one acted and the other only saw, watched, did nothing, was unable either to act or to prevent the act. A platoon of soldiers. They look the same in uniforms and helmets, all one, running with their guns. The choppers from which they have come not stilled yet behind them, blades just turning. A last piece of dawn hangs in the sky behind the dark outlines of the choppers and the soldiers who come running into the village. The platoon enters the village and what happens, happens. He told the events as he has imagined they occurred, as he has told them to himself, pieced them together from what was said later: how a Viet Cong was caught hiding, or how they caught a young man hiding and this meant to them that he was Viet Cong; how as they held the young man, a boy came out from a hut and threw a grenade and one of their own was killed; and so they killed the man they held, and the boy; and they killed the grandfather who came from the hut to protect the boy; and on and on the killing went; and the burning went on to punish and to cover the killing. The platoon does this, but the platoon is made of individuals. And one individual – or perhaps more than one, perhaps there may have been others, he does not know – runs, at some point in all of this, runs away and puts a wall between himself and what is going on. He sits with his back to the wall, blind to all else.

  And then you come and take his picture.

  Her voice was plain, stubborn, her figure small and decided. He didn’t answer.

  She didn’t cry any more and she didn’t say any more. She went into the hall and got her raincoat and the rucksack, put back the pack of tissues and zipped it up. The sounds she made were efficient, material: the barefoot pad of her steps, the hard brush of synthetic fabrics, the zip, the shuffle as she put on her shoes. White trainers, red coat, black rucksack, out of the door. Running steps down the metal staircase in the darkness to catch her train home.

  She had dropped a tissue on the floor. He picked it up and then he picked up the sheets of prints, the one from the floor and then those from the table. The magazine lay beneath them. His words were only a part of the truth. The rest of it was in the soldier’s eyes. He put the sheets back into their boxes, and the magazine with them, stacked the boxes with the others in the cupboard and slid the panel back across it, the panel smooth when it was closed, merging with the wall. He could hear Mrs Ozawa and her daughter outside by the foot of the staircase, saying goodbye in soft, light, Japanese women’s voices.

  It is there in the eyes, in those eyes that make the photograph so effective. The soldier has been inside the village. He has seen, or possibly he has done, whatever it was put that look into his eyes. Is it necessary that he did it, or was seeing enough? Perhaps seeing is guilt in itself. The eyes cannot bear that. They look out pale and shocked and blind from the dirtied hero’s face. That’s what the viewer wants to believe, that they just cannot bear what they have seen. That this man has been no more than a spectator, a viewer himself. Seeing alone is a kind of guilt, and seeing is shame. Kumiko understood. And you took his picture, Kumiko said, and Jim had said the same thing. Everyone who sees knows the shame.

  He saw Jim one more time. He saw him as he had first seen him, a golden head above the crowd.

  It was at the Omotesando crossing. He saw him just as he came up from underground. It was a chill November morning and the sky as he came out from the station was high and grey, the cars halted, the crowd crossing the road ahead of him in a dark flood.

  Possibly he had been on the same train and he had not known it. They might without knowing it have travelled on the same trains all the way from Kichijoji. It was some weeks since since the trip to the hot spring. At first he had half expected to see Jim on the street, as if they were somehow fated to meet up again, as if because they had met before then there was a stronger likelihood that they should meet again. For days, he had avoided the bar; but then he had gone to it, and sat on a stool at the counter and looked for Jim’s bottle up there on the shelf, and noted the level in it, and he had gone again a few days later and noted that the level was unchanged, and since then he had not been back. He had no thought of seeing Jim here at Omotesando at this of all times, where so many thousands went on a Sunday morning, where he had gone, idly this November day, to photograph the fashionable and the others among them.

  Yet there he was, and it seemed suddenly unsurprising t
hat it was so, his tall figure riding the flood before him. He followed where the flood went. I have done this before, he thought. But if he turns now, he will know me. But Jim did not turn, and besides, there were so many people between them that he need only look down and he would be no one, no more than a paler brown head among the Japanese. It was Jim who could not hide. Jim was visible from a long way off, by his height, his hair, his stride, the length of his legs and that urgency in him that took him always faster than those around him. He gained on the crowd all the time, moving just ahead of the stream up the wide avenue in the direction of the park, and Jonathan kept pace. He might have run. He might without much difficulty have caught up with him, grasped him by the shoulder and made him turn to face him. Look at me, Jim, look at me now. Tell me what you saw. Your eyes, tell me what was in your eyes. But he didn’t run. He kept to the same pace, working through the crowd, a second, smaller, browner, figure weaving ahead of the stream. The lights had changed, the traffic was moving again past the pedestrians, four orderly lanes of traffic separated from them by a line of young trees. The trees were almost bare, their branches dark against the pale sky, the last leaves falling through the still air, detached by the morning’s cold if not by wind even as the crowd walked beneath.

  Somewhere along the way, Jim stopped. He stopped too. When Jim turned into a side street and went into a coffee shop, he waited. He could see Jim inside through the glass of the window, which also held the reflections of the people on the street, saw him behind the passing figures and through the reflections, looking around, going to a table at which a girl was already seated and leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. Then he too was sitting down, leaning towards her across the table, taking her hand. Her face was hidden by her hair. He knew that she would be pretty. She would be pretty like the others. They were lovely, Jim’s girls, but they did not stay with him, or he with them. The girls did not last, or it was Jim who did not last, who never let them come close enough to last. That was what you could do with beautiful Japanese girls; you could touch them and yet not be touched, and perhaps, if they were lucky, you had not quite touched them either. It was a kind of transaction that was easiest made between people who were strange to one another. In the coffee shop Jim was rising from the table, Jim who would always be a stranger in this place. He was paying for the girl’s coffee though he had ordered nothing for himself. He was waiting while she took her coat from the chair, following her out to the street as she put on the coat, a long camel coat that looked expensive and stylish as she was, watching as she pulled a black coil of hair out from beneath the collar and smiled and shook it smooth.