The trouble with writing to his mother was that it made him think too much. It brought him back to who he was, to whys and hows and whens. Nothing unexpected, he had written. Yet what did you expect when you went to photograph a war? I don’t know why I was surprised, he might have said to her; but a very long time ago he had stopped telling her the things that mattered. She had gone out into the garden alone and he had watched from a distance, from the house or from up in a tree. And now he had gone away almost as far as he could have gone. I shouldn’t have been surprised, he might have said. If he had spoken to her. If he had ever spoken to her. If he was to speak to her again. You would have thought that I knew about war. There were dead people. On the ground. In a ditch. A woman lay in a field. I saw her alive before I saw her dead. He wouldn’t tell her that, how he saw a body on the ground and blood soaking into the soil. There was that place they would climb to, he and Richard, in the walnut tree at the edge of the lawn, sometimes he would climb up alone and sit astride a branch with his legs dangling and watch as she worked below in the flowers, and words that he might have spoken would form in his head.
A stray lock of hair would fall forward over her temple, and she would stand and smooth it away with the back of a gloved hand.
I met someone else who was there, at the war, he might have said. I don’t know what he did there. You can’t tell from just looking at him. But you can’t tell that about anyone, can you?
His mother said that his father had hated the Japanese. He didn’t know if that was true. He didn’t know what a man felt who killed people. Did you have to hate someone to kill him? That was what he used to think. His father had hated the Japanese and went to fight them because they were wicked and cruel. And his mother spoke of them with a particular tone of voice which said that they were not forgiven.
He wrote the letters, and went out and posted the letters, then returned alone to his flat. His mother wouldn’t buy a Japanese car. His Japanese girl was something else that it was easier not to mention.
I Was There Too
I was there too. I saw you there but you were blind. I think that you were blind in that moment, Jim, that what you had already seen had blinded you. You had seen it happen. I can imagine the start of it. Before the dust and the smoke, before the flames. Before any screams or gunshots. A village going about its morning. Many of the villagers have been up before dawn. The women are carrying water, making their cooking fires, sweeping, in the early mist that hangs about the houses and across the fields. There is the sound of what the women are doing and still there is the sound of the cicada, which has been the dominant sound of the night, but as the sky lightens and the sun begins to rise that sound first intensifies and then it drops, at some particular degree of lightness, and after a moment’s silence, an instant of what seems to be deep silence, is overtaken by the sound of the birds and of the frogs, the mass of frogs in the flooded rice fields, as the sun rises and begins to burn away the mist. By then both men and women are going out into the fields to start work ahead of the heat, among them a young mother with the usual conical bamboo hat and a baby tied to her in a sling of bright turquoise cloth, treading the narrow paths raised beside the irrigation channels and between the fields. And into that morning comes the sound of the helicopters, not one but a number of them appearing in the sky like a squadron of vast and vicious damselflies, and those in the fields are running even before the helicopters land. And from the helicopters step soldiers, and you are one of them. And there for me it stops. I can describe that, the scene before, because it is an everyday scene and I have seen others like it, but I cannot describe what it is that happens next, let alone your part in it. You saw the rest. You must have seen it, Jim. You must remember. I did not see until afterwards, and by that time you were blind.
He brought a different girlfriend when they went to the hot spring. She was just as pretty as the last one, a slender girl with the pale skin and long features of an old-fashioned Japanese beauty, and her name was Akiho. This name he would remember; her name and her quiet, and his feeling rather sorry for her. The resort was a remote one up in the mountains and Jim drove them from Tokyo in his car, out on the expressway and then a complicated route cross-country in the dark. Akiho sat with the map in the front seat and the traffic was slow because it was the start of the weekend, and Jim was in one of his moods. He was restrained and cool and silent, and it was all right at first. He drove coolly as he seemed to do everything, but the journey took much longer than they had anticipated, and he was suddenly, unfairly crushing to Akiho when she realised that they had taken a wrong turn. He didn’t say much, only, That’s taken us way out of our way. The hurt was all in his tone of voice. He turned the car round, abruptly so that his irritation could be felt in the turn, and a little while afterwards when they stopped to fill up with petrol he suggested that Kumiko go in the front instead.
Kumiko can read a map, can’t she?
It was Friday night and all of them were tired. Whichever way they went, they wouldn’t reach the hotel until very late. They sat a moment silent in the car, Jim standing tall at the driver’s door in the whiteness of the petrol station forecourt, his face very fine and tight. Without a word, Akiho got out and went to get into the back, and Kumiko replaced her.
How unkind, Jonathan thought. And then, how alone he is, thinking of him as he had stood in that bright light looking down to them in the dim interior of the car. He is quite alone. I can see that, but the Japanese girls can’t – or perhaps they can and that’s why they forgive him.
They drove back into the dark and the traffic, skirted a town and found their way up winding mountain roads. For a long time, none of them spoke. Left, Kumiko said. Or, Take the next right. Jim drove smoothly but the tension had not left the car. He took a leisurely hand from the wheel and slotted a cassette in to play. He had picked up whatever cassette he could reach. Dylan. The music should have soothed them. As they turned the bends the headlights moved across the concrete walls of the mountainside. Everywhere along these roads the cut sides of the mountains seemed to be encased in concrete. Jonathan looked out of the window and saw them pass. Dylan drawled on. All there was to see out of the car were the white lines of the road and the engineering about it, the retaining walls and conduits and barriers.
Do you think they really need to do that when they build the roads?
Do what? Jim said. The Japanese girls were silent.
All that concrete? Is it absolutely necessary or is it something peculiarly Japanese? Encasing the mountains and controlling the streams. They do it at the seashore too, they cover everything with concrete. Because of the earthquakes and the volcanoes and the tsunami, perhaps they feel the need to control nature everywhere they can.
I don’t know, Jim said. That’s a bit philosophical for me. He reached out a hand to the dashboard and switched off the music. Kumiko, why don’t you choose a new tape?
There was silence then and he felt foolish for his words. Akiho was asleep or pretending to be asleep. Kumiko chatted to Jim as she took out his tapes and looked through them in the low light that came from the opened glove compartment. He felt excluded, sitting behind, seeing the still back of Jim’s head as he drove, his hands negotiating the bends, Kumiko’s movements and the curve of her cheek turning towards him as she talked, how prettily she pushed back her hair when he wasn’t even looking at her. A signpost loomed up, Japanese characters that he couldn’t read. Left here, she said. Then we’ll be there. But there was still some way to go. Or it took a long time because the road was slow.
There is only that one photo he has of that day, beneath the umbrella in the rain. They woke late to rain so heavy that you could see the lines of it falling across the darkness of the forest. They went down to break fast and then lingered over coffee until they thought that the rain had eased enough for them to go for a walk. They borrowed two umbrellas from the hotel, which was all that the hotel had left because other guests had also taken umbrellas, and they
went out and took a long walk, on a forest track that wound down into the valley and the village, and in the village they found a place for lunch, but on the way back up the rain was driving and the umbrellas were not enough to keep them dry. This picture he took by the hotel just before they went in. You can see in it that the girls’ hair is wet. Jim’s hair is wet too, darkened and slicked to his face. He holds the umbrella in his right hand and Akiho stands on his right. Kumiko is on his left, wearing the same red raincoat she had worn before. She has run up to be in the picture and Jim’s left hand rests on her waist. He had noticed that as he took the shot.
It was finally said. It was statement and confession and accusation. I was there, he said. This was the moment to say it, if it was ever to be said. This moment at the bath, so still and dim and innocent. It was a dim room like a cave, the bath taking up most of the space, the area around it tiled with dark neutral tiles, and wooden stools and wooden buckets lined up before low taps for them to wash. There was a door and a big glass window to the outside where they could have bathed in the hot spring in the open air – if it had not still been raining so hard – a mist over the spring where the steam and the rain met. They were alone inside, just the two of them naked in the pungent steamy air, Jim squatting and soaping his back and ladling water from the wooden bucket. I was there. His voice came simply against the sounds of water and of Jim’s washing. I saw you there. There was a scar on Jim’s back, a livid, jagged scar, and it seemed to tighten as he spoke, as the whole of his back tightened.
It was a raw, recent-looking scar, not one of those childhood scars everyone carries somewhere. He had already been washing when Jim entered the room, coming in with the small white towel held before him. He had noticed at once the beauty of his body like that of some Greek hero, his skin which had a golden tinge to it even where the sun did not touch, the fine golden hairs on his chest; and then when he also crouched down to wash, there was the scar beneath his right shoulder. Jim saw him looking.
’Nam. Looks bad but it was just a surface wound. He soaped across his back.
What was it?
Shrapnel. I was lucky. It just winged me and didn’t penetrate.
He poured a ladle of water down himself, soaped himself some more. Beneath him a stream of soapy water spilled across the floor.
We were out in the delta. I’d never been anywhere like it. I guess you might have said it was beautiful if you hadn’t of been doing what we were doing there. I guess it was beautiful anyhow. Only sometimes you didn’t see that.
I know, he said. I was there.
So simple the words were in the bare room. He spoke them and almost before they were out he saw that long back tense and harden, and all in one moment the wooden bucket was pushed aside and Jim was standing, and he was afraid, with the spilled water running at his feet. He could see that Jim had understood. Perhaps he had remembered, all at once, the memory come back to him of the burning village and how he had fled from it, how he had stalled there at the wall – and the photographer, first standing then crouching before him. Now the position was reversed. It was he, the impassive soldier, who was standing, anger visible all down his body. Jonathan was afraid, physically afraid but he was also afraid of whatever words this man, the soldier, might say, and he was afraid of the memory that surrounded them, that he could feel in his skin, that he seemed to breathe with the wet air. You, the soldier said. The soldier said only that, standing naked before him, and then he stopped. He was suddenly aware, they were both suddenly aware, that two other men had entered the room, two Japanese men muttering to one another in a bass, grunting, male Japanese, coming into the room, finding their buckets and their stools, squatting down to wash, turning on the taps, looking across at them only briefly, turning their eyes discreetly away as if they had come upon some erotic moment, turning the atmosphere in the room from one of anger to one of surreal embarrassment.
The soldier was a soldier no more. He plunged his naked body into the hot water of the bath. He stayed there a long time in the heat, quite still – as long, Jonathan thought, as any man could stay in water so hot. All the time that he was there Jonathan could only wait, squatting on the stool with his head in his two hands, waiting, unable either to leave or to enter the bath so long as the other was in it. And then at last he burst from the water like some wounded whale, and went to a tap and filled a bucket, cold, and emptied it down himself, and shivered.
He stood, holding the little towel.
You took that picture. Do you know what that picture means?
He spoke softly now. At the far end of the line of washing places, the Japanese men were talking to one another and scrubbing themselves with what seemed a perfect Japanese containment.
You go with your camera, you go sightseeing and you think you know what you’ve seen. But you don’t know what war is. You know nothing. That’s war, you say. People see your pictures and say, yeah, that’s war. They have these words to go with the pictures. That’s a soldier in a war. They think they know what that soldier did. They can’t begin to know a thing like that. What he did, what he saw, who he is. They see me and they see the rest of it, and they think they know. They don’t know what I saw. What I did. They think they know, and they know nothing.
He spoke it all in one low rush, leaning down to him where he sat on the stool, speaking so low that if the Japanese men had understood English they couldn’t have caught it. Then he stood to go, and now the bitterness in his voice cut clear across the room. And you. You knew who I was. So what do you want to spend time with me for?
Jonathan got into the bath, slowly, lowering himself into the heat until all of him was immersed but his head. It was good then. Too hot until you were in it up to your neck, then once you were in, it was good. He moved around until he was resting with his back to the other men and his eyes to the window where the rain was still falling onto the spring outside. Rain, steam, water. He tried to think of nothing else. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes and put his hand to his nose, lowered his head for some moments into the bath. When he came out, he poured one ladle of cold water after another down his back.
Kumiko would speak when he went up to their room of the effect of the minerals in the water. She had spent this time at the bath with Akiho. She would say how good her skin felt from the water. He had no sense of that for himself. He saw as if from a distance that she looked very pretty in the yukata she had worn to the bath. Her skin that she said was tingling had a dark freshness to it, a quality like that of the wet pines outside the window. She had opened the window to look out now that the rain had stopped and the mist was lifting, leaning out, her black hair loosely knotted so that it would have fallen in a single movement. There was a stretch of time in which they might have made love before going down to the restaurant for supper. What’s the matter? she said. Why so quiet? He stood beside her and saw the mist curl about the trees, the mountains show themselves, and he breathed the smell of the mountains after the rain that was like the smell of her skin after the bath.
Let’s go outside, he said. Look, it’s not raining any more. So they dressed and went out, and though the rain had stopped drops were falling still under the trees. They came back and took their seats in the restaurant, and Jim and Akiho weren’t there. They sat at a table for four and waited a while. I don’t think they’re coming, he said. I think we should eat without them.
All right, I’ll show you. When we get back to Tokyo, I’ll show you, if you really want to see.
It had not been enough to tell her that they had quarrelled. He had to say why, and once he had told her why, then she must see the pictures.
I know this man. I cannot believe that he is this terrible man you say. You have to let me see.
I didn’t say that he was terrible or not-terrible. I know that the pictures are terrible, that is all.
They spoke about it in the night, and in the early morning when they woke, close but distant from one another, their voices rising higher than
was necessary, like bells across the hotel room.
Why do you not want me to see?
Because I wish I had not seen it myself.
It was what you went there for.
Was it?
Wasn’t it?
Of course it was. If you go to be a war photographer, you photograph war. That is what you do.
I’m sure I don’t know.
He closed his eyes and the words rang through his head again as she got up from the bed and tied her yukata and went to the window, knotting her hair at the back of her neck as she did so, and opening the window wide and leaning out. She had done that before, he thought. So many things you saw you’d seen before; things repeated themselves, came back, again and again; like the pattern of the words they had just spoken, that echoed other words, randomly, a rhyme, some words out of his childhood; things reminded you of other things, any things, from whenever in your life.
The Gun Room Page 10