A Gesture Life (16 page)

Sunny stayed that night at the house, though not in her bedroom. I hadn’t touched or disturbed a thing in there, not her many hairbrushes, not her books or records or her posters, in fact I hadn’t even cleaned or vacuumed, as I thought I should wait for her return. But instead of her own bed she chose to pull down from the closet some old quilts to make up a floorbed, spreading them three high in the family room in front of the fireplace. I sat in one of the wing chairs, somewhat to the side of her. She lighted a fire, which she always liked to do, and sat down before the small flame, blowing on it and feeding it with newspaper and kindling. When she was young, she would ask me nightly if we could light one, even when the weather wasn’t cold enough to do so, and often I would oblige her. She could spend hours in front of it, letting her face and limbs grow hot to the touch, and I would have to ask that she move back, for fear of her getting burned. She never wanted to use the fireplace screen because it dulled the heat, and that night of her brief return to the house, she pushed it aside as well. I used to lecture her on the dangers of flying sparks, reminding her that even one fiery mote could set a house ablaze, but she never seemed to hear me, only propping the screen to one side, happy to shield but a small corner of the room.

It is ironic, of course, that I should have been the one who caused a near-conflagration, and put my beloved house in danger. But as with everything else, I have begun to appreciate—perhaps like my old friend Fujimori—the odd aspects of things, unsettling as they may be. Take this pool, for instance. I’ve always esteemed the dark stone inlay, not the painted blue surround that one sees so clearly from the sky when landing in most any American city, the azure rectangles and circles beside the dotted houses. The water in
mine appears nearly lightless, whether in bright sun or dusk, and the feeling sometimes is that you are not swimming in water at all, in something material and true, but rather pulling yourself blindly through a mysterious resistance whose properties are slowly revealing themselves beneath you, in flame-like roils and tendrils, the black fires of the past.

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN
, I didn’t seek out the pleasure of women. At least not like my comrades in arms, who in their every spare moment seemed ravenous for any part of a woman, in any form, whether in photographs or songs or recounted stories, and of course, whenever possible, in the flesh. Pictures were most favored, being easy. I remember a corporal who in his radio code book kept illicit slides of disrobed maidens, a sheaf of which he had salvaged from a bombed-out colonial mansion in Indonesia. Whenever I walked by the communications tent he would call out in a most proper voice, “Lieutenant Kurohata, sir, may I receive an opinion from you please.”

The women in his pictures were Western, I think French or Dutch, and caught by the camera in compromising positions, like bending over to pick up a dropped book, or being attended in the bath by another nude woman, or reclined in bed and pulling up a furry scarf between the legs. The corporal had perhaps a score of these, each featuring a different scene, replete with detailed settings
and whatever scant costume, and he slowly shuffled through them with an unswerving awe and reverence that made me believe he was a Christian. Of course I shouldn’t have allowed him to address me so familiarly, but we were from the same province and hometown and he was exuberantly innocent and youthful and he never called to me if others were within earshot. I knew at the time that he had never been with a real woman, but he seemed to know their intimacies, as if in going through his photos he had become privy to the secrets of lovemaking, the positions and special methods and the favored styles of the moment.

I myself, up to that time, was hardly what one could call experienced, but unlike the corporal I found little of interest in the hand-sized tableaux. They held for me none of the theatrics and drama that he clearly savored in them. Instead, I was sure, they smacked of the excess and privilege of a sclerotic, purulent culture, the very forces that our nation’s people and will were struggling against, from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to where we were posted at the time, in the foothill country of old Burma, approximately 125 kilometers from the outskirts of Rangoon. The women in the photocards were full-figured, not quite young, though several of them were attractive in an exotic manner, such as circus performers who do bizarre tricks to force one’s eye.

The one image I preferred was the one of the bath. It was a mostly unadorned scene. With no other props but the tub and a coat hook for the robe and towels, the staging was quite plain. A woman was receiving a bath as she stood exposed, the attendant to the side of her in the midst of sponging her long, pale back. Somehow, I always noticed the helper more than the featured bather. She was younger, and more delicately limbed, like a Japanese, though in truth it was her face that struck me. From her expression, one
could think she was truly intent on washing the woman’s body, as if she weren’t concerned with the staging or the camera or the oddity of her own nakedness, but of her task alone.

Several times the corporal offered to give me that particular card, but I didn’t want the bother and worry of keeping it among my few personal things, should I be killed and those items along with my remains be tendered to my family in Japan, as was customary. In most all cases the officer in charge of such transferrals checked the package to include only the most necessary (and honorable) effects, but one heard of embarrassing instances when grieving elders were forced to contend with awkward last notions of their dead. I feared it would be especially shaming to mine, for as adoptive parents they might shoulder the burden of my vices even more heavily than if I had been born to them, blood of their blood, as there would be no excuse but their raising of me. Troubling to me was the image of my mother, peering at the photo of the bathers, and so inescapably remembering me, and then having desperately to hide it in her cosmetics chest before my father arrived home from his factory. Still, being twenty-three years old and a man and having been only with that Madam Itsuda during my first posting in Singapore, I was periodically given to the enticements of such base things, and unable to help but step into the radio tent whenever the corporal addressed me.

“Have I shown you this new series, sir?” he said one sweltering afternoon, reaching into the back inner flap of his code book. His eyes seemed especially bright, almost feral. “I traded some of mine to a fellow at munitions. He had these. He said he was tired of them, sir.”

There were several photographs, which he had pasted into a small journal book, the cardstock and image of much lower
quality than the corporal’s Dutch assortment. But these were pictures of women and men together, from a close-in perspective, patently engaging in sexual intercourse. I had never seen such pictures before, or even imagined they could exist. The depicted acts were crudely staged, but seemed actual enough, and the style of the photography, if this could be said, was documentary, almost clinical, as though the overexposed frames were meant for some textbook of human coitus. To my mind, there was nothing remotely titillating in them, save perhaps the shocking idea that people had willingly performed the acts while someone else had photographed them.

The corporal, unfortunately, took more than a customary delight in the pictures. He seemed to be drawn into the stark realism of them, as if he desired to inhabit them somehow. I would notice him every so often around the camp, lingering about on his own, the private journal always in his clutch. In the week or two after he had first shown them to me, I encountered him several times, each instance finding him further disheveled in appearance, wholly unwashed (and reeking most awfully, even more than the camp norm), as well as being slightly jumpy and skittish, with a scattered gaze. His face had erupted in a sudden rash of pimples. He was, as mentioned, callow and youthful, as yet, at nineteen, without much developed musculature or hair on his lip. He was the youngest boy of a fairly prominent family, whose holdings in our town included a trucking firm and an automobile dealership. He had been trained in coded field communications to take advantage of his obvious intelligence, and to avoid the likely consequences of his physical immaturity if he were an infantry regular, which would be certain injury and possible death at the punitive hands of superiors, long before an enemy confronted him.

I took pity on him because of this, though I was afraid that
lurking beneath his quick mind was a mental instability, a defect of character that I was certain would lead him to a troubling circumstance. As one of the brigade medical personnel, I decided to write a memorandum to Captain Ono, the physician-in-charge, advising that Corporal Endo be evaluated and possibly even relieved of his duties and disarmed; but as with much else in wartime, it was lost, or ignored. I should have understood the corporal’s strange behavior to be an alarm—for example, he had placed among the photographs of his elders in the small shrine next to his bed several of the newly traded pictures, and actually cut out certain lurid forms and applied them in a most dishonoring fashion beside the portraits of his stolid-faced grandparents. When I lingered over this personal shrine, the corporal assumed I was admiring his artistry and even offered to refurbish mine if I so desired.

This was in the early fall of 1944, when it seemed our forces were being routed across the entire region. Ever since Admiral Yamamoto’s transport plane had been ambushed and destroyed by American fighter planes some eighteen months before, the general mood and morale, if still hopeful, had certainly not been as ebullient and brash as it was in the high, early times of the war, when the Burma Road fell, and Mandalay. And now with our being under threat of attack from British and American dive-bombers—though none seemed to come for us, as if we’d been forgotten—the behaviors of the brigade, and most notably of Corporal Endo, grew increasingly more extreme. Sometimes, if one stood outside the communications tent, one could hear him talking to himself in a singsong voice, pretending—as he readily admitted to me—to be a film star like Marlene Dietrich or Claudette Colbert in the midst of a romantic seduction. Of course the corporal didn’t speak English, but he memorized well enough certain dramatic tones and
utterances such that his gibberish seemed almost real. Others had heard him do this as well, and there was soon suspicion among some of the officers that the corporal was a homosexual, and one of the captains even asked me if in my opinion he was a threat to the other men, like a contagion that should be checked. I told him I did not think so, but that I would be watchful of his activities and make a full report.

I knew, of course, that the corporal was constituted like most men. And not because of his interest in pornography, which was all too typical and rampant around the base. His unusual conduct was, I believe, a simple by-product of the deepening atmosphere of malaise and fear. I myself had developed a minor skin condition on the lower calves, and I was treating many others for similar irritations such as boils and scalp rashes and an unusual variety of fungal infections. It seemed the whole encampment was afflicted. Corporal Endo had no such physical problems, save his acne, and so I began to consider the possibility that his expressions were of a besieged mind, one perhaps innately tenuous and fragile and now—under duress—grown sickly and ornate.

Late one evening he came to my tent behind the medical quarters and asked if he could come inside and speak to me. He had washed up somewhat, and he looked much like the corporal of old. After awaiting my permission, he sat down quietly on a folding stool. I had been reading a surgery text on fractures under the dim oil lamp, and though I was weary and about to retire, it was clear the corporal was disturbed, and so I thought it best to give him some attention. There was a trenchant, focused look to his eyes, as if a notion or thought had taken a profound hold over him and he was useless before it.

But he didn’t speak right away, and so I asked him if I might help him with something.

He replied, “Please forgive me, Lieutenant. I’m rude to request a moment from you and then waste your time.” He paused for a few seconds and then went on. “You’ve been most generous to me, and I feel I’ve only returned to you the most inappropriate conduct and manners. There is no excuse. I feel ashamed of myself, so much so that I sometimes wish I were no longer living.”

“There’s no need for such a sentiment, Corporal Endo,” I said, concerned by his words. “If your shame comes from showing some of your pictures to me, you must obviously know that it was always my choice to look at them. You did not force them on me. Now, on the other hand, I would only be insulted if you suggested that I had no autonomy where your pictures were concerned, like any child. If this is so, Corporal, then you had better leave my tent immediately or ready yourself to suffer the consequences.”

“Yes of course, Lieutenant,” he answered, bowing his head in a most supplicant angle. “I’m sorry, sir, for the implication. But if you’ll excuse me, it wasn’t only the pictures I was talking about. Please forgive my insolence, but it is another thing that makes me feel somewhat desperate.”

He paused again, crossing his belly with his arms as though he were ill or suddenly cold. Then he said, “You see, sir, it’s about the new arrivals everyone has been talking about. It’s known around camp that they’re scheduled to be here soon, and I’ve received messages for the quartermaster that the supply transport and complement will likely arrive by tomorrow.”

“What about it, Corporal?”

“Well, sir, it’s not my task to do so, but I’ve looked around camp
yesterday and today, and I haven’t been able to see where they’ll be housed once they’re here. All of us enlisted men are in the perimeter bivouacs, and the more permanent buildings in the central yard are of course being used. I thought as one of the medical officers, you might know where their quarters would be.”

“I don’t see where this is any of your concern, Corporal. But if you must know, they’ll probably be housed in tents, like everyone else. Where exactly will no doubt be quickly determined, but not by me. I’m not in charge of their status or medical care. That will be Captain Ono’s area, as he’s the chief medical officer. Anyway, none of this is a matter of great importance, particularly to someone like you.”

The corporal bobbed repeatedly, his face still quite serious. “Yes, sir. Should I then speak to Captain Ono?”

“If you must,” I said, feeling that I would soon grow most annoyed with him if our conversation went on any longer. But I felt somewhat protective of him, and I feared he might provoke Captain Ono, who was known in the camp for his sometimes volatile outbursts, a mien which should have seemed quite odd for a medical doctor but somehow didn’t seem so at the time. In fact, Captain Ono was quite controlled, if a bit grimly so, wound up within himself like a dense, impassable thicket. A week earlier, however, he had beaten a private nearly to death for accidentally brushing him as he passed on a narrow footpath near the latrines. Ono ordered the man to kneel and in plain view of onlookers beat him viciously with the butt of his revolver, until the private was bloody and unconscious. He treated the same man soon thereafter in the infirmary, in fact saving his life with some quick surgical work in relieving the building pressure of blood on the brain. I know that the commanding officer, Colonel Ishii, had actually spoken to the
captain afterward of the benefits of meting out more condign discipline, and the captain seemed to take heed of the suggestion. In fairness, it was an isolated violence. Still, I was concerned for Corporal Endo, and so I said to him: “Will you tell me what your interest in all this is? You won’t find the captain very patient, if he agrees to speak to you at all. He’s a very busy man.”

The young corporal nodded gravely. “Yes, sir. I should not speak to him until asking you. I’m grateful for your advice. You see, sir, I was hoping that I could be among the first of those who might meet the volunteers when they arrive. If there is to be a greeting in the camp, for example, I would be honored to take part—”