A Gesture Life (26 page)

“I want to believe that you and I will do all the things we spoke of,” I told her. “I am hoping the war will end soon, as has been
rumored, and perhaps much sooner than anyone knows. It is said the war in fact has been going very badly. There is even talk the Americans will soon attempt to invade Japan itself. No one will say it, but the end is likely coming, and an accommodation will be made. It must. Perhaps it will be next month, or next week even. Then we can go out of this place, we can go out of this place together, and I will take care of you and protect you no matter where we go.”

“But you say he is coming tonight,” she said sharply. “The doctor will come here tonight. Tonight! Will the war end before then? This afternoon? Will you spirit us away before the dusk falls, Jiro? Because if not there is nothing more to talk about in a real way. There is dreaming and dreaming talk and little else, which is happy enough, and maybe all that remains to us. But please don’t try to make things sound real anymore. It makes me feel desperate and mad. You’re a decent man, Jiro, more decent than you even know, so please. You can pretend, if you wish, and I’ll pretend with you, as much as I am able. But I ask you please no more than that.”

She became weary all of a sudden, and let her arms fold beneath her as she lay on her side on the meager blanket. The crown of her head was almost touching my knee where I sat beside her, and after a moment I reached out and began stroking her hair. She had let me do this before and she did not mind now. Her hair was unwashed and heavy and unsweetly redolent but to me it was a perfect mane. Two nights before I had done the same when she grew tired and lay down, stroking her gently at first but then more vigorously and deeply, running my fingers down to her soft scalp, until my hands were warmed and smooth with her oil. She fell asleep and I went to my tent and could not sleep myself, the rich, bodily smell wafting over me. I held up my hands as I lay on my bedroll, and before I knew it I had tasted and kissed them and rubbed them on my face
and neck and elsewhere, and in the morning I wanted to be with her like nothing I had ever known. But on sight of the closet door I had to retreat and scrub my hands in the exam room, ashamed by the feeling that I had secretly profaned her.

But now she closed her eyes as I stroked. She had told me she was no longer sleeping much at night or any other time, hardly shutting her eyes even a few minutes a day. She wanted to fall asleep but could not. But I thought now she was very near it, her breathing steady and rhythmical, and it seemed with each pass of my hand through her hair her exhalations grew longer and lighter. It had been many years since I had watched a woman sleep; the last time was when I lived with my first parents in Kobe, where we slept all together in a one-room house. My mother and father would be heaped in the corner like a mound of sackcloths, the noise of their exhausted slumber keeping me awake, my mother tittering in her dreams. Some mornings her pants bottom was pulled half-down, her long straight hair fallen down into the corners of her gaping mouth, my father’s hand clutching her breast. I remembered wanting to brush the loose strands away from her mouth, to cover her nakedness with the blanket.

But here beneath me, K was falling away, the line of her mouth softening, and though someone (even the doctor) could come by at any moment, I crawled around and lay down behind her, so that our bodies were aligned, nestled like spoons. She was warm and still and I gently pressed my face into the back of her neck and breathed in the oily musk of her hair. And it was so that I finally began to touch her. I put my hand on the point of her hip and could feel all at once the pliancy of it and the meagerness and the newness, too. I felt bewildered and innocent and strangely renewed, as though a surge of some great living being were coursing up my arm and
spreading through my unknowing body. She was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, or somehow forcing herself to, and she did not move or speak or make anything but the shallowest of breaths, even as I was casting myself upon her. I kissed as much of her body as was bared. I kissed her small breasts, which seemed to spill a sweet, watery liquid. I gagged but did not care. Then it was all quite swift and natural, as chaste as it could ever be. And when I was done I felt the enveloping warmth of a fever, its languorous cocoon, though when I gazed at her shoulder and back there was nothing but stillness, her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, and she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all.

I said then,
I love you,
and she didn’t answer.
I love you,
I said again, in Korean, not whispering it this time but speaking it as clearly as I could, and when she didn’t reply I assumed she was completely asleep. I rose carefully and stepped back and buckled my trousers, wanting desperately to wake her and kiss her on the mouth but instead letting her remain, recalling how restive and sleepless she said she’d been. I would have done anything then to lend her some peace. I would have executed whatever she asked of me, helped her even to escape. I would have willingly injured another human being had she asked, or needed me to. And it unnerves me even now how particular and exacting that sensation was, how terribly pure. That a man pleasured could so easily resolve himself to the whole spectrum of acts, indifferent and murderous and humane, and choose with such arbitrary will what he shall have to remember forever and forever.

I went out of her closet-room, whispering to her that I would return in several hours, with food for her and maybe something to drink, and thinking ahead to an entire evening in her company; but as I gently shut the door I thought I heard a murmur. I couldn’t
lock it; to do so seemed at that moment too cruel. Instead I stood quietly for a moment and waited and indeed it was K, saying over and over very quietly what sounded most peculiarly like
hata-hata, hata-hata.
But as I listened more closely I realized that she was fitfully crying, though in quelled gasps, as if she were trying to hush herself. I was afraid to move, lest she hear me, and so I remained, my ear lightly pressed to the worn wood of the door, until she quieted and was silent again and in fact fell asleep, her breathing deep and certain.

After I left her I found myself in a state of unease and exhilaration. I could understand why she should become upset, that she was perhaps sad for the end of her maidenhood (which I thought then was the most precious ore of any woman), but hadn’t I professed my devotion to her, hadn’t I in mitigation said the words that should let her know what I was intending for us, after the war? I thought I should have also told her that I was now resolved to speak candidly with Captain Ono, that I was prepared to suggest to him my keeping a log of my duties around the camp and infirmary—which I had indeed begun compiling. At least I would not wilt and fade and disappear before him, as I had score upon score of times.

And yet I had no other, further plan; there was no good recourse from her required duties to the camp, there was no actual reprieve I was offering her. I loved her, though I cannot say how that love was or if it was true or worthy in any sense, having never in my life been sure how such a thing should be. I can say I wanted her and could not bear her being with another, and if those are veritable signs, then I should rightly hold her in memory in every way that I am able, and to the last of my days.

Captain Ono, however, was seemingly nowhere to be found; I even sought him out at the commander’s hut, rapping on the door
sharply until the new sentry ran up around the side and requested that I stop, saying the colonel was “resting” for the afternoon. The captain had indeed been around, he said, with his medical kit, as he had each morning for some days, and in the afternoons the colonel required strictly undisturbed quiet, as ordered by Captain Ono.

I recalled then the multiple requisitions I had just sent by courier to Rangoon for morphine and ether, as our supply for surgery was curiously dwindling, despite our not having conducted any recent procedures. I had long suspected he was medicating the commander, though certainly not against the man’s will, as one sometimes saw them talking in the evenings on the veranda of the hut, the colonel’s demeanor familiar and jovial, if a bit too loose. The probable fact of this further emboldened me, and as I went around the camp in search of the doctor I felt more determined than ever to withstand whatever insult he might level at me, and somehow influence him to agree to my sole stewardship of “the girl” under some obscure technical or medical rationale.

So sure of myself was I, so certain of my imminent resolve, that the thought of committing an aggression seemed again suddenly quite natural to me, as if I were a man long accustomed to the necessity of such things. I remember suddenly feeling suited to the notion, perhaps even bristling with it as I strode purposefully about the camp, the image of Ono desperate and pained beneath the weight of my will. For I had been quietly considering various revenges upon him, drawing up the ways I would pay him back for his diatribes and affronts, my plans including, too, the most extreme of acts. Had someone asked, I would have denied any such thoughts, but in the core of my heart I was tending the darkest fires. I had certainly despised others before, particularly the boys in the school I attended after being adopted by the Kurohatas, boys who treated
me with disdain most of the time and at worst like a stray dog. Each day I vowed to wreak vengeance upon them, see them through some terrible circumstance I’d contrived, or else await the hand of fate. But nothing ever transpired. I never attempted to mark them, and soon enough we passed on to the upper school and there were plenty of others to befriend, both cause and enmity mercifully fading from my mind. I say mercifully because it was never my nature to harbor such thoughts, which have always been near-caustic to me, but in respect to the doctor a vital, searing charge was propelling me, an ashen, bitter hate whose taste I no longer abhorred.

And though exactly how I cannot describe, mixed up with this was my feeling for K, and my sudden sense of her nearness to me. It was a connection aside from what we had just done, what I should say I believed already to be a special correspondence between us, an affinity of being. This may sound specious—one may rightly think here was a young man in the blush of his first sexual love, typically conflating sensation and devotion—but I was not thinking so much of her body or even the desirous tentacled feeling of mine. I was considering what she had suggested about our pretending to be other people, like figures in a Western novel, imagining how we could somehow exist outside of this place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of such folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love.

So when I finally came upon the doctor, when I finally saw the angular shape of his back and his wiry neck as he berated several soldiers for the dilapidated state of their quarters, it seemed I was summoning the picture of my plunging a long blade into his throat, terrorizing him not with pain so much as the fright of an instant, wholly unanticipated death. In reality I was carrying a scalpel in my holster (pinned against the pistol), and I actually reached into the
leather pouch as I approached him and felt the metal handle. I could simply pull out the razor-sharp instrument and insert it a few centimeters into his skin and run it down the length of the carotid. None of the men would protest, and if one did, it would be too late. The doctor would clutch at his throat, the blood would flow forth freely, and in less than a minute he would quietly expire.

Captain Ono turned to me just as I was a few steps away. But my hand was at my head in salute and he said, with no little irritation, “What must it be now, Lieutenant?”

“I would request to speak with you, sir. It’s an important matter.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. The enlisted men were holding themselves in, pleased as they were to witness an officer receiving the captain’s harsh treatment.

“And what would this concern, Lieutenant?”

“I was hoping to speak in private, sir. It concerns one of the volunteers.”

“You surely are being scrupulous, Lieutenant Kurohata. And is right now the most necessary time for you to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“Yes, sir,” I said sharply, nearly barking. One of the enlisted men couldn’t help himself and let out a snort at my pained rigor. The captain at once wheeled and struck him across the face with his open hand, and the man fell down, more, it seemed, from sheer surprise than the force of the blow. He quickly stood up without any help and stood at attention, as were his fellows. A wide red welt rose up over his eye and the side of his face. The doctor waited and then hit him again, and again the man fell down and then got back up to his feet, this time more tentatively. The whole action seemed
somehow self-evident, being strangely mechanical. He then turned to me and in no different a voice said, “Then perhaps you and I should talk elsewhere, Lieutenant Kurohata. I require a few more moments with these men. You’ll meet me at the infirmary shortly.”

I did not of course want to go back there with him, but he had already dismissed me and immediately resumed addressing the men, criticizing them for their indolence and disorganization. Such a sight was becoming more and more common. Like most others in the camp, the doctor himself seemed caught in a state of increasing agitation, the protracted stretch of waiting and inaction and ennui causing flares of anxiety and disruption. A rash of fights had recently broken out among the men, and the feeling within the officer corps had, in fact, become distinctly chilly and distant, what with the system of command ever loosening and the threat of fighting having clearly passed us over.

I was walking quite slowly, as I was loathing the thought of the three of us together, her so near to him in my presence, and the doctor actually caught up with me before I reached the infirmary. He took me by the shoulder to stop me, the windowless back wall where K was locked in the closet just in our sight.