A Gesture Life (29 page)

And I said to her, strangely thinking of that, “I remember now, how he said you were with child.”

“I heard him tell you.”

“Is it true?”

“No.”

“He said you were pregnant not by him but by another, even before you came here.”

“It’s not true.”

“Are you lying to me, K? You don’t have to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. But she rose, turning away, her arms tight about her.

“Let me see your body, then,” I asked, trying to figure if she were, and trying to believe how it could be mine.

“There’s nothing in me. There can’t be. If there is, then God forgive me for what I’ll do.”

“Let me see you.”

K stood still for a moment, then went over to the lone slatted window. The light from outside was gray and soft; an afternoon rain was falling gently, and in its cast she looked even younger than she was. Like a girl waiting to go play outside. And I thought she was about to leave through it, that she might really try to climb out, though of course there was nowhere to go. But instead she turned and gazed at me for what seemed a very long time. Her expression was not sad or fearful or confused. She untied the string of her baggy trousers and let them fall down at her feet. Her rough cotton blouse hung loosely over her belly, the patch below that showing darkly through the gauzy material. Her calves and ankles were thin, but her feet especially so, the tops of them shockingly bony, reedy and translucent. Though I was weak I sat up, not from desire but because I wanted her to stop. Though I could not say so. She loosened the waist knot of the blouse so that it came open and fell, and then she was wholly naked before the window, coolly burnished, smooth. Her middle seemed no fuller than the rest, which was underfed and thin but still of amazing riches to me. I thought
she was the most beautiful statue of herself. I put out my hand and she came to me, not looking at me anymore, and I kissed the tepid skin of her, at her belly and below, and I could taste her, her sharp-sweetness and unwashedness and her living body underneath. My eyes and cheeks felt shattered but I pressed against her anyway, more than I could bear. I was nearly crying from the pain. She did not hold me but she did not push me away. I never meant for this but I could no longer balk, or control myself, and then something inside her collapsed, snapped clean, giving way like some storm-sieged roof, and then I descended upon her, and I searched her, every lighted and darkened corner, and every room.

And yet afterward—I don’t know how long, for time seemed to bend upon itself inside the small ward—we were simply sitting on either end of the cot, not speaking, not meeting each other’s eyes. I could only glance over at her and see how she was bent over her knees and cradling her face in the crook of her arm. Not weeping or moaning, but figured in certain quiet. Almost hiding there, though I was sure—even as young and earnest and fearful as I was—it was not just from me; it was from that place and time, the whole picture and small detail, from the homely, dim structure about us, the squalor of the heavy air, from the ennui and restiveness of the entire encampment, the surreally distant war, and then of course from who I was as well. For in my own way I comprised it, my yearning and wishing and my wanton hope, the sum of which, at end, amounted to a complete and utter fraudulence. For that is, finally, what she would escape if she could, not the ever-imminent misery and horror but the gentle boy-face of it, the smoothness and equability, the picture of someone heroic enough to act only upon his own trembling desire.

One could say, I suppose, that I was a very young man. Which
of course I was. But I bring this up not to excuse myself or to try to mitigate my actions or to confess. Rather, I mean it to stand simply as a fact. I was young and callow, but that youthfulness was also inescapably pure. It was wholehearted, and so native to me. Completely mine. And that was the terribleness of it. For I must have wanted her unto death, and I could not bear anyone else having her, and I allowed events to occur because of that feeling, even if it meant I would lose her forever.

I must have fallen asleep, for I awoke to the sound of footfalls outside on the landing. It was Captain Ono, I knew, by the dull ring of his keys. K was no longer with me in the ward room. The captain told the sentries they were relieved of their posts for one hour. One of them barked a response and then they marched away. The captain unlocked the infirmary door and stepped inside. I could hear him going to the examination room, where his desk was, and I tried to get up quickly but I lost balance and had to pause a moment. Then I heard him say, “You are looking quite wonderful this afternoon.”

There was no answer, but he said anyway, “See now, how I’ve brought you something. Some mochi, the last of a box I received last month. They’re hardly perfect, but one can still eat them. Go ahead, they’re for no one else.”

I would have gone right over to them and confronted him but the sound of his voice, the way he was speaking to her almost decorously, froze me. To hear him was to realize how I must have sounded when I was with her, though his tone was elegant, still circumspect, only the least bit attenuated. He knew I was there in the ward, of course, but there was no care of that, as though he truly did own my life, or more, that I wasn’t really living anymore, that I’d never set foot again outside the sick house. I went to the door,
which led to a tiny hall, and I could see them there, her sitting on the exam table and him before her on the chair, his back to me.

“I wish for you to eat them,” he said, holding them out. “They come from a venerable sweet shop in my hometown, which is famous throughout the province. My mother sent them to me, and it is amazing that they actually arrived. These last two are quite delicious. You can see one is rolled in green tea, the other in black sesame seeds. If you are bashful we can share. Take one, and I’ll have the other. Come now, or you’ll force me to choose for you.”

The captain tried to make a show of picking one, but she didn’t move or say anything. He held up the box to her again and she could hardly shake her head. He rose then with gravity and I was sure he was going to strike her, but he suddenly embraced her instead, roundly and warmly, clutching her as if he feared he might never see her again. And without realizing it, I found myself in the center of the exam room, mere steps from them. I could have reached and touched his shoulder, the blunt back of his head. I was unarmed and weakened but I could have struck him. And yet on sighting him, on seeing him holding her so, I felt a certain sadness for him, the humane sorrow one has when one witnesses the briefest moment of another’s abandon and self-loss, which is a levity, and a phantom death, and enviable enough.

K was now staring hard at me, her arms stiffly around his back. She was quiet, not trying to hide my presence from him—for he well knew I was there in the room with them and was completely unconcerned, as if I were still his loyal assistant—but directing me, motioning with her eyes that I go to the cabinet of surgical tools and instruments. The wide, rotting planks of the floorboards groaned under my movement, and the captain only said, stepping back from K and hardly glancing at me, “There you are, Lieutenant.
I expect when you’re recovered you’ll resume your duties. You’ll remain here a few days. Now leave.”

I didn’t answer him. I was seeing only that one of the cabinet handles had been turned, its steel door unlocked. And then I knew what she was telling me. Here is your moment, Lieutenant Kurohata. Take up the scalpel. Deliver him swiftly from us. Stand in your place and strike him down. And as I was listening to this, finally hearing the silent running of my own heart, the dull submarine click, I found on the leather-lined shelf the honed steel instrument with its crosshatched handle, the pen-like blade lithe and insignificant in my hand. It would be simply like writing his death. And as I faced them the captain was already turned, ready for me, knowing as he always did what I would do next, as if he were my partner and my twin, my longtime synchronist. He had unholstered his pistol and was aiming it at my chest. If he would fire I would fall murderously upon him, to rid her of both of us. But he winced and a quizzical expression rose up in his face, and with his free hand he touched the side of his neck, as if he had just been stung by a wasp or spider. K stepped away from him, in her hand a red-tipped scalpel, one just like mine. He said her name and then it poured from his neck, the wine-dark spew, a bloody epaulet alighting on his shoulder. Falling to his knees, he dropped the pistol. It lay there, darkly lustrous. He sat heavily on his haunches and motioned to me, with genuine wonder, as if I should take his hand.

He fell over then. We could only watch until he stopped moving, the life running out of him and down through the cracks of the floorboards. I wiped and examined the wound after he was dead. It was amazingly precise. K was still holding the blade, standing stiffly above us. She was not exultant; the color had left her face. She had stabbed him with a deep, short incision through the major
artery, which had been rent open like an undammed stream. He looked quite peaceful to me then, slighter as he lay, as if the dying had made him youthful.

And for a brief moment, too, I almost felt her hand hovering over me, angled high, and I closed my eyes in anticipation of the sundering edge. She could have stabbed me just as swiftly. For as with any man in the camp, she should have tried to kill me. And if I believed then that she did not do so because she valued me or hoped to be saved by me, I realize now that it was neither of those things. Not at all. She had not hurt me for the same reason that she had given over her body some hours before, not for passion or love, or mercy or humanity, but their complete absence and abasement, such that there were no wrongs remaining, no more crimes, nothing to save herself from.

In an odd way, I think now that K wanted the same thing that I would yearn for all my days, which was her own place in the accepted order of things. She would be a young woman of character, as significant to her father as was his son. She would have the independence that comes from learning and grace. She would choose her kind of devotion; she would bear children and do her necessary work, a true vocation, and she would grow old as I have grown old, though she would look backward with a different cast than mine, a different afterlight. All I wished for was to be part (if but a millionth) of the massing, and that I pass through with something more than a life of gestures. And yet, I see now, I was in fact a critical part of events, as were K and the other girls, and the soldiers and the rest. Indeed the horror of it was how central we were, how ingenuously and not we comprised the larger processes, feeding ourselves and one another to the all-consuming engine of the war.

K leaned on the examination table and doubled over, gagging,
still gripping the surgical knife. Nothing came out but some watery spittle. I tried to help her but she pushed away my hands.

“Please,” she said, wiping her mouth with her forearm. “Please, Lieutenant. Don’t touch me.”

“I’ll only ever do so when you wish.”

“Then please…” she said, her eyes sickly, desperate. “I won’t be touched anymore.”

“You will come with me when the war is over.”

“Don’t speak of that,” she said wearily. “I don’t wish to think of it.”

“You will, I promise…there’s nothing that can prevent it. Not even this.”

“I am not going anywhere with you!” She was crying now, suddenly mad. “I am not going with you! Do you hear me?”

“I’ll help you.”

“I don’t want your help!” she shouted. “I never wanted your help. Can’t you heed me? Can’t you leave me be? You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent. But I will tell you now, it is my sex. The thing of my sex. If you could cut it from me and keep it with you like a pelt or favorite stone, that would be all. You are a decent man, Lieutenant, but really you are not any different from the rest. I’m sorry I gave myself to you, not for me but for you. Perhaps it was a second’s hope. For that I’ll be sorry to my death. But if you loved me, Lieutenant, if you truly loved me, you could not bear to be with me. You could not see me like this, you could not stand for one moment longer the thought of my even living.”

“I love you,” I said, in hardly a voice.

“Then show me, Jiro,” she answered. “I’m too cowardly to do it myself. I want to but I can’t. There is his pistol. The guards are
going to return at any moment and they will announce themselves. When he doesn’t answer they’ll come in. You must say I killed him just as I did, and that you took his pistol and you shot me. If you cannot do it yourself, then say so now. I’m afraid, but I have nothing left to do. There’s no escape. I know you dream of one but it doesn’t exist. This time won’t end. It will end for you, but not for me.”

K bent and loosed the weapon from him and put it in my hand. She moved back a little, stepping away from the body of the captain. She wasn’t crying anymore. “Jiro. Please. You are a good man. Yes, you are. A good man now.”

The pistol weighed heavily in my hand, as though I’d never held one before. I had shot in training and for practice but never once fired at something living, much less her. But she was right, I knew. It was incredible to think there was a way for us, the hope akin to how a boy might fancy that he could truly fly, perched up high in the limbs of a tree. And he might even fashion paper wings and lash them to his arms, he might feel the airy hollowness of his bones, he might know like the sun the perfect certainty of his flight, and yet his first step tells, it tells with prejudice the rules of the world.

Yet I could not shoot. I could not. Whether for love or pity or cowardice. Then we heard the men returning, and I looked out and saw they were accompanied by a first lieutenant, a hulking, boorish man named Shiboru, who was in charge of the guards. They were but steps away from the stair and landing. I pulled Captain Ono by the neck and sat him up and stuck the muzzle to his wound. Then I fired. K shouted out, in surprise and dread. I dropped the pistol and let him fall dully. Shiboru came running in with his sidearm drawn as I was kneeling beside the captain.