A Gesture Life Read online

  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.

  “He’s shot himself,” I said. “Get the large bandages in the cabinet.”

  Shiboru looked confused, but I pointed at the cabinet and he complied. I realized it was he who had executed Endo that day. He hurriedly brought the gauzes but when he gave them to me I told him it was already too late.

  “How did this happen?” he said, not yet holstering his revolver.

  “It was an accident,” I replied, picking up Ono’s gun. “He was playing with the girl. Doing tricks for her. He was switching hands when it went off.”

  “What happened to you?”

  I told him the captain had beaten me the day before, not explaining any further, and Shiboru naturally didn’t question it. He looked down at the captain’s body and said haughtily, “Only real soldiers should toy with such things. And even then. So I suppose you’re the base doctor now, eh, Kurohata?”

  “If the colonel wishes it.”

  “Oh, that he will,” Shiboru answered, nodding to the hall. “It seems the old man needs his medicine. He insisted on me coming here and getting the captain. Right off, too, with the needles and all. I suppose you’ll be by daily as Ono here was. I’ll let my men know.”

  He snorted when I didn’t answer, and he said gruffly, “He’s in his house. You better go there now. The sentries will take care of this mess. She’ll come with me.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “She’s got no reason to be here. I know what was going on, Kurohata, like everybody else. The doctor, having it special. In fact, maybe you, too? But no more, eh? Everybody’s bored with just the three others. They’re nearly useless now besides. Fucking skeletons. Can’t you fix them up or something? It’s almost better with your own hand. At least you don’t want to throw up when you’re doing it. But this one, she’s a doll. Skinny, but she’s a real beauty. Come here, doll. Come here to your big brother.”

  I went to the storeroom to get the vials of the tincture, trying desperately to think of what to do. When I came back the guards were waiting to escort me to the commander’s house, but I stopped at the exam room to try to stall or convince him to leave her to me. It was strange, then, when I looked inside; I thought I saw her gazing at him almost tenderly, with a last human glimmer, and then I knew in an instant how terrible all the rest of it would be. She reached out with one hand and seemed to caress him, but he groaned instead, clutching one side of his face. When he let go there was a fine red line, from the corner of his eye down to his mouth. He started bleeding profusely. She had cut him, but not too deeply, as though she were trying only to mark him. She didn’t move away. Then he punched her hard enough on the mouth that some of her teeth flew out, like tiny white birds.

  One of the sentries pulled me along, saying, “Don’t worry, the lieutenant has his certain way.” Outside, through the window, I could see that K had risen up again, bloody-mouthed, and he struck her again.

  When I finally finished administering to the commander and returned to the infirmary there was no one there. I had injected him and sat with him as he requested but it still took nearly an hour until he fell asleep. Just before he did he suddenly realized that it was the first time I had administered his medicine, in place of Captain Ono. He wasn’t disturbed or even suspicious; he was already too deep in the thrall of the injection. All he wanted was that I sit beside him as he lay prostrate on his bedpad and gently pat him on the back with a slow, steady rhythm. After a few minutes he began half-humming a sentimental folk song, his faint voice breaking in beats as I patted, so that he sounded almost like an old woman consoling herself at day’s end.

  As soon as he was asleep I went directly to the comfort house, but there, too, it was quiet, being late in the afternoon, when the girls were allowed to sleep before the evening and late night. Behind their communal tent I found Mrs. Matsui, crouched over a dented washing pail of gray water, wringing undershirts. I asked if she had seen Lieutenant Shiboru, and of course, K.

  She nodded.

  I asked where.

  “Aren’t you going there, too?” she said, wringing out an undershirt.

  “No, where?”

  “They’re at the clearing.” She picked at her teeth with her fingernail. She was angry and even a little upset. “A whole bunch of them. I told that bitch this would happen to her. Stupid little bitch. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed,’ I told her, if she goes on like that. Or worse. But now see how it is? It has to be worse. Something worse.”

  I ran up the north path by the latrines, toward the clearing, as it was known, which was where Corporal Endo had taken K’s sister. But I wasn’t halfway there when I met them coming back, singly and together and in small groups. The men. It was the men. Twenty-five of them, thirty of them. I had to slow as they went past. Some were half-dressed, shirtless, trouserless, half-hopping to pull on boots. They were generally quiet. The quiet after great celebration. They were flecked with blood, and muddy dirt, some more than others. One with his hands and forearms as if dipped in crimson. Another’s face smudged with it, the color strange in his hair. One of them was completely clean, only his boots soiled; he was vomiting as he walked. Shiboru carried his saber, wiping it lazily in the tall grass. His face was bleeding but he was unconcerned. He did not see me; none of them did. They could have been returning from a volleyball match, thoroughly enervated, sobered by near glory.

  Then they were all gone. I walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The air was cooler there, the treetops shading the falling sun. Mostly it was like any other place I had ever been. Yet I could not smell or h
ear or see as I did my medic’s work. I could not feel my hands as they gathered, nor could I feel the weight of such remains. And I could not sense that other, tiny, elfin form I eventually discovered, miraculously whole, I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands. Nor could I see the face, the perfected cheek and brow. Its pristine sleep still unbroken, undisturbed. And I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part.

  15

  HOW SHIMMERS the Bedley Run pool in this flood of last August light, the groups of mostly mothers and children on this weekday crowded about the man-made shoreline where it curves in full beam of the sun. The whole town seems to be here. Thomas and I have set up our chairs on the sand down-shore, under the breezy shade of large maples, the part of the beach preferred by older folks and those concerned with overexposure to the rays, or others, like the handful of our town’s black families, who are enjoying their own lively, picnicking circle a few steps from us. Thomas has found them, or they have found him, and he plays with their children with a quiet, unflinching ease, something I have not seen in him until now, overexcitable as he often is. I have already given him the first lessons of flotation and breathing and treading, and as much as he was eager to try out the deeper water (with me at his side), he’s caught up now with his new friends, filling buckets of sand as they build a wall around their talkative mothers. I am happy for him, happy that I can sit close by and hover and let him do his child’s good business. I am pleased enough, too, that Sunny and I have so far remained on decent and civil terms, no matter if they are ones eternally provisional. They shouldn’t be, certainly not if we were real father and daughter, but maybe even those who share blood and love believe only their devotions are unconditional, to be sustained through every crucible.