James Salter - The Hunters

The next day was Sunday. He spent the early afternoon at Miyata’s. He had brought two cartons of American cigarettes with him as a gift, and around the table, on which was a bowl of fruit as voluptuous as colored photographs, they sat, drinking tea and smoking. Eiko sat with them. She took little part in the conversation, but her silence seemed merely polite. Cleve felt certain that her thoughts were full of things she could have said but did not. He could hardly keep his eyes from her. Every glance made him need another.

Later, he rode with her, bicycling through oddly connected streets, down hills, and past unexpected stretches of green park. They walked the bicycles up a final steep grade and turned off the street between a whitewashed lane of trees, at the end of which a small lake was hidden. They sat in a shaded spot on the shore. Opposite them, across the still, reflecting surface was a bank of heavy, sloping masonry, soaked with moss. It was like the wall of a moat. Close beyond it ran a defiladed road. They saw the heads of occasional strollers. Nothing else was in motion, except four ducks that searched the shallow water nearby for food, in a single file, as if drilling.

He had almost forgotten how to enjoy such an hour, how to stop counting days, missions, kills. He breathed deeply. The afternoon was warm. There was a dreamlike air of isolation. He sat with her happily, letting the world move on without him. Their talk was filled with long, unanxious pauses. Quietly they spoke to each other, as if waiting meanwhile for the shy inner person to emerge.

At first he thought that he was learning something of Japan as it really was, but slowly he began to doubt that. She was her father’s daughter, not entirely Japanese. She was somewhere between Japan and the West, unique, just as the remote, soft-singing islands in the Pacific were between.

He felt himself drawn gently forth. She had that gift of silence that surpasses speech, the elusiveness that allows itself to be endowed. He smiled when she confessed to wanting to be an actress. It was so unthinkable. She seemed so completely fine and unequipped. She was determined, though, even to an exact ambition. It was modest, as perhaps a constellation seems modest: to be in a single great film, only that; to be part of something that people all over the world would acclaim, and in which through the years she would always be the same.

“You want to be a goddess forever,” Cleve said.

She felt for the answer in the grass beneath her fingertips and spoke to it.

“That would be perfect.”

“Of course.”

There was a long pause. They lay in the cool grass, side by side, unwilling to do anything that might change it.

“What is your ambition?” she asked after a while.

Cleve closed his eyes. There had been many ambitions, all of them true at the time. They were scattered behind him like the ashes of old campfires, though he had warmed himself at every one of them. Now an ambition had been forced upon him, but he hesitated. The innocence of a girl could have no values by which to judge him. What is your ambition?

“It’s hard to trace,” he said. “It was simple at first. When I was a boy I wanted to be like my father. He’s retired now, but he was in the navy. A captain.”

His eyes were closed. He was trying to pare away the complications of a lifetime.

“For a long time I never even bothered to consider anything else. I was going to the naval academy, like he did. It was understood. My brothers could do anything they chose, but I was the oldest. I had a responsibility.”

“You went?”

“Oh, yes. Not for very long. You took a physical the day you arrived, and I didn’t pass. It seems funny now, but it was very serious. There were a lot of jokes during the war about old women on streetcars saying, ‘What is a fine, healthy young man like you doing out of uniform?’ None of them ever asked me, but I was ready. ‘Madam,’ I was going to say, ‘I have albumin in my urine.’”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“It’s not important. It’s only important not to have it if you’re going to be a naval officer. My youngest brother finally went to Annapolis, so that made up for it in a way. By then I was grateful. It sort of left me to myself a little.”

“How many brothers are you?”

“Three,” Cleve replied. “An unusual family. Not one of us fought in the war. Not even my father. He commanded things, of course, a cruiser once, but never where there was fighting. That’s really why he retired. He was sure he’d never overcome the disadvantages of that. It was worse for me, though. I joined the Air Force when the war was almost over. I went ‘overseas’ just as everybody else was coming back. Not even to a place where there had been war, at that. To Panama. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes. The canal.”

“That’s right.”

He could hear the ducks. He opened his eyes to glance at them, white as handkerchiefs against the water’s edge.

“It was Panama,” he said softly. “You know what fighters are? The airplanes?”

She nodded.

“I really started flying them there.”

“Dangerous, neh?” she said. “My father says it takes bravery.”

“In a way,” Cleve answered. “I can’t explain it. At first it’s dangerous. Then it changes. It’s a sport. You belong to it. More than that. Finally it becomes, I don’t know, a refuge. The sky is the godlike place. If you fly it alone, it can be everything.”

He stopped talking and then found he wanted to go on.

“One Sunday, like this, it was in the early summer, there was Korea. I couldn’t wait to go. I thought I knew what I was supposed to do.”

“What is that?”

“The point is,” he said, “you do a thing well. You devote yourself to it, and after a while pride arrives, plain, fatal pride. You’re happy in yourself, at last. You do something well, like your wanting to be in one good picture, one really fine one.

“Well, here is the place where the fighter pilots live, and if you shoot down five planes you join a group, a core of heroes. Nothing less can do it.”

“You’ve done that?”

“Oh, no. I’ve shot down one.”

“A man like yourself, perhaps,” she said.

“I hope so. I hope it was no frightened boy. I want this to be the end, anyway. And when you make your last appearance, before whatever audience you have, you want it to be your real performance, to say, somehow, remember me for this. I’ve never said that to anyone.

“You know, truth doesn’t always come from truthful men. I have this colonel, wing commander, who would never stand in awe of truth; but he said it one day, one miserable morning: ‘There are a few men who go beyond the rest.’ If it’s fallen to you to do that, there’s no other way. You ask for my ambition: it’s that. Not to fail.”

“And afterward?”

He opened his hands.

“But what will you do?” she asked. “What do you want to do?”

He did not answer.

In the spring afternoon they lay, the light falling on them. There was no future or past. There was the slow, immortal beating of his blood, somehow in time with hers he wanted to imagine.

“We must go,” she said at last.

“Not yet.”

“Please. It’s late.”

He sat up.

“Will I see you tomorrow?”

“I hope.”

Another day. Cleve began to try to plan it. He wanted to be able to present it to her, perfect, like a gift.

They stood for a minute before they left, leaning on the bicycles and watching the ducks. He thought, as the day faded and they made their way back through the dusk, of what he had not said. To come back. To stay in Japan. It was not impossible. He suddenly felt the light-headedness of thinking that he had not passed the time of choices. He left Miyata’s reluctantly and drove by taxi through a city he was beginning to feel he knew. He arrived at the Hosokawa as soft as a man waking from sleep.