The Gossamer Fly

by Meira Chand

  ‘There is something I want to ask you, Frances. You are one of our oldest members. Can you think of anything we can possibly do to help Jean? You know, of course, what’s happened?’ Janet Okuda showed surprise as Frances shook her head. She leaned nearer, the bulge of her midriff distended under the soft blue fabric of her dress.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t know. But it was only last week. Her husband has gone off with a Japanese woman, someone he picked up in a bar. Sounds terribly cheap and tawdry to me. But he was always one for the bars and the women, we all know that. Being married to Jean never changed him. She has been so wonderful, of course, gone along with him from the beginning. Always said it was the way here and didn’t mean much, and that inflation would bring him home quicker than nagging. But look where it has landed her now. Don’t know what she’ll do. She’s still in a state of shock, and hopingit will just blow over.’

  Listening, Frances’ face grew tight and small. Natsuko saw thin lines beneath her eyes and the dry powderiness of her skin. Frances did not speak.

  ‘Talk to her, Frances. I want her to know we are all here if she needs us. It is most important she should feel our support.’ Frances nodded mutely.

  Later they went for more tea and passed the woman, Jean. Frances hesitated and momentarily stopped, but somebody already stood talking to her. They watched as Jean gave a small, bleak shrug and her words came clearly to Natsuko and Frances.

  ‘Sometimes people seem so different when you meet them abroad. Society here is so rigid, like a stiff flower arrangement, all spontaneity sacrificed to form. And people have to revert to form. They can’t live back here unless they do.’ Her voice was bitter, the splinters of pain welling up into her face.

  Natsuko looked up then and saw her mother staring fixedly at Jean. The agony in Frances’ face revealed something that had no shape. Then, quickly, she turned and walked on.

  But, sitting again on the edge of her chair, the cup perched on her knee, Frances’ eyes still flitted nervously over Jean again. Natsuko watched in apprehension. Although she understood nothing she felt her mother marooned upon a fragment of feeling, rushing further and further from solid shore. A shadow passed across Frances’s face, hovering behind her eyes or on the edge of spoken words. Slowly, this anxiety penetrated Natsuko, gathering in her, pulpy with her mother’s fear.

  Now, standing in the hospital corridor, she saw a short, stout Italian nun come out of a door and walk on towards the next. She was the one who had first shown Natsuko to her mother when she was born. Natsuko remembered her name, Sister Nina Rosa. In the middle of the corridor the nun stopped, bending awkwardly to tie a shoelace. Beneath her habit the backs of round calves appeared, and the end of short stockings about her knees. Straightening, she walked on, nodding as she passed Kazuo and the other nun. Natsuko saw her father smile briefly. Then, in his face, the eyebrows drew tightly together again, between them deep creases flared up into his forehead.

  Natsuko felt her insides gather into a small tight ball. Beyond the corridor the future pushed out, the dark shaft of a well, whose end she could not see. Behind her she felt sure Hiroko smiled quietly.

  5

  Not knowing what to do with them, realizing they should not always be left with the maid, Hiroko, Kazuo called them into the study with him. Placing his hands on the desk, pushing back the chair resignedly, he looked at them sitting upon the couch. Since Frances left for England he felt the weight of the children, they disturbed his work. Tidying the papers on the desk he placed reference books on Japanese sword fittings to the left, the sheets of the unfinished article on top, weighed down by a stone seal in the shape of a lion. On the paper ink had dried, thick and glossy. Verticle strips of cross-hatched characters stood out strongly from the page. April sun illuminated the manuscript, cutting through the loquat tree outside the window. He swivelled round in his chair to the blue glazed pot of the hibachi brazier beside him. Pressing his knees against it he picked the metal chopsticks out of powdered grey ashes, and turned the glowing charcoal at the centre. Raw warmth fanned up at him, he held his fingers to it.

  ‘You may draw the armour today.’ He looked proudly at the two fine suits sitting side by side in front of a screen. Had he been offered a similar chance, as a child, he would have felt honoured. Then these same suits of armour were locked away, in a stone storehouse in the garden of the family home. Their black lacquer boxes resembled house shrines and, like esoteric Bhuddist images, were opened only once a year, not for viewing, but for cleaning. Then, had his father allowed him this privilege, to touch, look and draw the mass of intricate metal plates and lacing that made up the armour, he would have been overwhelmed.

  For his childhood had held little light relief. It was study, lessons, and again more study punctuated by exams. Pressure built up for months before these exams, especially the ones for middle school. That day had been like a white-hot poker in his mind. His whole academic future, and the course of his life until the day he died, depended upon the passing of exams, and entry to the right academic spheres. Each examination took him deeper into life, nearer adulthood, further from the permissive pre-school years. Looking back he remembered those early, carefree years as the sun reflected in rockpools, as he caught tiny, burrowing sandcrabs on a beach in Shimoda. Or again he found them in the smells of disturbed grass, as he rushed through it one day, waving a butterfly net. He could still see the butterfly, yellow and huge, flitting before him against the sun. His eyes had watered with the effort of holding it pinned against the bright sky.

  Then he reached kindergarten age and the family had ceremoniously presented him with his first desk and a stout leather satchel. He was measured for a uniform of thick black serge. From then on the brightest orb in his life was the electric light on his desk. Play became filled with guilt, and the warning expressions of adults against such irresponsibility. Like ripples on the surface of a pond, the lifelong obligatory duties and debts of giri and on spread out from his small body, clearer, denser, further reaching with each year of life. The very state of living, he was taught, was a debt. Virtue could only be found in dedicating himself actively to the job of gratitude, to the repayment of each part of the debt. The layers of obligation started from the highest pinnacle, of Emperor and country, and spread out in a triangle through duties to parents, ancestors, teachers and work, down to the very basic duty to his own name. This must always be clear, admitting neither failure nor ignorance, fulfilling each Japanese propriety, observing respectful behaviour, never living beyond means, curbing all inappropriate displays of emotion, reputing all insult with honourable vendetta.

  They were the descendants of a samurai family, and that pride and dignity embued each action of Kazuo’s father. He instilled its traditions into his sons. A man must rise above danger, and bear pain without flinching. But the vendetta of the sword was only one of the virtues that may be neededupon occasion. Stoicism and self-control were equally required. Once, soon after he started kindergarten, his father had caught Kazuo playing with matches. Solemnly he had taken the box from him and struck a match. Taking Kazuo’s finger he pushed it into the flame, and briefly held it there. The pain had been intense, he remembered itstill, but more than that he felt his father’s eyes, boring deeper within him than any flame could reach.

  His father had also many famous tales of samurai stoicism. He remembered one well, told him soon after the match incident, about Count Katsuu, who died in 1899. When he was a boy his testicles had been torn by a dog. While a doctor operated on him, his father held a sword to his nose. ‘If you utter one cry,’ he told him, ‘you will die in a way that at least will not be shameful.’ This story had haunted Kazuo for months. He dreamed frequently of it in lurid detail, waking in the night, covered in sweat, biting his lips to make no sound, praying his father would never know his cowardice in facing this exemplary story.

  The noise of Natsuko’s feet, kicking the base of the couch, pulled him back from his thoughts. He cleared his throa
t and Riichi looked up, obedient. Natsuko just flopped back in the couch, lips pushed out in silent pout.

  He looked at them; and knew despair. Against his better judgement their upbringing was so different from his own. He begrudged them nothing of their mother’s culture, but there seemed no meeting point with his own. They were the products of the local international school, as Frances insisted they be educated in a westernised system, not the Japanese educational system. They must be global citizens, she had said. He looked at them, slouched and undisciplined, Western now in the worst sense, in spite of their Japanese blood. He loved them, but he had not foreseen this for his children when he married. Anger with Frances overwhelmed him. Could she not see clearly their children’s future? What hope had they here, growing up in this irresponsible way? They appeared to him inwardly soft, and outwardly slovenly. He wanted then fiercely to break through the ignorant net Frances had thrown about the children. He wanted them at least to understand that part of him within themselves. He wished them in every true sense to have a choice. Frances saw strength only in rebelling against convention, seizing happiness in spite of obstacles, emphasizing wherever she could the lonely stand of the individual. For Kazuo all strength was in conforming, in being part of the whole plan, in fulfilling to his best each obligation as he saw it. He could do no more than sympathize with Frances’ wish always to fight, to stand alone in the solitary confinement of some crochety, irrelevant and totally useless point of view. He wished his children to know there was another way.

  He was conscious of never learning to talk to them on their level. It was easier always to instruct, as he did the classes at the University, where his lectures on Japanese history were listened to with interest and respect for his learning. Opening the drawer of the desk he took from it paper and pencils. There was peace without Frances. He was unused yet to the novelty, and the thought was always with him. He wished she would never come back.

  Riichi drew quickly. Kazuo Akazawa was pleased at his interest. Perhaps, he thought, the boy felt the beauty of these tiny facets of metal, laced with braid and leather into wonderfully pliable armour. Or maybe the ridged bowls of the helmets, with their winged horns and silk tasselled bows, impressed him. He was hatching in small neat squares of plate firmly, as if each mattered to the whole design. His eyes moved from paper to armour and back again, bright and keen.

  Watching him Kazuo remembered the sword incident, and before that Riichi’s strong wish to learn kendo. In spite of Frances’ heated disapproval he clung on until she gave way. Kazuo wondered then if it was really too late? If he was to bring the two children in here each day, like this, and enlighten them in a consistent manner upon different aspects of their heritage. He had done little, in spite of all his own learning, to educate them in his culture. Whatever had rubbed off on his children was but a particle of all he could teach them. Until now Frances had had her way. And shutting the door of his study he lost himself in history and art, and felt replenished. So that, when he emerged, he could conduct himself in dignified resignation. Carefully, he had constructed a shell about himself. Now, in Frances’ absence, he felt like something frozen put out in the sun. For the first time he saw he had given his children almost nothing of himself. Now, while Frances was away, he would begin to rectify this. So he stood behind Riichi and began to explain.

  ‘The lacing is in the shikimi style, Riichi. Before that they laced in another way, the kibiki, but that had two disadvantages. It needed a great many holes to accommodate it, and much more braid. When wet it all became a terrible weight.’

  Natsuko was not drawing. From the corner of his eye he saw her blank page. Although only ten, he found her more difficult to reach than Riichi. She slid her eyes up sideways at him, in the same resentful manner as her mother. He must always wonder what he had done wrong, although he had yet to address her directly.

  ‘You don’t want to draw the armour, Natsuko?’

  ‘No.’

  He sighed. ‘Go and look out of the window. Perhaps there you will find something.’ He hoped she would not notice his defeat.

  She went. He watched her stand, belly pushed out to take her weight against the window, back arched, one foot crossed behind the other. Her casualness made him feel superfluous. She appeared compact and distant. It was easier with Riichi, he was seventeen, nearly an adult, and they had their gender in common. There were interests they might soon share, and in character he was more pliant. Something in Natsuko could not be led. He left her alone and returned to Riichi.

  All Natsuko could think was, she is gone. Gone. She will not come back. It is nearly as if she is dead. She could not believe the promise to return, in spite of her mother holding her close and saying, ‘It will not be for long. You know I couldn’t possibly leave you all for too long. It will be just a few weeks. I expect I shall be back before you know I have gone.’

  Crushed into her mother’s body, Natsuko had sensed her desperation. And in her mind she saw again now, far away on the tarmac, the door of the plane, shutting. The windows were tiny, giving nothing. She searched each disc separately for her mother’s face. But all she found was her own panic, flowing out in tears she could not stop. She had not once asked a question, afraid to hear the answers. But a few nights before her father sat on the edge of her bed, unasked, and talked mysteriously of what was wrong with her mother, and when she might return from England. Looking up at him from the pillow she had concentrated on his shadow, thrown by the bedside lamp onto the wall, and the moving silhouette of his lips as he talked. She knew she must wait, quite still, until the voice finished, before she could breathe again. She heard him say her mother was very ill. Yet the illness was not one seen in an X-ray or a blood test. Nor could a knife cut it out, or medicine repair it. She must heal on her own, from the inside out. And that might take a long time. There was yet no way to say how long. The words gave neither hope nor end. On the wall the silhouette of his lips moved rhythmically, a splinter of short hairs fanned up on the crown of his head.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear? Are you not interested, Natsuko? Can’t you even look at me while I talk?’ His voice cut into her suddenly, harshly. She turned, looking up at him then. But he was already standing up. Abruptly he switched off the light and walked from the room, saying only a sharp goodnight at the door.

  She was relieved he was gone, but after a while his words returned to her, shifting around in her, burrowing deeper and deeper until there was not a part of her left, without holes of pain and fear.

  Now, remembering, tears blurred her eyes and the study window before her. She hated this room, and wished their father would not call them to it. Lying at the back of the house, down a passage, it was dark. Except for one side, where she now stood, trees shrouded the windows, crowding against them, leaves ragged, sometimes fleshy, dusty in Summer, oily in rain, thick and black with evening light. In a breeze, claws of holly scratched against the glass. Even in Summer it was cool here, in an unnatural way.

  She stared at the lawn, sloping down to some conifers and Japanese yew trees. The grass was still yellowed and dead after the Winter, but in patches green bristles pushed through. In a sheltered spot the first buds of the cherry tree had already opened. Nearby fallen petals of magnolia lay strewn about, a rotted soggy brown, like pieces of wet toast. Riichi’s pencil scratched industriously in the silence behind her. Its concentration made Natsuko angry. She wanted to turn and stare disapprovingly at him. But then she would have to see the two suits of armour. They sat, side by side, in front of a low calligraphy screen.

  After the grandparents died and their house was sold, the armour came to them from the storehouse. She remembered the small building, tall as the house, with a metal door and walls two feet thick, windowless and sombre, filled with family treasure and junk. Now, free of their black lacquer boxes, supported on wooden frames the armour lived in the study, admired by many. The armour was designed to completely cover a warrior’s body. From stocky waists and breastplates
grew the flaps of skirts and shoulders. Hanging from these were leg guards and long loose arms with iron fingers. One body suit was blue laced with a brocaded dragon covering the cuirass, and a helmet of curled ear flaps. The other, threaded with red, head sunken deep between enormous shoulders, had flat horns soaring off the helmet. Side by side they sat together like sentinels, their presence chilling the room, projecting menace and disdain. The face masks of polished black iron, fierce enough to frighten bad spirits or enemies, were whiskered and bearded. The red-laced one had a stiff blond moustache, the blue one a soft white beard that spread sparsely over his chin, startling against the dark iron face. Their mouths grimaced wildly, filled with iron teeth. Each night, Natsuko thought of them, sitting below her bedroom in the study. Sometimes, even in daylight, their faces slipped between her thoughts. Then their presence seemed to corrode the house and all she could think of were the empty slits of their eyes.

  Just knowing they were behind her now, watching, waiting, made the walls grow tight about Natsuko, until they pressed in from all sides. In spite of her father and Riichi, sitting beside her, unaware, neutralising the room, she had to get out. Abruptly then she turned and ran, without a word of explanation.

  She came to the kitchen, knowing Hiroko would be there. Hiroko was preparing the lunch, lifting a small red octopus in a wire net strainer from a pot on the stove. Steam rose off the boiling water and the short, thick tentacles. Pink suckers puckered each leg like buttons. Hiroko took a knife to the chopping board as Natsuko watched, and sliced off the limbs. Inside the flesh was white and smooth. But Natsuko thought of the suckers, the waving legs, and knew she would not eat it. Her mother never cooked such things. From the boiling water steam frosted the window above the sink, and coated the air with a hot, rough smell. Each time Hiroko pressed down with the knife a muscle pulled at the side of her mouth.