She was watching the dark silhouettes of figures passing the squares of light in the windows of the houses on the other side of the road when she heard a faint tapping noise coming from the upstairs room. This house was full of strange noises. Its wooden floorboards and beams often creaked at night, and Elly had occasionally heard scurrying sounds in the ceiling that she assumed were mice or rats, though she had yet to see them.
She set down her mending and climbed the steps to Fergus’ study. The room was pitch black. She groped through the darkness to find the light switch, which was awkwardly placed halfway along the side wall, and gave a little cry of pain as she barked her shin on the metal trunk where Fergus kept part of his chaotic cache of old letters and newspaper cuttings.
When she switched on the light the tapping stopped for a moment, and then began again, even more frantically. Behind the half-opened curtains, she could see the shadowy shape of a very large moth, trapped between the paper screens and the window. The moth’s wings thrummed desperately against the glass as it struggled to escape from the enclosed space. Wondering how the insect had got in there in the first place, Elly slid the paper screen back a little way, unfastened the stiff wooden catch on the window and tried to open the window as far as she could. She wanted to steer the panic-stricken creature towards the opening, but the harder she tried, the more it retreated into the inaccessible space between the screen and the window. Its wings had left little smudges of powder on the glass pane.
Through the window, when she opened it, she could see out into the street below and smell the warm damp scent of evening — the smell of approaching summer. A passer-by stopped outside her house to light a cigarette. She saw the brief flare of the match in the darkness, and the glowing tip of the cigarette as the smoker inhaled a deep lungful of nicotine. Elly had given up smoking soon after they moved into this house. The presence of cigarettes in the fragile wood-and-paper building made her nervous. Seeing the smoker in the street outside, though, she had a sudden longing to light up a cigarette herself.
She left the window open and pulled the paper screen shut, hoping that the moth would find its own way out into the fresh night air. Fergus’ duffel coat was now hanging on a peg on the wall, and she resisted the urge to check whether the purple poetry book was still in one of its pockets. Instead, she surveyed the crowded landscape of his desk. Sure enough, there was a packet of Peace cigarettes, half concealed by the fraying towel that Fergus used as a typewriter cover. Without moving the packet, Elly carefully extracted one cigarette and held it to her nose, inhaling the scent of tobacco.
Still carrying the cigarette, she made her way back downstairs and picked up the brown envelope from the table. Although it had been sealed, the damp air seemed to have loosened the gum, and she realized that it would be quite easy to open the envelope without tearing the paper.
A long-forgotten memory surfaced unexpectedly in her mind: a memory of the day when she and her brother Ken, aged about twelve and nine, had opened some of their father’s letters by holding them over the steam from a kettle. Father had been mysteriously absent for some time, and they had somehow persuaded themselves that the letters would reveal where he was and what he was doing. She remembered the guilty excitement she had felt as they peeled open the first of the envelopes, but all they had found inside were boring requests for the payment of long-overdue bills.
Elly extracted her sharpest knife from a drawer in the kitchen and, without giving herself time to reflect on what she was doing, slid its blade under the sealed flap of the brown envelope on the table. It opened with ease.
Inside was a rectangular bundle of something wrapped in thin brown paper. More recklessly now, she tore open the paper wrapping — it would be easy enough to replace — and allowed the contents to spill out on to the table. Photographs. Of course. She should have guessed.
About twenty grainy photographs. She leafed through them, examining each in turn. They seemed to be photos taken during the war, presumably in China, though it looked to Elly more like South East Asia. The first half-dozen showed some kind of market, with women squatting next to baskets of fruit and vegetables and men carrying their wares suspended from poles balanced on their shoulders. Then there were a couple of anonymous shots of a column of soldiers approaching along a muddy road lined by palm trees and sugar cane. The landscape reminded Elly of the countryside around her old home in Bandung. Next came street scenes — a burned-out row of warehouses, and a couple of images of civilians pushing laden handcarts along a bombed-out road.
Elly turned these over and stared at the photo that she found beneath — an underexposed and blurry image of what looked at first like the aftermath of a large bonfire: a great pile of charred logs and sticks. It took her several moments to realize what she was looking at: the sticks had once been arms and hands, the logs were thighs and hip bones. She put it down with a shudder of revulsion, and skimmed over the next two photos, which showed the same scene shot from slightly different angles. Below these were some photos of a group of three men standing in front of the smouldering ruins of a cluster of huts in a clearing in the forest. Two of the men wore Japanese military uniform, while the other was an older-looking man in civilian dress, presumably Chinese. Most of these shots had been taken from a distance, but one from relatively close. There was a black shadow across one corner of this last photo, where the photographer had accidentally placed a thumb in front of the camera lens, but the faces of the military men were still visible.
Elly spread the photographs out on the table and stared at them for a while. They told her nothing. Nothing about Vida. Nothing about Fergus. Nothing except for the fact that war was appalling, and she knew that already.
She hunted in the kitchen cupboard until she found a brown paper bag which she carefully cut up to rewrap the photographs. She put the bundle back into the envelope, sealed it and placed it again on the table, but this time as far as possible from the photo of Maya in the children’s home, as if to create a space between the little girl and the horrors in the envelope.
Then she lit the cigarette.
CHAPTER 10
Sitting in the café facing the mirror, Jun could see the reflections of the two women deep in conversation at the table behind him. The Fox had her arms resting on the table and was leaning forward towards the other woman — the half-foreign-looking woman who had been sitting next to him in the bookshop. Though he couldn’t hear what they were saying, he could observe their gestures and expressions. The Fox looked relaxed and smiling, but the other woman was stiff and uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to like it when the Fox touched her. Who was she, and what was going on here? Was the Fox trying to recruit the other woman to her spy network?
He jotted down some impressions in his notebook, and then realized that he was going to need at least a temporary name for the other woman, until he could find out who she really was. After watching her face and movements for a while, he decided to call her the Rabbit. A cautious, compact animal, likely to hide in a hole when approached. He was pleased with that name. It made him smile to himself.
He was halfway through his lunch when he noticed the Fox take a package out of her handbag and pass it to the Rabbit, who sat holding it on her lap for a while before putting it into her own bag. When the two women rose to go, Jun counted out the cash, ready to pay his bill, and waited until they were almost out of the door before quickly leaving his payment in the metal tray at the cash desk and hurrying out into the street, where the sun had started to shine again, and a thin haze of vapour was rising from the damp pavement.
He had assumed that the women would both return to the bookshop for the rest of the meeting, but in fact they separated in the street outside, the Fox going back into the Lotus Bookshop building, while the Rabbit set off walking briskly down the alleyway. Jun made an instant decision. He had plenty of information about the Fox already, and would be able to pick up her trail later, but the Rabbit was a mystery that needed to be solved. He w
aited until she was about to turn at the junction with the main road, and then set off to follow her.
She headed for the main road and reached the tram stop just as a southbound tram was drawing to a halt. Jun sprinted and managed to leap on to the same tram as it started moving. Luckily, the Rabbit had taken a seat at the back, and the tram was almost full. He didn’t want to get too close to her. He knew that she had seen his face as they sat side by side in the bookshop, and was afraid she might realize that he was tailing her.
He stood in the corner nearest to the driver’s seat, and watched the Rabbit as she opened her handbag and took out the package that the Fox had given her. She held the package for a while, running her hands over it several times before returning it to her bag. For the rest of the journey, she just stared out of the window, occasionally fiddling with something — a bracelet or a watch — on her left wrist, as though it were some kind of lucky charm. Her broad face, her square-cut brown-black hair and the dark line of her eyebrows reminded Jun of a half-Japanese, half-Russian woman who used to play the piano and sing at some of Colonel Brodsky’s parties. He noticed how the elderly man sitting next to the Rabbit kept glancing at her askance, as though also trying to figure out where she came from. But the Rabbit paid no attention, seemingly lost in her own thoughts.
When the tram neared the Shinbashi stop, the Rabbit rose to her feet and picked up her carrier bag. Jun waited as long as he could before stepping down from the tram behind her. Without pausing or looking around, she walked purposefully across the main road and into one of the narrow streets that led towards the foot of a steep hill. The streets here were lined with two-storey wooden houses that must have been built before the war. Some looked rather shabby, while others had bright displays of potted plants beside their doorsteps. Now that the sun had come out again, housewives were putting their bedding out to air on the balconies. The Rabbit stopped in front of one of these houses, extracted her key from her bag and let herself in through the front door.
It was a modest little house. Jun would have expected her to live in something more stylish and Western. The place looked reasonably well kept — there were no broken window frames and no tiles missing from the roof — but, like the woman who lived there, it seemed quiet and self-contained. The house next door had a window box filled with a riot of red and pink geraniums, but there was nothing to distinguish the Rabbit’s house except for a large bushy conifer growing beside the entrance and a rather unusual brass doorbell, like a miniature temple bell, which hung to the right of the front door.
Jun stood for a while on the other side of the road watching the building, but found that he could see nothing through the dusty panes of glass in the window. It would be better to come back here after dark. He had learned that night was the best time to watch people in their houses, when their shadows were silhouetted and enlarged by the lights within the building. He did, though, carefully copy the names that were engraved in Roman letters and phonetic katakana on a small plate on the gatepost: F. and E. Ruskin. Then he headed back by tram to Kanda, to monitor the rest of the meeting in the Lotus Bookshop.
It was early evening, though not yet dark, when Jun returned to the house below Atago-yama. As he waited for dusk to fall, out of curiosity, he climbed the steep path that led to the summit of the rocky hill. It was quiet here. The only sounds to be heard were the voices of crickets trilling in the thick groves of bamboo that lined the path. At the top of the hill was a small plateau and, in the shadow of two tall radio towers, a crimson wooden gateway that led to a shrine. There was a large carp pond to one side of the shrine, with a wooden boat tied up among the rushes that lined its banks. The waters of the pond were filled with the last glow of daylight. The boat was like a mirage, floating in the evening sky high above the noises and smells of the Tokyo evening. Jun took a seat on a bench beside the pond, reading his samurai adventure story as he waited for the darkness to fall. It was only when the surface of the pond faded from coppery-gold to black, and a latticework of lights began to spread across the landscape below the hill, that he set off again briskly down the path and took his station outside the house that belonged to F. and E. Ruskin.
The ground floor of the house, when he reached it, was now filled with warm lamplight, and through the window he could see the top of the Rabbit’s bent head as she focused on some invisible task. There seemed to be no one else in the house. As he stood in a dark gap between two houses on the opposite side of the road, watching and waiting, Jun found his mind drifting back to Karafuto, remembering how he used to walk back from school through evenings like this, up the steep track through the forest to the little row of identical wooden miners’ cottages, with his satchel bumping against his back. He had always felt ravenously hungry by the time he headed home, and had always been able to pick out the lights of his house from the distance: Kiyo had brought back some red paper from a school art class once and pasted it as a decoration over their bedroom window, and the single square of red light had shone like a beacon from the crest of the hill . . .
His attention must have wandered for a moment, because he hadn’t noticed the Rabbit move from her seat in the front room, but suddenly realized that she was no longer there.
A light went on abruptly in the upstairs window of the house, and now he could see her standing by the upper window. She was leaning across the paper screen, one arm extended. Her breasts were outlined against the screen by the light shining from behind her. He was afraid that she would look out and see him staring at her house, so he turned aside and lit a cigarette, behaving like a passer-by who had just paused for a moment on his journey home from college.
Then she was downstairs again, clearly visible in the front room, standing with something in her hand. A knife. He watched her cut open a packet — presumably the envelope that the Fox had given her, and sift through its contents, once and then twice. He wasn’t near enough to see the contents clearly, but from their general size and shape, he guessed that they were probably postcards or photographs. She disappeared from view for a while, and Jun found himself staring at nothing but the bright blank squares of the window.
He could hear the faint sounds of dance music, which drifted out from the house into the night air. A little later he caught sight of the Rabbit again for just a moment. Her arms were stretched above her head and her body was swaying gently back and forth, as though she was dancing by herself to the music. Then she moved away, the sounds of music ceased and the house was plunged into darkness.
* * *
As he walked in through the front door of the Zero Club on his return that evening, his head still full of images of the Rabbit, Jun heard the slamming of doors and sounds of shouting. A mood of panic was in the air.
‘Goto, come quick!’ cried a voice — the German, Kaspar. ‘Guest Three. We’ve got a problem.’
Jun almost collided with Goto, who was running at full speed across the hallway. The sergeant grabbed him by the arm. ‘We’re going to need you,’ he said. ‘This guy’s a Soviet Korean.’ He propelled Jun into the section of the Zero Club that he had never entered before. ‘He’s speaking Russian. Interpret, but don’t do anything else. Got that? And keep your mouth shut afterwards.’
The narrow corridor that ran along the Guest Wing of the building was lit by two dim, naked bulbs. Jun could hear muffled noises from somewhere ahead, and see Nakano and Mishima standing, staring through an open door: one of the doors that was normally padlocked. As he approached them, the noises grew louder. They seemed human and inhuman at the same time. Kaspar pushed passed the others, beckoning Jun to follow him into the room.
In size and shape, it was much like Jun’s own bedroom, but this room was furnished like a prison cell — like the cell in Aomori where Jun had lain on his mattress waiting for the world to come to him.
There were green-painted metal shutters over the single window, and the only piece of furniture in the room was an iron bedstead, on which lay the gaunt and contorted form of a g
rey-haired man, half covered by a tangled sheet. The man’s left wrist was handcuffed to the bedstead, his chest was arched upwards, and his eyes were rolling wildly from side to side. He was muttering rapidly and incoherently in bursts of speech interrupted by great, rasping gasps of breath.
Kaspar had grabbed hold of the man’s right arm, which was flailing wildly in the air. Jun could see a vivid red line around the man’s wrist, as though it had been chafed by a rope, and the marks of dark bruises on his upper arms. He was so emaciated that his eyes seemed to be sunk deep in his skull. Beads of sweat were running from the man’s forehead and cheeks and soaking into the sheet.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Kaspar urgently, for some reason lowering his voice to a whisper, as though afraid of being overheard.
‘Let me go. Let me go! The factory’s burning!’ the man yelled abruptly, his words trailing off into a long, drawn-out groan.
‘I think he’s having hallucinations,’ said Jun. ‘He’s just talking nonsense.’ He turned to the man and spoke in Russian, ‘It’s OK. Be calm. We’ll get you help.’
The Russian words seemed to have some effect on the man, for his thrashing stopped as he tried to fix his unfocused gaze on Jun.
‘You’ll have to get a doctor,’ Jun said to Kaspar. ‘He’s having some sort of a fit.’ But Kaspar had turned away from him and was speaking to the men outside the door. ‘What are you standing there for? Get the stuff, Goto!’ he barked.
The man on the bed was still staring at Jun. Despite Kaspar’s hold on his arm, he had managed to bend his wrist and grab hold of Jun’s hand. The man’s hard, dry skin was burning hot, and his grip was crushing.
‘Help me.’ The man was speaking softly but distinctly to Jun. ‘Help me. They’re killing me.’
‘Who are you?’ asked Jun. ‘What are you doing here?’
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 12