Child of Fortune

by Yuko Tsushima

  ‘It need involve nothing more than talking about your troubles, your memories, gossip about other people, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And our department will have to keep a check on your health for a while. Five months pregnant, I think you said? There’s too much fat for five months.’

  ‘What this means is that the stress underlying such rapid and major changes in your body suddenly, now, has nowhere to go. This, paradoxically, is an unnatural state which just might result in some slight trouble. You seem to be pretty robust and not prone to illness, so I don’t expect there’s any risk, but still, just to be doubly sure …’

  ‘That’s right. I imagine this must come as a complete shock to you, but it all depends on how you look at it, you know. Every day, here, we have to deal with miscarriages, unavoidable abortions, and stillbirths, so one could say that you’ve been relatively lucky in that you’ve had no physical pain.’

  ‘All the same, why didn’t you see a doctor before? Is it true that you haven’t been to a hospital at all?’

  ‘Actually, in a case like yours I’d have expected you to come in sooner than you would with a genuine pregnancy. We can usually identify the problem and put a stop to things at that point, before the patient reaches the condition you’re in now …’

  Kōko must have remained absolutely composed throughout, so as not to worry the doctors. She managed not to be kept unduly long at the hospital and not to be especially late at the music store. Only one girl of seven had been left cooling her heels. Kōko started on her lesson by rote and continued through to the last pupil of the day, a ten-year-old boy. Nothing special happened. The children sat before the piano, dreamy but stolid, and banged the keys. If anything, Kōko took more care than usual to correct the positions of their soft fingers with the black-rimmed nails.

  After work she had dinner in a restaurant and returned to the apartment. The moment she took off her shoes, the strength left her body. She sat awhile on the step that led from the entrance hall, then went into her bedroom and crawled into bed without undressing. But she couldn’t seem to get to sleep. Her abdomen was still tender and distended. Nothing had changed: the fact weighed on her mind, it made her head ache. She tossed and turned, moaning aloud. In spite of everything, she couldn’t stop lying in a way that favored her stomach.

  Anything would have been easier to accept. Her whole body burned with humiliation. She could have stood the sight of anything they might have shown her: a fetus like the lungfish in the aquarium, a fetus like a lizard, even a plain lump would have been better than this. Nothing. How was it possible? What did they mean, nothing? She simply couldn’t comprehend.

  Nothingness was beyond her ability to grasp. She had once tried to approach the concept of outer space in some fashion of her own, but even before its boundlessness could terrify her it had made her feel sick. She was still in grade school then. It had seemed uncanny that she was actually living within something of which she had only the remotest conception.

  That night Kōko’s troubled dreams were filled with nebulae which she’d seen illustrated in some encyclopedia. Cancer, the Pleiades cluster, the nebula of Andromeda: countless stars sending a clear light into the purple-tinged ultramarine of space. They were beautiful.

  7

  Kōko took the next day off and stayed in her room. She didn’t go out or see anybody the following day, either.

  On the evening of the third day Osada came to see her without telephoning.

  ‘Are you still planning to have it?’ he said as soon as he was seated in the kitchen.

  Kōko was unable to find a reply, and Osada didn’t seem to have expected one anyway for he went on, stumbling over the words:

  ‘The child will be illegitimate, then … That might not matter to the parents, but what about the child itself? Even a divorce upsets the children more than you might think, so it’s obvious there’ll be some pretty serious hangups involved … But I’ll recognize the child if it actually arrives … I’m not happy about any of this, but I’ll go that far. I’ll pay child support, too, though it won’t amount to much … If it’s mine I want to do the right thing …’

  Osada broke off and looked Kōko in the face. She swallowed painfully and lowered her eyes, but she could tell that he was rubbing fiercely at his nose. So Osada had been brooding over this for three days: the thought unloosed her exhaustion again, and her body seemed to cave in like mud.

  ‘… You wouldn’t discuss it with me when you could have done something about it, no, damn you, you had to leave it till now … Anyway, I can’t marry you, but I’m prepared to do my basic duty as the child’s father. Since there seems to be no question that it is mine, I won’t try to duck out of it … Are you listening? What’s the matter? Suits you better to keep quiet, does it?’

  Osada drew a deep breath and released it softly. They faced each other in an interminable silence. Kōko didn’t dare lift her head to see his expression.

  How should she reply? She would have given anything to be able to unwind with him, to have a good laugh. What had gone wrong? Though she might have lost a lover, she didn’t want to lose Osada as a friend at least – a friend she could meet and share a joke with now and then. Was that impossible? Was it so unreasonable to ask? She saw her sister’s eyes again, and Hatanaka’s, and Mrs Doi’s. How she had wanted to talk with Doi’s wife. But she’d never quite had the courage to make the first move. While she always believed that the pain they both felt would simply dissolve if they could just talk things over, instead she had put together an image of the woman entirely out of guesswork and stormed it with emotions of every kind: hatred, bitterness, contempt.

  After a pause – she had no idea how long it lasted – Osada suddenly stood up.

  ‘We’ll have plenty of time to talk from now on, anyway. I’ll be calling in as often as I can.’

  Kōko nodded as she got reluctantly to her feet, then followed Osada to the door. When he had put his shoes on, he peered into her face. ‘You don’t look very well. You should try not to overdo it, you know. Oh, yes, what did they say at the hospital the other day?’

  For the first time, Kōko reacted: ‘Nothing special … but … why do you have to leave? It seems a pity … when we haven’t made …’

  Kōko was at a loss. Under her breath she was asking herself: had they ever really lain in each other’s arms? What had there been between her and this man? The question drove everything else from her mind.

  ‘You can’t be serious! It doesn’t matter how much you want it, you’ve got to go easy from now on.’ Osada burst out laughing and laid his hand on her shoulder; Kōko staggered. ‘You must take it easy, you know, when you’re expecting. Anyway, I’ll come again soon, if it’s all right with you.’

  With another smile in her direction, Osada departed.

  When she closed the door behind him the headache that had been developing while he was there suddenly became unbearable, and she climbed hastily into bed. I haven’t eaten properly for three days now, she told herself, her thoughts leaving Osada already. She wasn’t hungry – the very idea of food was nauseating. Her stomach was lined with a dull ache and a gassy, bloated feeling, as when she’d once eaten tempura fried in rancid oil. Her former appetite must have gone for good; she resented the hospital doctors all the more on that account.

  Kōko closed her eyes and curled into a ball. A girl appeared, far off, adrift in the darkness that filled her eyes. It was herself; a child of about ten, sloppily playing Hanon in the tiny sitting room. In the garden poking at earthworms with a twig, with her brother who was back from the forest home, not long before he died of a cold. Standing in a corner of the living room reciting the multiplication tables for her mother, who’d lost patience with her awful arithmetic grades, while her sister snickered. The walk to school along a lane that meandered among temples. With her brother at dinnertime, lifting bits of liver to their mouths one by one, under protest, at their mother’s stern bidding.

  Kōko was in
the third grade when her brother died. After leaving him for three years in the institution, their mother had at last been free enough from other cares to bring him home, and her unfeigned pleasure was so obvious that Kōko was quite put out. She bought him baseball gear, a bicycle, and even a TV set, in the days before everyone had one. His biggest thrill on arriving home, however, was discovering the chicken run in the yard. They must have kept chickens at the institution, because he went to work at once to collect worms. Kōko tagged along after him, fascinated by all his doings. And her brother, with an air of great dignity, assigned her this and that little task. He could call her name distinctly – Koh-ko! – not slurring it like the rest of his speech.

  But quite suddenly he was dead, before he ever settled into the special class he’d begun attending at a city school. During the two years he was at home he visited the institution on vacations and wrote often to its teachers and pupils – though his ‘letters’ consisted of strings of all the simple characters and numbers he knew, followed by a note from his mother giving his latest news.

  Being still very young, Kōko had been ready to believe that, like her brother, her dead father might come back one day from a dark forest. Then when she saw and touched her brother’s corpse, and saw it transformed to ashes in an urn, she came slowly to realize the meaning of death with a new, deep sense of loss. Neither her brother nor her father would return again from the dark forest. Death meant never being able to see someone again. And Kōko had begun to blame herself for what had happened to them both. If she’d only been a nicer baby, her father mightn’t have had to die. If she’d only done what her brother had told her more often … Why, oh why, hadn’t she tried harder to please him?

  After Kayako’s birth, Kōko’s mother had once remarked that she wished the baby had been a boy. Since Shōko already had a son, Kōko couldn’t understand her mother’s disappointment. She told her so and her mother had answered –Oh, but what good is that when her little boy doesn’t look like anyone on our side?– Then she’d laughed as the absurdity of what she’d said struck home. As a baby, Kayako had so closely resembled Kōko that Shōko liked to say –She looks as if you produced her all by yourself.–

  Her brother died before Kōko had a chance to realize he was a special child. She couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing or not. Her sister had always hidden his existence from her classmates and boyfriends, but he had never been a source of shame to Kōko. The world in which he lived was peaceful and free, a fairy-tale world.

  She had talked about him once to Doi, and about how, before Kayako was born, it had seemed quite possible that a boy like her brother was on the way. This was partly the natural nervousness of a new mother-to-be, but perhaps anticipation had also played a part. When told the baby was a healthy girl, she had been relieved and dejected in the same instant.

  Doi’s attitude was: –Then why not give it another try by having mine?–

  Kōko had frowned at this breezy remark. –It would be a serious matter, if a child like that actually arrived.–

  –Yes, but it’d be all the more lovable.–

  When Doi put it so clearly, Kōko could say no more. She was grateful, as her brother’s sister. She welcomed Doi’s honesty, the honesty of one who’d been raised in a healthy family with both parents, and who now had a healthy, intelligent wife and child of his own, and thus had never learned to count his blessings. At the same time, she couldn’t help feeling how meaningless their affair must be for him. Like a child, he simply wanted a peek into a world he didn’t know.

  That evening, Kayako also came to see her. Kōko’s eyes refused to open until Kayako (who must have let herself in with her own key) had prodded her shoulder any number of times. Then she took longer still to comprehend that it was actually Kayako sitting at her bedside.

  ‘What? What are you doing here? It’s late … Has something happened?’ Kōko sat up in bed. The room was in darkness, but Kayako’s eyes were clearly visible, glinting in the light from the kitchen. Silvery upturned eyes. After a while Kayako answered, with a catch in her voice:

  ‘Mom … are you going to have a baby?’

  Kōko nodded without stopping to think.

  ‘Then it’s true … I thought you must be terribly ill … Yesterday, Miho finally told me. I was shocked. Why did you keep it a secret? When I’m the one most concerned …’

  As there was nothing Kōko could say, she got up and went into the kitchen. It was not yet nine by the kitchen clock.

  Kayako went on excitedly to describe her aunt’s touchiness, and all her own forebodings, then she eyed her mother’s body uneasily again and broke into little giggles of bewilderment. When she had laughed for a moment or two she stood up, red-faced. ‘I have to go, I sneaked out without telling anyone. I just had to ask you about the baby … Are you all right on your own?’

  Kōko nodded and gazed at Kayako’s face, but Kayako immediately turned her back. ‘Well, goodbye …’

  Though she could tell the child hoped her mother would stop her, Kōko simply saw Kayako out. She was bleary-eyed, with a violent headache.

  What mattered right now was to get some sleep. As she was taking a couple of aspirin, she noticed her reflection in the window where she’d forgotten to close the curtains. She studied it, and it returned her gaze. It floated, outlined sharply in the night sky. Kōko stared hard at the figure in growing perplexity.

  Four days later, Osada phoned and suggested a meal somewhere. Kōko started to say no, but on second thoughts asked him to come over to the apartment because she wanted to talk. ‘About seven then, if that’s all right,’ he said, and hung up. Kōko rubbed her belly thoughtfully after putting down the phone: if she wasn’t mistaken, the swelling was gradually going down.

  I’ll never get him to forgive me, will I? With a heave of her shoulders she let out a sigh. She’d spent a week now in a daze, clutching the bedclothes, lost in dreams of childhood scenes. Though she’d done nothing but sleep and eat, the week had slipped by amazingly fast. Eventually, however – for all her efforts to recapture those happy moments from the past – she would have to come to terms with the doctors’ judgment. Kōko knew already that there was no way to fight it.

  She allowed that the pregnancy had been imaginary: that wasn’t the problem. What remained beyond belief was that she had brought it on herself. Why would I have imagined I was pregnant, to the point of changing physically? Me? I didn’t want to get pregnant. I was afraid of it, but I shrugged off the risk; it wouldn’t really happen, I thought, not at my age. Then I assumed that this carelessness had led to an actual pregnancy. And once I’d got myself pregnant, I decided – but not boldly, no, only with immense difficulty – to try accepting this embryonic life for my own and Kayako’s sake; but I was still short of confidence even then, and so I told my sister and – as it turned out in the end – made the fact known to Osada.

  She went over what had happened again and again, but it never amounted to anything more. She simply could not see where she might be making a mistake. Since she couldn’t understand what had happened, she supposed it must have some wholly foreign cause. The doctors, however, had said that unlike ordinary illnesses this one was a case of self-delusion, pure and simple. It would never have happened if she hadn’t thought it was happening. She was like the frog in Aesop’s fable who tried to imitate an ox till he blew up and burst. ‘As big as this? As big as this?’ asked the father frog as he puffed up his stomach with great gulps of air. She was certain she hadn’t wanted a baby, and yet they told her she’d wanted one so badly that she had puffed up her stomach herself.

  Most bewildering of all, these two things had both been real, and both at the same time. Neither was a figment, nor a fleeting image. She’d believed, in spending her time the way she did, that this reality was the only one there was; simultaneously, this same Kōko had been pumping air into her belly, wishing her way to pregnancy … But when had she split in two? She didn’t know. And how was she going to piece
her two selves back together again? She didn’t know. The only time she’d noticed passing had been spent in one way: as a genuine expectant mother.

  As she sank deeper into thought, Kōko was attracted again to the hard light, indistinguishable to the naked eye, of the stars scattered in space. Light is time, she thought. Two thousand light years. Five million light years. Thirty-five million light years. Four billion light years. Light is time. Then darkness must be a release from time. Light, and its absence. But was there any darkness where one could truly escape the light? Diffracted light. Refracted light. The stars scattered in their trillions. Time scintillating. Primordial light. Light that pre-existed the galactic system. Time that could no longer be called time …

  Kōko shifted her eyes giddily from her stomach and breathed deeply. Her gaze swept over the frying pans and bowls on the kitchen shelves; perhaps, she thought, there are some things which the likes of me shouldn’t try to understand. There was a pain in her side like a cracked rib: she had never known that such loneliness existed. She realized she hadn’t shed a single tear since she went to the hospital. The badly cared-for, blackened pots and pans held Kōko’s absorbed gaze.

  That evening Osada arrived a little early. Before he had even sat down, Kōko nerved herself to speak:

  ‘Uh … Look, I’m sorry to have caused you so much worry by the way I’ve behaved … I’ve been thinking, too, and I’ve realized I can’t reasonably go ahead with it …’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Osada’s eyes widened. Her mouth still open, but unable to continue, Kōko searched his face.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you saying you want an abortion?’

  Kōko nodded faintly. ‘Yesterday, at the hospital … So let’s forget it ever happened …’

  As she bowed her head in apology, and went on bowing, Kōko herself was startled at the alibi she’d seized on so abruptly – the moment it entered her head, in fact. It seemed she couldn’t tell him, after all, that the pregnancy had been imaginary. With luck, she hoped, Osada would be so struck by the pitiful implications of an abortion that he would take himself off, with awe and sympathy for a woman’s sex. The very sight of Osada in his denim jacket, ever the reluctant adult, had made her look for cues, testing him for possible excuses. She didn’t like doing it, but she failed to see why she should tell him what had actually happened, either.