‘This is Papa’s room,’ she says, opening the door wide enough for Yuji to see the brass bed-end, the big wardrobe, the vitreous gleam of the washstand. ‘And this one,’ she says, passing another door and going ahead to the end of the landing, ‘is mine.’
It is smaller than her father’s room, and almost half of it is taken up by a bed with a muslin canopy, a heaped quilt of ivory satin. At the far end of the room, under the window, is a dressing table littered with hairpins, perfume bottles, spools of ribbon. There are photographs there, too, in various decorative frames, and one of these she picks up, wipes carefully with her sleeve, and holds out to him. He crosses the room and takes it from her. It’s a small, informal picture of a young woman holding in her arms an unsmiling black-haired baby. Behind them is a window, a slatted shutter, the bough of some flowering tree.
‘Songlian,’ she says. ‘Songlian and me outside Papa’s house in Saigon . . . I didn’t want you to go home thinking I was one of those girls who makes things up about her life, you know, to make herself more interesting.’
He nods and gives the picture back to her. Did she honestly think he had not believed her, or is she showing him the picture so that he understands, fully, what she was trying to explain to him in the restaurant – that through her mother, through her mother’s mixed blood, she is, in part, an Asian girl? A quarter, an eighth, some fraction of her, not from the grey-stone streets in the painting on the landing but a member of that Great Asian Family the radio keeps lecturing them about. Is this what she wants him to know, to believe? He finds it rather ridiculous, but then, to his amazement, as she turns to replace the picture on the dressing table, he sees his hand reaching up to the back of her head and touching the place where her hair sweeps in a black stream behind one of her ears. She tenses, stiffens as if it was a gun or the blade of a knife he held to her neck, as if the slightest movement might destroy them both. Then she turns and stares at him, searches his face (for some mark of insincerity?), smiles, and sways towards him. They kiss, lightly at first, then more and more deeply.
‘Help me,’ she whispers. She is undoing the pearl-headed clasp of the cord round her obi. He helps her. They work in silence, pulling, tugging at the material. It unravels at their feet, a nest of coiled indigo. She loosens the under-sash. They avoid each other’s eyes now, but she finds his hand and guides it through the crêpe of her under-kimono to where, under the cotton of her slip, her hip and upper thigh are joined.
‘It’s a defect of the joint,’ she says. ‘Probably from my mother’s family. There are no scars, nothing that’s ugly. Nothing to be afraid of. You can look if you like, if you don’t trust your fingers.’ She lifts the hem of her slip. And it’s true. No scars, nothing ugly. Only the blushed white of her skin, the swell of her thigh.
There is a tautness to the moment Yuji finds almost unendurable. He watches his hand (though it hardly seems his) mechanically stroking her thigh. Her mouth is partly open, her long, black lashes lie against her cheeks. It is a face both childlike and lewd, tender, stupid with tenderness and trust. And then, on an impulse that comes from some place in him where violence and desire are equally mixed, he darts his hand to the shadow between her thighs, his whole hand clutching her there, seizing her, so that she folds against him with a sudden sharp cry.
At first he thinks it must be morning, but the light is just the lamp’s flat electric shining, and the room, the house, the world beyond the curtains is wrapped still in some vagary of night, some secretive hour, immense and empty, the dawn’s dawn perhaps. He gazes into the cloud of gathered muslin above the bed, and for a minute he rests at the half-woken ebb of himself and thinks of nothing. Then, when he can do it no more, when nothing starts to fill with remembering, he turns to look at her, her sleeping head on the pillow next to his, her slim bare arm in front of her face, as if to protect it. She is under the ivory quilt, and tried perhaps to get him beneath it too, until, finding it impossible, she dragged the rose kimono from the floor and covered him with that.
He slides out his feet, collects his clothes from different parts of the floor and goes onto the landing. Other than his watch, he is wearing nothing. It is five fifteen exactly. He puts on his clothes. Her stick is leaning against the wall by the bedroom door. He cannot recall her leaving it there. He goes down the stairs. He is afraid Beatrice will start to bark, or worse, far worse, that he will be confronted by Hanako, but the dog only blinks at him from the sofa and there is no sound of servant’s bustle. He turns off the side-lamp, goes into the hall, puts on his coat, his boots. The saddle of his bicycle is wet from a rain shower, though the sky has cleared. He wipes the saddle, wheels the bicycle into the road. Whatever he was before, he is sober now, intensely so, a stark and comfortless sobriety in which the moment he raised his hand to touch Alissa Feneon’s hair appears to him as the most foolish, the most reckless of his life. She tricked him of course, that much is obvious. Kabuki in the old style! But how can he go back, how can he stand in the salon warming his hands at the stove while she is there? And when her father learns of it – as assuredly he will – when he summons Yuji into his study, what then? What decent defence can he offer?
He, whose only wish has been to keep the world from throwing him off, a drop of water from a spinning ball, has now, through his weakness, through something as apparently innocent as curiosity, through the malevolence of fate, through the scheming of a mixed-race girl, undone the last good thing he had. He has betrayed Monsieur Feneon (who wanted a son!), he has scattered his friends; he has lost, irretrievably, his house of life. He peddles, a yell of silent outrage in his wake. Above him, the last stars are fading towards morning.
19
He considers writing Feneon a letter. Briefly, he considers writing one to Alissa. He has no idea what he could say to either of them. He is sorry? He is angry? He is miserable?
He stays in his room where now and then he laughs out loud, bitterly. He doesn’t care who hears. He has long and elaborate daydreams about volunteering for the army, going to Kanda in his new uniform, saluting smartly at the door of Feneon’s study, then turning on his heel and marching off to certain death. Two days pass, three days, a week. He does nothing. Nothing happens.
He follows old routines, bathes at the customary hour, eats with Father and Miyo, reads, walks in the neighbourhood, performs his few chores. He begins to tell himself he has over-reacted, that his reaction has, in fact, been somewhat hysterical. And why did he assume that Feneon would learn anything? Why should he? From whom? From Hanako? All Hanako could say is that they left for the theatre together in a taxi. Mrs Yamaguchi? She is Alissa’s teacher but not, as far as he knows, an intimate of the family. The only person other than himself who could speak, who could tell everything, is Alissa, and why would she tell her father a story that threw on her such a shaming light?
As for his own part in the affair of that night, each gesture, each sequence and exchange revised in memory many times, it seems to him now he cannot, reasonably, be held responsible for any of it. It was the last of his fever. It was the excitement of recapturing, so unexpectedly, his boyhood outing with mother. It was the wine (the wine Feneon wisely forbids him). And above all, it was her – her wiles, her questionable blood. How many others has she invited upstairs to look at the photograph of her servant foster mother? Was he the first, the tenth, the fiftieth?
Forgetting is a hard art, he knows that (as hard as its apparent opposite) but he starts to fold the memory of that night like a sheet of paper into smaller and smaller squares, imagining, as he does so, Alissa, sitting on the ivory quilt in her room, engaged in the same dogged exercise of the will. And when each of them has folded the paper to its smallest measure, dense as a pellet, tiny enough to hold in a crease of the hand, in one of the fate lines, hidden, then, surely, it will be – almost be – as though none of it ever happened.
How long must he wait? A month? Two? Longer? It would be a mistake to try to go back too soon. But eventually, the end
of the spring, say, the beginning of the June rains, he will stand on the step at Kanda and ring the bell, and Feneon, who will have had nothing to forget, nothing to fold, will greet him in the usual way. They will drink a glass of eau de vie. Yuji will explain his absence easily (his health, his mother’s health, even, perhaps, that he has been writing). Then the club will sit on the study floor to watch a hundred shades of grey flicker soothingly over the sheet pegged to the bookshelf. She will be there, of course – she must be if things are to be normal – but she will know how to behave. She will behave impeccably. And after the film they will practise their French in some harmless discussion and the evening will end with laughter, with calls across the dusky street as the club cycles home. He has only to be patient, to be silent, to keep his nerve. The end of the spring, the start of the rains, the first big cloudburst to drum on the roof.
Could it be that nothing has been lost at all?
20
At Setagaya, he sits on the verandah with Grandfather and Sonoko making bags for the loquats. If the young fruits are not covered while they are still the size of a child’s fingertip, weevils get in and suck out the juices. To make the bags they have on the wood between them a bowl of flour paste, a stack of magazines and newspapers. Sonoko is the most dilligent. Her pile of bags grows quickly, but Yuji’s pile is smaller even than Grandfather’s, for though his fingers are nimble, he is constantly stopping work to peer at a photograph or read a dozen lines of some story, weeks or months old.
One of the pages he pulls from a magazine, then pauses to read, is an account of a tour of Manchuria by a group of ‘notable authors’ invited to see first-hand the great strides made by the new administration in transforming such an antique place into a showcase of Asian modernity. At the bottom of the page, the authors are depicted standing in a line with certain representatives of the military. The most senior authors, the most notable, are in the middle of the line flanked by the highest-ranking officers. Ishihara is there (not in the centre but not at either extreme), dressed in a long leather coat like the one air ace von Rauffenstein wears in La Grande Illusion.
The faces of the writers are mostly smiling, as though the tour was a welcome break from the rigours of composition, the confines of their studies, but the officers’ expressions, shadowed under the peaks of their caps, are set and somehow unamused. Below the picture the caption reads, ‘Forward as one! The pen and the sword link arms.’
‘You want the weevils to beat us?’ asks Grandfather. He takes the page from Yuji’s hand, tears it in two and dips his brush into the paste. ‘Sonoko,’ he says, ‘it seems that Grandson wants the weevils to beat us!’
21
At home, the doors of the Japanese room are opened wide to the garden, the first time since the previous October. The mats and the woodwork are beaten and wiped. In a corner of the room where the air is touched by sunlight, an insect becomes a fleck of gold.
On the radio, daily bulletins plot the northward progress of the cherry blossom – Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya. There are also reports of the German advance into Norway, an action intended to protect the Norwegian people from the aggression of the British. Miyo, her hair tied up in a cloth, a duster in her hand, asks Yuji if Norway is close to Japan or as far away as Russia. He shows her the map in the morning paper. She stares at it, then laughs. She cannot explain why. ‘Because . . .’ she says, and shrugs and goes on with her work. Is she frightened? Or do the movements of armies, the fall of nations, genuinely amuse her?
22
A bright Saturday, the second week in April, he goes to the blossom viewing in Ueno Park. He has arranged to meet Junzo, Taro and Shozo under the clock at the subway terminus, but when he arrives there with Miyo, only Taro and Shozo are waiting.
‘Little brother’s sulking about something,’ says Taro. ‘His mystery girlfriend, I suppose.’
The park at ten o’clock is already crowded and it takes them half an hour to find a place for themselves, two yards of unoccupied grass between a group of middle-aged office workers and a circle of young mothers, drowsy, with drowsy babies on their knees. They spread their blankets. Above them, the blossom is so dense that when a breeze blows, the whole head of the tree moves like a single flower. Miyo opens the bento boxes. They eat, picking the food from the little wooden pockets. They have sake with them but after the first cup no one bothers to pour. They watch the passers-by, are watched in turn. Somewhere in the park a van with loudspeakers is broadcasting speeches. Miyo takes out her sewing. Shozo pulls his cap over his eyes. In a quiet voice to Yuji, Taro says, ‘You’ve heard the rumours?’
‘Rumours?’ Yuji’s heart begins to pound. ‘What rumours?’
‘Spies, saboteurs, traitors in high places . . . At the ministry it’s all anyone talks about.’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ says Yuji, hiding his relief in a frown. ‘Is any of it true?’
‘Some, I suppose. I don’t know how much. Anyway, it’s best to be watchful.’
‘Of course.’ Yuji picks a blade of grass. ‘Though what is it exactly we should watch for?’
‘Whatever is out of the ordinary. People who seem to have something to hide. Foreigners . . .’
‘Foreigners? Like the Feneons?’
‘Well, the Feneons, that’s different.’
‘If necessary,’ says Yuji, ‘we could speak up for them.’
‘It would be more sensible,’ says Taro, ‘to be discreet.’
‘Then we could speak up for them discreetly?’
‘And who would we speak to? The Tokko?’
‘Why not?’
‘Now you’re being stupid.’
‘Monsieur Feneon’s been here for ten years.’
‘I know all that. But these days it’s not how something is, it’s how it looks. Think of your father’s situation.’
‘Father?’
‘Even an important man like him was not protected.’
‘I am aware of it.’
‘And you are his son.’
‘So?’
‘Nobody is invisible.’
‘It almost sounds like you’re warning me.’
‘I’m saying you should use your head.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes,’ says Taro, nodding slowly. ‘More than you perhaps.’
They sit together, silently, as though on the brink of some sharp exchange neither is quite ready for, not today, not here in the open. Yuji flicks the rolled blade of grass away and gets to his feet. ‘I’m going to walk,’ he says. ‘You want to come?’
Taro shakes his head. ‘I’ll stay,’ he says. ‘Shut my eyes for a while.’
Alone, relieved to be alone, Yuji thinks first of heading towards the pond (‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond.’), then finds it easier to simply fall in with the movement of those around him, the aimless swirling of boots and wooden sandals, silken sleeves, epaulettes, piled hair, cigarettes, parasols. Only a man in tattered leggings hunkered in the shade of a stripped windbreak, one of the hundred or more who sleep in the park, who scavenge in the bins and grow beards like Chinese sages, seems to Yuji independent of the crowd and the crowd’s enormous slack mind. He watches him, admires the steadfast gaze, the immobility, then sees on the rising grass beyond him a woman’s back wrapped tightly in unpatterned water-green silk. He grins, almost calls out to her, but stops himself and circles cautiously until he is sure the old woman is not about to descend.
‘I hope you haven’t been following me,’ she says, as he walks up to her.
‘How could I? I had no idea you were coming today.’ He points to the tea tray in her hands, the two cups. ‘Have you lost her?’
‘I’m sure this is where I left her, though now it seems she has vanished.’
‘She will have met a friend,’ says Yuji, ‘and the friend has taken her to meet another friend.’
‘Someone with a lot of grandchildren, perhaps?’
‘Lots of grandchildren and lots
of interesting ailments.’
‘So now I’m waiting for her like a servant,’ says Kyoko, turning her smile into a pout. ‘What a nice way to spend my day off.’
‘Did you arrange a meeting place?’
‘The usual,’ she says.
‘The statue? I could carry the tea for you.’
She bites her lip, throws him a hard glance, but lets him take the tray from her hands and follows him as he steps into the current of the crowd again. Soon he’s making her laugh with his muttered commentary on the blossom-viewing parties, the over-ripe wives, the shrunken husbands, the red-faced children chasing each other bawdily between the trees. A holiday crowd more akin to the big-thighed clay manikins unearthed from Yayoi sites (grainy pictures of them in Father’s books) than the race of ‘warrior gods’ the vans with the loudspeakers are shouting about in the distance, though this last thought, mindful of his talk with Taro, mindful too that he is in the company of the wife of an acting corporal in the Kwangtung Army, he keeps to himself.
‘I heard you were ill,’ she says.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Who told her?’
‘Who do you think?’
He nods. He would like to know what else Haruyo tells the old woman. That she heard him make arrangements to go to the kabuki with the foreign girl? That she heard the front door slide open at six the following morning?
‘I’m well now,’ he says.
‘That’s good.’
‘Any news from over the water?’
‘A photograph.’
‘Another new coat?’
‘A coat? No,’ she says. ‘It’s not that sort of photograph.’
He waits for her to explain what kind it is but she doesn’t. He has heard of soldiers sending pictures home of prisoners or even of the enemy dead. Some girls, it was said, carried such pictures as love tokens.
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