One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘A little visit from the authorities.’

  ‘What sort of visit?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t have the details. It was the Higher Police, I think, the Tokko. A colleague at the hospital in Kanda mentioned it. I thought you might be interested.’ He opens the door, lowers himself onto the seat. ‘I noticed tonight how much healthier you are looking. The way you ate your food was hardly like an invalid, was it?’

  He shuts the door. His shadow leans towards the driver, then the car moves off, cautiously, into the dark.

  12

  When Feneon opens the door, he looks, thinks Yuji, like a man who has sat up all night reading some weighty, some impenetrable volume, something that exhausts both eyes and brain. He scans the street, then reaches out, takes Yuji’s arm, and draws him inside, shutting the door behind them.

  ‘You should not be here,’ he says. ‘It is perfectly likely they have someone watching the house.’

  ‘If so,’ says Yuji, ‘it must already be too late.’

  ‘Who did you hear from?’

  ‘An acquaintance of Father’s. A man called Kushida.’

  ‘Kushida? I don’t think I know him. Though I am remembering now what I was perhaps foolish to forget. I mean how visible I am. Any foreigner.’ He is speaking French to Yuji but uses the Japanese word for foreigner – gaijin – filling both its syllables with a still-raw anger. Then he shuts his eyes, breathes, opens his eyes, and leads Yuji to the doorway of the salon, pausing there for him to take in the room’s chaos.

  ‘It’s the same all over the house. Thank God Alissa was away.’

  ‘She’s away?’

  ‘Yes. Somewhere safe.’

  ‘But she knows?’

  He shakes his head. ‘It was only two days ago. And with things as they are it might be better if she remains in ignorance.’

  He goes through to the study. Yuji follows, unable for the moment to tell if he is relieved to find Alissa absent again or disappointed.

  ‘I made a start in here. Put the desk drawers back, began to collect the papers they scattered, but after a few minutes I felt like poor Sisyphus with his rock. They took the projector. They seemed delighted to have found it. And the films too, of course. I hope they watch them. Who knows what effect a dose of Chaplin might have on those horribly rigid minds.’

  ‘It was the Tokko?’

  ‘Oh, yes. All plain clothes and the sort of swagger that comes from not being answerable in the usual way. Not being required to explain or excuse anything.’

  For half a minute Yuji joins him in a defeated silence then, roused by pangs of shame that he, a Japanese, is inescapably implicated in this desecration, this act of the horribly rigid minds, he asks, firmly, that he be allowed to put the house in order again.

  ‘To clean up? I suppose we might do something. I can hardly leave it like this, eh? And I don’t think I shall be seeing Hanako again.’

  ‘They detained her?’

  ‘No, no. In fact, I had the impression she was not at all surprised to see them. A question of loyalties, no doubt.’

  They begin where they are, lifting the Buddha back to his niche by the door, furling the antique scrolls, setting the dragon pipes in their rack again. The books, as Yuji gathers them reverently from the floor, seem, in the trembling of their pages, to possess some knowledge of their recent treatment. From one of them, a Maison Gallimard edition of Anna Karenina, a piece of lilac paper flutters to the floor. When Yuji picks it up it’s obviously a letter. He passes it to Feneon, who scans a few lines of the small precise handwriting and shakes his head.

  ‘Not the one you were hoping for, I’m afraid. This is from a young woman I met before the war. The last war.’ He holds the letter out between two fingers. ‘Put her back with Anna and Vronsky. She’s been in there so long they must all have become good friends by now.’

  They are nearly two hours in the study. The salon, more spacious, less easy to ransack, is dealt with more quickly.

  ‘Can you believe that they searched the stove?’ says Feneon. ‘Perhaps they expected to find the charred remains of secret documents. One of them even took a photograph of it. I’m pleased to report the stove maintained a heroic silence.’

  When the last lamp is righted and the crystal fragments of a broken eau de vie glass have been swept onto a sheet of newspaper and carefully wrapped, they go to the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘You won’t have been up here before,’ says Feneon. ‘That painting is of Sézanne. The very street I was born in. This house here. You see? I looked through those windows as a child without the slightest idea there might be a place in the world called Japan.’

  They go into his room. In the daylight it is less plain, less sparely furnished than it appeared the last time Yuji saw it. At the foot of the open wardrobe is a man-thick heap of shirts, and sprawled beside them, like a shot ghost, is the goose-grey smoking jacket.

  ‘This they also photographed,’ says Feneon, nodding to the bed. ‘Really, when you think of it, it was the behaviour of lunatics.’ With his sleeve he rubs at one of the brass orbs on the footboard as if to remove from it the smudge of a policeman’s fingerprints, then he grimaces and presses at some stiffness in his neck. ‘I‘m too ancient for this kind of trouble,’ he says. ‘Let’s do Alissa’s room and then I’ll investigate the kitchen. See if I can find us some lunch.’

  They go to the end of the corridor. Feneon opens the door wide. The light in there, pouring through a mesh of fine lace, is softer, dimmer, paler. If, thinks Yuji, following the Frenchman inside, if he turns and looks at me now, will he not see everything, know everything? But Feneon does not turn. He is reaching over the bed, smoothing the bedding, the quilt of ivory satin.

  There are clothes on the floor. Yuji is not sure if he should touch them, but fearing stillness, how it might betray him, he scoops up an armful of silks and linens, and briefly, as he inhales the scent his pressing releases, his behaviour of that night, of the following morning, of all the nights and mornings since, seems like the actions of a man impossible to respect or like, a small-natured man whose timidity has made him cruel.

  ‘They wanted to take these,’ says Feneon, crossing to the dressing table and tidying the photographs. ‘I told them they would have to take me away with them. It seems they were not quite ready for that.’

  He lifts one of the pictures and holds it out to Yuji. ‘Recognise anyone?’

  ‘Who could I recognise?’

  ‘The child?’

  ‘The face is so small . . .’

  ‘It’s Alissa! The girl holding her was one of our servants in Saigon. When we came to leave she was inconsolable. You would have thought she was losing one of her own.’ He stares at the picture, then puts it back among the others. For a count of three, four seconds, he keeps his face averted. ‘We’re worn out,’ he says, at last. ‘Epuisé.’

  They go down to the kitchen, a room that seems not to have held much interest for the Tokko. Feneon finds two eggs and puts them in a pan to boil. Yuji slices a large nashi pear left ripening on the windowsill. ‘And look,’ says Feneon, ‘half a loaf from the last decent bakery in Kanda. They bake for the Russian priests at the cathedral. I wonder what will become of those gentlemen.’

  Rather than eat in the dining room, they sit at the little knife-scored table in the kitchen. They share a bottle of beer, clink glasses, though neither of them suggests a toast. When they have finished, Feneon sits back and wipes his lips, delicately, with the fat of his thumb.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘it’s time for you to leave, my friend. You have been very kind but I should not have let you stay so long. Is your bicycle at the front?’

  Yuji nods.

  ‘You can go through the garden. There’s a gate behind the rose bush that leads into an alley. The gate is stiff but it works. The alley will take you back to the street. Don’t wait around. Just ride home. You understand? I’ll find some way of letting you know if I have
to go away. We won’t lose each other. And tell the rest of them. No visits, for everyone’s safety, until this fever is over.’

  They go to the kitchen door. Feneon pulls the bolts, opens the door cautiously and looks out.

  ‘The gate is straight ahead. You see? And when we meet again I expect you to have written a poem or two.’

  ‘I will try,’ says Yuji, taking the other’s proffered hand, feeling his own disappear into that large, dry grip.

  ‘Shall I give your regards to Alissa?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Go quickly now. Be very careful.’

  ‘And you, monsieur.’

  Their hands part. Yuji, unsure if he is supposed to run or if running would simply draw attention to himself, begins to stride across the lawn. He does not look back, and as he passes the early afternoon shadows under the magnolia tree, he hears the sound of the kitchen door being shut again, shut and bolted.

  13

  He is squatting under the bulb in his room sewing a button onto a shirt. It’s midnight. A week has passed since he went through the gate behind the rose bush, a week since he cycled home, wind tears and tears of shame in his eyes. A week in which he has been left to wonder if his rashness – that blind eagerness to demonstrate his loyalty – might not have brought much closer the day his own house, his own family, will be visited by ‘the horribly rigid minds’. It is not hard to picture them, a gang in tight-fitting suits, chrysanthemum badges beneath the lapels of their jackets, rousting Mother from her room, harrying Father from his bed or his study. (And if he saw one lay a hand on Mother, grip her roughly, insult her perhaps, would he have the decency to attack that man?) He has even considered whether Kushida, knowing that his information would send him running down to Kanda, was setting a trap for him. Is that possible?

  He is lost in these thoughts, biting the taut thread with his teeth, when he hears his name being called from the street. Once. Twice. A pause. Then a third time – a yowl like a cat on heat. He turns off the light, pads to the window. There are no cars out there, no crop-haired strangers under the lamps. Anyone at all? Did he dream that uncanny voice? Then he sees a movement, something crawling from the shadows outside Otaki’s, a creature of some sort, certainly not a cat, more like a giant turtle dragging itself out of the sea. It moves towards the house, stops, looks up, a man now, a man suddenly, his face livid with the glare of the lamp. Then the voice again, that anguished cry.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Miyo is sat erect in her bedding. No sign of Father yet, no Haruyo. He pushes on a pair of sandals, the first his fingers can find, and runs through the garden to the street. Kyoko is already out there, and behind her, at an embarrassed distance, Otaki, carrying the crutch and gabbling about how Mr Kitamura was most insistent, and really, what else could he do but keep serving him, a veteran after all, a distinguished veteran.

  Saburo is lying, perfectly still, on his back, but his eyes are open, and when he sees Yuji he smiles. ‘Comrade! Knew I could count on you. Knew you would come.’

  He shakes off his wife, stretches up, clutches Yuji’s hand (almost pulling him over), hauls himself onto his one and a half feet, breathes deeply, looks briefly victorious, and immediately collapses to the ground again. A second attempt is more successful. He wraps an arm round Yuji’s neck, and the four of them, wedded to the drunken man’s movements, teeter towards the old woman’s gate. A dozen times Saburo stops to rage about the bastards who ‘butchered him’, or to ask, urgently, if Yuji remembers so-and-so from school, the kid with the big ears, or the one who cried a lot, or the one who, for half a sweet-bean cake, drank his own piss.

  Grandma Kitamura is waiting for them with a lantern and a blanket. She tries to drape the blanket over Saburo’s shoulders but he shrugs it off, irritably. ‘Look,’ he says to Yuji, touching the tabard he is wearing, the padded cotton waistcoat written over with what, by the lantern light, Yuji can now decipher as verses from the Lotus Sutra. ‘Without this I would have been killed a hundred times. A thousand! “Oh, Buddha of sublime nature and unequalled power” . . . Go to bed, Granny. You’ – he points at Kyoko – ‘heat sake. We have a guest, in case you hadn’t noticed. An old friend has called.’

  ‘Would it be better to sleep now?’ asks Yuji, softly. ‘After all, we could talk in the morning. We—’

  Saburo tightens his arm round Yuji’s neck. He laughs. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

  In a room at the back of the house, Kyoko puts out two sitting cushions, switches on the electric kotatsu, which immediately gives off a strange smell of burning. Yuji has not been in this room for years. The matting is frayed, the paper screens split and taped, the alcove, apart from an empty vase, bare.

  Saburo sits, dragging Yuji with him. For a moment Saburo seems to lose consciousness, but then he looks up, shakes his head like a dazed boxer, and takes the unsmoked half of an army-ration cigarette from behind his ear. He gives Yuji the lighter, cups Yuji’s hands in his own, and several times comes close to setting his eyelashes ablaze. In front of them, the damaged foot is on show, wrapped in a pinned sock. Kyoko brings in the sake. She pours, and puts the flask on the kotatsu. As she stands to leave she glances at Yuji, quickly shakes her head. He does not know what it means. A warning of some kind? (Get out as soon as you can!) Or is it to tell him that the bruise beside her eye, the greenish shadow the powder cannot entirely hide, is not there because Saburo has learnt anything of the game they have played these last months, his idle pursuit of her, her idle acceptance of it. Is that what she means?

  The moment they are alone, Saburo begins to speak, and though he sways from the waist and the nicotine-bright fingers round the cigarette are not quite steady, his voice come from a place the alcohol has not touched. Cannot touch, perhaps.

  ‘This,’ he says, his forehead almost grazing Yuji’s cheek, ‘will happen to you. Don’t bother fighting it. There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘When you come back, they won’t know you. They won’t want to know you. They won’t want to touch you.’ He draws on the cigarette, holds the smoke down, then lets it seep past his gritted teeth. ‘When I got my papers in ’36, they were still training soldiers properly. January to May at the depot, and not just square-bashing. We were cobblers, tailors, armourers, cooks . . . I could strip down a Nambu and build it again in the time it would take you to eat a bowl of rice. A Japanese soldier had to know how to do everything! Fire a grenade-launcher? Yessir! Dig a latrine, read a map, march through the snow when you can’t feel your feet? Yessir! These days they give them a uniform and pack them straight off on the boat. Half of them still seasick when they get to camp. Real specimens! Worse than you, Takano. City scum. Village idiots. Can’t march, can’t fight. It’s left to us, NCOs, senior privates, to train them, and the only thing worth teaching them, the only thing we have time to teach them, is how to kill. Know how you do that? Eh? You get yourself a dozen Chink prisoners, line up the training squad, tell them if anyone looks away they’ll get their teeth knocked in, then pull out the nearest prisoner and stick him in the belly with a bayonet. The army bayonet is the Meiji type thirty. It is fifteen and a half inches long. Chinks are mostly skinny as you. Stick them right and you get eight, ten inches of steel out the other side. That’s what we want to see, we say, though in fact we’re usually trying not to piss ourselves laughing at the sight of their faces. Then the sergeant asks for a volunteer. And guess what? There’s always someone who wants a go, some mama’s boy who suddenly realises what he wants to do in life is jab a man in the guts. They all do it in the end, even the ones who look more scared than the Chinks they’re sticking. The next day when you line them up, they’re different. They’ve changed. There’s no going back then. It’s like . . .’ He reaches out a weebling hand for his sake but the cup is too far away. He gives up.

  ‘Now, taking heads,’ he says, ‘that needs a bit of skill. Use too much force and you’ll make a mess of it, have them running all over the pl
ace like a chicken. Just keep it nice and calm, get the prisoner to kneel in front of you, pour a little water both sides of your blade, swish it off, lift the blade high, breathe out, breathe in . . . let it fall. Do it properly, you hardly feel the contact. Head pops off. Two big fountains of blood. Body tumbles into a hole. You wipe your blade, try not to look too pleased with yourself. Officers have the best swords, of course. Old family swords, or ones they’ve been given as graduation presents. Beautiful, some of them. They don’t get knocked out of shape like an NCO’s blade. You can keep chopping for as long as you’ve got strength in your arms. I knew a pair of captains, decent sorts really, family men, who had a competition to see how many heads they could take in an hour. When they’d finished, they had themselves photographed standing by a mound of Chink heads, like it was some office golf tournament. You’ve heard of the “Three Alls”, Takano? Seize all, burn all, kill all. That’s the army’s motto. Seize all, burn all, kill all. And don’t tell me it makes any difference who you were before – if you were educated or you could hardly write your own name. The educated ones can be the worst, like when I was up in Shunsi Province. What a shit-hole that is. Me and Yasumizo escorting a pair of Chinks to the hospital. No idea who they were. Big one might have been a communist, had that look about him. The other was probably just some peasant they pulled off the fields to make up the numbers. Anyway, we took them along to the hospital and when we got there they said we were in the wrong place. Have to go to the school next door, they said. Gave us a funny look. Well, we went over there. Just an ordinary middle school but they’d set up a kind of operating theatre in one of the classrooms with a sign on the door that said, “Training”. The hospital director was there, a smug bastard called Nishimura, and a colonel from the medical service, and about six doctors, just arrived from the home islands by the look of them, all hoping to impress the brass. Anyway, we handed over our prisoners. The big Chink lay down on the bed without any trouble, but the other, the little one, he starts crying at the top of his lungs. “Ai-ai-ai-ai!” One orderly was pulling him, another pushing, but he was stronger than he looked and he knew what was coming. In the end it was the nurse who got him on the trolley. She could speak a few words of Chinese, and though she was only young she talked to him like she was his mama, patted his hand, nodded and smiled at him right until the moment one of the doctors rolled him over and gave him a jab in the spine. Tell you the truth, I’d have been happy to go then, have a smoke outside, but when you’re a soldier no one cares what you want. You’re not even a human being any more. Just a tool. Pick up, put down, throw away. So we stayed, me and Yasumizo, in a corner of the classroom, scruffs from the infantry. “Now, then, gentlemen,” says the colonel, “shall we start with the appendix?” I remember that. Shall we start with the appendix? Like he was ordering something at a restaurant. Well, those doctors must have been hungry ’cause they jumped to it. Ever seen an appendix? Doesn’t look like much. Sort of thing you might use for fishing bait. Then they really got busy. Cut off the little peasant’s arms, made a hole in the big Chink’s throat. They were all chatting away, and when one of them made a mistake, got his nice white coat splashed, they all looked at each other and laughed. They cut off the Chinks’ balls. I don’t know what for. Science, I suppose. At the end of it the little peasant was good and dead but the other one was still breathing, a sort of “heh, heh, heh” noise. The colonel ordered one of the doctors to inject air into his heart but that didn’t work so two of them tried to strangle him with a piece of string. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just cut off his head. They’d cut off everything else and it wasn’t like they didn’t have enough knives in there. Then this old non-com medic, you know the type, bows and says, “Honourable doctors, if you inject him with anaesthesia, he’ll die.” So they do it and he dies and they all go off to wash their hands and have a drink while me and Yasumizo put what’s left of our prisoners into a pit in the old playground. A big moon that night. The pit was as big as your garden. Stank like a tanning factory . . .’