One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  He goes into the sewing room again, fills his arms with books, and carries them outside. At the back of the platform, the roof slopes to chest height. He builds a step out of dictionaries and novels and clambers up. He has never been on the roof before. The tiles grate and shift beneath his weight. He starts to climb (not a bear any more but a giant slug), writhing over the tiles, the bird droppings, the tufts of grass, the glittering moss, until his gloved hands grasp the ridge and he pulls himself up the final inches. He sees the fire immediately – a small cloud of pulsing orange light somewhere up by Watanabe’s bathhouse – and in his excitement he lets go of the ridge and descends chaotically, losing three buttons from his coat and landing on the platform, winded but unhurt, on the cushion of his own back. He gropes around his neck for the whistle, lets off three short blasts, drops the whistle, and runs through the house.

  ‘Fire by Watanabe’s,’ he says to Miyo as he pulls on a pair of boots.

  ‘Fire by Watanabe’s!’ he calls to Saburo, who swings from his gate, bellowing orders. He commands Yuji to stop, Yuji cannot, the little pills will not let him. He mounts his bicycle. His legs seem immensely happy to be peddling. He weaves, stylishly, around all obstacles. ‘Fire by Watanabe’s bathhouse!’ he calls to whoever he passes.

  After ten minutes he smells it, a waft of smoke, sour, fungal. He slows. The way now is filling up with drowsy neighbours, bedrobes under winter coats. They wander about, leaderless. He leaves the bicycle against the shuttered window of a shop, and runs, part of a pack of running shadows, the length of a last street.

  Already, at least a hundred people have gathered by the building, though the noise of them is buried under the rushing and crackle of the fire. Such is the confusion, the rapid shifting of light and dark, it takes Yuji several moments, standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, to realise that the fire is not by Watanabe’s, it is Watanabe’s. He lets out a sound, a moan of surprise and sorrow. ‘Did they escape?’ he shouts to the woman next to him. She doesn’t hear him, or doesn’t know. From a shattered window a flame shoots out, dies back, then leans from the window beside it, a lunatic in a yellow bed sheet.

  Someone passes him a bucket. He passes it on, slopping water over his boots. Someone else sees his armband, the character for fire. The crowd opens a channel, lets him through, pushes him forward. Soon, he is close enough to feel the heat prickling the skin of his face. In the distance he can hear the swelling chant of a fire crew, then a group of men jog past, not firemen but soldiers, cloths tied round their faces. Immediately, unthinkingly, Yuji follows them, runs after them like a boy in a game. They go into the alley at the side of the bathhouse – the side that seeps smoke rather than flames – and climb a flight of rusted metal steps to a door at the level of the first floor. The door is locked. The soldier at the front bursts it open with his boot. On the other side, Mrs Watanabe is sprawled on the mat, her small white feet twitching. Two of the soldiers lift her and retreat towards the alley. The others, Yuji at the rear, start, on hands and knees, to go up the stairs. The smoke above their heads is black, clotted. The stairs are hot to the touch, even through gloves. On one of the steps a hole the size of a horse’s eye has burnt away (or was it always there? A peephole?) and Yuji has a fire-lit glimpse of the women’s baths below, the water crusted with ash.

  At the entrance to the upper room the curtain is fringed with small flames. They duck beneath it, blunder on, crawl as far as the passage to the kitchen but can go no further. A single searing glance through narrowed eyes is enough to show that this is where it started, that old Watanabe, whatever is left of him, will be sifted from among the cinders of his rattan chair.

  ‘Watch out!’

  At the back of the kitchen something ignites, explodes with a shriek, burns with a bright green flame. Frightened now, awake at last to the danger, this peril he has so casually put himself in the path of, Yuji gets to his feet, intending, with held breath, to run for the top of the stairs, but as he turns he trips across the end of a table, scattering the tiles of a last mah-jong game. For a moment he is stunned, and when he raises his head he can no longer see the others. He calls out, drags his aching chest over the mats. The room, familiar to him from countless visits, has become a puzzle, a maze. Is this where it ends? Not in a shell-hole, but a bathhouse a mile from his home? He circles, squints crazily into the confused air, the flame-dark, then sees, an arm’s-reach to the side of him, a smudge of khaki. He stretches for it, touches cloth, flesh. A smoke-blackened face looms towards his own. Two eyes widen, blink. Stare. Yuji stares back, the pair of them, for a long second neither can afford, frozen in mutual amazement. Then the face looks away, and together, burrowing under the smoke, they find the top of the stairs. The house is roaring like a sea. They slither down, side by side, coughing and retching. Odd events take place in Yuji’s brain, leisurely imaginings, sequences, serenely lit, from boyhood (there, at the edge of the sea, is his brother gathering clams in a bucket, there is Grandfather standing in the low tide, his yukata gathered about his thighs . . .)

  Against his cheek he feels a gust of air. Cold air. A voice shouts, ‘One more here!’ His shoulders are seized. A man, a fireman, a wonderful stranger, lifts him to his feet. Then more hands, more strong arms, an effortless progress through the crowd until he is set down, gently, on the far pavement, his back against a wall. A canteen of water is pushed towards him. He drinks, coughs furiously, splashes water into his eyes. His coat is buttonless now. Patches of it are smouldering. He grips his throbbing head, spits between his knees. It’s several minutes before he feels well enough to look at the soldier beside him. A minute more before he has the wind to speak.

  ‘It’s you?’ he asks. ‘It’s really you?’ His voice is half an octave deeper. To his own ears he sounds like Father. ‘I can’t . . . It’s so . . .’ He drinks from the canteen again but coughs as he swallows and spews up the water. ‘Poor Watanabe,’ he says, at last. ‘Think Mrs Watanabe made it?’

  Junzo is wiping his face with the cloth that masked his mouth and nose. When he has finished he climbs to his feet, tugs a field cap from his belt and puts it on a scalp shaved so close it’s hard to see any hair there at all.

  ‘I wrote to you,’ says Yuji, rising dizzily with the help of the wall. ‘I even tried to visit. When you were in Kagurazaka . . . Did the girl tell you?’

  Junzo is walking away. From behind he looks like a drunk pretending, very hard, to be sober. Yuji hobbles after him. The movement of one of his knees is sharply painful. He tugs at Junzo’s elbow. ‘What?’ he asks. ‘What?’

  Junzo shakes him off. Yuji grabs at him again, is shaken off a second time. The third time Junzo swings round. The punch is not hard and the aim is clumsy but it sends them both sprawling onto the pavement. Breathless, awkward as a pair of deep-sea divers, they wrestle feebly by the heels of the crowd.

  ‘Have you . . . lost . . . your mind?’ gasps Yuji, pinned under the other’s weight.

  ‘Keep away from me,’ hisses Junzo. ‘Stay away from me!’

  ‘What are you talking about? What—’

  The crowd lets out a roar of excitement, surges back, breaks like surf over the pavement. The bathhouse roof is giving way. The flames roil up, unfurl themselves triumphantly. There’s a noise like a volley of rifles, then the main beam, burnt through, sunders at its mid-point and flies into the house, sending up two swirling plumes of sparks. Almost at once the fire is calmer. The crowd advances. Yuji looks for Junzo, summons the breath to call his name, then sees him, his back, already half a street away. He sets off after him, walking as quickly as his damaged knee will allow. By the time he is close enough to speak they have left the fire and the crowd behind them.

  ‘What is it? What have I done?’

  Junzo neither slows nor answers. Yuji knows he will not be able to keep up much longer, that he will, in another eight or ten strides, fall behind and lose him. Whatever he is going to do he must do it now. He moves closer, and with a surge of force, an accelerati
on made up in equal parts of fear and anger and the feverish chemistry of Amazawa’s pills, he hooks an arm round Junzo’s neck and drops them both into the dust. It’s a schoolboy throw, a schoolboy trick. He clings on, Junzo’s throat in the crook of his elbow. In the playground, this is when the captured boy submits, becomes, in defeat, sullenly amenable, but Junzo, writhing one way then the other, is already managing to loosen Yuji’s grip. He frees himself and with eyes tight shut strikes out at Yuji’s padded body until a bout of coughing doubles him up and the fight is over. Yuji stands – this long night of falling and standing – dusts down his ruined coat, then leans and silently offers the wheezing Junzo his assistance. His hand is pushed away, though not with any vehemence.

  ‘I saw you,’ says Junzo, when he too is on his feet again.

  ‘Saw me?’

  ‘I saw you come out of the Snow Goose. I saw you get into the taxi.’ His voice is toneless. A voice for reporting facts one is weary of living with. ‘I saw you both.’

  ‘Saw?’

  ‘I was outside the billiard parlour.’

  ‘We’d been . . . to the kabuki.’

  ‘You left the house at dawn.’

  ‘You saw me then?’

  ‘A neighbour. The woman from the fan shop. Told Hanako.’

  ‘And Hanako told you?’

  A nod.

  ‘Why would she tell you that?’

  ‘Because I asked her.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘What does it matter? I already knew it all by then.’

  ‘Knew?’

  ‘That you had abandoned her.’

  ‘Alissa?’

  ‘If you had cared for her, if you had stayed at her side, I could have accepted it . . . her choosing you. I would have found a way of accepting it. I would even have tried to be happy for you. But you abandoned her. So I started hating you.’

  ‘This is insanity,’ says Yuji, a protest that comes out sounding like a question. He is beginning to flounder. Something is happening to him. He is being swept away. Everything is being swept away . . . ‘Is she sick?’ he asks, suddenly. ‘I met her dance teacher in Asakusa. Mrs Yamaguchi. She said she’d had a letter.’

  Junzo laughs. The laugh becomes a cough. He spits, swipes the drool from his lips. ‘Sick? I don’t think it’s usually called a sickness. Can you really be as stupid as you sound?’

  In the upstairs room of the house to the side of them, a light comes on. A shadow moves the other side of glass and paper. The seconds pass. The light goes off.

  ‘She wanted to show me a picture,’ whispers Yuji. ‘She was explaining something.’

  ‘You abandoned her.’

  ‘She was trying to tell me . . . who she was.’

  ‘And you abandoned her.’

  ‘Please. Wait. You know where she is?’

  A headshake.

  ‘And Hanako?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Who?’ Junzo’s face lights up with a smile of utter misery. ‘Who do you think?’ He shivers. He has no coat, only his khaki tunic. ‘You’ve always been blind,’ he mutters, starting to shuffle away. There is no question of Yuji following him this time. He tries to remember where he left his bicycle. He remembers the pleasure of riding it. It seems to have been months ago.

  ‘If you had said,’ he calls, his voice loud as a dog’s bark in the hush of the street, ‘If you had said you loved her . . .’ And though he cannot be certain at such a distance, cannot be sure through his bloodshot eyes, it seems that his friend, nearing the unlit corner, falters in his stride and stumbles against nothing.

  6

  He wakes with a taste of ash in his mouth, smoke and ash. Slowly, reluctantly, he opens his eyes to the light on the ceiling, then turns to where Miyo is kneeling beside him, a piece of sewing in her hands (the same piece she has pretended to be working at ever since Mother and Father left for Kyoto). When she sees him looking at her, she smiles excitedly.

  ‘You’re like a hero,’ she says. ‘Everyone knows about it. Even Mr Kitamura must be impressed!’

  ‘Kitamura . . .’ mumbles Yuji, then shuts his eyes again. He has aches, mysterious zones of pain, but no fever. He is not even particularly tired.

  ‘The doctor is coming,’ she whispers, leaning over him so close he can feel her breath on his face. ‘The honourable doctor . . .’ And immediately, as though he has been listening outside the door, waiting for his cue, Kushida appears. Glasses, moustache, leather bag. Large pale hands.

  ‘So how is the young master of the house?’ he asks, standing above the bed, the padded shoulders of his civil defence jacket outlined by the light coming through the platform door. ‘It turns out you are the type who quite unexpectedly shows initiative. Even a sort of courage.’

  ‘Do you know about the old woman?’ asks Yuji. ‘The bathhouse-keeper’s wife?’

  Kushida makes a movement, a small gesture involving eyes, fingertips. A gesture to signal indifference. ‘I don’t believe,’ he says, ‘we should keep you away from the army much longer, do you? You should be storming an enemy machine-gun post rather than the local bathhouse. The public baths, by the way, are not at all hygienic. A tremendous source of contagion. If every bathhouse in the city burnt down we would be much the healthier for it.’

  He bandages Yuji’s swollen knee, dresses the burns on his left wrist, his left ear. ‘Should I send the bill to your father? When can we expect to see the professor again?’

  ‘You can send it to me,’ says Yuji, sitting, then easing himself up from the mattress. ‘Or if you prefer it I can pay you now. If you could wait downstairs? Miyo will bring you some tea.’

  For the remainder of the day, of daylight, Yuji stays inside the house. When he moves he leans on a stick, a curious varnished black ornamental walking stick Father brought back from his tour of Europe and which for years – all the years of Yuji’s life – has stood among the umbrellas in the pot in the vestibule. He has attacks of coughing, spits black phlegm, blows black mucus from his nose. How has he survived it all? What does his body want of him? He puts on the radio but after an hour could not have told anyone what he has been listening to. Saburo calls. Yuji has already instructed Miyo to say he is too unwell to receive visitors. He drinks a cup of sake but finds, to his disappointment, he has no appetite for a second. At six o’clock he sends Miyo to Otaki’s for noodles. They eat. She steals glances at him, looks of wonderment. Later, he bathes, sitting in the water with his leg raised to keep the bandages dry. After the bath he starts to shake. This gives him some comfort, some hope. Now, perhaps, he is about to fall ill, to lie dangerously ill for weeks, and then, of course, a long convalescence during which the world will simply right itself. What can be expected of a man too weak to hold a cup to his lips? He goes upstairs, crawls under his quilt, prepares to descend to the familiar confusion of fever, of the blood in riot, but the shivering stops. He cannot even sleep, cannot get close to it. He gets up, dresses, limps down the stairs and tells Miyo he is going out. She stares at him as if expecting news of another fire, then squats by the vestibule step to tie his laces. He waits, stands awhile, watching from the half-open door. He can hear Itaki in conversation with someone. When the voices cease he turns up his collar, pulls down the brim of his hat, and lurches to the gate.

  It takes him forty minutes to reach the tram-stop. He’s sweating. The pain in his knee has made him nauseous. On the tram he wonders if the other passengers, seeing him, his age, assume that his limp is a war wound. He gets down at the stop before the cathedral, walks under its immense shadow, then enters Feneon’s garden by the gate behind the rose bush. The moonlight that lit his view from the platform last night now lies in a tangle of bones below the bare branches of the magnolia. From the house he can see no sign of life at all. He presses his face against a window – the only one unshuttered – and sees over the salon floor a thin stain of electric yellow that comes, must surely come, from beneath the study door. He taps on the glass, taps aga
in more loudly, keeps tapping until the light suddenly swells and a figure appears, pauses, then comes cautiously forwards. Yuji lifts off his hat, shows himself, but it is not until the Frenchman’s face is almost touching the glass on the other side that he recognises him, frowns, and points towards the kitchen door.

  The moment Yuji is inside, Feneon slides home the bolts. The kitchen is several blocks of minimally variegated black. There is a smell of the food cooked earlier that evening. Grilled meat? Grilled chicken, perhaps.

  They go to the study. The lamp with its green shade is the only source of light. On the big desk there are scattered sheets of writing paper, a fountain pen laid at the side of a half-written-over sheet.

  ‘You’ve had an accident?’ asks Feneon, leaning against a corner of the desk and looking at Yuji, at the black stick, the dressing on his ear.

  ‘A fall,’ says Yuji. ‘My knee. It’s not serious.’

  ‘Sit,’ says Feneon. He points to the armchair at the side of the desk. Yuji sits. He is not quite sure where to put the stick. In the end he holds it across the top of his thighs, gripping the wood in his fists. ‘So,’ says Feneon, ‘what’s this all about? I assume it must be important.’

  Yuji nods. He has, in the few hours he has been at liberty to do so, forbidden himself to imagine the details of this moment. But now it has come he is seized by doubts. Is it possible he misunderstood what Junzo was saying? That Feneon will think he has gone mad? That the study door will open and there will be Alissa, unaltered? He plants the end of his stick on the floor, levers himself up. He has not misunderstood. The door will not open.

  ‘I saw Junzo last night,’ he says, addressing a cedilla of faded blue tapestry in the rug between them. ‘He informed me of . . . a certain fact. It concerns your daughter.’ He lifts his gaze. There is a not quite convincing expression of gentle bemusement on Feneon’s face. ‘Her situation,’ says Yuji.