One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  Of these, there are six, all foreigners: Sandrine, Rose, Kitty, Eva, Natasha, Mary. In the beginning, Yuji has difficulty telling them apart. All seem slightly blurred by strong perfume, and all, dressed in fabrics delicate as tissue paper, seem always to have just emerged from bed or bath. They are kind to him, treat him, he thinks, like a pet. He does not, after his second visit, expect to hear one of them play the piano.

  That the academy might be an unsuitable place for a woman in Alissa’s condition, a surprising place for Monsieur Feneon to be connected to, an altogether curious institution with a way of doing things that would – or so he guesses – not be much understood in the more traditional parts of the pleasure quarters . . . these are questions he turns over, with no great urgency, like loose change in his pocket. After all, there is no one to discuss it with, no one, yet, to be scandalised. And who is he – a person Feneon might have felt entitled to shoot – to raise so much as an eyebrow?

  It is Rose (or perhaps Natasha) who tells Yuji, four days before the term Miss Ogilvy spoke of has expired, about the breaking of Alissa’s waters. It is just after midday. The girl is helping him with his coat, tugging it clumsily off his shoulders in her excitement. ‘Isn’t it blissful?’ she says. ‘We were afraid you’d come too late.’

  He waits in the empty billiard room, looking at the painted nymphs and the dimpled, slyly smiling wives of European aristocrats, and wonders about this water they contain that breaks (like porcelain? Like a wave?).

  After half an hour the door by the fireplace opens and Dr Saramago comes in. He is wearing a pearl-grey three-piece suit. He is fat and surprisingly young. He has been upstairs with Alissa. ‘Not worrying,’ he says, breezily. ‘Baby later. Time for last sleep.’ He laughs (as if out of a well of cooking oil in his throat), takes a fur coat from the back of a chair, pats Yuji’s shoulder and leaves. A few minutes later Miss Ogilvy appears, crisp white apron, a dress with rolled sleeves, a rolled cigarette in her left hand.

  ‘There are contractions,’ she says, ‘but true labour has yet to commence. You may go and see her.’

  Alissa is in the bed. Her head, her narrow shoulders are raised on a heap of pillows. There is a fire in the grate, and since his visit the previous day a table has appeared at the end of the bed, a card table with towels on it, bundles of white gauze, a tin basin, a large pair of scissors. For two nauseating seconds Yuji remembers Saburo’s story about the doctors in China. Now, then, gentlemen, shall we start with the appendix?

  ‘Saramago,’ he says, ‘looks like an American gangster.’

  She manages a smile. ‘He’s nice,’ she says. ‘He brings us little custard cakes to eat.’

  Under the sheet, her body radiates a kind of imminence. The whole room is charged with it, a tension that has reached its perfection.

  ‘I suppose it will be soon now,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Will you be here?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘At the house?’

  ‘Yes. If you would like me to.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, then shuts her eyes, clutches a corner of the sheet in her fist, moans. It is a sound she made the night they were together in her room in Kanda. She turns to Yuji, no attempt to hide the fear in her face. ‘What if I can’t do it?’ she says. ‘Saramago says he has things to help me. Miss Ogilvy says at my age it will be easy. But what if they’re wrong?’

  ‘They’re not,’ says Yuji, suddenly appalled at how little there is he can do for her. He steps up to the bed, reaches his fingertips to where the sheet is tented over her belly. ‘Shall I fetch Miss Ogilvy?’

  She nods. ‘You don’t need to love me,’ she says as he opens the door. ‘But you must love the child. Will you love the child?’

  At three o’clock Dr Saramago returns. He smells of lunch, of China Town. He is upstairs for fifteen minutes, then comes down and leads Yuji to the billiard table. Yuji is good at billiards – he has had more time than most to practise it – but Saramago beats him easily.

  ‘Next time, shogi,’ says the doctor, grinning and carefully tying a little scarf around his throat. When asked about Alissa, about the baby, he makes an unrolling gesture with his right hand, something that might be readily understood in Porto or Lisbon but which tells Yuji nothing.

  At six o’clock the doors are opened and the first of the evening’s visitors arrive, a pair of naval officers, glamorous in caps and long military coats. Yuji is sent to wait in a room on the first floor of the tower. From the window he can see the lights of the neighbouring building. He buttons his jacket. There are radiators in the house, brass concertinas that gurgle and rattle like live things but give off very little useful heat, certainly not enough for the high-ceilinged rooms of the academy. He looks for something to read, finds in the bucket by the empty fireplace a newspaper from May 1938, reads a story about the fall of Swatow, then drops the paper on the boards and begins to pace. Behind a curtain in the far corner of the room is a painted door. He tries the handle. The door is not locked but leads only into a cupboard, its floor piled with women’s shoes, women’s boots. On a shelf at the back is a row of featureless wooden heads each with a coloured wig on it – black, blond, curly red – and from a hook below the shelf hangs a coil of buckled leather he mistakes at first for a horse’s bridle.

  In the billiard room, drunken voices sing along to the gramophone. (Is the music louder than usual tonight? Is there something the gentlemen should not be allowed to hear?) When it stops, Yuji dozes in a chair, wakes several times imagining his name has been called, then falls into a deeper sleep from which he is roused by someone standing over him with a lantern – Father, perhaps, come to tell him it’s time for his watch on the platform.

  ‘The electricity is off,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘The child was born by candlelight.’

  He follows her, her lantern, up a flight of stairs and along the corridor. Nothing waking could have more perfectly the character of a dream. Not just the uncertain light ahead of him, or the dark figure whose shadow is so weirdly thrown on the corridor walls, but the sense that with each step on the worn carpet his old self, like something useless, something used and finished, is falling away, blowing from him like a dust, like fine ashes.

  In the room the candles burn in little clusters. Three on the card table, three on the windowsill, five or six on the mantelpiece. All Miss Ogilvy’s girls are there, one of them sitting on Saramago’s expanse of pearl-grey lap. As Yuji arrives, they twitter with excitement, they rustle, then fall silent and turn adoringly to the propped-up figure of Alissa, the dark bundle lying at the opening of her nightgown.

  Out of the hush – a hush that seems entirely theatrical – Alissa says, ‘A little boy.’

  ‘A little boy,’ repeats Yuji. ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Thank you.’

  Saramago erupts with laughter. Miss Ogilvy shoos the girls from the bed, prods Yuji, quite sharply, in the small of the back. He sits on the bed. The baby is wrapped in a towel, its face pressed against one of Alissa’s breasts. It grunts as it sucks, groans like a dreaming dog. The girls, craning over the bed, sigh with pleasure. To Yuji the desperate sucking seems comical, slightly sinister.

  ‘Look,’ says Alissa, slipping the towel from the baby’s head to reveal a half-dozen luxuriant wisps of slick black hair. Japanese hair? Western hair? Eurasian? With a finger – and how expert she is already, how much the mother – she draws her swollen nipple from the baby’s mouth. ‘Hold him,’ she says. ‘Take him.’

  She shows him how to make a cradle of his arms, then leans forward and gently, very gently, rolls the baby from her arms to his. He feels its heat, the restless stretching of its body. There is something oddly dense about the weight of it, as if its life was rolled up tightly inside it like the sticky wing of an insect. It moves its dark-palmed hands, curls its feet, then rolls its face blindly towards his chest. A tip of tongue pokes out, touches the wool of his shirt. The eyes flutter in startlement. The ignorance of it! The utter helplessness! And this is his son?
This scrap? It starts to squall. It becomes rage. Immediately he holds it out to Alissa, feels a moment of awe and resentment at how swiftly her presence soothes it.

  Behind him, one of the girls comes in, bottles in her arms, dark green bells of champagne. Saramago opens them. Miss Ogilvy gives Yuji a glass. He turns to Alissa. She taps a fingernail against the rim of his glass. He drinks. Someone opens the window a little. There is the distant droning of an aircraft, of several aircraft. ‘What on earth are they doing flying at this hour?’ asks Miss Ogilvy. After a while the window is shut again.

  9

  Chains of coloured paper are hung in swags along the walls of the billiard room. A large Christmas tree is carried in by Yuji and the Chinese houseboy. The girls decorate it with the utmost seriousness. At the top they place a doll, a winged doll, an angel.

  There are cards, lanterns – also a little carousel of brass reindeer, their movement powered by the heat of candles. When shown to the baby, he throws back his arms and squawks with excitement, though shown it a second time he seems indifferent.

  He’s too intelligent for such a toy,’ says Feneon, grandly. ‘Already he has escaped from Plato’s cave.’

  ‘What nonsense you talk,’ says Miss Ogilvy, sponging a smear of regurgitated milk from the Frenchman’s lapel.

  In the six days since the birth Feneon has been a regular caller at the academy. The girls all seem to know him well, treat him like an indulgent father, are openly amused by Miss Ogilvy’s rudeness to him.

  To Yuji, Feneon has offered – with an ironic cocking of an eyebrow – his felicitations on the birth of a healthy son. If he is still angry with Yuji, he hides it well enough for them to speak to each other in civil tones, and for now at least the baby heals everything, distracts everyone, creates, in every room it lies in, a feeling of reverence, of incontinent hope.

  At Miss Ogilvy’s suggestion, Alissa and Yuji have named the child Emile. It would, she assured them, appeal to Feneon’s vanity, it would mollify him, and though, on learning of it, Feneon protested, his delight was obvious. Emile. Baby Emile. Little Emile. When not in his mother’s arms or on Feneon’s knee, he is passed among the girls. Yuji, too, takes his turn, reluctantly at first, unable to free himself from the paralysing fear of dropping him, but as he grows in confidence he finds himself falling under the same fascination the others surrendered themselves to so eagerly. Shyly, then openly, he dots the child’s brow with kisses, inhales the bready, powdery, new-animal scent of the warm black hair. At home, he notices his clothes have started to smell of the baby. Can anyone else smell it? His neighbours? Miyo?

  ‘I presume your parents know nothing of all this,’ says Feneon one evening, as they ride an empty carriage back into Tokyo together. ‘The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will become. The more painful for them.’

  Is he speaking from experience? How, Yuji would like to ask (and only in part to embarrass him), did you tell your parents about Alissa? Or were the thousands of miles between Sézanne and Saigon sufficient for the secret of a child, a lost mother, to be kept for ever? As for his own parents, what in his past dealings with them can reliably tell him how they will respond to the news of a bastard, half-caste grandson? Certainly he knows of cases where a son or daughter has been formally renounced, and for behaviour, for acts, far milder than his own might appear.

  On the morning of Christmas Eve he tells Miyo he will be away for the night. He leaves her money to go to the New Year markets. He will be in Yokohama. She should go to the Otakis if she needs help. She nods. She does not ask him any questions, though there is something in the way she looks at him that makes it clear she has reached her own conclusion about nights away in Yokohama.

  At midnight in the Bullseye Piano Academy the last visitors are guided – or waltzed, in the case of one beaming, red-faced old gentleman, the under-secretary of something – to the front door. The last taxi pulls away. The glasses and ashtrays and empty bottles of Monopole and Hennessy are carried to the kitchen.

  When everything is in good order again, when the fire has been fed and poked into fresh life, they gather on the rug or draw up chairs, their palms held out to the flames. Emile is sprawled asleep on a blanket by Alissa’s feet. Yuji kneels beside him. Natasha plays the guitar. They sing Christmas songs, Christmas carols. Most of these Yuji has never heard before, but one, ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’, is familiar to him. Mother – who must have been taught it by Grandfather Yakumo – used to sing it when he and Ryuichi were little boys, and because he has only ever heard it in her voice, he has always thought of it as somehow being a Japanese song, though now the foreigners are singing it, half joyfully, half sadly, he sees that it’s theirs, that it comes out of their world.

  After the singing, Feneon and Miss Ogilvy bring in the parcels that have lain so enticingly for days on the table in the back dining room. They spread them by the bottom of the tree. Rose – the youngest after Emile – reads out the names, reads out the doggerel that accompanies some of the names, and hands the parcel (with some ceremony, some giggling) to the recipient. Everybody has something. There are perfume bottles, ribbons, brooches, silken underwear. Alissa has a hat with a fox-fur brim, Yuji a tie with jagged orange stripes (a jazz tie!). For Emile, there are wooden toys and toys of tin, a pair of lamb’s-wool booties, a Chinese-style jacket hardly bigger than a man’s handkerchief.

  ‘Shall we be able to do this next year?’ asks Feneon, swirling the last of his brandy and letting his gaze rest on Alissa, on Emile.

  ‘We are doing it this year,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘And that is what matters. A grandfather should be wise enough to know that.’

  At bedtime – whatever time that is, three, four o’clock – Yuji has a mattress in the room where he waited the night Emile was born. (‘You,’ Miss Ogilvy informed him simply, ‘are in the tower. You know where to go.’) He lies there, slightly drunk, wondering if Alissa is upstairs listening for his footsteps or if, with the baby beside her, she is already fast asleep. What is he to her now? What is he supposed to be? Do the others all assume something? If they do, he wishes someone would tell him what it is. As for what he wants . . . He peers into the speckled dark of the room, moves his life around like the pieces of a puzzle, but just as the suspicion starts to grow in him that a life, his or anyone’s, is not a puzzle at all but something quite different, something that does not admit of solutions, he is lying on his arm softly snoring and dreaming of Mother singing in a voice thin as wire, ‘Schlaf in Himmlischer Ruh, schlafe in Himmlischer Ruh.’

  At mid-morning the house downstairs is deserted. Yuji takes a walk. He does not need his stick now. His knee has healed and the burns are no more than patches of raw new skin. When he comes back, he finds Sandrine and Mary turning the billiard table into a dining table. He helps them lift the heavy wooden lid, spread the spotless linen. The cats leap up, are chased off before they leave a trail of prints. In the kitchen, in swirls of steam, Miss Ogilvy, with two of the girls, is preparing dinner. (‘You can’t ask a Chinese to cook a Christmas dinner.’) There is a roast duck, trays of sweet potatoes, a great saucepan of red cabbage. The pudding is a ball wrapped in muslin. Apparently it has to boil for hours.

  It is dark again before everything is ready, the table set, the girls in their best clothes, the wine decanted. Miss Ogilvy takes photographs with her Leica and flashgun. Everyone together, then the girls in various demure poses by the mantelpiece. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘the new family.’ A chair is put out for Alissa and Emile. Yuji stands beside them. When Feneon is urged to join them he says he will, gladly, but first it should be just mother, father, son.

  ‘As you wish,’ says Miss Ogilvy, screwing a fresh bulb into the flashgun.

  The baby is restless. Alissa settles him with a touch, then smiles up nervously at Yuji.

  ‘At the camera, please!’ calls Miss Ogilvy.

  They turn to her, compose themselves. She lifts the gun. The light, white and chemical blue, is blinding, and for an inst
ant it prints their shadows thickly on the far wall.

  10

  New Year is spent with Grandfather. Yuji travels to Setagaya with Miyo. Mr Fujitomi is there. He has brought his wife and sister with him. After eating, they go by taxi to a shrine next to the railway station, a small place compared with the one in Hongo, old, unfashionable. They take Grandfather’s wheelchair. Yuji pushes it. How heavy the old man is, a dead weight, a dragging, dead weight.

  Chief Priest Takashita comes out to welcome Grandfather personally. He presents him with a scroll on which a snake is drawn beside certain verses from The Chronicle of Ancient Matters petitioning good health.

  They don’t stay for long. Grandfather looks at Sonoko, who looks at Yuji, who turns the chair round. The taxi is waiting for them, the driver flicking through a magazine of fortune-telling.

  At the house, the Fujitomis remain for a last flask of sake. Yuji sits with his secrets. Even Mr Fujitomi seems distracted. Has he heard anything from China? How long since the last letter? Grandfather is growling. His lower lip droops, trembles. When Sonoko does not immediately translate for him, he tries to slap her leg.

  ‘He says,’ she says, ‘Japan is finished.’

  The others look politely interested. All day and all night the streets have been full of a fine white mist.

  11

  As soon as the holidays are over and the academy is open for business again, Alissa moves back to the house in Kanda. It is easier now, much easier for Yuji to visit. He can go for an hour in the morning, then meet Fujitomi in the Low City before returning to the house for another hour in the evening. He is pleased, yet he also understands that the move’s indiscretion, its indifference to local scandal, means the hour of separation is not far away.