One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  On the evening of 15 January, the day families gather to eat New Year gruel, he crosses the garden through a cold west wind to find Alissa and Emile asleep on the sofa in the salon. Feneon is sitting with his back to the stove, the dog on his lap, a newspaper spread across the table in front of him. He greets Yuji with a nod, and after folding away the paper, he fetches his chessboard from the study. In silence they make their opening moves, exchange pawns, clear the lines for more powerful pieces to enter the fray. It’s Feneon’s turn. After studying the board for a minute, he looks up at Yuji and says, ‘I hope I can trust you to be discreet?’

  A few months ago and the question would have felt slighting. Yuji would have brooded on it. Now it is merely part of the new honesty between them, the new froideur.

  ‘I shall be leaving soon for Singapore. The British have a large garrison on the island and there’s an English planter there, a man called Farrell, who I was able to help with some trouble in Saigon. He will, he assures me, now repay the favour. As soon as I have found a suitable house, I will send for Alissa and Emile. It should only be a matter of a few weeks, perhaps a month, but during that time they will be entirely in your care.’

  There is no mention, no hint of the possibility of Yuji accompanying them. Is this how Feneon will free his daughter from her unfortunate connection? Or is it simply that Feneon, a practical man, understands as well as Yuji the impossibility of it? How, in better times, in Taisho times, a person like Professor Takano might go abroad, might even live there a season or two while he studied its ways, but now, for any young man – even one with a Class F exemption – to leave these islands without khaki on his back would be tantamount to desertion? He could never come home. He would have no home to come to.

  ‘I will care for them,’ says Yuji, quietly.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Feneon, using his bishop to knock over Yuji’s knight. ‘That’s settled, then.’

  The luggage – four trunks of battered tin, each with the markings of earlier journeys, the smudged chalk of a cabin number, a pasted-on, half-torn-off address in Bombay, Macau, Cholon – is sent to the Bullseye Academy and then, the day before the sailing, down to the docks to be loaded onto the San Cristobal da Lisboa. The San Cristobal is bound for Shanghai. From there a second ship will take Feneon to Hong Kong, where a steamer of the Peninsular and Oriental Company will complete the journey to Singapore.

  Alissa, Emile and Feneon have accompanied the trunks to the academy. Yuji joins them the morning of Feneon’s departure. The weather, turbulent all week, has settled again and a phone call to the agents confirms the ship will sail at the appointed hour of three in the afternoon. They decide on an early lunch, but as soon as they sit down Alissa begins to weep like a child. She tries but cannot stop herself. Feneon takes her outside, returns five minutes later holding her hand. At the table, he tells tales of shipboard encounters, the Irish priest he once shared a cabin with on a crossing of the Arabian Sea, the Romanian countess who travelled with a wolf cub. Miss Ogilvy accuses him of invention, of being little better than a novelist, a romancier, but she has laughed along with the others.

  The taxi comes at one.

  ‘We’ll say our goodbyes here,’ says Feneon. ‘No handkerchiefs waving from the quayside, please.’

  The girls form a line. He embraces each in turn, embraces Miss Ogilvy, wipes the small tear from her cheek. He takes the baby in his arms, kisses him until he writhes in protest, then holds his daughter, strokes her hair, gently untangles himself. To Yuji he says, ‘Did I ever apologise for hitting you?’ He reaches into a pocket of his overcoat. ‘This came to light while I was packing. I have no use for it now and perhaps it will make up for any unpleasantness between us.’

  He kisses his daughter again, kisses his grandson, picks up Beatrice who, half demented with jealousy of the baby, will travel with him, and goes to the door. Through the window Yuji sees him getting into the car. The driver shuts the door. Feneon looks back at the house, smiles and turns away.

  The girls immediately surround Alissa. They seem primed for dramas of this kind, of any kind. They are not reserved, not coolly secretive like the women in the paintings. Whatever they feel is played out on their faces without hesitation. Yuji moves away from them and looks at the envelope in his hand. There is a stamp with a lion on it, and an address written in ink faded to the colour of dried blood: ‘19 rue saint-Maur, Sézanne, France.’ The paper is mottled, stained by time, by the immense journeys it has made. It is beautiful. He smiles at it. He almost prefers not to read it at all but to go on imagining it, the precious content, as if he was one of the old poets picturing the moon from behind drawn blinds. Then the thought seems idiotic, unworthy of such a gift, and he tugs the letter through the ragged lips of the envelope and tilts it towards the afternoon light.

  For two minutes the handwriting is completely impenetrable. He begins to panic. To have it in his hands and not be able to read it! Unbearable! He starts again, scans each crabbed line as calmly, as methodically as he can. Single words appear – silence . . . newspapers . . . money . . . dogs . . . God . . . Then clusters of words – I never find . . . half of Europe . . . into his fields . . . backs of carts . . . Then at last, he has it. It speaks.

  Harar, 4 February 1890

  My dear Feneon,

  Excuse my long silence. I never find anything interesting to say! Deserts full of stupid niggers, no roads, no mail, no travellers.

  I haven’t seen a French newspaper in weeks. For all I know half of Europe is dead with the pox. Well, so much the better – though naturally I hope a good Christian family like yours is spared!

  My last caravan was a disaster. Did you hear of it? A year of incredible hardships and damn all to show except more creditors. Monsieur Ilg reproaches me for not giving the drivers sufficient provisions. He says he had to put the donkeys into his fields because they were covered in sores and too weak to continue. But is that really my fault? You know how things are here. Why should I be blamed?

  As a result of all I have endured, the endless walking and riding in this damned country, I have varicose veins in my right leg that keep me awake all night. I’ve ordered some special stockings from Aden but I doubt they’ll have them. I shall probably have to write to Mother and see if she can buy some in Vouziers. The silk ones are meant to be best, though the important thing is that there should be enough elastic in them. They also need to be long enough to give support to the whole leg and not just the knee, and they should be adjustable with some sort of lacing. In the meantime I shall have to struggle on as best I can, though the truth is I feel more like a dog tethered to the back of a cart than a human being. One day I’ll stumble and some thoughtful bastard will cut me loose and leave me for the vultures. A charming prospect, don’t you think?

  Yours, with a feeble handshake,

  A. Rimbaud

  12

  Miss Ogilvy offers Alissa her old pink bedroom at the academy. She will be safe there, and comfortable, until her father can send for her, but Alissa, with a smile, a shake of her head, leaves with Yuji and Emile for the early evening train to Tokyo. It’s the slow train, the local. At each stop the carriage becomes more crowded. Alissa keeps her eyes lowered, holds the sleeping baby tightly in her arms. Yuji stands over them, gripping the ceiling strap. He is aware of people, women particularly, trying to get a clear view of the baby’s face. One man, heavily drunk, looks as if he might pass a remark, but his courage fails him or he is too drunk to speak. He sits on the carriage floor, lets out a sigh as if of death, and falls asleep.

  By the time the taxi drops them off in Kanda it has started to snow again. Alissa gives Yuji the house key. In the salon, he quickly cleans the ashes from the stove and builds a fire. When it catches, he swings shut the iron door, adjusts the vents, and feels a surge of primal satisfaction, the pleasure of bringing warmth where it is needed, of bringing it to those who have been entrusted to him.

  ‘You really think he’ll be all right?’ asks Alissa,
a question she has already put to Yuji four or five times since Feneon’s departure. His words, for now, have the power to calm her, and this too gives him pleasure. ‘He will,’ he says, emphatically. She nods and busies herself with the baby.

  They have brought a parcel of food with them from the academy, remains of the lunch no one had much appetite for. In the kitchen there are a last few bottles of wine. They open one, touch glasses. ‘He was born out of a bottle of wine,’ she says, blushing and looking down at the sleeping head by her thigh. They pick at the food, grow drowsy. A glance past the shutters into the garden shows the snow still falling heavily.

  ‘You won’t get home tonight,’ she says. Yuji agrees. ‘You could use Papa’s room,’ she adds, quickly. ‘It’s nicer than the spare room. There are blankets and sheets in the cupboard beside the kitchen.’

  He tries to call Miyo but it seems the lines have been affected by the weather. All he can hear in the receiver is something like the whispering, the urgent whispering of phantom voices.

  At ten Alissa goes upstairs with Emile. Yuji makes the bed in Feneon’s room, puts out the light. The snow rubs its blunt fingers against the window. The city of millions is silent . . . Then the baby starts to wail, that sound Yuji is becoming so familiar with, that he seems to hear half a second before it begins. He sits up, willing it to stop, but it grows louder, an utterly intemperate sound, inhuman, like a giant cicada. Should he go in? Can he help? Would she welcome his help? He swings his legs to the edge of the bed but as his toes touch the floor the crying ceases, mid-phrase, leaving behind it a deep and brittle hush. He waits, then slowly lies his head on the bolster again, pulls up the blanket. He is tired but he knows that something in him will go on listening. Something in him will never stop listening now.

  In the morning he tramps through the snow to the bakery, the one the Russian priests used to go to. There’s a queue. There’s always a queue now where food is sold. On his way back to the house, he is stopped by Ooka the bookseller. ‘If the Frenchman left any nice books behind, why don’t you bring them over to the stall? Nothing improper, of course, nothing unpatriotic, but there’s still a market with the students for foreign stuff.’

  Alissa eats half a loaf of dark bread, smothering the slices in jam. She drinks warm milk flavoured with cinnamon, and into the last glass breaks an egg, laughing at her own appetite. When she has finished, she passes Emile to Yuji and stretches out on the sofa. In less than a minute she’s asleep. Yuji puts more wood on the stove, then sits on the rug opposite the sofa, the baby across his knees. Alissa is in her nightclothes still. The unbuttoned gown hangs open over the skin of one of her breasts. He stares at the edge, the seashell-pink rim of visible nipple, then looks away, frowns at the patterns in the rug and attempts to correct his thinking. Her breasts are for feeding the child. Their fullness is from the milk they carry. She is a mother (that object of universal veneration), a nursing mother, and yet the atmosphere around her, around her and the child, around all three of them, is drowsy and voluptuous and not at all what he might have imagined. He seems to be in a continuous state of mild arousal. Do all new fathers feel like this, everything sunk into the body? And what about the women? Was the ‘ghost’ an animal once, heavy as the one now sleeping with lips slightly parted on the sofa?

  Day after day through the snowfalls of early February he makes his way down to Kanda. He sleeps in Feneon’s room (the bed with the brass headboard, the springs that creak atonally every time he moves) more nights than he sleeps at home. He makes no effort to explain these absences to Miyo. He cannot tell her the truth – though he is longing to tell it to someone – and does not wish to make up stories. He pays her at least double what she was used to receiving from Father, and her duties now, a little cleaning, a little shopping, are almost non-existent, but each time he slides open the front door he half expects to find her gone, run off with the soy-seller’s son, or taken service in some household where she will not be lonely or bored.

  Once a week he fire-watches. When his name appears twice on the weekly roster, he simply ignores the second duty. Being afraid of Saburo is a habit he has fallen out of, quite suddenly, a luxury he no longer has the time for. When he does take his turn, he naps in the sewing room whenever it suits him, and on one of these twenty-minute sleeps, curled on the bedding with his overcoat pulled tightly about him, he dreams he has been left alone to care for the child. He is carrying him through Asakusa to the Montparnasse cinema. Ishihara is in there, and also – though Yuji only sees him from behind, the collar patches on his uniform, the shaved grey hair above the thickset neck – General Sugiyama. It’s a Chaplin film, The Orphan. The general laughs uproariously. Ishihara twists in his seat. ‘The future,’ he says, blowing smoke into Yuji’s face.

  When Yuji leaves the cinema, Emile is so small he has to hold him in the palm of his hand like a frog. He goes into a restaurant, asks for a cup to put the child in. He is no bigger than a beetle now. A gang of soldiers arrives. They invite Yuji to drink with them. One, with movements both playful and threatening, makes a present of his bayonet. When they leave, Yuji looks for the cup, but there are cups everywhere, scores of them, spread over every table, all of them empty. He searches, his heart wrung by a terror not even the fire-dreams provoked. He has lost Emile! He has lost his son! (And what can he possibly tell Alissa?) There is an instant of deranged clarity in which, alone in the nightmare restaurant, he realises he must kill himself . . . then he comes to, making some grief-noise in his throat, and staggers onto the platform, gulps mouthfuls of cold dawn air until he comes to his senses, but the dream stays with him for days. Even when he holds Emile, feels the packed robustness of his body, he cannot quite pick out a last splinter of anxiety.

  A telegram from Feneon. He is in Shanghai. He is well. He sends an embrace to his grandson. When Alissa shows it to Yuji, he reads it and passes it back without comment. She folds it, makes it small, then tucks it away in a pocket of the cardigan she is wearing. They look at the baby, play with the baby. When anything is in doubt, when the world threatens to force an entry, it is Emile they turn to, the power he has to root them in the present. His skin now has lost its look of long immersion and become smooth as a petal. The stump of umbilical cord that blackened and stank for a while has been shed to leave behind a clean, neat wound of separation. They lie him on the sofa, on the rug, on the bed. They examine him as though the human body was entirely new to them, their private discovery. One game, which entertains them for entire evenings, is to parcel out his features, divide them between Feneons and Takanos, between Orient and Occident. His eyes, in shape, are clearly Japanese, but their colour, hazel with gleams of new copper, comes from somewhere else. His mouth, his hands, the crown of his hair are, they agree, from the East. His nose, his feet, his skin tone, from the West. Yuji claims the child’s back, Alissa his ears, particularly the lobes. It is only during the third or fourth time they play the game that Yuji realises Alissa is hoping to assemble, from the unnattributed fragments, a picture of Suzette. As for the fear, the unvoiced fear of the child being lame, there is nothing visible, nothing in the vigour with which he writhes his limbs, to suggest any cruel inheritance. He is, in his way, perfect.

  They cook for each other, eat with gusto even the most unpromising results. They read aloud from what is left of Feneon’s library: Turgenev, Chekhov, the stories of Maupassant. When they have finished the wine Yuji asks Mr Fujitomi where he can buy more, and is given the address of a house in Koshikawa, the mansion of some junior branch of a zaibatsu family where a servant, a retired sumo, leads Yuji down to a cellar lined with a thousand dusty green ends of bottles.

  Fujitomi is the first person Yuji tells about Emile. They have spent half a day moving the contents of a failed shoe emporium from one end of the Low City to the other. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, working boots, high fashion. Yuji picks out a pair of fleece-lined women’s boots.

  ‘You’ve someone in mind for those?’ asks Fujitomi. ‘I don’t t
hink they’ll be missed.’

  ‘There’s a girl,’ says Yuji, quietly.

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘A foreigner.’

  ‘So your tastes run that way, do they?’

  ‘I’ve known her a long time.’

  ‘You’ll know the size of her feet, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘We have a child.’

  Silence. A beat of two. A beat of three.

  ‘A child?’

  ‘A baby boy.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No.’

  Fujitomi puts down the armful of rubber toilet slippers he is carrying, puffs out his cheeks, smoothes, with both hands, the skin of his scalp. ‘A little boy?’

  ‘Emile.’

  ‘Em . . . ?’

  ‘Emile. It’s a French name.’

  ‘French . . . You certainly know how to throw a surprise.’

  ‘He was born before the New Year.’

  ‘A Dragon boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the hour?’

  ‘Ox, I think.’

  ‘Highly auspicious.’

  They laugh together.

  ‘A little unofficial boy,’ says Fujitomi, a sudden fleeting melancholy in his expression. ‘A little international boy, well, well . . . Who else knows about this? Your father?’

  Yuji shakes his head.

  ‘You better start thinking what you’re going to say. You won’t be able to keep something like this quiet for long.’