Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha

by Richard Monaco

  Takezo

  Faint, final scatters of rain. The high, curving clouds were starting to pull apart like cotton wool. The wind was sinking into softness. The greenblue sky looked washed pure.

  He was walking downstream with her in his arms. He was getting blurred flashes of sight in his right eye too, now, the left still showing narrow bands of clarity criss-crossed by dark, blotchy streaks.

  He cradled her sleek, bare body into his torso, walking along the turgid, choked waterflow as it slopped and gathered in clumps of detritus, pushed around and over fallen branches, trickling, pooling spilling on…

  He concentrated on working his way along the grass and mud without slipping. He wasn’t going to drop her. He was desperate without panic to get her away from what had happened. The last memory he allowed himself was armored Yoshi upside down in the deep mud, legs kicking something like a frog’s. He carefully fled as if, somehow, distance and time might actually cure her, as if the shock and thudding impact, spattered blood, her terrible, hollow gasp as the lead ball had smacked into her tender flesh would not have happened, time unwinding behind his desperate feet… a child’s feeling and innocent hope…

  So he went on, urgently quick-stepping as if nothing mattered but this, just her barely noticed soft weight and the problem of following the twists and drops of the stream through his bent and broken sight, as if the terrible moment only lived in the past and place behind him.

  “I blew all those up,” he suddenly said, carefully stepping up over a fallen tree, long blue and white flowers overhanging the steep rim of the deepening ravine, flashes in slanting, late afternoon light. “Yet there was still one to shoot her.”

  If he could just get there soon she’d be alright. Enough had died, already.

  Except feelings were suddenly starting to collect like thick, stifled breath in his chest and were pressing behind his eyes.

  Takezo, my love, he remembered, with a choking feeling.

  “I found you,” he said, coming around a bend and half-skidding down a steep drop beside a sluggish waterfall, pooling into mud and soggy leaves. The sunlight speared through the still standing trees above and spattered here and there. “Wish I had not.”

  Fought so brilliantly, he thought, clear and bitter, I saved her to die…

  “No, no, not die… not dying… no more dying …”

  Tears were burning out now, melting the coagulations of face wounds so that he actually wept blood and water, wading through the shallow, warm pond, coming out into the flat land fronting the seacoast.

  He could already hear the surf, dull and immensely deep on the soft onshore breeze, crunching as if the sea were eating the shore. He raised her face and pressed his lips on her cheek, staining her with his blood.

  She’s warm, he told himself. She lives… yes… she will heal… it’s certain…

  Thirty-Seven

  Yazu

  Found his wife where the porch had been: her head and shoulders were clear of the fallen building, face unmarked. He squatted there, by the edge of the goldfish pool that was now choked with mud and leaves.

  “Wife,” he said, “in my heart I always cared for you. Aii. All prayers will be said. Still, I was not a good man. I am sorry.” He winced and looked away up over the rubble. The wind was picking up, hissing and whistling among the broken boards. “I must find my master. I must be a man of honor. This will be a gift to our son. Aiiii.” He covered his eyes. He wanted to leave before the storm hit again. “We will be an honorable family.”

  He stood up, staring down, now, at the obliterated pool where a fish was half-buried, dead pale and glinting gold. Nodded. Looked at her face, eyes shut and strangely peaceful.

  “I am not afraid to be honest, anymore,” he said. Sighed. “All prayers will be said.”

  Thirty-Eight

  Takezo and uMubaya

  It had been as if he simply stepped onto the air and went down to the beach far below in a single step. Yellowish, feral eyes burned and a huge lion-like shape, all fangs and claws, reared-up and pounced, a silent shadow, a memory and vision… then blackness…

  And, next, there was mellow, late daylight, soft warmth under him and the steady, soothing, massive sound of the sea crushing down nearby. He looked straight up at cloudless, pristine sky. Blinked hard and shifted his body to see what might be broken. Nothing, it seemed.

  So the big Zulu sat up and looked at the bouncing, cresting mountain range of waves. The high line of the foamy, rippled, broken surf rolled up and backwashed close to him, edged by seaweed and driftwood.

  He had no desire to go back to the city or where the war was or wasn’t. Vaguely considered finding his way to the farming village near the sea. Maybe they’d let him work or hunt for them – despite the opinion of the farm woman who’d seen him miss the deer with a half-hearted spear toss.

  He smiled, remembering her, the night in the barn…

  As my father would say, a hunter needs a quarry, a warrior an enemy and a farmer, patience…

  He stood up. He felt good.

  Decided to follow the coastline, see if any boats had survived. Around a few bends, as the sun was going to orange back across the great bay, he came on Takezo and Issa lying, a sand dune behind them, in a litter of broken pine branches from the pretty much intact wall of trees behind.

  Not over yet, he thought with some pleasure and misgivings. This man has truly the heart and soul of a lion… nothing deters him…

  Takezo was practicing looking at everything except her. When he finally did, she would have to be breathing. There was no question of that.

  So, as the sun was setting and he was still forcing himself into a remote unrealism, he managed to keep both eyes open and get a kind of almost coherent double image inasmuch as the approaching, dark figure resembled, more and more as he came closer, a man and not some bulged and bent morphic shadow staining the cleanly glowing western sky; not some horror or insensate, demented killer or relative.

  “Father and brother,” he muttered, in a raspy, dry chuckle, without amusement. “How nice to have a family, at last.”

  The big Zulu was now standing over them, his shadow stretching up along the soft undulations of dune and touching the secret, dark green mysterious network of the pines.

  “Takezo-san,” uMubaya said.

  “Everything was lies,” the ronin responded, looking past him at the reddening sun, no clouds at all to streak or alter the pure light. “More or less.”

  The big man knelt beside the woman. The deepening glow darkened her wound and the rills and creases of blood on her exquisite body.

  “What a pity,” he said, softly, setting down his long spear. “This land… so many women fallen like crushed flowers.”

  “She lives,” said the other, looking at the doubled, overlapping sun above the hills under which Edo was lost in a gentle, violet haze, staining it with a blending, unbroken blur that might have been paradise, under the distant, perfectly, divinely drawn, melting outline of Mount Fujiama.

  “Lives?”

  uMubaya touched her hand, gently. Knew that coolness, that dull feeling. Began to chant a prayer, under his breath. A prayer of cleansing and freedom.

  “I have been where she has gone, foreigner,” Takezo said. “I will go and bring her back.”

  “Back, great warrior?” Sighed. “I wish I could bring back even the living to me.”

  The sun was just nicking the horizon. The cresting tops of the waves were red, a clean, clear soft red, a jewel-like tint. Takezo was seeing wide strips and rills of sweetly transparent fire.

  “The doorway is a painting,” he explained. “Like a screen. When I find it, I will pass through it.” Shrugged. “I find everything.” He lay back on the sand and saw the first blurred star directly above. Closed one eye and the pale, bluish-white glow was single and clearer. Was each star a heaven-world, as was said? All the blood and madness and pain behind him might dissolve away forever into that single, pure, perfect, quivering poi
nt of infinite light. He sighed and smiled and his face hurt, stiffly. “I will find the doorway,” he said.

  The Zulu touched his bare shoulder.

  “Rest, now,” he advised. “We will all sleep for a time. She is already sleeping.” Shrugged. “In the new day we will do what we must do.”

  “Rest,” said Takezo. “Yes, foreigner. I find everything. I have no wish to, but I do.” Puffed out his cheeks. “Like a drain all filth flows through.”

  The waves were just crumpling shadows now as the sun dropped away. The sand glowed soft and faint. The stars were showing sharp and clear. uMubaya covered him and her with his own tattered robe.

  “I will go with you, lion-souled man,” he said. He was thinking about the empty places on maps. “Maybe you will come with me, as well.” Thinking about the empty place where his love was.

  Takezo pulled the robe up, still looking straight with one eye where it parted across his face. The star gleamed in a purity he could never express.

  “And, in the end,” he whispered to heaven, “I lost every good thing I found.”

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