I Called Him Necktie

by Milena Michiko Flašar

  63

  We were nine. Th en ten. With every passing year my awareness heightened. Or rather it clouded over. As I questioned them, my belief in childhood fairytales began to waver and suddenly I saw with scrutinizing eyes, with eyes of doubt, with eyes that no longer see. Like the holes in Yukiko’s tights, my sight was frayed. In the end it was right, what my parents said. I had no idea who I was associating with, and even if it didn’t matter at all to me whether the company I kept was good or bad, I still felt a growing anger that Yukiko withheld the truth from me about herself and her origins.

  Where are you from, I tried to coax it out of her. We were sitting back to back and pulling blades of grass out of the ground. The red cord above us had faded. Tell me, where? Where are you really from? Her shoulders leaned gently against mine. You know already. What do I know? I can’t tell you. But why not? Wriggling shoulder blades. Why not? Stony silence. I tore a whole tuft of grass out of the ground and threw it against the temple wall. Please forgive me. She shifted away from me. The wind blew through a cool gap between our backs. I’d have liked to say to her: It’s all right. I forgive you. But the anger prevented me, an angry pain.

  64

  The following day when I rang the bell at the Miyajimas’, her mother stuck her head out as usual and squawked: She’ll be right there. The door shut, it smelled of mold and mildew. From inside I heard loud shouting at first, then quiet hissing, growing ever quieter. What’s that supposed to mean, you don’t want to see him? What’s this nonsense all about, you’re ashamed? The hissing broke off. Now it was quiet in the house, only a single cry broke the silence: I can no longer. After that it was quiet again. The door opened, it smelled of decay. The mother stuck her head out: Come another time. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the day after. My daughter, the princess, has her moods.

  Countless, all the other times I stood in front of the door and rang the bell. Behind it Yukiko, a twinkling star. Its bright light deceives, for it was extinguished long ago. With the eyes of the neighbors on my back I reached out towards it, in vain. With their gossip in my ears I had to accept that it was lightyears away, wandering in the universe. At the Miyajimas they eat cats and dogs. At the Miyajimas they fry ants. At the Miyajimas they drink from the rain barrel. At the Miyajimas – people talked about them. In our housing development they were the catalyst for fear of the Other. The fear: You could turn out like them. My parents shared it as well. I noticed it in their obvious satisfaction when I sat at dinner with my head drooping. Friends come and go, they said. You’d better get used to it. One day you will look back and realize that everything has a meaning and a place. Empty words whose emptiness emptied me. I had nothing to counter them. With the last remnants of resistance I wrote a letter. Dear Yukiko, I wrote, let’s meet again by our pine tree. I want to see you and to understand. To say goodbye. To tell you that. I rubbed out that bit for so long that the paper became thin and creased.

  65

  To want a love that can’t be true. Severe twitching under his eyelids. I paused. The song played, clicking as it turned round and round. At the next table someone ordered a whisky soda in a monotone. Somebody lifted up the curtain. Rain splashing down. The curtain fell back heavily over the window. The café, freed from the spell of daylight, returned to the enchantment of darkness. Incredible, that I had believed there was no room between the people inside. Each one sat sunk in his armchair, lost in his thoughts.

  Did she come, he asked, his eyes still closed. In the gloomy smoke that enveloped us his tie was no longer red and gray. It was gray, simply gray.

  Did she come, he repeated. And since I did not reply: But she must have come. Didn’t she? She did come! He said it with such emphasis, as if not just I, but he as well, as if we both had been waiting for her to come. As if it mattered to us both that she should come.

  Yes, I said at last. Yukiko did come.

  So there you are! He sighed.

  But ...

  ... What?

  She had become a stranger. After barely four months I hardly recognized her. She was wearing her school uniform, looked like any other girl, with a bobbing ponytail. She looked sideways as she came towards me, as if embarrassed. Came up to me, head down. Only then did I recognize her by her smell. So self-conscious. I felt like hurting her. Grabbed her by the shoulders with my eleven-year-old hands. Shook her. Hit her, she took it silently, in the face. Why won’t you look at me? I lifted up her chin. You should look at me. At least that. I hate you. Can you hear? I hate you for making me belong to the others. To those who talk. Finally she looked at me: What you say is true. Our eyes locked. Near. Nearer. I kissed her. Far. Further. Something had come to an end. I pushed her away, and she turned aside. Walked like a bird with no wings over the sandy courtyard. I’m done with you, I screamed. Done forever. But by then she had already disappeared, white socks, behind the bushes. From the temple came the drone of the Heart Sutra*.

  66

  How to describe the bitterness? I was a glass, broken, and the space I once enclosed was now the same as the space around. Deserted space, in which I was lost, sharp knives under my feet. With each step it became less likely that I would ever get anywhere.

  For a while I avoided passing the Miyajimas’ house. Instead of right I went left, instead of straight I went a roundabout way, and if it could not be avoided, I crossed to the other side of the street. I shivered at the thought that Yukiko could be standing by the window, or she could come up the road, towards me. The thought made me narrow and small. She might point at me, she might remind me of my guilt. I almost wished for it. So narrow and small was I that I almost wished she were a worse friend than me.

  But she wasn’t.

  Soon enough I forgot that we’d ever been friends, and since I forgot, what happened lost its significance. My forgetting washed the taste of her lips from mine. I only faintly remembered the moment when they touched each other. Whether it had really been a kiss? It seemed to me that we’d only brushed lips. And I forgot even that.

  67

  And I must say: Avoidance was an easy exercise.

  Although the Miyajimas were our immediate neighbors, years passed without my meeting one of them. The father, they whispered, was bedridden with an illness, and the mother went about her business at night. Whatever that meant, anyway she was very seldom seen, and then only hastily scurrying, disheveled hair over her forehead, laden with sacks and bags. It was rumored she was carrying contraband, then that she was mad, and that stuck: She was mad. Even when nobody could claim to have seen her, they claimed her madness was obvious in her face. You can see things like that, was the unanimous conclusion, you can see it without looking. Only the fact that Yukiko, the poor girl, as she was now labeled, was accorded some recognition when she won first place in a mathematics competition, but: Who knows whether that was right? Who knows whether that wasn’t a made-up story? One thing was certain: It was better not to have anything to do with the Miyajimas. And for me too that was the case, until fate, what I called a stupid accident at the time, led our paths to cross one last time.

  I was sixteen. A new school year had begun. The names of the students were read out in class. I sat there in boredom, twirling a chewed pencil in my hand. Thirty others who were feeling just like me. The vacation, which had not been a vacation, had ended again, and we had the dark premonition that it would always be like that. That life, which was no life, was rushing inevitably to its end.

  Fujiwara Rie!

  Here!

  Hayashi Daiichi!

  Here!

  Kugimoto Sakuya!

  Here!

  Miyajima Yukiko!

  Here!

  The pencil broke. I didn’t look up. She was here! Here! Here!

  Oyama Haruki!

  Here!

  Taguchi Hiro!

  Here!

  Red thread, the thread of fate. Forever and ever.

  Ueda Sakiko!

  Here!

  Yamamoto Aiko!

  Her
e!

  She’s just a back. A slim back. That’s all she is. Sometimes I’m homesick. Butterflies, yellow, blue, green. The dust on their wings. Black monk’s habit. The Heart Sutra. One note. I hate you. Do you hear? It’s all the same to me. Friends come and go. Can’t you go? Princess. I’m beholden to you. Pst, pst. Blank space. The sky is falling. I would like to tell you. I’m finished with you.

  The tip of the pencil in the palm of my hand.

  A fleeting pain.

  68

  Just as I had succeeded for years in avoiding the people who lived next door, so I would succeed in the classroom, I resolved to do it from day one, to make a wide berth around the desk three rows in front of me. After all there was plenty of room not to meet each other, and as I’ve already said: I had practice. Nothing was easier for me than to go past someone in the most inconsequential way. What I could not know was just one thing, that this determination would be tested on the very second day.

  No idea who set things in motion. It began with a harmless aside: That one smells. I heard it. Clearly and distinctly: That one smells. Then silent finger-pointing, a wrinkling of noses. Yukiko’s voice, a whisper: Please don’t! More laughter: She smells like she’s got a fish under her skirt. Someone grabbed at her. I saw it. Clearly and distinctly: She shot back. What are you looking at, in my face. I looked away. I saw nothing. And so I saw nothing of anything on the third and the fourth, or the fifth and sixth, or any of the days that followed.

  This smell, came the cry from gaping mouths, whoever smells must pay five thousand yen. What do you mean, you don’t have it? Tomorrow you’ll pay. Dammit, you smell like a pig. Oink-oink. A dead hamster smells better than you. Hey, math whiz! How do you divide an ox into a cow? What started as a harmless aside grew into a litany with gathering speed.

  Yukiko could have used a friend.

  Someone to speak up for her.

  But I.

  I had no voice. I didn’t join in the others’ talk, nor did I protest against it. The thing was to stay outside if inside the world was falling apart. On that morning, when Yukiko came in to the classroom, her desk had been switched, and turned around. There was a caricature of a grunting pig on the blackboard. It was lifting one leg. Her name was underneath. She wiped it off, stroke by stroke. Yukiko became Yuki. Yuki became nothing. With the damp sponge in her hand, she eventually turned around, with a searching look, settling on me. In it was a sweetness, the glow of long ago: I swear to you, I’ll dissolve into stardust. That’s how she looked at me. As if she wanted to tell me: I’ll dissolve.

  69

  If I had. If I were. There is nothing more depressing than the past conditional. The possibilities it indicates will never be fulfilled, and, despite that, or because of that, they determine the present reality. If I’d somehow intervened then, if I’d been in a position to do that then, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.

  I left it to Yukiko to defend herself. Yet she did little more than simply stand still. A magic chalk circle, it got smaller and smaller. She resembled an animal playing dead. For a while it worked. But then the attackers gained the upper hand, and they wouldn’t stop until they had sniffed out her weakest points. A careless movement and they knew, that’s where they should keep advancing. The game was no longer a game, it was life and death. On the way home I did not see how she was pushed up against a wall, I did not see how they shook their fists at her in the dark passage, I did not see how her skirt slipped above her knee in the empty parking lot. I went on, a silent witness, as I had learned to be. If I intervened, at that time it was still a present conditional, a completely possible possibility, I would be the next in line, that was fairly certain. Better not to let anything come near me. Better to turn off here, before anyone sees me.

  70

  So now you know.

  Yes.

  And do you understand? That I ...

  .... you have said enough.

  No, not enough. There’s more.

  The tip of the cigarette glowed.

  Today they’re doing overtime. He opened his eyes and seemed to be searching for a point on which to focus. Blinking, he looked first at me, then at the bar, at me again, then at the floor. The floorboards creaked, a drunk went astray on his way to the toilet. Aimlessly he stood between the tables, someone should have taken him by the arm. But he just stood there, a statue without sense or purpose. It’s such a shame, he babbled, a trumpet interrupted his words.

  No, not enough, I said once more. But my voice sounded harsh. Perhaps, I thought, I should spare us both the end. Nearby someone was talking about fish and whether fish ever slept. Perhaps, I thought again, I should leave it at that. An old saying came to mind: It is hard to wake someone who is not asleep. The whole time the drunk stood in the middle of the room. The waiter ran around him, as though he were part of the furniture. He really was standing stock still now, you could believe he’d fallen asleep upright. Only when someone knocked into him did he sway gently, to and fro, then immediately stood motionless again. It was minutes before he finally began to move. Instead of going to the toilet he returned to his place and ordered another brandy.

  I must finish it, I thought, that’s the least I can do.

  There’s more, I heard myself say.

  71

  Someone found her, limbs twisted, on the playground. She had thrown herself from the fifth floor. Someone laid flowers there, where she had fallen. Wilting roses, carnations, chrysanthemums. On one of the accompanying notes it said: We mourn and are ashamed. Dear Yukiko. I put no words to paper. Any moment she would pop up behind the bushes and run back, her ponytail bobbing, backwards. Up to me. And further back. To walk between the graves. I ran off with a white sheet of paper in my hands. Perhaps, perhaps she would be waiting for me, there, by the temple. And we would sit in the shade of the bent pine and not let the wind pass between us.

  Red threads.

  Breathless, I stood still.

  The tree was bedecked with red threads, all over. Our friendship tree, on each branch hung five threads, for each year gone by, a thread. I gasped. How had she climbed so high? How had she reached the bushy crown? Our names in the bark had grown up with it, towards the sun. How had she known I would come here? Finally I saw and understood her. And yet not quite. Someone who creates such a work of art wants to preserve a secret to the very end. The meow of the temple cat. Was it still the same one? I picked her up and let her stretch her claws. Warm blood. I am still here. Dear Yukiko. I wrote it in the bend of my arm. I would like to tell you: I love you.

  72

  What remained was a gap in our housing development.

  Her parents’ house was cleared out shortly afterwards. From the windows of my room I could watch how the men, masks over mouths and noses, brought out all sorts of rubbish, junk and trash. Broken bicycles, in piles. Dented pans. A dumpster full of newspapers and magazines. Radios. Sofas. Mattresses. Nibbled by mice. Three boxes of lamp shades. And nails. And screws. It emerged that the Miyajimas had lived off their neighbors’ garbage for a long time. A scandal, said Mother. She was standing close behind me. What they collected! Look, our alarm clock. As if it still belonged to us. As if it were ours forever. A passing remark. In her thoughts she had already moved on. I realized there was no point in reminding her that she had thrown the clock away more than a year ago because its ring was too shrill for her. Let someone else be woken by it! With these words she’d thrown it in the trash.

  A last truckload of plastic. I went out. Empty tin cans. A cracked mirror, in which my face was a grimace, an ugly contortion. I reached into one of the sacks that had been put outside the entrance and pulled out a fossil. An insect was frozen inside it. I stuck it in my pants pocket and felt its surface in there. It was cool and smooth, a pleasure to touch. From behind his mask one of the workers grumbled: That’s enough for today.

  73

  The house was torn down. The materials had no value, they said, and it wasn’t worth repairing. On the way to sch
ool I saw them blocking off the street and on the way home I saw an excavator knocking down the last wall. The ground shook beneath my feet. Days later there was a level surface where I had once stood and rung the bell, and a few days later a new building went up. A family moved in: Father, mother and child. Good people, they said, perhaps a bit too stylish. How does that look? Our old Nissan next to their new one. There was hardly another word about the Miyajimas. According to what was known, and not much was known, not much anyone wanted to know, they moved into the lower part of town, burdened with debt, and no one would have been surprised to catch sight of them under a blue tarpaulin in one of the parks in S. Yes, one would have liked to be able to say that someone had seen them there. It would have been a reassuring horror story. To be able to say: They have hit rock bottom. And since the horror should not be allowed to fade, people said, without really knowing: No doubt about it. Even if they are not quite there. Some day they will hit rock bottom. Only when the Fujitas one block further over turned out to have a gambling addiction and marriage problems did the talk about the Miyajimas stop.

  And then?

  Nothing. I mean that’s how it was, and I had to get used to it. I had my seventeenth birthday. Then my eighteenth. The pressure grew. I resisted it. Clenched my teeth and thought: This is being grownup. To get over it, whatever it was, and even when you have not recovered, to regard it as over and done with. To forget. That too. To forget over and over again. If it were not for Kumamoto I would have managed it. But he had Yukiko’s eyes. The same look: I am dissolving.