The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  “It’s freezing in here,” he grumbled, oddly jovial. “They keep promising, Someone will take down your futon. Someone will light you a fire. Have you seen this someone?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I think I’ve gotten one of those braziers lit downstairs,” he said. “I saw some wood around. Not that it helps up here,” he noted, rubbing his hands together. “Father Damian’s an astonishing man. An inspiration. He’ll see you tomorrow, not tonight,” he added. “No need to sit up waiting.” His way of speaking was slack and lazy; he was not himself. He looked at me suddenly, as if only just seeing me. “In our chair with Dolly, are we? Wearing our coat?”

  I held up the telegram envelope. Uncle Charles recoiled. I said, “We could have buried her.”

  “My child,” he said, a little sobered, “if we had waited for the next ship, Father Damian would have taken on other staff. That snake Brother Michael would be here in my place. And then where would we be?”

  “In New York,” I said coldly. And then I tried to say it. “I could have seen her—” I began, starting to cry again.

  “My Aurelia,” said Uncle Charles. I expected a lecture, but he lowered himself onto the chair and gathered me in his lap. He smelled of liquor. “My child,” he said, holding me as I cried, helpless and snuffling. I missed her so much, and all I had was Uncle Charles, who sat there offering me clumsy, bearlike pats on the shoulder. At first, knowing he meant to comfort me was of itself a comfort, my doll in my lap and me in his, the awkward arms limp around me; but then his grip tightened. “My child,” he repeated, whispering, his breath harsh. His hands gripped my waist as he spoke. I looked at him uncertainly; his eyes narrowed, as if he were concentrating. He was lifting me up in his lap and setting me down, gently and rhythmically, but gravely. He would have this rhythm and no other. “My child, my child,” he said, his big hands trembling and pulling me tighter into his lap, again, again; I was a rag, a doll. And then he lurched up and groaned and dropped me, and my own doll dropped to the floor.

  I did not cry out when I fell because I did not want him to comfort me. I stood up and smoothed my dress and looked at him, flung back in his chair. His eyelids fluttered, his round peach face flushed ripe: veins jumped in his forehead.

  The thought struck me: I did not like my uncle Charles. I took my doll by the arm and I walked downstairs. The last dregs of evening lit my uncle’s big boots, splayed across the floor where he’d tossed them, and my small ones, too, tucked together in a corner. I sat on the step by the entrance and listened. Outside, far off, I heard a hoarse voice calling a short phrase over and over—a peddler, maybe—and from all directions the slow clop of wooden sandals. Nearby I heard the pop of wood burning in the brazier. Upstairs I heard nothing. Was he gathering himself to spring at me? I quietly put on one of my boots and laced it. A loud sound scissored down from his room: I grabbed my other boot. It was a snore. I did not like him. I laced my boot, took my doll, and walked outside. It was so simple. I glanced back through the lattice at Uncle Charles’s sprawled boots and walked into the dusk, one foot in front of the other.

  I saw the curved tip of the red torii gate rising beyond a house across the street; I walked toward it and saw the shrine glittering with candles. Lights and flowers surrounded a golden statue of a woman with a dot on her forehead. She was not God, but where was God?

  I would pray to her, I decided. Two-two-one. I had no coin, but I could leave my doll. I walked through the gate and tugged the bellpull. I bowed, I clapped, I made my awful wish.

  3

  1866

  I WASN’T SURE what to do next. I sat where I had stood, at the foot of the golden goddess, under the bell-rope, watching people, young and old, stroll by in their noisy clogs. Carrying towels, they wore coarse kimono in different shades of blue, and one walked with a lantern in the dimming evening: a pretty globe of paper with a candle inside, dangling at the end of a stick. People spoke, and from the staccato song-chains of their speech floated up, astonishingly, words from my grammar: mother, father, pretty, excuse me. I sat quietly, and as the night deepened, more lanterns appeared, passing calmly to and fro, clop, clop, clop. I was transfixed by the lights; I wanted to join, not any lamplit person in particular, but the whole street, the whole net of fairy lights bobbing in the dark.

  Then suddenly the lamps stopped moving, and then they all surged in the same direction. The steady tap of wooden shoes became a hailstorm, and then the shouting started, and I smelled the fire.

  Uncle Charles had left wood burning untended in a charcoal brazier in a paper house. Could the blaze have started somewhere else? Perhaps.

  TWO MEN in billowing priestly robes appeared from behind the shrine and swept the calm goddess off into the river of frightened people; she glinted gold and vanished. I crept forward in the opposite direction in time to see, by the light of the conflagration, our new gray house, intact (I could see through the front gate, see Uncle Charles’s boots sprawled where he’d left them) but glowing like a paper lantern, hollowed out by flame. As I backed away, the house trembled, and then it roared, belching up a ball of fire as the tiled roof caved in and brought the second floor heaving to the ground. Then fire fanned down the block, and I began to run.

  I do not know if Uncle Charles woke and wriggled through a window or staggered down the kitchen alley. Sixty-three years have passed since that night. Much later I learned that the same spring I arrived in Japan, Saint Patrick’s Church on Mott Street caught fire. While the churchyard where my mother was buried escaped untouched, the church burned to the ground. No one could say how it started.

  THE FIRE WAS a loud animal. It sucked the breath out of me. I groped and staggered, forward, away, through the screams and the groaning buildings. Men called for water to save their homes. Mother! Mother! cried the thin voice of a child. A horse-drawn cart pushed past me, and I thought, I could have climbed up on that. I was sure I had missed my chance, but then one of the horses spooked, shrieking on its hind legs, and the driver beat him about the head with wet rags to stop the falling sparks. Now, I whispered: I touched my Saint Claire medal for courage and ran toward the horses, shimmied into the cart, and flattened myself against a load of silk. As we pulled away, I bit my lip: had that child found its mother? When we had cleared the smoke and the press of terrified people, I scrambled out again and ran, ran into the dark.

  I RAN, and then I walked, unseeing. My lungs felt charred. Occasional breaths of incense burst through my sobs, so perhaps I passed temples. I walked and walked until my breath sanded my throat. I was so thirsty. Beyond a dainty bamboo fence, I saw a patch of stone where the moon shone wetly. I climbed the fence: no water. I passed a rock tied with string—a boundary marker, I one day learned—and saw beyond it a rough stone pillar. Its smooth worn top formed a cup, holding water. Oh. I leaned into it and drank like an animal. When I wiped my mouth, mucus clung to my wrist from crying.

  I was in a garden of moss and rock. I saw a tiny wooden house with a square hole in the side, like a door for a baby. A rough stone formed a step in front of the square entrance; I climbed up on it and looked inside. “Hello?” Nothing. I crawled in. I felt woven straw under my hands, a Japanese floor, so I untied my boots and kicked them behind me into the stone garden.

  This is how, smelling of fire, snot drying on my face, I first came to the teahouse Baishian. I lay flat on the floor and slept.

  WHEN I SAT UP in the dark, the fire felt as small and remote to me as a story. I was real. This house was real, all silvery wood and moonlight: the most beautiful place I had ever seen.

  The room stood small and austere, two pale tatami rectangles with a wide dark polished floorboard between them. In the heart of the room, I saw a gap in the floorboard, a perfectly square hole like the door I had crawled through, but smaller. The moon crept in through scattered windows, turned the straw floor white, made the floorboard gleam, but left a perfect square of night untouched at the center. It frightened me; I looked away. In the corn
er beside me, a tiny step up from the tatami floor, I saw an alcove, three feet wide by some two feet deep. The brightest splash of moon fell on the alcove floor: a beautiful piece of wood, brown-black, with a thread of white running across it like vein of bright marble. The room was a mirror for the moon. It seemed to hold its breath.

  All it lacked was its fairy-tale inhabitant, the spirit princess for whom the little hole I had crawled through was a wide gate, for whom seven feet by six was palace enough. Maybe she lived deep under the earth, and wafted in like smoke through the dark square in the floor. Would she be warm enough in here? I lay down, cold, and drew my knees to my chin.

  Someone was walking outside. It was strange to hear a footstep here without the wooden clop of sandals, but I was not mistaken: shff, shff, shff, as if walking barefoot, a light, knowing step, quick. The walker paused, as if startled, outside the house where I lay. A female voice whispered a word in Japanese: Older Brother?

  I heard a long pause, and then a head appeared in the square doorway. I shut my eyes, breathed deep sleeping breaths. A little foreigner, said the voice.

  I looked again: the head was gone. A large object had appeared in its place. It was dark, a creature, a stiff dead dog, and then I made it out. It was a Japanese pillow, a wooden box topped with a cloth pad. A thin cloth followed the pillow, and then I heard someone pick up my shoes, all in one resolute motion, and set them on the cloth inside the room. Then a back, a grown woman’s back, appeared in the doorway, shoulders moving; she was peeling off a pair of socks. I saw her arm reach in and set them on the cloth with my shoes. And then the woman herself crawled in through the little door, straightened, and loomed over me. Scared, I closed my eyes again.

  Koneko, she said under her breath. A word I knew, less endearing than it sounds in English. Cats and kittens are dirty in Japanese, and by definition stray, only tolerated—like Mr. Ohara’s mouser—if they earn their keep.

  And yet she paused over me, then crouched. I felt her face near mine. A damp feather of her hair touched my arm. I tried desperately not to change my breathing. Why didn’t she scream at me?

  And what kind of person, clearly not poor, went barefoot? I heard a slow, distant tok, tok: a night watchman pacing with his wooden clapper. I figured it out. The woman was hiding too. Older Brother, she’d said: where was he?

  I opened my eyes. A stark white face was looking straight at me, a monster with no eyebrows. I flinched. Boo, she said. A Japanese sound, ba. I cowered and froze up, gasping. Her ghost face eased into a faint smile, and I uncurled and simply stared back at her, my heart loud in my throat.

  I saw a young woman, perhaps sixteen to my almost ten, with long alert eyes, a narrow nose. A long face washed clean, longer for the lack of eyebrows. She was like the moon, like the dark wood shot with white. Her long drying hair was a silk river. Her eyes were lights. I shivered, from the cold, and because she was so beautiful.

  Her beautiful nostrils flared. Her beautiful face rippled with distaste. Kusai, she said. You smell bad. I hid my face in my hands, ashamed. She gave a tiny dry seed of a laugh and turned away from me. I opened my eyes and watched her. She wore two robes, a dark one over a light one. She stood, as if dispensing with an interruption, and took off her outer robe. She lay down on her side, facing away, on the pale tatami between me and the hole in the floor, settling her pillow under her neck. She sighed, and again I heard a hint of laughter. And then she spread her kimono so that it covered us both.

  My eyes felt bald, I opened them so wide, with shock, with gratitude. Foreigner. Little cat. You smell bad. Even my mother chased stray cats off the roof with a broom. She didn’t spread her clothing over them to keep them warm.

  My mother was dead in New York. No. My mother was alive; she was safe and far from fever. A spirit princess, she had vanished down a square hole in the floor under her bed, and left a false body behind. I reached for my Saint Claire medal. I couldn’t think.

  The woman’s hair had touched my arm. The woman’s hand, the back of her hand, had flickered across my side when she shook her robe smooth over us. Who had touched me, since I left home? Only Uncle Charles. I couldn’t think about that, either. The cotton of the woman’s kimono lay across my cheek; it smelled of old incense, dark and sweet. I watched her breathe. Her narrow back was a tall ship lifting gently on the waves. She was a moon princess. She was a bright vein in dark wood. I slept.

  IN THE GRAY DAWN, the woman sat beside me and pointed to her nose, the way Americans point to their hearts to talk about themselves. “You,” she said. Was she speaking English? I am you? You are you?

  She picked up my hand and took my index finger, they call it the person-pointing finger, and pointed it at my nose. “Me,” I said, not grasping the game. “You. Me. You. I don’t understand. Aurelia?”

  “U ra ya,” she repeated.

  “U ra ya,” I agreed.

  “Ura-ya,” she said dubiously, as if I’d told her my name was Road Toll, or Wet Mop. Her face cleared, and she lifted my hand toward me again, gently. “Urako,” she said softly, pleased with herself. “Miss Urako.” So it was a name, then, Urako, a name stressed like Erica or Jericho. This morning it was mine.

  I was the last thing she’d imagined finding here, her face told me, as she stared at my dress, my knitted socks, my necklace. What had she come here for last night, barefoot and in secret? “Older Brother?” I asked, remembering.

  She looked at me for a moment, then realized that I’d tried to say a Japanese word, then understood what I’d said. Her eyes widened soberly. She said something, and like her, I had to think about it for few seconds. Dead.

  There was so much I hadn’t learned, but I remembered a word from my grammar. “Sad,” I said.

  “Sad,” she repeated. She looked down and away.

  To cheer her up, I touched my nose for her again. “Urako,” I said. Her face bloomed.

  I WOKE TO GREEN: a square of bright sun and green green moss. I opened my eyes fully: not to a dark ship cell, not to Mott Street, but to the bare and lovely Japanese room, like a perfect shell tossed up by the sea. I was alone.

  Though the day was cold, the room had a warm look lent by all the different shades of brown, from the pale straw of the tatami to the deep warm black of the alcove floor, with its bolt of white gold, like a stroke of lightning. The clay walls were fitted here and there with bamboo-latticed windows. When I looked at the low slanted ceiling, I felt as if I were in a cunningly made little basket: I saw woven slats of wood and ribs of bamboo.

  At the center of the room, interrupting the foot-wide floorboard between the two tatami mats, gaped last night’s strange hole, less sinister, but no less mysterious. The satiny floorboard, its wood grain blooming like oil on water, was really two pieces of wood, perfectly matched, on either side of the foot-square hole. The hole—I nervously crouched over it—was a perfect cube, a foot deep, and lined with metal on all sides. Was that all? I dared myself to touch the cool floor of the hole, and came up with the faintest film of black on my fingertips: soot?

  I heard a soft quick patter outside and recognized the step from last night. It approached the little house where I cowered, paused with a light flap like a thin book dropped on a table, and receded just as quickly. And there, between me and the moss garden outside, just peeping into the small square of the doorframe, I saw two brown circles: the ankle-tops of a pair of leather boots. My shoes! Why had she taken them? And why had she brought them back?

  On the rock doorstep between the garden and the house, my shoes stood together, facing out, as if to point me home. And home? Two boots lit by a burning house. A churchyard. A woman coughing blood on Mott Street. I gathered myself close.

  Who would know to look for me? Had Brother Joaquin escaped the fire? Did he even imagine me alive? And with whom, if he found me, would I live? Nuns, I realized. I faced a life of boiled wool and boiled greens, soap and bone and waxy cold hands. Years without the reprieve of thinking, I have the right to be here. A lifet
ime mouthing my mother’s sullen gratitude for bed and board. What other place was there for me?

  Maybe here, I decided: this room, this house as bare as dawn. The woman had set my boots side by side outside the teahouse and I chose not to lace them on. Not until I’m thrown out.

  I heard clogs approaching and then I saw a figure in a rosy striped kimono pause outside the doorframe. Wasn’t it the woman from last night? This woman, however, gasped audibly, perhaps even operatically, gave a girlish shriek, and ran away in a din of wood on stone. A guess: I was not supposed to be there last night, but nor was she. In order to expose me, she had needed to conceal her traces: moving my shoes was a way to control when I was found first, and by whom. But if I could ever ask her, what would I say? Me not here; you not here too?

  I did not think, hearing her clatter away, that I would be allowed to stay in that perfect little house. I sat in the doorway, my head just brushing the top of the wooden frame, my feet resting on the rock below, and looked reluctantly out at the stone pillar where I had drunk the night before. The path leading out—flat gray slates embedded in spongy green moss—looked like a series of distant lakes. A voyage. What was going to happen? I didn’t want to run away, but nor did I want to face my fate shoeless.

  As I laced my first boot, again I heard a clatter: two pairs of Japanese shoes. The young woman reappeared, almost running, leading a round-faced older lady in a dark blue kimono, who threw up her arms when she saw me. “Ara!” she cried—which is what Japanese women say when they are surprised—her thick face twisting in disgust and horror. She spoke; the younger woman spoke. Were they mother and daughter? They looked nothing alike, and the older woman wore cotton, while the younger woman wore silk; the older woman wore raw wooden shoes while the younger woman’s sandals were covered with a skin of painted leather. The older woman pointed broadly at me; the younger woman, talking continuously, looked at me and pointed with restraint at her nose. As I slid on my other boot, the older woman approached me. As if seizing a chicken by the neck, she took hold of my arm and dangled me for a moment; all the mass of her flesh was muscle. As I hung, my unlaced boot half sliding off my foot, I saw very clearly the thin red stripes in her indigo kimono, her large arm, her puffy face and small eyes, her wooden combs bristling under a blue tented headscarf. The young woman looked down at me with a mixture of pity and amusement; I was embarrassed. My arm hurt in its socket. I whimpered, the young woman chirred, and the older woman let me down.