by Ellis Avery
In bed, I remembered the simple, offhand trust with which Yukako had accepted her breakfast that morning, the way I became invisible to her in the bath that night as she outlined her latest plans for the Baishian stools and table. I savored the lying brightness with which she told Tsuko about going to the teahouse the night before to warn Nao against working too loud or too late. “Tell me if he bothers you and I’ll have him stop at once,” she said. Oh yes you will, any hour, day or night, I thought, with a private smirk.
Alone in my little chamber, suddenly I felt the loss of her so keenly that I almost closed the door to catch my breath and cry a little, but then Nao appeared and I got lost in his body, in kissing his mouth, in his planed-wood smell. I felt softer than I had the night before, and I clung to him when we were through the way I’d clung to Inko as a girl.
He was so beautiful. I covered his face with my hands, feeling its hard and soft shapes. Whose face had I touched last? The boys, when they were small? “What was it like to be a child here?” I asked.
He laughed joylessly. “You know how the students take turns cleaning out the privies?” I nodded. There was so much demand for nightsoil among farmers that the students actually looked forward to the task: they got to keep whatever the owai man paid.
“Back in the Shogun’s day, do you think any of those little princelings were cleaning toilets?”
I remembered the Mountain’s students from my childhood, a softer lot than now, more attentive to their ancestral rank than to their temae. I did not remember them cleaning toilets. This had changed, I was dimly aware, after we pulled out of our worst time, when the students began coming again. “So Mr. Matsu must have done it when I was young,” I thought aloud.
“No doubt. But that’s what I did for ten years, eight to eighteen, every night. And every day I cut the tearoom charcoal. Matsu would beat me if I did it wrong.”
“Wrong like how?”
“Cut a piece too thick. Too thin. Too long. Too short. If any bark fell off. If there were any knots in the wood. I got a lash for each bad piece.”
“But how could that be your fault? I mean, isn’t that how it comes?” When the charcoal man brought his load, it was in the form of trunks and branches, black and silvery, whole trees carbonized in the kiln.
“Sure, but that didn’t stop Matsu. He said if the sizes were wrong, the Master’s tea fire wouldn’t light and it would shame us all in front of the guests. And there’s a little truth to that: if you always start a fire with the exact same cuts of charcoal laid the exact same way, you’re fairly likely to boil water every time. But you know what? My mother made three meals a day for forty-five years and she never failed at boiling water.”
I nodded. I could picture the bin under the backstage floor of each tearoom where the charcoal for ritual use was kept, each piece like all its mates. From overhead they looked like milled Kobe soaps, or candies, perfect identical black-and-silver wheels. I knew Toru and his father cut charcoal, but I hadn’t given much thought to what that might mean.
“Until Akio came, when Hiro had a break between lessons, he and Yuka would get saws and help me.” Yuka! I hadn’t heard anyone call her that since Chio’s day. “If he cut a bad piece, he’d make me beat him.” Nao grinned.
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, not hard. Yuka wouldn’t have let me.”
“Wait, was she older?”
He shook his head. “No, she was the youngest.” He made steps with his hands to show their birth order. “Me, Hiro, Yuka. But she always was”—there was a tiny catch in his voice, something you wouldn’t have heard if you hadn’t been listening for it—“a little hellcat, and he always was kind of frail.”
He drew lazy circles on my back as he spoke. “I still can’t believe how much she looks like him in her hakama,” he mused. I stopped breathing for a moment before he continued, “The charcoal dust made Hiro cough and cough. It got everywhere, and it itched. Sifting the ash was even worse. I’d spit wads of black stuff at the end of the day.” He laughed his raw sad laugh. “I don’t blame him for stopping, but when Akio came, it was like he’d never helped me.” In his words I heard it again, a splinter of the jealousy I bore for Tsuko Sono.
“And now little Toru has to do it,” he concluded. “Sweet kid. I really thought if this marriage to Aki didn’t work out, he’d find a better lot in life, but he’s too stupid to know what a drudge he is. And even if I could spare him, someone else would have to do it.”
I wanted to ask about Aki, but his voice had gone light and desultory. “The students could take turns at it,” I proposed, matching his tone, “the way they do with the toilets.”
“That would be a start,” he said. “Then they could caterwaul about it the way they carry on about laying ash. You’ve heard them.”
“Yes.” I nodded. After each brazier fire, once Toru sifted the ash, the students took turns shaping the fine dark powder into a prescribed form: the shape of a valley between two mountains. The charcoal fire then sat in this valley. “Doesn’t the ash form help the fire draw better?”
“It does. But there are other ways. You could use a sunken hearth, the way they do in the winter. Or you could use an enclosed chamber, like we do with glass. You do the same sort of thing in the kitchen.”
“And we don’t use special sizes of charcoal,” I agreed.
“Un. So why do you think they lay the ash that way, really?”
I thought of Alice Starkweather complaining earlier that day: They just treasure things because they’re old. “Because that’s how the old masters did it?” I asked.
“Guess again.”
He started tapping me again, which made me roll away a little. “No.”
“Because they can. They don’t have to heat up anyone’s bath, or scrub toilets, or dig canals, or sew kimono,” he said, with a nod to me. “They can sit there and push ash around with their dainty little shovels for an hour and a half until they’ve made a perfect valley with a satin finish. And then they can burn a tea fire in that ash and do it all over again. They’re showing off.”
Nao was silent, and when he spoke again, his voice was both soft and harsh. “After Hiro died, they cremated him, and when I had to sift the ash the next time, I almost threw up. It’s just dirt, I kept telling myself. It’s no one you know. And then I saw the old man critiquing the students’ ash forms and I almost threw up again. It was just dirt, and here I was hauling shit and spitting charcoal so that they could sculpt ash. Ura, these people play with dirt.”
“You left,” I said quietly. He had always called me Miss Ura before.
“If it weren’t for my mother, I would have never come back.” True, here he was just in time for Obon, the filial son.
“Though now that I’m here,” he added, “I can’t tell you how much satisfaction it gives me to piss in the Baishian privy.”
I laughed with him, but something had caught my attention. “Why did you say Matsu instead of my father?”
“I didn’t think you’d understand what I was talking about, Miss Foreigner,” he said, half teasing, half cold. He reached for my breasts and flattened them against my torso, flattened me back onto the futon.
I felt giddy and enveloped and desired, but I persisted. “But you said my mother instead of o-Chio.”
“Did I?”
He kissed me; we lavished ourselves on each other’s mouths and coupled again, hazy and streaky and sparkling. How strange, to have another human being inside you and still not know him. Afterward, I pressed my cheek into the hollow of his sternum. “Why did you leave?” I asked. “After Aki disappeared?”
“I didn’t know what was best for her, so I stepped back,” he said. “And I had some responsibilities in Tokyo. It seemed like a good time to go take care of them.”
“You always acted like she wasn’t even here, and now she’s gone,” I pushed, surprising myself. “Don’t you even miss her a little?”
“I don’t miss hearing Akio’s
name all the time. I don’t miss seeing her mother’s face.” He was hoarding something in his shuttered face, the way a husk hoards its grain of rice.
I kept my voice low and easy. “Who was she?”
“What’s it to you?” he snapped.
When I was a child, bored and hungry, I’d take one of the Shins’ decorative stems of dried rice and eat it, grain by stiff grain. The trick was to crush the tough husk between my front teeth slowly, just enough to splay open its sharp fibers without harming the rice within. I looked at Nao and carefully applied pressure. “When you wrote that year, you said you lost a friend.”
His face was suddenly as open to me as it had been closed before. “Roku. He was like a little brother to me,” he said. “Like Hiro before Akio came along. We lived and worked together until he died in a blast. There was a mistake. The roof collapsed and he was still inside.”
“The roof? Of the tunnel?” I asked, confused.
“Exactly,” he said, but not before a look of alarm shot across his face, as if I’d caught him lying.
I didn’t know what to do with that look before it vanished. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “When I ran away from the fire when I was young, I heard a child screaming. I still dream about it sometimes. I can only imagine if it was a friend.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
That’s when I knew to press on. “And then you met Aki’s mother?”
He gave me a long wry look. He exhaled. “Fine, because you’re a foreigner, I’ll tell you.” He pillowed his head on my chest and lay silent for a moment. “Her name was Ruri. I met her in Asaka, while I was doing explosives for the canal. Her family worked clearing away the rubble from the blasts. She was—” He held something back before continuing. “Her family worked as day laborers on farms when there was work, and starved when there wasn’t. The farmers needed them and hated them. When they went to get their wages, they weren’t allowed into the house, and when they worked, the farmers gave them tea in old cups they’d break when the harvest was over, to make sure their lips wouldn’t touch anything Ruri’s people had soiled. Her family lived with the other day laborers in a squalid little hamlet out past the farms. Ura, this is what gets me about the tea world: those people were so poor, they had only enough charcoal to heat water for cooking or washing. So often as not, they really were as dirty as the farmers said, but it wasn’t by choice.”
I was surprised by the way Nao talked, with more feeling and less bitterness than he had about himself. “Ruri was seventeen. Her husband beat her every night. When he broke her tooth, I said she could stay with me.”
I touched his face as he went on. “It was soon after my friend died; I was so broken up, I didn’t mind what the other men on the crew said, I just wanted to save one person’s life. I thought I could take her with me to Yokohama. Get her a job as a maid with foreigners, people who wouldn’t care what she’d come from. She was so grateful. We talked all night, making plans for her. I was grateful too. It finally took Roku off my mind.”
And here he was again tonight, talking late with a woman, I noted indulgently. “The next morning, all the men of her village dragged us out of bed and marched us to her husband’s shack with nooses around our necks. Her husband divorced her, and the only way her father would untie me was if I married her. So I let them marry us,” he said, with a bitter laugh. “A week later I left her at the lodging house where I was staying and went to Yokohama, found her a job with a good family, and came back to Asaka with the news.
“But she wasn’t at the lodging house. She wasn’t at her father’s house when I looked. I went to her husband’s house, and there she was, feeding him the rice I gave her. With a fresh black eye.”
“She went back to him,” I breathed.
“‘How could you?’ I asked.” Nao’s face was hollow as the words filled it. “‘I was born to this,’ she said. ‘This is my place.’”
“That’s so sad.”
Nao looked away, and then at me. “It’s not true.” He balled his fists for emphasis. “You’re not born to anything. She didn’t have to go back to him like that. She didn’t have to dump her child on my mother, or throw herself in the river. Maybe she thought Aki will have a better life than she had, but she could have had a better life. Every time I look at Aki, I want to slap her mother for giving in like that.”
A short hot sigh burst out of him, a sound of disgust: “My mother was the same way.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he said, “I went along with that farce wedding so everyone could put a good face on her leaving him, but I never wanted to keep her for myself. I went to bed with her that week, but I didn’t mean anything by it. But when I came back from Yokohama and saw her feeding that man, I felt as betrayed as if I’d married her in earnest. I went and got my gun and I sat up all night in the tunnel we were blasting. I didn’t kill him and I didn’t kill her. I just held it. I thought about Hiroshi. About Ruri. About the brother I had lost.”
He lay silent. When he looked up at me, his voice was thick and forlorn. “Trying to help just one person could break a man in half,” he said. “That was the night I decided I couldn’t work on that scale.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What did you do?”
His eyes shuttered again over his secrets. “Whatever I was able.”
“But what about making windows?”
“Well, that’s for pay,” he said, softening. “And it helps me. I can forget everything when I’m working.”
He stroked my clavicles as I lay quietly. “Aki has had a better life than her mother, thanks to you,” I said. “And look, she tried to run away from a bad lot and she succeeded. She tried to kill herself and failed. She got a black eye and worse, and it’s healing up fast,” I joked, cajoling.
He nodded, half smiling, but he winced as well, and I realized he’d left after we heard what happened to her face: he hadn’t wanted to see.
“And that’s without you even helping,” I added. He hung his head at the reproach even as he chuckled.
I felt so tender toward him. He sank into my embrace and I felt his heart beating in my palm. When I read Murasaki, I hadn’t been able to picture how three nights together could make a marriage, but now I could. I smiled. “You know, if we were Heian lords and ladies and you came a third night, we’d be married. Can you imagine? Just like that.”
He went brittle in my arms. He coughed.
“You think that’s what I meant? Don’t flatter yourself,” I jabbed lamely.
“We were never lords and ladies,” he said.
His voice held an edge of pity. His face shut me out. He’d said it himself: I went to bed with her, but I didn’t mean anything by it. I looked down, mortified. Before he could rise to gather up his clothes, I said, “I think you should go now.”
THE NEXT NIGHT I saw him and Kuga dancing at the neighborhood Obon fire. I could envision Chio dancing there, too, her strong arms, her unshowy, vigorous movements, as unself-conscious as an animal shaking itself dry. Nao and Kuga shared that, reaching up as if from the center of their bodies, as if their arms were incidental, as after-the-fact as hair. That aside, I reflected, unable to leave the shrine grounds, they looked barely alike. Kuga had once resembled her brother’s photograph, but now she simply had a crushed look, one that did not change even as she reached and danced. Nao, meantime, looked hopeful and lupine, his lush hair bobbing with his movements. I stood unable to move, watching him, flooded with embarrassment and desire. I was too proud to leave my door open that night, but sliding it shut took all my will.
AFTER OBON, JEWEL AND JADE returned and crowded back into the three mats by the kitchen with me. Nao finished work on the teahouse and picked up where he’d left off on the newlyweds’ upper room, subjected to Yukako’s tart scrutiny rather more often than warranted. We avoided each other. I promised myself I’d tell Aki her mother’s story one day, but I held it tight to my chest just then, not wanting to say how I’d heard it. The heat of
August broke, and I learned I was not pregnant.
34
1891
BAISHIAN WAS RADIANT. The morning of the Minister’s visit, the brown and gold wood shone glossy: every surface had been wiped until a white silk cloth could come away white. Fresh tatami lay new and green. An ancient scroll hung in the alcove, remounted for the occasion on rich new brocade, one crisp kanji on a white field.
The calligraphy Yukako and Tai had chosen bore the simple kanji for kan, barrier or gate: a little figure framed in a great double door. It was a reference to this night, the gate between the waxing and waning moon, and it also hinted at the Shin family’s desire to teach tea in the boys’ schools as well, to be let in through that gate. Mother and son had decided to use the venerable Hakama tea bowl again, with its narrow base and billow at one side, to allude both topically to the new girls’ schools and, more resonantly, to the old dress of samurai men, to a time when tea was a part of every hakama-wearer’s education.
In the center of the room, between the host’s mat and the guest’s, the floorboard with its darkly blooming wood grain seemed to float between the two tatami instead of lying flush with them: Yukako’s table was just as elegant as she’d imagined. Two round stools of the same wood sat beneath the table, demure and self-effacing. Though she’d adapted the room for a radically new purpose, Yukako had altered it as subtly as possible, filling it with furniture while leaving it uncluttered.
The windows were just what she’d hoped for. Nao had contrived to cover each window hole with two sliding panels, one behind the other, so that each could be left open or covered in glass, shoji paper, or both. As I looked gingerly inside the tearoom that morning, I wished for the Minister’s sake that he could come in the daytime too. There was a ghost of autumn coolness in the air those days, enough that the effect of glass focusing the heat of the sun was a pleasant shock to the skin.
For the event, Yukako planned to have all the glass windows covered with shoji but one. In the high alcove window, where the moon came flooding in, Nao had incorporated shoji and glass into the same panel: a diamond-shaped pane of glass in a milky square paper frame. Into that glass diamond, the harvest moon would float, an orange and majestic balloon. Yukako had timed the tea event—and rehearsed with Tai unobtrusive ways to slow or speed the evening along, depending on the Minister’s pace—so that the moon would sail in just after the intermission, during the preparation of thick tea.