The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  I held her in my arms, in the bowl of my thighs. She sighed, giving over all her weight to me. I felt her breathing with my entire body, long and smooth, the heat of her flesh moving through the cool heavy silk. Then she twitched and her breath caught; she pushed her wrist between her legs and held a fold of her robe there for a little while. She shuddered, jerked, murmured a few thick words, and then lay against me with her eyes closed. She smiled briefly, as if floating. For a moment her body felt light as balsa in my arms.

  THEN IT WENT heavy again. She was crying. I loosened her long hair and combed it with my fingers. “Older Sister,” I whispered for the first time in years, and the last.

  “He’s right,” she whispered. “I’ve thrown my life away on dust and leaves.”

  “That’s not true. Your family was failing and you made it strong. You took an art that could have died and you made it live, and the world is richer for it. In a small way, you changed the world.”

  “I changed the world,” Yukako snorted. “I haven’t done a thing. The world changed. Now that woman can just show up at my house and say I don’t even have a chance with the boys’ schools—” she spluttered. She was still for a long time.

  “You see, I thought I could have it both ways,” he explained, nodding toward the moon window. “Baishian with tables and glass. But my father’s world is gone,” she grimaced. “I should make my sons learn golf.”

  “Listen,” I said, feeling faintly impatient. “Do you remember how much you wanted to learn tea when I first met you? How you watched every lesson and you practiced every day?”

  Yukako grunted, wiping her wet eyes.

  “Did you want to learn so much because the men were doing it, or because it was beautiful?”

  “Because it was beautiful,” she sniffled, acknowledging the room around her with a glance.

  “And do you remember how you had to sit behind a screen to watch your father teach tea? And you never got a lesson of your own until you were married?”

  “Un.”

  “Because of you, no woman ever has to learn that way again. And that is all by itself a gift to the world. Do you understand?”

  Yukako nodded slowly. Her body relaxed completely into mine and she smiled for a moment.

  She sat quietly, thinking, the bone globe of her head resting on my shoulder. And then her eyes filled with tears again. “You know what made me so sad, earlier?”

  “What?” I knew from her voice she meant when she’d cried after quaking in my arms.

  Yukako sighed. “That woman just brought it all back to me. How I’ll never see Akio in this life again.”

  Ah. It had been his name she’d murmured thickly, before falling asleep for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The truth was, I didn’t feel very sorry. It occurred to me that the thing she and Nao had most in common was a need to waste passion on Akio. Twenty-five years seemed like a long time to mourn a boy who’d told her not to do temae, who’d cheated on her in her own house. Who’d abandoned her and Koito to go along with an arranged marriage, and then abandoned his wife and family to go get killed in Satsuma. When Nao left, Yukako didn’t literally say I loved you. She used the pronoun Japanese people go to great lengths to avoid, unless they are wives addressing their husbands. She looked up at Nao and said Antahan. You. And then You three: Nao, her brother, and Akio, whom she held in her heart as indelibly as that metal wall held its two scratched names, whom she loved with a tenacity forged in childhood.

  As part of me still loved her. She’d just managed to snatch away one of the few moments of unmixed bliss she’d ever given me, and still I held her. I missed it so much, the feeling of being in love with her. I drew my fingers down the black silk expanse of her hair, I traced the long calligraphic line of her back, I caressed her face with the back of my hand, barely touching her. She turned and embraced me: it had not happened since I was a child. I trembled. Her hand lay on my bare skin. I melted inside with longing, and then I kissed her.

  I COULD STILL FEEL the soft wet heat of her mouth as she stood on the other side of the room, my chest stinging from the force with which she’d pushed me away. “It was you. I can’t believe it.”

  What happened? I stared, dumbfounded, while Yukako dressed briskly, shaking with anger. “He taught you that, didn’t he?” she barked. Then I remembered her asking Nao, What are you doing?

  He must have kissed her, I realized, remembering when he’d first kissed me, how disgusting I had found it. But I had made the pleasure of kissing mine so quickly, so utterly, I’d done it without thinking.

  YUKAKO LASHED HERSELF into her kimono, bristling. I saw Tsuko had chosen a robe just as formal as Koito’s for her mother-in-law: black, five-crested, with an almost waist-high pattern of green maple leaves, a red one here or there anticipating fall. The green shone almost white in the moonlight; when Yukako, dressing with her back to me, spread her kimono, it looked as though she were standing behind a wall of glowing leaves. The robe fell six inches below the ankle; she folded up the excess with one swift knife-crease and spun into her obi as if throwing off sparks.

  She turned to face me again. “Every time I look at you, I’m going to remember this night,” she said coolly, as if noting it might rain.

  I blinked. Somewhere inside, I found it gratifying to think I might have such an effect on her.

  Then she spoke again. “This has been the worst night of my life.”

  She looked down to tuck a last obi cord into place and looked back up at me. “I know you have a job, Miss Urako, so I don’t feel bad saying this. You are to leave here tonight, do you understand?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “In my father’s day, the appropriate thing to do in this situation would be to take your own life. But I think that’s a bit extreme, don’t you?”

  I stared at her, appalled. But this was her family, wasn’t it? Rikyu, her founding ancestor, had been the tea master and closest confidant of the most important man in Japan, until he displeased his lord and was asked to commit suicide. On the day he died, he invited a few friends for a last tea ceremony, wrote a last poem, and slit his own belly with a shortsword.

  My face went hot. I placed my hands in front of me and bowed to hide my eyes as they filled with tears. I blinked, head bent, and as if for the first time I saw my own small hands on the tatami, the raw eye of each knuckle looking back at me. For twenty-five years, I thought, these hands have been hers.

  The appropriate thing would be to take your own life. Still bowing, I realized that Yukako had just told me how she cared for me: with her whole heart, like Shonagon’s Empress. We were vassal and liege, no less, no more. Like Rikyu, I meant enough to her that she would ask this much of me, that she would dignify what she was asking with a name this grave. For a moment I wished I had Nao’s gun to point at my stomach and prove myself worthy of the comparison. These hands are hers, I thought fiercely. This is my place.

  But I heard those words in Nao’s voice; they were Aki’s mother’s words. And I remembered what he’d said after repeating them: It’s not true.

  MY CHEST THROBBED, still, where Yukako had pushed me away. I sat up from my bow. I looked at her and spoke. “I need you to pay for me to go, the way you paid for Aki.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Everything in me wanted to shrink back, to say Nothing, nothing, to stick a shortsword in my belly and tell her I was hers forever. But I took a deep breath and said, “You gave Aki a dowry for the nuns. I want a dowry.”

  Yukako shrank back in disgust. I did not move.

  When she exhaled, Yukako’s sigh was equal parts betrayal and fatigue. “You greedy little foreigner,” she breathed. I shut my eyes in pain.

  I had depleted my courage, so I just sat there. She did too. I felt so much as the long seconds passed. The heat of my daring cooled off and still I sat there, cold and exhausted and stupefied.

  And obstinate.

  “This is silly,” ukako said. “The
night’s been long enough already without this nonsense. There’s money in my pillow. Take what you need and go.”

  I bowed again deeply, and left.

  36

  1891

  AS I PASSED THROUGH the kitchen to collect my things, I saw Kuga alone, deep in her cups, idly stirring the hearth with a pair of metal tongs. It was one of her black nights: I knew the next morning she’d be achy and snappish and not remember much. “Well, I’m going,” I announced.

  “Un,” she said, which is what I thought she’d say.

  “Okusama told me to leave and never come back, so I’m leaving,” I repeated.

  “Un.”

  I could hear the laughter of the others in nearby rooms. I could hear the last crickets whirring before the cold nights came in earnest. I could feel a wave of grief whelming toward me, as if from far away. Before it flattened me, I asked, “Do you think there’s any chance Nao-han might be Okusama’s brother?”

  Kuga moved her metal chopsticks back and forth, sluggishly blotting out her tracings in the ash. She looked like both her parents for a moment: Matsu’s hollow temples, Chio’s heavy lips. I remembered Chio at the end, calling Yukako by her father’s boyhood name. I remembered her quietly moving Nao’s photograph from the kitchen to her own little hut after her husband died. She would have been so young when Nao was born. Had the Mountain gone to her drunk on his own power? Or would he, like his grandson, have been happy to marry the kitchen maid? I had never wondered: had he even wanted to be his Master Teacher’s heir? Kuga slowly looked at me. “Shut your mouth,” she said, which I took for Yes.

  I made my way through the hall above the sewing room with a lantern and found Yukako’s lacquered pillow by her screen. She had begun moving it herself in the mornings, and I was surprised to discover how heavy it was now. A search through its drawer yielded only poems and ribbons, bits of old kimono, Akio’s tightly wrapped teascoop, but I could barely lift the wooden pillow-box; I felt the heavy slosh of metal in its chamber. I poured Yukako’s keepsakes into one of her carrying cloths and tied it neatly for her. Then I took the whole box. In the dark, with tears starting down my face, I was in no shape to face some clever secret drawer. I can’t puzzle it out, I thought. One poem, however, not by Akio, had caught my eye. I know who can.

  THE WALK WAS ENDLESS. Tears moved down my face in slow sheets. My hands went cold and bloodless from my knotted carrying cloths. Nothing had changed in twenty-five years: the night streets went on forever and I belonged to no one. I could have been a child again, walking and crying, stunned from the fire. I saw my uncle’s boots and the terrified horses. I heard groaning timbers and the thunderous collapse of tile. I smelled fire, I smelled fire. I sobbed as I walked: the wet, inchoate noises I heard were mine.

  I remembered Yukako as I first saw her in Baishian, phosphorescent, the way she spread her robe across me in the dark. I keened. I sat down on my burdens between two walls of night-shuttered houses and dug my sodden face into my hands. The rest of my life would consist of thousands of minutes, and from each she would be gone.

  I SAID I KNEW Madame from her geisha days, and Advisor Kato’s servants let me wait by the door. At length they returned to let me in.

  “I wondered whatever happened to you,” Koito said warmly after the maid brought tea. “But tonight—it never seemed like the right moment to ask.” Kato’s new guesthouse was even more lavish on the inside, with gold brocade edging the tatami and a fat handsome treetrunk for the alcove post. I noted Nao’s workmanship in the graceful round window. It seemed, given her unquestioning hospitality, that Koito assumed I was here to apologize for Yukako’s coolness, and was hoping, through me, to make a good impression.

  So it was with much awkwardness that I began. “There’s a rumor that a man with a gun is looking for your husband,” I first said carefully. Nao had ties to both Kato and Yukako, and I did not want to embarrass either one of them.

  “Thank you for worrying about us,” Koito said. “After this summer, with the Tax Minister, he always travels with a pair of bodyguards, but I’ll go send them a quiet word.” As she vanished down the hall, I wondered if Nao—or his “brothers”—had had any part in that summer’s murder.

  KOITO RETURNED with a dish of sembei crackers. I told her, ruthlessly keeping my voice from shaking, that for personal reasons I’d had a sudden falling-out with my mistress and that I’d been paid to leave. “She gave me this,” I said. “I can’t open it.”

  “Can’t open what?” Koito asked, popping open a simple catch. Out slid a tray of yen and sen coins, enough to cover a small tea gathering or deal with an unexpected tradesman’s bill. I’d known Yukako all these years and never seen the latch: embarrassed, I pulled the wooden pillow toward myself to see how to work it.

  Koito and I looked at each other. We both heard the rasping metal inside, and indeed, the box seemed no lighter for missing a tray of coins. Koito brought the lamp closer. “Ara!” she said, finding a pair of metal pins that had been covered by the coin drawer. She pressed them and the whole top of the pillow-box detached.

  The base of the box, we discovered, was a deep tray, filled with koban, large oval gold coins from the Shoguns’ time. Koito gave me a very long look. I felt hot and itchy. Yukako had not meant me to have this. “I don’t know,” I said nervously. My chance to ask the thing I most wanted to had come and gone. I gasped for air. “She just gave it to me,” I said, which wasn’t quite true. “I don’t know.”

  Just at that moment there came a clamor of servants and wooden clappers. I heard Mariko Kato’s squally voice. “Excuse me,” Koito said. There was a small wooden box on the dressing table, probably of valuables; she took it as she left the room.

  Just outside, I heard voices, and someone whistling a ditty from when the boys were young: “We’re not afraid of wearing convict red…” Then the whistling stopped, cut off by a blow to the face. I slid open the window and looked. Seven or eight men were crowded into Kato’s dainty front garden; all the house servants held lanterns. I saw Nao standing calmly, surrounded by guardsmen, his lip bloodied. I saw a man carefully wrap a gun in a sheet of paper. I saw Kato bowing repeatedly to a thick-faced man in a swallowtail jacket, who brushed him off with jovial menace. “It’s just a little hole,” he said, his laughter smug and meaty. “Why don’t we take him to the prefectural office tonight and find out what happens to people who shoot jinrikisha?”

  Kato looked from Nao to the great man and back, tugging his tight collar, as the words glazier and gun moved freely through the small crowd. The Minister’s visit had been a feather in his cap; the last thing he wanted was to spoil it with a scandal involving a man he’d hired. “Excellent idea,” he said wretchedly, bowing.

  “Ah, cheer up,” said the Minister, slapping him heartily on the back. The gesture was one Western affectation for which Kato was not prepared; he quailed. “We’ll compose moon-viewing poems on the way home, how about it? And you said you had that surprise for me on the Takase Canal; let’s have a look.”

  “Tomorrow,” Advisor Kato all but squeaked. “I said it would be ready tomorrow.” He bowed again, glum and harried, and then Mariko Kato stepped forward.

  “Please, Father. Let me come with you so I can tell them about Baishian,” she said.

  “Baishian? At Cloud House? Why, I was just there,” said Koito’s low voice.

  “It’s gone,” said Mariko, bursting into tears that were at least half real. It had always been strange to me that she had stayed on at the Shins’ after the disaster with Kenji, but I understood, when I heard her cry that night: she loved the place. “There was a fire.”

  “Is anyone hurt?” fluttered Lady Kato.

  “Just Baishian. The stream was right there, so we could put the fire out fast. But it’s gone,” she lowed.

  “What happened?” asked her father.

  Mariko sniffled loudly and composed herself. “I think it’s pretty clear what happened,” she said, turning to the knot of guardsmen. Nao sai
d something; I think it was No. I could not read his face as he watched her, but in her voice I heard the steel of a woman scorned.

  My last sight of him was the mask of his face as the guardsmen walked him away that night. His straight straight back.

  “YOU’RE CRYING,” said Koito behind me.

  I closed the window and turned to her.

  She looked down at the untouched gold, and up again at me. “Well, it was you or him. Either you burned the teahouse and took the money, or he burned it. And it’s worth this much to your mistress to blame you instead.”

  “Our falling-out was of a personal nature,” I said.

  “I see. He’s very handsome.”

  I wiped my eyes and said nothing.

  “You can’t be seen here, whatever happened. It’s too messy. If you stay tonight, you need to leave before sunrise.” I hadn’t thought about where I’d sleep: I bowed to Koito in gratitude. “Truth be told, I would not recommend you stay in Kyoto,” she added. She gave me a long look, tender and discerning. I wanted to ask, then, if I could follow her to Tokyo, but she glanced from my all-too-recognizable foreign face to the box of koban and her warning scared the question out of me: “Perhaps not even Japan.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Koito lent me a Western dress and promised to show me the way to a hotel for foreign tourists. I went to Brother Joaquin that morning and asked him to book me passage to New York. He had once arranged for me to enter Miyako; perhaps he could arrange for me to leave. We stared at each other, the grown woman bowing in her borrowed frock, the aging monk. Like Miss Starkweather, he spoke remarkably bad Japanese: he’d known enough to impress me and my uncle when we arrived, but had never, it seemed, learned more. Uncle Charles, he told me, was presumed dead after the fire, but his body had never been found. I said nothing. I had only ever dreamed him once, I realized, that afternoon before the Expo, long ago. “What a loss of talent,” Brother Joaquin sighed, shaking his head. “What a waste. And you, growing up among heathens. If we’d known, we could have found you…” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Fluent or not, his time here had changed him: we were bowing to each other as he apologized and agreed to help me. I gave him passage money: he knew of a ship leaving Kobe in two days’ time; he’d do what he could to get me on it. “It’s the least I can do.”