The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Hisashi follows after a while, now also wrapped in a blanket. A child is approaching them slowly out of the mist, rowing a small boat standing up. He offers his wares: cans of Coke, a glittering fish. He quotes prices in dong and dollar. Hisashi leans forward, towards the water. He and the child have a conversation without understanding each other.

  Out of the murkiness, more children come rowing towards them. The little boats cluster against the junk, bumping gently against the wooden hull. The children look up, stretching their hands towards the two figures in blankets, as if towards gods. Hisashi reaches out to them, their fingertips touching. The blanket slips from his shoulders. The children’s clothes are thin and dirty, their feet flapping in leaked water like misshapen fish. Children of the floating world. Water monkeys.

  Shadows rise up from the water. Dusk. When he looks up, the haziness lifts for a moment. The current has fanned out the scales from all the villages’ fish scrubbers into a veil drifting from the bay, following the sun. Beyond the islets, the deep sea is gleaming. He suddenly wonders what the inhabitants of the floating villages do with their dead, whether they just quietly slip them over the edge. He can feel the earth tilting into darkness.

  He wants to rejoice, drop onto his knees and pray into the empty winter wind. Yesterday he did not think she would survive the night. This morning she ate a scrap of toast the size of a thumb. And three black grapes. He counts the stems to which shreds of grape flesh still cling. Over and over. Like a child learning numbers. The number three: one plus one plus one. It moves him to tears.

  The more she ingests without vomiting, the more his hand is strengthened. There is no longer any excuse. He looks over her shoulder while she loads rice onto her fork, grain by grain. She puts the fork down. Slowly, she shifts the plate towards him across the bed. It is almost too heavy for her. The pile of rice remains almost untouched, as white as the sheet stretching between them like a frozen sea. They look at each other. He is adamant. A tear runs down her nose. Slowly she props herself up on an elbow, stretches out a hand. With a fingertip she picks up a grain, brings it to her lips. She falls back.

  ‘There. I can’t do more than that for you.’

  She is hardly audible. He leaves her in peace.

  In the kitchen he looks at the plate. For all the toil and struggle and strategising, she has, over the last week, eaten less food than would fit into the palm of a child’s hand. The euphoria was misplaced. He is losing.

  He relents. For the rest of the day he stops trying to feed her. He can see the pain taking hold of her. He keeps asking how she is feeling, how much it hurts, over and over. Every other minute, until she can no longer answer. Initially, the answer stays the same; later it becomes just a movement of the head. He ascends the stairs to his room, back down, through the kitchen and out to the garden. The familiar route.

  The gate bell rings. There is a video intercom for keeping out danger. It is Hisashi’s face that appears on the screen.

  ‘Hello!’ Hisashi bellows into the microphone, his wide forehead against the camera.

  Then, louder, so that the speaker inside vibrates: ‘Hello?’

  He lets him in.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m dropping by to see how things are going!’ Even jollier than on the phone.

  Hisashi walks further into the house, looking around avidly.

  ‘She’s sleeping, Hisashi, it’s not a good time—’

  His mother’s voice from the bedroom, stronger than before: ‘I’m awake. Show the guest in.’

  Hisashi walks ahead of him down the corridor. Then he stops, bends down. On the wooden floor, Hisashi finds an insect wing. Green and red with black spots. That of a locust, the kind that sweeps in swarms through wheat fields leaving not a grain behind. He holds it against the light, stretching it between his fingertips like a fan. In the bedroom his mother is waiting.

  From Hanoi they fly together to Tokyo. Hisashi’s flat is so small that one has to fold away the kitchen counter to access the bath. It slots together like a three-dimensional puzzle: the water from the kitchen sink drains into the bath, the little dining table slides away on a track to allow the bed above the study corner to hinge out of the wall. Like a Rubik’s Cube. Click-click. A flap in the kitchen is lowered to reveal the bathroom mirror. Lights tilt in different directions. Doors slide away. Television and computer screens swing from niches. Paraphernalia fits into drawers.

  He and Hisashi have to fold and brush past each other too. Each of them sleeps on an edge of the double bed, facing outward. He sleeps badly, dreaming that the bed snaps into the wall with them in it and that he is smothered together with Hisashi. He wakes up with Hisashi’s sleepy breath on his neck. The Japanese man has turned around and moved closer.

  They spend as little time as possible in the flat. They attend a Monday-afternoon Kabuki performance. As tradition dictates, the male and female characters are played by men who have for decades acted the same role, their acting polished to perfection. The stage movements are stiff, stylised. The theatre is filled with Tokyo housewives who gasp with joy when an old man with swollen feet and a prominent Adam’s apple changes into a delicate young girl right before their eyes. The audiences know the piece, they anticipate each movement, each word, each note. They could see it another hundred times. Or a thousand. It will never bore them.

  When they walk back to the flat, Hisashi pulls him by the sleeve.

  ‘Come, I want to show you something.’

  They walk up a narrow staircase. At the top, a young woman is awaiting them. She smiles a broad smile. She takes him by the arm and leads him deeper into the building, but Hisashi gesticulates, no, it is he himself who is the client.

  ‘Ah!’ she says, as if having an epiphany.

  She makes Hisashi sit down in front of a mirror. She holds up in front of him a catalogue with photos – coquettish schoolgirls with an index finger in the mouth, middle-aged housewives, bashful geishas, office ladies in pencil skirts. A short conversation follows, a negotiation. Hisashi points decisively at a picture.

  She takes the make-up palette in her hand and starts working on Hisashi’s face. He is standing to the side, watching. From time to time she stands back, admiring her handiwork. Moves closer to add a detail or scrape something away. Then Hisashi gets a wig. Black straight hair styled in a bob. Excitedly, she pitter-patters to the next room. She is dragging Hisashi – a shy hand clutched over his mouth – behind her. He follows the giggling pair. She disappears between rows of clothes hangers and reappears with an outfit – a frock of cerulean silk. Then shoes. Hisashi undresses, standing there in his underwear, his face carefully made up and white against the shapeless brown body. Once he is dressed, they trot in single file to the next room, Hisashi now in high heels.

  In this room, there is a runway, like at a fashion show. She makes Hisashi practise his walking in heels, one hand on the hip, mirrors all around. He is doing his best, but she shakes her head, claps with her hands, repeats her instructions emphatically. She shrugs her shoulders, turns to him as if he could help. She gives up, leaves the room muttering. The transformation is incomplete. Hisashi is unperturbed, looking at himself in the mirror over his shoulder, at his substantial derrière cocooned in silk.

  They are back in the flat. Hisashi is himself again. His own face, his own clothes. The place transforms like a machine. Kitchen becomes bathroom, living room becomes bedroom. One can travel between rooms without moving an inch. Panels snap open and hinge and slide and swing. Drawers fit in their niches. Clasps click shut.

  He is lying awake; Hisashi is snoring. When at last he dozes off, he dreams of Hisashi lying in a rice paddy, slowly swelling into enormity as gallons of water ooze into him.

  Hisashi sits down in the room with her. He now keeps arriving unannounced at any hour of the day, simply making himself at home. Coincidentally, it happens whenever she is having a better day. She talks to him. She sits up, asks for tea, even eats a tiny corner of toast withou
t prompting.

  He withdraws, sits down outside in the garden. He opens up a blank notebook on a table of steel mesh under a red chestnut tree. Now and then a leaf falls on the page. Sprinklers switch on automatically, wetting the lawn. He wants to write a belated journal of his and Hisashi’s trip two years ago. A thorough report, day by day. He is trying to remember, to figure out what happened during the trip, if anything, and what it has to do with what is happening here now. The silver drops from the sprinklers hypnotise him. His pen hovers above the page.

  On the surface it could well look like something else, this struggle of minute movements and intense strategy. Owing to unknown causes, his big toe has become infected. Overnight it has swollen like a clown’s nose. His mother notices it when he walks into her room barefoot. (Little escapes her gaze.) She is deeply concerned; she becomes fixated on the toe.

  ‘In the pantry,’ she says. ‘Epsom salts.’

  ‘It’s not important,’ he says.

  ‘Bring it.’

  She makes him prepare a strong solution in a bowl with boiling hot water. It is virtually scorching him.

  ‘Keep it in.’

  For almost an hour he has to sit like this under her supervision. Only once does she send him to fetch more boiling water. His wet sole leaves the single track of a cripple.

  ‘Let the solution draw out the infection.’

  She flickers up somewhat, talks a little while his foot, so it feels, is sucking up water rather than expelling the impurity. He wants to take it out of the bowl.

  ‘Not yet. Wait.’

  The next morning, when he wakes up, the toe is back to normal. She is sick as can be. Vomiting. Pain. Tiredness absorbing her into the earth. She exposes her shoulder with the morphine plaster. A little square of transparent plastic film. She pulls it off and drops it on the carpet, where it curls up and disappears in the sunlight.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Doesn’t help anyhow.’

  He presses his knuckles against his teeth.

  ‘Pills then? Even just paracetamol?’

  She turns away. The struggle has entered a new, brutal phase. Scorched earth.

  ‘It’s not important.’

  He opens his mouth to say something, but she waves away his words with her hand.

  ‘No pill ever again. Never anything again. My body still belongs to me.’

  War beyond war.

  She asks him to switch on the music and turns her back on him. The chant of monks. The droning bass behind it could be God’s voice, or the voice of the deep sea.

  They go on an excursion. From Tokyo they will travel south-west. The ultimate destination: Itsukushima Island, near Hiroshima. They book tickets to attend a Noh theatre performance on Itsukushima. Hisashi is not in the mood for it.

  ‘Boring, elitist stuff,’ he complains.

  He persuades him. They travel by night to avoid the worst of the traffic. When they return, it will be by day, so that they can get a view of Mount Fuji’s snowy peak.

  Hisashi is driving – singing and humming to stay awake. For his part, he is trying to sleep, but is forced to listen: off-pitch fragments of French chansons, British pop, impenetrable Japanese songs. When Hisashi switches on the radio and it belts out Kylie Minogue, sleep finally deserts him.

  Just before midnight they stop at a service station on the highway. They refuel, then park next to rows of lorries. He aims for the little, brightly lit restaurant where waiters are waiting behind polished glass, like wax dolls, but Hisashi says, ‘Let me show you something.’

  They walk around the building to a different entrance. Behind the first door is a slot machine. Hisashi inserts coins. It is warm and stuffy here. A little window swooshes open and two towels and magnetised cards slide out on an electric tray. They walk through a second door. The steamy heat takes one’s breath away. A dressing room. They undress and, with a swipe of the cards, lock their clothes in two steel lockers.

  They walk through a third door. In here everything moves at a languorous pace. Fat, naked lorry drivers are immersing themselves in baths or arranging themselves on deckchairs around the edges. Boiled red, like crayfish. Some leave their towels and slip into the water. It is scorching. The men look at him from under heavy lids, at his white body. Nobody says a word. In such steam, while you are slowly being boiled tender, it is not possible to speak.

  When they arrive back at the carpark glowingly revitalised, he notices, for the first time, the rows of plastic cherry blossoms blooming on electric wires criss-crossing overhead.

  He is sitting on the veranda. Hunger makes him alert. He has not been strictly implementing his threat to eat no more than his mother does, even though he makes her believe it. He nevertheless has difficulty taking in much, so that he is starting to feel transparent. The transparency enhances his senses.

  A lukewarm winter breeze is blowing. His ears are tingling with birdsong and the wind is moving through the branches. For weeks his mother has been reluctant to go out, even though he has offered to drag her bed out here, so that she can lie with her feet in the sun. He will have to find a way to bring the birds and the singing branches inside, to her. Her sheets are too white and silent.

  Dry leaves brush over the veranda floor, past his feet. Winter wants to sneak into the house. Perhaps he should stay here to keep out the plundering season, to catch every leaf and crush it, until his hands themselves turn to dust.

  Later on he is sitting in a garden chair, in a shaded corner under the red chestnut tree. From here he can see his mother through the window, in her bed. And she can see him. His travel journal is progressing. What he has forgotten, he makes up. It is coming to him, faster and faster. His pen takes them to places they have never been.

  He is there with her at every turn, at each crossing of another little boundary: when she can no longer lift her foot high enough to get into the bath, when a glass of water becomes too heavy and slips from her hand. At her request he brings paper. She wants to write a few last letters. She tries, but trembles so much that she can only make ink marks. It upsets her more than anything to date. More, perhaps, than the cancer diagnosis. For hours, she does not say a word. He leaves her alone.

  ‘I’ll write,’ he says later in the afternoon. ‘You dictate.’

  ‘Later,’ she says. (Never, that is.)

  She turns her back. He stays. She asks him, after a silent spell, what he is writing out there in the garden.

  ‘I’m struggling to finish it,’ is all he says.

  ‘Shall I read it and suggest an ending?’

  He hears something in the house. He walks to the lounge. A bird is fluttering about, up against the ceiling. Some greyish suburban bird or other; he has long since forgotten the names of birds here. He tries to chase it out. It keeps flying into corners. He opens the double doors to the veranda. It flies out, sweeping over the frost-dead lawn into the white sky. Bird shit stays behind on the interior walls, like crooked letters. Like Eastern calligraphy. Maybe that is an ending. Let the birds write it.

  He had been trying to keep Hisashi away from his mother. He thought the Japanese man would exhaust her. But she inexplicably perked up when he peered into her room.

  ‘How are you doing, Mommy?’ Hisashi asked.

  He wanted to point out to Hisashi that one does not address someone else’s mother in that manner in English, but she got in first.

  ‘Bring me a cup of tea and then we can have a chat,’ she whispered.

  When Hisashi returned with the tea, she was drowsy, but she took a sip or two.

  ‘I’m going to come and cook for you,’ Hisashi said to her.

  He wanted to explain that his mother was no longer eating anything, and that he was looking after her anyhow, but again she was too quick for him.

  ‘Something new, please. Something I’ve not eaten before.’

  The gate bell rings. Talk of the devil. When the front door opens, the food smells reach him instantly. They are emanating from the little tower o
f plastic boxes Hisashi is carrying against his chest. He wants to wax indignant about the repeated invasions, but his stomach is empty and his mouth watering.

  ‘We’ll be eating outside,’ Hisashi says, marching in.

  ‘She won’t go outside, Hisashi.’

  Hisashi just smiles mysteriously. He unpacks the food in an orderly and precise manner, not on the veranda, but in the shade under the red chestnut tree. On the rusty steel-mesh table he sets out miso soup, bowls of rice, a chicken and noodle dish, and vegetable tempura.

  He just stands there, looking on helplessly. There is green tea. Hisashi is disappointed that they don’t have Oriental mugs. He has to pour it into ordinary teacups.

  ‘Where do you get all these things, Hisashi?’

  ‘Cooked it!’

  ‘The ingredients, I mean.’

  ‘Tried delicatessens nearby. Shopping centres. Useless rubbish. Japanese ingredients, but expensive, useless rubbish.’

  He explains how he ventured into the run-down city centre, how he tracked down a little shop selling real Japanese products. The kind of things one would find in Tokyo.

  ‘Now we carry her outside.’

  Hisashi is smiling as if everything here is a secret and inexhaustible source of joy. The smile is as tormenting as the undertone in his mother’s music. He shakes his head.

  ‘She doesn’t want to, Hisashi. I’ve told you, haven’t I? She hasn’t been out for weeks. She’s too weak even to sit up.’

  Hisashi keeps smiling, leading the way into the house.

  She agrees to be carried outside. They help her from the bed into an armchair. The skin is hanging loose from her bones. Without a word they carry the chair between them, out into the sun, towards the smells of food.