Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  It was in my second term of first year, while watching the coverage of the 2011 tsunami in our college communal room (a mysterious sign on the door said THE MEDIA ROOM, though there was only one TV), that I first saw Rupert again. Rupert who would, in the not-so-distant future, become Mizuko’s boyfriend. He called me out on some of the things I was saying about Japanese culture. People looked at me and then back at him—two enemy samurai. Then, me first (and because of that him too), we recognised each other from our conversation while looking at the view in Tokyo the year before.

  Rupert Hunter was a permanent student. I’m not sure how old he was then—he didn’t have Facebook. I think he was doing his second master’s, and I think he was supposed to be writing something on masks in Africa. Something anthropological with the word culture in it. His hero was Bruce Chatwin, and later Mizuko talked about him having spent time with the Baoulé people in Côte d’Ivoire. We didn’t become friends. I got the sense that on top of being reclusive, he did not like me personally, and we rarely ran into each other. When we did, he would pretend he hadn’t seen me. Even when we were in a narrow passageway he would pretend to be checking the time, slowly, with disbelief, and then making some mysterious calculation that required his full concentration.

  The chance of both Mizuko and her boyfriend suffering from short-lived comas only a few years apart certainly seems slim, but that is what happened. I can’t imagine many things worse than waking from a coma. I feel depressed waking up and finding evidence that others have been up for a while already. Whenever I woke up to find that Mizuko had already left her side of the bed, I would lie there for a few moments feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me, before jumping up to check that she was still in the apartment somewhere. Wherever I am, I try to make sure I’m the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. I hate anyone watching me sleep. I hate it even more after last summer.

  Midway through my second year, word spread that the elusive Rupert Hunter had disappeared. It took some time for an already solitary person enrolled in an esoteric master’s program where foreign field trips were common, and whose interests qualified as obscure, to be noticed by his generally self-involved peers as being consistently not there. I did notice, and asked the porters if they knew anything about it. I was informed by one of them, who was quickly reprimanded by another for sharing the information, that Rupert had claimed to be on a year abroad in Senegal but that he had, only moments after sending his parents a message about Lac Rose, the beautiful, strawberry-milkshake-coloured lake in that country, been hit by a car while on his bicycle three roads away from college. He was now in hospital, and his father—the one who wanted everything to be historically accurate—was staying in his college room. He had been investigating while his son was unconscious and had discovered that Rupert had been living inside a Winnebago the whole term, teaching himself to play the kora, a West African harp, and highlighting pink every other line in Utz.

  7

  * * *

  The only reason I got to sleep with—in the same bed as—Mizuko after I first met her was thanks to Rupert Hunter.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go?” I’d said to him.

  Mizuko had two tickets for a talk at Columbia. One she had earmarked for Rupert, who, since the last time I’d seen him at university, before his cycling accident, appeared to have left England for real, transferred his mysterious academic studies to Columbia, and become Mizuko’s all-consuming passion and central neurosis. Though he presented a definite obstacle, without him I might never have had the guts to approach her in real life.

  “Sure,” he said. “I have tonnes to do.”

  “And you don’t want to give it to someone else?” I said, turning to Mizuko, trying to sound casual but also trying not to let her actually give the ticket to someone else. “Because obviously I’m dying to go. I tried to get a ticket myself,” I lied, “but they’re all sold out.”

  The talk was being hosted by the Japan Society at Columbia. I had breathed on their glass-covered noticeboard on my evening walks around the campus and noted the talks that were advertised there. There was one called something like “Sacred Cows and Kobe Beef.”

  “It looks so interesting,” I said, trying to suppress the note of desperation in my voice. I tried to remember what the board had said, but I could only think of words to do with meat. “I boned up on it the other day.” Then suddenly it came to me: “I was reading all about the ‘Bovine Revolution.’”

  Rupert looked at me in a weird way.

  Boned up was a phrase I had never used before. From their expressions, I decided I would not do so again. I had the same feeling I’d had in college every time I’d bumped into Rupert and he’d avoided my gaze, except now worse, because she was there too.

  “The what revolution?” Rupert asked with an incredulous look.

  “Bo-vine,” I repeated.

  “The talk she’s going to is about the Holocaust,” he said, looking over his shoulder towards the door.

  I froze. That was the other talk on the other board, a few paces along. I had forgotten it.

  Mizuko looked pained by the silence.

  “Are we talking about the same noticeboard?” I asked.

  “It was on the Donald Keene board,” Mizuko offered. “Not the Institute for Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives one. You might be mixing them up.”

  “Oh,” I said, tensing my hands into fists under the table. “Probably.”

  “I also want to go to the one about Takuboku,” Mizuko said warmly.

  She evidently thought I was a much better acquaintance of Rupert’s than I was, an impression I had tried to give as I sat down.

  “You had to register, and the registration is now closed,” Rupert said.

  “Oh no,” I said, not knowing what Takuboku was and deciding to keep quiet.

  “Anyway,” Mizuko said, “it starts at four in Kent Hall. That’s in ten minutes. Shall we walk over?”

  I felt the hot air of the café ripple through my lungs and stomach. It was the kind of nervous excitement that can sometimes cause me to pass wind, so I tightened everything and smiled at her. “Great.”

  I turned the beam of my smile on Rupert. A subtly altered smile, a hint more smugness, a touch less warmth, that I hoped conveyed I was out-Japanning him with his own girlfriend right in front of his fine-boned face. I had not forgotten how he had publicly embarrassed me in my first year with the tsunami coverage rolling in the background. This would be payback.

  “Don’t worry, Roo,” Mizuko said. “There’s another coming up we can go to together.”

  She brought up a page on her device, covered it with her hand so that the sunshine did not fade out the words on the screen, and read mechanically, “‘A critical reflection on liberal humanism in Japan’s transformation into a nation-state. Katsuya Hirano, associate professor, Department of History, UCLA.’ Oh! Here’s the one you meant”—she looked at me, realising with embarrassment that she had forgotten my name—“underneath.” She looked back at the screen. “‘From Sacred Cow to Kobe Beef—Japan’s Bovine Revolution. Daniel Botsman, professor of East Asian studies at Yale.’”

  Rupert snorted, swung a black canvas backpack onto one shoulder, and pushed his chair in. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Right,” Mizuko said. “See you later, baby.” And, turning to me, her new shadow, “Ready?”

  On the way, Mizuko gave me a short introduction. It would be about a Japanese diplomat sent to Lithuania to serve as Japan’s consul. She said his name softly, and so fast I couldn’t catch it. The visas he granted had saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis, who, I interjected so I could save some face, had invaded Lithuania in June 1941. I had been looking this up on my device as we walked by, briefly turning on my data roaming and pretending to send a text.

  Suddenly it was working out so much better than I had hoped for. But I felt that it was immensely disrespectful to be in such ecstasy prior to a talk given by the descendent of
a Holocaust survivor. I felt sure I would be punished for it later in some way and tried to bite my cheeks whenever they threatened to break out into a lunatic grin. The more I bit, the more the grin prised my cheeks apart. Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space. I had to stagger off the path and grab hold of a Beaux Arts streetlamp, where I leaned over the grass and heaved and retched and laughed like a maniac.

  “Are you okay?” Mizuko asked.

  I made a soft moan, the serene expiation of breath after vomit when the threat of imminent projection has subsided.

  “Feeling sick,” I said. “Nauseous.” I waved my hand at her. “Not actually going to throw up.”

  Mizuko waited silently. I wondered how to proceed. If I was sick she might not want me to go with her to the talk, and in any case, a sane person who felt sick would not go, they would go home. My mind moved quickly, too quickly, searching for a suitable lie. I lifted my head up and returned to the path she was still standing on.

  “I’m actually pregnant,” I said gravely.

  There could be no arguing with that. It came out and for a second I felt better, as with vomit, but then, almost immediately, the next wave of complexity I had just created for myself made me feel sick for real.

  “I’m not keeping it.”

  I knew she was pro-choice. I’d seen two or three pictures with captions that confirmed it.

  “Oh man,” she said, repeating her earlier question but in a softer voice: “Are you okay?”

  Her apparent concern—dimpled chin and knitted brow—brought me dangerously close to smiling again, so I put my hands to my face as if to wipe away tears, and she put her hand gently, or cautiously, as if it might burn her to touch me, on my back. My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.

  The inside of the auditorium was heavily air-conditioned. It was an egg-shaped room with shiny wooden walls, a waxed floor, and a small stage inside one of its elongated curves. I had been worrying it would be too intimidating and too grand for my purpose, which was to forge intimacy, but it was not an imposing room. It didn’t look like there had to be audience participation, or like everyone there was Japanese or Jewish or a member of Columbia, which meant I would have been conspicuous. Six or seven rows of white chairs were occupied by all sorts of people of all ages. The back row consisted mainly of student types, all frenziedly stroking luminous screens held in their laps.

  Mizuko and I took the first two seats in the second row. I tried to smile at her reassuringly. Maybe I would keep it, the laughter baby, and we could move back to Tokyo and raise it, dress it up in tiny kimonos. She too laid her device in her lap. It had a splintered screen despite a protective case designed like a slice of watermelon. I’d seen it in the many photos she took of herself in mirrors. She hung her head as she put in her pass code, which, I correctly guessed, was the year of her birth.

  1 2

  8 9

  She had long nails, filed to demonic points, with just the tips painted pink. She had to use her fingers lightly, flexed so that only the pads of them touched the screen. Still there was a slight click. I felt at ease by her side now that I was not required to speak. I could simply sit and cast sidelong glances in her direction. It was like sitting next to a film star. This person I had only ever seen in miniature so vital beside me.

  A wiry man ascended the stage and put things on a small lectern, and then another man joined him and turned on a white projector screen behind them both. Mizuko glanced up briefly, noticing the change in light. The lights above the audience dimmed, and I felt bliss expanding from my chest and sliding down into the rest of my body, collecting in my shoes like warm pools of butter despite the air conditioning. This, I thought, is the reward for making things happen rather than just waiting for them to happen to you.

  The talk itself was of course horrific. The speaker showed us pictures of Jewish women in Lithuania. He also showed pictures of women undressing in a forest before their execution. The Nazi terminology for murdered, he said, with a steady voice that made Mizuko shed tears and wipe them delicately away, was liquidated. The part at which I myself cried was when he described the Jews in long lines, allowed to carry some baggage as a sham, to create the impression amongst them that they were simply being resettled rather than shunted to their death. The speaker was the descendent of someone who had been saved by the Japanese diplomat. Disobeying his bosses in Japan, the diplomat had issued thousands of exit visas. Over July and August, he and his wife had stayed up all night, writing visas. The Japanese government closed the consulate, but even as the diplomat’s train was about to leave the city, he kept writing visas from his open window. When the train began moving, he flung his visa stamp out the window so the crowds could continue to stamp visas for themselves. The speaker’s father had eventually settled in America, where he met his wife, who was in the audience.

  Mizuko leaned over to me when he pointed her out, sitting in the front row just to the right of us. “She has such a beautiful profile,” Mizuko whispered, her breath warm milk.

  I nodded and then kept my head very still so that she might admire my head in profile too.

  Because the diplomat had issued the unauthorised visas, he was dismissed, but quietly, without reason. He worked odd jobs after returning to Japan and later moved away for a time. He fell into obscurity and never spoke of his actions, but in 1968 a survivor who had become an Israeli diplomat tracked him down. His name was Sugihara. Mizuko, I knew, loved all stories about people who tracked other people down.

  The talk, we were reminded, was being recorded. When it was time for questions from the floor, I put up my hand first, wanting to show Mizuko how I had as much interest in this subject as in beef, only to lower it when the hammering in my chest meant that I didn’t think I would be able to keep the tremor from my voice. Mizuko, however, perfectly composed, asked a question of her own. I often listen to the talk online, and I have come to love the diplomat and the memory of Mizuko and me being there together, because this was when anything felt possible and barely any lies had been told.

  When I listen, the question right before Mizuko’s is from a law student who says his name into the microphone. His surname I can’t catch, but his first name I took as a sign. It is Mark. Mark, with a voice that slides, eliding words, asks the speaker what he thinks Sugihara’s legacy is. By this point I was used to how unapologetically earnest Americans are. After a pause, the speaker says that Sugihara has taught him the power of an individual. “Most people,” he says, “think that they don’t have an impact on anyone else, but you’re having a huge impact, or you can have a huge impact, without even realising it, even on the course of just one other person’s life.” When I listened to this at the time my eyes blazed; I was hoping Mizuko was receiving it with the same fervour I was by directly applying every word the speaker was saying to my own situation and, more specifically, to the possibility of a relationship between us.

  Then there is a lull as the person with the microphone brings it round to our side of the seats. In comes Mizuko’s voice, followed by a little bump of her breath into the head of the microphone, like a train rolling into the air cushion at the end of the track.

  “Hello. I’m Mizuko Himura.” Her voice is smooth and self-assured.

  Something inside me clenches. A phantom breath on the back of my neck.

  “I teach creative writing here.” The present tense makes me wince. “Thank you so much for giving such a moving account of your family and of Sugihara.”

  She pronounces his name with a Japanese accent. The lightness of the word, thrown up into the air like a child, makes her subsequent American English sound plodding.

  “I was wondering if you could shed light on how he came to carry out such an extraordinary act of disobedience, given that in Japanese culture respect for your elders is inviolable.”

  Her quest
ion floored me, still floors me.

  Every time I hear it I repeat the word inviolable over and over in my mouth, as if rolling a grape and trying not to break the skin.

  This, she later explained, was a question she had prepared and already had her own answer to, but she was interested in hearing the speaker’s point of view and, more importantly, in alerting the non-Japanese in the audience to just how exceptional Sugihara’s actions had been. His father had pushed him to become a doctor, but he, more interested in foreign cultures, wanted to study English. His father forced Sugihara to take the entrance exam for medical school, but Sugihara wrote only his name on the test. His father was furious when he found out and disowned him. She also, I knew, liked stories about this kind of rebellion. I could see why this talk was exactly her sort of thing.

  After everyone clapped and the men descended from the stage, we went out into the warmth of the early evening. The sun was low in the sky, its light arrowing straight across from one side of the island to the other, west to east, blinding us. We looked down at our feet as we walked. The spokes of light picked out each herringbone brick and made it redder. Our shadows cast us as a ludicrous double act. We walked around a corner of a building so that Mizuko could have a cigarette out of the glare. We came out onto a platform above Broadway. I have been told that when I concentrate intently, as while watching something and forgetting myself, I am a heavy breather. It is something I am always at pains to correct. There were red and off-white squares underfoot, and she stood on red and I stood on white. I peered out over the dark red exterior of Teachers College and then across to the cream church spires as Mizuko tried to light her rolled cigarette. It was a wind-spot, and the cigarette wouldn’t light. The way she was holding it in her mouth and her pointy little nails fiddling with the lighter for so long made me want to take it from her mouth and lean in to kiss her. I wondered, from the way my feet felt as if they might be standing on a waterbed rather than on solid ground, if we might have been standing on the site of Mark and Susy’s first kiss. I hoped not.