Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I left the room without saying a word.

  I found myself doing big, meandering loops around Morningside Heights, hoping to see Mizuko and Rupert. Not so I could talk to them, just so I could see. I walked up and down the street. I went to the Hungarian, I went to all the usual haunts. At the back of Riverside Church, I saw the posters on the lampposts for the exhibition. I went again—it was still free and warm. There weren’t many rooms and there was less of a crowd, and I quickly saw that Mizuko and Rupert weren’t among the people there. This time I paid closer attention to the pictures and the black figures populating them. I stared at them for a long time, wondering what I was going to do and how I was going to get home. When I came out it was already dark.

  I walked to Silvia’s apartment. Two Tonys offered me their condolences, but I still couldn’t speak. The weightless feeling started to harden and the heaviness arrived. I sat on the floor.

  Silvia’s cordless phone rang. It was the funeral directors; they had called by mistake, hoping to get Nat. After they apologised for their mistake, the man wished me a safe trip home. I felt so heavy that I could imagine plummeting through the floor to the very bottom of the building. It’s disconcerting to have an undertaker wish you a safe trip. Nor had I yet decided I was definitely leaving, but the casual, decided way in which the undertaker said it made me realise that everything was really over.

  I didn’t know how I was going to find the money to get home. For the past month I had been spending Mizuko’s. Before that I’d used Silvia’s credit card when I needed it, but I decided that it had probably been frozen.

  I lay in the apartment, putting off whatever it was I was supposed to do now. I read a book about the healing power of dolphins. Snowflakes slid down against the glass while beyond it they flew upwards on the wind.

  The apartment continued to fill with flowers, though I did not know who the senders imagined was there to receive them. I took some of the dollar bills Silvia kept on her tip tray. I took some of the larger notes I knew she had in one of the drawers in the study. I went for a short walk around the block to a shop with a sign saying WE BUY FUR. I took some of Silvia’s fur coats I’d seen in her closet, but the man was rude about them, which I did not realise was the prelude to his making me an offer, so I left. I went back to the apartment and waited. I was waiting for someone to arrive and stop me. As I moved around in my personal oblivion, bumping into things below waist height, I understood why Silvia had continued to sleep on the couch after Rex died. If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back. One part of me didn’t want hope—I wanted it to be decided—but then I also didn’t want it to be decided at all.

  The last night I slept there, there was a big yellow moon. I stared at it with Silvia’s binoculars. I remembered the guided tour and Rupert’s father. The people in the town were celebrating by making “moon-viewing rice balls” and collecting aki no nanakusa, which are grasses that flower in autumn. These, our guide explained as she gave us each a handful, were bush clover, pampas grass, arrowroot, fringed pink, agueweed, and Chinese bellflower. There’s an emoji you have probably never sent: the moon-viewing ceremony emoji. It has the moon, a heap of mini-mochi, and the pampas grass. I have a handful still, pressed dry into a paper leaflet which explains the story:

  The Old Man of the Moon one day looked down into a big forest on earth and saw three friends sitting together around a fire. These three were a rabbit, a monkey, and a fox. He decided to find out which of the three was the kindest, so he went down to earth and changed himself into a beggar. He asked the three friends to help him, saying that he was very hungry. The monkey brought back fruit, and the fox brought back a big fish. However, the rabbit was unable to find any food, and so he asked the monkey to gather some firewood and the fox to build a big fire. Once the fire was burning very brightly, the rabbit explained to the beggar that he didn’t have anything to give him, so would put himself in the fire to cook so that the beggar could eat him. Just before the rabbit jumped into the fire, the beggar turned back into the Old Man of the Moon and told the rabbit that he was very kind but that he shouldn’t do anything to harm himself. Because he decided that the rabbit was the kindest of the three, he took him back to the moon to live with him.

  I realised that I wanted my mother. I wanted the feeling that Mizuko had described of being reunited with her own in the hospital. The call was short. I explained where I was and what I needed her to do for me, and then I had to correct my present tense, to refer to Silvia in the past. Susy’s voice was small but reassuringly the same. “So come home,” she said.

  I was delayed in the airport by the man who looked at my passport. I had arrived with endless hours to spare but had forgotten about my spent visa. I finally managed to board, just as the gates were closing. The British accents onboard, especially that of the pilot, piping into the cabin, reminded me less of myself or my mother than of Robin. I cried silently for most of the flight. When my neighbour asked me to turn out my reading light, I watched the flight path on the screen in front of me. Weird digitised cartography. A red line. Green and blue. Borders. Sea. Glitches. Gone.

  On arrival, I went to the electronic passport gate. I wanted no face to check mine, no repeat of my arrival at or departure from JFK. I wanted to slip quietly into the electromagnetic field of home. The kind of impersonal validation of my identity, my sameness, that the smart border control system is perfect for. My machine was taking longer than those of the people on either side of me. I wondered if the change I felt had taken place inside me was really that seismic. I pressed my chip harder into the reader and looked more sternly at the facial recognition monitor. Nothing. I thought of Mizuko’s new story, the novel. Man had such impenetrable means to stop the outside world from coming in, and so little to stop our inside world from surging out, wrestling any foreign object into submission. I tried the old trick. I’m one of you, I told the machine. Now let me in. It refused, and I joined the back of the adjacent queue.

  30

  * * *

  I was ready to head for the train, had planned to move quickly through arrivals so as not to feel the sinking feeling of being unmet, but at the gate I saw Susy waiting for me, bearing a sign decorated with scratchy Biro drawings of rabbits and my name. Maybe she had once called me that too; if she had, I had forgotten.

  The emptiness inside me, a numbness where hunger should have been, had increased ever since I’d left New York. In a way, it had helped me feel closer to Mizuko. Like the way Silvia had slept on the sofa, it made me feel as if things hadn’t landed yet, that the shock was still new. Normality turned out to be far worse.

  “Darling.”

  She took my bags. She looked just the same. I tried to take one back from her.

  “No need,” she said. “I’m a Libra. Well balanced.”

  It was a phrase I had heard her say so many times before, and something about hearing it just then, its simple equanimity, made me cry again.

  From watching Silvia, I’d learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most other people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people’s understanding. I wanted Susy’s sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn’t want it—I didn’t want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

  “It’s okay,” Susy said. “I don’t blame you for leaving. I didn’t see what I was . . . I didn’t realise what I was like before.”

  I had once located our house on Google Earth and showed it to Mizuko. It is at the end of a long road shaped like a fishhook. The road turns into gravel for the last stretch and makes a loop around the house, so that you can always hear someone arriving. As usual, the brindle dog came running out to frighten me until it recognised me, when it looked embarrassed. I entered the hallway with the circular walnut table where the post was kept.

  “I forgot to tell you the dishwasher’s not w
orking, so take your glasses, plates, cutlery, et cetera, into the shower with you—it saves us hot water.”

  “Okay.”

  I put my suitcase down and the brindle dog stared at it in an interested manner, and then I followed Susy to the kitchen. I had no sense of what time it was. There was a clock above a shelf of china milk jugs, but it had long been broken. Dried flowers and bugs lay at the bottom of glasses. It was all exactly as I had left it.

  She had her back to me at the sink and was listening to Gardeners’ Question Time. The sound of it, accents and concerns—the normalcy—seemed crazy.

  “That’s my present from Charles,” she said, turning and indicating the kitchen table, where she had apparently given up trying to assemble a Magimix. I remembered how strange her eyes were, nacreous and lilac-coloured. They were complemented by her oversized baby-blue fleece, magnified by her glasses, and slightly loose in their sockets. I rubbed mine, which were raw from recycled air.

  “Who’s Charles?”

  “I can make smoothies with it, he says. I don’t know why he thinks I’ll want to do that.”

  My heart felt heavier even than it had on the floor at Silvia’s, as if it were sinking into my feet and then dropping like a stone to the bottom of the deepest ocean.

  “I don’t know who Charles is, Mum.”

  “He’s my new friend.” Her eyes darted to the door. “He’s responsible for bringing out the new me.” She smiled to herself, then shook her head. “I did actually take my raincoat. I hope I didn’t leave it in the airport.”

  “Under that chair. What does that mean, your new friend?” My mother hadn’t had a new friend in years, and certainly not a male one.

  “Special friend.” She glanced up briefly and gave me another thin smile. Maybe she had changed. Up close she looked older than I remembered her. She moved more slowly. Her grey hair was matted at the back. Most of all, she was being unusually obliging.

  “I’ll go put my bags away. I’m exhausted.”

  I climbed the wooden staircase. The other dog, the decrepit Labrador that could no longer make it up the stairs, lay at the bottom watching me go.

  Since I had gone to university, my room was usually referred to as a guest room. Someone had left a heart-shaped cushion on the bed. I took off my shoes and socks. My feet were swollen after the long flight and marked by the scars of old blisters.

  I got up in the middle of the night and unpacked. I realised I’d left things at the Rooiakkers’ and Mizuko’s, but I had gained things from Silvia’s. In the morning I went up into the attic. Things scattered and ran for cover under my feet. Leaving the boxes largely intact had seemed to comfort Susy. As if things could turn around at any moment and Mark would be back to claim them. Now I understood this strategy very well. It seemed less like madness. In fact it made complete sense. I found the box I knew contained the single copy Susy had had made of “Alice in Dallas.”

  There was a time when everything had not yet separated . . .

  “Hello?”

  I spun round to see Susy standing behind me. She was holding a coil of thin, shiny rope and what looked like a sheet folded over one arm.

  “Hi?”

  “Hi.” She stood over the hole where I had perched the ladder.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve done a portrait of one of Charles’s friends’ dogs. I’ve started doing dog portraits. This one was a Tibetan terrier crossed with a poodle. Do you want to see? He offered to deliver it for me this afternoon, so I’ve got to wrap it up. That’s it over there.” She indicated behind me to the painting.

  “Very nice. How much is he going to pay you?”

  “Well, he’s an Arab, so he’s promised to pay me in pistachios.”

  “Pistachios?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s literally nuts?”

  She made a hurt face so I apologised.

  “I made a coffee cake to celebrate your return.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I should really get rid of this stuff. Charles bought me a book by a Japanese woman where she tells you to—”

  “I know,” I said, flinching. Mizuko had told me about the phenomenon when we’d cleared out her apartment.

  “Her method involves gathering together and communing with everything you own, then—”

  “I know what it is.” My voice broke.

  “Okay.” She looked alarmed. Hurt. “Shall we go downstairs and talk about what’s going on?”

  We descended one by one and went to the kitchen. There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree. Now she sat opposite me at the table, delicately folding and refolding her napkin. I could tell she wanted me to begin, but I did not.

  “Your outfit is rather fun.”

  I was wearing my black sack. “Thanks.”

  “Wait!”

  She decided she had to give me something, and she went to her bedroom and came back with a little figurine under a glass dome.

  “What’s this?” It looked like a sheep wearing a dress. I vaguely recognised it as a cheap Christmas ornament we’d once had on the tree. It didn’t look new.

  “It’s a Christmas present.”

  “Aren’t you going to wrap it?”

  “I thought you should have it now—in case you leave again. Because I wanted you to know I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. The word hit something very deep. I had hated her because she suffered, and now, for a reason I couldn’t be sure of yet, I didn’t feel that way anymore.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve worked that out for myself.”

  “So tell me about it all.”

  “What all?” I was stubborn. My newfound understanding had immediately grown into surliness. Now that she was being nice to me, it seemed like a good time to be the rebellious teenager I had never been able to be before, when she’d been difficult instead.

  “Your trip.”

  I burst into tears again.

  “Oh, Alice, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, sobbing.

  “Come on,” she said, “it’s me.”

  “I know. That’s partly it.”

  Parents tell their children not to talk to strangers, but as the statistics show, it is rarely strangers you have to worry about. It’s exes, family members, neighbours. Besides, hardly anyone gets classified as a stranger anymore. We’re talking to strangers all the time. I was worried that if I told her the story, she would identify with it too much. That her sympathy, however well-meaning, would make me possessive, angry again. She was always making things personal, seeing only their relationship to her rather than what was complex about them. And yet her request touched me. A skimming stone, bouncing towards me even though I tried to repel it.

  “Well, then, what’s the plan now? You can’t stay here forever.”

  My plan was indeed to stay there forever.

  I got up from the table and went to her study, otherwise dark but for the warm glow of her computer. I was not supposed to use it. No one was allowed to touch it, but her password was always the same.

  MARK1968

  Then my fingers stumbled over the keyboard as I typed her name.

  MISUKOP MIZUKO HIMRIENA HIMUA. HIMURA.

  Susy came and stood in the doorway.

  “What are you doing on my machine?” The gentleness in her voice was gone.

  31

  * * *

  It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You’ve reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs. Today felt like the right day t
o make this public, because a piece of the missing plane was found washed up on Réunion, the island in the Indian Ocean. It’s human nature to attach our little stories to something bigger, but the memory of some people really does hold so much more than their life ever encompassed. Sugihara, Mizuko’s rebel Japanese diplomat, was born on the first day of the new century: 1.1.1900. I like to imagine his parents taking in this date as they looked into his face for signs of themselves, the midwives eating simmered burdock root, sweet black soya beans, stroking him behind the ears, and all of them knowing he would be in some way special, destined for some great role. But the part of the Holocaust talk that resonates most with me now is no longer the part about the heroism of Sugihara and his signing all the fake visas. It is the part about what happened to him after—his living in obscurity, selling light bulbs door to door.

  Other than the numbers thing, I thought I’d got my problem under control when I took up gardening. That’s why I chose a basement flat with a garden. I wanted to pick up tools. To mow a lawn and listen to the radio with the sun shining off the extension cable like a river in the grass. I wanted to get healthy. Gain weight. I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I’d had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

  I left Susy in spring. I scheduled moving out to take place on the exact day in April I had left for New York the year before. I thought it was a good way to start over. The money Silvia had had—after all her medical, legal, and tax bills had been paid by the executors—she left to me. Otherwise I could never have moved out. Getting my own place was a big part of starting over and beginning to feel better again. I didn’t imagine that owning a physical space would make as big a difference as it did. I have my own threshold that I carry myself over, and I am the only one with a key. I enjoy being self-contained and self-sufficient.