Sympathy

by Olivia Sudjic

  I arrived with grow bags and hives and mini-manger-trough planters, riding the second wave of gentrification to break upon Wood Green. I remember that the churches in Harlem had homemade signs on their noticeboards with warnings like MAKE ROOM FOR PARASITE SODOMITE GENTRIFIERS, but in Wood Green, no such resistance. Not much happens here. Which is nice. I’m after that kind of vibe. Nor is it a fashionable place where people come to do nothing. There are no GONE FISHING signs. It’s just an okay place where people live. I chose this neighbourhood because it made me feel apathetic when I first looked round, which is how I wanted to feel. Since I’ve moved here a Chinese takeaway on the main street has ominously renamed itself from whatever it was before to the Golden Bowl, but other than that, the landscape is the last place on earth that might call Mizuko to mind.

  I like to spend my hours crouched on the hot, wet soil under the tarps, looking for leaf-miner flies and spider mites, spanking things and letting little clods of black soil fall onto my shirt. I like cutting things down best. Anything I can do with a power tool. I listen to the radio always, so I have the comfort of voices but no pictures.

  Moira is after privacy, not incarceration. If you watch this thing grow, it will envelop you . . . Today Gardeners’ Question Time is being broadcast from Weymouth. I note things down. They are discussing a wonderful energetic rampant prune. And they are right, Moira. To be safe from the world, you should not have to lock yourself out of it. But I am more careful to keep the outside outside and the inside inside. I have a soft pair of indoor slippers, a shoe rack for my gardening gear. For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

  But then they found a body.

  For a few days she was just a female body, found after water turned to ice. Then, through dental records, biometric data, phone calls, she gained a name. The reports said that Hiromi Himura, fifty-six, of the Himura banking family, had been visiting her daughter, a resident of New York. The reports added that Ume Himura was found, long dead, shortly after Hiromi’s body was found. The picture Hiromi had taken of Mizuko, Kakusei, Waking! was now circulating online.

  I read the same few news articles over and over. Ume had not established that Hiromi was missing, despite having failed to return. It was a relief that she had not been moved into a home. I felt that Ume would not have liked the ground beneath her moving again. I imagined her lonely death, remains decomposing into a human stain on a carpet. As I read, I began making short little huffs from my stomach. The only relief I could find in this ending was in how deeply it pained me.

  I suppose you will want to know what the letter said. Not mine, I don’t want to share that—some things should stay private—but a translation of Hiromi’s. Its intended recipient should at last receive it.

  Dear M,

  I’m sorry for this. Another failing, I know. You won’t believe it, but I came to America to try and be a good mom at last. I fed Michi and bought a rice cooker, for example. I waited for you to wake up so I could tell you in person. I’ll be a good mom now. Granny wanted to come too, but she is too old to go long distances, so I left her at home. But she was very worried. I was so happy when you began to wake up that I sent her a picture message, but I don’t think she ever turns on the cell phone I got her.

  The waiting gave me time to think about some things I regret. I realized for the first time how much I do love you, and I promised myself I would look after you when you woke up. I thought we could start over. And I would tell you the things you always wanted to know.

  That was what I planned when you were still unconscious, and then the evening that you first opened your eyes they sent me home and said to come back in the morning. I came back full of hope and big plans, but when I got back to your apartment there was a package for you. It was marked urgent, so I opened it. I’m sorry for that, because you know how much I am a private person. Even writing this is not easy for me, but I know it is the only way for us both to have what we want. It is my choice to have a secret in my life, just as it is yours to make it known, if that is what you want, when I am gone.

  Granny says that even if you live through an earthquake, there will be a tsunami, and even if you live through the tsunami, radiation will get you. We are never done. I was foolish to think I might be. Knowing you were okay, I felt such relief, and I thought it had finally changed—the numb feeling, sometimes even the anger I felt towards you for so long. But I was wrong. This is not your fault, and there is so much love that I wish I could give you now that I can finally allow myself to feel it. I understand why you wanted to know him, and I understand why you want to be known yourself, because I know what it is to be denied. Please know that I was never hiding you.

  You think I don’t understand why you write stories that upset the ones close to you for the benefit of people far away, people you will never even meet. I once felt something like it, and I once tried to tell strangers what happened to me, even though I never told you or Granny. I will tell you now so that I don’t disappear without giving you your answers first. I thought it would be obvious to you. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  I was raped. In 1981. Nine months after, I had you. So.

  Your father—the word makes me feel so odd—was living in the same university building as me. When I came back I told people I had rejected my place, since in the end I was there for only the first term. Granny was the one who wanted me to go, because she was so determined for me to be a scientist like Kathleen Drew. She fought my father so hard to let me, and finally he gave in. I got there, and at the end of my third week I went to shower and I left my bedroom door on the latch. When I came back a man was there. He said he had come to tell me I shouldn’t leave my door on the latch. He seemed a lot older. I thought he was trying to be kind. But the next time I went to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I left my door on the latch again. When I came back in that time he was standing right behind the door, enraged. He said he had told me not to do it. I must be stupid. He did not desire me, he informed me, he said he simply wanted me to learn to do as I was told.

  After he left I was too scared to leave my room. I didn’t know which door in the hallway was his, or if he was on a different floor. All night I lay awake. When I had to pee I went in a flask. I jumped out of my skin every time I heard footsteps pass outside. I waited until the morning, when lectures began, and then I went to the representative for international students and he told me to talk to the police.

  The first question they had after I told them my story was why had I left my door on the latch? When I saw that they did not believe me, I became upset. I didn’t know how to explain myself, even in my own language. I got confused and I started to feel ashamed. My English was not so good then, even when I was calm. When they took me to the station, the second account I had to give of my story, in front of the right officials for them to write down, was slightly different. I mixed up the order of certain things. They seemed to think I was not telling the truth. I told them I hadn’t slept all night and I would like an interpreter to help me, but they said they did not have anyone who spoke Chinese.

  When something is written down, that’s it. I don’t even remember what I wrote or whether it made any sense. Their questions made me feel like it was all in my head. They suggested I was homesick in a new place, wanting attention. I was eighteen. I didn’t know about sex, nothing about rape. I didn’t know that I should make them examine me there and then. Instead I had to leave the station and go back to my bedroom.

  I didn’t sleep that night or the next. They said they would find a match for my description, and I waited for a call or a visit, but no one came. I went to the international rep and told him I wanted to change rooms, and he said he would try to put me somewhere else.

  After a few weeks, an officer came to tell me they had found him. Rob
in Quinn agreed that he had been in my bedroom but said he had not forced his way in. He told them he had been invited. It was, the officer said, my two slightly different versions against his single consistent one. Robin Quinn said I had consented and must now be regretting my decision.

  I was written off as homesick foreign girl who had made a bad choice. Who felt regret at the loss of her innocence. There was nothing else. I called my mother and told her I was coming home. I said I’d made a mistake. When I got back I didn’t talk about it. I could barely talk at all. The longer I didn’t, the fewer words I had, and the less I could manage to make myself say.

  It has made me a difficult person to love. Even Granny says she didn’t like me as much after I came home. She thought I blamed her for sending me away. Tell her that isn’t true, by the way. I wish there was one person to blame. I see and read about people like him everywhere.

  I got the idea for my company because I hated the thought of a person being scared in a room on her own. I remember lying facedown, my arms pinned against my back, on my own floor, in my own room, surrounded by my own things from home in Tokyo—my single bed and my tennis shoes under it, my desk and my lamp and my pencil case—and thinking, Why don’t they help me? Why won’t they sound the alarm? And when the police looked around I wanted to shout, Tell them! You saw it, it happened right here. I can’t prove it alone. Afterwards I didn’t trust them either. I felt like all my everyday belongings and bits of home had betrayed me when I needed them to be on my side. I abandoned most of my belongings when I went back to Tokyo.

  If I say I understand why you need to tell your stories, maybe now you can understand why I did not tell mine. The risk of not being believed again was too much. I started to think that maybe I had made it up. Maybe it was in my head. But then I found out I was going to have you. It’s all come around. You take real things and turn them into fiction. I wish I could say I wanted you. The truth is I didn’t, and I knew I wouldn’t and couldn’t love you. I went along with the pregnancy at first because I felt too unsure of my own mind to stop anything that was happening to me. The idea that I couldn’t separate what was true from what was false was so terrifying. I couldn’t even trust myself to walk out the front door, let alone make a choice. Not knowing myself like that was more frightening to me than the stranger in my room. That was the worst thing—being hollowed out like that. That, in the end, was why I kept you. I wanted to know it had been real, to have some permanent mark. You were my burden of proof.

  My mother tried to make me end it. I think she suspected. My father was, of course, furious, but that only made me colder inside and more determined to go through with it. I remember thinking, as you grew inside me, that I would never let a man make me do anything ever again. I hoped that by pushing you out with all my strength rather than lying back unconscious and having another man put his hands between my legs to remove you, the last trace of him would be gone.

  I hadn’t anticipated that when I saw you it would feel worse. It would be like replaying the whole thing in slow motion. That’s the only reason there are almost no pictures of you as a baby, except the ones Granny took. I could not look directly into your face back then. You had been an abstract something, at worst a foreigner, inside my body, but outside it, you were like my enemy. I was afraid of you, because I was sure you and he were one. When they put you on my chest in the hospital I felt trapped, held there by a helpless baby, pinned back against my will.

  Granny wanted to look after you, and I let her. She tried to get me to change the name I gave you. She said I was depressed and it wasn’t fair on you to give you a sad name. I know you will look after her now.

  I told myself I was doing the right thing—what child wants to know that story about herself? One parent a criminal, the other a victim, and she is half of each? But I thought silence was better than a lie. So many times after we fought I wanted to lie like a leaf on the ground to be stepped on. Just to disappear. I was afraid you would bring him back into our lives. Since I spoke to the police I have never said his name out loud. Never looked for him. I didn’t even know until now that he had changed his last name. When I read the contents of the letter that came for you, I didn’t anticipate how it would hurt me, how it would turn me into a mother, someone to feel protective of you and at the same time pain, not just because of him but because in finding him you were rejecting me.

  I want to die away from home. Too many people in Japan go to the same old spots. The Sea of Trees is full of morbid tourists now who take photos of the hanging bodies and even steal their belongings. I do not want some creep taking a picture with me in the background.

  I will always be there if you need me, because I will always be part of you. The part of you that would not be denied.

  H

  I think back to when reading this used to make me cry, and I hear myself make short little huffs of breath as if I am choking. But I do not know the people I am crying for anymore. I don’t let myself sympathise—I think it would be wrong. I don’t compare Robin with my birth father, or myself with Hiromi, or Ume with Susy, or even Mark with Mizuko anymore, though they are both experts at disappearing. I don’t know, I can’t know, but I almost did. When I read it now it’s like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me.

  What I can link is the two letters. At first I felt only a very dim connection between my confession and hers. It was a circumstance of Mizuko’s life that I had not known, that had not been part of the picture I had of her, and so therefore it could not exist. Nor could I really admit to myself that Hiromi had really gone. Gone to Tokyo, sure. People were mass, and mass was energy, and energy never died, it just went somewhere else. I tried to think about death, to imagine it, but I couldn’t. Mizuko would say that if someone from my generation dies, they continue to live online. They are stuck all around us, bumping up against our fingers. Sharp objects sensible through cheap fabric, like the lining of a purse. Their world smells of Juicy Fruit gum, and the air tastes of copper coins like blood. We know and they know they’re lost forever, but neither of us can quit our search. But slowly it dawned on me—my own role in the story, and what it had cost Mizuko: the loss of one parent after gaining another.

  Working out that I am not Mizuko has been an important step towards feeling better. If I have hit on a moral, it is this: the body is our natural barrier. There were lines I should not have crossed, and I did so without permission. I was looking always for correspondences, but meaning is found through difference.

  But then there is inheritance. I guess the lines blur while we assimilate. I had started to recover. Moving gave me the impression that I’d managed to build a wall between then and now (except that the new life was founded on the money I inherited), but then the physical contents of Silvia’s apartment arrived. Including the three crates. I sat in the garden, laying out each item on the ground. First as if there had been a crime scene, then, as the accumulation grew, as if there had been a full-on tsunami. Her blue grid tray for pills—days along the top, then rows for morning, noon, evening, bedtime—reminded me, with a little pulse of electricity, that she was not just somewhere else; she was gone. I read or turned things over, seeing things in them I hadn’t seen before. I still have the sealed envelope with the red fish inside, which I’ve kept, and the last letter Silvia dictated to me, which I did not send. Maybe this won’t be an issue in the future, as there will be hardly any physical remains of a human lifetime; we’ll just give our grandchildren our devices. Can you imagine trying to divide up all the things in them? For Carol: this attachment. Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won’t even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.

  I made it through a month in my new home with all these old objects—painting walls and sanding wood and f
eeling generally stable—without trying to contact her. Then one morning I cracked and ate two Provigils for breakfast. I watched the footage she sent me from her trip into the exclusion zone with Ume, listened to the Holocaust talk online, and set up a new Instagram account under the guise of a new business venture: New Leaf Gardening. The card with the ram on it—the one I had read with Mizuko in the deli—suggested that the profession would suit me. I took the name from a van I saw in the Hamptons. It belonged to Mexican gardeners at work with a Strimmer on Walter’s fortifications. Because I could not stop myself, I searched for the triangular park of Roosevelt Island on Google Earth, next to the smallpox hospital, covered in a creeping green. I went down and down until I landed on the blades of grass and the goose dung and the dew. I felt all my self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I’d sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me—the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.

  I returned to the chapter in Silvia’s book about Vesta. When the virgins entered a collegium, they left behind the authority of their fathers and became daughters of the state. So any sexual relation with a citizen was considered to be incestium. Impurity. As a ward of the state until my adoption, I figured I was guilty of this many times over, starting with losing my virginity to Dwight. The punishment for breaking the oath of celibacy, I read, was to be buried alive in the campus sceleratus, in an underground chamber. The vestal had to be buried alive, because this was the only way to kill her without spilling her blood, which was forbidden. To kill her they created a kind of legal fiction that they weren’t really killing her. They buried the nonvirgin priestess with a nominal amount of provisions, so she would technically be descending not to burial in the city but to a habitable room, resulting in a lingering death by slow suffocation. I stood considering this fate as potentially being mine while I installed the mirrored cabinet doors, pulling them ajar when I had finished to test the hinges, so that I saw myself as an infinite regression getting smaller, smaller, smaller, an endless corridor through which I could retrace my steps.