The Witches' Book of the Dead

by Christian Day

  He dug and pressed into her flanks with his fingers, pounded on her with his fists, but it was no use. Like a repugnant succubus she held him captive, but then she abruptly released him, wailing, took him in her arms, stroked his face, and caressed him, now cooing a flutter of incomprehensible, soft words of comfort and succor.

  She was an aristocrat, yes, she blurted out after crouching once more against the cavern wall, and she was being held here against her will. It was so very wretched, and her hardship was great; she was truly sorry, she had only been trying to keep him here, she hadn’t seen another human being in months.

  Finally she began softly to weep and lamented that she was subsisting on kelp and rainwater, and sometimes, when the hunger was no longer endurable, she would catch and kill a seagull and drink its warm blood.

  Masahiko saw the bones of dozens of birds and innumerable fish lying scattered around the damp mud floor of the cave, in the dark corners small stones had been piled up carefully into temple shapes, and he saw that she had tried in vain to build a fire with wet driftwood.

  And the woman who had plunged off the cliffs before, that wasn’t her? No, of course not, she hadn’t left the shore in months, there was no escape from this place, the cliff face was much too steep to ascend. At first she’d tried every morning to walk along the beach in search of help and nourishment, but after a while there was nothing else but a dense, horrendous fog—not a soul, nothing, it was the end of the world.

  Along with the tattered shift, these three candles here, those couple of matches were all she still possessed; after they were gone, the dreadful darkness would hold sway in her cave. But how had she come to this place, who had cast her ashore? She could no longer remember anything, she said, one day after she’d been locked out of her chambers in Maruoka, she’d fallen asleep before her door in the hallway of the citadel and awoken here on this snow-sown beach, her body and visage colored with red paint.

  They had to get out of here, Masahiko said, he’d help her escape, and he thrust a half bar of chocolate into her dirty hand, but she replied, no, there was no point, it was her fate to remain here forever at the edge of the earth to eat raw seagulls and worms, and the night sky would be her coffin, and the moon her grave lantern.

  Masahiko then held her in his arms and whispered that he was going to get help now, she ought to be patient for just a short while longer, and he draped his coat over her shoulders and carefully fed her the chocolate. Please don’t go, she cried in a tremulous lament, and he answered softly, she shouldn’t give up, there was always hope, it was because of her that he had come to this bleak shore, and he would soon return with a doctor, with blankets, and with rice.

  And while she continued to weep and implore, he left the cave and strode onto the beach, then hurried back to the place where he had seen the bloodstain on the rock, and while the sobbing could only barely be heard in the distance, he climbed up the slope, painstakingly groping his way, until after a good hour of ascent he had reached the edge of the bluff, pulling himself up onto flat ground, which now seemed to him a stable, safe place, sheltered from the terrible dreamworld down below.

  It had begun to snow again, and he marched back through a freshly white crystalline world in the approximate direction of Sakai or wherever he supposed the city to be, and with every step that distanced him from the cliffs, he forgot the events in the cave and forgot about the crying, lonely, ruined woman in it whom he had promised a quick return.

  Only several months later, at home in Tokyo, did she appear to him again, standing by his bed, in the fearful moments just before awakening; or every so often, in the furtive gloom of a movie theater, whenever a film had not yet begun: then he would see her before him, her red-painted face turned away from him, cowering off beneath the movie screen, beside the ruffled velvet curtain.

  18.

  When we see someone suffering, we can find it within ourselves to pardon him for just about anything. Back in Zurich from Scandinavia, Nägeli had driven out past the city gates to Oerlikon to be shown a film at the local office of Danish Nordisk that, in a way, might be counted among the beginnings of his craft: August Blom’s Vampyrdanserinden of 1912—a clumsy though not incapably staged dramalet that began to burn right in the middle of the show, as the film had obviously been loaded incorrectly.

  The screening was discontinued; stepping out of the booth, the projectionist issued multiple apologies after having fiddled about with a fire extinguisher to spray foam that now bashfully dribbled down the inside of the little projection booth window.

  Nägeli remained riveted in his seat, his soul touched by the kaleidoscope of hypnotic magenta, of green, of blue, of yellow, indeed, of turquoise, created on the screen before him by the light beam from the still blithely projecting apparatus that shot through the firefighting foam, and he wondered (his head cocked slightly) whether the future invention of color film wouldn’t have much more sweeping aesthetic consequences than now nascent sound film. Two things were fundamentally opposed to one another, no?—color and film; it was evident, though, that a depiction of reality with an instrument as metaphysical as the film camera (that crucial but disembodied organ) would always have to be in black-and-white. Color—that psychotic lūdus, that crude chaos of the retina—indeed, it was pointless to show it.

  All of a sudden Ida came to mind—sublime, refined Ida—and he saw before him her freckled skin, her fair-haired curls that, pertly peeking forth from under a dark-blue beret, often framed the just-finished picture over which she had been leaning, lost in her drawing. Ida!

  How precious those holidays on the Baltic coast of Germany had been: they had already danced a quickstep at breakfast in that white hotel, she had eaten a piece of torte sumptuously dolloped with whipped cream, then came the walk down to a sea lined with dressing cabins cheerfully striped in blue and white, where wave after wave poured, tidelessly, tamely, onto the shore.

  And so they had gone into the water for a refreshing dip when quite suddenly the emerald whirl of a wave struck him, pulling him under, and he resurfaced, faltering and huffing and happy in the iridescent summer light; his hand raised in reassuring greeting, he had seen her standing there on the beach, deeply tanned in her navy-blue bathing suit, the tips of her delicate toes half-buried in the sand, her slim hands wrenched before her gaping mouth out of worry for him; then, when she saw Nägeli standing safe and sound, she had smiled in relief; there were roses, sprays of seawater, the homey, nutlike scent of seaweed, the shrieks of children, the pale-pink foam from seashells, the barking of dogs, the bones of coral, a cloudless, ecstatic sky, her slender upper arms, pearls instead of eyes; not for a single moment more did he think of his dying father, mumbling to himself instead as he stood in the ocean up to his loins: This is exactly how my childhood smelled.

  And in his mind colored subject and colored object became one, the beholder and the beheld, as if for a few seconds he had been permitted to break through that veil of time that keeps us mortals from apprehending the cosmology of our existence.

  Then later, up in the hotel room at the very end of a long corridor carpeted in coconut runners, Nägeli, aroused by a strong desire induced mainly by the effect of the hot sun, had torn from Ida’s body (the summery skin of her nape already smelled indecently of pistachios in the elevator, of damp oat straw) her still-wet bathing suit and mounted her from behind, huffing and puffing, on the double bed, as if she were a mare in heat—in the course of which it seemed to him as though Ida, turned away from him toward the wall, were nonetheless stifling a soundless yawn.

  Nägeli remained seated there in the projection room for a long time while the screen above shone white and blank and inconsequential, as if both it and he had lost their meaning. The soapy foam had all slid off. He began to pack himself a pipe, paying no heed to the tobacco crumbs that fluttered onto his shoes, nor to the warm little tear under his eye.

  So now his father was gone. His shade was forever rent from time. He felt as if now, fin
ally, the myriad possibilities of his imagination were embracing him; he snuggled deep down into his suit coat and dozed off, the pipe cupped in his hand on the armrest.

  And then, snoring imperceptibly (sleep is a rose, as the Russians say), he was watching a matte-gray, completely plotless film that lasted for hours, and in this dream he saw an oddly quaint Europe, aquiver by morning; he saw crooked façades of half-timbered houses, which appeared to be perpetually crammed against each other, pushing and shoving; poets in pointed caps, living inside under twisted roofs, composing their dithyrambs in springtime, before dawn; magnificently resonant church bells, heralding Eichendorffian mysteries, calling burghers to early Mass with their peals; he heard the imperturbable clop-clop-clop of horse hooves; he saw splendidly heaping silver platters of cheeses, ham, blood sausage, and grapes, whose cloying, meaty aromas wafted over the cobblestone marketplaces, and saw the breakfast beers as well, hastily sloshing their way to the tables, tankard by tankard; he saw hanging above him massive, black, wrought-iron lamps, unlit by day, dangling down now like empty cages (those in which people were displayed as punishment in former times); and he saw the room at the clinic after his father’s body had been taken away, and the deathbed, and the pillow with an indentation in the middle that looked as though it had been arranged precisely so as to ensure that the impression of the back of his father’s head would only remain eloquent and visible for a short time and then cease to exist.

  19.

  At the very end, on the last day of his final year at school, Masahiko had obtained the key to the attic from Kikuchi-sensei’s locker and surreptitiously entered the top floor of the boarding school. He had barred the metal door behind him, crawled under the roof braces to the place where the insulating wood shavings protruded out a good bit from the roof ridge, and seated himself on a crossbeam, where he ate two rice balls.

  The resinous aroma of the wood and the familiar taste of his snack filled him with a great, deep satisfaction, permitting him some distance from his actual scheme: to destroy this school that had humiliated and debased him for years. Dangling his feet, he watched a rat scurry along the inner edge of the roof and vanish into its lair amid the shadowy planks. Then he sat there motionless for quite some time.

  Next, he reached into the trouser pocket of his uniform and produced the matchbox, turning it absentmindedly around and around and finally laying it down neatly on the crossbeam beside him, sprang onto the attic floor in one leap, left that place again by the little door and hung the key back on the hook in Kikuchi’s school locker unnoticed, then strolled into the schoolyard to squat down and attend to a somewhat tricky mathematical problem that concerned, among other things, the proof of existence of several polynomial rings.

  And while he sat there thus, making his calculations, the earthy smoke of the fire reached his nose even before he could see it. He immersed himself in his notes, the school bell was rung, and then, piercingly, a dissonant siren sounded. Pupils rushed out of the main entrance like startled crows, gathered in the courtyard, and gawked up, mesmerized, at the crest of the building from which the tongues of yellow-red flames darted, accompanied by thick black smoke, growing ever taller and blazing in joyful arousal up into the sky.

  Although the fire brigade was on the scene not a half hour later with two fire engines and a considerable squad of brave uniformed men, the school could not be saved. A tremendous column of billowing smoke rose aloft, and the flames consumed everything, spreading to the gymnasium and obliterating the classrooms, the dormitories, the dining hall, and the teachers’ offices with their own special furious greed.

  Thousands of files and composition books fueled the flames, hundreds of rubber erasers melted away in a sizzle, pencils and paintbrushes vaporized steadily, even that unspeakable pile of bricks of which the pupils had had to avail themselves in the early morning became a black beacon, streaked with soot.

  Masahiko crept away, scaled the hill near the boarding school, sat down in the grass, and watched the fire from a distance, as if he were looking through a microscope or rather a telescope held to the eye the wrong way around.

  While tiny grasshoppers sprang beside him out of the weeds, the instructions from the teachers and the fire brigade, shouted through a megaphone, reached his ears curiously muffled. He lay down on his back and observed an incipient little cloud that joined up in the pale-blue sky with a larger one. We live not only in a world of thoughts, he reflected, but also in a world of things. And the past? It was always more interesting than the present.

  PART TWO

  破

  20.

  Some weeks after he had dispatched the film and letter to Germany, Amakasu, squeezed into his tuxedo, had been chauffeured early one evening to the American legation for a reception, where the world-famous actor Charles Chaplin, then on a reconnoitering tour of Japan with his manservant, Toraichi Kono, was to be honored.

  Those droll films in which Chaplin played a down-and-out fellow plagued by bouts of bad luck who still managed to prevail against all odds were enjoying fantastic success in Japan. Something about the inner, utterly anarchic expression of that short, shabbily dressed, always melancholically amused, mustachioed hero, something in his lived sangfroid, stirred the Japanese soul deeply; they applauded his cinematographic escapades, and his revolt against authority, usually embodied by cretinous policemen, was felt by the audience to be extremely liberating.

  Amakasu had caught himself several times in one or the other cinema in Ginza slapping himself on the thigh or laughing freely and without inhibition. It was indeed quite extraordinary what took place up there on-screen; the blows of fate that little prole suffered and then his inevitable victories were at once unsettling and exhilarating.

  Now then: Amakasu ascended the four or five stone steps from the gravel path to the main entrance of the embassy, illuminated by floodlights ablaze, a bowing servant took his sodden homburg and umbrella, and a white-gloved officer hastened to salute him, Amakasu nodding as he passed.

  In the resplendently lit reception halls things were festive—a local jazz band made sincere attempts to play entertaining but not too obtrusive standards; the swell of dozens of voices reached his ears. Over there was the Dutch ambassador (pederast), there a prominent Chinese Communist (compulsive gambler), smoking in the corner with pointy fingers an Italian colonel (impotent). Amakasu caught sight of the geriatric prime minister, Inukai, bowed toward him to an appropriate depth, his hands flat against the seam of his trousers, and then, smiling, reached into a silver dish presented to him in order to affix one of the pretty pins to his lapel—small, crossed Japanese and American flags.

  That was him in the back, my goodness, there was Chaplin, svelte and trim, the curly hair on his temples tinged with silver, absolutely charming and, yes, very rakish in his black tuxedo, a glass of Champagne in his left hand, in his right a cigar, encircled by three attractive, giggling Japanese women and a jovially muttering bearded admiral, standing next to a tower of orchids that was artfully arranged, to be sure, but with American immoderateness.

  Chaplin laughed quite openly at a joke and then quickly covered his mouth with both hands as though he were ashamed of the condition of his teeth, and a black lock of hair fell to his brow, quivering. He looked nothing at all like he did in his films, Amakasu thought; he more resembled a small, likeable rodent, perhaps even a fox.

  A Japanese man came sauntering by and handed Amakasu a clinking glass of whiskey—it was Toraichi Kono, Chaplin’s smirking assistant, who was already so stone drunk that he morphed back from American to Japanese only as he approached, and this looked labored and unnatural. Of course, he said, of course he knew who Amakasu was, charmed, really. He smelled quite faintly of something old, something unwashed.

  Chaplin himself now came stumbling up; Amakasu was unable to say whether his lurching was put on or genuine, but Chaplin had already seized both his hands and was pumping them up and down and relating immediately and outright that he had just
seen Tokyo Chorus by Ozu yesterday, and it was a fantastic master-piece, and he was now firmly resolved to keep making silent films, like Ozu. He, Chaplin, was first and foremost a mime, and he could say without false modesty that in this capacity he was a singular master.

  In this country it was said of cinemas that they were gardens of electric shadows, wasn’t that a truly wonderful description now that, unfortunately, Sous les toits de Paris was being whistled everywhere? (René Clair’s sound film was showing quite successfully in Tokyo movie theaters at that time.) And Amakasu noticed how extraordinarily charismatic and intelligent Chaplin seemed after all, and how dangerous this enemy would be, and how much power his culture was capable of exerting, and above all how closely related camera and machine gun were.

  He recalled the film reel with the gruesome flick he had sent to Berlin several weeks earlier, and a fleeting doubt stirred in him about whether he had done entirely the right thing—maybe it would have been better had he mailed a more wholesome film, something pleasant, something funny, shots of the shōshimin perhaps, inconsequential tales of the trials and tribulations of the lower classes, and he bit himself quickly and inconspicuously on the lower lip, and Chaplin, who harbored an exceptionally sensitive awareness of those around him, gently took the arm of the Japanese man and suggested they leave this quite excessively extravagant reception (for he, too, knew who the unobtrusive Amakasu was) and dine together at the Imperial Hotel, among friends of the cinema, and Amakasu, whose diplomatic skill had abandoned him for one careless second, consented, relieved, feeling simultaneous honor and shame.

  21.

  And so they drove in a convoy, sitting behind windshield wiper blades that swept away the rain in hypnotizing semicircles, through the dazzling, glittering Ginza district to the Imperial Hotel, a peculiar, eccentric box built by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright that had always reminded Amakasu of vine-choked Hindu or Maya temples, of the parody of a venerable Babylonian shrine, with its hanging gardens and labyrinthine rivulets, water baths, walls of flowers, and ponds.