The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  The engine noise rises. The men at the front of the bus begin to pull. The road is now a river of mud. We see their feet slipping. The men at the rear have braced themselves, ready to push. The engine revs again. The bus seems to move. The wheels begin to churn. The bus falls back. The engine rises again. The two groups of men are shouting to one another. Trying to establish a rhythm. Forward, then back. Forward a little more. We can see their straining faces in the headlights. The road is slippery, the ropes are wet. Forward, back. Forward, back. The bus begins to break free. The wheels begin to emerge. The engine noise is deafening.

  The bus is almost out—all but one of the men behind it have stood back. Then the wheels begin to spin. For an instant, nothing happens. The men at the front, who have begun to relax, who have already seen themselves triumphant, brace themselves again. The wet ropes snap tight. It is as if something ugly has been lurking in the darkness above us. The bus begins to slip backwards. One of the men shouts a warning to his companion, who is still behind the bus. Inexplicably, he is still pushing. The brake lights come on. There is another shout. The man half-turns. And we all see who it is. It is Hiroshi.

  Unobserved, he has joined the men at the rear of the bus. Now he stands there alone, open-mouthed, wild-eyed, looking back at us over his shoulder through the beating rain. The bus looms over him. Someone, a woman, cries out. But now the bus appears to rush, to lunge at him. It clubs him heartlessly backwards into the water. Which seems to open up and swallow him. The underside of the bus hits the water with a tremendous thump. A wall of water and mud bursts up over the semicircle of men at the pool’s edge. Then it begins to settle, to drain back into the pool. We all think Hiroshi will just rise up out of the water, coughing and spluttering. Looking foolish. But he doesn’t. Instead, a brief, inhuman cry erupts from beneath the bus. A single, strangled howl. Then nothing. The muddied surface begins to still.

  It is clear that Hiroshi is trapped. The men at the rear leap forward, into the water. Two of them begin reaching around, arms deep in the water, searching for him. There is shouting. Some of the women drop their umbrellas. They rush to the front of the bus, yelling to the men: Pull, pull! One of them is pounding on the driver’s door, screaming something up to Mr Nakagawa, who realises something terrible has happened. The engine roars again. The wheels begin to spin. The water churns. Steam from the exhaust billows up over the bus. The two men have found Hiroshi. They have him by one of his arms. They are pulling on it, trying to drag him free. I can see his wet and bloodied hand above the men’s bent backs. It is opening and closing, as though it is some ghastly mouth able to suck air down into his drowning body. But it isn’t. And the bus refuses to move.

  An hour or so after sunrise, we come around a bend in the road and there, sprawled below us, is Osaka. The city spills down the mountainside towards the bay which lies motionless in the early morning haze. Further south, along the coast, it is impossible to see where the city ends. It dissolves into the grey and indeterminate horizon beyond.

  It took more than an hour to pull the bus free. In the rain. In the dark. The light from the lamps grown dim. With everyone shaken, silent, as if we were all already aware that each of us had been brought there for some obscure and terrible reason to witness what had unfolded. We all felt guilty. We could not look at each other. But we all understood one thing. We had escaped. Only Hiroshi had been made to pay. And his father.

  When the bus was finally pulled clear, Hiroshi had bobbed to the surface like a cork. No one moved. At first. We all stared at his floating body, watching it turn slowly in the rain. Then his father, and one of the other men, waded into the pool to lift him free.

  I can still see Mr Nakagawa kneeling at the rear of the bus, in the yellow mud, on his own, with his dead idiot son cradled in his lap, rocking him slowly back and forth, saying something over and over, which I cannot hear.

  How many times has Sachiko told Katsuo this story? How many times have they sat on the terrace at night looking down at the jewelled city, or in the darkness of the lit garden, listening to the frogs, the slow tock, tock, tock of the water clock, the strings of a shamisen?

  Some nights, they would walk through the maze of narrow streets above the house, to find out where the music was coming from. As they walked the sound seemed to change location, echoing softly off the hillside, or a stone wall, or the air itself. Sometimes far off, sometimes near, it constantly circled around them, a kind of playful living thing. And yet so melancholy.

  And all the time, at his urging, Sachiko would be talking to him.

  Tell me again about helping your grandmother lay the kimono out on the snow, tell me about the horses, or Kimiko, he would say. Tell me about the night you stole away, about the lovers in the pool.

  And he would see Sachiko’s shadow darting through the trees as they walked. Once, on their way home, Sachiko stopped, grasped his sleeve.

  Listen, she said. It sounds like the music is coming from our house.

  They listened for a long time. She was right. It did sound like it was coming from their house. But, of course, it wasn’t, and never could have been.

  In the garden, Katsuo pictures the anvilled clock’s tipping. Slow, then quick, the water spilling from its bamboo lip. Then faster still, as if it too is hurrying back to its tock, tock, tock.

  How many times had he listened to her voice in the darkness? Each time she added something new. Some just remembered thing. He kept having to go back, to change what he had written.

  No longer. Now there is nothing more she can tell him.

  Chapter 20

  SHE hears them first. Their hooves, thundering up the slope. The sound hangs in the crystalline air. Two horses, black as night, rise up out of the snow like phantoms.

  The mare stands still in the sharp morning light. Ears twitching. Vigilant. The stallion, wild-eyed, circles. His dark flanks steaming. Rippling with uncontained energy. Anticipation. Their shadows etching the radiant snow.

  Sachiko lies hidden in her thicket, in the field above her house. She is a twelve-year-old girl watching two horses circle each other. Their shadows coupling, uncoupling, then coupling again. Their fogged breath. The steam clings to these apparitions in the snow, like spirits reluctant to depart.

  She sees the tremors pass in waves along the stallion’s flank. One after another after another, like a shadowed sea. He paws the snow-covered ground. Nuzzles the mare. Butts her haunches with his head, trying to turn her. She stands her ground.

  He charges away from her, a sudden dark-hooved fury. Possessed by something he does not understand.

  Sachiko waits.

  She hears the echoes of his hooves. Circling, elusive. Then, from a different bearing altogether, the stallion rises up out of the snow again. He comes thundering back. He stops just short of the mare. Tosses his head. With a start he veers away from her again. Circles. She is his pivot. The locus about which his momentary being revolves. His breath comes now in short exhortations. He paws the ground, is still.

  She has never seen anything like it before. It is like some new and unimagined life form, a creature as long and thick and smooth as her arm. That has come out to graze from some hidden place deep within the stallion’s belly. It makes no sense. It hangs there, its dark weighted head swaying just centimet
res above the snow, as if it is searching for something it has lost.

  And then she understands.

  The realisation is catastrophic. Her brain is reeling. This, she knows, has something to do with her. Her future.

  She watches the horses intently now. The two are coiled. Every muscle tensed. The stallion so perfectly still he could be an artefact. Until his surface breaks. Without warning, he lunges. Tears viciously at the mare, her mane. He rears.

  Sachiko watching.

  Now he strikes at the mare’s neck with his hooves. Again and again. He shies away, turns a tight pirouette. Returns. Lunges at her neck again. His eyes glazed. There is a kind of madness here.

  She can see a dark trickle of blood issuing from the mare’s torn flesh. On the white snow, a chain of blood-red looping drops. She, too, is locked in their trance.

  The mare can no longer move. She is transfixed. Her bulging eyes waiting.

  The stallion paws the ground again.

  Their coupling is beyond imagination, beyond reasoning. Nothing has prepared Sachiko for this. The awkward, urgent, clumsy manoeuvring. Confused hooves jostling in the kicked-up snow. Their slow turning purposeful. They dance a dance to steps that only they know. It is impossible. What they want. But, at last, the desired union. Images from a grotesque dream. The stallion still bends to tear the mare’s already bloodied neck, as if to anchor himself there.

  Sachiko’s first instinct is to run, to intervene. To stop this bloody onslaught. Now, watching, she cannot turn away.

  Without warning, something white erupts against the stallion’s flank. Another explosion, higher up, on the horse’s neck. A white peony bursting from the horse’s flesh. Then another.

  Sachiko knows what these are. She sees the concealed stones falling. Sees them instantly swallowed by the snow.

  Now they come in volleys. Their short arc brief against the perfect sky. As they fall, white against white, it is impossible to see them. It is only when they hit their mark that they are visible again. These snowballs packed with stone.

  Then, miraculously, as though they too have risen up out of the snow, half a dozen boys are charging. They have been lying in wait. Now they emerge from behind the snow-covered bushes. They are running, churning the soft snow, yelling, hurling their missiles at the rutting horses. Who stop, still united, in the face of this incomprehensible thing.

  Sachiko emerges from her cover. Runs. Shouts: No! No! Don’t hurt them. Leave them be.

  But it is too late. The horses have broken apart. Another wave of snow-stones plummets down on them. Then, with the spell irrevocably broken, the horses return to their separate worlds. They pull away from each other. They turn, and plunge down the slope again, away from her, their phantom shapes absorbed once more into the morning snow.

  Sachiko feels her anger rise. The boys too have watched the horses disappear.

  Why, she yells at them.

  The boys turn to her, this girl who has spoilt their fun. There is a strange hiatus, a recalibration. What to do to restore the equilibrium? One of the older boys steps forward. He wedges his feet into the snow, leans back with his arm outstretched. He is now a human catapult. He launches a snowball high into the air. It plummets down. Disappears into the snow a metre or two in front of her. Then there is another. Closer this time. Sachiko looks up to see each of the boys readying themselves. They are all human catapults now. She turns to run. But the soft snow impedes her. She can hear the thuk of snowballs landing around her. Unseen by her, one of the boys has found a piece of wood. He throws it after her. It turns end over end in the air. It strikes her, high on her shoulder. It pierces Sachiko’s skin through her blouse. She stumbles. Falls. Then she feels the pain, like a knife blade in her back. The boys stop. They stand some distance away from her. This is not what they came here for.

  It’s Sachiko, one of them says.

  She rolls onto her back. Lies dazed, looking up into the pure sky.

  Fear decides the boys. They back away. Turn, run, in high looping bounds, down the slope.

  Sachiko pushes herself to her feet. The pain has begun to ebb. She arches her shoulder, winces. Brushes herself down. She sees the piece of wood that struck her. Its sharp end bloodied. When she turns towards home, she sees the blood-red stain on the snow. Its magnitude alarming. She reaches over her shoulder, pulls at the fabric of her smock. Feels the sticky wetness, looks at her fingertips now painted red.

  And knows there is no escaping the pain that now awaits her.

  Why did you go there, Sachiko? Why? Explain it to me again, how you fell?

  It becomes her mother’s constant lament. Sachiko sees it in her every look. It comes to occupy the space between them.

  Her father was on the snow-covered slope above their house that day, doing what Sachiko should have done, laying out the new season’s kimono in the snow. How dazzling white the white ones were. It hurt your eyes to look at them.

  By chance he glanced up to see his distant daughter walking towards him. He knew instantly that his world had changed. And because he had been the one to run to her—exclaiming, broken-syllabled: Sachiko, Sachiko—he was held to blame. He had not been watching over her.

  Chapter 21

  THE bus terminal is deep within the vast and teeming square. Even at this early hour, traffic is jigsawed to a stop. Battered trucks, hand carts, buses, clog the interstitial spaces. Schools of ancient bicycles swim through the narrow fissures. All around them, a swirling tide of men ebbs and flows, shouldering their wares, heads bent. Near and far, horns bark, men shout. High-pitched whistles shred the air. The bus floats on a shallow sea of dust and diesel fumes. A smell as thick as fog seeps in through its carapace.

  The bus creeps forward, stops.

  Is this it, Father? Sachiko says.

  Yes, he says. This is where we get out.

  She looks at the tumult around them. The buildings on the square’s far periphery are like a distant shore. She wonders how they will get from here to there.

  Stand up, Sachiko, her father says. Get your things.

  The doors of the bus open like floodgates. The brutal outside floods in—the noise, the pungent smell of rotting fish, the diesel fumes, the stench of men. Sachiko feels herself being swept back into the bus. Which begins to fill. She cannot breathe.

  Her father is behind her. He leans into her ear. Take this, he says. He hands her his handkerchief.

  Put this over your nose. You will get used to it. Here, hold on, step down.

  Only a few passengers get off. Two or three exhausted businessmen, their suits dirty, crushed, their eyes drawn. One of the old women, who smiles at Sachiko in the stairwell, pats her arm.

  Sachiko looks down at what awaits her. Then she steps into the swirling chaos. She and her father are by the bus, pinned against it by the noise, the smell. By the mass of bodies sweeping past them.

  Wait here, her father says. I have to collect our luggage.

  Here? she says. She can hear the panic in her voice.

  I won’t be long, he says.

  Wave upon wave of fetid, choking air washes over her. She grasps the wheel well of
the bus to stop herself from being dragged into the cross-currents. She is pulled this way, then that. Unseen things touch her. She imagines hands reaching for her from within this seething mass, tugging at her, touching her, sliding across her body. She cannot move. She is embossed into the side of the bus.

  There are no women here. Just men. Men with their carts. Men with their pieces of paper. Men with cigarettes. Men on their own, who stare.

  You want to sell?

  A hideous face looms up in front of her. One glaucous bulging eye faces skywards. The other, with its small dark pupil, fixes on her, then turns to someone perched above her. Someone Sachiko has not seen. It is one of the businessmen from the bus. He is standing in the stairwell. He has not heard what the man has said. Instead, he is looking out over the sea of heads, searching for something. Or someone.

  You want to sell? the face repeats more loudly.

  The sightless tallowed eye seems to move of its own accord. It scans the sky, as though still trying to pinpoint exactly where the previous danger had come from. Its owner tugs at the businessman’s trouser leg. Attracts his attention. He rubs one stained finger against his thumb. Points to Sachiko.

  What? the man in the suit says impatiently.

  You sell?

  The man indicates Sachiko again. He steps forward so that he is centimetres from her face. He looks at her sideways with his one unclouded eye. At her hair. Her eyes. Her mouth. Her skin. Assessing. Calculating. How old is she? Is she still fresh? Sachiko can smell the stench of stale tobacco and something else on his breath. He reaches out, grasps her arm. Tightly. He is pulling her away.