The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  There were few people making the climb at that hour, and only a trickle making their way back. The path was steep and I kept my eyes focused on the ground in front of me, so that I did not lose my footing. I was about a third of the way up when I heard a voice call my name.

  Master Omura?

  I looked up to see old Professor Todo standing on the stone landing just ahead of me. He was leaning on a walking stick, taking a moment to catch his breath. He had hardly changed. It was almost as if he himself had been preserved in stone.

  I can see from the expression on your face, he said, that you have heard the news.

  What news?

  That I am dead. That I committed suicide years ago. I myself am not so sure that that is the case. He was smiling at me.

  I would have expected Professor Todo to be a bent and broken old man. Instead, he seemed happy, happy in a way I had never seen him before.

  He spoke of Katsuo.

  I hear he has made a name for himself, he said. That he is now a famous writer. Ah, Katsuo. Such an interesting boy. Always watching. Always observing. He nodded to himself. Yes, Katsuo. Still the most brilliant student I ever had. I am pleased that he has done well. He shook his head. Such a brilliant boy. It is not always the case.

  But Professor Todo, I said, taking the opportunity to ask the question I had always wanted to ask. With respect, Katsuo betrayed you. After all you did for him, he still betrayed you!

  Yes, yes, he said, as if what I was saying was of no consequence whatsoever. But Katsuo was like a son to me, the son I never had. I knew his father well, you know. Very well. I’ve just been up there, chatting to him. He pointed with his stick up the mountainside. When we were young, we were like brothers. And, well, Katsuo. It was the least I could do. The money meant nothing to me.

  The money?

  But as soon as I said it, I knew. How stupid could I have been? The anonymous benefactor, the person who had provided for Katsuo’s education, who had supported him from the time he was a boy. The money had come from Professor Todo.

  Did he know?

  Did he know what?

  Where the money came from?

  Oh, I don’t think so. I had sworn his uncle to secrecy. No, I doubt that he knew.

  And forgive me once again, Professor Todo, but you say you were just up there, chatting to his father? At the shrine?

  Yes, he said. Didn’t you know? His father was in Hiroshima on the day they dropped the bomb. With his wife, Ayumi. Except that she had stayed on the outskirts of the city, with relatives. Only Haruki had gone into the city centre. They never found his body. Ayumi died almost a year later, of radiation sickness. You know, Master Omura, I once asked Ayumi to marry me, but she refused. She was already secretly betrothed to Katsuo’s father. If only I had known. If only I had asked first. Life could have been so different…So, on the first Monday of each month, I go up there to say hello to him, and to Ayumi.

  I could hear Katsuo’s voice: My father was killed in a bomb explosion. A bomb explosion! I thought.

  And you, Tadashi? What about you? I hear you have a legal practice in Osaka.

  And I thought: How would he know that? I was only ever on the periphery of things. Perhaps I frowned, looked away. When I turned back to him, his old grey eyes were still fixed on mine. Something passed between us then, a moment of understanding. I am not a fool, Tadashi, his eyes said. And I have never been a fool.

  I stood there observing Professor Todo, his face. Never have I seen a face so tranquil, so unburdened by the past.

  You are a good person, Tadashi, he said. An honourable person. Say hello to Katsuo for me when you next see him.

  And then he was walking away, as if we had never met, as if we had never encountered each other on this deserted mountain path one cold and wintry afternoon, years ago.

  Chapter 38

  INSPECTOR Jovert!

  He was on his way home. He had stopped off at the Monoprix opposite the newsstand to pick up a few things.

  He turned to see a young woman facing him. The world folded in on itself. She was standing on the other side of a bank of cold-storage units. Her face was narrow, olive-skinned, dark-haired; half-Algerian, he knew instantly—how many hundreds of these faces had he seen in his life. Luminous, blue-green eyes.

  I knew I recognised you, she said. She was coming around the display units to him. We met at Le Bar l’Anise, she said. On Bastille Day. Actually, it was that night, at the fireworks. Don’t you remember—I bumped into your table, spilt your wine?

  Ah yes, now he remembered. She was the girl he’d looked through, the one in the black dress. But that’d been July, and here it was, already October.

  Yes, of course, he said.

  But where to go after this?

  I knew I knew you, she said. But the light was so poor in the café. I remembered later—Inspector Jovert. You are Inspector Jovert, aren’t you?

  Yes, he said. I am.

  You testified at my brother’s trial, she said. Mehdi Lambert.

  Of course, Mehdi. How could he forget? He looked at her again. He could see the family resemblance. She had Mehdi’s dark hair. His thin face. His lean build. Different eyes, though. His were glacial.

  I’ve cut my hair, she said. She reached up, pulled at a dark strand. Her hair was short now, as short as a boy’s. And I’m not wearing my glasses, she said.

  But he wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about Mehdi. He could still have given Mehdi’s height and weight if someone had asked. Mehdi Lambert, the seventeen-year-old boy who had stabbed his stepfather to death in one of those godforsaken socialist-experiments-gone-wrong high-rises on the outskirts of Paris. How long ago was that? Six, maybe seven years?

  It was one of the worst cases he’d ever had to deal with. The stepfather, a violent alcoholic, a petty criminal, had abused his young children, Mehdi’s half-brother and half-sister, for years. He was well known to police. Petty theft, burglary, assault with a weapon, grievous bodily harm. He had even, Jovert knew from the police files, assaulted the young woman—what was her name?—who now stood before him.

  But if her stepfather had mistreated her, and her brother, it was to their youngest half-sibling, a boy of four, that their stepfather devoted his most vicious attention. The police files showed the boy had been hospitalised four times in his short life—a fractured skull, he’d fallen off his tricycle; a broken nose, he’d fallen down the concrete stairs to their apartment; two severely burnt hands, this had been when the boy was two. According to the boy’s father, the child had been standing on a stool watching him cook when he had fallen forward, onto the stove. But the father could not explain how it was that the blistered burns on both his son’s hands, now infected, were so concentric. It looked, from the photographs, said the prosecutor, as though the child’s open hands had been held there.

  The mother—their mother—had been too frightened to testify.

  On the night their stepfather died, so too did their half-brother.

  Jovert remembered how the father, unemployed, had come home in a drunken rage. The mother had been working the night shift at the nearby food-pr
ocessing factory.

  Mehdi had come home at around 8.30, perhaps a little later—he had been at his girlfriend’s—to hear his stepfather’s raised voice coming from their apartment.

  I could hear it the moment the door buzzed open, he said. And as I came up the stairs, my stepfather’s voice had got louder and louder. By the time I got to the top of the stairs I realised that he was screaming at Luc.

  You fucking son of a bitch, I could hear him saying. You piece of Algerian shit. What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Answer me, he screamed.

  Mehdi told the court that his stepfather had it in for the boy. He was darker than the rest of them. He accused his wife, their mother, of screwing around.

  Look at him, he’d say. Just look at him—he’s as dark as a fucking Arab’s arsehole. Aren’t you, Luc. And he’d slap him across the head. Hard.

  Their mother said it wasn’t true: she had never cheated on him.

  It happens, she said. Some children are naturally darker. Please, Michel, don’t hurt him.

  I’ll tell you what happens, he said. When I’m out, you cock-sucking whore, you fuck other men. You think I don’t know. I see them come and go.

  But no one comes and goes, Michel. No one.

  Don’t lie to me! I see them, you fucking lying bitch. I’m not stupid, you know. I have eyes, I can see.

  One of his neighbours, an elderly Iranian woman, had been waiting on the next landing when Mehdi reached the door.

  Pauvre petit, she said as he searched for his keys in his satchel. This no good, Mehdi. One day he kill him.

  You fucking bitch. I’ll show you, you fucking piss-drinking fucking whore.

  Something crashed to the floor. There was the sound of breaking glass.

  I will kill you, you cunt.

  For a moment, Mehdi thought his mother must be home. That the two of them were arguing.

  Allah, Allah. I sorry, Mehdi. I call police.

  What did I tell you? his father was screaming when he entered the kitchen. Don’t-make-sad, Luc. You make sad again and I swear, I’ll fucking…

  Mehdi found Luc and his stepfather in the kitchen. Luc was in his pyjamas. He was standing on one of the kitchen chairs. Mehdi wondered how long he had been standing there. The boy had been crying. But now he was silent. Pieces of a broken chair lay scattered on the kitchen floor. Half a wooden seat. The broken bentwood back. One piece, a slat or something, was in the kitchen sink. It appeared as though the chair had exploded. His stepfather was standing opposite the boy. He had a broken chair leg in his hand.

  Luc hadn’t even glanced at Mehdi when he came in. He stood looking down at the floor. Mehdi could see that there was something wrong with his left arm—it was hanging at an odd angle. An autopsy would later show that it had been broken in three places.

  His father was still shouting at him: Don’t make sad, don’t make sad, Luc. Luc…I’m not going to ask again.

  Luc, what’s happening here? Mehdi asked. Why are you up on a chair?

  My stepfather, he said, glanced at me in the doorway. I saw his rage intensify. It was as if he refused to allow himself to be judged by me, someone who meant nothing to him. I was not his son. I saw my stepfather turn the broken chair leg slowly in his fist so that one of its hard edges faced in. And…and then he struck Luc a blow to the side of his head with all the force he could muster.

  Luc, Mehdi said, had teetered on the chair for an instant. But then it was like the air had gone out of him, as though he was one of those stovepipe men you sometimes see waving their arms about outside those places that sell cheap furniture and somebody had turned the compressor off. Luc collapsed onto the chair. Just like that. Then he slipped onto the floor.

  And he didn’t move. Not once. He just lay there, Mehdi said. I couldn’t believe it. There was so little of him. Luc. So little. A moment ago he’d been alive. And now…My stepfather was standing over him, except that it didn’t look like him, like Luc, anymore. The bloodied chair leg was still in my step-father’s hand, and there was a look of indescribable hatred on his face.

  What have you done? I screamed at him. Oh my god, what have you done? But before he could answer, I grabbed the kitchen knife that was lying on the bench, and I just started stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, saying: Never, never, never again.

  Martine, that was her name. Martine. It had surfaced now. He remembered her testifying. She’d been in her early twenties then, had had long dark hair, glasses. He remembered how quiet she was, how articulate, studious. She could have been the prosecutor herself.

  She had testified that she’d moved back to Algiers a couple of years previously. To escape her stepfather.

  Jovert looked at her again. How much more informed her face was now. How much more subtle. Stronger. He thought of the chasm of time that separated them. They were several lives apart. But for this temporal accident, had things, life, been otherwise, he knew he could have fallen for a girl like Martine.

  Martine, he said.

  Yes, she said, surprised. So you do remember?

  I remember, he said. And Mehdi. How is he?

  Mehdi had been convicted of manslaughter. Justifiable homicide. His teachers had testified on his behalf. He was a good student at the lycée. He worked hard. His mother depended on him. Despite this, he was sentenced to jail. Six years, to serve a minimum of three. There was an appeal. The sentence was too harsh. There had been mitigating circumstances. The judgment was flawed, it was racist. Mehdi was a half-half. His mother Algerian. His father French. There had been an outcry. No French boy would have been jailed under similar circumstances. Mehdi was released from jail, pending the appeal. But he didn’t wait. He didn’t trust the French justice system. It was too polluted by history. Instead, he took off for Algiers, where his sister, Martine, was.

  When he thought about it later, it seemed to Jovert that he had spent most of his life listening to people, sifting through what they said, weighing, assessing. Trying to fit things together. But life, unlike crime, was not something you could solve. What people told you was not always the truth; the truth was what you found out, eventually, by putting all the pieces together. And sometimes not even then.

  But where did that leave his life? Perhaps, he thought, his life didn’t matter in the end. It was life itself that mattered. It wasn’t personal. Life just rolled through you. And then moved on.

  Martine told him that she had come back to revive the appeal process, to get help. But Mehdi had gone into hiding in Algiers. She could not find him.

  Now, she thought, she might have found someone who could help her. He was standing right in front of her.

  PART VIII

  OMURA

  Chapter 39

  IT starts as a normal day. Tadashi Omura steps out of his apartment and pulls the door closed. He takes the lift downstairs. Then he sets out on the ten-minute walk to his office. The air is clear. The sun is shining.

  He has no presentiment that truth is circling overhead. That it will be waiting for him when he arrives at his office.

  Then he is sitting at his desk. He takes the document he has been working on out of his briefcase and opens it. Sees the isolated pools of r
ed. His many emendations. There is still so much to do.

  His left hand rests on the page. The fingers of his right hand reach expertly up for his glasses, snug in his coat top pocket. His detailed revisions are suddenly as sharp as barbed wire. His handwriting meticulous, dense, inescapable.

  The document is a family will. It is the territory he hates most. The will is complex, an old Osaka family. They are well known, wealthy. Once, they were happy.

  For reasons he will not disclose, the father, a former friend, wants his only son excised. His word—excised.

  Omura remembers him, the boy, as a young child. Shy, smiling, well-mannered.

  But now things must be watertight.

  Where did this new bitterness come from? What transgressions did it conceal? He could not ask. The father unbending.

  Watertight. No loopholes. No gaps. To ensure the carnage continues.

  Later—three soft knocks. He is still at his desk. His ashtray has begun to fill. He waits, glances at his open diary. The low reverberation of a departing freighter rolls across the city. Eleven thirty.

  Mrs Akimoto, his secretary, knocks again. He imagines her leaning in towards the door, her small clenched fist still raised.

  Come in, he says.

  Mrs Akimoto is older, old-fashioned. She has been with him for years. From before she was married. She bows, as she always does.

  Forgive me, Mr Omura, but there is someone here to see you.

  He looks at his diary again. Perhaps he has missed something.

  It’s a lady, Mrs Akimoto says. She does not have an appointment. I suggested she make one, but she said she would wait. All day, if necessary. Until you come out.