by Mark Henshaw
You remember you told me, Jovert said, when Hideo brought Sachiko down to Osaka, they stopped at an inn because of the rain. Then they went on. Down the mountainside. In the storm. And the bus broke down, it got stuck in this water-filled hole on the side of the road. And the bus driver’s son…
Hiroshi?
Yes, Hiroshi. You told me how he had drowned when the bus fell back on him. Well, he was there. Katsuo. Katsuo was there.
How do you know?
Who told you the story? Jovert said.
Katsuo.
And where did he get it from?
From Sachiko. As I’ve told you, he would ask her the same things over and over again. Building up his account of things. Adding to what he’d missed. When I went to see him that fateful night, he told me how Sachiko had died in the snow. How he had tried to keep her awake by getting her to talk. How she had told him again of coming down the mountain with her father. Almost from the moment they left her village, things started to go wrong. It was as if these things were warnings, omens, which they did not heed.
And do you recall what he said about Hiroshi? What you told me?
Hiroshi?
When the bus lurched backwards. When Hiroshi was struck down. When he was stuck under it. They couldn’t get him out. And you said something about his arm, how it rose up out of the water. You described his hand. You said it was like a…like a bloody mouth trying to suck air down into his body.
Yes, Omura said. I did say something like that.
But you said, Sachiko said, that she and the old people, the women, the old men, and the children were standing at the side of the road some distance away. With the rain still beating down on them. Didn’t you? Even I can see them there, huddled under their umbrellas, looking on while this nightmare unfolds. Isn’t that what you said? And when the bus begins to loom over them, the men jump out of the way to escape it. And down it comes, trapping Hiroshi. And the men are all there, in a semicircle, watching, except for the two who are trying to pull him out.
Omura did not reply. He was listening intently to what Jovert was saying.
He was one of them, Jovert said. Katsuo. One of the men standing in the semicircle at the rear of the bus. It was he who saw Hiroshi’s clenched and bloodied hand rise up out of the muddy water, gasping for air. Sachiko couldn’t possibly have seen that. She was with the women and children on the far side of the road.
Omura was nodding.
Don’t you see? It would have been exactly what Katsuo would have done.
Pieces began to fall into place. Jovert could see Katsuo going to Sachiko’s village dozens of times, disguised, just to catch a glimpse of her. He would already have been obsessed with her after that first night. Of course he would have ensured he was on the bus bringing her down to him.
It couldn’t possibly have been Sachiko who told him, he said. It had to be him. And then, when they got to Osaka, at the bus terminal, the man who was standing in the stairwell of the bus, while Hideo went to get their luggage. The businessman who rescued her. That must have been Katsuo. He was watching over her.
Jovert did not stop there. There was one other thing he had figured out.
He was here, too, wasn’t he? he said to Omura. Here in Paris. When Katsuo disappeared that time, after the publication of, what was it?
The Chameleon, Omura said.
The Chameleon. The chameleon, Jovert repeated. You said he was away for years, isn’t that what you said? He was standing looking at Omura now. He was here, wasn’t he, Professor Omura? In Paris?
There was a moment of silence while something other than Omura decided what his answer would be.
He was. Yes, Inspector, he was.
In my apartment?
Omura didn’t answer immediately. He reached for the teapot, poured some more tea into his cup.
I looked up the tenancy records, Jovert said. This morning, at the real-estate office.
Omura still did not answer him. Instead, he waited, as though he were weighing up the consequences of what he was about to say.
Yes, he said.
So you weren’t waiting there for me, were you?
What do you mean, Inspector?
The night you picked up my keys. That night you said you were waiting for me. It wasn’t me you were waiting for, was it?
I’m not sure I follow, Inspector?
You weren’t waiting specifically for me, he said testily. You were waiting for whoever lived in my apartment. So that, perhaps, if luck was on your side, you might get inside, look around. At the apartment your former friend had lived in.
I was waiting for you, Inspector.
But only because it was my apartment.
Oh, I see, Inspector. The coincidence thing again. As if it didn’t matter who lived there now? As if anyone would do.
He drew on his cigarette.
Auguste Jovert, recently retired Inspector of Police, who finds out he has a daughter he’s never known two days before I knock on his door. That’s just coincidence, is it? He leaned back against the kitchen wall. How very interesting, Inspector. How very western.
He took a sip of tea.
No, Inspector, it was you I was waiting for. As soon as I found out you were a former Inspector of Police, I knew. It was preordained. It was meant to be. The unfolding I had been waiting for, for so long, had at last begun.
But you knew he stayed here, in my apartment, all those years ago.
Of course. He told me. Paris. Rue St Antoine. He told me how he loved seeing the golden-winged boy soaring over the city. It was why he had taken the apartment. So bizarre, so surreal. He told me about the lift. He told me how much he enjoyed walking around the Paris streets at night, knowing that he could be walking in Victor Hugo’s footsteps. Kawasimodo. How they still inhabited them. The Marais. The swamp. If only you knew what that meant to us—the swamp.
But I could have been anyone, Jovert said. And all this stuff about finding the right person, the person through whom we see our own lives—it’s all nonsense, isn’t it?
I don’t know, Inspector. You tell me.
Chapter 46
WHAT happened in the days and weeks that followed this conversation, Jovert no longer remembered. He was sure there were still plenty of other questions he had forgotten to ask Omura. But he had to get his own house in order first. Decide whether he was going to Algiers to find Mathilde, or not.
He awoke at some unknown dark hour. The room pulsed with a soft, amniotic glow. He had been dreaming, but about what he knew not. He lay for a moment, watching the pattern of the lace curtains magically appearing and disappearing on the ceiling. Shadowed tree limbs, clouds, flying birds, all suspended in an alien aqueous sky. His rectangled bedroom window now a beating membrane, delicate beyond belief, like some veiled, thin-veined living thing.
He rolled onto his side. The green-glow digits of his bedside clock were gone. He reached for his lamp, pushed the button. No light came on. He closed his eyes, put a thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. But his head still beat in time with his beating room.
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He stood by the intermittent window. Pulled one corner of the curtain aside. It was snowing. Large feathered flakes floated down through the darkness into the cupped light of the streetlamps below. It was as if the light were conjuring them, as though stillness itself were falling. Once and for all.
There are two police cars angled across the laneway below with their headlights on. On the pavement, an ambulance, its lights flashing. Wave after wave of reddish light surges up the walls of the building opposite. Jovert watches it fall back to the pavement and spill towards the roadway. This is how he comes to see it, the fallen figure lying in the gutter, snow settling on his coat, his legs, his hair. Softly, as if each individual flake is being placed there. And he knows.
He will go down in a minute, he thinks. There is no hurry. Not now. It no longer matters. He watches one of the medics retrieve the gurney from the back of the ambulance. Another is on his two-way radio. Next to him, a policeman, smoking. Fox-tailed plumes of breath escape his mouth and then slip away into the night.
Just before the corner, he finds Omura’s hat leaning against the wall, rocking back and forth on its rim. As if it could not bear being there. As if it is already in mourning.
Jovert speaks to the young policeman. He’s wearing thick glasses. There’s snow on his cap, his shoulders. It turns out he knows him, vaguely, from years ago. His father one of his former colleagues.
Inspector Jovert?
Gilles! he says. How are you?
Gilles shrugs, looks across to where Omura is lying.
Jovert remembers him as a boy. Unhappy. Withdrawn.
And your father?
You know, he says. He’s my father.
Yes, he does. He remembers well.
The policeman, Gilles, looks uncomfortable. He glances at his cigarette.
It’s okay, Jovert says. He touches him on his arm. I’m no longer working. That’s all over now.
I heard, the young policeman says. He takes one last puff of his cigarette. Flicks the butt into the snow anyway.
Their breaths are fogged. It is much colder down here than he had anticipated. He pulls his coat around him.
Gilles rubs his gloved hands together.
I’d better go and help Jean-Paul, he says.
The ambulance officer is still retrieving things from the rear of the vehicle.
Jovert stands for a moment looking across to the snow covered form lying in the gutter.
I know him, he says.
Oh?
Yes, he’s one of my neighbours, a friend. His name’s Omura. Professor Tadashi Omura. He used to teach at the Imperial University in Tokyo.
He wonders if he could ask Gilles for a cigarette. He looks up into the darkened sky. They’re both looking up now, staring into the darkness, their eyes blinking as the snow comes streaming down. It’s falling more heavily now. The top of Jovert’s building is barely visible. It could easily not exist.
I saw him, he says. From up there. From my window. I live up there. This is my building.
The two of them are still looking up into the dark swirling sky, as if they are both contemplating what Jovert has just said, what it could possibly mean.
Omura is alone now. Lying in the snow. He could be sleeping. But when Jovert goes over to him, steps out onto the roadway, he sees that Omura’s eyes are open. He could be looking down the snow-filled alleyway, as if, having seen the ambulance approaching, having seen its flashing lights, heard it pull up, its engine stop, he is still waiting for them, wondering what they’re doing. He can’t stay here.
His head is resting on one of his arms. The other is outstretched, as if pointing to something. Jovert follows the line he might be indicating. Then he sees it—the fallen notebook. It lies in the snow, in the gutter, almost completely covered. A few minutes more and it would have disappeared. Jovert looks around. The policeman, the medics, are still busy at the rear of the ambulance. He bends down, picks it up. Brushes the snow off it. Puts it in his coat pocket. He thinks of that night after the fireworks, of returning home on his crutches, seeing Omura outside his building, flipping through the notebook until he finds the page. He sees Omura holding it up to his face, tapping it with his fingertip. Then bending down myopically to punch his code into the panel beside the door.
Tonight, there is no light over the door. His building, the ones adjacent to it, the ones opposite, are all blacked out. It’s the first day of December. The first big snowfall of the year.
Perhaps Omura had come around the corner to see what this month’s new code was in the lamplight. But found, instead, his angel, the one sent to collect him, waiting to tell him it was over. This wondrous great adventure. No need to worry. You won’t need that. Your notebook. Here, let me take it from you. Lie down upon the snow.
Jovert looked up to his window again, at the sky glowing dimly above him—the snow falling down towards him invisible until it hits the light, in which he is now standing, alone, with Omura lying at his feet.
Can we contact you, Inspector. If we need to?
The two medics are circling the body. They could be animals in the snow.
He nods.
Gilles says something.
The medics lean down.
His body unbending.
On the stretcher, Omura looks like a child, curled up on his side. One hand outstretched, the other resting under his head. And the world is now weeping.
Back in his room, his lamp has come on. His clock is blinking. He goes to stand by the window once again. Snow in his hair. On his shoulders. He has Omura’s hat in his hand. He pulls the curtain aside. Places the hat on the cold windowsill. Drops the notebook into it.
They have gone—the ambulance, Omura. He looks for Omura’s imprint in the snow. But there isn’t one.
The snow is falling more purposefully now. The breeze has picked up. One of the police cars is still there, at the end of the street, half-blocking the laneway. The snow lies thick and soft on its roof, its bonnet. It is beginning to quilt. The car’s emergency lights are still flashing. Soon they too will disappear.
The snow is dense in the lamplight. Great shoals of it are eddying fretfully back and forth in the narrow laneway, as if they are looking for Omura. There is something frantic about their movement, back and forth, back and forth, as if they can foresee a moment when they will have to account for why they had momentarily turned away. And when they turned back, he was gone! How were they to know?
Watching the snow swirling, the police car disappearing, Jovert felt as though his building were moving. As if it had become unmoored from the solid earth below. Was now adrift. The floor seemed to pitch forward beneath his feet. He put both hands out onto the cold windowsill to steady himself. The world.
The snow has given up looking. It seems to collect itself, then, all at once, in one great mass, it minnows up through the lamplight into the darkness above.
The street is barely visible now. Like a fading photograph. The details are gone. Soon, Jovert knows, the world outside will be erased: there will be nothing left. Except for the barely perceptible glow of the streetlamps, the pulsing o
f the police car’s lights, which themselves have begun to recede, as though they are a constellation that is growing dimmer and dimmer as he watches. The moment he turns away from the window, he knows, all of this will cease to exist. So he stands watching as this part of his life slowly disappears before his eyes. Then he turns, looks back into his room, to the still-unknown future which awaits him there.
Chapter 47
TWO days later, the police had contacted him. To ask if he would look after Omura’s affairs. Act as go-between, given his, Jovert’s, former status. His relationship with the deceased.
The following night, at around 10.30, just as he was about to go down to Omura’s apartment—he had already collected the key—not to start packing up, but just to go down there, to sit perhaps, take a minute or two to say goodbye—there was a knock on his door. For one mad, irrational moment, he had thought it was Omura.
He went to the door, opened it, and an apparition of another kind was standing there.
Martine?
He must have stepped back. She too seemed to have been taken by surprise. Her right hand was still in the air. Her fingers clenched.
Oh, Inspector! I’m sorry, I was just about to knock again. I wasn’t sure if you were home.
How did you get in? he said. It sounded more harsh than he intended.
I followed someone in.
It was something he’d always worried about while he worked. That someone he’d arrested, put away, some crazed sociopath, would find out where he lived. And come looking for him. It had never happened. But it was always there, in the back of his mind, nevertheless.
I’m sorry, Martine said, to turn up on your doorstep unannounced. She looked at him standing in his coat. And this clearly isn’t a good time, is it? I can see that you’re on your way out. I knew I should have called.