The Snow Kimono

by Mark Henshaw

  She took two steps away from the door.

  Martine. He raised his hand as if he was a traffic cop. Wait, he said. Slow down. He let his hand drop. Yes, I am going out. But it’s only down to Omura’s apartment. You remember Professor Omura. Yes, of course you do, how could you forget? Omura died a couple of nights ago. He was caught in the snowstorm. It’s been left to me to sort out his affairs.

  I’m so sorry to hear that, Inspector. You and he had become bound to each other in a way, hadn’t you? Recently. From what you were saying.

  Bound to each other. He would never have put it that way himself, but she was right, he now realised.

  They were still standing awkwardly in the doorway.

  Won’t you come in?

  No, look, I don’t think so. I came to ask you for something. But it can wait.

  Just a moment, Martine, he said. I know this will sound strange, but would you come down with me? You saw him. You know what he was like. How much time I’ve spent with him, these past five months. I’m not sure I want to go on my own. If I sit down there, I’m afraid I will turn to stone. Then there will be two of us they’ll have to attend to.

  Okay, she said. Yes. I will. I’ll come down with you.

  Do you realise you’re still limping, Inspector, if you don’t mind me saying.

  They were walking down the corridor to the lift.

  Am I?

  Yes. When did you get rid of the walking stick?

  Sticks! I kept losing them. I don’t know. A couple of months ago. When did we last see each other? September?

  October, she said.

  October. So it must have been just after that.

  Maybe you ditched them too soon?

  The lift arrived.

  Then he was inserting the key into the lock in Omura’s apartment door, opening it, reaching in for the light switch.

  The apartment seemed darker now, now that Omura was no longer there.

  God, it’s dismal in here, she said.

  It had only been three days, but the apartment already smelt musty, as though Omura had been dying in there for weeks.

  Are you sure you’re okay with me being here? Martine said. It doesn’t feel right, if you know what I mean.

  No, he said. It’s okay. I’m glad you’re here.

  He walked over to the small table with the typewriter on it. The lamp had been left on, as if to lure him there.

  Did I ever tell you that I used to hear Omura typing away at all hours of the night? And morning.

  You did, she said.

  God knows when he slept.

  The typewriter was flanked by two piles of paper, one of them almost gone. There was an envelope on the thicker pile, a passport underneath. The envelope had Jovert’s name on it.

  I thought this might have been the case, he said. It’s why I wanted to come down here. He picked the envelope up, opened it, began reading.

  My dear Inspector,

  Could you do one last thing for me—could you send what I have written to Fumiko? Perhaps she will understand what I tried to explain to her that day, but could not. My shame. Please accept my apologies for lying to you.

  Strange, he thought, the note was dated 22 September. And yet here it was, December. At the bottom of the note was an address. He began to read it. Then he heard Martine.

  Oh my God, she said. Inspector!

  She had picked up the passport, flipped it open.

  What is it? he said.

  I think you should have a look at this.

  She handed Jovert the passport. He too looked at the faintly blurred Hirohito-like photograph of Omura trapped under the plastic covering. At his face. His eyes.

  So? he said.

  It’s-not-him, she said. It’s not Omura.

  Jovert looked back at the page—to the passport holder’s details.

  Nom: IKEDA, it said.

  Prénoms: Katsuo.

  The world began to reel. He felt dizzy, as though he were going to fall. He reached for a walking stick he no longer had.

  Are you all right, Inspector? Martine said.

  No, he said. I don’t think I am.

  Later he read the note again. The address:

  Miss Fumiko Omura

  c /– Professor Tadashi Omura

  Faculty of Law

  University of Tokyo

  7-3-1 Hongo Bunkyo-ku

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  Fumiko Omura. Not Fumiko Ikeda. How much had that cost him? To write that down, acknowledge that.

  And then he thought of Mathilde. His own daughter, the daughter he had not had. And the photograph of her, her eyes looking back at him. Watching. Waiting.

  Chapter 48

  MARTINE was late. Jovert was sitting in Le Temps des Cerises, the café on the corner of rue de la Cerisaie and rue du Petit-Musc, a place he hadn’t been to in years.

  Except for a man in his forties—someone who looked as if he knew a thing or two about life—sitting alone at a table with a half-finished drink in his hands, there was no one else in the café.

  On the way, he had walked past La Maison de Jerôme, the antique store where his hippopotamane had gone. It was no longer there. The space it had occupied was now full of junk. He felt guilty seeing it gone. At least he had known where it was, even though it was caged, even though it had nowhere to go. He wondered if he had walked past the store so often just to check on it. To see if it was still looking out at him. Waiting for him to change his mind, to take it home with him again.

  He recalled the first time he had pointed Omura out to Martine. They were sitting at La Pointe.

  There he is, he said.

  Who?

  Omura. Over there. At the bus stop.

  I can’t see him, she said.

  See the man and the woman with the stroller. He’s behind them. Wait. See, there he is. The little man in the coat and hat.

  Why is he limping?

  Is he?

  Yes, look.

  She was right. Omura was pacing slowly back and forth. And he was limping. It was slight, but it was definitely there, nevertheless.

  I don’t know, he said.

  He reminds me of the Emperor Hirohito, she had said. With his hat, and those round wire-rimmed glasses. Even the way he stoops. It’s just like him.

  Jovert laughed.

  Why are you laughing? she said.

  Because that’s what I thought when I first saw him, when he was standing in the corridor outside my apartment.

  We did this project, at school, she said. On the bombing of Hiroshima. I remember seeing a photo of this little man, wearing spectacles, and a hat, hands behind his back, inspecting what was left of the city, the buildings that had been destroyed, the rubble…The caption below the picture said: The Emperor Hirohito inspecting the devastation of Hiroshima. I remember thinking not only how terrible it must h
ave been to be there, but also how small he was, the Emperor. How could anybody that small be an Emperor?

  Yes, he said. I know what you mean.

  Inspector!

  He looked up to see Martine walking towards him. The door was still closing behind her. She was folding her wet umbrella.

  I’m sorry I’m late, she said. This weather! She looked out the window, to where it was raining, to where the wind was gusting. Is it ever going to stop?

  He got up, reached out, took her hand.

  That’s okay, he said. I just got here myself.

  She looked down at his almost-empty glass.

  Well, ten minutes ago, he said.

  Fifteen, she said. You forget, I saw you at Le Bar l’Anise.

  Yes, you’re probably right, he said. Fifteen. Please, won’t you take a seat?

  The waiter came over and helped her off with her coat.

  She sat down, rubbed her hands together.

  What would you like to drink?

  She took the wine menu, skimmed it expertly.

  I think I’ll have the Mont-Redon, she said.

  A bottle, or a glass?

  Oh, God no. Just a glass. She laughed. She looked away then, as though she were remembering something. Some other special time.

  No, no. Just a glass, she repeated.

  He signalled the waiter.

  You know, she said. You have this habit. I was watching you when I came in. When you’re thinking about something, or something someone’s said to you, you turn away, as if the answer is written somewhere else. In the air outside, perhaps. On the roadway. I noticed it at Le Bar l’Anise that first night.

  And she was right, he had been doing exactly that, looking at the people hurrying by in the rain, their coats folded tightly about them, their umbrellas held out, shielding them against the wind, looking for the answers that lay scattered there.

  The waiter brought Martine her glass of wine.

  I’m sad he’s gone, he said. Omura.

  Katsuo.

  Katsuo.

  You shouldn’t be. Omura was right, she said. Katsuo was a selfish, insensitive, narcissistic…She searched for a word. But couldn’t find one. Who used people. Who always put himself first. Who didn’t care, or have any idea, about the impact of what he did on others. He was a jerk.

  Katsuo? Insensitive? Or Omura? Which one was I talking to?

  He reached for his pack of cigarettes. Loosened one from the rest. Offered it to her.

  No, no thanks, she said. I think I’m going to give up. Once I’ve found Mehdi. I might as well start now.

  Do you mind?

  No, please. Go ahead.

  He struck the match against the side of the box. It burst into flame with a hiss. He held it up to his cigarette, then placed the still-lit match in the ashtray, where it burned for a few seconds before extinguishing itself.

  Well, whoever it was, Omura, Katsuo, I’m sorry he’s gone, he said.

  She looked at him again.

  It’s true. Tadashi. Katsuo. I miss him. His voice. It’s as though a special sound in the world, something unique, has stopped. Forever.

  That’s how I felt when Mehdi disappeared, she said. I used to see him every day…and then there was nothing, he was gone.

  I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? Even though it’s only been a week, Omura always had something to tell me. Always. It was like I had access to another world. Even when I resisted, he’d still persist. I never really knew where we were going. Where we’d end up. But wherever it was, I knew we were going somewhere. When he was telling me about Fumiko, about Katsuo—about himself—Sachiko, Mariko, I felt inhabited by him, by what he was telling me. And it all seemed somehow connected. Not just to him. But to me as well.

  He picked up his glass.

  The other night, he said, the night we went down to Omura’s apartment, you said there was something you wanted to ask me. What was it?

  I wanted to ask you…I wanted to ask you, if you decided to go to Algeria, to find Mathilde, would you take me with you? Help me find Mehdi.

  I thought it might have been that.

  He nodded to himself.

  Yes, of course I will, he said.

  When he looked up, her eyes were brimming with tears.

  I’m sorry, she said. But I miss him too, my brother.

  Then Jovert did something he had never done before. He reached out across the table and took her hands in his.

  Yes, of course I’ll take you, he said. I’ve already been there with you.

  She did not look up.

  Are you okay? he said.

  She nodded. He went to pull his hands away, but he felt the small renewed pressure of her fingers, holding him there.

  He recalled a colleague, someone from another jurisdiction, someone he hadn’t seen or heard from in a while, who had told him about a young woman he’d once seen sitting in a café. She had been with this older man. The man had been holding the young woman’s hands. His colleague had been close enough to see that, even though she had tears in her eyes, she was smiling. He remembered his colleague telling him how this image had stayed with him for some reason, how he had never been able to forget it.

  He heard the man behind him put his glass down, heard the scrape of his chair as he got up. Jovert was still holding Martine’s hands when the man walked by. They must have exchanged glances, the man and Martine, because she smiled up at him through her tears as he walked past, alone, unknown, to who knew what awaited him in the streets outside.

  What was it called, the bar? The one his colleague had mentioned. He thought for a moment. It was something appropriate…Yes, now he remembered. The Winterset. The Winterset, he thought. How could he forget.

  He thought again about Martine, this young woman, whose hands he held, and whose hands held his. He thought about her brother, who had killed their murderous step-father. And the younger brother they had both lost. Four-year-old Luc. Who had stood there, looking silently into the eyes of his rage-blinded father, waiting for the fatal blow. Had he had any inkling of the final darkness that was about to befall him?

  Perhaps, he thought to himself, another universe did exist. Some parallel, other life. If only we gave it a chance. That he should be sitting here with this young woman, holding her hands across the table; that there were tears in her eyes, through which she was smiling, wasn’t a coincidence. It was something else, something greater.

  He looked up at Martine. Her eyes. One dark tributary had survived her hand and now lay imprinted on her cheek. He felt her fingers moving in his. Perhaps it was not too late to atone, after all.

  Chapter 49

  WHENEVER Jovert stepped out the door onto rue St Antoine, he always had the feeling that he was stepping into history. Did he imagine it, or was there not, each evening, when he went to get his paper, some invisible flow against which he had to brace himself? He had often thought about the masses sweeping down rue St Antoine to storm the Bastille. He knew that this was not
the case. There were no angry masses. It hadn’t happened that way. But his boyhood imaginings had proved ineradicable, permanently resistant to the later truth. The crowds still swept by. So close to him he could almost hear their murmurings.

  And from the time he was a boy, he had always been fascinated standing in the exact spot where something significant had happened: an assassination; the death on the Champs-Élysées of some poor poet whose name he could never remember, cruelly felled mid-thought by a falling tree. He had stood on the corner of rue Amyot, where Modigliani’s eight-months-pregnant wife, Jeanne, had thrown herself from their fifth-floor window. He had mourned her loss, as if some vestige of what had happened that day lay indelibly inscribed on the pavement in front of him.

  But hadn’t this always been the case, for him? How many crime scenes had he been to in his life? Were there not hundreds of times when he had stood in the exact place where someone had died some brutal and unnecessary death? Had it not been his job to reimagine what prosaic horror had taken place there—in a bedroom, a kitchen, a sixth-floor balcony? How many times had he traced a trail of blood on a staircase from a now less frantically opened door down to the deserted landing below, where the bigger pool lay? And had there not been, each time, a smaller, more mundane voice of history still quietly sobbing there?

  Sometimes, when he thought about what Omura had said, he found himself going over it in his head, taking each individual word in his hands as though it were a pebble. Examining them. One by one. Then reassembling them in exactly the same order, trying to find the precise moment at which they ceased to be just a string of single words, and they were transformed into something else, something much bigger, that flowered in his brain. Or stopped him in his tracks.

  He recalled doing the same thing when he was a boy, going over a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph in a book, reading the words over and over again, trying to prise them apart long enough to see into the secret cleft they had just described. But he never could. The words closed over as quickly as a woman turning on her bed.