Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  “Where do you go to school?” he asked. If she couldn’t read Japanese, then she could hardly go to a normal school.

  She stopped laughing abruptly and sighed. “I don’t. I have a tutor from Paris who teaches me. My mother says that’s so I’ll learn the same things as I would at home. But I’d rather have classmates.”

  Hiroshi knew that she came from a country called France, in Europe. He had looked it up in an atlas, but he found it hard to imagine what it looked like and what it would be like to live there. He thought of the other children in his class and how they liked to tease him for being the smallest. “Classmates aren’t always so great,” he said.

  “I went to an international school in Delhi,” Charlotte declared. “I had a best friend there, Brenda.” She paused. Hiroshi realized she found it painful to think about it. “We said we would write to each other, but she’s never replied to my letters.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes. It’s because my father’s an ambassador. So he has to go to a new country every few years, and of course we have to go with him. I’ve already been to India, and before that it was Congo, and when I was very little we lived in San Francisco.” Charlotte looked him up and down. “What does your father do?”

  Hiroshi shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know him. All I know is that he’s American.”

  “You’ve never seen him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a photo of him at least?”

  Hiroshi nodded. “At home.”

  “You must show me one day.” She took a framed picture of herself with her family from her desk. Her father had light brown, slightly wavy hair and a rather sardonic smile. “This is in front of the house where we lived in Delhi.” She pointed at the background, which consisted of a few palm trees and some gray trees with curiously intertwined branches. “That was the garden. You can’t see any monkeys in the picture, though.”

  “It sounds as though you liked it better in Delhi than here,” Hiroshi suggested.

  “I just don’t like being alone all the time, that’s all.” She scooted over to her shelf with all the dolls and took down the one Hiroshi had repaired. “How ever did you do it? It was completely busted.”

  Hiroshi shrugged. “I have a lot of tools. I just tried things out.”

  “Real tools?”

  “Yes. I always ask for tools for my birthday. Christmas, too. I prefer building things to buying things.” For some reason, he didn’t want to admit that most of the time he never even had money to buy things.

  Charlotte looked thoughtfully at the doll. “Funny. I never really liked this doll before, but she’s something special now. I think from now on I’ll call her Valérie.” She repeated the name as though letting a drop of some delicate flavor melt onto her tongue. “Valérie. Yes, that’s her name.” She went back to the shelf and carefully put the doll back where it had been sitting. “I’m afraid we can’t really play today, because my parents are giving a reception this evening,” she said. “I always have to be there as well. I still have to shower and let them do my hair and get me ready. It always takes much too long.”

  “Ah,” said Hiroshi. He didn’t quite know what a reception was supposed to be. That must be something that rich people did. “That’s too bad.”

  “But you can come visit me,” she suggested. “If you like. We could play when nobody will interrupt us. Out in the garden, too.”

  Hiroshi nodded. “Yes, okay.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon maybe? Three o’clock?”

  “Okay,” said Hiroshi.

  Charlotte told herself that evening that all in all it had been a good day. Even the reception was fun, she decided. Not the getting ready, of course. All those interminable hours of washing, drying, and styling her hair and trying on clothes really got on her nerves. But the reception itself was always fantastic; everybody was dressed in their best, making pleasant conversation, and she got to sit at a beautifully decorated table and eat wonderful things.

  The guests were always charmed when they saw a ten-year-old girl behaving like a fine lady. Charlotte always gave a little secret smile when she heard them say that. As if it were so difficult. All you had to do was behave nicely and say “Please” and “Thank you” and “Really? How interesting” a lot, know which cutlery to use when (which was easy—it always went from outside to inside), and not spill anything; that was all there was to it. Oh, and of course you had to stay sitting still for as long as the grown-ups did. Actually, that was the hardest part.

  Charlotte was particularly well behaved that evening, since she knew it would make her mother happy. And she wanted her mother to be happy, since she was happy as well, happy to have made a friend thanks to Maman; if she hadn’t invited Hiroshi and his mother, it would never have happened. She was sitting next to a dear old Japanese gentleman, who was delighted he could speak to her in Japanese. It turned out he was the minister of education for the entire country. Charlotte told him she would much rather go to a real school and have classmates than take private lessons, but that unfortunately she had no choice.

  On the other side of her sat a young Russian lady who looked, Charlotte realized with a jolt, astonishingly like the doll that was now called Valérie. However, her name wasn’t Valérie but Oksana, and she didn’t speak Japanese, just English, and even that not particularly well. Charlotte asked her to teach her a few words and phrases in Russian and then decided she liked the language.

  “Perhaps my papa will be transferred to Russia one day. Then I’ll learn Russian,” Charlotte said.

  Oksana smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find it easy.” The minister of education nodded vigorously in agreement.

  After dinner they retired to the Yellow Salon, where the men gathered on one side of the room, smoking and drinking whiskey or pastis. The women took over the other half, where the seats were, and drank liqueurs and chatted.

  Charlotte didn’t have to go to bed yet; that was part of the arrangement. If she behaved like a fine lady, she was allowed to stay up as long as she liked on evenings like this. She’d had lots of practice staying up late by now. The only thing that bothered her was they expected her to stay over on the ladies’ side of the salon. But she was interested in what the men had to say much more so than in the ladies’ conversation. The ladies mostly liked to talk about “social trends.” Charlotte didn’t know what they were; they seemed to be of great concern. Or they chatted about painters and their sensational exhibitions and that sort of thing. That evening they were talking about an American writer called Michael Crichton and his latest novel, which apparently said bad things about Japan. Everybody agreed it was not nice to write novels like that. What Charlotte couldn’t understand was why they had to go on and on about it.

  She wandered over to the bar that had been set up in the middle of the salon and took another soda. She had noticed that if you drank a lot of soda, it was easier to stay up late. Papa was standing near the bar with the Russian ambassador, who was the guest of honor that evening, and they were talking excitedly. Mikhail Andreievitch Yegorov spoke French fluently with a wonderful Russian accent that sounded like music. He was telling Papa a strange story about an island he called the Devil’s Island. It sounded fascinating. Charlotte decided to let good manners go take a flying leap and went over to join them.

  His mother hadn’t said a word all day, but nevertheless Hiroshi had noticed something was wrong. It wasn’t hard to guess it had something to do with what had happened that morning at the embassy. She finally came out with it at suppertime. She said he should leave that girl alone; nothing good could come of it. Said they were rich folk, and he’d best keep his distance from rich folk.

  “But why?” asked Hiroshi.

  His mother didn’t look at him. She gazed into empty space, seeming to see something else, something he knew nothing about. Nothing good, that
was for sure.

  “We’re nothing to them,” she said bitterly at last. “People like us aren’t important to them. They don’t have to care how we feel, so they don’t.”

  Hiroshi thought about this and then about what it had been like to spend time with the girl today. Charlotte. Without making a sound, he practiced the r and l with his mouth.

  “I thought she was nice,” was all he said.

  His mother looked at him, stared at him for a long time as though he were a stranger, and finally said, “You’ll see soon enough what that can lead to. Believe you me.”

  The Russian ambassador broke off his story when Charlotte approached, bowed to her with a broad, cheerful grin, and said, “Ah, the young lady is doing us quite an honor. Mademoiselle Charlotte!”

  She liked how he said Charlotte, rolling his r’s in that Russian way. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said politely, the way her mother had told her a lady should.

  Yegorov straightened up and laughed out loud. “No,” he said. “No, you are not intruding. Quite the opposite. Now tell me, how do you like Japan?”

  “Very much,” Charlotte said. Of course, she could have complained that apart from a few streets around the embassy and some shopping malls, she had hardly seen any of Japan and so she couldn’t really say much about it, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said at a reception, where everybody was on their best behavior and just said nice things to one another. That was the art of diplomacy. So she continued, “We’re going to a museum soon; it’s called the Island of the Saints. I’m looking forward to it a great deal. It’s bound to be interesting.”

  The Russian raised his bushy eyebrows. “Really? How nice. Although I must confess I’ve never heard of that museum.”

  “It’s not actually a museum as such,” Papa explained offhandedly. “It’s a Shinto shrine to the north of Tokyo that is open to visitors once a month. The island itself is just a tiny little place in the middle of an artificial lake, not much bigger than a tabletop. But it’s said to be very pretty. Typically Japanese.”

  “You learn something new every day,” Yegorov declared. “And I thought that I’d read my city guide quite thoroughly.”

  Papa smiled indulgently. “You really mustn’t blame yourself, Mikhail Andreievitch. I would imagine most Japanese have never heard of it either. Charlotte’s nanny is from that area, which is how we learned of it. It’s called Seito-Jinjiya.”

  “The word jinjiya means shrine, and seito means Holy Island or Island of the Saints,” Charlotte explained.

  “Well, well.” Yegorov nodded in approval. “And what is there to see?”

  “Old things!” squealed Charlotte. The next moment, she held her breath, shocked at her own enthusiasm. She mustn’t get carried away. That wasn’t how a lady behaved.

  “Old things? You like those?”

  “Oh yes, very much.”

  “The shrine,” Papa added, “is said to hold some relics that are supposedly among the oldest in Japan, including a sword that belonged to the first emperor.” He smiled. “One always wonders whether those sorts of claims are true. I don’t know how many swords the first emperor owned, but there must have been an awful lot of them for there to be so many left over.”

  The Russian ambassador laughed heartily, his belly wobbling under his smoking jacket. “Ah yes, we have the same trouble with relics in Russia. Some of our saints seem to have had twenty fingers and a hundred teeth.” He looked down at Charlotte. “And you want to see these things?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes. I’m hoping my new friend will say he’ll come.”

  The Russian winked at her. “Oh ho, you already have a new friend. And what’s his name?”

  “Hiroshi,” Charlotte told him cheerfully. “His mother works in our laundry, and he, um, found my doll.”

  Help! She really had gotten carried away, so much so that she had nearly let the cat out of the bag. She had only just kept her cool. It was important to be able to do that if you were going to be a fine lady. Maman had taught her that. You had to keep your cool, and above all you had to think carefully about what to say and what not to say.

  Later that evening, when the reception was over and they were standing next to one another in the bathroom, Jean-Arnaud Malroux, ambassador of the French Republic, officer of the Légion d’honneur, and author of several books about France’s role in the world, said to his wife, Cécile Malroux, née the countess of Vaniteuil, “I’m always amazed how quickly our daughter learns foreign languages, how easily they come to her. Did you hear her speaking to the Japanese minister of education? He could hardly stop talking about it as he was saying good-bye.”

  His wife was wiping her makeup from her forehead with a cotton pad. “Charlotte doesn’t learn languages,” she said, “she just breathes them in. I don’t know who she gets it from; certainly not from me.”

  The ambassador was brushing his hair—one of the most sublimely useless things one could do at bedtime, but it had become a habit. “Come now. I don’t believe that it has any mystical significance. Children are simply better at learning languages; it’s only natural. But it nonetheless always surprises me to hear it for myself.” He looked at the brush, plucked a few hairs from it, and put them into the bin beneath the washbasin. “But did you also hear what she told Yegorov? That she’s made a friend here?”

  “I was even there to see it happen, so to speak.”

  “Really? How did it come about?”

  His wife put aside her cotton pad and pulled a tissue from the box. “It was this morning. The boy who brought her doll back. He’s the son of someone on the domestic staff.”

  “You mustn’t let Charlotte get too close to her friends here.” The ambassador picked up his toothbrush and toothpaste. “I could be recalled from this post any day now, quite literally, and then what would happen? You know how she’s still mooning after that girl she spent all her time with in Delhi—what was her name? The little English girl with the strawberry-blond curls.”

  “Brenda,” his wife said. “Brenda Gilliam, and in fact she’s Scottish.”

  “Her father was the professor of medicine?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We mustn’t put her through another separation like that,” the ambassador warned, holding his toothbrush under the warm water that gushed from the tap.

  His wife looked at him in the mirror. “Do you know where we’ll be going next?”

  “Probably South America. They’re assigning some new posts out there at the moment—Chile, Argentina, Guatemala…”

  “Argentina!” his wife repeated enthusiastically. “Argentina would be wonderful.” As a young woman, she had lived in Buenos Aires for a year and a half, dancing the tango, partying through the night, and falling in love with a new, fiery young man every month. It had been the one wild time in her life, and she lived off those memories to this day.

  “It all depends on when Bernard gets better,” her husband said, anxious not to feed any false hopes. “Or at least when he’ll be able to work again. I dare say he’s never going to get better.”

  Bernard Beaucour was the actual ambassador for France here in Japan, and Jean-Arnaud Malroux was simply his senior diplomat, representing Bernard in his absence. Beaucour had cancer, but before returning to Paris for treatment he had let it be known he fully intended to serve out his time in Japan even if he died there.

  “The sooner the better,” Madame Malroux said, taking another cotton pad and soaking it in that chemical goop whose secrets no man could ever fathom even if he spent a lifetime trying. “I don’t know immediately…It must have something to do with the climate here. Or the city. Or the thought that there may be an earthquake at any moment. An earthquake! It hardly bears thinking about.”

  3

  The next day Hiroshi was standing in front of the embassy gates at three o’clock, but the guard
refused to let him through.

  “But I have an appointment!” Hiroshi protested.

  “Canceled.” The guard tapped at a few characters scribbled on his messy notepad. “Says so here.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t tell the likes of us such things.” He looked regretfully at Hiroshi. “I’m sorry, too, but the best thing for you to do is just go back home.”

  Hiroshi looked at the man, the iron gate, the flag hanging limp and motionless on its pole. It was a hot, windless day. He wasn’t going to get anywhere standing there, that much was certain. He said his thank-yous in a flat voice and walked away.

  People like us aren’t important to them. They don’t have to care how we feel, so they don’t.

  It had to be a misunderstanding. That was the only possibility. Charlotte had invited him for three o’clock, and no matter what the man at the gate said, that was the plan.

  You’ll see soon enough what that can lead to.

  He had an appointment. And he wasn’t going to let anything stop him from keeping it. Hiroshi went around the compound wall and slipped behind the tree with the gap in the spikes. He fetched the rope from its hiding place in the knotted hole where a branch had died, wriggled though the gap, and let himself down as quietly as he could. Then he went the same way he had gone on Tuesday. He didn’t run into anyone, and there wasn’t a single car parked on the stretch of tarmac he had to cross. That was probably because it was Sunday.

  The door into the house next to the trash cans wasn’t locked. Hiroshi slipped inside. The room behind the door was bare and ugly, but another door led into the hallway where he had been with Charlotte the day before—the opulent hallway with all the framed oil paintings and thick carpets. He scurried up the stairs and knocked on her door.

  She flung it open. “Finally,” she said. “I thought you weren’t coming.”