The Last Samurai

by Helen Dewitt

  I was beginning to wonder if I was in the right place. Maybe the girl at the Whitechapel had tricked me after all. I was in a room with a concrete floor, and piles of rubble in the corner. I went from room to room, and all were the same.

  I went downstairs. I came into a dark room in the middle of the building. The only light was from the door, so I felt my way toward it. Now I was in another room with broken windows, cold grey light showing more crumbling concrete and rubble. There was a stack of boards along one wall piled almost to the ceiling, all cracked and warped, and on the floor beside them were little mounds of what looked like dust. I went to have a closer look, and they seemed to be heaps of tiny flakes of paint.

  Now I heard a noise. It was a regular, metallic noise—the sound of a tool on stone. I followed it through another door into the next room, and the next, and the next, but there were only more piles of board, more silted paint. Then I went through another door and by the far wall a man in a black knitted hat and a faded black boiler suit sat on a milk crate. He seemed to have a chisel, or possibly just a screwdriver, in one hand, and he was chipping paint off the wall. I saw that the walls were painted a kind of shiny black up to a height of about five feet, except that for about five feet behind him, and the whole of the wall before that, which showed bare concrete, and a mound of chipped flakes of paint ran along the floor like the trail of a mole.

  I said

  Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr. Watkins?

  He said

  What you see is what you get.

  I did not know what to say. I said

  Was it lamb’s blood?

  He laughed.

  Yes, as a matter of fact. What made you think of that?

  I said

  Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

  Are you fully trusting in his grace this hour?

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

  Are you washed in the blood,

  In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?

  Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

  He said

  I didn’t know those were the words, but yes.

  I said

  Those aren’t all the words. There are two other verses. It goes:

  Are you walking daily by the Saviour’s side?

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

  Do you rest each moment in the crucified?

  Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

  Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin

  And be washed in the blood of the Lamb

  There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean

  O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!

  Are you washed in the blood, In the soul-cleansing blood is the chorus.

  He said

  Funnily enough no one ever thought to ask. Funny, don’t you think? You should’ve seen the look on his face when I asked for it.

  He said

  It was quite a job setting it up. They’ve not got much—couple pints, maybe—must’ve taken 50 of the little buggers.

  He said

  I wanted to see what difference a fact about the medium would make to what the thing was about. In the event that seemed banal. I thought well sod it, Rembrandt could start off doing Lot’s wife and turn it into Bathsheba and the Elders, I’ve changed my mind that’s all.

  I said

  Susanna.

  He said

  What?

  I said

  Susanna and the Elders. Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, who was sent into battle by King David so that he could have an affair with his wife.

  He said

  Whatever. The point being, when I thought about it, it was too fucking much. I mean, I really couldn’t give a toss about religion. I cared about colour. I cared about that bear, I did. I could have killed the wanker who shot him. To be fair, I probably wouldn’t have liked being mauled, but if he’d wanted to do me a favour he’d have shot me and left me for the bear. It would have been more use. Nice meal for the bear, and I could’ve stayed. It was so white there. White drifting about and frozen solid and getting inside your skin.

  He put down the screwdriver and took out a packet of cigarettes.

  He said

  Do you smoke?

  I said

  No.

  He lit a cigarette and said

  My manners may be rough but there are limits. Here was someone who’d followed me for two days and saved my life, and anyway I was I admit a little shaken as I’d been planning on freezing to death, I didn’t think I could insist on staying. So I left that white place and when I got back to England I wasn’t thinking too straight. I knew I’d have to go on to red, but I wasn’t thinking straight and I let my thinking get tangled up in a cliché, and while I was still confused I went to the slaughterhouse and set the thing up and got the slaughterhouse to get me the blood of 50 lambs.

  He said

  Well I realised as soon as I got on with it that it was a mistake. Banal, irrelevant, but I wasn’t going through all that again. I thought of going back and asking for cow’s blood or sheep’s blood or horse’s blood and going through it all again and I couldn’t be bothered.

  He said

  So I thought I’d just leave that out and see what happened, but if anyone asked I’d tell the truth. I don’t lie about my work. I was sort of surprised no one did twig it, but people aren’t very interested in belief so maybe it’s not so surprising.

  He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, picked up the screwdriver and began chipping away at the wall.

  He took out the cigarette and ground it out underfoot.

  He said

  Is that why you’re here? To satisfy your curiosity?

  I wanted to say yes.

  I could imagine him lowering himself into the bathful of blood, and I couldn’t imagine him sending the boatman down to a pocket of blue. I was glad to have no part of him. But I had come and I couldn’t go away without doing what I’d come to do.

  I drew my bamboo sword and raised it.

  I said

  I came to satisfy my curiosity.

  I drew it back in a slow sweeping motion.

  I said

  I wanted to see you because I’m your son.

  And he said

  Out of?

  And I said weak with relief

  Sorry?

  And he said

  Who’s the alleged mother?

  I said

  You probably wouldn’t remember. She said you were both drunk at the time.

  He said

  How convenient.

  I said

  Never mind.

  He said

  You came here for money didn’t you? You thought you could stick me. You’d better pick better next time.

  I said

  It’s not so easy. If you pick a person to whom you could be obliged you may be disappointed.

  I said

  Have you seen Seven Samurai?

  He said

  No.

  So I explained about the film and he said

  I don’t understand.

  I said

  You sent the boatman down to see the pocket of blue. He said he’d seen pictures and you said it wasn’t enough. I thought you’d see why I want to go by mule through the Andes. I thought it would be worth fighting with bamboo swords.

  He said

  So I won.

  I said

  If we’d fought with real swords I’d have killed you.

  He said

  But we weren’t.

  It was true that I was not his son and that it was a trick.

  I thought that he probably did not know the film very well.

  Kambei tests the samurai who interest him: Katsushiro stands behind the door with a stick.

  His first choice is a good fighter and no coward—
he comes through the door and parries the blow. He is offended by the trick and insulted by the idea of fighting for three meals a day. But the second spots the trick without coming through the door and he laughs, and he accepts out of interest in the samurai.

  I said

  You have certainly seen through the trick. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I hope you find what you’re looking for

  though I thought that a man with his money who had bought this grey building and its grey light would look a long time for colour here. I thought that he could probably get more money for his chippings.

  I turned and walked back through the three dark rooms to the stairs, and went down to the ground floor. I had reached the gate when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind me.

  I fumbled for the lock and turned it at last and pushed the door open, and it caught on a chain and recoiled. I closed it and undid the chain and ran into the street. I began to run down the street.

  I heard footsteps behind me and sprinted ahead. His legs were longer. A hand gripped my arm and we stopped.

  The sky was now completely grey. The sky was grey, and the street was grey, and a big glass office building reflected grey sky, grey street, grey man, grey boy. His face was leaden and ugly, dead and dry in the nasty light.

  He said

  Come on then. I’ll take you to Atlantis.

  He began running again, pulling me along. He ran through a lot of little streets and then we came out in Brick Lane. He began to run up the street, past the sari shops and Indian sweets shops and Islamic book shops and at last he ran up the steps of a brick building and dragged me through the door.

  It was bright white, perhaps not polar white. To our right a flight of stairs ran up. To our left a door through which we went; a small entrance, walls covered with cards, another door.

  We went through this door, and now we were in a very high, very long room, and along its walls and on racks across the floor were pots and tubes and sticks and papers in hundreds and hundreds of colours. We were standing by the cash register. Two people in a queue turned and stared, and one salesman said

  Mr. Watkins!

  And the other said

  Can I help you?

  And he said

  No.

  Then he said

  Yes. I need a knife. A Stanley knife.

  And while an assistant hurried to get this he was walking through the room.

  His hand still gripped my arm, though not so tightly. He stopped by a display and read out ‘chrome yellow’ and he said

  I wonder what the real thing looks like, eh my old son?

  And he walked on to the back of the room where there were racks of paper.

  He was walking fiercely between the racks of colours, not looking after that remark. There were large sheets of handmade paper with rose hips and other dried flowers pressed into them. There were pieces of paper of smaller sizes on a side table. He took one and looked at it and took it and he bought this and the knife. Then he resumed walking around and the sales assistant hovered at our heels until he told him to stop. He would pause behind a case and then someone would come around the case.

  At last he said

  All right. All right. All right.

  His hand now circled my wrist loosely. He walked through the air as if it were water, by jars of colours for painting silk, and white fringed silk scarves in cellophane for painting, and white silk ties for handpainting, and white silk hearts in cellophane.

  He stopped and he began to laugh a breathy scratchy laugh like the stubble on his face.

  No cheap jokes, he said.

  He said

  This will do. This is just what I was looking for.

  He picked up a silk heart and he took £10 out of his pocket and handed it to a salesperson. He had to use his other hand to get the money, so he dropped his hold on me. Now he went up a short flight of steps, then up another step to a platform overlooking the store, and I followed him up to the top. On the platform were three round black tables and three chairs with cane seats. There was a table against the wall with two coffee machines and a sign that said Help yourself to coffee and Milk in the Fridge; next to the table was a fridge. A couple of small speakers sent Virgin FM scratchily out.

  He pulled a second chair to one of the tables and sat down. I sat down.

  He tore open the cellophane with his teeth and unwrapped the white silk heart. He pulled the Stanley knife free of its cardboard.

  He said

  You know my agent? He can tell you who’d give money for this; he’ll find someone who’d like to buy it.

  He held his thumb up. He breathed on it, and then he ground it onto the white silk.

  He said

  You know the old joke. I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.

  He gripped my thumb tightly. I thought he would do the same with my thumb: it was dirty enough from my climbing. He held it so tightly it hurt, and before I understood what he meant he had seized the knife and slashed my thumb with the blade.

  A big gout of blood welled out of the cut. He let it gather on the blade and then he took this away and did something on the silk, and then he scooped up more blood with the knife and transferred it to the silk, and he did this nine or ten times. Then he put the knife aside and he brought my bloody thumb down on the silk beside the black mark he had made.

  He lifted my hand and dropped it on the table. He retracted the blade of the knife and put the knife in his pocket.

  On the white silk were the two thumbprints, one black one red with a cut across it. Underneath was written in wet letters

  Washed white in the Blood of the Lamb

  4

  A good samurai will parry the blow

  Looking for a father had turned out to be an unexpectedly high-risk activity. Stand behind the door, Kambei tells Katsushiro. Bring down the stick as hard as you can, it will be good training for you. Any more training and I might not live to see 12.

  A week went by and we got three red bills on the same day. Sibylla called the project and asked when she could expect her cheque for £300 and the person she talked to was rather snide and said if they took as long to pay as she did to do the work she would probably get the cheque around Christmas. So Sibylla said she would send in 10 issues of Carpworld by the end of the week and the rest the week after that. They sent the cheque for £300 and Sibylla paid off the bills and we had £23.66 to keep going until she got paid for Carpworld.

  I was reading a book on solid state physics. Sibylla gave it to me for my birthday because it said inside the front cover that the extension of our understanding of the properties of solids at the microscopic level is one of the important achievements of physics this century and because she had found a damaged copy on sale for £2.99. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the bargain it looked, because the blurb went on to say: Dr. Rosenberg’s book requires only a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. Sibylla thinks no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is; it is certainly an absorbing subject but to follow it you really need at least some kind of introductory materials on the above-mentioned subjects. I was getting rather frustrated but I thought I would rather die than sell the heart, not because I wanted to keep it but because it would be horrible to take money for it.

  I came in one night after a useless day at the Museum of Science and Technology. Considering they charge an entrance fee you’d think they’d hire people who knew about science and technology, I thought the attendants would be able to help me when I ran into trouble but the one I asked couldn’t.

  I was thinking about the Umklapp process, or thinking about it as much as you can think about it if you don’t have a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. The Umklapp process relates to groups of waves that
cross each other’s paths: there is little or no interference when the waves are in a linear medium, i.e. one in which the displacement at any point is proportional to the applied force. The waves are said to be harmonic, and the energy of the wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude; the displacement of the medium at any point can be obtained by adding the sums of the amplitudes of the individual waves at that point. If the medium is not exactly linear, on the other hand, the principle of superpositon no longer applies, and the waves are said to be anharmonic. The Umklapp process is a special case of this: if the sum of two oncoming phonons is large enough, their resultant will be a phonon with the same total energy, but travelling in the opposite direction!

  The staff at the museum had not been very helpful when I had asked questions, and I knew that Sibylla would not be able to help. I was wondering whether I should try to get into a school. I came into the house and Sibylla sat at the computer with the 12 issues of Carpworld 1991 to her left and the 36 issues of Carpworld 1992 1993 and 1994 to the right. The screen was dark. I opened the door and she said:

  He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

  She said:

  The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out

  At one stride comes the dark.

  She asked if I had had a good day. I said I was reading The Solid State by H. M. Rosenberg. She asked if she could see it, and when I handed it over she looked inside. She said: What is a phonon?

  I said: They are quanta of lattice vibrational energy.

  They died as men before their bodies died, said Sibylla.

  I said: What?

  Never mind, said Sibylla. I believe that the body can survive 30 hours of typing Carpworld into a computer, for mine seems to be still of a piece.

  She was flipping through the book and now she said: Oh, listen to this!