by Yoko Ogawa
The old man had come up with the idea of installing a simple system to communicate with the hidden room. He ran a rubber tube from the office to the storeroom below and inserted funnels he had found in the kitchen in either end. By speaking into the funnels, you could talk without actually opening the trapdoor, as though on the telephone.
The freshly washed sheets and blankets were clean and soft. The desk and chair gave off the scent of new wood. The pale orange light of the lamp was enough to illuminate the room. We switched it off, climbed the steps of the ladder, and pushed up the hatch. Negotiating the tight entrance was no mean feat. You had to narrow your shoulders and twist them to one side as you pulled yourself up with both hands. The old man helped me as I struggled through the opening.
I worried that a man as large as R would get stuck somewhere in the middle of this maneuver, but then I realized that he would probably not have many occasions to leave the room once he entered it.
We fit the door back into the opening and covered it with the rug, leaving no sign at all of the room that lay hidden beneath.
“I have a place to hide you. Please come with me.”
When we had finished our work, I made this declaration to R, being careful not to change my tone or expression, exactly as though I had been inviting him to dinner.
The lobby of the publishing company was crowded. Here and there, laughter or the clatter of a coffee cup or the ring of a phone could be heard. I needed to explain quickly, using this noise to cover our conversation.
“You’ll be safe there, I can assure you. Please get ready as soon as you can.”
R set his cigarette down in the ashtray and looked at me without blinking.
“You’ve found a hiding place for me?”
“For you—of course.”
“But how did you find it? It couldn’t have been easy.”
“That doesn’t matter. But we have to hurry, before they decode your genome…”
“I’ve already decided,” he said, interrupting me.
“Decided what?” I asked.
“I haven’t told my wife anything. She’s pregnant, and the baby will be born in a month. I can’t go and leave her behind, and I can’t take her with me. No one would be willing to hide a pregnant woman.”
“You have to hide by yourself. That’s the only way to save not just yourself, but your wife and your baby too.”
“But what would that change, whether I hide or not? And when would I ever be able to return?” The smoke rising from the ashtray drifted between us. R tapped his lighter three times on the table, as though trying to calm himself.
“No one knows what the future holds. Someday, even the Memory Police are bound to disappear. That’s what happens to everything on this island,” I said.
“But—I had no idea you were planning this. I’m confused,” said R.
“Of course you are. But for the moment, you need to focus on escaping the Memory Police. I know you must be worried about your wife, but those of us who stay behind will find a way to help her. I’ll certainly look after her. Your job is to survive, so that one day you’ll be reunited with her and your baby. And besides, if you’re arrested, what will become of the novel I’m writing?”
Suddenly sensing that my voice had grown louder and louder, I took a deep breath and drank the rest of my coffee.
The fountain in the courtyard of the building had been turned off, and there were leaves floating in the basin. A black cat dozed on the brick wall that surrounded it. The flowers in the beds were withered, and the wind was scattering scraps of paper across the pavement.
“Where is this hiding place?” R asked, his eyes fixed on the lighter in his palm.
“I can’t tell you ahead of time,” I said, following the script the old man and I had agreed upon. “It could be dangerous if you knew too much. Once you know, there’s always the chance that the secret will leak out. The safest thing is for you to simply vanish into thin air, with no preparation, no prior warning. Do you understand?” R nodded. “Then you can trust me. There’s nothing to worry about and I’ll take care of everything.”
“It seems you’ve got yourself mixed up in something quite dangerous on my account.”
My manuscript was still spread out on the table. R’s fountain pen and my pencil were lined up next to each other. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and slowly looked up at me. He didn’t seem particularly upset; in fact, the look on his face was almost peaceful. The failing light in the courtyard threw shadows around his eyes that made his expression appear somewhat sad.
“No, it’s just that I want to go on writing novels for you for a long time to come, and I need you as my editor.” I tried to smile, but my mouth felt numb, so I hurried on with my instructions. “This is the plan. The day after tomorrow, on Wednesday, come to the ticket gate at Central Station at eight o’clock in the morning. I know that doesn’t give you much time, but it has to be Wednesday, and there isn’t really anything you can do to get ready. You just need to come by yourself, dressed to go to work, and make sure you fit everything you’ll need in your briefcase. If there are things you want later, I can always get them from your wife and bring them to you. When you get to the station, I want you to buy the business newspaper at the kiosk and read it in front of the crêpe shop just to your right after you leave the ticket gate. The shop will still be closed at that hour, but don’t worry about it. Before long, an old man will approach you. He’ll be wearing corduroy pants and a jacket and carrying a paper bag from a bakery. That will be the sign. You shouldn’t speak to him, but once you’ve made eye contact, you should follow him. That’s the plan.”
* * *
. . .
It was raining on Wednesday morning. A deluge that seemed to threaten to inundate the whole island and send it spinning down a whirlpool. When I opened the curtains in my room, I could see nothing but the rain splashing against the window.
I didn’t know whether the rain would be good or bad for our plan. On the one hand, it might help us evade the eyes of the Memory Police, but I was also worried that it would impede the movement of R and the old man. In either case, there was nothing for me to do but wait.
I turned up the heater and warmed the whole house. Then I boiled a kettle of water. Finally, I took to checking the street every few minutes from the window in the hallway, in order to be prepared to unlock the door as soon as they appeared. Normally, it took about twenty-five minutes to walk from the station, but there was no telling how long it would take in this downpour.
At 8:25, I suddenly began to feel as though the hands of the clock had slowed. I stood in the hallway and looked back and forth between the window and the clock on the wall in the dining room. The windowpane was cloudy with condensation, so from time to time I had to wipe it with the sleeve of my sweater, which soon became damp in turn.
But the only thing I could see were sheets of rain, obscuring everything—the trees in the yard, the fence, the telephone poles, the sky. Thick, suffocating sheets of rain. I prayed that R and the old man would manage to make their way through. It had been a long time since I had prayed for anything.
It was after 8:45 by the time they finally arrived. I unlocked the door and they all but fell into the hallway, soaked to the skin and grasping each other’s shoulders. Their hair was plastered to their faces and their clothes were dripping. Their shoes made a squishy sound. I led them into the dining room near the heater.
They were still clutching the business newspaper and the bag from the bakery that had served as their signs, though both were now limp as dishrags. The rolls in the bag had gone soggy and were completely inedible.
R took off his coat, sank into a chair, and closed his eyes. He sat, breathing quietly. The old man, seemingly determined to warm R as quickly as possible, moved the heater closer and went to find a blanket to put around his shoulders.
Drops fell to the floor wherever he went, and soon steam was rising from both of their bodies.
We sat for a while, staring at the heater and listening to the sound of the rain. I’m sure we had things we wanted to say, but it seemed as though something weighed on our chests, preventing the words from coming out the moment we opened our mouths. The flickering flame, visible through the round window in the heater, was bright red.
“It all went exactly according to plan,” the old man said eventually, as if speaking to himself. “The rain covered everything.”
R and I looked up at the same moment.
“I’m so glad you’re both safe,” I said.
“I was worried we might be followed,” said the old man, “so we took the long way around.”
“So does this mean that my hiding place is your house?” R asked. “I would never have guessed.”
We were all whispering, as though something bad might happen if we disturbed the silence of the room.
“We aren’t working with any of the underground organizations. We did this on our own,” I said. “Oh, but I should introduce you. This is our collaborator, a friend of my family since long before I was born.”
R and the old man reached out from under their blankets and shook hands.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” R said, but the old man just shook his head.
“Let me make you something hot to drink,” I told them, going to the kitchen to warm the cups and brew a stronger pot of tea than usual. We drank slowly, silent again for a time.
Eventually, they began to dry out. R’s hair grew soft again, and the color returned to the old man’s cheeks. The rain continued to fall in heavy sheets. When I was sure that all three cups were empty, I told R it was time to show him to his room.
* * *
. . .
R let out a little gasp of surprise as I rolled up the carpet and lifted the trapdoor.
“Like a cave floating in the sky,” he murmured.
“It’s a bit tight, I know, but at least you’ll be safe here. No one can see you from outside, and there’s not much chance of them hearing you either.”
The old man and I climbed down the ladder, followed by R, and, as we’d foreseen, with three of us in the room, it seemed quite crowded. R set his heavy, bulging briefcase on the bed. Under normal circumstances it would have contained manuscripts and galley proofs, but now, I suspected, it contained even more important papers.
The old man explained how to use the heater, the toilet, our improvised intercom, and various other features of the room. R nodded in response to each item.
“I’m afraid it isn’t very comfortable, but as long as our friend is here to help us, everything should be fine. He can make just about anything you could need.” I patted the old man on the shoulder as I said this.
He blushed and rubbed the stubble of white hair on his head. R simply smiled.
Once these explanations were finished, the old man and I decided to leave R alone in his room. He had been under tremendous strain and needed to rest. I thought as well that he might need time and privacy to process such a sudden separation from his family.
“I’ll bring you lunch at noon,” I told him, stopping for a moment on the ladder. “But if you need anything in the meantime, just call on the intercom.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I closed the trapdoor and unrolled the rug, but for a moment I stood there, frozen, staring down at my feet. I recalled the sound of his voice thanking me, a voice that seemed to rise slowly up as though from the depths of a swamp.
Ten days had passed since R had taken refuge, but it was apparent that it would take longer still before we accustomed ourselves to this strange way of living. We needed to decide about each little detail—when to bring more hot water for his thermos bottle, what time to bring meals, how often to change his sheets.
Then, too, when I sat down at my desk to write, I found myself thinking about the hidden room and I made very little progress on my novel. It would occur to me that R might be lonely and want someone to talk to, but then I’d reconsider, still holding the funnel at one end of our intercom, and conclude it would be better to leave him in peace. No matter how hard I listened, there was never any sign of someone living under the floor, and yet this silence made me all the more conscious of his existence.
Eventually, the days came to pass according to a fixed schedule. At nine o’clock, I would bring the tray with his breakfast and a thermos of boiling water and knock on the trapdoor. During that visit, I would retrieve the empty water tank and refill it. Lunch was at one. If R needed anything, he would give me a list and some money, and I would do the shopping when I went out for my walk in the evening. Mostly he asked for books, but there were other requests as well—razor blades, nicotine gum (since the cramped quarters made smoking impossible), notebooks, tonic water. Dinner was at seven. He bathed in the evening every other day, using a basin of hot water to wash himself. After which, he had nothing to do but wait for the long night to pass.
The only time I lingered in his room was when I came to retrieve his dinner tray. If I’d been able to get something good for dessert, we sometimes ate it together. I would put the cookies or pastry on the desk and we would talk at length, reaching out from time to time for another bite.
“Are you feeling a little more settled?” I asked him.
“A bit, thanks to all your kindness,” he answered. He was wearing a plain black sweater. Lined up on the shelf that hung on the wall were a mirror, a comb, a tube of ointment, an hourglass, a good-luck charm. Books, all of them old, were stacked high next to his bed—a memoir by a composer who had committed suicide long ago, a treatise on astronomy, a historical novel about the time when the mountains to the north were active volcanoes.
“If something’s wrong, please tell me.”
“No, everything’s fine.”
But it seemed that he was not yet completely accustomed to this room. He sat with his back hunched, his hands on his knees, constantly worried that any unguarded movement would mean bumping into the lamp or the shelf or the wall around the toilet. The bed was clearly too narrow, and there was nothing to brighten the room, neither flowers nor music nor anything else. It was as though the air around him and the air in the room had gone stale, having failed to blend together.
“You should eat,” I told him, pointing at the cookies on the desk. Food became scarce during the winter, and it was especially difficult to get sweets. The old man had made the cookies from oats he had obtained from a farmer he knew.
“They’re delicious,” R said, popping one into his mouth.
“The old man could make his living as a cook,” I said. There were a half-dozen cookies. R ate two and I ate the rest. He refused a third cookie, saying he had little appetite since he could not move about much.
The electric heater was turned down low, but it was not particularly cold. When the conversation died, I could hear R’s breathing. There was no choice here but to sit practically touching each other. When I glanced over at him from time to time, I could see his profile outlined in the orange glow of the lamp.
“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.
“Of course,” he answered.
“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”
“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”
“So you have everything inside you that
has disappeared from the island?”
“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”
“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”
“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.