by Yoko Ogawa
I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”
“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”
“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”
“If that’s true, then I’m glad,” R said.
I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.
* * *
. . .
The next day, a call came from the publishing house. From the new editor who had taken over responsibility for my work.
He was short and thin, a few years older than R. His face was so ordinary that it was difficult to make out the expression it wore. On top of that, since he spoke almost in a whisper and mumbled a bit, I missed a good bit of what he had to say.
“When will you be finished with the novel you’re working on?”
“I have no idea,” I told him, realizing R had never asked me this sort of question.
“The story seems to be reaching a delicate phase, and I think you need to proceed cautiously. Please let me know when you have something more to show me. I’m very anxious to read the next section.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on the table.
“By the way,” I said, as casually as I could, “what has become of R?”
“Well,” he mumbled, and I could hear him picking up his glass and gulping down some water, “he has…disappeared.”
The last word of this I heard quite clearly.
“Disappeared…,” I repeated.
“Yes, that’s right. Have you heard anything from him?”
“No, nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.
“It was quite sudden,” he said, “and everyone is a bit baffled. He simply didn’t show up at the office one morning. No message, nothing. Just your novel, sitting out on his desk.”
“Really?”
“Yes, that was all. But of course I suppose it’s not that unusual nowadays for someone to disappear.”
“I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. You don’t suppose…”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I have some records I’ve borrowed from him. I don’t know how I’ll be able to return them.”
“If you like, I could take them for you. I may get the chance to pass them along to him.”
“I’d be grateful,” I said. “And if you find out where he is, could you let me know?”
“I will. If I find out,” he promised.
* * *
. . .
We decided it would be the old man’s job to be in touch with R’s wife. The toolbox on the back of his bicycle let him pass as a repairman, allowing him to visit her without attracting attention.
Soon after R vanished, she went home to her parents’ house to deliver the baby, but that plan had been made well in advance and had nothing to do with recent developments. Her parents owned a pharmacy in a town to the north that had once been home to prosperous smelting works, but that was deserted now that the factories had been closed.
We decided to use the abandoned elementary school in the town as our point of contact. On days ending in zero—the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth—she would leave things she wanted to send to R in a wooden box in the courtyard that held meteorological instruments used by the children at the school. The old man would go on his bicycle to retrieve them, leaving items R wanted to send to his wife in their place. That was how we had arranged things.
“Everything seems quieter in winter, no matter where you go, but that’s the loneliest place I’ve ever seen,” the old man reported after his first trip. “As soon as I got over the hills, a cold wind hit me in the face. That must be right where the north wind starts to blow. The streets were nearly deserted, more cats around than people, and the houses were old and mostly empty. I expect folks moved away when they closed down the smelters, which look pretty spooky just sitting there, like crumbling rides at an amusement park. No matter where you go, there’s another one, sad as can be, as though they died, trapped in place by layers and layers of rust.”
“I had no idea,” I told him, filling his cup with hot cocoa. “When I was little, there was a beautiful orange glow in the night sky that came from just over the hill.”
“I remember, too. There was a time when the men who ran those works were respected all over the island. But that’s gone now, and lucky for us it is, since the Memory Police don’t go there anymore. It’s not likely they’ll ever suspect us.” He took a deep breath and lifted the cup with both hands.
“How is R’s wife?” I asked.
“Tired, as you’d expect. She told me she’s having trouble understanding what’s happened to her, but that’s normal enough. Her husband’s been snatched away just as she’s about to give birth to their first child. But she’s smart and tough, and she didn’t try to find out where he is or who’s hiding him. She just told me to say how grateful she is.”
“So she’s gone home to her parents to wait for the baby to be born?”
“Yes. But their pharmacy doesn’t seem to be doing too well. While I was there they had just one customer, an old woman who’d come for a bottle of Mercurochrome. It’s a tiny little place and everything’s showing its age—the sliding door, the floorboards, the old glass cases—I almost wanted to get my toolbox and go help fix it up. R’s wife works behind the cash register, but I could see her big belly when she moved around the shop.” He sipped his cocoa for a while, and then, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, he unwound his scarf from his neck and stuffed it in his pants pocket. I refilled the kettle and set it back on the stove. Drops hissed as they fell on the burner.
“And there was no problem with the handoff at the box?”
“Everything worked perfectly. The school is small and there was no one in sight. The whole place seems to have gone cold, with no lingering warmth or smell from the children, not so much as a footprint. It was freezing, like a laboratory of some sort. Not a place I wanted to hang around, so I came straight home.”
The old man retrieved the cloth bag that was hidden under his sweater and pulled out a white envelope and a package wrapped in plastic.
“These were in the box,” he said.
I took the package from him. It appeared to be several items of carefully folded clothing and a few magazines. The envelope was thick and tightly sealed.
“The box hasn’t been used for a while and it’s in pretty bad shape,” he continued. “The paint is peeling and the latch was so rusted it was tricky to open. But I figured it out. The instruments are all broken—no mercury in the thermometer and a bent needle on the hygrometer—but that means no one else is likely to look inside. R’s wife had left the package tucked out of sight in the back, just as we agreed.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry to have put you in so much danger.”
“No, that doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. The cup was still pressed to his lips and I worried the cocoa would spill. “The important thing now is to get these things delivered.”
“You’re right,” I said. I clutched the packet and the envelope to my chest and started up the stairs, feeling the warmth of the old man’s body still linger
ing in the objects.
I was a bit surprised when he appeared for the first class I took at the typing school. He did not look anything like a typing teacher. For one thing, for no good reason perhaps, I had it in my head that typing teachers were always women—women of a certain age, with an overly polite way of speaking, heavy makeup, and bony fingers.
But I found, instead, a very young man. One of average build, dressed in well-cut clothing in understated colors. He was not particularly handsome in a classical sense, but each feature—eyelids, eyebrows, lips, jaw—made a strong impression. His expression was calm and thoughtful but tinged with a distinct shadow, something you would notice if you focused solely on his eyebrows, for example.
He looked like a law professor or a preacher—perhaps rightly so, since we were in a church—or an industrial engineer. But he was, in fact, a typing teacher, one who knew just about everything there was to know about typing.
I never once saw him actually using a typewriter, though. He merely circulated among the students, commenting on the position of our fingers or the way we handled the machine and then marking the mistakes on our practice sheets with a red pen.
From time to time, we were tested on the number of words we could type in a given period of time. He would stand in front of the classroom and take a stopwatch from his jacket pocket. We would wait for his signal, fingers poised over the keys, sample text next to the typewriter. I was fairly certain that he had composed the English words on the pages we were to copy, which were usually letters or, occasionally, something that looked like a thesis of some sort.
These tests were not my greatest strength. Even for words I had been able to type quite easily during practice, when it came to the test my fingers suddenly seemed to freeze. I would reverse the letters “g” and “h” or confuse “b” and “v,” or, in the worst cases, miss the starting position for my fingers completely and end up typing nonsense.
I was particularly susceptible to that distinct variety of calm that comes before the start of a test. Those few seconds when everyone held his or her breath, when the sounds of prayers and organ music from the church had died away and our senses were concentrated in our fingers—those seconds completely unnerved me.
I was convinced that the calm in the room would assume an almost physical form, like a gas leaking from the stopwatch he held in his hand. The watch was apparently well used, and its thin silver chain was tarnished. The thumb of his right hand would be poised on the button, which he was about to push at any moment. The chain would be draped across his chest.
The gaseous calm, emanating from his hand, crept along the floor of the classroom, accumulating in the corners and eventually coming to rest on my hands. It felt chilly and oppressive. I had the feeling that the least movement of my fingers would rend the membrane of silence and everything would fall to pieces. And my heart would begin to pound.
At the instant my suffering was reaching a peak, when I was unable to stand even another second, he would give the signal to start. His timing was always impeccable—as though the stopwatch had been measuring my heartbeat.
“Begin!”
It was the loudest thing he said in the classroom. Then every typewriter would begin clicking away. Except mine, which remained frozen as though terrified.
For a long time I have wanted to watch him in the act of typing. It must be very beautiful to see. The glittering, carefully maintained machine, the snow-white paper, his perfectly straight back, his expertly placed fingers. The very thought of it makes me sigh. But I’ve never yet seen him type. Even now that we have become lovers. He never types in front of other people.
It happened about three months after I’d started attending the typing classes. A heavy snow had fallen that day—the most I’d ever seen. The buses and trains were stopped and the whole town was buried.
I left the house early, walking to the church in order to be on time for a three o’clock class. On the way, I fell several times and the cloth bag I used to carry my books had gotten wet. Even the top of the steeple was covered in snow.
In the end, I was the only one who made it to class that day.
“It’s good of you to have come in such weather,” he said. As usual, his clothes were perfectly pressed, without a stain or wet spot from the snow. “I thought no one would show up.”
“If I skip a single day, my fingers get stiff,” I told him, taking my textbook out of the damp bag.
It was particularly quiet that day, perhaps because of the snow. I sat down at the fourth typewriter from the window. We had a rule that the first to arrive could choose any machine she wanted, since each had its idiosyncrasies—sticky keys or worn-out letters. Usually he would sit at his desk near the blackboard, but that day he stood near me.
First I typed a business letter, a request for an advance copy of an instruction manual for a recently imported machine for manufacturing jam. He stared at my hands the whole time I typed. As soon as my eyes strayed the least bit from the text, some portion of him appeared in my field of vision—shoes, pants, belt, cuff links.
It’s difficult to type a letter, with all the rules concerning the line spacing and layout. I’d always had trouble, even under normal circumstances, but with the teacher observing me so closely, I grew more and more tense and made one mistake after another.
Nor did he miss a single one of them. He would bend over, bringing his face close to the typewriter, and point to each error. It wasn’t done in the spirit of reproach, but nevertheless, I felt increasingly oppressed, as though I were being backed into a corner by a powerful force.
“You need to press harder with the middle finger of your left hand. That’s why the top of the ‘e’ is always missing.” After pointing out the faulty “e,” he took hold of my finger. “None of your other fingers are bent this way at the tip.”
“No, that’s right. I jammed this one playing basketball when I was a little girl.” I could tell that my voice sounded a bit hoarse.
“It will work better if you strike the key straight down,” he said, holding my finger and tapping several times as he pulled up on the curved joint.
eeeeeeeeee
He had taken hold of the barest tip of my finger, but I was as overwhelmed as if he had taken me in his arms. His hand was cold and hard. I don’t believe that he held me with unusual force, but I felt an inescapable sense of oppression, as though the skin of his hand had attached itself to my finger, which continued to tap at the key.
His shoulder, his elbow and hip were just there, next to me. He seemed to have no intention of releasing my finger, which continued to tap at the key.
eeeeeeeeee…
The tapping of the key striking the paper was the only sound in the room. Snow had begun to fall again, covering the tracks I had made between the gate of the church and the clock tower. He continued to hold me tighter and tighter. The stopwatch slipped from his breast pocket, turning over once in the air as it fell to the floor. I wondered whether it had broken. It seemed strange that I would be preoccupied with the stopwatch when I should have been worrying about what he was trying to do to me.
The bell in the clock tower began to chime. Five o’clock. The vibration came from far above, rattling the window glass and passing through our bodies, before being absorbed by the snow below. The only motion was the falling of the snowflakes. I held my breath, unable to move, as though locked inside the typewriter.
* * *
. . .
From that point on, I decided to have R read my manuscript before showing it to the new editor. Needless to say, he could no longer write comments in the margins, but we discussed every detail of the work as we always had, there in the secret room. Since there was just one chair, we would sit next to each other on the bed, using the back cover of a sketchbook as a makeshift table for the manuscript.
It was better for him, too, to have work to d
o. The healthiest way of living in the secret room was to wake in the morning thinking about the things that had to be done during the day; then, at night before going to bed, to check that everything had been accomplished, whether satisfactorily or not. Moreover, the morning agenda needed to be as concrete as possible, and the tasks ideally involved some sort of reward, no matter how small. Finally, the day’s work needed to tire him out in both body and spirit.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” R began rather guardedly one evening as he received his dinner tray halfway up the ladder, “would you mind finding me some sort of work to do? I’d like to contribute what I can—and besides, it would help me pass the time.”
“You mean something other than reading my novel?” I looked down at him through the trapdoor.
“I do. I know I can’t be very useful working here in this room, but any sort of trivial task will do. It may be difficult for you to find something, but I’d be truly grateful. I feel so useless.”
He held the tray in both hands and looked down at the food arranged on it. As he spoke, little ripples ran across the surface of the potato soup.
“It won’t be difficult at all. I have all kinds of little chores. By tomorrow morning I’ll find something. It’s an excellent idea, killing two creatures with one stone. So eat your dinner while it’s still warm. I’m sorry that it’s the same soup day after day, but the harvest was terrible this year, and there are no vegetables other than last year’s potatoes and onions.”
“Not at all. It’s delicious.”
“That’s the first time anyone has ever complimented my cooking. Thank you.”
“And my thanks to you for finding me something to do.”
“Not at all. Good night then.”
“Until tomorrow.”
Standing on the narrow ladder, his hands encumbered by the tray, R simply nodded his good-bye. Once I was sure he had reached the floor, I closed the trapdoor.