by Yoko Ogawa
“You have a talent for asking the impossible, young lady.” The man pressed his fingers against his temples. “Most of what we do here must be kept secret. That’s the nature of our work,” he added.
“Then can you at least tell me whether he’s being kept safe somewhere?”
“I can assure you he’s perfectly safe. And haven’t you just told me there’s no need to interrogate him? Or is there something that causes you to worry that he might come to harm?”
I told him no, that there was nothing, and reminded myself that I mustn’t get drawn into this sort of exchange.
“Then you have nothing to worry about. We are asking only for his cooperation. He’s being served three meals a day, as much as he can eat, and the chefs who work for us come from first-class restaurants. Even if we were to send him that,” he said, casting a disdainful glance at the objects on the table, “I suspect he wouldn’t want to eat any of it.”
“I suppose your rules also prevent you from telling me when he’ll be able to go home?”
“Indeed they do,” the man said, smiling and recrossing his legs. “You catch on quickly.” The tassel from one of the medals on his chest shook. “Our primary function here is to assure that there are no delays in the process and that useless memories disappear quickly and easily. I’m sure you’d agree that there’s no point in holding on to them. If your big toe becomes infected with gangrene, you cut it off as soon as you can. If you do nothing, you end up losing the whole leg. The principle is the same. The only difference is that you can’t touch or see memories, or get inside the hearts they’re kept in. Each one of us hides them away in secret. So, since our adversary is invisible, we are forced to use our intuition. It is extremely delicate work. In order to unmask these invisible secrets, to analyze and sort and dispose of them, we must work in secret, to protect ourselves. I think you can understand.” He stopped his monologue here and began tapping the table with his fingers.
I could see the streetcar running outside the window. As it turned the corner, a layer of snow slid from the roof. However weakly, the sun was shining for the first time in many days, and the glare from the snow was blinding. Outside the entrance to the bank across the way, people were lined up to withdraw money. As they waited, they rubbed their hands together and hunched their shoulders against the cold.
Inside, the temperature was comfortable. It was silent, except for the tapping of the man’s fingers. The guards continued to stand quietly by the door. I looked down at my muddy shoes, realizing that my stockings had dried at some point.
I came to the conclusion that it would be useless to inquire further about the old man. Thinking back over everything that had been said since I’d entered the building, I realized I had no idea what had become of him. I gathered the items on the table and returned them to my bag. The rolls, which had been warm when I’d left home, were completely cold.
“Now then,” said the man, taking a sheet of paper from a drawer in the table, “it’s my turn to ask you some questions.” The paper, gray and shiny, contained boxes with endless categories: name, address, and occupation, of course, but also academic history, medical history, religious affiliation, employment experience, height, weight, shoe size, hair color, blood type, and on and on. “Please fill this out,” he said, taking a pen from his pocket and setting it in front of me.
That was the moment I began to regret having come. The more information I provided, the closer they would be to R. I should have realized that beforehand. Still, it was even more dangerous to hesitate. Given their history with my mother, it was more than likely they already knew all the information they were asking me to write down. They weren’t interested in my name and address; they were testing me. So the important thing was to remain calm, to act naturally.
Telling myself exactly that, I looked the man in the eye as I picked up the pen. The questions weren’t particularly difficult, but in order to avoid trembling, I moved my hand more slowly than usual across the paper. The pen glided smoothly, and I could tell it must be expensive.
“Please,” said the man, nodding at the tea. “Before it gets cold.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, but at the first sip I knew it wasn’t tea I was drinking. The smell and flavor were subtly different, like nothing I’d ever consumed. A mixture of bitter and sour, as though brewed from dried leaves piled up on a forest floor. The taste was bearable, but it took considerable courage to swallow that first sip, since I was all but certain it was drugged. Was it a potion to make me sleep so they could extract my secrets, or a solution that would allow them to analyze my genes? Or who knew what else?
The man stared at me from across the table, and I could feel the eyes of the men by the door as well. I drained the cup in silence and then handed him the completed form.
“Excellent,” he said, glancing down at the page with a slight smile as he returned the pen to his pocket. The tassel on his medal brushed back and forth.
* * *
. . .
It snowed again that night. I found I wasn’t at all sleepy, wired from the stress of the afternoon and the strange drink. I took out my manuscript, thinking I would make some progress on my novel, but not a single word came to mind. In the end, I sat by the window and watched the snow through the gap in the curtains.
After some time, I moved aside the dictionary and thesaurus on my desk and pulled out the funnel hidden behind them that we had rigged as a speaker.
“Are you asleep yet?” I asked, my voice hesitant and quiet.
“No, not yet,” R answered, and I could hear the mattress springs squeaking. The funnel in the hidden room was mounted on the wall next to his bed. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing in particular,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”
The funnel was made of aluminum, dented and quite old. Though I had washed it carefully, it retained a faint odor of spices from its days in the kitchen.
“It’s snowing again,” I told him.
“Is that so? It must be getting deep.”
“It is,” I said. “This is an unusual year.”
“It’s hard to believe it’s snowing just outside the wall here.”
I liked the sound of R’s voice through the makeshift speakers. Like a spring bubbling up from far below me. As it traversed the long rubber tube between the two funnels, all unnecessary sounds faded away, leaving only the soft, transparent liquid of his voice. I pressed my ear against the funnel, unwilling to waste even a single drop.
“Sometimes I put my hand on the wall and try to imagine what’s going on outside. It almost seems as though I can sense it—the direction of the wind, the cold, the damp, where you are, the sound of the river, all the vague signs. But in the end, it never works. The wall is just a wall. There’s nothing on the other side, no connection to anything else. This room is completely closed off. All my effort only serves to convince me that I’m living in a cave, suspended in the middle of nothingness.”
“Everything outside is completely different from when you came here. The snow has changed everything.”
“Changed how?”
“Well, it’s difficult to describe. For one thing, the world is completely buried. The snow is so deep that the sun barely starts to melt it when it does come out. It rounds everything, makes it look lumpy, and it somehow makes everything seem much smaller—the sky and sea, the hills and the forest and the river. And we all go around with our shoulders hunched over.”
“Is that so?” he said, and I could hear the springs squeaking again. Perhaps he had stretched out on the bed as we talked.
“Right now, the flakes are quite large, as though all the stars are falling out of the sky. They dance in the shadows and glint in the streetlights and bump into one another. Can you picture it?”
“I’m not sure I can. It’s almost too beautiful to imagine.”
“I
t’s truly lovely,” I said. “But I suppose that even on a night like this, the Memory Police are out there hunting. Perhaps some memories never perish, even in this cold.”
“I suspect you’re right. And I doubt the cold has any effect. Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
“Is that so?”
“You sound as though that’s a bad thing.”
“It’s just that you have to hide here because of those memories. If you could let yours fade away like the rest of us, there’d be no need.”
“Oh, I see.” The words were half murmur, half sigh.
When we talked using this makeshift system, we were forced to move the funnel back and forth from our ears to our mouths, leaving a brief silence between each utterance. And thanks to these pauses, the most mundane conversation sounded quite important.
“If it keeps up like this, I’ll have to shovel the walk tomorrow morning,” I said, reaching out to part the curtains a bit wider. “Trucks from the town hall come every Monday and Thursday to collect the snow. They dump it into the sea at the harbor near the old man’s boat. It gets terribly dirty and sad on the way, and you can hear the sound when it gets sucked into the water, as though the sea were swallowing it down its enormous throat.”
“They throw it into the sea? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s the perfect place. But I’ve watched from the wheelhouse on the boat, and I always wonder what happens to it after it vanishes into the waves.”
“I suspect it melts almost immediately,” R said. “Melts and mixes with the salt water, and then onto the fishes and the seaweed.”
“I suppose so. Or the whales drink it in, release it to the tides.”
I switched the funnel to my right ear and rested my elbow on the desk.
“At any rate, it’s gone without a trace,” I added.
“Yes, I suppose it is.” He took a breath.
The windows were dark in the neighboring houses, and no noise reached me, no sirens, no cars, not even the wind. The whole town slept, and the only waking sound was the voice coming to me through the funnel.
Though the old man had done a wonderful job of constructing our listening system, it was still extremely rudimentary, and the slightest twist of the tube or tilting of the funnel made our voices seem distant and weak. Nor did it do much good to speak louder. I put my mouth into the funnel and let my words tumble down the tube.
“When I was a child, I was drawn to the mystery of sleep. I imagined it as a land with no homework, no bad meals, no organ lessons, no pain or self-denial or tears. When I was eight years old, I was thinking of running away from home. I no longer remember why. The reason was probably something insignificant—a bad grade on a test or the fact that I was the only one in the class who couldn’t do a pull-up. I decided to run away in search of the land of sleep.”
“That was quite a plan for an eight-year-old.”
“I put it into effect one Sunday when my parents were away at a wedding. My nanny was in the hospital for gallbladder surgery. I found a bottle of sleeping pills in a drawer in my father’s desk. I had seen him take a pill every night before he went to bed. I don’t remember how many I took that day. I certainly intended to take as many as possible, but it was probably just four or five. But soon I started to feel sleepy, and I let myself drift off, satisfied that I’d taken enough to ensure that I would be going to the land of sleep and would never return.”
“So what happened?” R asked, his tone careful.
“Nothing, really. I slept, of course, but there was no world of sleep. Just darkness stretching out in every direction. No, that doesn’t quite capture it. It wasn’t even darkness. There was nothing, nothing at all, no air or noise or gravity—not even me to experience them. Just overwhelming nothingness. It was evening when I woke again. I looked around, wondering how long I’d slept. Five days? A month? A year? The windows were dyed with the colors of the sunset. But I realized almost immediately that it was the evening of that same day. My parents had come home from the wedding, but neither of them seemed to realize that I’d slept the entire day. They were animated and wanted me to taste the cake they had brought home from the reception.”
“The pills didn’t make you sick?”
“On the contrary, I felt refreshed after so much sleep. Which made the whole thing worse. Perhaps they weren’t sleeping pills at all, but just vitamins or something. In any case, I never made it to the land of sleep or anywhere else—like the snow vanishing into the sea.”
The night had deepened and my hand had grown cold holding the funnel. The flame in the stove was wavering, the fuel having run low.
“Would you like me to hold the funnel by the window so you can hear the snow falling?”
I stood up to open the window. The cold was sharper than I’d imagined, and it stung my cheeks. The tube was not long enough, but I pulled it out as far as it would go to bring the outside air to R. As I opened the window, the snow swirled upward for a moment, then quickly settled back into its quiet pattern.
“How is that?” I asked. The snow falling into the room collected on my hair.
“Aah, I can feel it. I can feel the snow.”
His quiet words were absorbed into the night.
The old man was released three days later. I had stopped by to check on the boat during my usual evening walk and found him stretched out on the bed in the first-class cabin he used as his room.
“When did you get back?” I asked him, kneeling by the bed.
“This morning,” he answered, his voice hoarse and weak. His face was pale, his beard had grown out, and his lips were covered with scabs.
“I’m so glad you’re safe,” I said, stroking his hair and cheeks.
“I’m sorry I worried you.”
“That doesn’t matter. How are you feeling? Are you injured? Should I take you to the hospital?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m just a little tired, so I’ve been lying down.”
“Are you sure? Then you must be hungry. Hold on a minute. I’ll make you something.” I patted his chest through the blanket.
During his absence, everything in the refrigerator had gone limp and stale. But it hardly seemed the moment to worry about it, so I made soup out of every vegetable I could find and then made some tea. Propping him up in the bed, I tucked a napkin around his neck and spooned the soup into his mouth. After a moment, when I thought he seemed to have recovered a bit, I began to question him.
“But what did they do to you?”
“Don’t worry. They don’t know anything about the room. I’m sure of that at least. Their attention is focused on a smuggling incident.”
“Smuggling?”
“At the end of last month, some men took a boat and escaped from the cape by the lighthouse. They were fleeing the Memory Police.”
“But how? I thought the boats were useless. They disappeared years ago. Your ferry doesn’t work, does it? And no one would remember how to sail it anyway.”
“No, the people who they were hunting haven’t forgotten anything—the sound of the engine, the smell of the fuel, the shape of the waves as the boat glides through them.” He wiped his mouth with the napkin and coughed before continuing. “There must have been someone in the group who was a naval architect or a navigator, someone who still knew about boats. That must be why they were able to do the impossible—smuggle themselves off the island. Up until now, everyone has been focused on trying to hide. No one even imagined he could get away by crossing the sea. Even the Memory Police seemed caught off guard.”
“Did they think you had helped them somehow?”
“Yes. It seems they brought in everyone who knew anything about boats. They questioned me over and over, about everything. Showed me pictures of people I didn’t know, took my fingerprints, made me go back over t
he past few months and tell them where I’d been and what I’d done. It was an impressive interrogation. But I didn’t tell them anything about the room, and they were too focused on boats to be suspicious.”
I stirred the soup, scooping up some parsley and a piece of carrot, and fed them to the old man. With each bite, he bowed his head, as though excusing himself again for the trouble he was causing.
“But it’s too terrible, doing all that to someone who wasn’t involved with the escape.”
“No, no, it wasn’t so bad. Since I had nothing to hide as far as the boat was concerned, their questions didn’t really bother me. I just wish I’d been able to put up a bit more of a fight.”
“But how did they manage to get the boat ready without the Memory Police finding out?”
“I don’t know the details, but I think they must have secretly repaired a boat that was left in the shipyard. They wouldn’t have had the right tools or parts. The Memory Police stripped out all the engines when the boats disappeared, broke them in pieces and threw them in the sea. They probably had to make do with all sorts of improvised parts—that’s what the police were asking me about, technical things about ships. But of course I didn’t help them, since I don’t remember anything at all.”
“Of course,” I said, pouring some tea and passing it to the old man. The air outside the window was still, but the sea had worked up a considerable swell. Strands of seaweed floated in the waves. Evening was creeping over the horizon. The old man took his cup in both hands, peered into it for a moment, and then drained it in one gulp. “But it must have been terrifying—heading out to sea like that in the middle of the night.” I shuddered.
“I’m sure it was. Especially since the boat would have been patched together from whatever they could find,” said the old man.
“How many do you think there were?”
“I don’t really know. But I’m sure it was more than the boat was intended to hold. There must be more than one boatload of people trying to get off the island.”