A Tale for the Time Being (31 page)

I hummed into the darkness, singing the words under my breath even though I wasn’t quite sure what they all meant. I thought I heard him chuckle next to me, or maybe it was the wind, but
when I looked over to where he had been sitting, Haruki #1 was gone.

3.

Stupid Nao! What a foolish girl! There I was, sitting with the ghost of my dead great-uncle, who just happened to be a kamikaze fighter pilot in World War II, and who was
probably the most fascinating person I will ever get to meet, and what did I do? Sing some stupid French chanson to him! How idiotic is that??? He must have thought I was just another typical dumb
teenager, and his time on earth was precious, so why waste even a moment of it with me? Better to just shimmer off and hang with someone who can think of more interesting conversational topics.

What is wrong with me? I could have asked him about all sorts of things. I could have asked him about his interests and his hobbies. I could have asked him if only depressed people cared about
philosophy, and if reading philosophy books ever helped. I could have asked him about what it felt like to be ripped from his happy life and forced to become a suicide bomber, and if the other guys
in his unit picked on him because he wrote French poetry. I could have asked him how he felt when he woke up on the morning of his mission, which was also his last morning on earth. Did he have a
big cold fish dying in the hollow of his stomach? Or was he filled with a luminous calm that emanated from him so that everyone around him stood back in awe, knowing that he was ready to take to
the sky?

I could have asked him what it felt like to die.

Stupid, baka Nao Yasutani.

4.

In the morning after breakfast, when Muji and Jiko were busy greeting the first carload of priests from the main temple who had come to help with the osegaki ceremony the next
day, I sneaked off to Jiko’s study. She doesn’t mind me being there, so I don’t know why it felt like sneaking. It’s my favorite room in the temple, overlooking the garden,
with a low desk where she likes to write, and a small bookshelf with a lot of fat old religious and philosophy books with faded cloth bindings. Jiko told me that the philosophical ones belonged to
Haruki #1, from when he was in university. I tried to read some of them, but the kanji in the Japanese books was crazy difficult, and the other books were in languages like French and German. Even
the ones in English didn’t sound like any English I ever heard. Honestly, I don’t know if there are still people who can read books like these anymore, but if you took out all the
pages, they’d make great diaries.

Opposite the bookshelf, at the back of the room, was the family altar. A scroll with the image of Shaka-sama hung at the top, surrounded by the ihai
¹³⁰
for all our ancestors and a book with all their names. Below that were different shelves for flowers and candles and incense burners and offering trays with fruit and tea and
candy.

On one of the shelves, just off to one side, was a box wrapped in a white cloth and three small black-and-white photographs of Jiko’s dead children, Haruki, Sugako, and Ema. I’d seen
these pictures before but I never paid any attention. They were just stiff, old-fashioned strangers, time beings from another world who meant nothing to me. But now everything was different.

I stood on my tiptoes and reached across the altar for the picture of Haruki. In the photo, he looked younger than his ghost, a pale student with a school cap and a poetic expression, frozen
under glass. He also looked a little like my dad, before my dad got flabby and stopped getting haircuts. The glass was dusty, so I rubbed it with the hem of my skirt, and just as I was wiping,
something in his face seemed to move a little. Maybe his jaw tightened. A tiny spot of light seemed to shine from his eye. If he had turned his head and looked at me and spoken I wouldn’t
have been surprised, and so I waited, but nothing else happened. He just kept on staring off toward a faraway place beyond the camera, and then the moment was gone, and he was just an old picture
in a frame again.

I turned the frame over and saw there was a date on the back, Showa 16. I counted back on my fingers. Nineteen forty-one.

He was still in high school. Just a couple of years older than me. He could have been my senpai.
¹³¹
I wondered if we would have been friends and
if he would have protected me from the bullies. I wondered if he would have even liked me. Probably not. I’m too stupid. I wondered if I would have liked him.

One of the fasteners on the back of the frame was loose, but when I tried to push it into place, the whole thing came apart in my hands. I was like, oh, shit, because I really didn’t want
Jiko to know I’d broken it, so I tried to line the pieces up again, but something was jamming it and getting in the way. I was really sweating now. I thought maybe I could hide it, or just
leave it on the floor and blame Chibi, but instead I sat down on the tatami and took it apart again, and that’s when I discovered the letter. It was only one page, folded and tucked in
between the photo and the cardboard backing. I unfolded it. The handwriting was strong and beautiful, like Jiko’s, in that old-fashioned way that’s hard to read, so I folded it back up
and stuck it in my pocket. I didn’t mean to steal it. I just needed a dictionary and some time to figure out what it said. The frame was still broken, but I stuck the photograph back and bent
one of the fasteners, which sort of held it together. Before I put it back up on the altar I held it close to my face.

“Haruki Ojisama!” I whispered, in my most sincere and polite Japanese. “I’m very sorry I broke your picture frame, and I’m very sorry I was such a fool. Please
don’t be mad at me for taking your letter. Please come back.”

5.

1.

“Le mal de vivre,” Benoit repeated. He was a short man, wide-faced and barrel-chested, wearing a pair of filthy Carhartts held up by red suspenders over a torn
flannel shirt, and a toque jammed down over his curly black hair. His wiry beard was streaked with grey. He held a cluster of wine bottles in one large hand and gripped a Tanqueray bottle in the
other. He stared past Ruth’s head into some middle distance where French verse seemed to reside. The din and clatter of the recycling center seemed to quiet down just long enough to let him
speak.

“Yes, of course it means the pain of life,” he said. “Or the sickness, or perhaps the evil of living, as in ‘les fleurs du mal.’ Or, simply, the sorrow of life,
contrary to la joie de vivre.”

He paused for a moment to savor the sound of the words before tossing the bottles into the square hole of the crusher. The clatter of shattering glass was deafening. “Why?” he
shouted.

“Oh, nothing,” Ruth said. She felt suddenly unsure about how much she should tell Benoit, how much she would be able to convey over the racket. “They’re just the words of
a song I heard.” How to explain the circumstances: that they were lyrics from a song being sung to a ghost; that she’d read them in a diary she’d found in a barnacle-encrusted
freezer bag on the beach? She wanted to ask him for help translating the French composition book, and she had brought it along with her, but it all seemed too difficult. The dump wasn’t a
great place for nuanced conversations on a Saturday morning.

In the parking lot behind her, pickup trucks sloshed through the mud to the Dumpsters or backed up into the bays. Even though the transport center had recently introduced a garbage pickup
program, islanders still liked to do things the old way. They liked to come to the dump to dispose of their waste personally. They liked to haul their sodden boxes of cans and plastic bottles to
the recycling table, sort their paper from their cardboard, and hurl glass into the crusher. They liked to browse through the racks and shelves at the Free Store, which was the closest thing the
island had to a department store. A trip to the dump was like a trip to the mall. It was what passed for entertainment on a Saturday morning. Children ran around outside, pretending to play World
of Warcraft amid the dripping wreckage of rusting cars and doorless refrigerators. Dreadlocked punks scavenged for chains and derailleurs in the tangle of bicycles. Crows and ravens and bald eagles
circled overhead, fighting for territory and meat scraps.

“Yes,” Benoit said. “It is a very famous song. By Barbara.” He pronounced the name in French, wrapping his lips around the three syllables, giving each equal weight and
caressing the guttural
r
’s deep in his throat.

“No, actually. It was a singer named Monique—”

He flapped his hand impatiently. “Serf, yes, yes, it is the same. Barbara is her stage name, for her many fans. Are you a fan, too?”

“Well, I’ve actually never heard her,” Ruth said. “I just ran across the lyrics in a book and wondered what they meant . . .”

Benoit closed his eyes and began to speak. She had to lean in to catch what he was saying over the steady din of the crusher’s motor.

“
Le mal de vivre
, ‘the pain of life.’
Qu’il faut bien vivre
. . . ‘that we must live with, or endure.’
Vaille que vivre
, this is
difficult, but it is something like ‘we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.’ ”

He opened his eyes. “Does that help?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, I think it does. Thank you.”

Benoit studied her. “Is this all you want? You do not need help with the rest of the translations? There is still the booklet in French, non?”

She eyed the crusher’s gaping maw. “Muriel?”

“Dora,” Benoit answered. He grinned, exposing the hole where a front tooth should have been.

“Of course.”

“Mais, j’adore Barbara,” he said, “and now I’m interested to help you. Here is too noisy. Perhaps we should adjourn to the library?”

He hollered for one of his dreadlocked dump punx to replace him, whistled for his dog, and then led her through the parking lot, up a dirt embankment that had been elaborately terraced with
geranium-filled truck tires, to a small room at the back of the garage where the forklift was parked. His little dog ran ahead, barking.

The room was surprisingly neat, with windows overlooking the Dumpsters below. The furnishings were sparse and what you might expect: a banged-up metal desk in the corner; two office chairs on
wobbly casters; a dented metal filing cabinet. But above the desk and covering the two adjacent sides of the room were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, lined with books. The fourth wall was decorated
with discarded paintings, mostly stoner art, faux native iconography, and paint-by-numbers northern landscapes of moose and grizzlies that were so bad they were good. Tacked to the wall, as well,
was a sheet of ruled binder paper with a copy of the Serenity Prayer, neatly written by hand.
God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .

“Voilà,” Benoit said, spreading his arms. “Ma bibliothèque et galerie. Welcome.”

He sat down on the chair at the desk. The little dog, a wiry-haired mutt with a lot of terrier in him, jumped up onto one of the chairs, but Benoit called him off, and then used a rag to wipe
the seat and offered it to Ruth. The dog gave Ruth a rueful look, then curled up at Benoit’s feet.

She walked slowly past the shelves, scanning the spines. Some titles were in French, but many were in English, a good collection of the classics, interspersed with some science fiction, history,
and political theory. It was better than what she could find at the library.

“All from the dump,” he said, proudly. “Help yourself.” He watched her, intently, as she pulled a collection of Kafka’s stories from the shelf. “You look very
much like your mother,” he said, as she sat down across from him.

She looked up from the book, surprised.

“Ah, you didn’t know?” he asked. “Your mother and I were great friends. She was one of our most loyal customers.”

She remembered then. Oliver used to bring her mother to the dump every Saturday morning. They had a standing date, and her mother never forgot, even when the rest of her world was fading.