End of the Road (28 page)

#

Yumiko died of a heart attack at
seventy-three. It was unexpected but quick, and for that Takahiro
was grateful. He had thought that finding her collapsed beside the
sink in the little outhouse was the worst day of his life, but the
day she was cremated was harder. He let himself cry that day. After
all, every man should cry over his wife.

#

He had met her by the rice paddy when he
himself was a young man. Twenty-three, with a lean, muscular
physique that he would never better, he had been helping his own
father the day she came walking past, a floppy white hat pulled
over her brow to ward off the sun, gloves and long sleeves
protecting the pale skin of her arms.

He looked up from his work to see she had
stopped to watch him. Makayoshi had nudged him and given him a sly,
conspiratorial wink. Yumiko had smiled, and for a moment had looked
uncertain, lost, as if she had forgotten all about the business
that had brought her here. Then she had nodded, half to the boys,
half to herself, and gone on her way.

But later she had come back. And she had
stayed.

#

Takahiro wondered sometimes what curse he
had brought upon himself to outlive them all, but it wasn’t
strictly true. Tomoko died a year after Yumiko, and the two
brothers were alone but together again. Seima was just a framed
photograph on the wall but Kentaro was very much alive, if
overworked, in a government office in Osaka. Ayana was at
university, apparently with a sweetheart she planned to marry.

There was one last time
the fragments of his family were together, when Kentaro visited
over the
Obon
holiday in August. Rather unexpectedly he brought Ayana with
him, and tailing her was her man, Yohei. They ate and drank
sake
and laughed and
joked over old times. Yohei was a city boy but a kind one, and a
year later he and Ayana were married. Takahiro and Makayoshi caught
the
shinkansen
down for the wedding, danced like young men at the party,
drank too much
sake
and slept most of the way home.

#

‘
I know you sold yours
but you can have mine,’ Tanaka told him, standing on the grassy
verge as Takahiro stepped down into the water.

Takahiro smiled. ‘Like the old days.’

‘
Well, at least let me
hold the trays.’

Takahiro smiled again and nodded. For a
moment he glanced up at the sky, as if searching for someone
looking down on him. Makayoshi, or Yumiko, perhaps. Maybe even
Seima.

‘
That would be grand if
you would.’

‘
It all passes on,
doesn’t it?’ Tanaka said. ‘Everything goes in the end.

Takahiro said nothing. He
broke the first little rice seedling off the rest and pushed it
down into the waterlogged soil.
And yet
the world carries on, without us
, he
thought.

#

He had wanted to see Ayana one last time,
but she had children now and life was busy. She wrote him letters,
and sent photographs of the children, but he was fading to memory.
Her own father was ailing and had moved in with them, and the
grandfather that lived up among the rice paddies in the shadow of
the Japan Alps drifted further and further away down the river of
her life.

He was gone before he was gone, but he
didn’t hold it against her. She had her own life to lead.

#

‘
That’s it,’ Takahiro
said as they reached the end of the row. ‘Not bad for a couple of
old men, eh?’

Tanaka, sweat drenching his brow, laughed.
‘You mind if I take a rest? I might have a couple of years on you
but this is still young man’s work.’

Takahiro nodded. ‘Go ahead. I’m going to
stay here a while longer.’

Tanaka climbed up out of the mud and headed
off towards the little shed where he kept his own tools. Takahiro
sat down for a moment to get his breath back. He felt a little
fluttering in his heart, and looked up once at the sky, then down
at the grass verge beside the rice paddy where they had sat so many
times, and talked, laughed, enjoying each other’s company.

His mother and father, his brother
Makayoshi, their wives Yumiko and Tomoko, Seima, Hiroko, all
passed. Now Kentaro was sick, and Ayana, his little angel, was a
mother and the master of her own destiny, a destiny that no longer
included him.

What he would give to
have them all back together, just one more time! Takahiro closed
his eyes, remembering the warm June days, the boiled eggs and the
rice balls, the little
dojo
in the stream, the frogs croaking in the
water.

So this is what it feels
like
, he thought.
The sunset of my life
.

He opened his eyes as tears streamed down
his face. He saw two small children skipping along the side of the
rice paddy, and for a moment he wanted to call out to them, to tell
them to be careful, that although it wasn’t deep it was thick and
you could easily get stuck. One of them raised a hand and shouted
something that he couldn’t understand.

And there, behind them, he saw her, taller
than he remembered, stepping slowly along the grass verge with the
care only a mother would take.

Was she real or was his mind having a last
dance with him, a last turn around the ballroom floor as he
followed the others into dust? He started to stand but his feet
felt suddenly heavy. His heart seemed to jump and his chest felt
tight. He looked down at the dark, swirling waters of the rice
paddy and knew where he had to be. He stood up, took a step forward
and let his feet sink into the soft mud below the surface of the
water.

The children were all around him, dancing
like fireflies. Ayana was standing over him, her face the heavenly
palour of an angel, ageless. Somewhere far, far away he was aware
of Tanaka calling his name.

‘
I’ll be with you,’
Takahiro whispered to no one. He closed his eyes, and he was back
there in those beautiful days, his family all around him, the tops
of the rice seedlings poking up from the brown water in organized
rows, the smell of youth and life and vitality in the air. Takahiro
smiled, and welcomed them all back.

Back to Top

END

Chapter
26

The High Road to the Mountain Gods

By Jacques Antoine

1: Sonam and the Bullies

When she first arrived in Kathmandu, the
summer after graduating high school, Emily stayed in a little
guesthouse off Gangalal Road, near the river. In those days, her
interest lay further east, in the Pashupati temple by the airport.
At three miles or so, the run directly there was not enough
exercise. A zigzag route through the streets made it much more
satisfying.

The morning air always felt big with
expectation of the day to come—the sights and sounds of a living
city, brightly colored buildings and people, deliveries by bicycle
and motor scooter weaving this way and that, children shrieking in
the streets, tourists everywhere. “Surely Amaterasu will not find
me here,” she told herself when she first arrived. But under the
guise of Pashupati, the lord of all living things, Vishnu spoke in
her dreams with the shrill voice of the sun, the queen of
heaven.

Raised in Hawaii and Virginia, Emily did not
pray to the Shinto gods of her mother’s native Japan, and did not
know how to find the comfort of the Buddha. To be caught in the
tension between two spiritual yearnings with no rituals to
reconcile them was disorienting, to say the least. The dreams that
disturbed her sleep proclaimed her the great-granddaughter of the
goddess of the sun—she didn’t bother about the precise number of
generations standing between herself and Amaterasu. She simply
thought of her as “Granny.”

Her own reading, driven by spiritual
turmoil, had reinforced what she felt deep inside. The great nature
demons commanded the worship of our ancestors for millennia, until
a more spiritually abstracted faith supplanted them, no longer
focused on appeasing the personalities who controlled the bounty of
the harvest and the turning of the seasons, weighing instead the
contents of our hearts. The process was strikingly similar in
Europe, Africa and Asia, in each case working through one or
another paradoxically historical figure to mediate for us with an
increasingly distant divinity. The Buddha was one of these.

But the Buddhism of Japan felt to Emily like
too stark a contrast to the demands Granny made on her. She craved
mediation, and sought it in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the
homeland of Siddhartha Gautam, in Nepal. Perhaps here, living among
a people with a unique genius for assimilating opposites into an
already crowded pantheon, she could finally find some relief, or at
least understanding. Now her attention had shifted to a temple at
the western end of the Kathmandu valley.

Her landlady, Sunita Kansakar, plump and
self-satisfied, gray hair dyed black, watched as she went out early
to run through the still dark streets of the city all the way to
the outskirts. And she watched for her return an hour or so later,
just as the sun peeked over the rooftop of the building next
door.

“
I’ll never understand you,
Michi-
chhori
,” she
said, using Emily’s Japanese name, but appending a couple of
affectionate syllables. “Why do you run so far? It looks
exhausting. What is the point?”

“
I find it restful. It
helps me think.”

“
And what is so difficult
to think about that you need to exhaust yourself over
it?”

A fair question, Emily had to admit. And why
come all this way to think? Mrs. Kansakar must expect to hear that
a young man occupied her thoughts, someone like fourth year
midshipman and soon-to-be Ensign Perry Hankinson back in Annapolis.
But would she so gladly hear the rest of it, the violence that
seemed always to stalk her, the deaths she felt somehow responsible
for?

“
You know, the usual
things,” she said.

And it would have been more or less true, or
at least not utterly false, if the usual things included wondering
if she could risk releasing her chromosomes into the human gene
pool.

“
Young people,” Mrs.
Kansakar said, with a snort. “Everything is always so
dramatic.”

Emily laughed. “Thank goodness I haven’t
disappointed you.”

“
Come, child, at least you
can eat.”

A couple of bowls of potato
vegetable curry and a plate of
poori
bread filled the little space between them on the
kitchen table. Emily was the only guest she ate with, the only one
up early enough to share a meal with… and the only one whose
company she enjoyed enough. The breakfast for the rest of the
guests sat steaming in a large pot on the stove next to a huge iron
skillet ready to fry the rest of the
pooris
. It wouldn’t be needed for at
least another hour.

The orderliness of Mrs. Kansakar’s kitchen
soothed Emily on a deep and visceral level. Everything found its
place here under her direction, legumes and root vegetables in cool
bins below the counter, spices allotted temporary quarters in jars
and boxes on the upper shelves, greens delivered just that morning
while it was still dark heaped up next to the sink. Everything
expressed equally Mrs. Kansakar’s providential authority. She was
the tutelary demon of this place.

“
Can you teach me how to
make curry?”

“
Yes, certainly, child. But
you’ll have to give over your running to find the time in the
morning,” she said with evident satisfaction, and a sneaky little
smile.

“
Can I come with you to the
market?”

Mrs. Kansakar nodded, eyeing her companion
with fresh curiosity. How quickly Emily had found a place in the
affections of an irascible old lady, one whose stern moral judgment
and sharp tongue all her neighbors feared at least as much as they
respected. Like the kindly old dragon-lady from a Russian novel,
everyone tiptoed around her, apprehensive of the sarcasm that stung
wherever it landed. A visit with her could loom over one’s day like
an ancient fortress on a hill. What must they think of her newfound
protegé?

“
Michi-
didi
, Michi-
didi
,” cried a young man in the
burgundy and saffron colored robes of a monk, standing at the
kitchen door. Clearly upset, practically trembling, he addressed
her as “big sister.”

“
Michi-
didi
, it’s Sonam… he… he…”

“
Nawang,” Emily replied,
glancing at the clock over the sink. “What’s wrong with
Sonam?”

Just then, a little boy peeked around the
doorframe, dressed in a light gray uniform shirt and tie, wearing a
torn blue sweater. A scrape on his chin and a purpling bruise under
his eye told her all she needed to know.

“
Here,
chhora
, take that off,” Mrs. Kansakar
growled in the voice of maternal authority. “Let me see to
it.”

She gave his sweater a disapproving shake
and took it into the next room.

“
It wasn’t my fault,
Michi-
didi
,” he
pleaded.

“
Another fight?” Emily
said. “What was it this time, more name-calling?”

“
They ganged up on him,
Michi-
didi
,” Nawang
offered in Sonam’s defense. “I know he didn’t start it this
time.”