I Am a Cat (73 page)

“Much as I’d like to speed it up, that laggard sun won’t set. Its hang-up is most hard to bear.”

“Your endlessly unsetting sun is no less hard on us, your tanned and sweating audience. So, let’s forget the whole interminable tale before its lentor kills us. Scrub it, Coldmoon,” says my master who is now quite clearly nearing the end of his tether.

“You’d find it harder still if we stopped at this point. For we are now coming to the really interesting part of the story.”

“All right then. We’re prepared to listen, but only on condition that the sun goes down.”

“That’s a pretty tall order, but all things yield to my revered teacher, and lo the sun has set.”

“How extraordinarily convenient.” Singleman uttered his toneless comment with so much nonchalance that everyone broke into laughter.

“So night, at last, had fallen. You can perhaps imagine my relief. With great stealth I slipped out of my lodgings into the quietness of Saddletree, for so that huddle of poor dwellings had been named. My nature shrinks from noisy places so that, despite the obvious conveniences of a city life, I had at that time chosen to withdraw from the whirl of the world and to live secluded in a snail shell of a dwelling, a farmhouse miles from anywhere in a corner of the countryside scarce trodden by the foot of man.”

“That ‘scarce trodden by the foot of man’ seems to be piling it on a bit,” objects my master.

“And that touch about the ‘snail shell dwelling,’” adds Waverhouse, “is insufferably bombastic. Why don’t you say, ‘in a tiny room, too small even to have an alcove?’That would sound much better, if only because a great deal less affected.”

But Beauchamp, as he immediately makes clear, finds the description praiseworthy. “Whatever the facts of the room’s dimensions, Coldmoon’s phrasing is poetic. I find it very pleasing.”

The meticulous Singleman chips in with a serious enquiry. “It must have been an exhausting business trudging there and back to school from such a remote shack. How many miles, roughly, would you say?”

“Perhaps five hundred yards. You see, the school itself was in the remote village. . .”

“In that case, many of its students would have been boarded in nearby lodgings. Is that correct?” asks Singleman in relentless tones which suggest the far-off baying of bloodhounds.

“Yes. Most of the farm dwellings had one or two student lodgers.”

“Yet, did you not describe the place as scarcely trodden by the foot of man?” Singleman moves in for the kill.

“I did indeed. But for the school the place would have been virtually uninhabited. Now, let me tell you how I was dressed as I slipped out into lonely Saddletree in that deepening dusk. Over a padded handwoven cotton kimono, I wore the brass-buttoned overcoat of my school uniform. With the overcoat’s hood pulled well down over my head to make sure I’d not be recognized, I drifted along the road in such a way as not to attract attention. Being November, the road from my lodgings to the Southern Highway was thick with fallen persimmon leaves. Every step I took set the dead leaves scurrying, and their rustle behind me seemed proof that I was being followed. When I turned and looked back, the dense mass of the Tōrei Temple, blacker even than its surrounding forest, loomed up black above me. As you may know, that temple is the family shrine of the Matsudaira Clan. An extremely quiet and little-visited building, it lies at the foot of Mount Kōshin not more than a hundred yards from where I was then living. Above the forest trees the sky’s vast hollow glittered with moonlit stars, while the Milky Way, slicing across the River of Long Rapids, stretched east and ever east toward. . . now let me see, toward. . . well yes, Hawaii.”

“Hawaii? That’s quite startling,” said a startled Waverhouse.

“I walked some two hundred yards along the Southern Highway, entered the township from Eagle Lane, turned into Old Castle Street, up Great Bushel Road and so past First Street, Second Street, and Third Street, all running off Main Street which itself runs parallel to the Road of the Cost of Food. From there I took Owari Street, Nagoya Street, and the Street of the Magic Dolphin into Fishball Lane and thence. . .”

“You can spare us the topography. What we want to know,” my master rudely interrupts, “is whether or not you bought a violin.”

“The man who sells musical instruments is Kaneko Zenbei so, using parts of his own name, he calls his shop Kane-zen. But to reach the shop, sir, we’ve still some way to go.”

“Forget the distance. Just go and buy a violin. And do it quickly.”

“Your wish, sir, is, as always, my command. Well, when I got to Kane-zen, the shop was ablaze with lantern light and. . .”

“Ablaze? Oh no. Not that again. How often this time are you going to scorch us with the blazing repetition?” On this occasion it was Waverhouse who raised the fire alarm.

“Friends, have no fear. It’s only a passing kind of blaze that lights your immediate horizon. It will, I do assure you, flicker and die down. Well, as I peer through the light blaze from the shop, I can see a faint reflection of that glare shining from the polished body of a violin while the roundness of its pinched-in waist gleams almost coldly. So falls the lantern’s light across its tightly drawn strings that only a section of the fiddle’s stringing flings out at me its glistening darts of silver.”

“Now that,” says Beauchamp almost moaning in his pleasure at the words, “is a truly masterly piece of description.”

“That’s the one, I thought, that’s the one for me. The blood began pounding in my head and my legs so weakened they could barely hold me up.”

Behind a scornful smile, Singleman grunted.

“Instinctively, and with no further thought, I rushed into the shop, yanked out my purse, pulled from it a couple of five-yen notes and. . .”

“So in the end you bought it?” asked my master.

“I was certainly going to do so, but then I thought to myself,‘Wait. This is the moment of crisis. If I act rashly I may bungle things. Should I not pause for deeper reflection?’ So, at the eleventh hour, I reined myself in.”

“Sweet heaven,” groaned my master, “d’you mean to say that even now, after we’ve slogged along behind you across such veritable Australias of balderdash, you’ve still not bought your fiddle. You really do drag things out. And all for some piddling contraption of cheap wood and catgut.”

“It is not, sir, my intention to drag things out. I can’t help being unable to buy it.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Why can’t I? Because it’s still too early in the evening. There were still too many people passing by.”

“What does it matter if there are two or even three hundred people in the streets? Coldmoon, you really are an extraordinary man,” my master shouted in his anger and frustration.

“If they were just people,” says Coldmoon, “even a thousand, even two thousand of them, of course it wouldn’t matter. But many of them were in fact my fellow students; prowling about with their sleeves rolled up and with bludgeons in their hands. There’s a particular group, the Dregs, who pride themselves on being permanently at the bottom of the class. I had to be careful because louts of that kind are invariably good at judo, and I dared not take the risk of any kind of tangle with them. For who knows where even the most trivial brush with violence may end?

Of course, I yearned to have that violin, but I was also fairly anxious to remain alive. I preferred to go on breathing without playing a violin to lying dead for having played it.”

“Then am I right in thinking that you didn’t buy a fiddle?” My master struggles on in search of certainties.

“Oh, but I did make a purchase.”

“Coldmoon, you’re driving me mad. If you’re going to buy a fiddle, buy it; if you don’t want to buy one, don’t. But for the sake of my sanity, please settle the matter one way or the other.”

Coldmoon grinned. “Things settle themselves,” he said, “and all too rarely in the way one had most hoped.” With careless care he lit a cigarette and blew out smoke at the ceiling.

I think it was the smoke which finally snapped my master’s patience.

In any event, it was at this point that he abruptly rose to his feet, went off into his study and, returning with a musty-looking, foreign book, lay down flat on his stomach and began to read. Singleman had earlier slipped away unremarked, and is now sitting in front of the alcove playing
go
by himself. The plain fact is that Coldmoon’s story has proved so boringly long that, one by one, his listeners have abandoned him. Only two of them are still sticking it out: Beauchamp with his unquenchable faith in art and Waverhouse to whom longeur is second nature.

Coldmoon somewhat crudely blew out a last long stream of smoke and resumed telling his story at the same leisurely pace.

“Having decided that an immediate purchase of that violin would be ill timed, I now had to decide upon a suitable timing. The early part of the evening had already been found too dangerous and the shop would of course be closed if I came too late. Clearly the ideal time would be somewhere before closing time but after the prowling students had all retired to their lairs. Yet to identify the precise best moment of purchase was not, as I’m sure you, Beauchamp, will appreciate, at all easy.”

“I can see it would be difficult.”

“Eventually, I fixed upon ten o’clock as the best time for action. But what should I do until then? I didn’t much like the idea of going back to my lodgings only to sneak out again; while visiting some friend for a time-wasting chat struck me as too selfish. I accordingly decided to pass the waiting period in a simple stroll around town: two or three hours, I thought, could always be quickly and congenially consumed in such a leisured ramble. But on this particular evening so leadenly the time dragged by that I understood as deeply in my heart as if I myself had coined that ancient line which says, ‘A single day seems long as a thousand autumns.’” Coldmoon twisted his features into a pattern which he presumably considered expressive of the agonies of waiting and, confident of some suitable reaction from Waverhouse, turned the full glare of his faked distress upon that subtle aesthete.

Nor was he disappointed. Waverhouse would interrupt the announcement of his own death sentence for the sake of hearing himself babble, and Coldmoon’s look of open invitation was utterly irresistible.

“As I recall,” he immediately responded, “the old song tells us not only that it is painful to be kept waiting by the beloved but also, as one might of course expect, that the waiter feels more pain than the awaited. So perhaps that eaves-strung violin actually experienced more bitter pains of waiting than did you on your aimless and dispirited wandering around town like some clueless detective. ‘Dispirited’ is a splendid word. Isn’t it the Chinese who say, ‘dispirited as an unfed dog in a house of mourning?’ Indeed, there’s nothing more dismal than the whining of a homeless dog.”

“A dog? That’s cruel. I’ve never before been likened to a dog.”

“As I listen to your story I feel as though I were reading the biography of some ancient, master artist, and my heart brims with sympathy for your sufferings. Our tame comedian Waverhouse was only trying to be funny when he compared you with a dog. Take no notice of his nonsense but pray continue with your story.” Beauchamp pours oil on potentially troubled waters, but Coldmoon in truth needs neither encouragement nor consolation. Come what may, he’s going to tell his story “Well,” he continues, “I wandered up Infantry Road and, along the Street of a Hundred Houses and thence, through Money-changers’

Alley, into the Street of the Falconers. There I counted first the withered willows in front of the prefectural office, and then the lighted windows in the side-wall of the hospital. I smoked two cigarettes on Dyer’s Bridge and then I looked at my watch. . .”

“Was it yet ten o’clock?”

“Not yet, I’m sorry to say. I drifted across Dyer’s Bridge and as I walked eastward along the river path I passed a home bound group of three masseurs. Somewhere in the distance dogs were howling at the moon.”

“To hear, on an autumn night by the riverside, the distant barking of dogs. . . That sounds like some scene-setting speech from a Kabuki play.

You, Coldmoon, are cast as the fugitive hero.”

“Have I done anything wrong?”

“You are about to do something frightful.”

“That’s a bit much. All I’m going to do is to buy a violin. If that’s to be considered criminal, every student at every school of music must be guilty of crime.”

“Criminality is not determined by any absolute standard of good or evil. The acts of a criminal may actually be good in absolute terms but, since they have not been recognized as good by the consensus of public opinion enshrined in the law, they will be treated, and punished, as crimes. It is extremely difficult to establish what, in truth, is a crime.

For what is truth? Christ himself in the context of his society was a criminal and was punished as a criminal. Of the bloodline from King David, he was accused by his fellow Jews of wishing to be a king. He did not deny the charge, which naturally was very serious to the Roman governor of that conquered province, and the plaque on his crucifix, ‘The King of the Jews,’ identified his crime. Now, does our handsome Coldmoon deny being an artist in a society where artists are regarded as offensive? Of lusting after a violin in a community where such a filthy emotion is virtually criminal?”