Lord of All Things
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Authors: Andreas Eschbach
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2011 by Andreas Eschbach and Bastei Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG
English translation copyright © 2014 by Samuel Willcocks
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Lord of All Things
was first published in 2011 by Bastei Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG as
Herr aller Dinge
. Translated from German by Samuel Willcocks.
Published in English in 2014 by AmazonCrossing, Seattle.
ISBN-13: 9781477849811
ISBN-10: 1477849815
Cover design by Edward Bettison
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913063
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
“I know what you’d have to do so that everyone could be rich,” said Hiroshi.
“That’s rubbish,” said Charlotte. “Can’t be done.”
“No, it can be,” he insisted.
“Hurry up and swing,” she said. She was annoyed by the way Hiroshi just sat there, rattling the chain. She pushed off the ground with her feet and began to swing. “Come on! Let’s see who can go highest.”
The evening sky was like dark blue glass, infinitely wide and mysterious. There was not a cloud to be seen, just a first tiny star, winking and twinkling away. As if sending an invitation:
Come and visit
. What would it be like to fly up there? And the grass smelled warm, of summer and strange herbs and fresh-cut grass.
“Come on, swing!” she called out. “I don’t believe you anyway.”
“You’ll see.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Charlotte yelled as the swing took her higher and higher, and the wind tugged deliciously at her dress. “You think that if we just printed enough banknotes, everybody would be rich. But it doesn’t work that way. My papa explained it all to me. All that would happen is that everything would get more expensive—just because you have more banknotes, doesn’t mean you’d have more things to buy.”
Hiroshi looked up at her scornfully. “I know that much,” he called.
“Well then. Come on and swing! Jump if you dare.”
Charlotte whooped. Today she would dare. She would swing as high as she could and then let go. And she would fly!
“You’ll see,” Hiroshi called again. Then he began to swing, too, shoving off from the ground and flinging himself full-length on the seat to catch up with her. “That’s what I’ll do when I grow up.”
“Do what?”
“Make everybody rich. Really rich! So that everybody can have whatever they want. And as much as they want.”
Charlotte swung and swung for all she was worth, wondering what Hiroshi had dreamed up. The swing creaked dreadfully and shook a little from side to side, since one of the poles had begun to come loose from the concrete that was supposed to keep it steady. “How are you going to do that?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Because you don’t know. You’re just showing off.”
Hiroshi didn’t care that she’d called him a show-off. She knew he wouldn’t care; he never did. He was always so completely sure of himself.
“Just wait,” he shouted, flinging his legs up high. Now he was swinging higher than her.
Charlotte was panting from the effort to keep up. “If it’s true, then you have to jump!”
“Okay!” Hiroshi was swooping up and down, back and forward, plunging and soaring as though he wanted to loop the loop and wrap the chain around the top of the swing. “But do you know what I don’t understand?”
“What?”
“Why nobody had the idea of how to do it before me,” Hiroshi yelled. “It’s so incredibly simple.”
Then he let go and flew through the air like a shot from a cannon. For a moment he seemed to float, as though he would fly up and ever up, right up to the sky and out into space. But then he landed on the lawn, rolling, whooping, and laughing out loud. Charlotte looked at him enviously. She had stopped pumping her legs and instead just held on to the chains and waited until the swing came to a halt. When the moment had come to let go, she couldn’t do it. Why not? She had wanted to so badly.
Charlotte Malroux knew more about the past than anyone else ever could, but she didn’t know the future. She was only ten years old, and she didn’t know yet what a blessing that was.
THE ISLAND OF THE SAINTS
1
Hiroshi and his mother lived on the third floor of an apartment building across from the French embassy, where she worked in the laundry room. They had two rooms and a bath. Mother slept in the smaller room, while the other served as kitchen, dining room, and living room. Hiroshi’s bed was behind a folding screen, along with a shelf where he kept his things. Over his bed was a narrow window with three panes of glass that he could slant open to let in the fresh air. When there was any. Here in the middle of Tokyo, the air wasn’t fresh all year round. In summer the nights were often so sticky and warm that Hiroshi couldn’t sleep, and sometimes not even the rain helped him nod off.
It was on just such a night that he saw the girl for the first time.
A light, silver rain fell, shimmering in the moonlight and the streetlamps like a magic curtain. The flat smelled of the miso soup they’d had for dinner and of the laundry strung across the room on a line, which was taking its time to dry. Hiroshi stood up and put his hand out the window to test whether it was beginning to cool down outside. It wasn’t. He stood there for a while, looking down at the vast, dark embassy garden, unsure whether he was sleepy or not. Eventually, since there was nothing else to do, he lay back down on his bed.
The third time he got up to look outside, there was a girl standing in the garden. She just stood there, her arms spread wide, looking up into the sky. Her long, dark hair cascaded down her back. She was wearing nothing but a nightgown, which clung to her body, soaked through. Hiroshi shut his eyes, counted to ten, and then opened them again. The girl was still standing there in the middle of the lawn. She swayed back and forth, slowly, dreamily, as the warm rain poured down onto her. Had he made some noise in his surprise? Hiroshi didn’t know, but he heard the door slide open behind him and his mother enter the room.
“What is it?” she asked. “You should be asleep.”
“There’s a girl in the garden,” Hiroshi said.
Mother shuffled across to the bigger window. After watching the scene down below for a while in silence, she said thoughtfully, “So that’s how it starts. How rich people go mad, sooner or later.”
“Why is she doing that?” Hiroshi asked.
“There’s a new ambassador. That might be his daughter. I heard somewhere that he has a daughter.”
“She’s all wet.”
“Go to sleep,” said his mother.
“I can’t. It’s too warm.”
“You have to get some sleep, or you won’t be able to keep your eyes open in school tomorrow. At least lie down and try to rest a bit.”
Hiroshi didn’t move from where he was any more than the girl did. It looked as though she were praying to the moon. Or waiting for something to fall from the sky so that she could hug it.
“What about her? She has to go to school as well.”
“What business of yours is it what she does?” Now his mother sounded indignant. “They’re rich folk. We have nothing to do with the likes of them.”
“Why are they rich?”
“They just are. Now go to sleep,” said Mother and left.
That seemed to be the biggest problem in the world: that some people were rich and others weren’t. Mother often talked about it.
At that moment the girl let her arms fall. She looked back at the house, and it seemed somebody was calling her from there. Hiroshi couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the rain, but he saw her reluctantly move away, saw her walking barefoot through the grass toward an open door. Hiroshi waited till she had vanished from sight, then lay down. When he finally did fall asleep, he dreamed about her, of course.
From then on he lay in wait. Every afternoon he hurried home from school and took up his post at the window. He fell into the habit of doing his schoolwork there and would have liked to eat by the window as well, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it.
“What’s this all about? she grumbled. “What are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” Hiroshi said, and in a way he was right: most of the time all he did was stare down into the embassy garden, waiting for something—he couldn’t say what. Waiting for the girl, of course. But why? What did he hope would happen if he saw her again? He didn’t know. He only knew he couldn’t help standing by the window for hours at a time, even though all he ever saw was an occasional pale dot behind a window—which might or might not have been a face—and from time to time a shadow, a movement.
The problem was that, from his apartment, he could only see a small section of the garden. Hiroshi knew the garden was very big, but the buildings all around and the many plants that grew there blocked his view. For instance, he knew there was a swimming pool there, but he couldn’t catch so much as a glimpse of it through the trees. He often saw the gardener, Mr. Takagi; Hiroshi only knew him from afar. He mowed the lawns and trimmed the bushes in a special way—the way they did it in France, he had told Mother once.
Other than that, not much happened. Hiroshi watched the birds hopping from branch to branch. He watched the shadows move across the lawn and tried to work out the time without looking at the clock. It was hot and uncomfortable by the window, but now that he had started he couldn’t give up.
When Hiroshi brought home his report card just before the summer holidays, Mother grumbled about his grades. “You could do so much better if you only made an effort. The way you remember everything, school should be easy for you. But you just don’t seem to care. You think, school, grades—so what? But it matters. For later. If you want to get a good job, one where they’ll look after you, with a good company, then you have to go to a good college. And they’ll only take you if you have good grades.”
“All I need to do is pass the entrance exam,” Hiroshi protested.
“If your grades aren’t good enough, they won’t even let you take it,” Mother shot back. “You know that very well.”
“Yes, I do,” he admitted.
It was always the same speech over and over again. She was right, though: Hiroshi really didn’t care about school. But was that his fault? Why didn’t they ever learn anything interesting, like how robots worked? Instead, it was just boring old mathematics, boring old Japanese, boring old geography…It would be years before they got to something even halfway interesting, like physics. But at least the summer holidays had arrived. That meant he could spend all day waiting by the window.
Of course, his mother didn’t like that at all. “Why don’t you do something useful with your time, the way other children do?” she shouted every day when she came home from work. “Why did I bother buying you that tool kit you wanted so much? It’s just standing in the corner, gathering dust!”
“I’ll use it soon enough,” Hiroshi answered.
It would be a long while before he got another expensive present like that; he would have to parcel out the time he spent with it. And it wasn’t as though the toolbox was going to run away in the meantime.
“Other children go to their school clubs. They do sports, they play football.”
“I don’t want to,” said Hiroshi.
Play football? Somehow his mother didn’t seem to see he was smaller and weaker than everyone else in the class—in other words, he had no chance. In gym class he was always the last to be picked for a team, the one who scored least points, the useless one. And that was if you ignored the fact that the other boys called him a bastard because his father was American.
Daken
they called him when the teachers were out of earshot: mongrel. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“Or go swimming. All you need to do is go to the school office and you can get yourself a cheap holiday pass for the pool. That would be better than sitting around here in the heat all day.”
“It’s not all that hot,” Hiroshi answered. But it was, of course. In the evenings he sometimes felt sick from the heat.
“Fine,” his mother said at last. “You’ll have to tear yourself away from your window when we go to Minamata.”
Hiroshi slumped. Minamata again.
“When are we going?” he asked.
“For the Bon
festival, of course. That’s when we always go.”
He ran through the calendar in his head. The Bon festival began on August 13.
“There’s still time.”
“I’m just telling you.”
A few days later he had to try on his “good” pants to see whether they still fit. Of course, they were too short by now. Even if he was the smallest in his class, he was still growing.
“I can let these down,” his mother said thoughtfully as she knelt in front of him and tugged at his pants leg, “but this is too narrow here. We’ll go and buy you a new pair before we fly out.”
“We’re flying?”
“Yes. Mrs. Nozomi got me the tickets; she knows someone. We’ll have to get up early, because the airplane leaves at ten to six. But ever since they raised the prices on the Shinkansen, it’s cheaper than taking the train.” She looked at Hiroshi. “Aren’t you pleased? You like flying.”
“Yes,” said Hiroshi.
That had been two years ago, the first time he had ever flown in his life. But in fact Hiroshi feared the trips to visit family in Minamata. Not because of his grandparents, who were kind enough to him but always held back a little, but because in the end he was half
gaijin
and he didn’t really belong. Most of all, he was afraid of Aunt Kumiko, his mother’s older sister. When she was younger, she had fallen ill with mercury poisoning, like so many people in that area, and now she just lay in bed, cramped and motionless, her arms clamped to her chest, her eyes turned inward. The doctors said it was astonishing she was still alive; most patients with her illness had died by now. At least she no longer screamed the way she used to. And she had stopped those dreadful convulsions.
The Bon
festival was always the same in Minamata. Everyone would pretend they were one big happy family who all loved one another and that everything was fine and dandy. And then, after he and Mother had returned home, she would spend weeks complaining about the pollution and the car fumes and the noise. She would work herself into a state about poisons in the water and buy gallons upon gallons of bottled water, which Hiroshi would have to carry upstairs into the apartment.
He decided not to think about it. And he stayed sitting where he was at the window. Until at last something happened to reward his patience.
The curtains were all drawn again, and the rooms were as gloomy as if somebody had just died. Charlotte tried not to make any noise as she crept through the apartment looking for her mother. She finally found her in the living room, lying on the couch, one arm across her face and apparently asleep. Half-asleep at least.
“Maman?” Charlotte knew what the matter was already without even having to ask: Mother had a headache again. She was always having headaches.
A martyred groan from the sofa. “My child! What is it?” Moaning. “I have a headache.”
“Today we were going to…” Charlotte began, and then she stopped midsentence. It was hopeless, she knew, but she had to ask.
“Ah yes.” A long, loud indrawn breath. Then, after a while, “Some other time.”
“Why am I never allowed to go out?”
“You are allowed out.”
“I don’t mean out in the garden. Out on the street.”
Maman groaned reluctantly. “Get that idea out of your head. It’s much too dangerous.”
Charlotte felt herself growing angry—angry and disappointed. As the dark feelings brewed inside her, she found it harder and harder to keep them bottled up. “I liked it better in Delhi,” she proclaimed. “Why can’t I go to an international school here as well?”
“I don’t want you spending all your time at schools where they only ever speak English,” Mother replied in a feeble voice.
“What’s so bad about that?”
A sigh heaved up from the bottom of a grave. “A child should not contradict her mother. Go and find something to do, and leave me alone. I have a headache.”
So Charlotte crept away. She was so bored. She went out onto the terrace, sat down in the shadow of the wall, and watched the gardener watering the flowers by the pool. She could take a swim. But she had done that so many times recently that she no longer cared to. After a while she crept back to her mother, who was still lying motionless in the dark.
“Yumiko could take me to the museum,” she suggested warily.
Mother sat up, startled. “What?
Mon Dieu
! You and your museums all the time! What kind of child are you? No normal child volunteers to go to a museum.”
She hadn’t actually said no, Charlotte realized. If there was any chance at all of making the day worthwhile, this was it. “But Yumiko could take me, couldn’t she? She knows Tokyo. She can look after me.”
Silence. Sour, suffering silence.
“It was a mistake to employ a Japanese nanny,” Mother murmured bitterly.
“Yumiko is very nice,” Charlotte retorted. That wasn’t completely true, but most of the time she was easy to get along with.
“She’s a silly cow!” Mother screamed all of a sudden and threw a cushion across the room, then another right behind it. “Can’t you see I’m not well? Can’t you just leave me alone? Don’t you have homework to do? Don’t you have lessons, damn it all?”
No, there was no saving the day now. Charlotte fled without another word.
After one more walk through the vast, dark apartment, she crept off to her room. Homework? She didn’t have any homework. It was the holidays, even for children like her who had a private tutor. That was the whole problem. She picked up a doll from the end of her bed, where she kept all the things she didn’t have a proper place for. It was a doll Papa had given her as a present when they had to move from Delhi to Tokyo. Charlotte didn’t even know what to call it. When she got the doll, it had been wearing its long blond hair in a hair band with the name Denise
written across it, but Charlotte thought that was a stupid name for a doll.
“Well then, what do you want to do?” asked Charlotte, looking curiously at the doll. She pressed the button on its back that made it talk.
“I want to go dancing,” the blond doll declared.
“Dancing? We’re not even allowed out of the house, so put that idea out of your head.”
