One Morning Like a Bird (25 page)

    ‘It was the
Tokko
?’

    ‘Oh, yes. All plain clothes and the sort of swagger that comes from not being answerable in the usual way. Not being required to explain or excuse anything.’

    For half a minute Yuji joins him in a defeated silence then, roused by pangs of shame that he, a Japanese, is inescapably implicated in this desecration, this act of the horribly rigid minds, he asks, firmly, that he be allowed to put the house in order again.

    ‘To clean up? I suppose we might do
something
. I can hardly leave it like this, eh? And I don’t think I shall be seeing Hanako again.’

    ‘They detained her?’

    ‘No, no. In fact, I had the impression she was not at all surprised to see them. A question of loyalties, no doubt.’

    They begin where they are, lifting the Buddha back to his niche by the door, furling the antique scrolls, setting the dragon pipes in their rack again. The books, as Yuji gathers them reverently from the floor, seem, in the trembling of their pages, to possess some knowledge of their recent treatment. From one of them, a Maison Gallimard edition of
Anna Karenina
, a piece of lilac paper flutters to the floor. When Yuji picks it up it’s obviously a letter. He passes it to Feneon, who scans a few lines of the small precise handwriting and shakes his head.

    ‘Not the one you were hoping for, I’m afraid. This is from a young woman I met before the war. The last war.’ He holds the letter out between two fingers. ‘Put her back with Anna and Vronsky. She’s been in there so long they must all have become good friends by now.’

    They are nearly two hours in the study. The salon, more spacious, less easy to ransack, is dealt with more quickly.

    ‘Can you believe that they searched the stove?’ says Feneon. ‘Perhaps they expected to find the charred remains of secret documents. One of them even took a photograph of it. I’m pleased to report the stove maintained a heroic silence.’

    When the last lamp is righted and the crystal fragments of a broken eau de vie glass have been swept onto a sheet of newspaper and carefully wrapped, they go to the bottom of the stairs.

    ‘You won’t have been up here before,’ says Feneon. ‘That painting is of Sézanne. The very street I was born in. This house here. You see? I looked through those windows as a child without the slightest idea there might be a place in the world called Japan.’

    They go into his room. In the daylight it is less plain, less sparely furnished than it appeared the last time Yuji saw it. At the foot of the open wardrobe is a man-thick heap of shirts, and sprawled beside them, like a shot ghost, is the goose-grey smoking jacket.

    ‘This they also photographed,’ says Feneon, nodding to the bed. ‘Really, when you think of it, it was the behaviour of lunatics.’ With his sleeve he rubs at one of the brass orbs on the footboard as if to remove from it the smudge of a policeman’s fingerprints, then he grimaces and presses at some stiffness in his neck. ‘I‘m too ancient for this kind of trouble,’ he says. ‘Let’s do Alissa’s room and then I’ll investigate the kitchen. See if I can find us some lunch.’

    They go to the end of the corridor. Feneon opens the door wide. The light in there, pouring through a mesh of fine lace, is softer, dimmer, paler. If, thinks Yuji, following the Frenchman inside, if he turns and looks at me now, will he not see everything, know everything? But Feneon does not turn. He is reaching over the bed, smoothing the bedding, the quilt of ivory satin.

    There are clothes on the floor. Yuji is not sure if he should touch them, but fearing stillness, how it might betray him, he scoops up an armful of silks and linens, and briefly, as he inhales the scent his pressing releases, his behaviour of that night, of the following morning, of all the nights and mornings since, seems like the actions of a man impossible to respect or like, a small-natured man whose timidity has made him cruel.

    ‘They wanted to take these,’ says Feneon, crossing to the dressing table and tidying the photographs. ‘I told them they would have to take me away with them. It seems they were not quite ready for that.’

    He lifts one of the pictures and holds it out to Yuji. ‘Recognise anyone?’

    ‘Who could I recognise?’

    ‘The child?’

    ‘The face is so small  . . .’

    ‘It’s Alissa! The girl holding her was one of our servants in Saigon. When we came to leave she was inconsolable. You would have thought she was losing one of her own.’ He stares at the picture, then puts it back among the others. For a count of three, four seconds, he keeps his face averted. ‘We’re worn out,’ he says, at last. ‘
Epuisé
.’

    They go down to the kitchen, a room that seems not to have held much interest for the
Tokko
. Feneon finds two eggs and puts them in a pan to boil. Yuji slices a large
nashi
pear left ripening on the windowsill. ‘And look,’ says Feneon, ‘half a loaf from the last decent bakery in Kanda. They bake for the Russian priests at the cathedral. I wonder what will become of
those
gentlemen.’

    Rather than eat in the dining room, they sit at the little knife-scored table in the kitchen. They share a bottle of beer, clink glasses, though neither of them suggests a toast. When they have finished, Feneon sits back and wipes his lips, delicately, with the fat of his thumb.

    ‘Now,’ he says, ‘it’s time for you to leave, my friend. You have been very kind but I should not have let you stay so long. Is your bicycle at the front?’

    Yuji nods.

    ‘You can go through the garden. There’s a gate behind the rose bush that leads into an alley. The gate is stiff but it works. The alley will take you back to the street. Don’t wait around. Just ride home. You understand? I’ll find some way of letting you know if I have to go away. We won’t lose each other. And tell the rest of them. No visits, for everyone’s safety, until this fever is over.’

    They go to the kitchen door. Feneon pulls the bolts, opens the door cautiously and looks out.

    ‘The gate is straight ahead. You see? And when we meet again I expect you to have written a poem or two.’

    ‘I will try,’ says Yuji, taking the other’s proffered hand, feeling his own disappear into that large, dry grip.

    ‘Shall I give your regards to Alissa?’

    ‘Please.’

    ‘Go quickly now. Be very careful.’

    ‘And you, monsieur.’

    Their hands part. Yuji, unsure if he is supposed to run or if running would simply draw attention to himself, begins to stride across the lawn. He does not look back, and as he passes the early afternoon shadows under the magnolia tree, he hears the sound of the kitchen door being shut again, shut and bolted.

13

He is squatting under the bulb in his room sewing a button onto a shirt. It’s midnight. A week has passed since he went through the gate behind the rose bush, a week since he cycled home, wind tears and tears of shame in his eyes. A week in which he has been left to wonder if his rashness – that blind eagerness to demonstrate his loyalty – might not have brought much closer the day his own house, his own family, will be visited by ‘the horribly rigid minds’. It is not hard to picture them, a gang in tight-fitting suits, chrysanthemum badges beneath the lapels of their jackets, rousting Mother from her room, harrying Father from his bed or his study. (And if he saw one lay a hand on Mother, grip her roughly, insult her perhaps, would he have the decency to attack that man?) He has even considered whether Kushida, knowing that his information would send him running down to Kanda, was setting a trap for him. Is that possible?

    He is lost in these thoughts, biting the taut thread with his teeth, when he hears his name being called from the street. Once. Twice. A pause. Then a third time – a yowl like a cat on heat. He turns off the light, pads to the window. There are no cars out there, no crop-haired strangers under the lamps. Anyone at all? Did he dream that uncanny voice? Then he sees a movement, something crawling from the shadows outside Otaki’s, a creature of some sort, certainly not a cat, more like a giant turtle dragging itself out of the sea. It moves towards the house, stops, looks up, a man now, a man suddenly, his face livid with the glare of the lamp. Then the voice again, that anguished cry.

    At the bottom of the stairs, Miyo is sat erect in her bedding. No sign of Father yet, no Haruyo. He pushes on a pair of sandals, the first his fingers can find, and runs through the garden to the street. Kyoko is already out there, and behind her, at an embarrassed distance, Otaki, carrying the crutch and gabbling about how Mr Kitamura was most insistent, and really, what else could he do but keep serving him, a veteran after all, a distinguished veteran.

    Saburo is lying, perfectly still, on his back, but his eyes are open, and when he sees Yuji he smiles. ‘Comrade! Knew I could count on you. Knew
you
would come.’

    He shakes off his wife, stretches up, clutches Yuji’s hand (almost pulling him over), hauls himself onto his one and a half feet, breathes deeply, looks briefly victorious, and immediately collapses to the ground again. A second attempt is more successful. He wraps an arm round Yuji’s neck, and the four of them, wedded to the drunken man’s movements, teeter towards the old woman’s gate. A dozen times Saburo stops to rage about the bastards who ‘butchered him’, or to ask, urgently, if Yuji remembers so-and-so from school, the kid with the big ears, or the one who cried a lot, or the one who, for half a sweet-bean cake, drank his own piss.

    Grandma Kitamura is waiting for them with a lantern and a blanket. She tries to drape the blanket over Saburo’s shoulders but he shrugs it off, irritably. ‘Look,’ he says to Yuji, touching the tabard he is wearing, the padded cotton waistcoat written over with what, by the lantern light, Yuji can now decipher as verses from the Lotus Sutra. ‘Without this I would have been killed a hundred times. A thousand! “Oh, Buddha of sublime nature and unequalled power”  . . . Go to bed, Granny. You’ – he points at Kyoko – ‘heat sake. We have a guest, in case you hadn’t noticed. An old friend has called.’

    ‘Would it be better to sleep now?’ asks Yuji, softly. ‘After all, we could talk in the morning. We—’

    Saburo tightens his arm round Yuji’s neck. He laughs. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

    In a room at the back of the house, Kyoko puts out two sitting cushions, switches on the electric
kotatsu
, which immediately gives off a strange smell of burning. Yuji has not been in this room for years. The matting is frayed, the paper screens split and taped, the alcove, apart from an empty vase, bare.

    Saburo sits, dragging Yuji with him. For a moment Saburo seems to lose consciousness, but then he looks up, shakes his head like a dazed boxer, and takes the unsmoked half of an army-ration cigarette from behind his ear. He gives Yuji the lighter, cups Yuji’s hands in his own, and several times comes close to setting his eyelashes ablaze. In front of them, the damaged foot is on show, wrapped in a pinned sock. Kyoko brings in the sake. She pours, and puts the flask on the
kotatsu
. As she stands to leave she glances at Yuji, quickly shakes her head. He does not know what it means. A warning of some kind? (Get out as soon as you can!) Or is it to tell him that the bruise beside her eye, the greenish shadow the powder cannot entirely hide, is not there because Saburo has learnt anything of the game they have played these last months, his idle pursuit of her, her idle acceptance of it. Is that what she means?

    The moment they are alone, Saburo begins to speak, and though he sways from the waist and the nicotine-bright fingers round the cigarette are not quite steady, his voice come from a place the alcohol has not touched. Cannot touch, perhaps.

    ‘This,’ he says, his forehead almost grazing Yuji’s cheek, ‘will happen to you. Don’t bother fighting it. There’s nothing you can do.’

    ‘Do?’

    ‘When you come back, they won’t know you. They won’t
want
to know you. They won’t want to touch you.’ He draws on the cigarette, holds the smoke down, then lets it seep past his gritted teeth. ‘When I got my papers in ’36, they were still training soldiers properly. January to May at the depot, and not just square-bashing. We were cobblers, tailors, armourers, cooks  . . . I could strip down a Nambu and build it again in the time it would take you to eat a bowl of rice. A Japanese soldier had to know how to do everything! Fire a grenade-launcher? Yessir! Dig a latrine, read a map, march through the snow when you can’t feel your feet? Yessir! These days they give them a uniform and pack them straight off on the boat. Half of them still seasick when they get to camp. Real specimens! Worse than you, Takano. City scum. Village idiots. Can’t march, can’t fight. It’s left to us, NCOs, senior privates, to train them, and the only thing worth teaching them, the only thing we have
time
to teach them, is how to kill. Know how you do that? Eh? You get yourself a dozen Chink prisoners, line up the training squad, tell them if anyone looks away they’ll get their teeth knocked in, then pull out the nearest prisoner and stick him in the belly with a bayonet. The army bayonet is the Meiji type thirty. It is fifteen and a half inches long. Chinks are mostly skinny as you. Stick them right and you get eight, ten inches of steel out the other side. That’s what we want to see, we say, though in fact we’re usually trying not to piss ourselves laughing at the sight of their faces. Then the sergeant asks for a volunteer. And guess what? There’s always someone who wants a go, some mama’s boy who suddenly realises what he wants to do in life is jab a man in the guts. They all do it in the end, even the ones who look more scared than the Chinks they’re sticking. The next day when you line them up, they’re different. They’ve changed. There’s no going back then. It’s like  . . .’ He reaches out a weebling hand for his sake but the cup is too far away. He gives up.