One Morning Like a Bird (29 page)

    On the table, yesterday’s newspaper lies open at a photograph, something quite artistic, of a soldier in silhouette, his arm flung back in readiness to hurl a grenade at the unseen enemy. Looking at it, Yuji thinks of Fumi Kihara and the giant match (‘Do you need that more than he does?’). Father is reading the journal of the Japanese Archaeological Society (‘Techniques for the Dating of Cultural Artefacts in Pre-Kofun-era Sites’). From somewhere in the garden, somewhere among the neatly etched shadows, comes the agitated twittering of sparrows.

    ‘I wonder what it will be?’ says Miyo, arriving from the street, her cheeks bright with cold.

    ‘What what will be?’ asks Yuji.

    ‘The reason,’ she says.

    ‘The reason?’

    ‘For going,’ she says. ‘The reason for going.’

    Father lowers the journal, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and looks at her over the top of his glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks.

    ‘The notice,’ she says.

    ‘On the Kitamuras’ gate?’ asks Father.

    She nods.

    ‘A new one?’

    She nods.

    ‘What does it say?’

    ‘You have to go there at noon.’

    ‘Today? Yuji, you better have a look.’

    It’s ten forty-five. Yuji finishes his coffee, dresses. The notice – this one in red ink – employs the same semi-official language as the others, and commands all members of the neighbourhood association and the women’s defence group, to report to the block captain’s house at twelve o’clock, Sunday, for a demonstration.

    ‘Even soldiers get Sunday off,’ mutters Itaki, reading the notice over Yuji’s shoulder. ‘At this rate we might as well all volunteer. Oh, by the way, Mrs Otaki says you can get sugar  . . .’

    ‘I’ll ask,’ says Yuji.

    ‘And flour?’

    ‘I’ll ask.’

    ‘We should have made you block captain,’ says Itaki, turning back towards his shop. ‘I said it all along.’

    Promptly at noon they file into the Kitamura house, fifteen men and women, shuffling along the corridor of beaten earth behind Grandma Kitamura. Because the nature of the demonstration has remained a mystery, some of the neighbours are dressed formally as if for a visit to a government office, while others have put on overalls, boots, headscarves. They pass through the house and out into the garden. In the pond, under the dirty gold of its surface, Yuji glimpses the mottled back of a carp. Saburo and Kyoko are waiting at the bottom of the garden. Kyoko is wearing a pair of monpe trousers. They are not as elegant as those worn by the model in the newspaper. They make her legs look shorter, her hips broader.

    Saburo is in a white military work tunic. He has a pickaxe over his shoulder. He starts shouting at them while they are still some distance off. He tells them they are on the front-line now, that they must develop the Yamamoto spirit, that the enemy could arrive at any time, right here, in Tokyo. ‘That sky,’ he bawls, pointing, ‘could turn black with enemy planes. We have to get ready for that! We have to get ready
today
!’ He glares at them, sucks in a deep breath, steadies himself, throws down his crutch and raises the pickaxe. After a dozen swings he looks round at Kyoko. ‘What are you waiting for?’

    She starts to dig, tipping out with her shovel the ground he has broken. ‘You, too, Granny,’ says Saburo, roping together the two halves of an entrenching tool.

    The neighbours neither move nor speak. The digging is very slow. After half an hour Mr Kawabata has to sit. An hour passes. The sweat drips from Saburo’s nose. He swings and falls, gets up and swings again. Kyoko, in her baggy trousers, shovels dully, competently, as if through a dung heap on her father’s farm. After two hours they stop. The old woman’s face is violently flushed.

    Saburo addresses them again. ‘Trenches! Every household! Trenches to shelter in! Takano family, you have the biggest garden. You will set an example by digging the biggest trench. The deepest. Now go home. And remember, if you don’t want to roast, you better dig!’

    Yuji helps Mr Kawabata to stand. Mrs Kawabata, wearing her women’s defence sash, is quietly weeping. ‘We’ll just have to roast,’ she says, once they have reached the safety of the street. ‘Old people like us won’t have a chance anyway. Excuse me,’ she says, ‘for saying something improper, but I hope it happens soon. After all, it’s not much to look forward to, is it?’

    The neighbours, avoiding each other’s eyes, turn away to their houses.

Up in the sewing room, mid-afternoon, a woollen jacket over his knees, Yuji is allowing himself to drift towards sleep. Now he has the fire-watching, the days in the blue van, sleep is something he would like to store up, to have a reserve of to set against a future scarcity, for it seems inevitable now that he and everyone else is entering a time when they will peer at the world through the smoke-glass of an inassuagable fatigue. He lets the book (
Les Fleurs du Mal
) slide from his grip, lets his chin drop towards his chest, sighs, and sees, in the lasts instants of consciousness – the first, perhaps, of dreaming – a sun-cleaned image of Kyoko shovelling the earth in her garden, while the young cat, the absurdly named Foreign Girl, limps over the grass towards him.

    When he wakes, coming to suddenly in the twilit room with no sense of how long he has slept, he feels oddly calm, sober and calm, as if, in sleep, some old difficulty has found an unexpected resolution, though what difficulty, what resolution, he cannot tell himself. He is stretched there, willing the moment to go on a little longer, when he hears noises from outside, from the garden, and turns his head sharply towards the platform door. He listens for a second, then scrambles to his feet, opens the door, and goes onto the platform. Saburo is leaning over the fence (what is he standing on?). He is leaning over the fence and shouting at Father.

    ‘You think I should come over and dig it for you? Are you afraid to get a blister on your hands? This is a final warning! If the trench is not started before nightfall  . . .’

    And father says something back, a low voice, a slow voice. Whatever it is he says it leaves Saburo speechless.

    Yuji hurries down the stairs, slips at the turn, bounces down the last few steps, almost knocks over Miyo. He meets Father at the door of the Western room. ‘Please excuse me,’ he says. ‘I ought to have started it. I will start immediately.’

    He goes into the kitchen. Haruyo is steaming tofu for Mother’s evening meal. The look he gives her, loaded with rage, visibly unsettles her. He takes the lean-to key from its peg beside the door and goes out to the narrow path (the tradesmen’s path) that runs between the kitchen and the spindle hedge. He unlocks the lean-to. The air in there still tastes of summer, preserved somehow around the blades of tools, in the heat-warped wood of cobwebbed shelves. He chooses a mattock and walks through the garden holding it across his hips like a rifle. He should ask for Father’s advice, of course, for his instructions, but he starts to dig near the old pine stump, hacking at the ground until, after ten minutes, the muscles in his back begin to spasm. He crouches, brow against the mattock’s haft, cools off, then starts again, a slower, less angry rhythm that stops only when he can no longer clearly see his feet. If he is going to continue, he will need some light, and he is crossing the garden to fetch a lantern when Father summons him from the open door of the garden study. They go inside together.

    ‘I was just fetching a lantern,’ says Yuji.

    ‘Listen to me,’ says Father. He pauses. ‘I have phoned Kensuke. I have told him of our situation. I have told him I am no longer certain of my ability to protect your mother. Her tranquillity.’

    ‘You’re going to the farm?’

    ‘We will take the express on Wednesday.’

    ‘Wednesday!’

    ‘Tomorrow I will go to Setagaya. I will explain things.’

    ‘And me?’

    ‘You?’

    ‘You wish me to remain here?’

    ‘For us all to leave would draw  . . . unnecessary attention.’

    ‘I see.’

    ‘I have an obligation to your mother.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘If we stayed. If something happened  . . .’

    ‘When will you return?’

    ‘That will depend. Not, perhaps, until after the New Year. Do you need money?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘It may be easier for you when we have gone. I regret that we have not been able to help you more.’

    ‘I have been a burden to you  . . .’ says Yuji, mechanically.

    ‘You seem to be managing well enough these days.’

    ‘With Mr Fujitomi?’

    ‘You may end up a man of business, like your grandfather.’

    ‘It seems unlikely.’

    ‘Yes. Perhaps.’

    ‘It’s a long time since Mother travelled,’ says Yuji.

    ‘Yes,’ says Father. ‘Quite a long time.’

    The window is a narrow rectangle a degree or so less utterly dark than the book-lined blackness of the study. Father has almost disappeared, can be seen only peripherally, as certain remote objects in the night sky are seen, by not looking at them directly. Again, they have come to the edge of a conversation, that long-postponed confessing that would begin – and either could begin it – with the words ‘After Ryuichi  . . .’. It might have freed them once (these two who have taken a certain pride in
not
speaking), but now, it seems, the time for it has passed. They have changed. They have been changed. Between them, the tilt of circumstance is quite different.

    In the room the air is peppery against the lining of Yuji’s nose. He sniffs, dabs his nostrils with a finger. ‘The Wednesday express?’ he asks. For all he can see of Father, he might as well be speaking to himself.

4

Yuji is in the first car with Mother and Father. Haruyo and Miyo and most of the luggage are in the car behind. As the cars arrived late (held up by some parade in Iidabashi) and loading them took longer than expected, Father is fidgeting with the shirt cuff above his watch and scowling at the back of the driver’s head.

    Yuji cannot take his eyes from Mother. How strange, how extraordinary to see her with the common light of day washing over her face! She smiles at him, but when the movement of the car jolts them in their seats she shuts her eyes as if in pain. She ought, thinks Yuji, to travel in a palanquin, or like an heirloom doll, wrapped in tissue paper inside a cedar box. How will she manage the train? And then another hour of driving, the twisting ascent to the farm on roads that at each sharp turn become rougher and narrower, more track than road? He is afraid for her, but feels too a flickering excitement, as though they were all setting off on a family outing, a trip to view the chrysanthemums at Dangozaka, a restaurant by the river. Even to the
kabuki
 . . .

    At the station, two elderly porters help them with the luggage, leading the way, puffing and calling briskly for room. The Kyoto train has almost finished boarding. At the windows, little parties, or single men or women are readying themselves for the awkward moment of farewell. The porters carry the cases inside. Father and Haruyo follow them up the steps. On the platform, Yuji and Miyo wait with Mother. Miyo is shaking with sobs. Mother murmurs to her, their heads close together, but the girl can neither look up nor reply.

    Father climbs down from the train. ‘There’s not much time,’ he says.

    Mother takes his arm. She turns to Yuji. ‘I will be thinking of you,’ she says.

    He nods. ‘I will be thinking of you also.’

    They look at each other, the ghost and her son, as if they were alone together. He hopes she cannot see the fear that has taken hold of him, the wild certainty that once she has stepped onto the train he will never see her again, that she will die (fade to nothing), or he will die (in some shell-hole in China). Father and Haruyo help her up the steps, almost carrying her. As soon as she is inside, the porters jump down and swing the door shut. A ragged ball of smoke rolls down the carriage roofs. A minute later the whole train shudders, rocks backwards, and begins, with the appearance of immense effort, to creep along the platform. Father struggles with the compartment window, forces it open. ‘I will inform you of our arrival,’ he says. Is that what he says? He can hardly be heard, hardly, in the sudden flow of steam, be seen. Yuji waves to him, then, in a gesture stolen from the cinema screen –
Hotel du Nord
?
The Citadel
? – he lifts his peach-bloom trilby from his head and holds it high until the last carriage is lost in the sunlight of midday and there are only the shining rails, narrowing and curving into the distance.