One Morning Like a Bird (7 page)

    Yuji waits to see if he will start to sing. He often, under the press of such nostalgia, lets his voice roll from a growl into the wavering line of some old song, but today the stew is too tempting. They grin at each other, three at three, take up their chopsticks, lean towards the pot.

    As they eat, Yuji tries to imagine what will happen when the model is finished – what will happen to the model and what will happen to Grandfather. The moment cannot be far away now, no more than another winter, two at most. Will he build an extension onto the house, turn the twelve mats into twenty, let the model grow north to Asakusa? Or will the end of the table be the end of his labours, his memorial to the last of Edo, to the spirit of his eldest grandson, to a thousand streets shaken to firewood then burnt to red ashes?

    He has never said what he intends, only that the last piece will be a rickshaw and its runner hurrying past the Bank of Japan. And though he likes to announce this with a solemn, emphatic nod, Sonoko, in her gentle voice, teases him – ‘You were still pulling rickshaws in ’23? Was it your hobby, perhaps?’ – knowing perfectly well that in ’23 Grandfather was a valued customer at the bank, a rickshaw passenger, perhaps, but not for twenty years the man sweating between the poles. The teasing doesn’t offend. Grandfather knows she understands, and Yuji too. The model is a kind of poem, and in a poem time can be folded many different ways.

    When they have eaten, when the lid is back on the pot, the pickle dish is empty and the rice tub returned to its winter wrap of plaited straw, Grandfather excuses himself, and with a quick wave, retreats to the back of the house for his afternoon nap.

    Yuji goes with Sonoko onto the verandah. He puts on his boots. A breeze is ringing the little iron bell that hangs from the eaves (and how cold the sound is, like the tinkling of ice). When he is ready, and his coat is buttoned, she hands him a sheet of writing paper wrapped round a pair of ten-yen banknotes.

    ‘Grandfather understands your difficulty,’ she says, ‘but hopes you will learn soon what needs to be done.’ She bows to him. He pushes the money into his coat pocket and sets off down the path, his boots crunching over a lattice of winter shadows.

10

From the drying platform he watches Kyoko at the edge of the pond crumbling dried silkworm for her carp. He whistles to her – a soft, low whistle. She turns her head, but before she can find him the old woman rolls out of the house on her chilblained feet and immediately looks up to the platform. Startled, he steps back, hides behind the quilt airing over the drying poles. He wonders if his legs are still on view. He wonders if the old woman is possessed.

    That afternoon he rings Makiyama’s office. Ito, one of his assistants, answers the phone. Makiyama isn’t there. Ito has nothing intelligent to say. Yuji hangs up. To find Makiyama he will have to hunt him, bar by bar, along the Ginza. But not today.

    For supper they eat seven-herb stew. Dr Kushida is their guest. He informs Father that their colleague from Imperial, Mr Amano, has died of a brain seizure. Father nods, puffs on his cigarette. Yuji, touched by the sake, almost asks, ‘But is it serious?’

    Night. On stockinged feet he comes down the stairs to fetch water from the kitchen. He steps over Miyo, who’s sighing in a dream as though some lover was with her, the soy-seller’s son perhaps, tampering with her virginity. In the Western room, a thin light spills over the rug as far as the circular dining table. He steps inside. The screens to the Japanese room are open and the light is coming from the box-lamp beside the alcove. Father is there, sitting cross-legged, surrounded by his collection of incense burners. He is cleaning them, wiping each one carefully with a cloth. On the dresser (next to the photograph of Father and Mother, stiff as dolls, outside the shrine on their wedding day), the hands of the clock stand at twenty to two, Thursday morning.

11

On the fourth day of the second month, the day of the Season-changing Festival, Yuji cycles through a dusk of lightly falling snow to the year’s first full meeting of the French Club. Arriving, he leans his bicycle against a drainpipe, unwinds the scarf from about his face, and rings the bell, a brass bell, round and scalloped like a flower.

    He likes this ritual of ringing and waiting on the step. The house is a little fortress sealed off by red-brick walls, by the black panels of a stout wooden door. Unlike his own home – unlike almost any Japanese home – the inquisitive world cannot simply announce itself with a cry then get halfway in and crane its neck to see round a screen. It’s true, of course, there are windows, large ones, but those on the street are usually shuttered, while those on the upper floor give little away beyond a reflection of roofs and sky, or at night a thread of light between the curtains. It is, he believes, the sort of house the heroes and heroines (not the grandest, of course) of the novels he has read might live in, in Paris or London, or, more particularly, in Moscow or St Petersburg, for the house was built by a Russian in the year after the Nicholai Cathedral was finished. A foreign outpost in the hills of Kanda, a house – despite the new spirit in Japan, that disinterred hostility to the world beyond the black lines of the coasts – he is proud to be seen going into, and which, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he calls
my house of life
.

    He is expecting Hanako, Feneon’s maid, to answer the bell, but it’s Feneon himself, tall, grey-eyed and dressed in an ankle-length smoking jacket of goose-grey silk, who ushers Yuji inside, the pug, Beatrice, peeping from between his slippers.

    As he has hoped, Yuji is the first to arrive. He shakes off his boots and follows Feneon through the hall to the salon, where, in the centre of the room, Hanako is on her knees by the stove, grimacing and crimson-faced as she thrusts a poker into its mouth. The stove is a relict of the house’s original owner, a cask of black iron forged in a Russian foundry for Russian winters and decorated on its sides with a frieze of wild animals, birch trees, iron stars.

    Alissa is sitting at the end of the sofa next to a lamp, an open book on her lap. There is no kimono tonight. Instead, she is wearing a black woollen dress, black stockings, a little red jacket fastened with a row of black buttons. Her hair, which at the year-forgetting party was arranged Shimada-style, is now in a simple glossy plait secured by a black ribbon. Her stick is propped against the rolled leather of the sofa’s arm.

    ‘Not much like spring, is it?’ she says, glancing behind her to the garden window, where snow flickers in the house light and lies along the grey limbs of the magnolia tree. To answer her, Yuji explains that the official opening of spring is not intended to indicate any imminent improvement in the weather but is connected to the yearly cycle of agriculture, the advent of a new planting season, the need for the community to purify itself through rituals such as the scattering of beans and the lighting of sacred fires. He knows, of course, she knows all this, knows it as well as he does himself, but she has spoken to him in Japanese and he wishes to rebuke her for it. On club nights he expects her to speak French. It is, in fact, a rule.

    ‘To warm you up a little,’ says Feneon, handing Yuji a dainty glass in which a mouthful of eau de vie is trembling. He gives a second glass to his daughter, then returns to the drinks table behind the piano for his own glass.

    ‘And what shall our toast be?’ he asks. ‘Health and happiness?’

    ‘An end to stupid wars,’ says Alissa.

    ‘Or at least,’ says Yuji, who here, in a borrowed language, has the dizzying sense he can say those things it would be most unwise to say anywhere else, ‘at least, perhaps, an end to conscription?’

    Feneon rests a hand on his shoulder. Yuji hardly dares to breathe. They raise their glasses, sip, swallow. The doorbell rings. Beatrice leaps from the sofa and pursues Hanako into the hall.

    ‘Things will work out,’ says Feneon. ‘They usually do, somehow.’

    ‘The Emperor will come to his senses,’ says Alissa. ‘He’ll deal with the warmongers.’

    ‘The Emperor?’ says Feneon. ‘It seems to me we know very little about him. I’m not sure we should depend on him doing anything decisive.’

    ‘And in Europe,’ asks Yuji, wishing to remove the name of His Sacred Majesty from the conversation before they are intruded upon, ‘what can people depend on there?’

    ‘Oh,’ says Feneon, shaking his head, ‘on France making lots of speeches, being brave but at the same time utterly incompetent. On England making treaties, then looking after nothing but her own interests. On the Germans being good at catching trains and reducing everything to rubble. On the Russians  . . . well, who can tell what our friends the Russians will do?’

    ‘Arrive in Tokyo,’ says Alissa, ‘if the army keeps provoking them. It’s not 1904 any more. There’s Zhukov’s tanks to deal with this time.’

    Taro, Junzo, Shozo and Oki enter the room, laughing together and rubbing their hands. They bow to Feneon then make a half-circle round the stove. At Junzo’s feet the dog dances on her hind legs. Junzo takes a square of chocolate from his pocket, reaches down and lets her, with her soft muzzle, her little tongue, eat from his hand.

    ‘Junzo’s the kindest of you,’ says Alissa.

    ‘Because he gives chocolate to an animal?’ asks Oki.

    ‘Animal!’ says Feneon. ‘Beatrice is a beautiful woman bewitched on the road by a goblin. If one of you would just agree to kiss her, I’m sure she’d change back to her old form. Don’t any of you want to get married?’

    The young men, gazing at the dog, colour slightly and say nothing. Feneon, smiling to himself, goes to the table and fills more of the dainty glasses. They drink, give back the glasses, then file past the carved oak door into Feneon’s study. On the desk the projector is raised on a plinth of books (
A Cochin Almanac
,
Warren’s Encyclopaedia of Industry
, a volume of Darwin, of Malthus), its brass-bound lens aimed at a linen tablecloth stretched and pegged over the bookshelves. Alissa, with the pug in her lap, sits on the swivel-chair behind the desk, while the others take their places on the rug. Feneon, with the cuff of his smoking jacket, gives the lens a last polish. When he’s satisfied, he nods to Hanako, who pushes up the switch on the wall by the door. There’s a second of utter darkness, then the whirr of the projector’s motor, the ticking of spools, a cone of white light, the pulsing of numbers on the cloth and finally, appearing out of the broken grey like something surfacing at sea, the film’s title:
Pay Day
.

    They’ve seen it before, of course, three or four times, but that’s expected, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that the film is old, because that too is expected: all the films in Feneon’s collection date from before 1929, the year his little unofficial cinema in Saigon (that amusement for the ladies and gentlemen of the Foreign Section) caught fire during the second reel of
Fool’s Paradise
. What matters is the ritual of being there, the occasion’s innocence, like an echo of those childhoods they have so recently left behind them.

    Yuji, his back against the side of the desk, looks between Junzo’s head and Shozo’s, chuckles at the Little Tramp’s antics, then – so familiar is it all, so comfortably familiar – lets his eyes stray from the tablecloth to the gilded spines of Feneon’s library, the silk scrolls on the wall, the Khmer masks, the rack of dragon pipes above the door, the glinting brass lamps from Laos, the Thai Buddha spectral and serene in the weird moonlight of the projector, and plays his usual guessing game as to where amid this clutter, this haul of an adventurer’s life, the letter from Rimbaud is lying, lost or hidden.

    Out of the Frenchman’s hearing, the club is divided on the subject. Oki, with a wave of his cigarette, with that old man’s cynicism he affects, says it’s all a tease, a game of the sort foreigners often play, and which only a simple-minded Japanese would take seriously.

    Taro asks them to consider the facts. Wasn’t Feneon’s father trading in the Arabian Gulf at the same time as Rimbaud? Doesn’t his family come from Sézanne, no more than a short ride from Rimbaud’s Charleville? And why would he make up such a thing, this man who, to the best of their knowledge, is scrupulous in all his dealings?

    Shozo agrees, but argues that the letter never left France, or if it did, has long since vanished, blown away on a breeze or rolled into a taper to light someone’s evening pipe in any of a dozen cities from Pondicherry to Yokohama where Feneon has lived and done business.

    As for Junzo, he is predictably stubborn. For him, the letter is somewhere in the house, somewhere near at hand, and for no better reason than because Alissa Feneon has told him so. She even claimed to have read it, though was, apparently, as evasive as her father when it came to speaking of the contents.