The Heat of the Sun (20 page)

‘Prince Yamadori?’ I said, emerging into a courtyard lined with pale gravel. A gong, bronze and immense, glimmered by the far wall. In the centre of the wide space, an old man in
orange robes raked the stones with meditative calm. As I approached, he did not look up.

‘I was told to come,’ I said, my voice low.

The old man kept raking, face averted, head down. I touched his arm and he giggled; he was senile, or perhaps had acquired so great a tranquillity that every reaction was at tortoise-speed. The
bent head rolled towards me, revealing eyes sleek with yellow film. ‘Sharpless-san?’ he said at last, and pointed to the shrine that lay across the courtyard.

Shadowy eaves overhung the entrance. Inside, sweetness hovered on the air. Light, pale and smoky, seeped through high lattices and, from the dark back wall, above an altar laid with flowers,
loomed a Buddha, impassive and vast. Prostrate before the statue was a solitary saffron form. A peculiar composure filled me, and I thought how I had misjudged what awaited me.

‘Trouble,’ I said, when the saffron form rose. If his blondness appeared incongruous against the Zen robes, I did not consider it. There was a rightness to him, a naturalness, as he
came towards me.

He smiled. ‘I see you’ve met the Bonze.’

‘Bonze?’ Hovering outside was the old man, still holding the rake.

Trouble said, ‘You knew he was my great-uncle?’

‘How could I know that?’

Moments later the raking resumed, the languorous
scrape... scrape
. Trouble and I were meeting in a dream: it did not seem strange that we had not said hello, not shaken hands, not
embraced.

He led me out of the shrine. We would walk in the gardens, he said, and explained that his great-uncle, now a servant, had once been a priest of this temple, but gave it up after Trouble’s
mother died. ‘He’d denounced her, you see. Cast her out of the family for becoming a Christian. He never forgave himself.’

We passed beneath cypresses, Trouble keeping a slow pace by my side. Shadows and sunlight flickered over his robes.

‘So, you’re a Buddhist now?’ I said. ‘You believe all that?’

‘What’s believing? You think you have to trust in something, be convinced of it absolutely.’ I was not sure he was talking to me: by
you
, perhaps, he meant Westerners
generally. ‘Here, you learn that it’s practice that’s important. Forget belief. There are things you just
do
. All else follows.’

I said, ‘But Yamadori, you believe in him?’

We had come to a stony platform overlooking a lawn. Trouble gestured for me to sit on a bench. Far out on the lawn, three young men in monks’ robes competed at archery. As they stretched
back their bows, it seemed to me there was no element of play in their actions, but care, a care as meticulous as the Bonze’s in his interminable raking of the gravel. Punctuating my talk
with Trouble came a muted
thop-thop
of arrows striking targets.

‘I’d expected Yamadori,’ I said. ‘To see him, I mean.’

‘We thought you might. But I’m the one who has to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Sharpless, what did you expect to happen?’ he said.

‘That I’d hear about Le Vol.’ I had barely thought about him.

‘Oh, they’ve released him. I dare say he’s waiting for you back at the consulate. Better be quick, though. Tomorrow, he must leave Japan. He’s been lucky. I was able to
change the prince’s mind.’

‘Thank you.’ I gripped his hand.

His voice hardened. ‘I’m not coming back. You know that, don’t you? In America I was incomplete, always at a loss. And Mama could have told me so much. But all she told were
lies. And the senator’s no better. He’s worse. Why does he hate me so much?’

‘He doesn’t. You can’t forgive him – ever?’

‘There’s a saying we have in Japan,
Shikata ga nai
. It can’t be helped. Too bad. I know what you’re doing. You want me to go back and I can’t. I won’t.
It’s not about forgiving. Once I lived in the wrong world. Now I don’t.’

A flush spread up my neck. ‘No. You’re half-Japanese, but half-American too. You grew up in America. Your family’s American. How often do you play this game, dressing up in
monk’s robes?’

‘It isn’t a game. I’m at school.’

‘I get it. Renounced your religion, like your mother.’

‘You don’t understand my mother. Don’t think you do.’ He reached into his robes and withdrew a small, glittering object: the dagger. Casually, he held it out to me. How
beautiful were the handle and scabbard: the gold, the silver, the precious stones. I drew out the blade.

‘See that writing in Japanese?’ Trouble’s voice seemed to come from afar. ‘
To die with honour when one can no longer live with honour
. I think all the time about
those words.’

I said abruptly, ‘There’s a war coming.’

‘Japan and America? All America cares about is keeping the profits flowing. Any war that’s coming, they’ll keep well out of it.’

The bowmen had left off their contest and stood talking; they could have been any three young men, relaxed after play. One of them waved a hand to Trouble, and Trouble waved in return.

‘Tell Kate it’s no good, all right?’ he said. ‘Tell her it’ll always be no good.’

‘You thought I came for Kate?’

‘You did, didn’t you? You’re her ambassador.’

The bowmen were splitting up; one, the one who had waved, walked in our direction. His robes glowed in the sun and I thought how beautiful he was: a loose-limbed, carefree boy, bow and quiver
hooked across one shoulder. How different Isamu appeared, dressed as a monk!

I began to tremble. The dagger glittered in my hand, as if I meant to stab myself and was hesitating. ‘Trouble, this is all unreal. War will come. There’ll be no place for you here.
Come home. Save yourself.’

‘But I have. I
am
home.’ He took back the dagger, concealing it in his robes again as Isamu reached us. Addressing Trouble in Japanese, Isamu mimed an arrow-shot, cuffed
Trouble playfully, raised a hand to me, then made his way back towards the temple buildings.

Envy and sorrow burned in me like fire. What Trouble had said was true: all the time, but unknowingly, I had been Kate Pinkerton’s ambassador, and my mission, I realized now, had
failed.

That evening, Le Vol, Clifford T. Arnhem and I indulged in a long, drunken dinner. Mr Arnhem, doing violence to a samisen, yammered out the one about Naga-sacky where the
fellers chew tobaccy and the women wicky-wacky-woo; Goro, joining us, laughed over everything and nothing, then sobbed between gluggings of sake for his dead friend Yakuside. The girl Kiku,
covering her mouth, told jokes in broken English. The night was hot, the doors open; insects plunged and darted about the lamps. Mr Arnhem, growing sombre, played the one about the Japanese
sandman, an old second-hand man, trading new days for old.

In the morning I said goodbye to Le Vol.

‘You’re sure you won’t come home?’ I asked him.

‘They’re only throwing me out of Japan, not making me go to America. I can’t pass up this chance. You should come too. Come on – China! It’s the story we’ve
been waiting for.’

Was I a coward? Was I a fool? I held up my ashplant, my excuse for everything, and said: ‘Be careful, old friend.’

My own ship, for San Francisco, was to sail a week later, but before it left, a restlessness claimed me and I departed early, bound for Hong Kong. Goro, by the gangplank, bowed to me deeply and
urged on me again the charms of his niece in Takeo. Tearfully, he babbled that she would wait for my return.

A suspended period in my life began. I lingered in Hong Kong, that peculiar British outpost that seemed so disconnected from the massing bulk of China; I travelled overland to the French city of
Saigon and by ship to Singapore, secure in the embrace of the British Empire; further south to Batavia, in the Dutch East Indies; east, to Port Moresby in the Australian protectorate of Papua;
north-west to Manila, in the American islands of the Philippines.

Everywhere I felt the press of strangers. Natives massed against me in promiscuous streets, and colonials slapped me on the back in clubs beneath laggardly, churning ceiling fans; I found myself
driven along jungle tracks or taken shooting, or hauled off to brothels by planters who had heard I was a visiting writer. Dutifully, I investigated temples and palaces and travelled on trains past
squalid shacks and dazzling lakes and lush terraced hills, but nothing could assuage the loneliness that gnawed at me like physical pain. I favoured hotels near the sea. At night, lying awake,
hearing the moon tugging at the tide, I would feel as if my soul were driftwood, buffeted on the waves, and wish that one day I could be washed ashore.

In Bataan, shaving one morning, I saw that my face was bloated. My nose and cheeks were red, and my eyes looked boiled. Months had gone by. I was running out of money. I suppose I thought that
if I kept close to Japan I was somehow tied to Trouble, revolving, if distantly, in his orbit.

At breakfast, I paid attention to the papers. The war in China had gone from bad to worse. For months, I had seen something strained in the faces of the colonials: the same fear, the same sense
of an ending. Yamadori’s threats were coming true. All across the Far East, palm trees swayed, rice paddies gleamed, rains pelted down and were soaked up by the sun, and rickshaws clattered
through stinking streets: all was as it had always been, yet something was over, as if a curtain had fallen.

I sailed home via Guam and Honolulu.

Arriving in New York one blustery afternoon, I realized a destiny that had lain in wait ever since I had taken my leave from Trouble at the temple of Shofuku-ji. When I reached Gramercy Park,
there were lights on in the houses. Slowly, I ascended the steep steps. The butler, with oppressive deference, showed me into the drawing room. I felt I was expected.

Trembling, I looked about me: at Kate Pinkerton, like the figurehead of a ship, unchanged in all the years I had known her, swelling majestically over the tea table. At the ornaments, the glazed
spines of books, the ancestral portraits. At the guests: the lady-librarian type, hair up in a bun; this or that society lady in too many pearls; the society gentleman, sleek and neutered, whose
cheeks and chin appeared greased with oil. And there, standing at the fireplace, elbow on the mantelpiece at a jaunty angle, the guest who was not a guest at all. He filled my mind like a vision:
thick blond hair, neatly parted; pale grey lounge suit, with trousers knife-edge sharp; cigarette burning in a laconic hand.

As I entered, he was deep in some anecdote, but he left off when he saw me. Kate Pinkerton cleared her throat, ready for introductions, but all I could do was stand, swaying a little, in the
middle of the carpet, and say softly, almost to myself:

‘Trouble. You’ve come home.’

ACT FOUR

Trouble had said he would pick me up in Albuquerque.

Making my way across the army airfield on a cloudless day in early summer I saw no sign of him, and my spirits sank; Los Alamos was – what? – eighty, ninety miles away and I
didn’t like the idea of arranging my own transport from this sleepy-looking base. The sun beat down hotly.

In the airfield’s only building, a long, low, galvanized-iron shed, a young sergeant with too many freckles stirred himself behind a counter that looked like a bar, saluted sloppily, and
told me in a drawling voice that no, no sir, nobody had come for me. Grinning, he added, ‘You part of that show at Los Alamos, sir? What do you make up there – rockets to the
moon?’

The fellow annoyed me, but I let him fix me coffee in a chipped enamel mug, while I sat and waited on a pew-like bench. Mechanics and a pilot came and went. Some stopped to chat with the
sergeant, leaning, elbows crooked, across the counter, as if with tankards of beer; none paid attention to Major Sharpless and I had begun to wonder if Trouble would ever come when a vehicle
squealed up outside, cheers broke out, and a voice I knew well cried in triumph, ‘Forward to victory!’

It had been the senator’s campaign slogan in 1928.

Colonel Ben Pinkerton (as Trouble now was) bounded into the shed. Immaculate in his well-pressed uniform, he remained lithe and slender, the hair visible beneath his cap still blond; only later
did I see strands of grey and cracks in the skin around his eyes.

He pumped my hand enthusiastically, shouldered my knapsack, and led me out to the jeep.

‘I could have got a driver,’ he said, ‘but I thought it’d be better if we could talk properly. You’re looking good. The uniform suits you – Major
Sharpless!’

As I hauled myself into the passenger seat, the mechanics, hunkered in a row by the shed, studied us idly; one, a sunburned fellow with a wrench in his hand, made some smart-aleck comment I did
not quite hear. Trouble only smiled, flung my things into the back of the jeep, and blasted the horn three times as he tore out of the base with a spray of gravel.

‘Popular fellow, aren’t you?’ I observed.

‘It’s not about me. It’s Los Alamos. They’ve guessed something’s up and they’re dying to know. Some of the stories you wouldn’t believe – Flash
Gordon, I tell you!’

We passed through a checkpoint and swung northwards. Trouble wore dark glasses and chewed gum. On an unpaved highway he put on speed, and I snatched off my cap before the wind snatched it
instead. Dust churned under our wheels, and I had to shout, ‘So it’s some big scientific show, this place at Los Alamos? You’re up there all the time these days – and the
senator too?’

‘Let’s just say we’re going to end this war – and soon.’

I had never doubted it. Already the Nazis had surrendered in Europe; Japan, after the firebombing of Tokyo, seemed hardly likely to hold out much longer.

I said, ‘Do you think the Japs ever really had a chance? They didn’t, did they?’

‘Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember Singapore? An Eastern country, raining down ruin on the Empires of the West! I wouldn’t bet it’s over yet.’

Often I had imagined the firebombing of Tokyo: the B-29s crossing the dark skies like monstrous, malevolent insects, the bombs pounding unceasingly, the fires rampaging, consuming mile after
mile of flimsy wooden buildings. How many thousands had died in the inferno? Roads had become rivers of boiling tarmac. There had been no escape.