The Painting (2 page)

The cherry-bark man said the same thing the old woman had. He’d done what he could. You cling to the dark cave of your body, he said. Perhaps you’ve welded yourself to it. A memory you won’t release. Or maybe the injury is too grave.

I
DID NOT LEAVE
the mountain for another ten years. A hut and a place to do my pottery, that was all I wanted. I attended morning and midday prayers and took care of the garden, planting potatoes and daikon, daisies and wild roses. Mostly, I spun pots using clay from the mountain’s stream. The same clay that had adorned my feet. The cherry-bark man still visited me. He would ask, Boy, what have you learned from your pain? It was only later that I would understand what it gave me, what it propelled me to do, and much, much later, how much it had stripped away.

JAPAN 1869

P
ERHAPS SHE WILL PROVIDE
a distraction, he thinks, trying not to look at the once elegant teahouse still smoldering from last night’s fire. Even from his spot behind the glass, he smells the bitter smoke, though he imagines he is more sensitive to it than others. And when he breathes, the gritty soot hurts his lungs. He thinks he knows who set the fire and even why; he just isn’t sure what to do. He looks until his limbs quiver, his feet ache, and now he must grip the edge of the wall to steady himself.

Whatever is she doing? The way his wife is walking down the stone path in the garden, placing a sandaled foot here, arching her back, stretching over to her right and then to the center of the path, Hayashi wonders if she might be drunk. Perhaps last night upset her with the flames and smoke and panic. Her movements scare off a kingfisher. He’s about to call for the maid to bring her back inside when he sees she is playing some sort of game, a silly game of not stepping on the fallen leaves. How could she possibly—of all mornings, when she must know how painful it is for him.

She’s reached the small bridge that crosses over the stream and leads to the teahouse. She wears her pale peach morning kimono with images of white fortunes printed on the fabric. Her black hair tumbles from its bun, skulking
down her back, and she is stunning, replete with youthful beauty. He knows that when people meet them, they wonder why such a beautiful woman is married to him.

There is fire in her body, he thinks. Look at the way the air shimmers around her. Too much desire; all she ever wants to do is paint. If she could, she’d stay in that studio for hours, painting and painting, who knows what, he’s seen so little of her work. He puts his hand on the top of a chair. His feet throb, as they nearly always do, but today, they are excruciatingly painful. He can only stand on them for bits of time, his life divided up by how long they can bear his weight. He wishes she’d come back inside and tend to them.

S
HE AWAKENS
. F
OR FOUR
days, she’s barely painted. There was the shopping to do and the making of a special dinner for guests, his guests, a celebration of the autumn season and his moon-watching ceremony. After the party, his feet pulsed and she worked on them for a half hour before she asked the maid to take over. And then last night, of all things, someone had burned down the teahouse. She can’t imagine Hayashi has any enemies; he’s such a mild, quiet man. He’ll do nearly anything to keep the waters smooth. This fire, she’s sure it will disrupt her plans. Everything already feels disjointed, and it isn’t even midmorning. But she must paint.

Gray coats the light outside, A dull light, she thinks, rather like my thoughts. He usually sleeps at least another hour. On her way to the studio, she passes by the teahouse. Dew still glosses the grass, the night’s residue. A bird calls out, slicing through the silence of the morning, and she smiles, searching for it—a long-tailed rosefinch or tree sparrow? When she first came here two years ago, she hated almost everything—the big, cold house that looms behind her, the Buddhist temple next to it, and the cemetery, where the townspeople bury their dead.

But the gardens. Oh, the gardens are lovely and expansive and she is most comfortable in the lush green, the tall willows, maples, oak, dogwood, and bamboo. Here, she can roam. And there, the smell of the rich cinnamon bark of the trees, the light dappled on the flat, shiny madrona leaves, the expanse of sky. Look! A kingfisher. Perhaps she will paint that iridescent blue, the
bright orange of fire on its chest. When she first arrived, she spent all her time in the garden, wandering, sitting, sketching, until he moved his bags of clay and gave her one side of his studio.

She steps on the stone path. The maple leaves with their rough teeth edges lie in her way. She is both attracted and repelled by them. Fallen stars, she thinks, bad luck to step on one, shatter someone’s dream. She moves aside. Maybe my dream. Or perhaps they are good luck, she doesn’t know. She smells the teahouse from the far side of the bridge, its smoldering bamboo and reed. Her day, ruined, she is certain, by this fire.

She senses she’s being watched. He is awake, she thinks, and as she turns to look, a quick glance—why is he awake—her hair comes unpinned. She turns abruptly away. He’s supposed to sleep another hour. She knows it will be a difficult day for him, the teahouse burning, unfolding terrible memories, but why can’t she have this small corner of time?

And now she can’t erase the image of his thin limbs poking out of his sleeves, his face gaunt, and those dark, deep-set eyes, always remote, always tinged with anger and sadness. She lingers longer, watching the leaves.

She picks one up and tosses it in the air, trying to postpone when she must go and attend to him. Lately, her dreams have been about flying. She flies far from this place west of the new capital, now called Tokyo, above the rice paddies, the fields of barley and wheat, an ocean of grass racing to the horizon, above the rows of small houses, the new buildings sprouting and slanting up the hillsides, and hunts for her lover. She is no longer sure he is in Ezo, or what the new government now calls Hokkaido.

These dreams, she thinks, smiling timorously, perhaps they are a good sign. Perhaps it means he is coming, or he is here. And then she lets herself think a fanciful thought: Maybe her lover set the fire.

H
E LEAVES THE KITCHEN
table, tired of waiting for his wife, shuffles away from her disturbing actions, down the long hallway of the house. Along white stones, he walks to the temple, only a short distance from the house, and opens the side door to the main room. All sound is swallowed here, a pool of stillness with the focal point in the center of the room against the far
wall, the contemplative Buddha, fat, golden, glimmering, and smiling, as if he has a secret. The Buddha is surrounded by the villagers’ offerings, huge white bags of rice, green bottles of sake, sticks of incense, shiny coins, jars of pickled pink ginger, and dried barley. The goat that someone once brought is in the back pasture, along with a horse that needs new shoes.

He takes a soft cloth and polishes the Buddha, beginning at the base, up the legs, his rounded belly, and there—what’s this—at his neck, a hairline crack. When did this happen? He studies the fragile split. Since the eleventh century, the Buddha has sat, and now, why now, this fissure? He traces his fingernail along the line and feels his eyes water.

Nothing lasts, he murmurs. And it is true, so he says it again.

He peers out the small window and a few villagers have arrived, waiting for the front doors to open. Big puffs of steam flare from their nostrils; they are slapping their hands together to stay warm and perhaps to let him know they are waiting outside.

He opens the heavy, wooden door. Please, he says. Come in.

They file in, set down their offerings, take a cushion, and sit, facing the Buddha. Today, there are only eight. A few weeks ago, more than two dozen, and the numbers will dwindle further now that the Meiji leaders have declared Shintoism, not Buddhism, the national religion. Still, the few ardent villagers come and he lets them in; still, on New Year’s Eve, he will ring the bronze bell 108 times, 8 in the old year and 100 in the new year, chasing away the 108 worldly desires by the ringing sound. So smart, these new officials believe they are, thinks Hayashi. They proclaim with such arrogance they can rip asunder beliefs with a silly piece of paper.

W
HEN HE RETURNS To
the kitchen, she still has not come inside.

Shall I begin, Hayashi-san? asks the maid.

Soon he will have to leave for town to report the fire. No, he says, shoving his feet into the bucket of ice. The hem of his kimono falls into the bucket and he jerks it from the freezing water and rings it out. The maid steps into the kitchen. He sits still and listens to the wind and thinks, Sorrow is a boat that only drifts backward.

Finally, Ayoshi comes inside.

I’m sorry, he says, but I must ask you—

Of course, she says and kneels before him, plunging her hands into the ice. She presses her thumbs into his arches. His hands are trembling, his jaw flares in and out as he grinds his molars. He is shaky this morning, she thinks. Perhaps she’s made it worse by lingering outside. Her hands already ache from the cold. She presses and massages and for a long time, neither one of them says anything. Finally, she asks what he’s going to do about the fire.

He tells her he’s meeting with the government officials in town. He’s going to have to walk; the horse is not yet shoed. You’re welcome to join me.

I’m sorry. I have a lot of work to do, she says, averting her eyes to his feet. She pushes harder. Who could have done such a thing? she asks.

What work? he thinks. She has no work; she prefers to paint. He stares at his wife and imagines the winds of youth blowing through her. There are some mornings he is certain she’ll be gone. The other side of the bed is often empty, she rises so early and rushes to the studio. For some time now, he has thought the matchmaker chose the wrong one; perhaps the matchmaker didn’t know certain facts or chose not to disclose them. Of course, his wife is very skilled in the healing ways. She has hands full of energy and she moves in the spirited way. Perhaps the monks who made the arrangements with the go-between thought this was enough. Or maybe they chose not to tell him the whole story. The matchmaker guaranteed she came from a good family and that she was still pure. He knows the new leaders made her father an official representative, responsible for carving up the Hokkaido area into small plots of land for rice farmers. Before that, he was a feudal lord under the Tokugawa and adamantly against opening Japan to the West. But like so many others, he had to change his ways. Hayashi fretted about meeting her father. He assured the stiff old man with high cramped shoulders and an air of stony vigilance that he could provide for his daughter. He was certain her father would ask about Hayashi’s connection to the West, whether he planned to travel there, take his daughter there, but her father stood straight as a knife and barely said anything.

He leans away from her, from the pain in his feet shooting up the back of
his calves and his right shin bone. Her hands, he thinks. He often forgets how powerful they are. When she first arrived as his wife, she massaged his feet every morning without waiting for him to ask. Now he feels as if he must beg.

Her hands burn from the cold. She pries her mind from her freezing fingertips. Outside, the naked branches of the maple, each leafless line, an experiment in design. Maybe she will put them in her painting today, she thinks, but no, it has never worked that way. She hears the wind rattle the window. Last night, it whipped the flames high into the black sky, the wood crackled, the smoke billowed, and she stood at the window, enthralled. She’d never tell Hayashi this, but it looked like a festival she once attended in Hokkaido. A large bonfire, with bundles of mugwort and bamboo grass being burned for purification. The men and women dressed in costumes, dancing, singing, and feasting. A spirit-sending ceremony. A dead bear had been found and they were sending its spirit back to the god world. She watched the flames of the bear’s spirit shoot up to the sky, her lover standing beside her.

Her thumb joint creaks. She begins to lose her final pocket of precious warmth. Is this working? she asks.

He nods, tasting metallic bitterness. He knows this taste comes from a lingering panic. When he was a boy, and the fire held him, swallowed up the air and the coolness, his mouth was full of the same acrid saliva. Then vomit when he smelled burning flesh. He calls out to the maid for a glass of water. She hands him a cup; he gulps it down and asks for another. As the taste subsides, he looks onto the memory of his burning house with horror, his family gone, but before that, before the flames, his proud father, his kind mother, his sister, the shameless beauty of his life; and somehow he cannot separate the two, the horror from the beauty, so closely linked, so intrinsically bound.

This is working, he says to his wife, hoping to reassure her. His grip on the edge of the chair eases.

Good. She clenches her jaw.

And it is happening, the lovely moment is unfolding. He can’t feel anything in his right big toe. His left heel is disappearing to the cold and he loves this
feeling, this erasure of his feet. He imagines he was once made of water. A long time ago, his limbs were plump with soft water; his skin, smooth like his wife’s.

She hates his feet. The arch of each foot collapsed and blackened with streaks of dark purple, the outer edges pink with a line of bright red, the bottoms of his toes a swirl of black and dark blue, and his heels a separate color altogether, a shiny brown and black, like the streak left by a banana slug. She knows these colors too well. Several months ago, the colors seeped into her dreams. When she woke in the morning, she felt a churning in her stomach, certain they would tunnel their way into her paintings. That’s when she asked the maid to take over.

She digs her fingers into his toes. Her thumb on top, her second finger below. The dent in the big toe on the left foot, he told her about it. Not from the fire. He must have been four. His family went to the seashore to escape the summer heat. He was so excited—did she have that reaction to water, he asked—he ran barefoot in the white sand and stepped on a piece of green glass. Strange, he said, how the body carries its marks.