The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (66 page)

•

We always sat across from each other at the same table in the same restaurant, talking. She was a regular there, and of course she always picked up the tab. The back part of the restaurant was divided into private compartments, so that the conversation at any one table could not be heard at another. There was only one seating per evening, which meant that we could talk at our leisure, right up to closing time, without interference from anyone—including the waiters, who approached the table only to bring or clear a dish. She would always order a bottle of Burgundy of one particular vintage and always leave half the bottle unconsumed.

“A bird that winds a spring?” I asked, looking up from my food.

“A bird that winds a spring?” said Nutmeg, repeating the words exactly as I had said them, then curling her lips just a little. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you just say something about a bird that winds a spring?”

She shook her head slowly. “Hmm. Now I can’t remember. I don’t
think
I said anything about a bird.”

I could see it was hopeless. She always told her stories like this. I didn’t ask her about the mark, either.

“So you were born in Manchuria, then?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “I was born in Yokohama. My parents took me to Manchuria when I was three. My father was teaching at a school of veterinary medicine, but when the Hsin-ching city administrators wanted someone sent over from Japan as chief veterinarian for the new zoo they were going to build, he volunteered for the job. My mother didn’t want to abandon the settled life they had in Japan and go off to the ends of the
earth, but my father insisted. Maybe he wanted to test himself in someplace bigger and more open than Japan. I was so young, it didn’t matter where I was, but I really enjoyed living at the zoo. It was a wonderful life. My father always smelled like the animals. All the different animal smells would mix together into one, and it would be a little different each day, like changing the blend of ingredients in a perfume. I’d climb up onto his lap when he came home and make him sit still while I smelled him.

“But then the war took a bad turn, and we were in danger, so my father decided to send my mother and me back to Japan before it was too late. We went with a lot of other people, taking the train from Hsin-ching to Korea, where a special boat was waiting for us. My father stayed behind in Hsin-ching. The last I ever saw him, he was standing in the station, waving to us. I stuck my head out the window and watched him growing smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the crowd on the platform. No one knows what happened to him after that. I think he must have been taken prisoner by the Soviets and sent to Siberia to do forced labor and, like so many others, died over there. He’s probably buried in some cold, lonely patch of earth without anything to mark his grave.

“I still remember everything about the Hsin-ching zoo in perfect detail. I can bring it all back inside my head—every pathway, every animal. We lived in the chief veterinarian’s official residence, inside the grounds. All the zoo workers knew me, and they let me go anywhere I wanted—even on holidays, when the zoo was closed.”

Nutmeg closed her eyes to bring back the scene inside her mind. I waited, without speaking, for her to continue her story.

“Still, though, I can’t be sure if the zoo as I recall it was
really
like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it’s
too
vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I’ve wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?”

It had not. “Do you know if the zoo is still there in Hsin-ching?” I asked.

“I wonder,” said Nutmeg, touching the end of her earring. “I heard that the place was closed up after the war, but I have no idea if it’s still closed.”

•

For a very long time, Nutmeg Akasaka was the only person in the world that I could talk to. We would meet once or twice a week and talk to each
other across the table at the restaurant. After we had met several times like that, I discovered that she was an extremely accomplished listener. She was quick on the uptake, and she knew how to direct the flow of the story by means of skillfully inserted questions and responses.

So as to avoid upsetting her in any way, I always took great care whenever we met to see that my outfit was neat and clean and well chosen. I would put on a shirt fresh from the cleaner’s and choose the tie that best matched it in color. My shoes were always shined and spotless. The first thing she would do when she saw me was examine me top to bottom, with the eyes of a chef choosing vegetables. If anything displeased her, she would take me straight to a boutique and buy me the proper article of clothing. If possible, she would have me change into it then and there. When it came to clothing, she would accept nothing less than perfection.

As a result, my closet began to fill up almost before I knew it. Slowly but steadily, new suits, new jackets, and new shirts were invading the territory that had once been occupied by Kumiko’s skirts and dresses. Before long, the closet was becoming cramped, and so I folded Kumiko’s things, packed them in cartons with mothballs, and put them in a storage area. If she ever came back, I knew, she would have to wonder what in the world had happened in her absence.

I took a long time to explain about Kumiko to Nutmeg, little by little—that I had to save her and bring her back here. She put her elbow on the table, propping her chin in her hand, and looked at me for a while.

“So where is it that you’re going to save Kumiko
from?
Does the place have a name or something?”

I searched for the words in space. But they were not there in space. Neither were they underground. “Someplace far away,” I said.

Nutmeg smiled. “It’s kind of like
The Magic Flute
. You know: Mozart. Using a magic flute and magic bells, they have to save a princess who’s being held captive in a faraway castle. I love that opera. I don’t know
how
many times I’ve seen it. I know the lines by heart: ‘I’m the birdcatcher, Papageno, known throughout the land.’ Ever seen it?”

I shook my head. I had never seen it.

“In the opera, the prince and the birdcatcher are led to the castle by three children riding on a cloud. But what’s really happening is a battle between the land of day and the land of night. The land of night is trying to recapture the princess from the land of day. Midway through the opera, the heroes can’t tell any longer which side is right—who is being held
captive and who is not. Of course, at the end, the prince gets the princess, Papageno gets Papagena, and the villains fall into hell.” Nutmeg ran her finger along the rim of her glass. “Anyhow, at this point you don’t have a birdcatcher or a magic flute or bells.”

“But I do have a well,” I said.

•

Whenever I grew tired from talking or I was unable to go on telling my story because I lost track of the words I needed, Nutmeg would give me a rest by talking about her own early life, and her stories turned out to be far more lengthy and convoluted than mine. And also, unlike me, she would impose no order on her stories but would leap from topic to topic as her feelings dictated. Without explanation, she would reverse chronological order or suddenly introduce as a major character someone she had never mentioned to me before. In order to know to which period of her life the fragment belonged that she was presently narrating, it was necessary to make careful deductions, though no amount of deduction could work in some cases. She would narrate events she had witnessed with her own eyes, as well as events that she had never witnessed.

•

They killed the leopards. They killed the wolves. They killed the bears. Shooting the bears took the most time. Even after the two gigantic animals had taken dozens of rifle slugs, they continued to crash against the bars of their cage, roaring at the men and slobbering, fangs bared. Unlike the cats, who were more willing to accept their fate (or who at least appeared to accept it), the bears seemed unable to comprehend the fact that they were being killed. Possibly for that reason, it took them far longer than was necessary to reach a final parting with that temporary condition known as life. When the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse on the spot. The lieutenant reset his pistol’s safety catch and used his hat to wipe the sweat dripping down his brow. In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. Their ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles. The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears’ corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.

In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers’ rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.

Those animals that were now nothing but corpses were dragged from their cages by the Chinese workers, loaded onto carts, and hauled to an empty warehouse. There, the animals, which came in so many shapes and sizes, were laid out on the floor. Once he had seen the operation through to its end, the lieutenant returned to the zoo director’s office and had the man sign the necessary documents. Then the soldiers lined up and marched away in formation, with the same metallic clanking they had made when they came. The Chinese workers used hoses to wash off the black stains of blood on the floors of the cages, and with brushes they scrubbed away the occasional chunk of animal flesh that clung to the walls. When this job was finished, the workers asked the veterinarian with the blue-black mark on his cheek how he intended to dispose of the corpses. The doctor was at a loss for an answer. Ordinarily, when an animal died at the zoo, he would call a professional to do the job. But with the capital now bracing for a bloody battle, with people now struggling to be the first to leave this doomed city, you couldn’t just make a phone call and get someone to run over to dispose of an animal corpse for you. Summer was at its height, though, and the corpses would begin to decompose quickly. Even now, black swarms of flies were massing. The best thing would be to bury them—an enormous job even if the zoo had access to heavy equipment, but with the limited help available to them now, it would obviously be impossible to dig holes large enough to take all the corpses.

The Chinese workers said to the veterinarian: Doctor, if you will let us take the corpses whole, we will dispose of them for you. We have plenty of friends to help us, and we know exactly where to do the job. We will haul them outside the city and get rid of every last speck. We will not cause you any problems. But in exchange, we want the hides and meat. Especially the bear meat: everybody will want that. Parts of bear and tiger are good for medicine—they will command a high price. And though it’s
too late now to say this, we wish you had aimed only at their heads. Then the hides would have been worth a good deal more. The soldiers were such amateurs! If only you had let us take care of it from the beginning, we wouldn’t have done such a clumsy job. The veterinarian agreed to the bargain. He had no choice. After all, it was
their
country.

Before long, ten Chinese appeared, pulling several empty carts behind them. They dragged the animals’ corpses out of the warehouse, piled them onto the carts, tied them down, and covered them with straw mats. They hardly said a word to each other the whole time. Their faces were expressionless. When they had finished loading the carts, they dragged them off somewhere. The old carts creaked with the strain of supporting the animals’ weight. And so ended the massacre—what the Chinese workers called a clumsy massacre—of zoo animals on a hot August afternoon. All that was left were several clean—and empty—cages. Still in an agitated state, the monkeys kept calling out to one another in their incomprehensible language. The badgers rushed back and forth in their narrow cage. The birds flapped their wings in desperation, scattering feathers all around. And the cicadas kept up their grating cry.

•

After the soldiers had finished their killing and returned to headquarters, and after the last two Chinese workers had disappeared somewhere, dragging their cart loaded with animal corpses, the zoo took on the hollow quality of a house emptied of furniture. The veterinarian sat on the rim of a waterless fountain, looked up at the sky, and watched the group of hard-edged clouds that were floating there. Then he listened to the cicadas crying. The wind-up bird was no longer calling, but the veterinarian did not notice that. He had never heard the wind-up bird to begin with. The only one who had heard it was the poor young soldier who would be beaten to death in a Siberian coal mine.

The veterinarian took a sweat-dampened pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match. As he lit up, he realized that his hand was trembling—so much that it took him three matches to light the cigarette. Not that he had experienced an emotional trauma. A large number of animals had been “liquidated” in a moment before his eyes, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, he felt no particular shock or sadness or anger. In fact, he felt almost nothing. He was just terribly puzzled.