Twenty-Six (41 page)

There is a narrow little path that he has never taken before. It veers left through a ditch where some mountain ash berries, orange and wrinkled, still cling to their stems beneath tiny caps of snow. He decides to follow this little notch in the trees over the crest where the land falls away quickly. He finds himself in a place where a brook has cut a deep V through some shaley rock. The floor of this little valley is only as wide as the brook, which is mostly frozen over. He skis carefully down on snow-cushioned ice, watching for rocks in the brook bed that will scrape the bottom of his skis.

Where the walls of shale end there is a thick, low overhang of leafless willow branches that he must crouch almost to his knees
to get under. He emerges on the other side and finds himself at the bottom of a shallow swampy basin. The country is pockmarked by holes like these, places where long-abandoned mine workings, far below the surface, have given way, collapsed. At the centre of the basin, up to its knees where the animal has gone through the ice, is the biggest bull moose Ennis has ever seen. The moose has already dug big holes in the snow with his snout. The giant rack of his antlers, jutting out from either side of his head like two half-sheets of plywood, are covered with dirty snow and mud from where he has rummaged for food.

Three steps and Ennis would practically be riding him. His heart thumps wildly in the cage of his chest. The moose turns to look straight at him, and beneath the pungent smell of the swamp where the moose has been digging, Ennis gets a hot whiff of the animal, the smell of fur and shit and musk. A single sweep of that massive head could break Ennis in two.

They stand there, man and beast, each looking curiously at the other. The moose chews slowly on some root it has pulled up from the cold mud. Black water drips placidly from the bell beneath its chin. Steam rises from its warm nostrils into the cold air. Ennis unclips his skis, gently shoves them to the other side of the willows, and crawls back through the way he’s come.

On the other side of the thicket, he tries with trembling hands to reclip the skis to the boots. When his fingers prove unable to do this, he takes a step onto the snow with just his boots and finds himself up to his knees, as the moose had been, locked in place. He lies back on the snow and closes his eyes, waits for his breath to come back to him. He opens his eyes in the light of early morning and watches the steam rising up from his own nostrils.
When he arrives back at the house, Dunya is sitting alone on the floor of the front room. Her eyes are closed, her back is straight. A cup of clear tea steams on the floor beside her. Ennis peels off his outer clothes, right down to the long underwear, and goes into the room with her. She opens her eyes at the sound of him entering. Without looking, she picks up her teacup and drinks from it. She closes her eyes again. Ennis sits on the futon across from her. He feels himself trembling slightly, so slightly it would be invisible to Dunya, even if she had her eyes open.

“I saw a moose,” he says.

She opens her eyes and regards him.

“A moose,” says Ennis. “It was like …” He has no words for the experience. He places a hand flat on the centre of his chest until he feels the beating of his heart. He moves closer to his wife, sits on the floor in front of her, the closest he’s been in months.

Looking at the soft features of her face, he remembers the petite, pretty girl she was growing up. She came from what then seemed the exotic north end of the Red Row, a place where the Poles, Ukrainians, Belgians, and other European immigrant families settled. She was always so gentle and shy. He walked past her house on the way to the tracks, taking the iron bridge to New Glasgow in the days before the highway. And there she’d be, bent over with her father in the garden at the front of the place, using her strong bare hands to pull weeds from the dahlia beds. They were no longer kids the first time he’d taken her out on a date. They had both been out of school and working for their keep for a long time. He remembers how tall and self-confident she looked in a short-sleeved floral dress on a summer night, standing at the far end of the plank-covered dirt walkway to her front door, waiting for him. When he reached the step, he smelled the
late peonies against the fence. Through the screen on her front door, he heard her parents talking in the kitchen, speaking a language he did not understand. Ennis and Dunya walked the tracks down to the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, holding hands the whole way. On the iron bridge that crossed the East River, he thought he’d impress her by walking on the ties, which were not far enough apart to fall through, but were empty in between all the way down to the water. But she followed right behind him without saying a word. She’d done it a hundred times before.

Later, on the way back up the tracks in the dark, after the movie was over, he tried to slip his hand under the dress. She didn’t say a word, but backed away quietly, and backed away again when he tried again.

Slowly, apprehensively, one hand still over his own heart, he reaches out and puts the other hand on Dunya’s shoulder. She holds his gaze without saying anything. Her shoulder tenses at his touch, then relaxes again. She closes her eyes once more and he can hear her exhaling slowly.

W
hen their train pulled into the main station in Hakone, they transferred to a local that took them to a funicular station. They rode the funicular uphill about a kilometre to a pretty little subdivision on the side of a mountain. If the day were clearer, Meta doubtless would be able to see a great distance from the mountainside, but in Tokyo it is raining, and big, low pillowy clouds are banked against the mountainside, locking them in.

Yuka has a little map that is printed on the back of the glossy brochure for the rest house, and she peers into it for a few moments, orienting herself. A few times she peers up from the map and shifts her position slightly, lining up the map with the grid of streets before her.

Meta imagines the rest house will be a run-down concrete box of a building. She’s learned that you get what you pay for in Japan, where she’s been charged more than ten dollars for a
simple cup of coffee. And she and Yuka are paying almost nothing for these accommodations, compared, that is, to what they’d pay for a hotel. Yuka has assured her that the price is low because it is subsidized by the municipal ward. “Rest house is beautiful,” Yuka said when she’d first made the invitation for Meta to come along.

“Have you been there?” Meta asked.

Yuka shook her head. “I see a picture,” she said.

“This way,” Yuka says suddenly, crinkling the map into a pocket and picking up her Louis Vuitton bag. Meta struggles to keep up as Yuka heads off down a narrow street.

The rain that was teeming down when they left Tokyo is wafting slowly here in big flakes. The snow is on the wet side of firm, and the flakes are piling up quickly. The accumulation has been pushed back from the streets several times already. The banks beside Meta are almost waist-high. Still, the ground is covered with a thick white blanket, and though there are tire tracks on the streets and footprints on the sidewalks, the only movement in sight is the falling of snow.

Meta is pleasantly surprised at the sight of the rest house. At first glance, it appears to be less than five years old. Its steel and glass arches, though no more than three storeys tall, give the building an air of grandeur set against the snow-softened greenery that surrounds them. Inside the spacious lobby, walls of glass stretch all the way to the vaulted ceiling, letting daylight stream in. The hostess who shows them around takes them through the entrance and lobby into a vast games room that is carpeted and full of plush chairs and tables and cluttered with boxes of board games. On an elevated floor at the far end stand the ping-pong
tables, two of them. Most of the guests, the hostess informs them, are getting ready for dinner, which will be served in twenty minutes.

“There is
very
nice onsen bath here,” Yuka says. “I see a picture.”

Meta plops down on the loveseat and feels herself sink into the plush. Their room is large, with windows at the far end that look out over a terraced balcony and a snow-covered garden of evergreen trees and shrubs. Just inside the windows there is a sitting area: a loveseat and chair with a coffee table between. Their room is so clean and new and spacious, the view outside the window so tranquil, that the effect is to immediately cleanse Meta of the crampedness, clutter, and grubbiness of Tokyo.

“This place is unbelievable,” she says. She looks out over the garden, letting the peacefulness of the scene lull her. Yuka is scurrying about unpacking. Meta wishes her friend would slow down now that they are here in the mountains. Yuka made the reservation for the rest house long ago, before her boyfriend went to Kyoto. She’d even made arrangements for Kazuhiro to spend the weekend with a relative who lived near the seashore at Chiba, two hours south of the city. Meta knows she herself is an afterthought, second choice.

“Now is time for meal,” Yuka says. She rushes to the door and holds it open, waiting for Meta to get up from where she’s settled in.

The dining room is traditional, with tatami mats, low tables, and cushions to sit on, seating maybe 150 people or more. Everyone but Meta and Yuka is dressed in a yukata, a casual belted robe made from cotton. Most seem to be retirement-aged.
There are a lot of smiles in the room, which unnerves Meta somewhat. She is used to the stone-faced expressions people wear on the streets of Tokyo, but this is where people go to deliberately shed that disguise. People are actually laughing, calling out to each other.

A hostess shows them to the table that corresponds to their room number. The meal is already laid out for them, cooling.

Each place setting has several vessels, small and large, each containing a separate part of the meal. There is a bowl of miso soup with seaweed and tofu, a bowl of hot rice, a plate of grilled fish, a smaller plate with some fried tofu, several small dishes, each with a different sort of pickle, a tray for dipping sauces, a small plate of wasabe, some pickled ginger root, and a good portion of battered deep-fried vegetables.

Yuka raises a tiny glass of sake to her lips and takes a taste. “This is low-quality sake,” she says. “But taste is not so bad.”

Meta still feels cold and damp after being outside in the snow, and she drinks the miso before it cools. This does nothing to warm her, so she raises the sake to her lips and tips it back in a single swallow. She almost gags on the flavour, but the alcohol goes shooting through her, shaking her with a quick, invigorating shiver, then settling to a fiery ball in her stomach that begins slowly to spread through her.

They eat hungrily after their journey, with barely enough room between bites for conversation. Occasionally Yuka explains what some food item is, how it is prepared, or exactly how one is supposed to eat it.

At the end of the meal, Meta leans back and feels herself sink pleasantly into the cushion she sits on. The tightness in her begins
to loosen. Beautiful scenery, some alcohol, a full stomach, these have worked a spell on her. Across the table, Yuka smiles at her, and two age lines bracket her mouth. It has been several weeks since her boyfriend’s departure, and Meta thinks that part of Yuka’s changed demeanour is probably due to a gradual loss of physical pain. She isn’t pounded on regularly, and this may be the first time since Meta has known her that Yuka is not nursing a fresh injury.

They return to their room when the meal is over. There is light coming in from the windows on the courtyard, but the sun has set and the light shines down from the still-lit clouds and reflects up from the snow. The maids have come through and laid out their futons, taking them from the big closets in the walls. Giant, thick quilts cover both beds, and Meta throws herself onto one, wiggling down into its softness. Face in the bedding, she opens her eyes just wide enough to see the pure, clean light that suffuses the room.

“Don’t fall asleep yet,” Yuka says.

Meta opens her eyes fully and rolls onto her back to see Yuka standing naked over her. Her clothes are folded neatly on the chair beside her, and the yukata, supplied with the room, is draped over a forearm. Meta startles at this sudden vision of flesh. On the only occasions Meta had seen Yuka’s skin, it has been burned or bruised or bandaged or swelling over a broken bone. Now in the magical light of Hakone, her dark, wheat-coloured skin glows with the same wavelength of light as the room. Her two small, round breasts curve up slightly to peak into large, dark nipples. Yuka slips the robe over her shoulders and cinches it at the waist.

“Now we will go onsen,” Yuka says.

Meta lies back on the futon. She does not want to move. Everything inside her is leaning toward sleep. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” she says.

“You
must
come onsen,” Yuka says. Her tone expresses an absolute lack of choice. “But first is small surprise.”

She bends down to her suitcase and pushes through some clothes until she pulls out a brown paper bag with black kanji on the side. Meta recognizes the symbol for alcohol. On top of the clothes in the suitcase, there is a package of Some Time cigarettes.