Searching through the last of my boxes (and, yes, I have some boxes to my name) I pull out a radio. Perhaps I used it to listen to the baseball. Maybe sumo. I suffer a flashback – blurry, distorted – and grasp at it: the usual suits crowding a table. The second floor of a wooden shack of an izakaya. Downtown Shinjuku. Hands hold cups of sake and cigarettes. A moment of anticipation, waiting, then … the umpire shrieks and the crowd roars out a noise like the rush hour and it’s only a fraction of a second before the salary man huddle, all senses dulled for the benefit of sound, explodes, triumphant. Almost ecstatic. Sake is spilt. Two men fall over each other. Hands squeeze arms and slap backs. Eleven voices sound simultaneously. I am crying, but then I am old.
I dust the radio with my right sleeve and push a space clear at the end of the bookshelf which relentless earthquakes have left unsteady. It sits snugly in its nook, this antiquated device, symmetrical to the wall and sporting a sombre gleam along its black handle. There’s something beautiful about it: something genuine and sensical. I make the tea. With habitual slowness.
Outside is a bonsai tree inherited from my mother. Plum. I tend to it every morning, after my tea and toast. The tree hasn’t flowered for almost forty years. Nothing. Only leaves. The last time plum blossom opened out along its branches, it was early January: dangerously premature. When I try to recall the swansong, the first thing to come to me is the smell. I opened up the balcony doors so the apartment could fill with it, in spite of the gruelling cold. I follow the trail of scent to the image of the flowers: the space between the petals, the subtle colouring of the stamen. Foregrounded against a backdrop of crisp blues: the towers of glass reflecting the sky. The tree still sits at the corner of the balcony on its simple wooden pedestal, though the skyscrapers behind it are greater than ever, in size and number. I keep to the horizontal, focus on the light creeping through the clothing on the washing line; the tiny leaves of the perfectly-formed plum tree; the brittle clothes pegs with their rusty hinges, lying the floor. Or I let my focus fall over the side.
Because my twelve-mat apartment sits at the corner of the building, I have two balconies, both large by Tokyo standards. Each stretches the length of the apartment. The south-facing balcony houses a drying line, the bonsai tree on its rickety shelf, and an old, plastic washing machine, on whose greying surface is a picture of a cat and, underneath, the legend, “let’s wash everyday!” Beyond these, the skyscrapers rise intermittent on the skyline like the posts of a groyne partially covered with sand: the old Nomura Building and the Yasuda skirt, the Metropolitan Government Office, the Sumitomo complex, and the i-land Tower, with its strange Klingon insignia. From the west-facing balcony the skyscrapers stop, and the city spreads itself, low and crowded, towards Nakano. One or two high-rises stand alone. Fixed to the side of one of these is a large Yen Shop sign, which stops casting its lurid blue and orange patterns on my back wall at precisely eleven each night.
There are rarely cars in the narrow road outside, but there are sometimes people. There’s the old lady a few buildings down, the suits, and a middle-aged woman across the street who gives piano lessons to ungenerous children, dragged there by their parents. And there is a boy of about ten who comes to stand on the uneven street with his father, dressed for baseball, regardless of the season. His father carries a ball pierced by a thick cord, and knotted at the bottom. He wraps the other end around a hand, steadies the ball, stands clear. “Go,” he says. His son brings the bat back, swings – CRACK – and the ball spirals furiously around his father’s fist. “Not hard enough,” he says, unwinding the cord and repositioning it. Pink spots appear on the boy’s cheeks. “Again,” the man barks. They practise for at least an hour like this every day. Whenever another person comes into view, the father pulls back his hand and waits for the passer-by to be gone. The boy does his best to do the same: not to fidget, not to twirl the bat on the knobbly tarmac. Both act as if their routine were somehow private. It’s because of this that I don’t always watch them, and I never stay for the full hour.
Three small children live in the apartment block directly across from mine: two girls and a boy. He can’t be more than eight, and his sisters are perhaps six and four. In the rain they emerge in matching wellington boots, waterproof macs, hats, and umbrellas: yellow, red, pink. The smallest girl’s umbrella has fat, white rabbits arranged around its perimeter. She jumps in potholes filled with rain, and her brother laughs heartily at her antics while their mother frets. And then they set off – three little ducks following their mother in a line down the street, the smallest at the very back, wrapped in pink plastic. Lovely children. Always calling out to one another in cartoon voices. In the sunshine, they bundle out into the street on little scooters, skates, bikes, pogo sticks. Sometimes they play with tiny balls, which bounce higher than the buildings when the boy is the one to throw. His sisters squeal loudly as he sends the balls up to vanish into the air. Once, one came onto the balcony.
I was sitting inside, reading, when I heard it bounce, deflect off the window and bang into the metal railing. I slid back the balcony doors to the sound of small, excited voices rising like smoke from the street below. The ball was spooling in the drain: bright yellow, shot through with deep crimson ripples. In my hand it was almost weightless. I peered over the edge, thinking to throw it back and disappear, smiling to myself at the mystery it would cause, but when I peeped over, my eyes met those of the boy. His head was thrown completely back, his mouth agape. I’d been seen: I froze. I didn’t know what to do – no one had ever looked up before. I stepped back inside, sliding the door closed, clicking the lock at its centre shut, gently, so no one could have heard. I still have the ball. It sits, contained inside a washed-out jar, on the bookshelf. When I found the radio, I made them neighbours, lining them up as neatly as I could.
I can’t leave this apartment. They’ve given my condition different names, but I can see it for what it is. I know it’s not open spaces that I’m petrified of, and had small, cramped spaces troubled me, I wouldn’t have been able to stay in this two room apartment as long as I have. No, it’s love (isn’t it always?) and the possibility that I might be shown affection, and the possibility that I might not. It keeps me here, away from people. I wonder if I’m laughed at by the neighbourhood children … but I am thinking of a different time, a different way of living. Probably they don’t know about me. Almost certainly this is the case. With the exception, perhaps, of the little boy whose ball I keep. Forgotten, my boundaries are unclear, but it’s hard to present a face when there’s no space for one and, in spite of my loneliness, it’s the last thing I want. Anonymity has always worked for me. Everything stops and begins again in this apartment. Here. Now. It’s where I am, where there’s no love lost, or gained. An old man without boundaries, without definition: an undefined man, fuzzy around the edges. It’s what I come down to. And beyond this it’s just bones.
The last time I went out, there were dozens of crows in the air, filling space with their huge, muscular bodies. Enormous. Black wings beating like the damned. Eyes darted upwards; looks of anxiety, disgust. Sometimes fear. No one looked for too long, not with so many afraid to meet a crow’s gaze. I’d forgotten about the birds, and the feeling of superstitious foreboding they brought with them on the air. It was a long time ago.
More vividly than anything else from that final day, I remember the dystopic vision of a future Tokyo I experienced, standing outside Fukoda-San’s hardware store: a city gone to the crows, the humans outnumbered, and most disappeared to prefectures far away. In my imagination, the few who remained in the city hid in darkened rooms, peering furtively from behind ragged curtains at dirt-smeared windows. Trade was done by night when the birds slept. The flights of stairs which had paved the way to the department stores were covered with green moss. Huge wire nests, built into the grotesque scenery, hung suspended over disused train tracks. Everything in disrepair. It was a skeletal vision – black and grey and brown – and I sometimes wake having dreamt it, believing it to be true for those first few moments, staring at the ceiling. And it fills me with repulsion, and an unspeakable sadness.
And the room that is mine is cold and dry; my breath turns to steam as it escapes my lips and I have the impression that something is coming to an end, though I couldn’t say what. I know from my calendar that it’s January now and I wonder if somewhere there’ll soon be a street strewn with plum blossom, if there is a chance I’d find it, if I went out. (But I can’t go out. If I leave, I’ll suffocate. No doubt about it.) And the earthquake that shakes me as I sit in front of the shrine on the tatami is like a mother’s hand rousing me from one bad dream to send me into another. And even then I’m not completely convinced it’s the building that quivers and shakes, and not myself. (This is frequently my impression.) And I wonder how it would be if I weren’t so irreparably alone. And I wonder how long I have lived in this room, and who was here before me.
The city outside heaves a sigh. Tangled lines shudder in its shadow. Its enormous, unimaginable shadow. Shrinkage is only an illusion, conjured by train lines and cars, mobiles and cyberspace. Tread the city and it’s gigantian in dimension. I have never trodden the city. And I’ve never left it.
And I never contributed to it: there are no children. I often return to this thought. No children. Perhaps this was a part of the problem, all along. But then I did have something of the romantic in me, didn’t I? Aren’t these my memories, fragmented and unrecognisable as they are, these recollections of yearning? And wasn’t it me who wrote those wishes at Tanabata and tied them to bamboo, hoping for a clear sky? So many times, I remember so many notes, always the same wish. People would wish for various things – success at work, good health, money – but what no one seemed to know was that, traditionally, people had wished only for good weather; they had made a wish on behalf of the lovers separated, lost to one another. My mother had led me to believe that any deviation from this would not be successful. I was fortunate, then, that my own wish corresponded with the original, authentic one. I think about ordering some bamboo, so I might celebrate the star festival once more – the more I think about it, the more eager I am to do it – but it’s still winter, and there are months to pass before July will come again.
Lying half asleep on my futon last week, I heard a soft thud out on the balcony. As though someone had landed on it from above. It’s not inconceivable. I’m on the top floor, at the corner. Anyone could climb the steps up to the flat roof, walk across and jump down onto the balcony below. This is how it sounded to me: I could find no other explanation for it. I lay, barely breathing, ears straining, cold. The city held its breath, too, but it had been too distinct a sound to ignore. I got up and hobbled across the few icy feet to the french window, encouraged by the lack of shadowy figures on my curtain. I opened the door, my legs so cold they bungled attempts to keep me up. My hands gripped the door frame. Icy wind roared into the room behind me. I looked out over the city: a convergence of shadowy layers and shapes, ghostly in the misty dark. A few snowflakes waltzed their way to the balcony floor, caught in the light of my bedside lamp, melting on contact with the cement. Each one short-lived and unique, like the cherry blossom. The edge of the roof above the window was banked in sparkling white. At my feet was a mound of the same frozen magic, and I huffed out a frosty white and puffy relief. My breath steamed out of my mouth like a blank speech bubble in a comic book. It should have read: the snow has come.
The sky turns a darker shade of grey with the sun gone behind cloud cover and I wonder what it would be like if the sun disappeared forever. I’ve heard that in the far north people spend months in darkness. This is the reason given for the high number of suicides. Still, we don’t do too badly ourselves: too much light, probably. And the sky, the colour of a headache today, and the cold, and the steam break down the sometime beauty of the city. I saw this done with a woman once – the only one I ever fell asleep beside – her beauty systematically deconstructed with make-up remover and cotton wool, then smudged and puffed up and out by sleep, and perhaps the odd nightmare or two. But that’s women for you, and that’s a different story (isn’t it?). That’s something else.
They build and they build and they build, the skystealers rising at a rate that leaves me gasping. I can see them on the horizon, have watched them multiply, creeping steadily closer. To block me in. I wonder if I’m surrounded on all sides, but I can’t tell, and I try not to contemplate it too seriously: I’m easily frightened. And the world outside seems so large now, towering over us like a wave about to break, that the direction is irrelevant.
Outside, the city is no longer held together by the bright, and looks two-dimensional and tatty. Would I dare to test it? I see people walk into doors which seem to be painted on to my window in miniature, and many come back out and walk away, safe, but this could be a trick of the optic nerve, and I’m distrustful.
I step back; retreat.
My boxes are few. Limited. And I’m pacing myself; savouring the discoveries. First came the journal, which I still don’t feel ready to read. In case it’s mine. In case it’s not. I don’t recognise it and it sits on the bookshelf, held upright by the ball and jar. It’s time will come. After the journal came the radio, and with it a few battered memories of a life that might have been mine. As I go to draw a third item from the lottery, my stomach is tight with excitement. My hand closes around another book, but softer than the journal; more flexible. I pull it out. Cardboard flaps fall closed, concealing the remaining contents. I examine the cover of the book I’m holding: The Way of the Samurai. It falls open in my hands and my eye is drawn to a line of faded yellow. I fetch my glasses from the television and sit back down to read. The end is important in all things, it tells me. What could be truer?
A young man delivers eight bags of shopping to my door every Friday. He’s been coming for months. I don’t know how many exactly: the next time he comes I’ll ask him. If I remember. I’ve not seen the boy’s face – he’s never taken off his helmet, preferring to speak to me from within – but I know his family name is Tsutsumi, and I know he’s still a boy from the quality of voice that comes from inside the shiny black head shell. It sits large on his thin frame, gives him the impression of existing in an anime world. Maybe this is why I don’t feel threatened by him. Almost certainly I would, were I to meet him in another circumstance, I think. Or perhaps I did and just can’t remember. In any case, we have an easy and superficial relationship, the boy and I, which we have maintained, without deviation, for months. He’s consistently disinterested, but reliable. And I’m grateful. It starts with his peculiar knock at my door. A smattering of polite phrases are exchanged – often the same sentences in the same order – and, after I’ve signed the supermarket’s check sheet, the eight bags come into my possession. The signal that the entire proceedings have come to the proper close is his motorbike, growling into silence. Thinking about him now, I’m close to calling it a fondness I have for him, but sentimentality comes dangerously easy when you stay at home at my age.
Once the snow begins to melt, the skies open up and rain washes the city of its dirty sludge. Water droplets form pregnant pearly lines on the undersides of my balcony rails. Beyond the rail and the low-lying roofs that jam the space in-between, the skyscrapers disappear into a rainy mist that sits low, like a mountain cloud, over the megalopolis. A few towers are lost in the mist altogether, only the red, pulsating lights at their peaks and corners glowing through the watery screen. The raindrops get larger, heavier, faster. The balcony doors rattle on their rails, shake in their fixtures. I pull my focus back, past the buildings and the rail to the glass which is shot through with thin metal wire: if it breaks it might just stay in place. Then, through the storm, to the west, I see the orangey-golden light flicker on in the apartment across the road.
It sits directly across from mine, on the same floor. Their window faces my balcony, with perhaps three or four metres of space between us. The light in this place across the rain-soaked tarmac is soft and warm. Tonight their curtains are only partially drawn, as though pulled by a hasty hand, and a space remains at the centre: a thin strip of peachy light. Their bodies move beyond the frame. I watch them meet, glowing skin on skin, and have to run to the bathroom.
I spend the next day hunched over on the cold, plastic floor, staring at the bottom of the toilet bowl, unable to keep anything down. I arrange cushions and blankets next to the toilet. I call the medical advice line and describe my condition to a soft female voice on the other end of the line. “Stomach virus,” she tells me, matter-of-fact: “… time of year … give it a few days … only water …” I want to explain I don’t have a virus, that I don’t go out to catch any viruses, but I have a hot, palpable image of the two lithe, naked bodies, and I know I can’t formulate all the words it would take. I wrap up, suffer the dry, stale air of the heater. I stay inside, with the doors locked and the curtains fully drawn. Focus on the book I’ve pulled from the treasure trove. And after a few days of reading this, I start to recover. Then another disc arrives.
Someone puts discs through my front door, through the letterbox. I’ve forgotten who this someone is. A friend? A relative? A neighbour? Do I have any friends or relatives? I am quite sure that I don’t have any friends or family, because I’d see them sometimes, wouldn’t I? Or maybe I do and have forgotten. Or maybe I did and can’t remember. Or maybe they come calling and I don’t hear them. Or maybe they have keys and walk right into this room – every Thursday, say – but I don’t see them. Neighbours I must have, unless the apartments to either side of me are empty. Sometimes I hear noises, but so infrequently it could be people being shown the apartment. Or people could be living there quietly. Yes, a neighbour is the most likely possibility. I wonder if they get paid.
They arrive at irregular intervals, and on these discs that come addressed to me Tokyo is recorded. I take in the city in a flattened state; contained, decontaminated, and depersonalised by the television screen. And I can watch these discs, delivered by an invisible someone, or groups of someones, and feel gratified. And safe. I slide the new one into the tv and press play. And this is what I see: people of all ages, swarming like locusts across the streets and in and out of shops; young girls with spiky hair, painted faces, strange clothes; holographic screens advertising an array of products on the glass fronts of the convenience stores; blue suits; boys with hair like bleached straw; frizzy afro imitations; enormous screens suspended over sidewalks, illuminating the night so much that an artificial daylight streams onto the passers-by; girls with white, painted faces, and blackened lips and eyes, like human pandas in frilly black lace dresses; anime footage of ugly, bigheaded dogs in tutus; impossibly pointed shoes and boots balanced on soles a foot high; games arcades at every corner; skyscrapers disappearing into the mist; crows ripping apart pigeons by the roadside; neon neon neon; pachinko parlours packed with bored housewives and young gambling addicts; hostess bars in neon and the girls in neon and the punters bathed in the neon emanations; a Coca Cola sign scrolling in and out on a night-time skyline.
Later it occurs to me that I have no real way of knowing when the filming took place, no way to discern whether the city I take in on my screen still exists. And still there can’t be anything in the city that is much older than me. How many times has the city fallen only to rise again? And every time it rises, it grows taller, defiantly so. Rise and fall, without the Empire. And what do I know of the city, anyway? I, who never entered into its ebb with an open heart? And the girl, oh Gods, the woman-child. Yes, but something, really something, more than child there, or was it of my own invention? What have I done? I can’t remember anymore, can’t recall if it was real or just fantasy. I was dead before I came to the bend: this much I do know.
I remember. I remember when children played baseball on open stretches of grass, where the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Offices are. I remember that thirteen-year-old Megumi Yokota has vanished, and that mobile phones have killed all our ghosts. And a girl I once knew named Kiki, and that I always, always lie about my job. Lied, I mean ‘lied.’ The man on the wanted poster stays with me, too; the man who stole from the city bank. The Sumida fireworks in November, and the year the cherry blossom came out in February.
I remember the old Emperors’ birthdays, the date the rainy season used to start, the way the convenience stores took over the city. I remember when you could buy fresh flowers from vending machines in the station, and the schoolgirl dolls that I protested about too noisily. The time all the banks collapsed, and the rising and bursting of the bubble. The woods, on Fuji-San, where the shamed salary men go to die. Went to die. And then I remember the parks.
I pretend I’m on a park bench, in town, right smack bang in the centre of the city. I can see skyscrapers rising and falling and, closer, trees. Lots of trees. I pretend I can hear birds singing, chirruping.
I’m pretending. Always me. Only ever me. Here.
Pretending.
And in the stream which runs through the park there are large coy carp; their big golden and black bodies are sliding and gliding. There they are, how pretty, so vivid in colour, so vivid, they have always been there, and she flits through my mind like a ghost (she is ghostly in my mind) and I welcome her haunting (haunt me, haunt me), and beyond the sunset it all has to start over again.
It’s cold at night now, cold now in the darkness. It’s strange how all the brightness went out of the world so suddenly; everything so much dimmer now, darker. It’s a ploy, no doubt, to trick me. They turn my words into mockery every time I open my mouth. It was Them that did it; Them that took away all the bridges and left me with these spaces.
It’s cold now that we have the winter. There’s nobody outside now and it’s cold now so steam rises off my breath when I exhale (stolen by the winter devils). At least I have some way of checking now – this is important to me: some way of checking I’m still alive – no cold now a few times before now it was uncertain no sound now or movement: I just had to sit it out and await a sign (was this a problem for me? I can’t remember). It’s so cold.
I see snow falling now and lightly, snow coming down in the pitch black. Snow comes with my whimper – I whimper now – this is what I come down to. I wonder how the snow’s so bright, and I hear someone laughing and it scares me. Heavier snow now, lit from below, and more frantic. Plunge me back into my shadows. I move. Plug me back in. Please.
I move my face away from the pane and say nothing. Nothing happens. The snow remains. Window sill and curtains do not come into view (where are my curtains?) Where’s the world gone?
There’s just snow. I back, blinded, to my futon, where I hide my eyes tight under the covers breath one, still pretending breath two, and still the snow three, and only the snow four. Panic in chest five. Reign in my breathing six. In the space of seven I move my eyes and I can see the whiteness meeting, merging, and then, like that, black. And this is it, this is where it starts. Everything from here on in is in darkness for me. The journal sits on the table, and in it perhaps all the answers to the faults in my memories, all the answers. If it’s mine. If I kept it. It’s not an easy thing, to live with the conditional. I fumble my way to the table eventually, find the chair with my hands, sit down, trembling. I’m trembling. I feel my way across the surface, pass the phone, the directory, the plant, until the journal comes into my hands. Too late. I’ll never know. Outside, a woman and a man are arguing. I can tell from the tones that too much has been said; all of it unnecessary, all of it when black. On the tatami, the wall against my back, I think back to this morning, when I checked the calendar in the kitchen. It’s Friday. I wait.
Under the noise of helicopters circling overhead through the afternoon, sirens fade in and out. And there’s the low roar of the wind, a child singing a commercial jingle heard on the television, the mutter of collective chatter from the street outside. From a different corner: the clink of a gate hitting a post, footsteps, a door banging, coughing, birds clucking and cooing, more footsteps, birds cawing, laughter, the revving of an engine polluting a tranquil lull. the wheels of a bicycle, someone’s washing machine, a toilet flushing, coughing, wind, more wind, an aeroplane, which transmutes into a motorbike rounding the corner, an engine being turned off, footsteps getting louder. My heart does the same.
The delivery boy is kind. It’s not easy to explain what has happened, but eventually he seems to understand. I think I hear him take off his helmet, and I’m so moved I’m afraid, for a moment, I’m about to cry. He puts a brief hand soft on my arm, and tells me he’ll call me a doctor. He must have been fond of me, too, I think, just as I was of him. He tells me to wait, not to worry. The front door clicks shut more loudly than usual. For a while I sit peaceably. Then I start to think he’ll have forgotten. Or perhaps he was joking. I sit on, hands clenching the familiar and solid sides of my chair. I wait, the shopping still unpacked by the door. I listen to the frozen packets thawing, the crackle of icy surfaces melting, the plastic rustle of the bags.
The doctor comes with his little girl. “I hope you don’t mind Odasawa-san,” he says to me: “my wife couldn’t look after Kazumi today, so I had to bring her with me. But she’s a very good little girl, and I’m sure she’ll be quiet.” I say I don’t mind. I tell him I like children, that I used to be a teacher. I don’t know if this is true, but there’s a chipped mug in the kitchen cupboard I never use which says “Japan’s Greatest Teacher” across it in bold, red kanji and I suppose it could have been true. While he’s preparing his equipment on the table in the kitchen, the little girl comes over to sit with me. I feel her close by. She asks me why I’m so sad, and I listen for a while, trying to ascertain whether or not her father is close by and everything’s very quiet and she asks me again, and this time she holds my hand. My eyes – my stupid old eyes – begin to water and I feel her little hand on mine, squeezing slightly and I tell her, whisper to her, that I can’t see anything and every muscle in my stomach and chest is strained, waiting for my secret to be out. I feel her tiny hand, again, stroking mine. And I start to weep, noisily, uncontrollably, in front of her and though she must be alarmed at my outburst, she sits there quietly with me and holds onto my old, crumpled hand and I feel as though I might burst open with gratitude. And love. It gets harder to breathe. I hear the words “get her out of here!” and understand that I said them.
They come back later that day: two men. They check me over, talk to me. I feel Their fingers around my eye sockets. Try to stay calm, They say. They suggest that I might want to relocate to a home where I can be properly looked after. Faced with the vehemence of my refusal, They agree to let me try staying on in my apartment. They know about my condition, They say, which is why They came to me, instead of telling me to come to the hospital. They will give me a chance, They say. But if I can’t look after myself, I must leave. Insisting will be done. I feel my chin dripping. Every few days, They tell me, ignoring my tears, someone will come to check on me. They say They’ll be back in a couple of weeks. They’re leaving a woman behind for an hour or two, just to make sure I’m okay. I want Them to go away, but Their voices go on. And on. And when They do eventually go, there’s still the woman and this is worse: she moves so quietly, it’s impossible to keep track of her position.
A freak of nature, one doctor says, but sometimes these things happen.
Finally I’m left unsupervised.
I sit in my darkness, in my armchair. The door and windows are closed and bolted shut. It’s quiet. I lean my head back and I concentrate on breathing. And I realise that if this threat of being taken out of my apartment weren’t hanging over my tired old head, I’d probably be crying again now.
I sit with The Way of the Samurai in my old, crooked hands. I know it now by the diagonal crease where a corner of the front cover was once folded back. Softback, the Americans call it: good enough for a boy, even better for an old blind man. I hold it on my lap, touch it, try to remember its contents. This is reading for me now: guesswork. No more great conquests. It’s come down to fingering an old, battered paperback towards giving up its secrets. A hand between the sheets. My thumb falters across the spine and it slips, falls to the tatami like a dying bird, all flutter and thud. And then I remember it: the story of the ten blind men, hiking through the mountains, treading nervously along the edge of a precipice. Terrified. The leading man stumbles and falls off the cliff and the nine left above lament his fate loudly. But he calls up to them from where he has fallen, telling them not to be afraid. He shouts that the fall was nothing, that although he was afraid before he fell, he’s now at ease. “If you want to be at ease,” he calls out, “fall quickly!”
Fall quickly. I reach down to where the book lies, its pages spread to the tatami and I freeze a moment before letting my body drop to the floor beside it. My fall is a hard, singular thud, like a sack of sand. The chair leg digs into my shin. I listen.
There’s a splash of water, on the pavement or flower boxes; the clatter of stray cats scrambling from behind bins; a noise like the flutter of pages or a flock of birds bursting into the sky, perhaps from under the eaves of the old ramen shop on the corner.
Later, I hear helicopters circling and landing on the skyscrapers, filling the air with their mechanical song and then, chop chop chopping their blades into a full circle, moving into a drone and fading. I have a mental image – a memory? – of those damned crows again, gliding over the wall-of-pachinko noise, soaring over the battered body of the city. The sound of their wings echoes through the streets outside the apartment, like their deep and woody cries. And from where the crows creak indolent flight from their wings, the city must be a sprawling, monstrous thing; dirtied without love or design. But the images are gone, and all that left is the sound of an icy wind whipping around the towers of Nishi-Shinjuku, howling between narrower structures. Speeding up. My windows rattle noisily. I feel the draught flood in across the floor, and the sting of the cold is like a slap across my throat and neck. I hear a sniff out in the street. My ear disentangles a constant, low electrical hum, the crunch of gravel. A cat. Laughter from a distant room: laughter!
Negotiating my home is easy, and I start to relax. The sporadic visits from medics and people ‘checking up’ on me are unsettling, but they don’t stay long, and they’re enthusiastic about my progress and capability. Like a child, their encouragements lift my spirits, take the edge from the anxiety. There’s still a distance, though. I suspect they’ve been told: told about my odd little outburst with the doctor’s daughter, told not to get too near to me, or to hold my hand, not to be too kind. Not to trigger my sickness. My pain.
The earliest hours of each day are quiet, like a cemetery: the buildings rising in wooden prayer stick stacks, the bodies long gone. I listen to the city sleeping, her breathing not what it used to be. I hear the crackle, deep down in her lungs. It sounds like a snatch of the rainy season, caught through a door opened for a split-second. I know it’s night when the cars fade, after hours of droning, roaring, revving, honking, and are just a gentle whoosh in the distance. This is what the sea sounds like: like a city winding down.
And in some ways, life in darkness isn’t as bad as you might think. Once you get used to it. You don’t have to withstand the light anymore.
The radio: I fiddle with the dial, knock it gently a few times against my palm, hold it there awhile, and then grope around in the box until I find a couple of battered, worn batteries. I mumble a short, inelegant prayer to the deity of radios, or mechanics, or of pure, blind, good fortune. “Come on, come on, come on,” provides the closing as I fumble to slot them into the back, my stomach in a knot. Despite my exertions, I’m still shocked when it splutters into life. I pick up two men talking in a language I don’t understand. Is it English? Can I have forgotten so much? I try to recover a foreign word. My mouth is open for a long time before any sound comes out: “listen.” I sound it out in katakana like a tentative schoolboy: ri-su-nu. It feels familiar, but I can’t deconstruct it. What have I named? Back to the radio, I play with the buttons and this is what I hear: pop music; pop music; an advertisement for a new kind of cat; news of a yakuza stand-off in Sangenjaya, 17 dead; enka; rock?; Chopin; a noise that sounds like robots dying; pop. I listen to the lyrics: they’re still singing about love.
© Lenya Samanis
A Working Day in the Life of An English Teacher in Tokyo: 11/2001
9am: A girl with two-inch roots who doesn’t have a great deal to say, in any language. (I think the traffic outside is making that noise because of the rain.) When I show her a picture of a child drowning, she says “I will rescue her,” then, frowning, admits she cannot swim. The other girl in the class tells me that Japanese people have no hobbies so they go shopping. She laughs at an unnaturally high pitch and I crease out a cellophane smile, and think it’s probably not that funny, whichever way you look at it.
10am: “I have images of Americans riding bicycles recklessly,” says a middle-aged businessman, intent on practising his adverbs. There are two other students: a schoolboy who informs me that he gets electric shocks from absolutely everything, and another businessman who, when asked what he does in his free time, says that he is “building a function generator.” His classmates nod slowly, visibly awestruck.
11 am: A one-on-one lesson with an erratic young man who says he likes European Techno. He wants to talk about the slots in vending machines. For 45 minutes. It’s hard. The world is greasy, grey and too, too bright; my stomach painfully empty.
12pm: Three girls. One regales the class with a story about how her teeth hurt so much that teeth were all she could think about, so much so that she dropped out of law school and enrolled to become a dentist. She made a terrible dentist, and her teeth were eventually fixed. They don’t hurt her anymore. And, now the pain’s gone, she realises she’s not interested in teeth at all and has applied to take up her legal training once more. The other girls clap and pronounce the story ‘cool.’ We practise the future perfect.
LUNCH is slipping out while the fifty backs of my colleagues are turned. It’s September. The Twin Towers have just come down. The Americans are engaged in indignant and disturbing patriotism. And they’re the majority. I feel safer in the random world the students create with their arbitrary responses and bizarre statements. Sometimes, I reason, an apparent lack of any logic at all is preferable to twisted, demented logic.
2pm: A man crowding 50 who doesn’t look up to anyone. He’s a regular student. Today he tells me that his wife cries frequently and very well. It’s her secret weapon, he says, her party trick. All this because I showed them Man Ray’s ‘Glass Tears.’ The other student says the woman is beautiful and our resident cynic tells him that it might not be proper to find a crying woman attractive. There is a glint in his eye and I pull a face at him. We’re close to being friends, and I know there’s little this man loves. Booking English lessons he doesn’t need in order to try to prove to certain teachers that his grasp of their mother tongue is better than theirs is one of only a few pleasures he finds for himself. I encourage it. He’s also enjoying ripping the boards off an old, derelict and fundamentally useless house he has inherited, largely because the whole project upsets his wife so much. The other student asks me if it’s wrong to think a weeping woman is beautiful and I tell him that it’s the most interesting question of the day. He smiles and brushes himself off. I am getting good at evading direct expressions of personal opinion. I am learning how to disappear. The lesson finishes with all of us pleased with ourselves.
3pm: An elderly Japanese man wordlessly stands up as I enter the classroom and hands me a piece of crumpled paper. On it someone has carefully written two sentences in a haphazard hand: What time are you from? I am from today. He looks at me questioningly, his eyes threatening to brim. Sensing trouble, I shrug and say ‘Okay.’ He beams at me and his eyes start to water. Then he gets up slowly and offers one, low bow at the door before leaving me with the image of the paper clenched by his side, in one knotted, old hand. I sit in the empty cubicle room for forty minutes, wondering what just happened.
4pm: An old man who’s been stuck on the same lesson for two years shows me photographs of his house, his wife, his dog, and his ‘girlfriend’ in Thailand. In front of an old woman in glasses and a sweet face, who insists on presenting me with a bag of limes in order to prove her point that ‘gift food’ exists. Neither student seems aware the other is in the room.
5pm: Two high level students who don’t like one another are waiting in the glass classroom cubicle for the last bout of the day. I don’t have any energy or humanity left for any more conversation, so I throw out a few thoughts about suicide, and Camus, subtly instigate a conflict and pull into view a couple of bandwagons for the two of them to leap on. I hold a few matches to the corners, until I’m satisfied the fire will take. Then I sit back, and watch the place burn.
© Lenya Samanis
[Extract]
The Argument, or, Listen.
You were about ten when you first tried to really tell me something about yourself. You said you wanted to be a writer. I know my response disappointed you, possibly I even seemed unmoved. I’ve always believed this is what you were thinking, and I should be able to read that face if anyone can: it’s my own, after all. You held your silence and you waited. And there was only that story to tell. What else could I have said? Children are so demanding. Can you understand all this now you’re grown? I told you that story, about the time I had to write something at school, around about the age you were then. It was for a competition: we all had to write something about our parents, and when the day came, we had to stand up on the stage and read our piece. When my turn came, well, I told you all this didn’t I? How at the end I had put: “I think I would have written this better if I had a mother”? How every single person in the hall was crying? When I told you I won first prize, you were singularly unimpressed. You didn’t like that story. I remember I started to tell you again, years later, and you stopped me. “You told me before,” was all you said, and this wasn’t like you at all. I’d told you them all before. Why didn’t you like it? You didn’t say a word, and when I looked closely I saw a child’s fury, raw and open. “Let me tell you something: the apple falls from the apple tree,” I said. Still, you were silent. I don’t remember how it ended: only common sense prevails against the belief that that moment still hangs somewhere, with you and I staring at each other, hopelessly, unable to meet. I wanted to welcome you. You wanted your moment to yourself. That’s how I see it now. I stole it from you. Was that why you never mentioned it again? Can you see, now, with that harmless little anecdote, that I was offering to share my shelter with you? I wouldn’t do this for anybody else. There’s never been anybody here but me. Can you understand this now? This is all that I want. Now that I don’t seem to be able to tell you, it’s all I want.
I wonder if you understand. I know that this isn’t the time, that you aren’t thinking at all of that moment all those years ago, back when you were only ten, and your daddy ruined something important. You aren’t thinking about how what this comes down to is quite simply that I’m just not that good with children.
I want to explain to you. I want to know if you remember the story, too; if your memory of it is as clear as mine. I ask you, and suspicion forms furrows on your face. You are silent for a moment, and then you say:
“All I remember, right now, is you telling me that everyone dies alone.” I look at you in the epileptic light of a fire on its way out. The light casts from your eyelashes deep shadows, which lie, fluted and dramatic, across your cheek bone. “I was about six or seven, I think,” you add.
I’m confused by this swerve. “Well, it’s true,” I concede.
“Perhaps, but I was too young,” you say. I don’t know how to answer you, can’t find you in this mess. Why are you upset?
“I just don’t understand you,” I say, and it’s to myself as much as it is to you.
“You said he was a friend of yours,” you say. You’re making your voice sound tired. I’m angry with you for this: I never said he was my friend. “You call him ‘koumparos’,” you added. Shame on you.
“I point to the forest and you look at my finger,” I say to you and my voice sounds slightly scornful, even to my own ear. You shoot me a hard look. Koumparos: it was just what we called him. Just a name. You know that. Don’t you remember asking me what that word meant? Koumparos: ‘friend, mate’. But we don’t always mean it when we say it. Usually we don’t. I told you all this. Were you not listening? And later, when you said how he had told you he was koumparos at my wedding, I explained that I had more than eighty koumpares; that it’s not like other countries, where you have only one. Everyone’s a koumparos. Did you not understand from all that how a koumparos and a filos, a friend, are not at all the same thing? Didn’t you see how when everyone is a koumparos no one is, really? You should have paid closer attention. And so what if he was my friend? You think any of them are that much of a friend to me? How many times have I told you, mana mou, that in the final hour there’s no one you can rely on? Do you disregard what I tell you after you’ve listened? Or do my words not even enter those perfect little ears of yours? You know why your ears are perfect don’t you? Let me tell you something: you aren’t the first one to have those ears. Remember that.
Listen: do you remember that fortune teller from Athens we saw last spring, outside the fish market in the old harbour? You made me hand over twenty euros so she could spread out her cards and examine our palms. “But you don’t believe in this,” I said to you, and you just laughed at me and pulled me down to the grimy little table. She said we’d have a big argument: do you remember that? Maybe you only remember that she whispered something to me before we left: this is what you thought, but it wasn’t true. She just said it quietly and because you had your head turned, your attention elsewhere, you didn’t catch it. That killed you, didn’t it? You were desperate to know what she’d said, and you were furious because I wouldn’t tell you. I said she told me not to tell you, but none of that really happened. Her words didn’t make much sense at the time, and I just thought it would be more interesting not to know. I thought you could come up with something better than an old con-artist in a shawl from the tourist stalls. And it’s only now that those words come back to me.
You think while I sit here, gazing into the darkness between us, that I’m thinking about myself, don’t you? I know what you’re thinking. You haven’t mastered that face yet, and you need to. You will need to, out there. Oh, I know: you know what you’re doing, you’re a big girl, of course you are, but let me tell you something: somehow, by some extraordinary quirk of fate, you’ve escaped the nastiness so far. You got through unscathed, undirtied. But it will find you, like it finds all of us, and I know you’re not ready. You give too much away. As though you can afford to, where others can’t. As though nothing could possibly touch you. It lends you an air of arrogance you don’t really have. This is why some people are wary of you. You’ve asked me that so many times, and I’ve given you so many answers: there’s another to add to the pile. Do you see how inventive I am for you? What lengths I go to? It’s sometimes tiring. And you were supposed to be the writer, after all. Irony is a bastard.
The fire is practically out and you sit staring at the embers. Normally, you would get up, gather wood from the store, arrange the logs and poke at them until the flames were dancing again. Tonight you don’t move. You won’t do it, because I’ve started to lecture you more and more on your technique and it annoys you. You are making your point. I’ve been you, you know. But right now I’m tired, and for a few instants, here and there, flickers an alternative. We both love the fire: why does it have to be such a sore point? I’m only trying to teach you that lighting a fire is not something you can approach artistically. If you arrange the logs in the way that you do, the fire will never take: there has to be space underneath the logs for it to breath. I know you believe that your beautiful wood piles would still catch aflame, but you immediately set about wrecking your display anyway. You think I’m wrong, and you think you maintain some higher ground by humouring me. But let me tell you something: we are not humouring me. We’re saving time in the struggle to stay warm, and we’re saving our store of kindling wood and our little white blocks of lighter fuel. The fire is almost dead. Two or three points glow weakly in the gloom. I’ve lost your profile. I won’t get up to relight it either, I decide. Two can play at that game.
Listen: I didn’t expect you to be so angry.
I don’t ask you what really happened when you went out with him, how you filled all those hours together. And you know I won’t. You know I want you to just tell me, that I am too proud to ask, don’t you? I know you won’t tell me, because I’ve been you. A light goes off outside. The silence stretches out, taut. I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore: your face is turned away from me.
“I mean, this guy’s a psycho. We told you … how many people told you how crazy he is?” I start laying out tobacco in a rizla.
“This guy,” you say to me, “is your friend.” Again!
“My friend!” I can feel my temper slipping from my grasp, my fingers clammy. “What friend? I don’t even know where the guy lives! So I’ve known him ten, fifteen years: so what?” You don’t say anything. My fingers tremble slightly as I roll the rizla back and forth between my thumbs and index fingers. Why do you keep talking about him being my friend, as though that somehow validates everything? How can we talk when your logic is so warped? You don’t say anything. I run my tongue along the rizla edge. “He’s not my friend,” I tell you.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” you tell me. My rage quivers in my breast.
“Okay, maybe he was a perfect gentleman for one night,” I tell you, “but he’s been a crazy, fucked-up bastard his whole life. Gentleman. You don’t know this guy.”
“Neither do you,” you say to me. I want to smack you. “You didn’t know he had a kid, did you?”
“He has a kid?”
“Yes.”
“Even more reason to stay away from him,” I say. I can’t help myself. Christ, why this guy? You knew what he is. He’s nothing: you find this guy everywhere. His type is common, so why this particular one? And why when you, you’re twenty thousand miles away from common, now? How will he understand you? You’re my daughter. Can you understand what that means? It’s like he took me out and fucked me. Kyrie eleison.
“He put his first wife in hospital,” I tell you, as if you don’t already know: “Do you want to end up in hospital?” You mutter something to yourself. Christ, twenty years ago, I’d have clubbed him close to death for sneaking my daughter out and returning her at lunchtime the next day! Fucking bastard. I know his game: I used to be him, too. But you must know that: your mother must have told you. If I know your mother, she’ll have told you all the gory details. But then, after she left with you, she changed. Christ, she was crazy, your mother. I should have known from the start. The day of our wedding, there was a blackout across the whole island. The whole island had no electricity. Even the Gods didn’t approve of our marriage. You didn’t like that story much either, but that one was true.
The stories I could tell you about your mother … But it wouldn’t help. Perhaps when you are in a more receptive mood. Will you ever be in a more receptive mood?
Do you understand that I try to teach you only because I see you aren’t lost, like the others? I told your sister that Yassar Arrafat died the other day and you know what she said to me? She said “who’s that?” “It’s the guy in the market who sells kubas,” I told her. Kyrie eleison, this is where we are now. These are the ones who will be in charge in the future. I try to show you the world because I think you are capable of understanding it.
And then you go and do something as stupid as disappear overnight with a man who most of this family have agreed is a complete psychopath. A lunatic. Dangerous. How am I meant to react? Listen, your face is telling me that I’m a bad father. One thing I know: I’m not my father.
I am spitting blood inside: can you see that? Are things really so different where you were brought up? Are the concepts of shame and pride just old fossils there? Did you learn about them in your school textbooks, at least? You sit there and I see from your face that you think me ridiculous. And I realise you don’t understand this place, and you know what: if you don’t understand it now, you never will.
“Nothing happened,” you say, your tone emphatic. That’s good. I’m glad nothing happened – really, I am: you’ve no idea – but it really doesn’t matter if anything happened, and I tell you as much. People saw you together. People will say things happened, whatever the truth of the situation. Is it possible that you really don’t understand this? Or do you just not care? This is how it seems. This is why my blood is boiling. I’m not sure I believe you haven’t understood the way things work here yet.
Did he try to touch you? A hand on the small of your back to guide you across a street? Is it really true that nothing happened? All that time, and nothing at all? Perhaps it is true: it would have been enough for him to be seen with you. People will do the rest of the work, flesh out the story a bit, each time it’s passed on. Kyrie eleison, the whole village will be talking about this in no time at all. Didn’t you think about that?
“Listen: you’re going to leave, eventually,” I tell you, “go to another country. You won’t be here. I have to live here. You don’t need to come and bring my head down, now. We have our pride.”
“You’re worried about what people will say?” you ask me, and I see you are sneering. I can’t deny it. “You know that old woman who comes here,” you ask me, every word poised to attack: “the one that everyone says is crazy, the one whose children disown her and whose husband left her years back, the one who walks around talking to herself, roaming the fields at night?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I’m talking about the old woman you say isn’t crazy at all, but just lonely.”
“I know who you’re talking about.”
“The one you bring in here to talk to, drink coffee with, buy potatoes from? Well, you know what the people in the village are saying about her these days? They say she’s been fucking her son.” You glare at me, and there is real hatred in your eyes. You’ve curved the mouth I gave you into a nasty shape. “These are the people whose opinions you put above mine,” you say to me. I shake my head. There’s a smear of dirt on the floor, near my foot. I hear the chair legs scrape against the stone as you stand up.
You’re walking out on me. Listen, you’re leaving me with no room for manoeuvre.
“Don’t come back here,” I tell you.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t come back here.”
“The island?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not up to you whether I come here or not.”
“Okay, then don’t come back to this house.” You stare at me; you stare down at me.
“Fuck you,” you say. My heart skips a beat; literally, it does. I made you. You remember that. You are walking out on me: I’m having trouble taking this in. Then, like fireworks twinkling out of existence in a black-blank night sky, you’re gone. I hear the click of your heels on the stone floor of the yard outside, hear the break in the rhythm as you step over the uneven paving, under the gate with the rusty hinges. And I hear an engine rumble and splutter its way to life outside: you’re taking the car. This is not how it happens. I can’t move.
And what I know, in this moment, is that there’s a good chance you won’t have understood that as long as the sun goes on trying to drown itself in the sea every night I’m still your father, and these words are just splinters. A splinter never caused any great sorrow, surely. No one ever died from a splinter. It’s not enough.
I get up. For the first time in my life, I’m running after a woman. But I have to, I think: without the car, I’m stranded. This is what I shout out to you, across the front yard. You turn off the engine to hear me, then sit immobile in the front seat, your hands on the wheel. A smear on the windscreen covers your face. The woman who owns the village supermarket walks past slowly, craning her neck round the jasmine. I return to my seat in the living room and sit without stirring, listening intently for a clue as to what will happen next. And it’s just as the fortune teller said it would be: the sea is made of yoghurt and we are without spoons.
© Lenya Samanis
[Extract from a novel (Yen). Set in Tokyo, Japan.]
Foreword
And from where the crows creak indolent flight from their wings, the city is a sprawling, monstrous thing: inorganic, dirtied, built without love or design. From this height, Fuji-san can be seen, if the skies are clear. Fuji is ready to blow again. The column of smoke and ash will be spectacular from up here, above the old skyscrapers. They will come with their cameras to the tallest buildings. The disaster will reflect in the towers of glass and there will be a beautiful shadow across the sun.
From where lights flash red on the corners of buildings, the city is a sprawl of wasteland in the daylight. The kanji for movement: train tracks cut lines like the trail of black ink from a brush. The rivers are few. Mostly, her veins are tiny channels of water that trickle along concretised thoroughfares. A pulse beating its way slowly out of being. There is no surge. There is no swell.
Helicopters circle pads on the tops of the skyscrapers, adding to the beauty of the sunsets with their fumes. The great, black bodies of birds fill the air around the buildings; each one muscular and glossy and tight, like the shoulder of a doberman. At the base of the i-land Tower the astrological clock-tower throws from its peak a beam of fake moonlight which shines through the perfectly-manicured trees that line the wide streets, bathing the night-time pavement in a patterned, unearthly milky-white light: cut-glass leaves in a shadow-puppet sidewalk. In the daylight, the eye is drawn, instead, to the water around the great stone sculptures which rolls out in contained ripples. Up ahead, beyond the kids dancing in packs at the base of the Yasuda Building, staring at their reflections in the great, mirrored walls, past their serious expressions and the synchronised jerks of the bodies, Shinjuku train station sits like a blood clot in the city centre. Sixty-three exits: most of them hidden. Department stores sprout like tumours on every surface, most surmounted by beer gardens and golf ranges, from which vantage point the people on the street are ants, blackening the ground in their droves. When the rain threatens, they teem into gaping holes, taking themselves underground and leaving the streets abandoned. A few stragglers will remain, but when the typhoons hit, they will desert the city, too. And when typhoon or earthquake tear her limb from limb, the remnants are cleared away; Tokyo is rebuilt but not maintained. Nothing of her original selves remain.
Outside the west exit stand the monks in their black and white robes, immobile but for the regular twitch of the right hand around the bell. The crowds thicken here, around the main entrances to the stores where thousands are pulling the yen from their pockets. Bodies on the streets pass, converge, break apart, swerve to avoid collision. A mosh pit of overlooked indiscretions and bad grace. A battlefield; the pedestrians armed with bags, rolled newspapers, elbows and umbrellas, held at the centre. Metal tips sticking out.
Past the electronics store, on whose exterior Santa is crucified every Christmas in colourful, flashing lights. Past the glossy glass of the banks, and the bus depot. Past the steam rising from restaurants, and the smell of fried chicken, and fish. Over delivery men with their supplies and clipboards and past the white-green light of packed pachinko parlours. Through the doors of a games arcade, where people are playing at walking dogs, driving trains, banging drums. Out the other side of the arcade, a shoe shop brandishes a glossy sign which reads “established since 2001.” And on the way around the station, through the well-oiled machine, there is repeated a ‘Hello Kitty’ poster – large and pink and red – and emblazoned across the garish image are two words: “our religion.”
They signpost the way to Koshu-Kaido, where the street is packed with traffic: immobile, straining forward. A man in one of the cars is waving his hands over the wheel in incomprehensible patterns. A body out of control. The people in cars and walking on the pavements around him turn away, embarrassed; delete him from their view. Look up at the advertising hung over the station. Look out over the wall skirting the other side, where the train tracks spew out from a concrete gash, snaking out into the distance, like the tributaries of a stream. Or exposed nerves.
© Lenya Samanis
Cherry Blossoms
In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths …. A warrior is a person who does things quickly.
(Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai)
A girl I haven’t seen before stands at the end of the empty corridor, her head to one side. Sunlight streams through the door to shimmer in the dusty hall behind her. The girl’s mouth is promising pink, her hair a lengthy silk scarf of the blackest pitch. Thick, white socks pile up around her calves. A white collar arcs around a neck unused to lips and tongues and teeth and hands. I go straight for the corner.
A hand, out of nowhere, holds me in my place. Twisting round, I see the Deputy there, apparently out of breath. He releases me, inclines his head politely, and offers me a long white envelope. One fluid motion. But his eyes flicker past me, focus on the figure at the end of the corridor, come back apprehensive.
“The principal asked me to see that you received this,” he mutters, and I take the envelope from him: probably another memo about photocopying.
“Thank you,” I say as he walks away, his shoes clipping the floor like a woman’s heels.
When I look back, the girl is no longer there.
* * *
On my seventh birthday, my father gave me a book: The Way of the Samurai. Over the years I lost things, disposed of things, gave things away, but this book stayed with me. It offered a guide to living, and communicated its wisdom in the form of ambiguous anecdotes and metaphorical aphorisms. It demanded contemplation. To my father’s mind, The Way of the Samurai promised discipline. “The end is important in all things,” he quoted at me from the doorway of my room as I sat reluctant in front of exam revision. And when I was getting the highest grades in my class, and thought I’d earned the right to a day off, he replaced my bowl of miso soup with the book at the breakfast table, drawing a finger along the line as he read it aloud: “Continue to spur a running horse.” As the years wore on, he came back to this book: often in reference, always in earnest. And I followed. It provided structure; better still, validation. And the older I grew, the more sense it made. A warrior is rarely born thus.
* * *
Through windows strung out like lanterns at regular intervals along the corridor, I see students sitting in groups, under trees whose dark, twisted branches will be hidden behind thick flowers any day now.
We wait for it every year: we watch the television forecast, check the newspaper reports to see whether the wave of flowering has reached the Kanto plain. When it comes, we make arrangements at work: who will buy the sake, who will pick up food, who will bring tarpaulin, and who will go to the park early to reserve a desirable spot under the trees. After work, we rush to the parks and drink and laugh, and leave late, knowing we’ll suffer the next morning. And this has never stopped us. We soak it up, loving it all the more because we know it won’t stay long. The samurai spirit urges me to stay in the moment, to cherish the blossom. And the yen opens out. At its core it is hot pink. The slightest touch. It’s what the yen pulls towards.
And in the moment there is: her pouting lips, full and felt, stirring the ache of hunger in the stomach; the point of her chin, like the reflection of Fuji-san in a springtime lake; the narrow neck, dipping slightly at the centre like the cleft further down her spine; the sting of her breasts, like nothing else in the world. And the smooth nose with its tiny nostrils that can flare out unexpectedly, like petals tickled by a balmy breeze.
* * *
It was shortly after I met Momo that I noticed the orange, blue and violet dashes in the air. The dragonflies swept through the city, hovering above the heads of stampeding salary men in their suits, as though they didn’t know their place was in the countryside. We used to sit in Yoyogi park and count them. Some called it love. Not me. My longest relationship to date: swept along, but not away. And time proved me right: only one year later, and Momo no longer matters. When confronted with her these days, I’m surprised, then resentful. With Hazuki I’m Hikoboshi. This is how I imagine us: mythical lovers. Brought together in yearning. Separated by the Milky Way.
* * *
In the staff room, Shibuya-san watches me pack my bag. I can imagine what he’s thinking, what he’ll be saying later to the principal. He’s too old now to teach, so he sits around, commenting on the role of the teacher and what it’s become. It’s impossible for us to take him seriously and still return to the classroom so shamed. So we bow out our niceties and pretend not to see his frowning. There’s nothing to be done about the age in which we live except to live it, and this is something the old man may never understand, or even care to consider. I look to the students and see them utterly unaffected by the black gaze he casts over them. This is how I understand their world is unburdened in a way that mine isn’t. I envy them their flippancy: this is true. I envy them their determination to remain children. They are laughing and jostling each other all around me as I walk through the playground.
Brightly coloured o-hanami decorations hang from the tops of lampposts and shop signs all the way to the station. A black cat crosses my path and I can’t remember whether or not this is lucky. Because it’s quiet, I find a seat easily enough, in the sunlight. I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the window as we pass a building cast in shadow and then it’s gone as quickly as it came, and the four-beat bar takes over. A headline in the newspaper of the old man sitting opposite tells me that mobile phones are killing all our ghosts. I start to drift away.
* * *
Lying in bed last week, straining towards sleep, Momo asked me to tell her a secret. A cold fear laid its hands on me: did she know, or was this just another of her perverse questions? Could I ever tell her? A part of me longs to, to bridge the gap. A small part: too small. Wrap your intentions of needles of pine. It was the day after I’d found the Heaven’s Passport.
I first saw Hazuki’s Heaven’s Passport in an English class. It took on all kinds of strange identities in my mind, so when I was finally able to look at it more closely, the truth seemed a thousand times more perverse than the steamy admissions of lust that had raged in my imagination.
It happened after school one day. Everyone had gone home and the lights had been turned off for the night. And as I passed the lower girls’ lockers, I saw that hers was ajar. In the space of seven breaths. I nudged the door with my finger, and it swung open. Inside, the guarded notebook: a simple catalogue of good deeds, in a haphazard, adolescent hand, punctuated by shiny, gaudy stickers. I turned it over. It didn’t make sense. I read a few of her entries: they were sweet, sometimes amusing. And then I found the motivation.
On the very first page was her wish, which would come true once she’d performed one hundred good deeds. This was all promised in fine, golden print. What she’d written took me straight home to the three bottles of vintage red wine I’d been saving for a special occasion. How to explain to Momo why the wine has suddenly vanished, when she’s begged me to open a bottle so often? I dread the moment she notices they’re gone. I dread the moment it becomes apparent that I’m not prepared to tell her the truth, and that I don’t have the energy anymore to make it up.
If I cradle The Way of the Samurai loosely in my hands, there are certain points where the pages part of their own accord. One of these contains a passage underlined in red pen: If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling. Hidden in the leaves lay the promise of my salvation; hidden in the leaves the chance of a blameless path. Of the last sentence, of course, it was always the first clause which interested me. There never was a calling. Teaching used to be, or so I gather from what I’ve heard, but not now. Not for a long time. I’ve searched my colleagues for signs and it’s a strong conviction of mine that we are, all of us, lacking. So it wasn’t the promise of promotion of work that drew me in, but the prospect of a life free from blame. And it was this that brought me back, repeatedly, to the conditional. What did it mean to set one’s heart right? To live as though you were already dead? Years of thought brought me to a clutch of meagre speculations and one, clear conclusion: fear was out of the question. You are samurai: you’re dead before you reach the corner.
* * *
On the way to the convenience store, I pass my local launderette and see a plague of cockroaches trapped inside the window. Their large black shells glimmer in the dying light and I stop to count them as they wheel in their frenzy at the glass: twenty four. Making a mental note to buy a roach bomb in the morning, I move on, glancing back a few times to check the vision is real. The image will probably work its way into my sleep and there will be nobody to wake me when it does. Unless Momo is there. In spite of the roach dreams that might ride the tides of sleep tonight, I’m offering prayers to the few gods I now of that she is not. Not tonight. Please.
* * *
I look at Momo these days, and I can’t understand why she’s there. It’s a strange thing to be with a person you have no more left to say to. I’d prefer her not to come. I’d prefer to be left alone with my yen. Most disconcerting is the way she moves around so comfortably, the way she sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the screen, a bowl of steaming rice on her lap, or stands at the sink, elbow-deep in soap suds. She looks at home; my apartment has embraced her in a way it never did me, and she’s free to come and go as she pleases. I’m in no position to ask her not to.
Thirty-nine years, and still in no position! Dead before I reach the corner, and by my own hand.
Hazuki lingered after class. I waited for her to leave, my head down, scribbling on the register. She hovered about her desk, her skirt moving on the periphery of my vision. I drew breath, raised my head, to see her staring at me, a thumb baiting the corner of her mouth. Collecting herself, she straightened and bowed slightly.
“Sensei,” she said, politely, “There’s a lot I didn’t understand.” The almond-shaped space between her thighs, down to her knees. The same as her eyes. “Sensei?”
“If you tell me which parts you didn’t understand, I’ll explain again.”
She moved across to me. Her glassy hair broke open into a fat crescent of white light as her face lowered to the floorboards. In seconds, two white knees, impossibly chiselled, only inches away. My hands clasped and clenched on the desk. I thought I knew what her skin would taste like. The urge to put it to the test was almost unbearable. She put her notebook on my desk and I caught a hint of sweat mixed with jasmine. The blood in my temples pulsed. Yes, there are moments when self-control is out of the question. Even for a sensei. A glimmer in her eye. A throbbing in me for the pink confetti raining from the trees.
“So, the future perfect,” I began.
* * *
At the 7-11, the queue sits fat around the outer aisle like a blockage in a pipe. I almost leave, but my fridge is empty, so I grab a basket. Minutes later, in the queue the basket cuts off the circulation of blood in my arm, and I put it on the floor, pushing it forward with a foot inch by miserable inch. One lives in the world and reacts to things around him. The question is where one places his feet. I look down.
I’m staring inanely at the contents of my basket, wondering what it says about me, when my fingers find the memo in my pocket. We need to have some sort of meeting, I think to myself: I have plenty to say about the restrictions on photocopies. The queue shifts forward and I put the basket on the counter, busy myself with the memo in my hand while the kid packs my shopping. My eyes start to speed read. Stop. Go back. I have that feeling again, like I’m falling and it’s taking me years to hit the ground. It’s not a memo.
* * *
My heart was already busy with its swelling by the time autumn descended red, gold and yellow upon the city. I fell over the wooden desks, all pointed my way in the closed-off classroom. A long descent. A girl thirteen years old.
Is it true that people grow older at a faster rate these days? Certainly I feel now as I expected to feel in my seventies. So if I’m older in feeling than in years, couldn’t a case be made for her?
And maybe this is something like the secret Momo suspected I’d have. But then probably nothing so vulgar, or so recent, entered her imagination. And now there’s the delicate matter of the letter to hide from her, detailing the complaints lodged against me, and the inquiry that will follow.
* * *
Home, I slip my key into the lock and hold still, listening. Trying to sense whether Momo’s on the other side of the door. Click, push, silence. No television. No lights. I dump my shoes and coat at the entrance, my briefcase on the kitchen floor. Put my shopping into the fridge, which hums its approval. Spaghetti Bolognese goes into the microwave. High. Sixty seconds. I’m cast back, suddenly, to a spring afternoon thirty years old. My father towers above me. One of his fingers is raised, and I hear the samurai code on his lips: “There is something to be learned from a rainstorm, Yuudai-chan: you must be resolved to get wet from the start!”
Twiddling disposable chopsticks, I move into the main living area, where the futon is taking up most of the floor space, the duvet humped in segments across it like a huge, cotton maggot. I draw back the curtain and go out onto the balcony, where the moon is slung low, hammocked between the Soseki Tower and the Katanga Building. In a murky blue. No stars. Pylons pull thick, black cables taut across my view, dividing the city into three unequal parts. I take the letter out to read it again. I will not be expected at the school tomorrow. They’ll contact me in a few days. The more I stare at the words, the less sense they make and in a matter of seconds they’ve become hieroglyphs. Ping. Inside, I place the letter carefully at the back of a drawer, build up sandbags of socks towards the front, and push it closed quietly. I ought to shred it. Momo hasn’t yet wormed her way into all of my drawers, but I’m always on the alert. How to ask her to leave without risking a scene? How to take it all back quietly?
* * *
I worried for Hazuki’s education. I watched that she ate well in the cafeteria, that she was happy, that none of her classmates were nasty to her. After, when she bled, I wiped her myself.
* * *
I remember the sword shop my father took me to once, when I was young; the samurai sword with the silhouette of mountains and blossom scored along its edge, where the steel had been folded. The owner leant down to me and said: “To see if a thing is Japanese, boy, look for the careful arc, the controlled flourish.” I call back the sword itself, in its simple glass case. You should never breathe upon, or even speak close to a samurai sword: the blade is so sensitive, it can rust. I knew this at the age of seven. You should never hold a cherry blossom in a wet hand, or with too tight a grip. And this I knew instinctively. I close my eyes and find the girl. She glows soft and pure under hard white light, ready to open. A samurai sword: worth more when they’ve not killed. But the shedding of blood is something else: a part of the process. Part of the cycle.
And how to explain all this to a man who has pictures of dead Emperors on his desk, in place of his wife and children?
© Lenya Samanis
[Heavily doctored chapter from a novel: shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Award for Fiction, September 2006.]
[A short short, set in Cyprus.]
How to Come out Breathing
It’s a kind of game. I ask her if she remembers the day I took her to the zoo when she was little.
My daughter wraps a twist of hair around a forefinger. “Of course,” she says. If she didn’t have my face, I probably wouldn’t believe her. “My turn.” She frees her hand and stares off to where the waitress is slouching at the entrance.
I light my last cigarette. The smoke curls thick blue through my eyelashes. I watch her look down at the empty table; straighten her fork. We have been waiting almost an hour. I wonder if they sent someone out to catch the fish after we ordered.
“Okay,” she says. She has thought of something she wants to ask me. And though a small part of me is wary, what I’m thinking is: What does it matter that another person, another culture, raised her. How great can the distance between us be? Sitting across from her is like facing a mirror. And I’m feeling a thrill swell in my chest because – finally! – here we are. And we are talking. She clears her throat. “When you were in the war, before I was born …”
“Yes, mana mou?”
“Did you have to kill anyone?”
I take a sip of whiskey and put the glass down where my plate should be. “Yes.”
“What does it feel like to kill someone, papa?”
I don’t really remember. Will she believe this? 1974. You do remember: the mountains, the heat haze, the rocks. The day you left the others to sleep and went off on patrol alone. You were walking, thinking, and then the inevitable happened: you were face to face with a Turkish soldier. You both froze, wide eyed. Your mind spiralled. The world came to sudden standstill, as if astonished. And in that stretched-to-tearing moment there was just his huge, open eyes and his mouth. He was a boy, perhaps fourteen. You struggled to silence your incoherent thoughts. And then that line kicked in – either your mother cries or his mother cries – and you raised your rifle and pulled the trigger.
Mortified by the moment and what it had cost, you slumped to the ground alongside him. He was thin, and the soft down on his chin was patchy. You’d killed a child. He had a mother somewhere. You did not. You urged your heart to steel itself or stop; heard gunfire down in the valley; stared at a worm writhing in the dirt between your knees. You sat there a long time, imagining what would happen if your wife or your sister fell into the hands of the enemy. You pictured scenes of ransacked villages and atrocities that would later come true. You considered the men in distant rooms playing at politics, and everything you’d been pushed to do. The fury took hold of you, then. You took your gun in both hands and you raised yourself.
“Papa?”
And you smashed the butt into the still-staring face, setting all your rage behind the movement until you’d obliterated his eyes. Then you set to his body, breaking ribs. You slammed, punched, slapped, kicked, panted, spat, shook: you lost the details. You lost yourself in the things you did to that boy. You wore yourself out on him. And when you returned to camp, everything was different. Your life had been dirtied and to live it you had to blacken yourself. To slide in. To come out at the other end still breathing.
“Papa?”
“It’s not like anything, agapi mou. You don’t think about it.”
© Lenya Samanis.
[A short story about short stories, set in Cyprus.]
Coffee Grinds
The winter was marked by insomnia. I used to lie awake in bed at night, listening to my father fix himself up to the machine he used whenever he couldn’t breathe. It made a noise like the tumble dryer. I’d lie in bed listening: his coughing turning to retching in the bathroom; the cockerel crowing out in the street, stray dogs barking in the valley, his rasping in the hallway. Then the machine, after which a silence stranger than anything else. This is what it will sound like when he’s dead, I thought: just the occasional chink of china, cutlery, a drawer closing.
Those hours I spent listening to his labours, my mind ran off in so many directions I found it impossible to sleep myself, and we passed most of the nights awake. Sometimes we’d meet in the cavernous living room, rubbing our eyes, our faces, our arms. We’d both climb onto the two-seater, staring out into the dark, low-slung space together. Our bodies, heavy with sleeplessness, cleaved continually to and from one another. The fire would fill the room with epileptic light and we’d thrust out feet into the warm, gasping and sighing at the chill in our bones.
Sometimes, in those twilight hours, he told me about Greek heroes, old wise-men and local fools. Sometimes he asked me for stories, and I’d ransack my brain to find an anecdote he hadn’t heard, knowing there were few that weren’t of his own devising. And there were so many. We found new words for them, in the same way that my brother was slowly but steadily replacing the parts of his battered old scooter so that what emerged from the wreckage was shiny and bright and beautiful: we tried to spruce up our own little hoard. They got bigger, longer, more incredible, and more beloved: our invisible, pored-over collection. We brought them out for visitors. And we took them to bed with us, when we went.
We sat long hours in that small lounge. And it wasn’t all talk. At times, long periods of silence stretched out between us and then, out of nowhere, he would smack his hand down hard on my leg; catch the back of my head in his hand, squeeze out some solidarity, let my hair run through his fingers. All in the silence. Then he’d put his foot up, bare and shapely, onto the stocky coffee table. “You see this foot?” he’d ask me. Then, “put your foot here.” I’d place mine, much smaller, alongside his, and he’d tell me about the doctors who’d wanted to take a cast of his foot: “it’s perfect, you see,” he’d say to me, deadpan, “this foot, it’s a model foot. An ideal foot.” Then he’d look at mine, frowning. “But what happened here? Tell me how a daughter of mine could have such strange feet, now. Tsch: you took your mother’s feet. Like your nose.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my nose,” I’d tell him.
“Okay, okay,” he’d say, as if he were too tired to argue: “Kyrie eleison! What was the world going to do with you if you were perfect, anyway? You were going to be too much, now.” We’d sit there in our cold comfort and gaze at the mismatched feet, studying the curves of our insteps, the spaces between our toes. We’d put up a hand each, press them together carefully, palms touching, measuring our difference.
And at various moments in those unbroken hours, both of us expressed to the other the feeling we had that something big was about to happen, something that was somehow bad; but for all our anticipation the thing, when it finally came, still packed a punch.
Two years before that insomniac winter, he had been rushed into hospital with a heart attack, and he liked to remember the texture of that week, when there was a deadline on his life. He liked to remember that doctor. This doctor, he’d say, he came and stood in front of my bed, as I was lying there, and he flicked through the charts at the end of the bed, and he said one word to me. He said “change.” And he left. He went to leave. And I said “wait a minute! What do you mean: change? Change what?” “Your heart,” he told me. Anyway, I started laughing. He said to me “Stop laughing, it’s not a joke.” “It’s not a joke?” I said: “I’m sitting here, you come quickly and look at my papers, you tell me I need a new heart, and it’s not a joke? Where am I supposed to find a new heart? Do they sell them in the kiosk downstairs?” “That’s not funny,” he said: “Stop laughing.” He loved that story. Anyway, they let me go and they told me I had four days left. He’d get the sense of grandeur down: the dramatic sweep. Nothing changed. I just carried on. I got up; I smoked a few joints; people came round; I drank coffee; I sat; I went to sleep … the week was passing smoothly. And then it was Thursday night – the third day – and I had until Friday. And I woke up on Friday, my wife cooked a big meal … He would smile: the Last Supper. And I went to sleep, and Friday passed and I was still here, and I was still here … and Saturday came, still here, and Sunday … And I called my friend, and I said ‘Call that doctor and tell him to fuck off.’ This was two years ago. Ah, koumpare. Four days. That fucking bastard. You know, when I was in the hospital, my nose was frozen, and I mean frozen. And I couldn’t work it out and I asked this doctor – and this guy’s supposed to be one of the top doctors; they have him on television sometimes, to give his opinion – and he didn’t have any idea about my nose. In the end you know what he said to me? ‘Don’t touch it, then.’ Don’t touch it then! Kyrie Eleison! It was sometimes as if he’d carried on living just to tell it, over and over again.
My father’s heart threatened to give out with each beat; his lungs had been pronounced poisoned. Yet he kept going, getting paler and thinner and slower. His movements grew more and more gentle. He was fading in front of me. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t sleep: I thought I was going to miss something. For him, though, the insomnia was more serious. He started to insist that he’d had no sleep at all for five, six, seven days in sequence. He called the doctors and they said it was impossible, that he should be dead, then. He hung up on them, swore, and told his hospital story again. And me, I went in search.
We tried warm milk, old folk songs sung by men with husky voices, and subtitled films. The list of herbal remedies was endless. Just across the road, the botanist, who my father called ‘Mr Sage,’ was busy growing and experimenting with plants of all descriptions. We’d stopped asking for names: we’d never heard of any of them, anyway. When I had tonsillitis, the old man prepared a mixture of herbs for my throat. I saw him crossing the dusty road with them; his tiny, pointy beard supporting his usual serious expression. He gave me strict instructions to boil the plants and gargle with them every hour. “Tell him you did it,” my father said later, when I returned from the doctor’s with antibiotics. We both eyed the bundle of leaves guiltily. For my father’s insomnia, the botanist went on a seemingly endless quest. He’d arrive at our door every few days with a new concoction. And my father, I think, felt obliged to behave as guinea pig, compelled to follow the botanist’s instructions to the letter by the man’s unrelenting dedication. Always knowing the plants would fail him.
Our winter revolved around the problem of sleep. No one else in the family spoke about it, not when they were all getting ten or more hours every day, though the cat, sprawled indolently across every conceivable surface, managed to goad us through example. “Look at him there,” my father would say, disgusted: “he has sleep in his pocket.” It was true. He’d wake to bury his head in his food bowl for half an hour, then he’d return to the couch, the window ledge, the nook behind the curtain, and slot himself back into the world of sleep. We’d pull him over, tug on his legs, stick fingers in the spaces between the pads on his feet. He learnt to sleep through it all, surrendered his body to sleep: did what we couldn’t.
I was working in a local bingo hall, selling tickets in between the games. The girls took the floor in elegant strides, sweeping round tightly-packed tables with a twist, a turn, holding the tickets aloft, the coloured paper fluttering above taut bodies, under the fluorescent tubes of light. We didn’t finish until half three in the morning, for which inconvenience we were making more than the poutanas in the strip clubs. I’d get home to find my father still sat on the two-seater. Sometimes the cat was with him. Sometimes he was hooked up to his machine, an oxygen mask strapped to his face, his eyes unreadable.
The girls I worked with were Romanian, or Russian, and hardened from lives spent grafting and scheming, so I found my friends in the kitchen: the fat cook – Anthony – who wanted to go back to Canada, and the kitchen ladies who spent all night with their hands in hot soapy water, talking about their families. I ran for the lowest rung. One night, drinking a coffee out the back, with Anthony, one of the kitchen ladies took my cup from me, turned it on its head.
“She’s good,” he said to me.
“I don’t really believe in all that stuff,” I told him.
“No, really: she’s good. Try. See.” When the grinds had bled out and dried, she came to sit with us, just outside the back door, and turned it in her hand, gazing intently at the patterns laid out across the inside. Anthony threw the remainder of his coffee at two scrawny cats ferreting in the bin bags, and they scuttled off into the night.
“The man you like,” the woman said to me, “he thinks you’re just a friend. He thinks this is what you want. That’s why nothing happens with him.” I shrugged, reluctant to admit this could be true: these things could always be true. She went back to the cup. “Someone near to you will die soon,” she said.
“What?” I answered. She ignored me. “She’s meant to say things about long journeys and phone calls and happy news,” I complained to the cook.
“Yes, you will get some good news in three days,” she said, “or three weeks. But also, someone near to you will die. It will be soon.” She looked up at me as she set the small cup down, brushing off her hands, dusting the magic away. “Don’t worry. It’s okay,” she said. Then she left.
“You want some macaronia, koukla mou?” Anthony asked.
I had that anxiety in my gut all night, as I wound my way around the tightly-packed tables. I was a bitch that night. No, I haven’t given you my number. No, I’m not going to. No, I don’t wanna come sit with you. Buy your fucking tickets from someone else then: do you seriously think I care?
“Take a break,” my boss said. “Go have a coffee with Antonis.” The last thing I wanted to see was another coffee cup. Nikos came and put his arm around me and squeezed before letting go:
‘You’re okay, koukla mou? You don’t look good.” His black eyes glittered beyond the swell of his shoulder as he lifted a can of Keanita to his mouth. Did he really think I wanted to be friends?
“I’m okay,” I said, as my tongue felt out a few coffee grinds on a tooth. I went and stood in my position, ready to work my section of the room as soon as the game finished. Nikos stood up at his section, his eyes on me. I stormed through the rest of the night in a dazed and demented waltz. He caught me at the end of it:
“Come to the park with me, aggele mou.” I wanted to go to the park with him, like a sixteen year old, make out among the palm fronds.
“I have to go home,” I said: “my father’s sick.” I left him where the car window had been, leaning in for a kiss, his hair curling into his eyes.
A lot of things went through my head on the drive home.
I used to love the drives home: nothing happening; the mountains swallowed up in the darkness; the illuminated window displays eerie, the mannequins surreal. Music pumping out, insulated against a world in which people ate and worked, and laughed and cried. With the window open, the smoke from my cigarette whipped out, along with the tail ends of my hair. I used to speed through the town, pulling the old car hard round the turns, racing home yet not wanting to ever arrive. You know how many years Odysseus was travelling there, darling? How little of that book is about what happened afterwards? It’s all about the journey, mana mou: that’s all there is.
That night was different. That night the emptied-out landscape was noisy and took ten minutes of forever. I don’t know what I was expecting to find when I got home, exactly, but when I finally stumbled through the front door, the house was shrouded in silence.
The lounge was empty. And the kitchen, the yard, and the bathroom. All the lights were off. There was no rasp, no cough. I listened carefully and could vaguely hear my brother’s soft snores in another room. The cat appeared, sycophantic at my feet and breaking the silence with her loud, strained mews. “Quiet,” I told her, but she wouldn’t, not until I put down cat biscuits too fancy for our budget and some cuts of lamb from the previous night’s dinner. If something had happened, wouldn’t everyone still be awake? Wouldn’t someone have called me? I could go and look in the bedroom for myself, but what if I woke him when he’d finally got to sleep? So I sat up in the living room, watching the walls lighten, hearing the birds come out to do their worst. The cat came to purr and sleep on my lap, leaving a wake of long, white hairs. I ate some of the leftovers, shared more of the lamb with the cat; smoked half a pack of cigarettes, weighing in my mind how it would be when he did finally die.
At around six, my father appeared, ghoulish, at the entrance. I was relieved to see him, but he looked worse than he had for months. “I slept,” he said, grasping the back of the sofa for support. “Finally, I slept. And I feel fucking terrible, now. Kyrie eleison!” He showed me an expansive shrug and I moved over for him. “You didn’t sleep?” he asked. I shook my head. He tut-tutted at me, his head semi-inclined to the floor. He looked stoned, but I knew that wasn’t the case. “Never mind,” he said, bringing his hand down hard on my leg with a wry smile: “the first forty years are difficult. After that it’s okay.” He laughed, like he always did at those lines. And I was happy my thigh stung so sharply, that he had enough strength left for that. My sister appeared, bleary-eyed, shuffling across the stone floor in her pyjamas.
“Did you tell her what happened?” she asked my father, as she slumped into the couch. Sudden recollection flashed on my father’s face and a small smile dawned there.
The botanist, across the road, had died suddenly, the previous day, he told me. “Dead, boom, just like that.” It seemed so outlandish. “Yes,” he said, “he woke up, he asked his wife to cut his ear, then he died. Boom.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“Exactly,” he told me, reaching for his coffee: “exactly like that.”
“Why did he ask his wife to cut his ear?” I asked, curling toward him, ready for the details.
“To release the pressure,” he said, as if I was being idiotic. “They told me you were clever, you know.”
“Oh, I am,” I said. “I am.”
“Of course you are: you’re my daughter.” My sister shook the conversation out of her curls and disappeared into the bathroom.
“That’s terrible for the botanist, though.”
“Yes: Mr Sage.”
“His wife must be devastated.” He shrugged. He wasn’t given to speculating about women and their feelings at the best of times.
“Okay, it’s bad. It’s unexpected. But this is how life goes. And it was sudden. Probably it didn’t hurt so much.” He told me what he’d heard from the old woman who ran the village shop. It had been getting on for dusk; they’d been held up. Maybe it was this, he said, because it was so dark, or perhaps it was something else entirely, but they had the botanist in his coffin and, when they went to move it, it had slipped as they were sliding it onto the table. It had slipped and the lid had swung open. Bang down on the stone floor. My father started to laugh, and when he leaned back to cough up the phlegm brought on by this good humour, there was a genuine delight in his eyes. “The botanist, he fell out! Sitting up, with his hands in his lap! Imagine him sitting there, looking at them all!” He dissolved into loud laughter, clapping his hands, appealing to the empty room. “Oh my god, oh my god! Imagine it, now!” The laughter brought on a small fit.
“His poor wife: it’s so undignified” I said. I looked at him bent double. “D’you think he would’ve laughed?” My father paused for a second – recovering; considering – then waved his hand at me.
“Of course he would’ve laughed. What, you think dying makes you serious? It’s funny. He’s up there now; he’s laughing. What else is he gonna do?” His arms swung out from the elbow, palms turned to the gods, the right almost smacking me in the face. He turned to face me. He looked like he might be coming back to life again: he’d put indignation into his eye.
“Shall I make us some coffee?” I asked.
“Now this is a good idea,” he said: “you see: this is how I know you’re my daughter.”
“And there’s more,” I told him, moving over to the kitchen to fill the briki. He shook his head at me, not understanding. “I have a new story for you,” I said.
© Lenya Samanis
[Published in The Mechanics' Institute Review, 2006]
