An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful (18 page)

‘Hey, Eddie.’ Fisk shouting, pointing frantically to the empty seat beside him. ‘Come sit here.’

Edward pushed his way through a bevy of Indian woman to the front of the room.

‘Kept one for you, pal.’

‘Very considerate.’

‘Just being an evil American. Did you see him?’

‘Who?’

‘The great man. Nehru.’

‘Only in passing.’

‘I got to shake his hand.’ Fisk wriggled his palm at him as if it still retained some essence of the Indian leader.

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Wished him good luck.’

‘Good luck for what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s a big country he’s running.’

‘The show’s about to start.’

‘Yeah, like I’m going to see the Great Houdini or something.’

‘Maybe you will.’

Ishikawa performed the task of master of ceremonies,
introducing
Hu Wei to the audience first in Japanese then in English. The internationally-acclaimed illusionist was a thin, elderly gentleman who bore all the usual characteristics of his trade – the wispy beard, the pantaloons, the wide-sleeved silk coat embroidered with gold dragons. More impressive was the Chinaman’s air of aloofness, as if he were here this evening to pass on the mysteries of his ancestors, but only if he deemed the audience worthy of receiving them.

The illusionist started off modestly. Rings were linked and unlinked with ease, silk handkerchiefs changed colour, a needle was passed through a balloon. Edward had seen a similar performance at the Glasgow Hippodrome with his father just before the war. It was all very ho-hum. He was just about to slip away when Hu Wei announced in English:

‘Many of you may have seen an illusionist cut a woman in half. But tonight I will go one stage further.’ He stretched out an arm to beckon the arrival of two of the hotel staff carrying a long,
pale-green
wooden box, which was placed on top of a covered table.

‘Tonight I will cut a woman into three parts. Please. My assistant for this evening.’

And there she was. Sumiko. Shuffling on to centre stage, dressed in her traditional kimono, her face painted with thick white
make-up. 
She bowed to the audience, her eyelids fluttering, the stage lights reflecting the perspiration on her upper lip. She really did look like someone who was about to be cut up into parts. Edward genuinely feared for her – not for her safety – but for her ability to carry out the performance. Surely she had never done anything like this before.

At Hu Wei’s beckoning, she entered the box from one side,
sliding
in until her quivering feet appeared at the far end. There were three flaps across the front that Hu Wei lifted and closed in order to show the three sections of her body. A saw was produced and flourished high above the audience. Sumiko’s head and feet settled into tense stillness. The audience hushed. And the cutting began. It wasn’t the illusion of the sawing that enthralled Edward, or the grind of metal teeth on wood, the sawdust gathering on the floor, the collective imagining of torn flesh, blood, organs and entrails. It was when Hu Wei separated the three sawn sections, moving them on their individual tables about the stage, that he became the most excited. Sumiko’s head on one side of the stage, her torso on another, her legs in the middle. He found the whole performance to be extremely erotic, as if each part of her was being served up for him, and for him alone. Of course, Hu Wei re-formed her, held her hand while she tip-toed front stage, bowed to the
audience
. Edward clapped loudly, too loudly, in the hope of attracting her attention. But she remained impassive, caught up in an almost trance-like state that may or may not have been part of the act. She bowed again and disappeared behind a rear curtain.

The audience had hardly re-settled in their seats when the
illusionist
moved into his finale – shooting flames from the tips of his fingers. It was a spectacular display of digital fireworks, provoking loud cheering until one of Hu Wei’s ribbons of fire hit a pelmet to the side of the stage. The flame flickered then caught hold of the curtain fabric. Edward assumed, as must have everyone else in the static audience, that the incident was part of the illusionist’s act, until he saw a young reception clerk rush from the back of the room, rip down the flaming fabric, throw a bucket of sand over the fiery heap. The poor lad appeared to burn his hand in the process.

‘I am a doctor,’ declared an Indian gentleman emerging from the audience. ‘Ice. Get me a bucket of ice. Please. I will need some ice. And make way for our young hero.’

There was a burst of applause as the crowd parted. Edward saw Hu Wei pick up a piece of the burnt fabric from the stage, shake his head, then follow the doctor and his charge downstairs to the
kitchens
. Someone opened a window to let out the lingering smoke.

‘Quite a performance,’ Fisk said, flushed his cheeks.

‘The sawing or the burning?’

‘The whole goddamn show. Fancy a nightcap?’

‘Another time. I think I’ll go back to my room. I feel like writing.’

‘Wouldn’t want to disturb the muse. And the untitled novel.’

Edward really did feel like writing. The events of the day and evening shaking him up into a state of creative agitation. He needed to get it all out, get something down on paper.

She was waiting for him. In the semi-darkness. Sitting in the armchair where he had sat the night before waiting for her. Fingers of blue moonbeams lighting up her pale make-up. That porcelain face.

‘I am trembling,’ she said.

He walked over to where she sat, drew her off the chair. She really was shaking. She held her face up to his. That white,
expressionless
mask. The corner of her eyes bloody in irritation from the make-up. What did she want? He really couldn’t tell. He held two alien cultures in his hands. The culture of woman. The culture of the Japanese. He could not read the signs, these strange hieroglyphs of need, desire, fear. Then instinct or passion or some other
invisible
force took over. And he kissed her.

At first, Edward feared he might be acting merely in the spirit of the times, the lingering
zeitgeist
of the Occupation – another
arrogant
, foreign victor come to take the spoils now that the
Americans
had departed. Or even more simply, that he was the honoured paying guest taking advantage of the poor chambermaid. But it was not like that. This was not an unequal partnership. Sumiko
possessed as much power over him as he did her. His life became dictated by the possibility of her turning the handle of his door as he waited, caught on that emotional ledge between anticipation and disappointment.

Sumiko confided their liaison to no one. And neither did he. The Fuji Suite served as the sole location of their relationship, and by making herself responsible on the staff rota for the cleaning of their love nest, she gradually sneaked more and more of her belongings into his rooms. He loved these almost daily additions to his surroundings. When she was not there, he would go over to the wardrobe just to smell her scent on the sleeves of her garments or play with the jars of mysterious creams and unguents on the dressing table. There was something comforting in seeing her robe draped over the foot of his bed, discovering a long strand of her hair in the basin or flicking through the pages of the book she was reading just to feel where her own fingers had been.

‘You should read this book,’ she said. She was sitting upright and bath-clean on the bed, wrapped in a blue and white
yukata
courtesy of her employer. Her feet were bare. Such tiny feet. He abandoned his manuscript just to go over and kiss their soles. Her skin hot and scented from the soak. She giggled and wriggled and kicked at him to stop.

‘What is it?’ he asked, sliding up to lie beside her.

‘
Snow Country.
By Yasunari Kawabata. It is both sad and
beautiful
. It is my favourite book.’

‘My Japanese is not good enough to appreciate such a novel.’

‘I will help you translate.’

‘What is it about?’

‘About a cold man from the city. He goes once a year to an
onsen
in the snow country. There he meets a hot-spring geisha. Are you such a cold man?’

‘Why do you say such a thing?’

‘Because sometimes you are mean to me.’

‘When?’

‘In little ways.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It is hard to explain.’

‘Try.’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes you make me feel I am not perfect for you.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘I can see it in your eyes.’

Winter closed in, wrapping the hills in an icy mist. Gone were those wonderful days of writing by the waterwheel. Edward stayed in his room all day, radiators boiling, hardly changing out of his pyjamas and robe, ordering meals to his door. His whole world of sleep, work and play narrowed down to this one set of rooms. His cave in the mountains. He was hibernating. And he loved it.

It began to snow. He watched the plump flakes fall, purifying his world into a muffled silence. Until a crow flew off a branch, loosening a white trail in its wake. The hotel boilers stoked up into a frenzy. Black smoke from the few village houses grazing the sky. No one ventured out. No footprints in the snow. No snowmen. No snowballs. Or the joyous laughter of the young. For there were no children here. No vehicles could make it up the hillside either. The hotel was cut off from the plains below.

‘Supplies are dwindling,’ Ishikawa told him with all the worried seriousness of a military officer at the front. ‘We can only last a few more days if this freeze doesn’t break. Let us pray the pipes do not break first.’

Edward kept on writing, inasmuch a reaction to the blank
canvas
outside his window as from any inner inspiration. The snow made everything clearer, more defined, more true. Being stranded added a further dimension to his urgency. Page after page emerged from his typewriter. Accompanied by the sound of a clarinet, the soulful rehearsal of a member of the touring Japanese National Orchestra snowbound in the room above. Sumiko curled up on the bed reading her novel. She had found her own snow country and she was happy.

‘I want to go out of this room with you,’ she said sleepily. ‘It would be very great fun.’

‘It’s better for both of us that we aren’t seen together. You know that.’

‘Then let us go somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘An
onsen
. I have a day off next week. If the snow goes away.’

He didn’t want to go anywhere. He was locked into his magical world, why would he want to break the spell? But she persisted. The snow began to melt into marbled slush, the local bus company was getting vehicles through with fresh produce from the plain. He arranged to meet her at an
onsen
further down the hillside, away from the usual orbit of the other members of staff. Just before he left, he received a letter from Aldous delivered by the first mail-van to reach the hotel in ten days.

Typical Aldous. Short and sometimes sweet. Edward tucked the letter into his pocket, concentrated on his walk down to the bus stop from the hotel. Bellboys worked ahead of him
shovelling
salt on to the icy pathway. The ponds were frozen. The trees frosted white. As his eyes widened to take in his new horizons, he glimpsed a hawk trace a hungry path in the sky. It felt strange to move away from his base. He had spent months at the hotel hardly venturing outside its grounds. He thought he had hidden himself away in order to write. But as he stood waiting for the bus, his lips and cheeks already chaffed from the cold, he realised he was also emerging from a dark, womb-like period of mourning for the death of his parents. He felt like an invalid learning to walk again. He felt re-born. Aldous’ letter also cheering with the opportunity
it presented. He clapped his gloved hands, stamped the cold from his feet, began to hum as the bus appeared, cautious in its slippery descent, but remarkably, still on time.

Sumiko was waiting for him at the entrance to the spa hotel. Rosy-faced and smiling. She wore a fur hat, a long woollen coat and a matching muffler. He had never seen her in street clothes before. He had never seen her look so beautiful.

‘A friend borrowed to me,’ she said, touching her hat. She then linked her arm in his, and he let her lead him to their room.

‘However much time you spend washing your body at hotel,’ she told him as he changed into his robe. ‘Multiply by three.’ She nibbled on the tip of a finger in contemplation of this thought. ‘No, multiply by four. Only then can you enter the common pool.’

He did as she advised, soaping and rinsing himself in the men’s washrooms until his skin emerged prune-wrinkled from under the foam. Yet still the other Japanese male bathers took longer with their ablutions. He felt like a dirty foreigner polluting their water. He would soak in the naturally heated pools until his skin bristled pink, his blood thawed, his limbs dissolved into a rubbery mass. And then plod back to their room to lie on the futon where his body merged with hers into a constant mineral heat. The kneading of sweaty flesh. His blood boiling into fists of erections. Spilling his seed and still he was hard. Pores open. Heart open.

‘I love you,’ she said.

He watched her as she sat cross-legged on the
tatami
,
towel-drying
her hair in front of a low mirror. She turned to look at him. A tiny muscle twitched at the corner of her mouth. But he couldn’t bring himself to repeat her words. She turned back to the mirror, dragging a large comb so harshly through the tangle of her hair that he saw her eyes water from the pain. ‘I am not your
panpan
girl,’ she said.