Segaki (11 page)

Then, half turning, she spoke for the first time. Her voice was wispy and dry, as though it cost her an effort even to whisper.

“The Lady Furikake will be here soon,” she said, and drifted away.

He knew she had been there already and at the same instant, that she was there again. But whatever was watching him, now watched him from a different height, and seemed calmer and more appeased.

There was a single acid sound, as though someone had put an ice crystal on a stove. It was neither tentative nor followed by any other. It existed for a long time, even after it had died away.

He started to rise, but a voice came out of that shadowy darkness, a voice also withdrawn. “No,” it said. “Stay there.” A woman’s voice, far away, that would have been gentle, had it not been so used to command. He sat down again.

Then she began to play, at first as though merely
parting
infinite layers of silence, into which, somewhere, a sound had been dropped and lost. In the darkness of course her fingers would be blind. But then, carefully, they found what they were looking for.

He expected to find it painful, for the koto has that fresh innocence of youth that is always untouched by experience. No matter how much it knows, it always remains able to see everything for the first time, and so it is maddeningly vulnerable.

For the koto does all the things that water can do, as pliant and unyielding, it humorously shapes the rocks.
Silence is a vast black pool with granite edges. Reaching across the strings, with poised plectrum, and a serious little smile, Lady Furikake let fall a single pebble of sound down into that silence. It rippled out. It defined the stillness. And then, with a roar, came the whole
downpour
of the first spring flood.

The sound remained untouched. It was just sound, the spume and spray of music, but meaningless in itself. But as it dashed against silence, it echoed round him in a thousand playful, self-absorbed ways, with the thoughtful melancholy of a completely contented child. And
everything
it touched it defined by a meditative echo. These are rocks, it said, these pebbles, some hard, some soft, and here I am supposed to leap down over hot stones. Here I catch at a small moss covered boulder and make a
backward
dashing foam. I like that. And here, caught in the air and dazzled by the sun, I suddenly hang scattered into a thousand crystal eyes. They don’t see anything. They are themselves the act of seeing. And now, in the acid shallows of a mountain pond, away from the current, I am merely watching.

And then, as naturally as a little girl would aimlessly laugh, that effortless melody smoothly flowed out into a motionless sheet and became grave. It bobbled only at a single thought, like a solitary yellow water lily, on which there was an aphid and a drop of dew, while the petals shimmered slightly in an almost imperceptible breeze, a breeze that existed only in the centre of the pond, to refresh the lily. He wanted to look more closely at that lily. He knew he had to. It meant something.

Abruptly Lady Furikake drew the plectrum sideways and diagonally across the strings, making a sound like
ripped silk, very old. He wanted to say, don’t do that, the lily was so beautiful. It brought tears to his eyes.

She gave him a wistful, almost guilty little smile, and began again, a slow country air, very far away, that
suggested
a beach, and someone not exactly thinking, but pensive, against a sky without a moon. The surf there was only a gentle ravel. It turned the stones up to its own wet watermark, as though looking for something at the bottom of its bottomless chest of drawers. For after all the sea contains everything we ever lost, and somehow it has to be found again, when there is a call for it.

He relaxed and was grateful to her, for the tact of so placidly turning again to something impersonal. Her technique was consummate, and like most consummate things, lonely. One must be much alone to master a technique.

He felt sad. For like Japanese food, the koto is always somewhat sour, in order to remind us of the sweetness of things. He knew he would hear these three little melodies always, and that always they would make him grateful for being able to feel, when he was pleased, also a little sad.

It was so fastidious.

He heard her rise. “It is almost midnight,” she said, in a curiously gentle voice, as though she were touching everything for the last time, and at last realizing what it was worth. With a rustle she moved towards the wall, and a panel slid aside to let in the garden.

For a moment there was no sound but the furry crackle of the lamp in the eaves above him, in whose flame a moth lay drowning. And then the fresh sounds of the garden came into focus, the crickets, the toads, the
sussuration
of a tight packed pine, and the presence, how can you define that sound, of water absolutely still.

She stood in silhouette against the square beam that supported the roof tie, as moonlight poured weakly into the room and around his ankles, wearily finding its own level. “Are you afraid now?” she asked.

He shook his head.

She sighed. “Fear can also be beautiful, if only one has the ease to enjoy it,” she said. “It is a way of looking at things, if we have no other.” Gathering her robes in her hands, she glided across the tatami and sat down near him. Her head bent as she poured herself some tea. He had still to see her face, but he had caught the sparkle of her eyes, almost but not quite filled with tears. She straightened up and regarded him gravely.

Her fingers around the cup were pink against the light, and scarcely real. The aroma of the tea was intoxicating, and she held her head over it, as though bathing in it. It seemed to refresh her. Clearly it was a delicate tea. As clearly, whoever she had once been, she was a court lady, solemn and giggly all at once, wayward, wilful, but
discreetly
distant and agonizingly polite. There was
something
ancient and hieratic about her movements, as though she were the ghost of a child. Yet she was not strictly beautiful. It was merely that she could not help giving fastidiously an impression of beauty. Her bones were large, her face bland and massive. Yet she seemed fragile.

She certainly did not seem real. She was not exactly there. She leaned over and popped a sweatmeat into her mouth, watching him guardedly, with a girlish and naughty expression. It was as though she were doing
everything for the last time, so that after infinite
experience
, just because the experience was suddenly finite, it seemed the first, like a traveller, eating a last meal in the old home, and rather sorry to have to go on to the new one.

“Oh,” she said. “They are so good.” She seemed faintly surprised, and shyly she held the dish out to him. He took a sweetmeat. She watched his face, and he tried to smile. But actually it was dusty, crusted, and a little old, though very fine and rich. It held only the pale echo of a slightly tart sweetness, as though its texture were scented glass.

She was bending over the dish, in which there were three or four kinds, examining them intently, with an absorbed gravity. She looked up and blushed. “You see, it is only tonight I may eat them,” she said, from very far away, though while he had watched her so absorbed in them, she had seemed nearer. It was the tea. It had such heavy, luxurious, pungent fumes.

She took an almond cake and nibbled it, holding it in both slender paws, like a child imitating a squirrel, and gazing at him sadly and intently, as though she were waiting for him to do something expected. But he did not know what he was expected to do. As sometimes happens when people stare at us, he could feel his cheekbones begin to tingle, his eyelids grow suddenly granular, and his mouth too full. He felt pulled forward towards her, though he did not move. Despite himself he laughed, and breaking into a slow, delighted smile, she leaned forward and laughed gently too. It was an almost inaudible slightly rusty laugh. But when she smiled her whole appearance became beguiling and graceful, like that of a
solemn puppy who has at last decided it feels safe and warm. Her teeth were small, rounded, and ivory.

He did not know what would have happened then, had not the bell sounded, plopping into silence like a square of gelatine, and then, after what seemed a long silence, someone off somewhere began to play the shakahachi, that weedy, almost unendurable flute. The sound was alternately muffled and then clear.

“Oh no, not yet,” she said. The smile left her face and she got to her feet. She moved towards the sliding panels, paused, turned about, and beckoned him.

He felt far from safe, and yet he knew that he would follow. She walked ahead of him, onto a porch confused by many pillars. The flute stopped and after a moment a koto began, but not the same koto, and with an even sadder melody, like the natural history of a leaf, turned downward towards its burning. It was impossible to tell from which direction the sound came.

Though there was no breeze in the garden, her robes stirred slightly. Her head was motionless, and he could not see her features. She seemed deeply distressed.

Before them was another garden, obviously the sort of garden attached to women’s apartments, but rather large. Now he felt that she was smiling, being one of those people, even in life, who always smile a little ironically, because they cannot, by their nature, laugh, except, perhaps, sometimes alone. They are the people we can please only deeply, usually by accident, precisely because they cannot forget themselves in a merely light diversion. They feel things too aloofly ever to laugh out of
absent-minded
politeness.

She was waiting, he thought, for approval. He did not
think he would have been shown this garden if he had not passed some test, the nature of which, or when it had occurred, he did not know. For it was unlike Yasumaro’s garden. It was personal in a different way. The character of Yasumaro’s garden lay in its careful impersonality. His garden was a series of conclusions drawn about the world. But this garden seemed a wistful attempt to remember something.

And of course, in the moonlight, one could not see very much, but was only aware of an untouchable
innocence
, and of the bulks of rocks and shrubs, and the colourless presence of sleeping flowers. It was like an imaginary garden with real toads in it. But then, perhaps all gardens are imaginary. The more we love them, the more assiduously we tend them, the more they show us the world as we would like to be able to believe it to be, and if there are real toads in it, perhaps that is only
testimony
to the wilful naivété with which we insist upon the goodness of things, at the price even of self-protection, as though we were to cry out to the fairy dying of
disbelief
, whom we know not to exist: yes, we do believe in you, we do. And just because we deny reason to favour love, the fairy revives and does exist. After all it is only a play.

So he found this garden reasonable and soothing. He was only faintly puzzled that, since it was not there, it yet seemed somehow, in the wavering moonlight, to exist.

Even she seemed to exist, not baleful now, but
poignantly
good. The garden was utterly still.

“Do you like it?” she asked shyly.

He nodded. “It is so silent,” he said.

“Silent?” her voice withdrew. “Perhaps you are not happy. A happy person notices things. Try to listen.”

She went carefully down the three steps to the path and stood there waiting, as though commanding something that had always obeyed her chiefly because it liked to. Slowly sound welled up as though it were warm air through a cellar grate.

He heard the drip of drops of water from a leaf, then others, from all directions, a splash, and the plush
movement
of ripples across a turbid pond. A frog perhaps. And then other noises, a soft linen humming like the run of fine cloth through a ring, insect noises, the abrasion of chitenous wings. It was a little orchestra, swelling to a sonorous yet clacking night music, with the chirp of cicadas like wood blocks, to accompany a dance. And then, as though one had tossed ivory chopsticks into the air, a falling hollow rattle, as a squad of some iridescent beetle took off in a swooping swarm, flying at the height of his knee, to vanish with a descending buzz into a shrub.

She nodded, smiling, suddenly cold with pleasure, as though a lady bug had landed on her hand. Then, with an oddly provocative look at him, she slipped down one of the paths, among the shrubs, and disappeared.

The orchestra grew louder. He felt stricken. He did not want her to disappear. For though much about this place was dejected, and most of all the musty smell, and though he was on edge to hear that rent wail again, when he was least on his guard, of her he was not afraid at all. It was more as though he were afraid for her. She was too delicate to do him harm. She could only come to harm. And he had the belief that if she came to harm, then
that would wither him, as watching an execution kills something in us, makes it impossible, if we watch imperturbably, ever to respect life in the same way again.

The insects stopped. The drops ceased to fall from the peony leaves, and the peony flowers themselves were floppy and bleached. Only somewhere he heard the stealthy movement of ripples. He hurried after her.

He did not see her. He saw only a fluffy white cat,
predacious
and mangy, stalking through the undergrowth towards something motionless. The moonlight caught the eye of a bird. Despite himself he ran forward, waving his arms, and the bird jumped into the air.

The cat disappeared, and he found himself watching Lady Furikake, on the other side of a shrub, staring at him. Their eyes met for a moment, but it was too leafy for him to see her expression. She turned away. He hurried around the bushes, and found her standing on their other side, at the edge of a broad flat pool, sunk a foot or two below its surrounding bank, in which dead leaves half floated and half sank. It was from here the ripples came. The ground was covered with moss, and thinly planted with narrow stemmed trees which rose up for some distance before their branches began to curve out towards each other. The light and dark came in mottled patches, but the moon must be setting. The patches grew paler, and a soft radiance was slowly being skimmed off the water.