Segaki (12 page)

She, too, was watching the radiance retreat. He came and stood beside her, but did not look at her. They both watched the pool. He did not touch her, because he wanted to touch her, and was afraid to feel either nothing
or too much. But the pool stank of rotten green algae and the heavy silk of her robes had no shape. They had shape only when she moved.

“It is wrong to think we can know life by experiencing it,” she said. It was not at all what he expected her to say. “We can partake only of what we do not understand and never touch what we do.” Again she was silent. The moonlight was slowly snaking in to the far bank.

It was true, hedonism was not the same as self-
indulgence
. But it was not something he expected her to say. Besides, the pool, apart from its stench, had a monastic look. It brought back thoughts. For an instant he was at Noto, and horrified at himself for liking her.

She must have sensed some change in him. He was sorry. She was something one thought one saw, that turned out really to be there, and now she was fading again.

“I am so tired of the night,” she said, and thin as it was, her voice broke under the strain of saying something passionate. “I would like to see colours again. Do you remember what colours are like? Here everything is blue. I would like to see green, and yellow, and red again. And the real blue of the daytime, which is a kind of happier purple. At court, oh centuries ago, there were so many colours.”

“When?” he asked.

“Oh, that far back one forgets how to count. Once. The irises were like lapis lazuli and silver. We had so many pleasures then that we were always bored, but all I did was watch them. I never saw them at all. Do you believe in pleasure?”

He had no answer.

“Your brother does. That is why he is so austere. Do you know why he sent you?”

He shook his head.

“Neither do I.” She was suddenly, deliberately
capricious
. With a last look at the pool she turned to thread her way back through the garden, stopping to touch now a leaf, now a bud, feeling them out with her fingers, as a blind person would.

“No doubt I seem strange to you,” she said. She did not wait for an answer. She was abruptly haughty, as though she had tired of him.

All the same, as she reached the terrace, she stopped, and looked once more round the silent garden, as though trying to memorize something. Once more a bell rang. He did not dare to ask the meaning of those bells. The sound died away, and then, from a shrub, came the
red-mouthed
song of the hototogisu, a repeated aural stab, cold as crystal. There was a faint sighing in the air. The bird song vanished. She stood there until he could no longer hear even the echo of it.

“We must hurry inside,” she said, and seemed to smell the air. She picked up her skirts and swept ahead of him, smoothly over the terrace steps, her skirts undulating like a flattened snake. And almost as soon as she turned her back, there was a crack of thunder, and a high whirling in the air that descended on them in a gust of hot wind.

She stood alone in the midst of the dim hall. For the first time she seemed uncertain. Then the summer rain began, like a flood of needles, and then, more steadily, until the beaten peony leaves give a tissue paper rattle, tautened and then snapped, over and over again.

“Shall I play for you now?” she asked. Her voice located her. With the moon gone the hall had been even more shadowy than before, and the one lamp only made the shadows the more deceptive. She left the screen open. The noise of the soft rain and its puddles was everywhere, and made his head swim.

At first he did not answer. He found it impossible to say anything. He was afraid again, not of her, so much as of himself and of this house. He wondered uneasily where the maid was. He had the sensation of being watched.

“I only have this night,” she said. She stepped forward into the light, and he saw her almost transparent hands, fluttering with a tentative, helpless gesture. For the first time she spoke to him directly, with a passionate intensity that startled him. “Give me back my lost time,” she whispered. “For now I know what it meant.”

She stared at him, startled, obviously, by what she had said, dry eyed. Then she whirled and pattered off. She did not return. Perhaps she had wanted comfort, but he had none to give. She might have been anywhere from 18 to 30 or 400. He wondered when she had died.

He could not stand there idly, and he had no thought of leaving. Where would he go? Again he sat down and peered into the darkness. The rain did not abate, but it did begin to chime differently, as though it really were silver and not water, where a dim light from the lamp caught it, beyond the open panel. Then the tone became more acid.

It was the koto again. It played on and on, wavering, and then pulled into line by a sharp stroke across the strings, and somewhere even farther away, the
shakahachi
wavered too and then grew firmer, the echo of a forgotten court orchestra, but terribly far away, as though it were being played in the middle of last year, or some other year, long ago, as though, when one opened an old music book, the columns of signs and writing wriggled and began dustily to sound themselves.

The music went on until that bell which he had come to dread shattered everything. It did not survive the
overtones
of the bell. He peered anxiously every way, but could see nothing. Then she sank down opposite him, rather frail and mournful now, with a sad little droop of her shoulders. In the dim light he could not see her face at all, but only the smooth, cold flesh of her throat and her hands. They were so restless, those hands.

“It is one o’clock,” she said. She listened intently to the rain. “They say you are a Buddhist.”

“I was.”

“But you are not now?”

“I don’t know….” It was true. He didn’t. He
wondered
uneasily what she wanted.

“I am not. It became fashionable after my time at court,” she told him.

He started. Buddhism had been introduced in the sixth and the tenth centuries.

“Perhaps it is better to have several Gods, and
distribute
the blame. The garden is full of kami,” she said. “Sometimes I hear them calling. There is one in the pool. He is nice I think. And one in a cypress, not so nice.”

“And the ghost foxes of Edo,” he asked, abruptly reminded of them. The light from the lamp now stood out around her head. Sometimes the foxes disguised
themselves as beautiful women, but only when they had something to do. Again he was afraid. And she seemed to be swaying towards him, to want something, desperately, something she had to have.

“Have you seen them?” she asked. Her voice was still and eager. It sounded as though she loved them.

He wanted very much to ask if she were a ghost, though that would not have been polite to do, and to his horror found that he was asking her.

The room became motionless and somehow watchful. He heard only the rain. She blinked.

“Perhaps I am,” she said. She sounded deeply hurt, as though she had been interrupted. As though something she had been so careful to keep from breaking had
suddenly
been swept from her hands, a delicate piece of jade perhaps, perfect because so carved as to conceal its only flaw.

She did not go on, and there was nothing he could do. She had somehow withdrawn. He could not bear it. He took the lamp beside them and held it up, until it shone on her face. Her eyes were open, the texture of crushed velvet, and while he watched, three tears started down her cheeks. Her oddly thin lips were trembling. She flinched.

“Oh you are not like your brother. He is gentle,” she said. With a swift movement, she was on her feet,
hurrying
off into the darkness, out into the rain, dissolving into the night, until he could hear her no more.

He was left alone in the hall, with only the sound of the rain. Once more he heard that wail, anguished, but this time close to him.

Whatever it was was beside him. He did not scream.
With some courage he held up the lantern, so it fell across the face of the maid. She was without her veil, and her face was hideous, wrinkled, distorted with pain, grief, and anger, her teeth yellow and her eyes twisted buttons.

“Priest you may be, but you are no Buddha,” she snapped. “You have no manners. She was only trying to please you, it is rude of you not to be pleased. She had only this one chance, and for her it has been very long to wait. Almost too long. You are not a good man, whatever your brother says.” Her breath was foul, and she spoke sharply, with no grammar for their relative stations. He felt slapped by a hand without flesh. “Get up.” He got up. “You must follow her. She must not be left alone. Not yet.”

She tugged at him, whining, and he flinched away. She laughed then. Her flesh was cold and slimy.

“Oh a priest. One of the castrated ones,” she said. “Go. Go.” She shoved him towards the open panel. And then, her grip left him, and she was gone. Perhaps she could see in the dark. He stood there, badly rattled, sure the room was now empty. Then he blundered across the terrace, out into the rain.

The rain, which had looked so gentle, beat down on him brutally. It wet his clothes in an instant, and he could see nothing. Behind him he heard harsh laughter.

He stumbled through the garden. The long heavy kimono clung to his body like soft slobbery leeches, heavy between his shoulder blades, binding his
movements
. The rain roared down on his head. He ripped off his kimono and stood there in his loin cloth, shuddering, naked and helpless, no longer protected from himself
by his clothes. The rain on his exposed shoulders was now a repeated acupuncture.

He pushed his way through the shrubs, stumbling on the slippery moss, and the branches lashed and scratched his flesh, ripping across his nipples. He did not notice. He felt maddened and contrite.

There was no sound but the rain and his own
stertorous
breathing. The rain was icy, but also sticky, yet he did not feel cold, even though his nipples were stiff with cold.

He found her where his body had directed him to run, at that pool motionless as a depthless tarn, inhabited only by a water-snake. She was standing up to her ankles in the water, on which her obi already floated, staring at nothing.

The bushes behind him lashed necklaces of spray. She turned, saw him, and advanced up to her knees in the water, with a gasp of expectation. He plunged in after her and tried to coax her back to shore. She said nothing, but pounded him rapidly with her flurried fists. It was
exciting
. He could not even see her face, but knew she was both sorrowing and furious to be interrupted. Then inevitably something rose within him. He had forgotten that it had the power to do so. They were both slippery, and as he caught at her robe, it ripped, with the tired, shocked sound of very old fabric. She stopped pounding him and went limp. Half carrying her and half pulling her, he reached the shore, almost lost his footing, and then found the bank. Beyond them the obi drifted off under the rain.

She still did not speak and her body was frigid. Pulling her by the wrist, the victim of his own excitement, he
hurried back through the garden. Ahead of them a light shone, and then went out, even as others came on. Picking her up he carried her into the hall. There were now lamps lit along a corridor, and down this, unthinkingly, he hurried. The corridor had a musty smell. His feet made damp footprints behind him, and he dripped, they both dripped, on the mats, she even more than he, her robes trailing down.

The maid waited ahead of them, holding a lamp. Seeing him, she led the way, the light streaming out around her hunched black body, her sandals padding domestically against the tatami, which here and there were frayed and worn. She led him deeper into darkness, until he thought he could hold his burden no longer, and then her lamp disappeared. But from an open door ahead came a soft subdued glow.

He turned in there, aware only of a sudden warmth, unlike that of any other room of the house which he had seen. It was plainly Lady Furikake’s quarters, as though she could only survive in this close, humid temperature.

Dead or alive, or whatever she was, she was shivering, perhaps from shock, perhaps from cold. He called for the maid but received no answer. The only sound, apart from the rain outside, was the chalky hiss of the charcoal pellets in the kotatsu sunk in the floor.

Something had to be done. He took her clothes off. She weighed almost nothing. He rolled her about, as he removed them, careful not to look too closely at the first skin he had ever seen that excited him, perhaps because it was so taut and
non-commital
. He did not dare to touch it. He pulled out one of the two quilts neatly folded beside the kotatsu and put it over both her and the stove. Then
through the cloth he gently felt her body. Her eyes were still closed. Her breathing was hasty but shallow. The dim light flickered over her face, in patterns like those of cloud shadows undulating across a field. Her little bare feet curled up like squash flowers. Dead she might be, but he found himself afraid that she might die.

He got up to examine the room. Its only ornament was a low dish containing three irises, one of which was intentionally withered and brown. The symbolism was exact.

There was too much elegance here. Everything was etiolated. But people tend to forget that when it is not mere fashionable caution, elegance is at once a moral viewpoint, an ethical structure, and a metaphysical
necessity
. He was swept along by something unfamiliar to him, simply because instinctively he seemed to understand it, even though it altered him, until he watched himself
doing
things he had not known he could do. Know it or not, he was caught up in that clean imitation of youth that is younger and more fastidious than any real youth could ever be. It is pleasant, after all, to be vigorous, tight skinned, and forty, if one remembers that one is twenty at the same time.

His fingers were trembling. It was his body, now, that pointed out, a little humorously, certain defects in his mind. But even so, he did not realize that what he sensed she wanted, was only because unconsciously he now wanted it too. The walls were of sliding panels. Opening these, he discovered a wardrobe with chests, and opening these in turn, took out a neatly folded kimono, saffron and silver, at random. On top of it lay a few withered colourless flowers with powdery leaves, and the dust was
heavy. He shook out the clothing and then laid it beside her quilt.