Segaki (19 page)

For a moment there was silence.

Next the dog raised its head and began an eager whine. It scrambled to its feet, sniffed the air, went to the balustrade,
poked its head between two of the baluster panels, nose down, drew back, ran in a lazy figure eight around them, stopped, cocked its head, and galloped hastily towards the back of the pillared hall and through the doorway to the courtyard.

A moment later they heard it barking and plunging down the arcaded stairs, as though late for an
appointment
.

A little ridiculous under his hat, Yasumaro turned to Muchaku, “You’d better go look,” he said quietly.

Muchaku went to the balustrade and looked down. Far below him was an open almost perpendicular field, whose grasses had the ciliated motion of yellow sea anemones in a rock pool. Their movement was chiefly downward, but there was now another movement
upward
, the metal and lacquer back of a soldier climbing hand over hand up the steep purchase.

That joyous barking could almost be followed down the hill. The dog hurtled out of the bracken, trembling with the effort to leap faster than it could, lost its balance, disappeared in the grasses, yelped, and then appeared again. The soldier lifted his head.

Muchaku drew back and turned to face his brother across the worn emptiness of the terrace, at the far end of which Yasumaro made a self-contained little silken pool, sitting there with the hieratic gravity of Lady Furikake.

“A soldier,” he said. He did not say which one. Neither could he move.

“Ah,” said Yasumaro and reached for a sheet of sized paper from the roll beside him. He began to sketch with rapidity and assurance, one thing after another, on sheet after sheet.

Below them the yelping, muffled by the distance, but faster and faster, abruptly stopped.

“What should we do?”

Yasumaro looked gravely amused, but also, from the way his brush moved, almost without his glancing at it to see what it was doing, he was in the best of spirits. “Why should we do anything? We are in no danger. If he is a peasant, he will respect you because you are a priest. Perhaps you had better change. There are some robes here somewhere. But then anybody would know you were a priest.” He spoke more sharply. “In the room where I slept. Change.”

Muchaku shook his head. It would only be a
masquerade
. He could not bring himself to defend himself that way.

Yasumaro’s brush, which had for a moment shaken, now went on more firmly. “And if he is a samurai, or a courtier, he will respect me because I am an artist. Either way he will be intimidated. It is a pity you do not paint. Like most selfless activities, it is soothing. Art is so orderly. It is never self-indulgent. Some of course prefer stormy and passionate airs, but that is not art. That is only vanity.”

From below them came an abrupt animal scream.

Yasumaro’s wrist joggled, but he reached for still another sheet. At this he looked for an instant, and then scribbled rapidly.

He paid no attention to his brother, and yet he seemed to see every movement of Muchaku’s indecisive body.

“People say we are brave when we are only
determined
,” he said. “For after a certain age everybody is the victim of the propulsive force of his own character. So
we proceed by inertia. Once out of the atmosphere of childhood, if we succeed in breaking through, we can never turn back. If a thing is in front of us, we will hit it, otherwise we go on until we fizzle out like a meteor in someone else’s atmosphere. So why be sad? There is nothing to be done, and so much in either case to be seen along the way.”

He reached convulsively for another sheet of paper. He was enjoying himself hugely, but none the less,
whimsical
or not, he was not enjoying himself that much. At the last moment there seemed so much to draw, so much not so much to hold back, as to send on.

For a moment the silence was interrupted only by the soft slop of a well-charged brush. Yasumaro was now using two brushes, one for wash and the other for intense ink, thin and rapier pointed.

Then they heard the baffled, heaving, hysterical clank of armour somewhere inside the building. Hastily
Yasumaro
signed his name, grabbed another sheet, and spread something rapidly over it.

It was as though God were absent-mindedly doodling a world, that had nothing to do with the world then under discussion, yet something must be done to while away the tedium of man’s discovery of Him. It was by not listening that one learned to concentrate, and
discovered
, perhaps, one’s real motives. It helps to the attainment of perfection to realize that it can never be achieved by mere effort.

The soldier burst into the room. It was the soldier of Noto, as Muchaku had feared. He had been waiting for him for so long, that it would have been a relief to see him, if the soldier had not been such a monstrous parody
of what he had wanted to become. He was like a dog with burrs in its tail. His armour was rich, and came from ten of the defeated, nowhere did it fit, or match, and his helmet, which jogged on his head, had a chin strap too tight, so that it forced his cheeks out into an angry puff. The top was covered with a half-dozen stolen crests. They had belonged to somebody once. They would never belong to him.

He stomped up and down on the floor, caught sight of Muchaku, and rushed forward warily, frightened out of his wits, whirling an enormous sword several sizes too big for him, screaming at the top of his lungs. He was pitiable and terrible. He must have ceased to be a person months ago.

Yasumaro began to giggle, a high pitched, delighted sound. He leaped up, with his beautiful thin muscled legs bent, like a wrestler or a dancer, snatched off his garden hat, held it as a shield, and feinted with the slim pencil brush, holding the swob brush with his lesser fingers.

Then he laughed merrily.

It all happened too swiftly for Muchaku so much as to breathe. The soldier stopped, shaking his head groggily, and then lunged in this new direction.

Yasumaro leaped into the air, clicked his heels
together
, hissed through his teeth, his face animated with a sad kind of joy, and parried with his swob brush. The soldier blundered beyond him, as the swob brush charged with ink hit him in the face. Momentum carried him to the balcony. He teetered and then managed to turn. The grey wash dribbled down his nose and over his mouth into the stubble of his chin.

“Here,” shouted Yasumaro, his eyes twinkling.
“Here.” He crouched and made little swaying motions, as though to tease a dog.

The soldier rushed forward, Yasumaro dodged and strutted a few steps, alternately wagging the two brushes comically.

The soldier lunged. Yasumaro flicked the brushes as though to chide a naughty well-loved child.

The soldier bellowed with frustration, and began to cry. He rushed again. Yasumaro lowered his brushes, winked at Muchaku, and stood waiting solemnly.

The sword went right through him, into the flooring, and he sank down close to his paintings, with a luxurious little sigh of crushed silk.

Muchaku felt a cry escape from him. The soldier, blinking, looked down at the suddenly collapsed
Yasumaro
, the silk, the paintings, at Muchaku, even at Fuji, without seeing anything.

He looked like a man caught robbing a building. He yanked out the sword. Muchaku waited to be killed,
conscious
of his brother’s rich borrowed robe swdrling and flapping around him. Involuntarily he raised his slim fingers in a gesture of quietness, and then looked at them, surprised at what they were doing. They were slim and elegant and quite steady.

Startled by this, he glanced at the soldier.

The soldier began to gibber, darting to and fro. The tears poured down his face and he gave great racking sobs. And as though one flood of tears were not enough, he burst into fresh torrents of them. He trembled.

“I killed him. I killed Fudo. I killed my dog,” he screamed. “It was the old woman’s fault. She made me. She told me you were here.”

He gasped and looked around him. “Kill me,” he shouted. “Kill me.”

Muchaku felt his hands make some other gesture. He knew what old woman. He could almost see her face. It was the one who didn’t want anyone to get away, because she could not get away herself. His hands reached
instinctively
towards his brother.

The soldier began to shake violently. “You made me do it,” he cried. “You made me hate you. I don’t want to hate.” He dropped his sword, rushed to the balcony, cleared it with an enormous pursued leap, arched into space, and fell screaming through the air. Again, he must have changed his mind on the way down.

There was a clatter and then silence. Muchaku glanced towards Fuji. It had never been more serene. Then,
painfully
, surprised to find the world at peace, he went over to his brother, held his hand for a moment, and then parted the silk of the collapsed robe, which lay over the sketches.

They were nothing but rapid immortal sketches of snails, as perfect as persimmons, sometimes one to a sheet, sometimes three or four. They had dried almost at once. He had done last what he loved most.

The brushes were still in Yasumaro’s hand. Removing them gently, he went to the water-pail, washed them out, squeezed them dry with his fingers, and slipped them neatly back into their bamboo sheaths.

Then he waited for the sunset over the mountain, and through the night, for the freshened dawn. It was to see these things, after all, that they had come here, and for these, that his brother had left him behind. The sketches he put with the Fa Ch’ang. He was not lonely. There was a light breeze.

On the way down the hill he found the dog. It lay there uselessly, with hurt eyes. It had been so definitely itself, that it had never occurred to him to give it a name. But surely Fudo was the wrong name for it. Fudo is the name of those terrible war gods of flame and vengence which guard temples and support the thirst for blood. No doubt that was what the soldier had wanted. But all the dog had wanted was someone to accept a little affection. Even now its pink tongue lolled out
endearingly
between its teeth. It could not help it if it had also been loyal.

Looking down at it, he realized the terrible meaning of blood, though he could not put the meaning into words. When the stem of a cut flower oozes, we feel the same thing: compunction, distress, and a new kind of
tenderness
. He went on down the hill, not caring whether he was stopped or not, towards his brother’s house. But no one stopped him. He was avoided, for though he did not know it, he was now a man who could not be stopped, for he was no longer acting in his own interest.

At his brother’s house he stopped for several days. There was so much to do. Then, when he had returned Yasumaro’s ashes to their common ancestors, he went through those rooms for the last time.

In the painting room, where he had gone to gather up the paintings to take them and the Fa Ch’ang with him, he found a bowl of flowers, most of them dead now, but as his brother had arranged them. They were desiccated and pallid, but something caught his attention. He went closer and bent down to watch. It was a snail.

It was a delightful snail, a young snail, a confident snail, a cautious snail, and a cheerful one. It waggled its horns mutely in his direction and went right on climbing up its stalk. He picked it up.

For the first time in days he laughed out loud, tucked up his skirts, slid open the wall panel, and placed it demurely in the lushest, coolest, wettest part of the garden. The snail paused briefly, and then went right on with what it had been doing before, sliding decorous but hungry over its new purchase. One could scarcely expect it to be grateful, but undoubtedly it felt better. There was something absurdly touching about the tiny black lozenge droppings it left behind it as it trailed away.

He sat down on the veranda steps, to wait, he did not quite know why. He had not noticed, but it had been raining. There was still a drip from the eaves. It was musical.

Then he did notice, with an unbearable cool prickling thrill over his scalp and shoulders, that drawn up along the garden paths, on the stepping stones, everywhere, were perhaps a hundred snails. Their little green brown bodies slithered in and out, as they breathed, and their questing antennae, each with an amber tip, bowed and waved, as they faced towards the house. Their shells were glistening and clean. They edged backwards and forwards on their pseudopods. One could almost hear
them. Others came from all directions, from under the large, well-loved leaves, slowly, but somehow joyously.

Whether they had come to say good-bye, or were waiting to be fed, he did not know. Their master was no longer present. But he knew where their feed was, and getting it, he fed them, letting them slip over his fingers like self-propelled boats. And when he left, he could not forbear to take two of them with him, in the pocket of his robe, for he had not bothered to reassume his habit. That was no longer necessary. Instead he wore the best of Yasumaro’s robes.

Then he set out on the backward journey. That journey was also filled with ghosts, but now they were ghosts of the living. For him it was the end of the Angrya season. For he who had set so many Koans, now realized what the ultimate Koan was. Life was a nonsensical riddle, to which death was the equally absurd answer, and between them they shocked you into an awareness of the nature of things such as no logical question or answer could ever provide.

When he reached Noto, he found there only Oio and a gardener. The others, who had wanted some factual answer, had all fallen away. Together they began again. They went to Nara, taking with them only a box,
containing
the robe given him by Lady Furikake, the Fa Ch’ang, and some scrolls by his brother. In the course of time, somewhat to his surprise, he became a National Teacher, not perhaps because he had anything to teach, but because he was so serene. And in all this, as he had always been, Oio was his friend.

He was always gentle, for once one has gone beyond belief, then it is very easy to be gentle towards the beliefs
of others. And he was always untroubled, for he had at last learned that sometimes the trouble that occurs to us has nothing to do with us at all, but is merely irrelevant to us, as our own lives are irrelevant to life itself.

But he never lost the ability to evoke beauty, for once one has seen through it, life seems so poignant, like a flower that shakes itself after a heavy rain, as the stalk slowly rights itself again; or like a puppy toddling off to see the world for the first time, who sees too vividly, but never quite gives up, so enchanting is an affectionate curiosity; a white puppy or a black, for truth is in
everything
, but this particular truth of the nature of being was to be seen under the leaves, after a shower, when the snails came out, with their sap green tender bodies as touching as the first buds of spring.

And in the course of time Oio, who had known these things all along, succeeded him.