Shibumi (14 page)

For a time, Otake-san’s eyes were dull with inner focus as he gazed upon the drab garden, its features disintegrating in the mist. With an effort he pulled his mind from eternal things to continue his last lesson. “No, it is not your lack of experience that is your greatest flaw. It is your disdain. Your defeats will not come from those more brilliant than you. They will come from the patient, the plodding, the mediocre.”

Nicholai frowned. This was consonant with what Kishikawa-san had told him as they walked along the cherry trees of the Kajikawa.

“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring—but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts,
Kabuki
wanes and
Nô
withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his
yojimbo,
the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

“Do we still speak of Gô, Teacher?”

“Yes. And of its shadow: life.”

“What do you advise me to do then?”

“Avoid contact with them. Camouflage yourself with politeness. Appear dull and distant. Live apart and study
shibumi.
Above all, do not let him bait you into anger and aggression. Hide, Nikko.”

“General Kishikawa told me almost the same thing.”

“I do not doubt it. We discussed you at length his last night here. Neither of us could guess what the Westerner’s attitude toward you will be, when he comes. And more than that, we fear your attitude toward him. You are a convert to our culture, and you have the fanaticism of the convert. It is a flaw in your character. And tragic flaws lead to…” Otake-san shrugged.

Nicholai nodded and lowered his eyes, waiting patiently for the teacher to dismiss him.

After a time of silence, Otake-san took another mint drop and said, “Shall I share a great secret with you, Nikko? All these years I have told people I take mint drops to ease my stomach. The fact is, I
like
them. But there is no dignity in an adult who munches candy in public.”

“No
shibumi,
sir.”

“Just so.” Otake-san seemed to daydream for a moment. “Yes. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the mountain mist is unhealthy. But it lends a melancholy beauty to the garden, and so we must be grateful to it.”

After the cremation, Otake-san’s plans for family and students were carried out. The family collected its belongings to go live with Otake’s brother. The students were dispersed to their various homes. Nicholai, now over twenty, although he looked no more than fifteen, was given the money General Kishikawa had left for him and permitted to do what he chose, to go where he wanted. He experienced that thrilling social vertigo that accompanies total freedom in a context of pointlessness.

On the third day of August 1945, all the Otake household were gathered with their cases and packages on the train platform. There was neither the time nor the privacy for Nicholai to say to Mariko what he felt. But he managed to put special emphasis and gentleness into his promise to visit her as soon as possible, once he had established himself in Tokyo. He looked forward to his visit, because Mariko always spoke so glowingly of her family and friends in her home city, Hiroshima.

The First Assistant pushed back from his console and shook his head. “There’s just not much to work with, sir. Fat Boy doesn’t have anything firm on this Hel before he arrives in Tokyo.” There was irritation in the First Assistant’s tone; he was exasperated by people whose lives were so crepuscular or uneventful as to deny Fat Boy a chance to demonstrate his capacity for knowing and revealing.

“Hm-m,” Mr. Diamond grunted absently, as he continued to sketch notes of his own. “Don’t worry, the data will thicken up from this point on. Hel went to work for the Occupation Forces shortly after the war, and from then on he remained more or less within our scope of observation.”

“Are you sure you really need this probe, sir? You seem to know all about him already.”

“I can use the review. Look, something just occurred to me. All we have tying Nicholai Hel to the Munich Five and this Hannah Stern is a first-generation relationship between Hel and the uncle. Let’s make sure we’re not flying with the wild geese. Ask Fat Boy where Hel is living now.” He pressed a buzzer at the side-of his desk.

“Yes, sir,” the First Assistant said, turning back to his console.

Miss Swivven entered the work area in response to Diamond’s buzzer. “Sir?”

“Two things. First: get me all available photographs of Hel, Nicholai Alexandrovitch. Llewellyn will give you the mauve card ID code. Second: contact Mr. Able of the OPEC Interest Group and ask him to come here as soon as possible. When he arrives, bring him down here, together with the Deputy and those two idiots who screwed up. You’ll have to escort them down; they don’t have access to the Sixteenth Floor.”

“Yes, sir.” Upon leaving, Miss Swivven closed the door to the wirephoto room just a bit too firmly, and Diamond looked up, wondering what on earth had gotten into her.

Fat Boy was responding to interrogation. His answer clattering up on the First Assistant’s machine. “Ah… it seems this Nicholai Hel has several residences. There’s an apartment in Paris, a place on the Dalmatian coast, a summer villa in Morocco, an apartment in New York, another in London—ah! Here we are. Last known residence equals a château in the bleeding village of Etchebar. This appears to be his principal residence, considering the amount of time he has spent there during the last fifteen years.”

“And where is this Etchebar?”

“Ah… it’s in the Basque Pyrenees, sir.”

“Why is it called a ‘bleeding’ village?”

“I was wondering that myself, sir.” The First Assistant queried the computer, and when the answer came he chuckled to himself. “Amazing! Poor Fat Boy had a little trouble translating from French to English. The word
bled
is evidently French for ‘a small hamlet.’ Fat Boy mistranslated it to ‘bleeding.’ Too much input from British sources just of late, I suspect.”

Mr. Diamond glared across at the First Assistant’s back. “Let’s pretend that’s interesting. So. Hannah Stern took a plane from Rome to the city of Pau. Ask Fat Boy what’s the nearest airport to this Etchebar. If it’s Pau, then we know we have trouble.”

The question was passed on to the computer. The RP screen went blank, then flashed a list of airports arranged in order of their distance from Etchebar. The first on the list was Pau.

Diamond nodded fatalistically.

The First Assistant sighed and slipped his forefinger under his metal glasses, lightly rubbing the red dents. “So there it is. We have every reason to assume that Hannah Stern is now in contact with a mauve-card man. Only three mauve-card holders left alive in the world, and our girl has found one of them. Rotten luck!”

“That it is. Very well, now we know for sure that Nicholai Hel is in the middle of this business. Get back to your machine and root out all we know about him so we can fill Mr. Able in when he gets here. Begin with his arrival in Tokyo.”

The Occupation was in full vigor; the evangelists of democracy were dictating their creed from the Dai Ichi Building across the moat from—but significantly out of sight of—the Imperial Palace. Japan was a physical, economic, and emotional shambles, but the Occupation put their idealistic crusade before mundane concerns for the well-being of the conquered people; a mind won was worth more than a life lost.

With millions of others, Nicholai Hel was flotsam on the chaos of the postwar struggle for survival. Rocketing inflation soon reduced his small store of money to a valueless wad of paper. He sought manual work with the crews of Japanese laborers clearing debris from the bombings; but the foremen mistrusted his motives and doubted his need, considering his race. Nor had he recourse to assistance from any of the occupying powers, as he was a citizen of none of their countries. He joined the flood of the homeless, the jobless, the hungry who wandered the city, sleeping in parks, under bridges, in railway stations. There was a surfeit of workers and a paucity of work, and only young women possessed services valuable to the gruff, overfed soldiers who were the new masters.

When his money ran out, he went two days without food, returning each night from his search for work to sleep in Shimbashi Station together with hundreds of others who were hungry and adrift. Finding places for themselves on or under the benches and in tight rows filling the open spaces, they dozed fitfully, or jolted up from nightmares, hag-ridden with hunger. Each morning the police cleared them out, so traffic could flow freely. And each morning there were eight or ten who did not respond to the prodding of the police. Hunger, sickness, old age, and loss of the will to live had come during the night to remove the burden of life.

Nicholai wandered-the rainy streets with thousands of others, looking for any kind of work; looking, at last, for anything to steal. But there was no work, and nothing worth stealing. His high-collared student’s uniform was muddy in patches and always damp, and his shoes leaked. He had ripped off the sole of one because it was loose, and the indignity of its flap-flap was unacceptable. He later wished he had bound it on with a rag.

The night of his second day without food, he returned late through the rain to Shimbashi Station. Crowded together under the vast metal vault, frail old men and desperate women with children, their meager belongings rolled up in scraps of cloth, arranged little spaces for themselves with a silent dignity that filled Nicholai with pride. Never before had he appreciated the beauty of the Japanese spirit. Jammed together, frightened, hungry, cold, they dealt with one another under these circumstances of emotional friction with the social lubrication of muttered forms of politeness. Once during the night, a man attempted to steal something from a young woman, and in a brief, almost silent scuffle in a dark corner of the vast waiting room, justice was dealt out quickly and terminally.

Nicholai had the good fortune to find a place under one of the benches where he would not be trod upon by people seeking to relieve themselves during the night. On the bench above him was a woman with two children, one a baby. She talked softly to them until they fell asleep after reminding her, without insistence, that they were hungry. She told them that grandfather was not really dead after all, and was coming to take them away soon. Later, she confected word pictures of her little village on the coast. After they fell asleep, she wept silently.

The old man on the floor beside Nicholai took great pains to set out his valuables on a folded bit of cloth close to his face before nestling down. They consisted of a cup, a photograph, and a letter that had been folded and refolded until the creases were thin and furry. It was a form letter of regret from the army. Before closing his eyes, the old man said good night to the young foreigner beside him, and Nicholai smiled and said good night.

Before a fitful sleep overtook him, Nicholai composed his mind and escaped from the acid gnaw of hunger into mystic transport. When he returned from his little meadow with its waving grasses and yellow sunlight, he was full although hungry, peaceful although desperate. But he knew that tomorrow he must find work or money, or soon he would die.

When the police rousted them shortly before dawn, the old man was dead. Nicholai wrapped the cup, photograph, and letter into his own bundle because It seemed a terrible thing to let all the old man had treasured be swept up and thrown away.

By noon Nicholai had drifted down to Hibiya Park in search of work or something to steal. Hunger was no longer a matter of unsatisfied appetite. It was a jagged cramp and a spreading weakness that made his legs heavy and his head light. As he drifted on the tide of desperate people, waves of unreality washed over him; people and things alternated between being indiscriminant forms and objects of surprising fascination. Sometimes he would find himself flowing within a stream of faceless people, allowing their energy and direction to be his, permitting his thoughts to spiral and short-circuit in a dreamy carousel without meaning, His hunger brought mystic transport close to the surface of his consciousness, and wisps of escape ended with sudden jolts of reality. He would find himself standing, staring at a wall or the face of a person, sensing that this was a remarkable event. No one had ever examined that particular brick with care and affection before. He was the very first! No one had ever looked at that man’s ear in such sharp focus. That must mean something.

Mustn’t it?

The lightheaded hunger, the shattered spectrum of reality, the aimless drifting were all seductively pleasant, but something within him warned that this was dangerous. He must break out of it or be would die. Die? Die? Did that sound have any meaning?

A dense rivulet of humanity carried him out of the park through an entrance where two broad avenues intersected with a congestion of military vehicles, charcoal automobiles, clanging tramcars, and wobbling bicycles pulling two-wheeled carts loaded down with incredibly heavy and bulky cargoes. There had been a minor accident, and traffic was snarled for a block in every direction while a helpless Japanese traffic policeman in huge white gloves was trying to settle things between a Russian driving an American Jeep and an Australian driving an American jeep.

Nicholai was pushed forward unwillingly by the curious crowd that seeped into the spaces around the congealed traffic, intensifying the confusion. The Russians spoke only Russian, the Australians only English, the policeman only Japanese; and all three were engaged in a vigorous discussion of blame and responsibility. Nicholai was pressed against the side of the Australian jeep, whose officer occupant was sitting, staring ahead with stoic discomfort, while his driver was shouting that he would gladly settle this thing man-to-man with the Russian driver, the Russian officer, both at once, or the whole fucking Red Army, if it came to that!

“Are you in a hurry, sir?”

“What?” The Australian officer was surprised to be addressed in English by this ragged lad in a tarnished Japanese student’s uniform. It was a couple of seconds before he realized from the green eyes in the gaunt young face that the boy was not Oriental. “Of course I’m in a hurry! I have a meeting—” He snapped his wrist over and looked at his watch. “—twelve minutes ago!”

“I’ll help you,” Nicholai said. “For money.”

“I beg your pardon?” The accent was comic-opera British raj, as is often the case with colonials who feel called upon to play it for more English than the English.

“Give me some money, and I’ll help you.”

The officer gave his watch another petulant glance. “Oh, very well. Get on with it.”

The Australians did not understand what Nicholai said, first in Japanese to the policeman, then in Russian to the Red officer, but they made out the name “MacArthur” several times. The effect of evoking the Emperor’s emperor was immediate. Within five minutes a swath had been forced through the tangle of vehicles, and the Australian jeep was conducted onto the grass of the park, whence it was able to cross overland to a wide gravel path and make its way through astonished strollers, finally bouncing down over a curb into a side street that was beyond the jam of traffic, leaving behind a clotted chaos of vehicles sounding horns and bells angrily. Nicholai had jumped into the jeep beside the driver. Once they were free from their problem, me officer ordered the driver to pull over.

“Very well, now what do I owe you?”

Nicholai had no idea of the value of foreign money now. He clutched at a figure. “A hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars?
Are you mad?”

“Ten dollars,” Nicholai amended quickly.

“Out for whatever you can get, is that it?” the officer sneered. But he tugged out his wallet. “Oh, God! I haven’t any scrip at all. Driver?”

“Sorry, sir. Stony.”

“Hm! Look. Tell you what. That’s my building across the way.” He indicated the San Shin Building, center of communications for Allied Occupation Forces. “Come along, and I’ll have you taken care of.”

Once within the San Shin Building, the officer turned Nicholai over to the office of Pay and Accounts with instructions to make out a voucher for ten dollars in scrip, then he left to make what remained of his appointment, but not before fixing Nicholai with a quick stare, “See here. You’re not British, are you?” At that period, Nicholai’s English had the accent of his British tutors, but the officer could not align the lad’s public school accent with his clothes and physical appearance.

“No,” Nicholai answered.

“Ah!” the officer said with obvious relief. “Thought not.” And he strode off toward the elevators.

For half an hour, Nicholai sat on a wooden bench outside the office, awaiting his turn; while in the corridor around him people chatted in English, Russian, French, and Chinese. The San Shin Building was one of the few anodes on which the various occupying powers collected, and one could feel the reserve and mistrust underlying their superficial camaraderie. More than half the people working here were civilian civil servants, and Americans outnumbered the others by the same ratio as their soldiers outnumbered the others combined. It was the first time Nicholai heard the growled
r
’s and metallic vowels of American speech.

He was becoming ill and sleepy by the time an American secretary opened the door and called his name. Once in the anteroom, he was given a form to fill in while the young secretary returned to her typing, occasionally stealing glances at this improbable person in dirty clothes. But she was only casually curious; her real attention was on a date she had for that night with a major who was, the other girls all said, real nice and always brought you to a real fine restaurant and gave you a real good time before.

When he handed over his form, the secretary glanced at it, lifted her eyebrows and sniffed, but brought it in to the woman in charge of Pay and Accounts. In a few minutes, Nicholai was called into the inner office.

The woman in charge was in her forties, plumpish and pleasant. She introduced herself as Miss Goodbody. Nicholai did not smile.

Miss Goodbody gestured toward Nicholai’s voucher form. “You really have to fill this out, you know.”

“I can’t. I mean, I can’t fill in all the spaces.”

“Can’t?” Years of civil service recoiled at the thought. “What do you mean…” She glanced at the top line of the form. “…Nicholai?”

“I can’t give you an address. I don’t have one. And I don’t have an identification card number. Or a—what was it?—sponsoring agency.”

“Sponsoring agency, yes. The unit or organization for which you work, or for which your parents work.”

“I don’t have a sponsoring agency. Does it matter?”

“Well, we can’t pay you without a voucher form filled out correctly. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I’m hungry.”

For a moment, Miss Goodbody was nonplussed. She leaned forward. “Are your parents with the Occupation Forces, Nicholai?” She had come to the assumption that he was an army brat who had run away from home.

“No.”

“Are you here alone?” she asked with disbelief.

“Yes.”

“Well…” She frowned and made a little shrug of futility. “Nicholai, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one years old.”

“Oh, my. Excuse me. I assumed—I mean, you look no more than fourteen or fifteen. Oh, well, that’s a different matter. Now, let’s see. What shall we do?” There was a strong maternal urge in Miss Goodbody, the sublimation of a life of untested sexuality. She was oddly attracted to this young man who had the appearance of a motherless child, but the age of a potential mate. Miss Goodbody identified this mélange of contradictory feelings as Christian concern for a fellow-being.

“Couldn’t you just give me my ten dollars? Maybe five dollars?”

“Things don’t work like that, Nicholai. Even assuming we find a way to fill out this form, it will be ten days before it clears AP&R.”

Nicholai felt hope drain away. He lacked the experience to know that the gossamer barriers of organizational dysfunction were as impenetrable as the pavements he trod all day. “I can’t have any money then?” he asked atonally.

Miss Goodbody half-shrugged and rose. “I’m sorry, but… Listen. It’s after my lunch hour. Come with me to the employees’ cafeteria. We’ll have a bite to eat, and we’ll see if we can work something out.” She smiled at Nicholai and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Is that all right?”

Nicholai nodded.

The next three months before Miss Goodbody was transferred back to the United States remained forever thrilling and shimmering in her memory. Nicholai was the closest thing to a child she would ever have, and he was her only prolonged affair. She never dared to talk out, or even to analyze for herself, the complex of feelings that tingled through her mind and body during those months. Certainly she enjoyed being needed by someone, enjoyed the security of dependency. Also, she was a genuinely good person who liked giving help to someone who needed it. And in their sexual relations there was a tang of delicious shame, the spice of being at one time mother and lover, a heady brew of affection and sin.