The Elephant Vanishes (15 page)

Other than that, though, the appearances and workings of the world remained unchanged from before the winds had started. The Himalayan cedars and chestnuts stood their open ground, aloof as if nothing had transpired. Laundry hung limply from plastic clotheslines. Atop the telephone poles, crows gave a flap or two of their wings, their beaks shiny as credit cards.

Meanwhile during all of this, my girlfriend had shown up and began to prepare the hot pot. She stood there in the kitchen cleaning the oysters, briskly chopping Chinese cabbage, arranging blocks of tofu just so, simmering broth.

I asked her whether she hadn’t tried telephoning at 2:36.

“I called, all right,” she answered while rinsing rice in a colander.

“I couldn’t hear a thing,” I said.

“Yeah, right, the wind was tremendous,” she said matter-of-factly.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down on the edge of the table to drink it.

“But, really, why all of a sudden this fury of wind, then, again, just like that, nothing?” I asked her.

“You got me,” she said, her back turned toward me as she shelled shrimps with her fingernails. “There’s lots we don’t know about the wind. Same as there’s lots we don’t know about ancient history or cancer or the ocean floor or outer space or sex.”

“Hmm,” I said. That was no answer. Still, it didn’t look like there was much chance of furthering this line of conversation with her, so I just gave up and watched the oyster hot pot’s progress.

“Say, can I touch your tummy?” I asked her.

“Later,” she said.

So until the hot pot was ready, I decided to pull together a few brief notes on the day’s events so I could write them up in my diary next week. This is what I jotted down:

• Fall of Roman Empire
  

• 1881 Indian Uprising
  

• Hitler’s Invasion of Poland
  

Just this, and even next week I’d be able to reconstruct what went on today. Precisely because of this meticulous system of mine, I have managed to keep a diary for twenty-two years without missing a day. To every meaningful act, its own system. Whether the wind blows or not, that’s the way I live.

—translated by Alfred Birnbaum

“M
OTHER DUMPED MY FATHER
,” a friend of my wife’s was saying one day, “all because of a pair of shorts.”

I’ve got to ask. “A pair of shorts?”

“I know it sounds strange,” she says, “because it is a strange story.”

A
LARGE WOMAN
, her height and build are almost the same as mine. She tutors electric organ, but most of her free time she divides among swimming and skiing and tennis, so she’s trim and always tanned. You might call her a sports fanatic. On days off, she puts in a morning run before heading to the local pool to do laps; then at two or three in the afternoon it’s
tennis
, followed by aerobics. Now, I like my sports, but I’m nowhere near her league.

I don’t mean to suggest she’s aggressive or obsessive about things. Quite the contrary, she’s really rather retiring; she’d never dream of putting emotional pressure on anyone.
Only, she’s driven; her body—and very likely the spirit attached to that body—craves after vigorous activity, relentless as a comet.

Which may have something to do with why she’s unmarried. Oh, she’s had affairs—the woman may be a little on the large side, but she is beautiful; she’s been proposed to, even agreed to take the plunge. But inevitably, whenever it’s gotten to the wedding stage, some problem has come up and everything falls through.

Like my wife says, “She’s just unlucky.”

“Well, I guess,” I sympathize.

I’m not in total agreement with my wife on this. True, luck may rule over parts of a person’s life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there’s a will—much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers—there’s a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around. No, her heart was never set on marrying, is how I see it. Marriage just doesn’t fall within the sweep of her comet, at least not entirely.

And so she keeps on tutoring electric organ, devoting every free moment to sports, falling regularly in and out of unlucky love.

I
T’S A RAINY SUNDAY
afternoon and she’s come two hours earlier than expected, while my wife is still out shopping.

“Forgive me,” she apologizes. “I took a rain check on today’s tennis, which left me two hours to spare. I’d have been bored out of my mind being alone at home, so I just thought … Am I interrupting anything?”

Not at all, I say. I didn’t feel quite in the mood to work and was just sitting around, cat on my lap, watching a video. I show her in, go to the kitchen and make coffee. Two cups, for watching the last twenty minutes of
Jaws
. Of course, we’ve both seen the movie before—probably more than once—so neither of us is particularly riveted to the tube. But anyway, we’re watching it because it’s there in front of our eyes.

It’s
The End
. The credits roll up. No sign of my wife. So we chat a bit. Sharks, seaside, swimming … still no wife. We go on talking. Now, I suppose I like the woman well enough, but after an hour of this our lack of things in common becomes obvious. In a word, she’s my wife’s friend, not mine.

Short of what else to do, I’m already thinking about popping in the next video when she suddenly brings up the story of her parents’ divorce. I can’t fathom the connection—at least to my mind, there’s no link between swimming and her folks splitting up—but I guess a reason is where you find it.

“T
HEY WEREN’T REALLY SHORTS
,” she says. “They were lederhosen.”

“You mean those hiking pants the Germans wear? The ones with the shoulder straps?”

“You got it. Father wanted a pair of lederhosen as a souvenir gift. Well, Father’s pretty tall for his generation. He might even look good in them, which could be why he wanted them. But can you picture a Japanese wearing lederhosen? I guess it takes all kinds.”

I’m still not any closer to the story. I have to ask, what were the circumstances behind her father’s request—and of whom?— for these souvenir lederhosen?

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m always telling things out of order. Stop me if things don’t make sense,” she says.

Okay, I say.

“Mother’s sister was living in Germany and she invited Mother for a visit. Something she’d always been meaning to do. Of course, Mother can’t speak German, she’d never even been abroad, but having been an English teacher for so long she’d had that overseas bee in her bonnet. It’d been ages since she’d seen my aunt. So Mother approached Father, How about taking ten days off and going to Germany, the two of us? Father’s work couldn’t allow it, and Mother ended up going alone.”

“That’s when your father asked for the lederhosen, I take it?”

“Right,” she says. “Mother asked what he wanted her to bring back, and Father said lederhosen.”

“Okay so far.”

Her parents were reasonably close. They didn’t argue until all hours of the night; her father didn’t storm out of the house and not come home for days on end. At least not then, though apparently there had been rows more than once over him and other women.

“Not a bad man, a hard worker, but kind of a skirt chaser,” she tosses off matter-of-factly. No relation of hers, the way she’s talking. For a second, I almost think her father is deceased. But no, I’m told, he’s alive and well.

“Father was already up there in years, and by then those troubles were all behind them. They seemed to be getting along just fine.”

Things, however, didn’t go without incident. Her mother extended the ten days in Germany to nearly a month and a half, with hardly a word back to Tokyo, and when she finally did return to Japan she stayed with another sister of hers in Osaka. She never did come back home.

Neither she—the daughter—nor her father could understand what was going on. Until then, when there’d been marital difficulties, her mother had always been the patient one—so ploddingly patient, in fact, that she sometimes wondered if the woman had no imagination; family always came first, and the mother was selflessly devoted to her daughter. So when the mother didn’t come around, didn’t even make the effort to call, it was beyond their comprehension. They made phone calls to the aunt’s house in Osaka, repeatedly, but they could hardly get her to come to the phone, much less admit what her intentions were.

In mid-September, two months after returning to Japan, her mother made her intentions known. One day, out of the blue, she called home and told her husband, “You will be receiving the necessary papers for divorce. Please sign, seal, and send back
to me.” Would she care to explain, her husband asked, what was the reason? “I’ve lost all love for you—in any way, shape, or form.” Oh? said her husband. Was there no room for discussion? “Sorry, none, absolutely none.”

Telephone negotiations dragged on for the next two or three months, but her mother did not back down an inch, and finally her father consented to the divorce. He was in no position to force the issue, his own track record being what it was, and anyway, he always tended to give in.

“All this came as a big shock,” she tells me. “But it wasn’t just the divorce. I’d imagined my parents splitting up many times, so I was already prepared for it psychologically. If the two of them had just plain divorced without all that funny business, I wouldn’t have gotten so upset. The problem wasn’t Mother dumping Father; Mother was dumping me, too. That’s what hurt.”

I nod.

“Up to that point, I’d always taken Mother’s side, and Mother would always stand by me. And yet here was Mother throwing me out with Father, like so much garbage, and not a word of explanation. It hit me so hard, I wasn’t able to forgive Mother for the longest time. I wrote her who knows how many letters asking her to set things straight, but she never answered my questions, never even said she wanted to see me.”

It wasn’t until three years later that she actually saw her mother. At a family funeral, of all places. By then, the daughter was living on her own—she’d moved out in her sophomore year, when her parents divorced—and now she had graduated and was tutoring electric organ. Meanwhile, her mother was teaching English at a prep school.

Her mother confessed that she hadn’t been able to talk to her own daughter because she hadn’t known what to say. “I myself couldn’t tell where things were going,” the mother said, “but the whole thing started over that pair of shorts.”

“Shorts?” She’d been as startled as I was. She’d never wanted to speak to her mother ever again, but curiosity got the
better of her. In their mourning dress, mother and daughter went into a nearby coffee shop and ordered iced tea. She had to hear this—pardon the expression—this short story.

T
HE SHOP THAT SOLD
the lederhosen was in a small town an hour away by train from Hamburg. Her mother’s sister looked it up for her.

“All the Germans I know say if you’re going to buy lederhosen, this is the place. The craftsmanship is good, and the prices aren’t so expensive,” said her sister.

So the mother boarded a train to buy her husband his souvenir lederhosen. In her train compartment sat a middle-aged German couple, who conversed with her in halting English. “I go now to buy lederhosen for souvenir,” the mother said. “Vat shop you go to?” the couple asked. The mother named the name of the shop, and the middle-aged German couple chimed in together, “Zat is ze place,
jah
. It is ze best.” Hearing this, the mother felt very confident.

It was a delightful early-summer afternoon and a quaint old-fashioned town. Through the middle of the town flowed a babbling brook, its banks lush and green. Cobblestone streets led in all directions, and cats were everywhere. The mother stepped into a café for a bite of
Käsekuchen
and coffee.

She was on her last sip of coffee and playing with the shop cat when the owner came over to ask what brought her to their little town. She said lederhosen, whereupon the owner pulled out a pad of paper and drew a map to the shop.

“Thank you very much,” the mother said.

How wonderful it was to travel by oneself, she thought as she walked along the cobblestones. In fact, this was the first time in her fifty-five years that she had traveled alone. During the whole trip, she had not once been lonely or afraid or bored. Every scene that met her eyes was fresh and new; everyone she met was friendly. Each experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her, untouched and unused. What she had held near and dear until then—husband and home and
daughter—was on the other side of the earth. She felt no need to trouble herself over them.

She found the lederhosen shop without problem. It was a tiny old guild shop. It didn’t have a big sign for tourists, but inside she could see scores of lederhosen. She opened the door and walked in.

Two old men worked in the shop. They spoke in a whisper as they took down measurements and scribbled them into a notebook. Behind a curtain divider was a larger work space; the monotone of sewing machines could be heard.