The Elephant Vanishes (18 page)

“To lay in stock.”

“Exactly.”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“Sure.”

“Have you already decided on the next barn to burn?”

This caused him to furrow up wrinkles between his eyes; then he inhaled audibly through his nose. “Well, yes. As a matter of fact, I have.”

I sipped the last of my beer and said nothing.

“A great barn. The first barn really worth burning in ages. Fact is, I went and checked it out only today.”

“Which means, it must be nearby.”

“Very near,” he confirmed.

So ended our barn talk.

At five o’clock, he roused his girlfriend, and then apologized to me again for the sudden visit. He was completely sober, despite the quantities of beer I’d seen him drink. Then he fetched the sports car from around back.

“I’ll keep an eye out for that barn,” I told him.

“You do that,” he answered. “Like I said, it’s right near here.”

“What’s this about a barn?” she broke in.

“Man talk,” he said.

“Oh, great,” she fawned.

And at that, the two of them were gone.

I returned to the living room and lay down on the sofa. The table was littered with all manner of debris. I picked up my duffle coat off the floor, pulled it over my head, and conked out.

Bluish gloom and a pungent marijuana odor covered everything. Oddly uneven, that darkness. Lying on the sofa, I tried to remember what came next in the elementary-school play, but it was long since irretrievable. Did the fox cub ever get the gloves?

I got up from the sofa, opened a window to air the place, went to the kitchen, and made myself some coffee.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, I went to a bookstore and bought a map of the area where I live. Scaled 20,000:I and detailed
down to the smallest lanes. Then I walked around with the map, penciling in X’s wherever there was a barn or shed. For the next three days, I covered four kilometers in all four directions. Living toward the outskirts of town, there are still a good many farmers in the vicinity. So it came to a considerable number of barns—sixteen altogether.

I carefully checked the condition of each of these, and from the sixteen I eliminated all those where there were houses in the immediate proximity or greenhouses alongside. I also eliminated those in which there were farm implements or chemicals or signs that they were still in active use. I didn’t imagine he’d want to burn tools or fertilizer.

That left five barns. Five barns worth burning. Or, rather, five barns unobjectionable if burned. The kind of barn it’d take fifteen minutes to reduce to ashes, then no one would miss it. Yet I couldn’t decide which would be the one he’d be most likely to torch. The rest was a matter of taste. I was beside myself for wanting to know which of the five barns he’d chosen.

I unfolded my map and erased all but those five X’s. I got myself a right angle and a French curve and dividers, and tried to establish the shortest course leaving from my house, going around the five barns, and coming back home again. Which proved to be a laborious operation, what with the roads winding about hills and streams. The result: a course of 7.2 kilometers. I measured it several times, so I couldn’t have been too far off.

The following morning at six, I put on my training wear and jogging shoes and ran the course. I run six kilometers every morning anyway, so adding an extra kilometer wouldn’t kill me. There were two railroad crossings along the way, but they rarely held you up. And otherwise, the scenery wouldn’t be bad.

First thing out of the house, I did a quick circuit around the playing field of the local college, then turned down an unpaved road that ran along a stream for three kilometers. Passing the first barn midway, a path took me through woods. A slight uphill grade, then another barn. A little beyond that were racehorse
stables. The Thoroughbreds would be alarmed to see flames—but that’d be it. No real damage.

The third and fourth barns resembled each other like ugly twins. Set not two hundred meters apart, both were weather-beaten and dirty. You might as well torch the both of them together.

The last barn stood beside a railroad crossing. Roughly the six-kilometer mark. Utterly abandoned, the barn had a tin Pepsi-Cola billboard nailed to the side facing the tracks. The structure—if you could call it that—was such a shambles, I could see it, as he would say, just waiting to be burned.

I paused before this last barn, took a few deep breaths, cut over the crossing, and headed home. Running time: thirty-one minutes thirty seconds. I showered, ate breakfast, stretched out on the sofa to listen to one record, then got down to work.

For one month, I ran the same course each morning. But—no barns burned.

Sometimes, I could swear he was trying to get me to burn a barn. That is, to plant in my head the image of burning barns, so that it would swell up like a bicycle tire pumped with air. I’ll grant you, there were times that, well, as long as I was waiting around for him to do the deed, I half considered striking the match myself. It would have been a lot faster. And anyhow, they were only run-down old barns….

Although on second thought, no, let’s not get carried away. You won’t see me torch any barn. No matter how inflated the image of burning barns grew in my head, I’m really not the type. Me, burn barns? Never. Then what about him? He’d probably just switched prospects. Or else he was too busy and simply hadn’t found the time to burn a barn. In any case, there was no word from her.

December came and went, and the morning air pierced the skin. The barns stood their ground, their roofs white with frost. Wintering birds sent the echo of flapping wings through the frozen woods. The world kept in motion unchanged.

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT TIME
I met the guy was in the middle of December last year. It was Christmas carols everywhere you went. I had gone into town to buy presents for different people, and while walking around Nogizaka I spotted his car. No mistake, his silver-gray sports car. Shinagawa license plate, small dent next to the left headlight. It was parked in the lot of a café, looking less sparkling than when I last saw it, the silver-gray a hint duller. Though maybe that was a mistaken impression on my part: I have this convenient tendency to rework my memories. I dashed into the café without a moment’s hesitation.

The place was dark and thick with the strong aroma of coffee. There weren’t many voices to be heard, only atmospheric baroque music. I recognized him immediately. He was sitting alone by the window, drinking a café au lait. And though it was warm enough in there to steam up my glasses, he was wearing a black cashmere coat, with his muffler still wrapped around his neck.

I hedged a second, but then figured I might as well approach the guy. I decided not to say I’d seen his car outside; I’d just happened to step in, and by chance there he was.

“Mind if I sit down?” I asked.

“Please, not at all,” he replied.

We talked a bit. It wasn’t a particularly lively conversation. Clearly, we didn’t have much in the way of common topics; moreover, his mind seemed to be on something else. Still, he didn’t show any sign of being put out by my presence. At one point, he mentioned a seaport in Tunisia, then he started describing the shrimp they caught there. He wasn’t just talking for my sake: He really was serious about these shrimp. All the same, like water to the desert, the story didn’t go anywhere before it dissipated.

He signaled to the waiter and ordered a second café au lait.

“Say, by the way, how’s your barn doing?” I braved the question.

The trace of a smile came to his lips. “Oh, you still remember?” he said, removing a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his mouth. “Why, sure, I burned it. Burned it nice and clean. Just as promised.”

“One right near my house?”

“Yeah. Really, right by there.”

“When?”

“Last—when was it? Maybe ten days after I visited your place.”

I told him about how I plotted the barns on my map and ran my daily circuit. “So there’s no way I could have
not
seen it,” I insisted.

“Very thorough,” he gibed, obviously having his fun. “Thorough and logical. All I can say is, you must have missed it. Does happen, you know. Things so close up, they don’t even register.”

“It just doesn’t make sense.”

He adjusted his tie, then glanced at his watch. “So very, very close,” he underscored. “But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to be going. Let’s talk about it next time, shall we? Can’t keep a person waiting. Sorry.”

I had no plausible reason to detain the guy any further.

He stood up, pocketed his cigarettes and lighter, and then remarked, “Oh, by the way, have you seen her lately?”

“No, not at all. Haven’t you?”

“Me, neither. I’ve been trying to get in touch, but she’s never in her apartment and she doesn’t answer the phone and she hasn’t been to her pantomime class the whole while.”

“She must have taken off somewhere. She’s been known to do that.”

The guy stared down at the table, hands buried in his pockets. “With no money, for a month and a half? As far as making her own way, she hardly has a clue.”

He was snapping his fingers in his coat pocket.

“I think I know that girl pretty well, and she absolutely hasn’t got yen one. No real friends to speak of. An address book
full of names, but that’s all they are. She hasn’t got anyone she can depend on. No, I take that back, she did trust you. And I’m not saying this out of courtesy. I do believe you’re someone special to her. Really, it’s enough to make me kind of jealous. And I’m someone who’s never ever been jealous at all.” He gave a little sigh, then eyed his watch again. “But I really must go. Be seeing you.”

Right, I nodded, but no words came. The same as always, whenever I was thrown together with this guy, I became altogether inarticulate.

I tried calling her any number of times after that, but her line had apparently been disconnected. Which somehow bothered me, so I went to her apartment and encountered a locked door, her mailbox stuffed with fliers. The superintendent was nowhere to be found, so I had no way to know if she was even living there anymore. I ripped a page from my appointment book, jotted down “Please contact,” wrote my name, and shoved it into the mailbox.

Not a word.

The next time I passed by, the apartment bore the nameplate of another resident. I actually knocked, but no one was in. And like before, no superintendent in sight.

At that, I gave up. This was one year ago.

She’d disappeared.

E
VERY MORNING
, I still run past those five barns. Not one of them has yet burned down. Nor do I hear of any barn fires. Come December, the birds strafe overhead. And I keep getting older.

Although just now and then, in the depths of the night, I’ll think about barns burning to the ground.

—translated by Alfred Birnbaum

M
Y HUSBAND LEFT
for work as usual, and I couldn’t think of anything to do. I sat alone in the chair by the window, staring out at the garden through the gap between the curtains. Not that I had any reason to be looking at the garden: There was nothing else for me to do. And I thought that sooner or later, if I sat there looking, I might think of something. Of all the many things in the garden, the one I looked at most was the oak tree. It was my special favorite. I had planted it when I was a little girl, and watched it grow. I thought of it as my old friend. I talked to it all the time in my head.

That day, too, I was probably talking to the oak tree—I don’t remember what about. And I don’t know how long I was sitting there. The time slips by when I’m looking at the garden. It was dark before I knew it: I must have been there quite a while. Then, all at once, I heard a sound. It came from somewhere far away—a funny, muffled sort of rubbing sort of sound. At first I thought it was coming from a place deep inside me,
that I was hearing things—a warning from the dark cocoon my body was spinning within. I held my breath and listened. Yes. No doubt about it. Little by little, the sound was moving closer to me. What was it? I had no idea. But it made my flesh creep.

The ground near the base of the tree began to bulge upward as if some thick, heavy liquid were rising to the surface. Again I caught my breath. Then the ground broke open and the mounded earth crumbled away to reveal a set of sharp claws. My eyes locked onto them, and my hands turned into clenched fists. Something’s going to happen, I said to myself. It’s starting now. The claws scraped hard at the soil, and soon the break in the earth was an open hole, from which there crawled a little green monster.

Its body was covered with shining green scales. As soon as it emerged from the hole, it shook itself until the bits of soil clinging to it dropped away. It had a long, funny nose, the green of which gradually deepened toward the tip. The very end was narrow and pointed as a whip, but the beast’s eyes were exactly like a human’s. The sight of them sent a shiver through me. They showed feelings, just like your eyes or mine.

Without hesitation, but moving slowly and deliberately, the monster approached my front door, on which it began to knock with the slender tip of its nose. The dry, rapping sound echoed through the house. I tiptoed to the back room, hoping the beast would not realize I was there. I couldn’t scream. Ours is the only house in the area, and my husband wouldn’t be coming back from work until late at night. I couldn’t run out the back door, either, since my house has only the one door, the very one on which a horrible green monster was now knocking. I breathed as quietly as I could, pretending not to be there, hoping the thing would give up and go away. But it didn’t give up. Its nose went from knocking to groping at the lock. It seemed to have no trouble at all clicking the lock open, and then the door itself opened a crack. Around the edge of the door crept the nose, and then it stopped. For a long time it stayed still, like a snake with its head raised, checking conditions in the house. If I had known
this was going to happen, I could have stayed by the door and cut the nose off, I told myself: The kitchen had plenty of sharp knives. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than the creature moved past the edge of the door, smiling, as if it had read my mind. Then it spoke, not with a stutter, but repeating certain words as if it were still trying to learn them. It wouldn’t have done you any good, any good, the little green monster said. My nose is like a lizard’s tail. It always grows back—stronger and longer, stronger and longer. You’d get just the opposite of what what you want want. Then it spun its eyes for a long time, like two weird tops.