The Heat of the Sun (17 page)

In the alleys below there were few wanderers. Jaundiced street lamps, scattered above, made splashes of light. Here, the music I had heard before was louder, coiling out from an open doorway. I
bowed my head and entered a barroom, a place of flickering lanterns and blackened low beams, like the cabin of an ancient ship. Faces loomed above shadowy benches. On the bar stood a frilly-horned
phonograph, crackling out the martial-sounding song.

‘Sake.’ The barman, a pigtailed elderly Chinaman, pushed a glass towards me. I shook my head:
No, no sake
, I tried to say, but already he had hobbled away from me, slipping
into semi-blackness, where he squatted, eyes shut, swaying his head to the music. I leaned, half turned, against the bar and drank. I took in my companions. Every face was old: seamed,
parchment-brittle. Only one fellow appeared to be Western, a Slav perhaps, but his features, like beaten bronze, stretched Orientally over cuttlefish cheekbones.

The phonograph crackled into silence, and the Chinaman wound the handle. The same song played again; heads nodded for the opening measures. Two old fellows mumbled under the music; I wondered if
they were talking about me, but I thought not. I was invisible. There was something timeless in this place, something weightless, as if nothing here could have consequence. A second sake appeared
beside me. Between soundings of the martial song I heard the wash of the sea. It was closer than I had thought.

A man leaned beside me. At first he was only a mouth, a gust of spicy breath through big, jutting, peg-like yellow teeth. Why he spoke to me I could not imagine; then I realized he was speaking
English. He was Mr Arnhem’s driver.

‘Hah! But Sharpless-san, you see my suffering, no? To think, my old friend to be wrapped in funeral robes! How fat he look in them, like a fugu fish! Ah, many time we drink, drink’
– he gestured about him – ‘and I say,
Good Yakuside-san, our days they grow short, but mine, I fear, shall be short by more, and yours
’ – he laughed, a little
hysterically – ‘
yours, the sorrow when we part
... and treacherous Yakuside-san, he nod, he smile, he say,
Hah! old friend, you die half already, your eyes are like weasels,
your knees are like raisins
...’ – did he really say
weasels
? Did he really say
raisins
? – ‘
you, you join your ancestors any day now
. And
Yakuside-san, he lie, he lie!’

Only slowly did I realize that the fellow was telling me about a dead friend. I wondered how long ago the funeral had been. That day? Yesterday? Months ago? Years?

‘Yakuside-san and I, we have understanding,’ he said. ‘Business we do, business here and there. But stories that went around after that – that
business
with his
little niece, they lies, Sharpless-san, all lies, lies. Me, I blame the Bonze...’ He slugged back his sake. His driver’s uniform had frayed at the collar.

‘Goro, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That’s your name?’

His breath was overpowering. ‘All of us, we look same to you, no? But, Sharpless-san, I know you at once! When I see you last, you tiny baby. Now look like father – like father come
back. Who in Nagasaki not know that honourable man? I pleased to say he my friend. Perhaps he speak of me, in those years after he go away – Sharpless-san, I nakodo!’

I began to feel drunk. ‘I thought your name was Goro.’

‘Goro the nakodo – man who make marriage.’

‘You married them?’ I said. ‘The lieutenant and the girl?’

‘No marry! Me man of business, not holy man.’ He said it as if a man of business were the better thing to be, then grinned, and the grin made me feel slightly sick. ‘I, Goro,
help them meet.’

‘A pimp?’ I had not meant to say it aloud.

‘He is drunkard.’ It was the Chinaman. Filling our glasses again, he splashed the counter. ‘Every night, with Yakuside-san...’ He flung back his head and mimed a glugging
motion. ‘Every night, till head it fall to bar.’

‘Shut up!’ Goro waved the barman away. I downed another sake, and at once wished I had not. Goro’s mouth opened and closed; his yellow teeth waggled. Now he was saying
something about the days, years before, when he had been with Sharpless-san and Pinkerton-san on Higashi Hill, and I asked him if he would take me there, but just then the barroom fell silent.

In the doorway, half in shadow, stood three Japanese soldiers.

A young officer stepped forward. Blearily, I took in his rounded cap, his tight collar, the leather strap that crossed his chest. Pacing forward, he held in one hand a thin stick like a
schoolmaster’s cane and slapped it in a slow rhythm into the palm of the other. Stopping before one bench, he inspected the elderly drinkers before moving on. No one spoke. I thought myself
barely visible in the gloom, but before the officer stalked out again, his eyes fixed on mine and I felt singled out, threatened, as if he had marked me down as an adversary to be crushed.

Sighs and nervous laughter rippled around the barroom after the patrol had gone. Goro slapped me on the back, beckoned the barman for sake, and demanded that I drink, drink.

Moths flurried around glimmering lanterns.

‘Where did you go?’

I had woken more than once in the night, startled each time to find myself beneath gauzy netting. Restless dreams disturbed me. Again I was in the bar with Goro; again his toothy face thrust
into mine, but he spoke Japanese or just nonsense-words, gobbling away like a turkey cock. I sank under the tide of talk; I saw his face twist; then he drew away and there behind him, fixing a
liquid gaze on me, was the young Japanese officer.

‘I said, “Where did you go?”’

Sunlight, for some time, had pressed behind the blinds; now it filled the room, and Le Vol turned back from the window.

‘Please.’ I pressed my face into the pillow.

‘Goro brought you home. You were stumbling and swearing. And in the consul’s house! What are you playing at?’ He pulled back my mosquito netting. ‘Come on. Koshi-byo
awaits.’

‘The temple? Baedeker’s by my bed.’

‘Baedeker? I want Sharpless.’

‘You go.’ I pulled my face from the pillow – temporarily, I hoped.

Le Vol had shaved, dressed, slicked his hair.

‘What’s with the grooming?’ I said. ‘This isn’t like you.’

‘And this isn’t like
you
. You’re still drunk, aren’t you?’

‘I’m sick!’

‘Well, you can’t be. Do you want the Pulitzer or not? This story’s going to be big.’

‘Great Temples of Kyushu!’ Le Vol could not be serious. ‘Calvin Coolidge said the man who builds a factory builds a temple. Do you think it works the other way around? Does the
man who builds a temple build a factory?’

‘Up! Mr Arnhem is at our disposal – and Goro and his automobile.’

I told Le Vol to go ahead. ‘I’ll catch up with you.’

‘I’ll bet!’ He flung up his hands. ‘Damn you, Sharpless.’

‘Close the blinds, will you?’ I called, but he had gone.

I rolled on to my back. I flung a forearm over my eyes. From outside came the chugging of the Lincoln sedan, then tyres crunched over the drive.

When I rose at last it was afternoon. The house was quiet; even the bent-backed maidservant did not come when I called. I searched the kitchen for coffee, but found none. I glugged down several
glasses of water.

My plan was no plan at all: I would walk into town and wander without direction. If my odyssey brought me to Koshi-byo, well and good; but as I reached the end of the consulate’s drive, I
found, when I rounded a vine-covered wall, a rickshaw-puller standing idle. The fellow, after the manner of his tribe, was wiry, naked to the waist, and strangely ageless, a wizened boy, his teeth
brown with chewing-tobacco as he grinned and said, ‘Koshi-byo?’

‘Higashi Hill.’ I settled into the rickshaw like an invalid, drawing a rug across my knees. The sun struck brightly at my eyes. We rattled into streets thick with people and stalls
and cluttered storefronts. We crossed a canal; automobiles honked like geese and streetcars trundled by, tugging at overhead wires. I glimpsed a temple, scaly with ornament like a dragon’s
back. Might this be where Le Vol had gone?

The rickshaw disconcerted me; its swayings and bumpings, its openness to the streets, made me feel vulnerable and strangely ashamed. Grimly, I concentrated on the puller’s knobbly back,
until the pressing streets gave way and we climbed between houses spaced wider apart and spring trees shedding sticky buds.

Now the air was sweet and I forgot my queasiness. Buildings scattered down the hills like pale boxes. The harbour, far below, flashed in the sun. We passed through a screen of cypresses and
before us was a house, a low, ethereal affair of papery walls and black beams beneath an overhanging terracotta roof. The garden was broad and long, with ornamental boulders, curving paths, and
raked pebble borders. Slipping down from the rickshaw, I felt as if I had reached a centre that I had skirted all my life.

Like a thief, I moved through the garden. An ornamental pond smelled noxious; no fish flickered in the reedy water. Making for the lawn’s edge, where the hill sloped downwards, I surveyed
the harbour. Yes, I thought. From here, one could follow all the ships that came and went.

I made for the house. The veranda, unbalustraded, jutted out from creamy walls. The steps that led up to it were an arrangement of stones. The quiet was hypnotic. One of the walls had been slid
back, opening the way to an interior deep in shadow. Old timbers creaked beneath my feet; I might have been on the deck of a sailing ship. I removed my hat, my shoes; I stepped through the screen.
Inside, the sparse room was not as dark as I had expected. Inner screens, some partially opened, led to other rooms. The place was a magic box; the configuration of the walls could be changed at a
whim.

‘Hello?’ I said, though I thought the house was empty.

Tatami matting muffled my steps as I passed from room to room. Incense drifted on the air, and something, perhaps a gossamer insect, brushed my face. Beside a cabinet of lacquered teak leaned a
samisen, that strange slender banjo-like instrument played in Japanese prints by delicate young women with downcast eyes. I had never seen a real one before.

‘Hello?’ I said again, and heard a sound of humming. Shadowy against a screen stood a ghostly, kimonoed figure with hair heaped high, turning a fan in an upraised hand.

‘Ah, but he come – American come.’ She snapped the fan from her face and stepped towards me. This was no ghost, but a woman all too real – her hair unravelling, her face
seamed and sagging beneath its mask of make-up. Her teeth were poor and there was sourness on her breath as she looked up at me, slapped my arm with the fan, and said, ‘Come,
American.’

We stepped into a chamber that stood open to the garden. I was back on the veranda where I had begun; a tea table had appeared, arranged neatly with a peculiar large metal vessel, porcelain
bowls, and cups without handles. Cherry blossoms splayed from vases nearby, and on a plinth stood a telescope, a dark, tapering cylinder banded in brass. On each side of the table was a flat, pale
cushion. The old woman descended with surprising grace to one, and gestured to me to take the other.

Clumsily, I lowered myself. The woman’s face was grotesque, the paint thick as a clown’s, the eyes yolky and rimmed in red. She dipped the ladle into the teakettle; I sipped the
bitter, steaming tea. The ceremony would have proceeded in silence, but from time to time the old woman hummed or let slip a muttered phrase, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes English:
‘American here?’ or ‘Ship in harbour?’ or ‘Sharpless-san, he fix Mr B. F. Pikkerton, no?’

‘You’re the girl’s maid,’ I said. ‘Suzuki.’

And all at once the old woman, as if in response to her name, leaped up and rushed to the plinth. Jamming an eye to the telescope, she called out words I could not understand and beckoned to me
excitedly.

Her fit was over almost as soon as it had begun. Leaving the telescope spinning, she resumed her place and carried on sipping tea. She only muttered, as if it were expected, ‘Mr B. F.
Pikkerton, he no come today.’

The longer I sat with Suzuki, the stranger the scene became. Gently, she picked out a song on the samisen. Her voice, to my surprise, was beautiful, and I listened as in a trance, wishing I
could understand, but before the song was over she flung down the instrument and covered her face. Her shoulders heaved. I went to her, but when I stole an arm around her she flared, screaming and
clawing at me, shrieking out curses until I escaped ignominiously. As I slithered down the stony steps from the veranda I barked my shin, and braved further blows as I scrambled back for my
ashplant.

The rickshaw-puller waited for me outside.

‘Koshi-byo?’ he said, and I nodded, but only because I did not know how to tell him to take me back to the consulate. Something wet coursed down my cheek, and I dabbed at it with my
handkerchief: Suzuki’s nails had drawn blood. I had left behind my hat and shoes. Blankly, I watched the rickshaw-puller’s brown, bent back, its jutting vertebrae suggestive of some
ancient, stubbornly persisting form of life – something repellent, reptilian – as we jolted down from Higashi Hill.

In town, spidery entanglings of wires meshed the sky like a net, as if to keep the citizens trapped; the streets were dirty, crowded, reeking. Everything was as it had been before – but
no, it was not.

Cries filled the air. There was a thunder of feet.

The chaos, even as it descended, seemed unreal: unreal, the loud report, like a shot; unreal, the crowds pushing, flooding out from the alleys, filling every space between rickshaws, bicycles,
automobiles; unreal, the shouting, the blasting of horns.

Young men pressed from all directions, jostling and angry. Fists punched the air; words screamed from flung-back throats. Where had the riot come from? How had it erupted? All at once it was
there, and I was in the middle of it.

I cried out to the rickshaw-puller, but he paid me no heed, struggling as best he could to liberate us from the fray. Something slammed the side of the rickshaw, sending it rocking. I gripped
the arc of the canopy, wondering if I dared jump into the street. Could I make it to the sidewalk? But on the sidewalk, there was only the same swarming, angry crowd.