The Nicholas Linnear Novels (13 page)

“So. Enough of prattle. I am like an old woman today. Perhaps it is the weather that has made me so. I am loquacious in storms; perhaps it aids my uneasiness. Monsoon season was always a time of terror for me when I was a child.

“A fair enough introduction. You may wonder, Colonel, as to my cultural origins. Well, my father was Chinese. Not a Manchu, thank heavens, but a cultured, quiet mandarin. He was, originally, a merchant but because of a shrewd mind he soon became an important businessman, emigrating to Singapore when he was thirty-three. Oh, I am from the mainland, certainly; not from here. My mother was a Japanese.” His eyes opened wide. “Oh, now, Colonel, you needn’t look so surprised. Those things happened from time to time. Not, I admit, with any degree of regularity. No, no. And the true nature of my mother’s origin was scrupulously concealed for obvious reasons. Her differing features my father explained away by claiming she came from the north of China, near the Russian border where there is much mixed blood, Mongol and Manchu and heaven knows what else.

“However, of Cheong’s origins I have no specific information. Perhaps she knows or then again not. It was never discussed between us. Perhaps, one day, she will tell you. But that, of course, is between the two of you. For myself, I believe it matters little, if at all, for her matrix is here. It is where she grew up; it is what fixed her.

“When one is able to see the matrix from which a precious stone is taken, one is invariably better able to judge the quality of that stone.” He shook his head. “But this is a somewhat cold example. Let me give you another. One meets an extraordinarily beautiful woman but, in spending time with her, one gradually finds her behavior somewhat erratic, confusing—in short, incomprehensible. Now, perhaps, one learns, subsequently, that this same woman was the middle daughter of three. It is now possible that one has taken the first step in unraveling the mystery of this beautiful woman’s strange behavior. And, of course, the more one learns, the less odd her behavior becomes until, at length, it is perfectly understandable.” He sniffed once at the air. “It will be over soon,” he said. “Come. Let us descend.”

They sat, the three of them—the Colonel, Cheong and So-Peng—around the red lacquered table in the room of screens while Chia Sheng silently served them course after course of food. The Colonel had not in three years seen so much food at once, nor tasted one dish after another so delicious or so exquisitely presented. There was, firstly, every manner of
dim sum
—tiny delicate rice-dough dumplings, filled with a variety of stuffings. Then there was fish soup, hot and spicy without being in the least heavy. Thirdly, there were six kinds of rice, from the simply boiled white to a kind of double-fried version with minced seafood and cooked egg yolk. The fourth course consisted of a cold salad spiced with white horseradish and cucumber. Then came the main courses: hacked fowl, golden brown, crisped, rubbed with coarse salt and herbs; broiled shrimp; hardy langoustes; cracked crabs, their shining carapaces blue and red, fresh from the boiling water. And lastly, great crescent slices of melon, the juice already running down along the sloping sides, onto the clay plates, like the rivulets of an icy stream.

At last they were through and So-Peng, pushing his rind-garlanded plate from him, heaved a deep sigh and patted his stomach. “Tell me about your matrix, Colonel,” he said.

And the Colonel told him all about his father, all he had been told about his mother he never knew, struck down by diphtheria when he was only two. All about his stepmother, whom he despised for no one particular reason but rather for many diffuse ones. He told So-Peng about his feelings at being an only child, a concept that the other found as fascinating and absorbing as he found it strange. About his boyhood in rural Sussex and the road to school which eventually brought him, as it did to most, to London. Of his burgeoning interest in the Far East, his studies and his eventual enlistment.

“And now,” said So-Peng, “you are to embark upon a new chapter of your life. You are about to become a politician and more, a maker of history. Very good. Very good. Soon I, too, must leave Singapore for a time. My services are needed elsewhere. Thus this becomes, truly, a farewell party.” He paused now, as if waiting for something to occur. Long moments passed in silence with just the lentitudinous dripping from the last of the rain leaving the lush loquat trees that surrounded the house.

Presently Chia Sheng appeared-holding a shadowed object close to her. When she reached the table, she lowered the object into So-Peng’s hands. This time she did not leave them but stood silently at his side.

So-Peng held the object before him, chest high, and the Colonel saw that it was a copper box ten inches by perhaps eight across, enameled and elaborately lacquered. On its top was exquisitely painted a fiery, scaled dragon, entwined with an enormous, powerful-pawed tiger.

Still holding the box in midair, So-Peng said, “It is now my duty to apologize to you, dearest Cheong, for being away from Singapore on the day of your marriage to Colonel Linnear. I have thought upon this for many months, deciding what would be most appropriate, for, as you know, everything that is mine is yours also. As it is with all my children.” The box was now lowered slowly to the tabletop, where it lay like the most exquisite of jewels, newly mined. “But you mean more to me, Cheong, than all the others, for your love shines all the stronger, all the purer for the hard road you had to endure. No one of all my children, none save you, has ever wanted for anything since the moment of their birth.

“This I have no doubt you already know. But what you are not aware of and what I tell you now is that, of them all, it is your mind alone, which has cleaved most closely to my own. This has touched me deeply, for it has happened naturally, with no urging from myself. It is what you yourself wanted and what you now possess.

“Now, on the point of our last farewell—for I fear that we shall never see each other again—this is for you, for your Colonel, for your child about to be born, for your children yet to be conceived. This I give you gladly, with all my love. It comes from me, from Chia Sheng, from the long line of our families. In all the world there is only one. And its contents, too, are the sole sentinels, their like not to be found in any quarter of the globe. This is my legacy. Use it as you may.” His old hands, their long fingers over which the skin was stretched like patinaed parchment, extended, pushing the box slowly across the table until it passed over the center meridian. At that point, as if they no longer wielded any power, they relinquished their hold, withdrawing over the empty red expanse of the table to the old man’s lap.

The Colonel, holding Cheong’s trembling hand in his, stared into So-Peng’s eyes. He meant to say something but, whirling upon itself, his mind paralyzed his tongue and there he sat, on the near side of the table, as if a world apart, watching a man who was obviously as important as he was mysterious, not knowing who he was, what he did or why he might be so important, yet, despite that, understanding it all for the first time.

Both the Colonel and Cheong fell in love with the house and its grounds in the suburbs beyond Tokyo. MacArthur had, perhaps quite properly, requested that the Colonel find suitable lodgings within the city proper, to be more accessible to his work. However, he could find no such place, at least none that could satisfy both him and Cheong.

Thus they traveled outside of the city and, almost immediately, came across the house. It was in an area that had, miraculously, escaped the destruction that had devastated fully half of the city and much of the outlying suburbs.

It lay on the eastern verge of an enormous forest of cryptomeria and pine within which the Shinto temple blossomed like some otherworldly flora whose grace of design, quiescence and natural humility instantly bewitched the Colonel’s mind, speaking to him more eloquently than even the country’s finest minds of the eternalness and dignity of the Japanese spirit. And always when he came in sight of it he thought of So-Peng.

No one knew who had inhabited the house before the Colonel and Cheong moved in, not even Ataki, the wizened old gardener. It had been there, abandoned, for years, he had told the Colonel, though he had come faithfully every day to tend the grounds, and time had dimmed remembrance. Perhaps, the Colonel thought with a certain degree of resignation, he just did not want to say. In any event, it was now the Colonel’s.

The formal garden in front of the house was breathtaking, complete with complexly flowering bonsai trees and a shallow stone pool filled with blue-eyed goldfish with fins like fine, gossamer veils (the Colonel quickly bought a tank, setting it up in the kitchen, one of the house’s few Westernized rooms, for their warm winter’s sojourn).

In the back of the house was another kind of garden altogether, a Zen pebble rectangle with four jutting rocks placed at significant points by the original artist within the uniform expanse, looking, the Colonel thought, like islands jutting from beneath a perfectly calm sea. However, Nicholas pointed out, when he was old enough to speak, they were most surely mountain peaks rising above a cloudbank: this comment much to the delight of both the Colonel and Cheong. But in any event, the Zen garden was, ironically enough, a place of perfect peace and meditation in a country half-dead, mutilated and charbroiled, struggling now toward a new kind of survival.

Nicholas adored the house and the grounds with an unquenchable passion. He was drawn, over and over, to the Zen garden, where Cheong would often find him sitting thoughtfully, head held in his hand, gazing out over the stark serenity of the rising rocks amid the precisely arranged pebbles. After a time it would be the first place she would look for him.

Nicholas could never decide whether he loved the garden best when he was alone there or when Ataki would come with his water and his rake—to keep the earth beneath from drying out and to make certain that the pebbles were properly aligned—for he adored both the intense solitude of the place (“It’s like,” he told the Colonel once, “you can hear your soul breathing”) and watching the old man’s preciseness and deft economy of movement with the pebbles, which were worn so smooth that Nicholas firmly believed that their origin must have been some point on the island’s shoreline, for only the constant action of a motion-filled sea could create such stupendous smoothness.

It appeared to Nicholas that the old man’s motions were so utterly effortless that he scarcely seemed to expend any physical energy at all. When he was perhaps six he had asked Ataki how it was he moved the way he did, and when the old man answered with one word, “bujutsu,” Nicholas went to the Colonel straightaway to ask him what it meant. It was no good badgering Ataki, for he would only tell you what he wanted you to know.

“Bujutsu,” the Colonel said, putting down his cup of tea and folding lengthwise the newspaper he had been absorbed in dissecting, “means, collectively, all the martial arts of Japan.”

“Then,” Nicholas said clearly, “I want to learn bujutsu.”

The Colonel regarded his son. He had learned quite quickly that Nicholas never said anything lightly and that now, if he said that he wanted to learn bujutsu, he was quite prepared to take it on; superfluous for the Colonel to tell him how arduous a task it was likely to be.

The Colonel got up from the table and, putting his arm around his son’s shoulders, opened the
shōji
—a sliding paper-and-wood wall—so that they could, together, walk outside.

They stood by the edge of the Zen garden but Nicholas noticed, on looking up at his father, that the Colonel seemed to have fixed his gaze far beyond its border, indeed, beyond even the last boundary of their land, to the rising green swords of the cryptomeria forest.

“Do you know, Nicholas,” the Colonel said in a rather floating voice, “that within the perimeter of the Shinto temple at the center of the forest lies a park—a small one, mind you—that is said to contain forty different species of moss?”

“I’ve never been there,” Nicholas said. “Will you take me?”

“Perhaps one day,” the Colonel replied, his heart aching, for he knew that there was never enough time and he was here to do a job, a monstrous, bloody, awful job that, nevertheless, needed to get done and, furthermore, needed him to get it done right; these years had been more than enough to grind down a man of lesser courage and perseverance than the Colonel. But each time his tired mind seemed on the verge of faltering, he would recall So-Peng and his son, encompassed in the same thought, and he would go on, through another long night and the subsequent longer day until the weekend came and it would begin all over again. “But I have never seen that park either, Nicholas. Few save the Shinto priests of that temple have viewed it.” The Colonel took some time now before he continued. “What I mean to say is that you wish to go where few nowadays would wish to go—and there are many specializations.”

“I wish only to start at the beginning, Father. That is not so much to ask, is it?” He looked up again.

“No,” the Colonel said, tightening his grip upon his son’s shoulders. “Not too much.” He thought for a moment, his lean face wrinkled along the firm brow. “I tell you what,” he said at last. “I’ll speak to your aunt about it, all right?”

Nicholas nodded, his gaze lowering from his father’s face to the mountains thrusting blindly out of the clouds.

The person to whom the Colonel had referred was, in fact, Itami. Nicholas, knowing her origin, had never really considered her his aunt. Perhaps, after all, this was because he had disliked her for as long as he could remember, and having once formulated this opinion, could not get himself unstuck from it.

It would be no great surprise to learn that his instinctual dislike of her was only an offshoot of how he reacted to the presence of her husband, Satsugai. In a boy who, from birth, had been taught to attain within himself an inner calmness of spirit, like a cool guiding stream, it was most disconcerting for him to come within close contact with Satsugai. He felt, at those times, like an ineffectual moon whirled about by the proximity of a nova. Great turbulent currents, powerful eddies disturbed his tranquillity, and this inability to return to a semblance of inner balance until Satsugai had left frightened him.