The Nicholas Linnear Novels (53 page)

“Late in the night, or early in the morning, to be completely accurate, he could be found in the great first floor parlor—the building had two stories; it may have been British-made, though certainly for quite a different purpose originally—sitting in one of the overstuffed wing chairs playing a game with red and black marked tiles I had never seen before—”

“Mah-jongg?” Nicholas asked.

“No, not mah-jongg. Another game entirely. One I could never fathom. He would sit there silent and motionless while the girls cleaned up and when they had finished and had left he would begin to play.
Click-click. Click-click.”

The old man lifted out a cigarette and, with some difficulty, owing to the length of his nails, lit it with a thin gunmetal Ronson. He smiled as one eye squinted up with the smoke. He might once have been an oriental Humphrey Bogart, the expression came so naturally to his face. He twisted the lighter’s wide face so that the light glanced off it in a flare. “A memento of those days, so far away. Belonged to a British diplomat whom I helped out of a spot of trouble there. He insisted I take it. I would have lost face had I not.” He pocketed the Ronson, drew briefly on the cigarette, let it out so that his image was as hazed as the countryside rolling by outside.

“It was impossible for me to sleep in that place—even after I had been satiated. I hope I am being delicate enough, young lady.”

“Perfectly,” Yukio said. Nicholas wondered what the old man would think if he heard the way she threw words around.

“It was my habit to read late at night—I am an insatiable reader. Have been all my life. But one night I felt restless enough to put my book down—I was reading
Moby Dick.
In English, mind you—I don’t trust translations; you lose too much—and take a stroll through the first floor.

“
Click-click. Click-click.
I heard the tiles as he moved them. I sat next to him and watched. In those days I was certainly a brash young man. Not rude, mind you. I was far too well brought up by my parents. But I had a spot of—what shall I say?—the impetuosity of youth, yes?

“Now this man was older than I am today, a good deal older, I would say, but then I am an abysmal judge of age so you must not go by me. Still, he was old. Anyone who saw him would certainly say that, yes.

“The odd thing about him was that his nails were so long that he was required to wear sheaths to protect them from breaking. These sheaths were something I had read about before. The mandarins were fond of wearing them, as an affectation, I had always supposed, during the turn of the century. However this was the late 1930s. Who in China still kept their nails thus? No one, I had thought. Now I knew differently.

“Usually these sheaths were of lacquer but these, if my eyes did not lie, were made of gold. Solid gold. But how could this be? I asked myself. How could the nails support such a weight? Still, I know gold and there was no doubt.

“‘Why have you come here?’ asked the man without looking up.
Click-click,
went the tiles.
Click-click.

“I was so startled that for a moment I could not find my voice and he was obliged to prompt me. ‘Come, come,’ he said. Just like the
click-click
of his tiles. The same cadence.

“‘Can’t sleep,’ I said, still rather tongue-tied.

“‘I never sleep,’ he said. ‘But that is because of my advanced age.’ He looked up at me. ‘When I was your age, I never missed a night. Perhaps that is why I don’t miss it now.’ He spoke in a rather peculiar dialect. It was Mandarin all right, but the inflections were odd, some nouns clipped at their ends, and so on. I could not place where he was from.

“‘I don’t often have this trouble,’ I said, still the dazzling conversationalist. ‘But you’re not that old.’

“‘Old enough to know that I am going to die soon.’

“‘Oh, I doubt that.’

“He eyed me critically. ‘Well, sentiment is never very accurate.’ He began to stack up his tiles, nine to a pile. ‘But there is no need for concern. I have no fear of death. In fact, I will happily leave here now. I do not want to see what is coming.’

“‘Coming?’ I said like a half-wit. ‘What is coming?’

“‘Something terrible,’ he said. His hands on the small lacquered folding table looked like shining alien artifacts, newly unearthed. ‘A new type of bomb with a power beyond anything you can imagine. With enough force to destroy an entire city.’

“I shall never forget that moment. I sat as still as a statue, barely breathing. I remember hearing the chirruping of a cicada so clear and near that I thought it must have gotten itself trapped inside the house. Oddly, I found myself wanting to get up and find it to free it into the vast darkness which surrounded us.

“I could not move. It was as if his words had pierced my heart, riveting me to the chair in which I sat.

“‘I don’t understand,’ I said with a kind of opaque astonishment.

“‘It is not likely that you would,’ he said, finishing stacking his tiles. Then he put them away into an inside pocket of his robe.

“He rose and, for an instant, I thought I might have known him or at least seen him at another, previous time. But I think now it was just the light which made it seem so.”

“What happened then?” Yukio asked.

“What happened?” The old man looked momentarily nonplussed. “Why, nothing. Nothing at all. ‘Good evening to you, sir,’ he said in his somewhat formal way. ‘I wish you pleasant dreams.’ Though how he could have meant it after what he had just told me I could not imagine.

“The place was very still after he left and, slumped back in my chair, I imagined I could hear the sound of the grass growing outside where the tree frogs slept. A cloud of mosquitoes whined against the netting.

“At some time I must have gone upstairs—though I have no real remembrance of doing so—to Ishmael and Ahab and the
Pequod
, though I could not well concentrate on even so great a world as Melville’s that night.

“His words ran around my head as if he had somehow engraved them upon the grooves of my brain with a cunning scalpel.”

“But how could he have known?” Nicholas asked. “At that time not even the Americans who eventually comprised the Manhattan Project knew.”

The old man nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly. “That is often what I ask myself. From that day in August when I stood on that secluded hillside and felt the earth shake and the sky burn with color and heard the heat wind coming, I have asked myself that same question. How could he know?”

“And what is the answer?”

The old man looked at them and smiled wanly. “There isn’t one, my friend.” The train was slowing as it came out of a downgrade. Cinders flew, whirled up and around by the wind eddies created by their passage. He stood up and bowed to them, long hands clasped against his flat stomach, nails like translucent chopsticks. “My station,” he murmured. “Time to get off.”

“Hey!” Nicholas said. “Wait a minute.” Forgetting, in his anxiety to know more, his modes of speech, lapsing into the common formation; it lacked the necessary respect a younger person must show toward someone his elder. It did not matter, however, for the old man had gone, swinging lithely down off the car even before the train had come to its full panting stop. Clouds of steam obscured the windows.

Nicholas came back down the aisle, slumped down in the seat next to Yukio. “Too late,” he said. “Too late.”

Now the train picked up speed for the last part of the journey toward Shimonoseki. It was quiet in the car. Even Yukio was silent. She stared at her hands while he looked out the window.

The night was aflame. They were passing fairly close to one or another of the southern cities—he had no idea which one—which had been turned into a supportive structure for a vast oil refinery. Giant flames leaped and spewed into the darkness like the corona of the sun seen close up in a kind of silent hellish dance. It seemed an inhuman place to work or live, a desolate dreamscape from which there was no exit. It went on and on as they traveled, the lines of red and orange lights leading in inevitable precise rows toward the refinery’s main building bulking blackly against the skyline, the bloated billowing flames.

“What did you think of the old man’s story?” Yukio said.

He turned his head. “What?”

“The old man. Did you believe him?”

For some reason he thought of So-Peng. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“I didn’t.” She crossed her legs at the knees, very American. “Something like that couldn’t have happened. Life’s just not like that.”

They spent the night in Shimonoseki, so near the water they could hear it though they could not see it for the thick ground fog. Horns hooted mournfully, deepened by the night air, made somehow mysterious.

She lay with her head on his bare chest, her night-dark hair spread in a fan across his pale flesh. He was a long time falling asleep. He felt her breathing gently, rhythmically through his fingertips, the weight of her on his sternum and rib cage. He wondered what it was about her that drew him so powerfully. And could not even decide why it seemed so important for him to know.

Yukio stirred and it seemed a part of him.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“Oh, nothing.” Her voice was very soft. “I was just thinking of a story. It’s the one my mother told me. The only one I remember. Want to hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, once upon a time there was a lady. She lived in a castle in Roku-No-Miya. Where that is no one knows to this day—that’s just how my mother used to say it. Anyway, after this girl’s parents died, she was brought up by a governess—she was an extremely well-protected girl—and, as the years passed, she grew up into a beautiful young woman.

“One evening she was introduced to a man and, every evening after that, he would come to the castle and she would entertain him until gradually the place took on a festive air.

“But during the long afternoons, while she was alone walking her gardens, the lady thought of the power of fate. She thought about being dependent upon this man for her happiness. Then she would shrug her shoulders and smile wanly into the sun.

“At night she would lie awake beside her lover, neither happy nor unhappy. What satisfaction she could possess was fleeting.

“But then, one day, even this was to end, for her lover informed her solemnly that he must go with his father to another district to assist him in his new political post. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the assignment is but for five years. At the end of that time I shall return for you. Please do me the honor of waiting for me.’

“The lady openly wept, perhaps not from love itself but from the idea of separation.

“In six years, nothing was the same at the lady’s castle in Roku-No-Miya. The man had not returned and all the servants had gone as both time and money withered away. The lady and her governess were forced into the old, long-abandoned samurai’s quarters to live.

“Now there was only rice to eat and great gaps in the wooden frame of the place let in both wind and rain. At length the governess beseeched her lady, saying, ‘Forgive me, lady, but your lover has abandoned you. There is a certain man who has been inquiring about you. Since we have so little money…’

“But the lady would not listen. ‘I have no use for other adventures now,’ she said. ‘I only wish for the solace of death.’

“At that moment, in another district, the lady’s lover lay with his new wife. Startled, he sat up in the dark, saying, ‘Did you hear that?’

“‘Go back to sleep, my lord,’ his wife answered him. ‘It is only a cherry blossom falling.’

“Not over a year later, this man returned to Roku-No-Miya with his wife and retinue. He had paused at a roadside inn to wait out inclement weather and there had sent a number of notes to his former mistress. Not one was returned and thus, piqued, he left his wife at the house of her father and set off in search of the castle at Roku-No-Miya.

“When he arrived, he almost passed it up, so changed was it. The great wood and iron gates that had become so familiar to him were but stumps in the loamy earth and, down the road, the high blue lacquered
torii
, around which he and the lady used to stroll in the spring and summer, was gone.

“The castle itself he found uninhabitable. Some immense storm had completely demolished the east wing and the rest was in shambles.

“In the old samurai’s quarters he found only an old, time-weary nun. She was, she said, the daughter of one of the lady’s servants. When he inquired after the lady’s whereabouts, she said, ‘Alas, my lord, no one knows.’

“He went out searching for her but no one in the district claimed to have seen her.

“One dreary, rain-filled night, he stopped at a crossroads beside a monk and, hearing a voice he was certain was familiar, peered through the loose slats of a board house. Instantly he recognized the withered woman on the floor as his mistress. Rushing with the monk to her side he looked upon her face. She was surely dying and he asked the monk to recite a sutra over her. ‘Invoke the name of the Amida Buddha,’ the monk implored the lady. To which she replied, ‘I see a blazing carriage…. No, it is a golden lotus.’ ‘Please, my lady,’ the monk cried, ‘you must call out to the Amida Buddha. We have no power over transmigration, otherwise. You must call to Him with all your heart.’

“‘I see nothing,’ the lady cried. ‘Nothing but darkness.’

“‘My lady—’

“‘Darkness and a cold wind blowing. A black wind, so cold.’

“The monk did his best to assist her while the man prayed to the Amida Buddha. Gradually the lady’s cries grew fainter, at last mingling with the sound of the wind whistling through the trees.’”

Yukio was quiet for some time.

“Is that the end of the story?”

“Not quite. On the night of the full moon, some days later, the old monk sat by the same crossroads, pulling his ragged cloak about his bony knees in an effort to keep out the cold.

“A samurai came by singing a song and, seeing the monk, paused to hunker down next to him. ‘Is this the place?’ he asked. ‘It is said in the district of Roku-No-Miya the weeping of a woman can be heard sometimes at night. What do you know of this?’