The Nicholas Linnear Novels (54 page)

“‘Listen,’ was all the monk would say. And the samurai listened. He heard nothing at all save the tiny night sounds. Then, of a sudden, he thought he heard a woman’s cry of grief. ‘What is that?’ he said.

“‘Pray,’ said the monk. ‘Pray for a spirit that knows neither heaven nor hell.’ But the samurai, having no God, merely looked at the monk before he walked on.”

They ate breakfast at the hotel and then went outside. It was cold and damp, the fog still swirling with curled tendrils underfoot. They saw the train on which they had arrived still standing at the station—way station was more like it. It was merely a central platform between two sets of tracks with enormous rough-hewn pillars of wood supporting a slanting, pagoda-like roof, lacquered on top against the debilitating effects of the weather and the salt air, but was quite naked underneath. The scent of cedar was still powerful.

As they watched, a skeleton crew swung onto the train and, several moments later, it crawled a small distance onto a section of track set into an enormous disk which, as the train stopped, turned one hundred and eighty degrees. The train now pulled slowly into the opposite side of the platform, ready for the return journey north to Osaka.

The show over, they walked slowly away. The sky was perfectly white, the sun diffuse and ragged within the mist.

They were quite near the harbor and Nicholas could already make out two or three high white sails of the fishing boats maneuvering carefully away from the quay. Past them, he knew, though hidden now, lurked the flatlands of the Asian shore.

As they came up on the headland, he thought he could make out the dark brown hills, due south, of Bunzen Province across the narrow straits on the island of Kyūshū.

“How peaceful here,” Yukio said, stretching like a cat. “How different from Tokyo or Osaka or even Kyoto, as if the war never touched this place, nor industrialization. We might be in the seventeenth century.”

“Full of samurai and the ladies of samurai, eh?”

She took a deep breath. “It’s like being at the end of the world—or the beginning.” She turned to him, put her slender fingers around his wrist. He was startled at the nonsexual intimacy it conveyed. The sharp smell of drying fish hung heavily in the air, clinging to their nostrils like paint. Great gray and purple gulls wheeled, crying, in the low sky, half seen. “Why don’t we stay here, Nicholas.”

“Here?”

She nodded her head like a child. “Yes. Right here. Why not? It’s idyllic. The rest of the world doesn’t exist here. We can forget. Be free. Start all over. Like being born again without hurt or sin.” He looked at her and her grip on him tightened convulsively. “Oh, please,” she said, her voice as hushed and echoey as if she were talking in a cathedral. “Let’s not go on. What for? What can there be waiting in Kumamoto to compare to this? You have me; there’s the sea. We could go sailing. Out into the ocean. Even to the continent. It’s not so very far away. How much time could it take? And then. And then…”

“You can’t really mean that,” he said. “You have to be realistic, Yukio.”

“Realistic?” she cried. “What do you think I
am
being? There’s nothing for me back there.” She flung her arm out to the north, from where they had come. “There’s no love, no life. And to the south, in Kumamoto? What’s there? Saigō. Saigō and his damnable secrets. I don’t want any part of all that. It terrifies me.”

They had passed a street vendor, shrouded in fog, and Nicholas detached himself from her for a moment, went back, bought two small paper cups of tofu in a sticky sweet brown glaze. He gave her one. A wooden spoon was stuck in the center of the sweet.

She looked at it, then at him. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. A strong gust of wind, humid with the fecundity of the sea, whipped around them and she had to peel her hair away from her face. A few strands clung to the wet corner of her lips. The rest of her hair, unbound, was like a scarf worn in midwinter, flying out behind her. “You treat me like a child. You buy me a sweet as if I’ve just awakened from a nightmare.” She batted the paper cup from his outstretched hand. It hit the ground with a fat splat and stayed there, a misshapen lump of white and brown. “What I’m feeling is not going to go away, despite what you may think. I go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning hoping that it
is
all a dream. But it’s not. Don’t you see that?” He began to walk, she with him. “Nicholas, please.” Her body was bent slightly, either against the wind or against her emotions; perhaps both. “I’m begging you. Let’s stay here. I don’t want to go across to Kyūshū.”

“But why not? You knew where we were coming when you insisted I take you along. What did you imagine would happen?”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I didn’t think that far ahead. I’m not like you in that respect. I can’t plan ahead. I never know what I am going to do, how I am going to feel until I do it. I didn’t go with it all the way until the end. I just wanted to be with you—” Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes opened wide. She whirled away from him, bent over.

“Yukio—”

“Leave me alone. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”

He threw away the cup, held her by her shoulders. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Please talk to me.”

“You know I can’t do that,” she said, “very well.” Her back was still to him.

“Yukio”—he held her tighter to him—“you must tell me.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t.”

He spun her around. “Yes you can. I know you can.” He stared into her frightened eyes, enlarged now by incipient tears. “Will it help if I tell you?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” But at least she knew what he meant.

“I love you,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ve known it and not said it. I—” Was this why he was terrified?

“No. No,” she said. “Don’t say it. Please. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.”

“But why not?”

“Because,” she said fiercely, her face wrenched in a snarl, “I believe you.”

He almost laughed with relief. “And is that so bad?”

“Don’t you understand yet?” Her face was so close to his, her eyes seemed crossed. “I feel like I’m going to die. I’m not equipped—”

“Yes you are!” He shook her so that her hair flew across her face and her lower lip trembled. “Everyone is. You just don’t know it.”

“I can’t handle it.” Her voice was almost a sob. A boat hooted over their shoulders, the rhythmic rumble of its diesel reaching them as a vibration up their legs until it had passed, its green and gold stack lost in the mist. He could not even see as far back up the foreshore to where the vendor must still be, hawking his sweet tofu.

“I am committed now,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. “I’ve said I’d come.”

“You can always change your mind. No one’s locked you into one decision.” Her voice had taken on a pleading edge. But was it for him or for herself?

“My commitment is to myself,” he said softly. “I must find out what Saigō is doing in Kumamoto.”

“Why? Why is that so important? Who cares what he’s doing? Who is it going to affect? Neither of us. Why can’t you just let it go? It’s such a small thing.”

“It’s not,” he said despairingly. “It’s not a small thing at all.” But he wondered if there was any way he could explain it to her. How could he when he was not even sure he could explain it to himself?

“It’s come down to that fight you two had in the
dōjō
,” she said cannily. “It’s like you have each other by the throat and neither of you will let go. You’ll destroy each other that way, don’t you see? One of you has to let go, otherwise… Why can’t it be you?”

“There’s a matter of honor.” He only knew it now, a revelation like the sun as it first slips over the horizon, beginning to defeat the long night’s chill.

“Oh, don’t give me that one,” she said shortly. “That kind of honor went out of style a long time ago.”

How little she must understand of life, he thought. “For some of us, it’s never gone out of style.”

“For the samurai,” she said tartly. “The elite of Japan. The warriors who hurl themselves unhesitatingly into battle. Who live to die in combat?” She laughed, a harsh, discomforting sound. “Now who needs a strong dose of reality? You’re the same, the two of you. Two rabid dogs who’ll worry a leg off before they’ll give up and let go.”

“Not the same,” he said. “Not the same at all. Saigō hates everything I stand for. My mixed blood; my love of Japan combined with my
abominable
Caucasian features. It rankles him that someone who looks the way I do should be better than him at anything, especially something so important as bujutsu.”

“Important? What’s so goddamned important about bujutsu? What has any of that to do with living, with feeling—”

“You’re a good one to talk about that.” Knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as it was out of his mouth. He saw the look on her face, said, reaching out for her, “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, you meant it, Nicholas. I’m quite certain of that. And you’ve a right to say it, I guess. I’ve been frightened these last few days and now you know how I get when I’m frightened. You’ve made me feel—something—I was sure was impossible for me. I still don’t quite—well, part of the time I want to run away from you and hide and never see another human being for the rest of my life. Is it okay to trust you? I keep asking myself. Isn’t it just my cunt and my mouth he’s after? But then I think, he’s already got those so why go into this at all? It must be real even though every instinct that’s still functioning tells me it’s not. The past dies very slowly.
I
keep hearing echoes all around me. When you talk to me, say things, I hear what you’re saying but, in my mind, other meanings, hidden and secretive like invisible hieroglyphics, burn themselves into my brain and I hear two different things and I begin a debate as to which of those signals is the real one, the one you mean for me to hear.” She looked at him. “Does any of this make any sense to you?”

“I think so.”

“I see it doesn’t.” Her eyes were so bright they seemed to glitter despite the lack of any direct light. “I suppose I am trying to tell you I love you.”

Her arms were around his neck, though how they had gotten there he had no idea. Hadn’t they been at her sides just a moment ago? Had there been any movement since then? What was happening?

They kissed in a kind of timeless moment where even their breath hung suspended, condensed clouds on a chill winter’s morning.

They took their bags down to the ferryboat ticket taker’s, a ramshackle wooden building no larger than an outhouse with an arched window in its front, glassless and inadequately hooded against inclement weather. One could easily freeze to death within such a place.

A young boy in his late teens took the two rail ticket passes Nicholas handed him, stamped and punched them in several places, handed them back.

“The next ferry sails in seven minutes,” he told them. Even here, in such an out-of-the-way town, there was the typical Japanese concern with punctuality.

Yukio was unnaturally quiet until they cast off. But once away, her melancholy seemed to slip away. “Perhaps there will be a new show in town,” she said gaily. “Or a riding stable. We could picnic and ride all afternoon.” It was as if the episode on the near shore had never occurred. Still, Nicholas was disturbed in its wake.

Behind them, Shimonoseki drifted away like a dream, beyond the churning white wake of the ferry. Gulls swung gracefully across their bow, wheeling obliquely like a fighter squadron, calling plaintively to each other.

They passed, quite close it seemed in the mist, a pair of fishing boats lying low in the swells, their black nets hauled up the masts like a moron’s idea of a sail. A young boy on one of the boats waved excitedly as the ferry passed him by but there were none aboard, it seemed, inclined to return the gesture.

His gaze shifted subtly to regard Yukio beside him. Her head was thrown back as if to catch the wan sunlight on the wide planes of her cheekbones, her hair flying to one side, a raven’s spread wing. The long line of her neck was exposed, shadowed softly because of the thrust of her chin in this position. The hard jut of her breasts. Was it his imagination or could he see the slight protrusions of her nipples as they poked, erect, through the lace of her bra?

“Why is it, do you think, that Satsugai is afraid of the Colonel?”

The wind tore at her words flinging them over the ferry’s side, out toward the bobbing fishing boats, mere black points now, misting to dull gray, and for a moment he was not sure he had heard her right.

“I was not aware that he is.”

She turned toward him, studied his face. “Oh, yes. But of course. You mean you haven’t noticed it? Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised, really. I’ve spent more time with him than you have.”

“They argue a lot.” He put his elbows along the railing, leaned overboard. He felt her hand on his arm.

“Don’t do that. Please.” She laughed. “If you fell in I’d have to go in after you and I hate the water.”

“Water and trains.”

“Water worse than anything. I don’t mind being near it. I like that, in fact. I’m just terrified by the tides and undertow and that.”

“About Satsugai,” he said. “He and my father are from the opposite sides of the tracks, politically speaking. But that’s, well, just talk.”

“Do you imagine that they would be together if it were not for Itami and your mother?”

He looked at the water, dark and light. “No, I don’t suppose so.

“Right. Well, I know Satsugai. That kind of hate only stems from fear and let me tell you he is not a man who is easily frightened. Whatever the Colonel has on him is potent indeed.”

“I think it’s just that Satsugai, being in the
zaibatsu
, was under suspicion as a war criminal for a time. You know, during the purges when the Americans disbanded the traditional family structure of the
zaibatsu.
My father intervened in Satsugai’s behalf. I don’t know the details but that kind of debt would be a heavy burden for Satsugai to bear.”

“Yes. He prides himself on owing no one and he’s more powerful now than he was during the war.” She shook her head. “To think that’s due in part to the Colonel.”