A Personal Matter (21 page)

Bird propped his shoes against the wall in the hallway and then shook hands with Mr. Delchef, who was beaming at him from just inside the door. Like a marathon runner, he wore only a pair of blue shorts and an undershirt; his red hair was cropped short but he sported a bushy and expectably reddish mustache. Bird could find nothing to indicate that the man in front of him was a fugitive—except his stupendous body odor, worthy of a hulking bear of a man though Mr. Delchef was slight of build. Probably he hadn’t found the opportunity to take a bath since secluding himself here.

When they had exchanged greetings in mutually meager English, Mr. Delchef explained that his girlfriend had just left to have her hair set. Then he invited Bird inside, but Bird pointed to the tatami mat floor and declined with the excuse that his feet were dirty. He wanted to say what he had to say standing in the hall. He was afraid of being stuck in Mr. Delchef’s room.

Bird could see that the apartment was empty of furniture. A single window was open in the back, but it was obstructed by a severe wooden
fence less than a foot away. It was probable that other private lives were being unfurled on the far side of the fence, better not observed from Mr. Delchef’s window.

“Mr. Delchef, your legation wants you to go back quickly,” Bird said, plunging headlong into his mission.

“I will not go back; my girlfriend wants me to stay with her,” Mr. Delchef smiled. The poverty and crudeness of their English made the dialogue seem a game. It also permitted them a harsh frankness.

“I shall be the last messenger. After me someone from the legation will come, or maybe the Japanese police even.”

“I think the police will not do anything. Please remember, I am still a diplomat.”

“Perhaps not. But if the people from the legation come and take you away you must be sent back to your own country.”

“Yes, I am prepared. Since I have caused trouble, I must be assigned to a less important post or I must lose my job as a diplomat.”

“Therefore, Mr. Delchef, before it becomes a scandal it would be better to return to the legation.”

“I will not return. My girlfriend wants me to stay,” Mr. Delchef said with a broad smile.

“Then it is not for political reasons? You are hiding away here simply because of sentimental attachment to your girlfriend?”

“Yes, precisely.”

“Mr. Delchef, you are a strange man.”

“Strange, why?”

“But your friend cannot speak English, can she?”

“We understand each other always in silence.”

A bulb of intolerable sadness was gradually sprouting in Bird.

“Well, I shall make my report now and the people from the legation will come right away to take you back.”

“Since I will be taken against my will there is nothing I can do. I think my friend will understand.”

Bird weakly shook his head in admission of defeat. Sweat sparkled in the fine copper hair around Mr. Delchef’s mustache. Then Bird noticed that brilliant beads of sweat were trembling in the hair all over Mr. Delchef’s body.

“I shall tell them how you feel,” Bird said, and stopped to pick up his shoes.

“Bird, was your baby born?”

“Yes, but the baby is not normal and now I am waiting for it to die.” Bird couldn’t have explained the impulse to confess. “The baby has a brain hernia, the condition is so terrible that the baby appears to have two heads.”

“Why do you wait for the baby to die when it needs an operation?” Mr. Delchef’s smile vanished and a look of manly courage fiercened the lines of his face.

“There is not one chance in one hundred that the baby would grow up normally even after surgery,” Bird said in consternation.

“Kafka, you know, wrote in a letter to his father, the only thing a parent can do for a child is to welcome it when it arrives. And are you rejecting your baby instead? Can we excuse the egotism that rejects another life because a man is a father?”

Bird was silent, his cheeks and eyes feverish with the violent blushing that had become a new habit. No longer was Mr. Delchef an eccentric foreigner with a red mustache who maintained a humorous presence of mind though his predicament was severe. Bird felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper. He gathered himself to protest at whatever the cost and suddenly hung his head, sensing he had nothing to say to Mr. Delchef.

“Ah, the poor little thing!” Mr. Delchef said in a whisper. Bird looked up, shuddering, and realized the foreigner was talking not about his baby but about him. Silently he waited for the moment when Mr. Delchef would set him free.

When Bird was finally able to say good-by, Mr. Delchef presented him with a small English dictionary of his native language. Bird asked his friend to autograph the book. Mr. Delchef wrote a single word in a Balkan language, signed his name beneath it and then explained: “In my country, this means
hope.”

At the narrowest part of the alley, Bird awkwardly crossed paths with a small Japanese girl. Smelling the scent of freshly set hair and seeing the unhealthy whiteness of her neck as the girl squeezed past him with her head lowered, Bird stopped himself from speaking to her. Bird emerged in the dizzying light and ran for the car like a fugitive, sweat cascading down his body. At this hottest hour of the day, he was the only man in the city on the run.

S
UNDAY
morning, Bird woke up to find the bedroom brimming with unexpected light and fresh air: the window was wide open, a breeze was making a lightful sweep of the room and blowing into the hall. From the living room came the drone of a vacuum cleaner. Accustomed to the dimness of the house, Bird was embarrassed in all this light by his own body beneath the covers. Hastily, before Himiko could storm in and tease him in his nakedness, he put on his pants and shirt and went out to the living room.

“Good morning, Bird!” Himiko said brightly. Her head turbaned in a towel, she was wielding the vacuum cleaner as though it were a pole with which she wanted to crush a scampering mouse. The flushed face she turned to Bird had regained its look of youth. “My father-in-law came over; he’s taking a walk while I finish cleaning.”

“I’d better leave.”

“Why must you run away, Bird?” Himiko said resentfully.

“I feel like a recluse these days; it just seems queer to meet someone new when you’re living in a hideaway.”

“My father-in-law knows that men often stay the night here and it’s never bothered him specially. But I think he would be disturbed if one of my friends seemed to rush away like a fugitive the minute he got here.” Himiko’s face was still hard.

“O.K. Then I’d better shave.” Bird went back to the bedroom. Himiko’s show of resentment had been a shock. Bird reflected that he had been clinging doggedly to himself from the minute he had moved into his friend’s house, aware of Himiko as a single cell only in the organism of his consciousness. How could he have been so certain of such absolute rights! He had become a chrysalis of personal misfortune,
seeing only the inner walls of the cocoon, never doubting for an instant the chrysalis’s prerogatives. …

Bird finished shaving and glanced into the fogged mirror at the pale, grave face of a chrysalis of personal misfortune. He noticed that his own face looked wizened, not, he had a feeling, simply because he had lost weight.

“Ever since I barged in on you I’ve been acting mostly like an egomaniac,” Bird volunteered when he returned to the living room. “I’d even started to feel as if that was the only way to behave.”

“Are you apologizing?” Himiko teased. Her face again was utter softness.

“I’ve been sleeping in your bed and eating the food you cooked for me, even making you wear my own tether. I have no right to any of this, and yet I’ve felt perfectly at home here.”

“Bird, are you going to leave?” Himiko said uneasily.

Bird stared at the girl and was stricken by something like a sense of destiny: never again would he cross paths with a person suited so perfectly to himself. The taste of regret was harsh on his tongue.

“Even if you do leave eventually, stay for a while, will you, Bird?”

In the bedroom again, Bird lay down on his back and closed his eyes, clasping his hands behind his head. He wanted a minute alone with his gratitude.

Later the three of them sat around the table in the restored living room discussing the leaders of the new African states and the grammar of Swahili. Himiko took down the map of Africa from the bedroom wall and spread it on the table to show her father-in-law.

“Why don’t you and Himi take a trip to Africa?” the older man proposed abruptly. “If you sold this house and property you’d have all the money you needed.”

“That’s not such a bad idea—” Himiko glanced at Bird as if to test him. “You could forget your unhappiness about the baby, Bird. And I could forget my husband’s suicide.”

“Exactly, and that’s so important!” Himiko’s father-in-law declared. “Why don’t the two of you just pack up and leave for Africa?”

So rudely was he rocked by this proposal that Bird submitted to panic unprotestingly. “I couldn’t do that, I just couldn’t,” he said with a feckless sigh.

“Why not?” Himiko challenged.

“It’s too slick, that’s why, just happening to forget in the course of traveling around Africa that your baby’s life has ebbed away. I … ,” Bird stuttered, blushing, “… I just couldn’t do it!”

“Bird is an extremely moral young man,” Himiko said derisively.

Bird’s blush deepened and he arranged his face in a look of reproach. In fact he was thinking he would have melted like a cube of bouillon under boiling water if her father-in-law had suggested undertaking a trip to Africa with the moral objective of rescuing Himiko from the phantom of her husband, how eagerly would he then have released himself to that journey into sweet deception! Bird was terrified the older man might make the suggestion in just such a way, at the same time he longed to hear the words: in his loathsome needfulness he felt like concealing himself in a dark hole. An instant later Bird saw in Himiko’s eyes the white flicker of awakening.

“Bird will be going back to his wife in a week or so.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize—” her father-in-law said. “I only suggested the trip because this is the first time I’ve seen Himi so alive since my son died. I hope you’re not angry.”

Bird looked at Himiko’s father-in-law in puzzlement. His head was short, and utterly bald, and it wasn’t clear where it stopped, because the sunburned skin on the back of his skull grew in a piece to his neck and from there to his shoulders. A head that recalled a sea lion, and two slightly clouded, tranquil eyes. Bird looked for some clue to the man’s nature and came up with nothing at all. So he maintained his wary silence and smiled a vague smile, laboring to conceal the disgraceful disappointment gradually climbling from his chest to clog his throat.

Late that night, in slothful positions that minimized the burden on their bodies, Bird and Himiko fucked in the humid darkness for an uninterrupted hour. Like copulating animals, they were silent to the end. Again and again Himiko soared into orgasm, with brief intervals at the beginning and then after increasingly languorous pauses; Bird each time recalled the sensation of flying a model airplane on the evening playground at his elementary school. Himiko swooped around the axis of his body in ever widening circles, trembling and groaning her way through the sky of her orgasms like a model airplane laboring under the burden of a heavy motor. Then she would descend yet again to the
landing ground where Bird waited, and the period of silent, dogged repetition would revive. Sex for them was rooted now in sensations of daily quietude and order; Bird felt as if he had been fucking the girl for more than a hundred years. Her genitals were simple now, and certain, lurking there were not the buds of even the most insubstantial fears. No longer a somehow inscrutable thing, Himiko’s vagina was simplicity itself, a pouch of soft, synthetic resin from which no ghostly hag could possibly emerge to harry Bird. He felt profoundly at peace, because Himiko explicitly and without qualification limited the object of their sex to pleasure. Bird remembered how it was with his wife, their timidity and the unflagging sense of peril. Even now, after years of marriage, they foundered on the same gloomy psychological shoals every time they made love. Bird’s long, clumsy arms and legs would prod his wife’s body, withered and rigid in its battle to overcome disgust, and she invariably would receive the impression that he had meant to strike her. Angry then, she would rail at Bird, even try to strike him back. Ultimately, the alternatives were always the same: he could become involved in a piddling quarrel, withdraw from his wife’s body and continue far into the night the sparring that made the antlers of aroused desire glitter, or he could finish in agitated haste with a wretched feeling of receiving charity. Bird had pinned his hopes for a revolution in their sex life on the birth of the child and what would follow. …

Since Himiko repeatedly compressed Bird’s penis like a milking hand as she circled her private skies, Bird might have chosen her most ardent orgasm as the moment for his own. But fear of the long night that would follow coitus continually drove him back. Dumbly Bird dreamed of the most saccharine sleep of all, achieved midway on the gentle slope toward orgasm.

But Himiko continued to fly, dropping groundward in smooth descent and suddenly dancing back into the sky like a kite caught in an upward draft. It was on yet another of these false landings that Bird, carefully restraining himself, heard the telephone ring. He tried to rise, but Himiko clasped her soaking arms around his back. “Go ahead, Bird,” she said a minute later, relaxing her grip. Bird leaped for the phone still ringing in the living room. A young man’s voice asked for the father of the infant in the intensive care ward at the university hospital. Bird,
stiffening, answered in a voice like the whine of a mosquito. It was an intern calling with a message from the doctor in charge of the case.

“I’m sorry it’s so late but we’ve had our hands full over here,” the voice from the distance said. “I’m to ask you to come to brain surgery at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, it’s the Assistant Director’s office. The doctor would have called you himself but he was exhausted. We had our hands full over here until late!”