A Quiet Life (16 page)

I was certainly captivated by Mrs. Shigeto's story. For I, too, long to lead a quiet life with Eeyore as
nobodies.
This was all the more reason that I, feeling a little guilty, thought I needed to put in a few words in Father's defense. Although I didn't write this in “Diary as Home,” I told Mrs. Shigeto that Father probably didn't think being a writer made him a privileged person.

“You might refute me,” I said, “by saying that, at this very moment, Father is a writer-in-residence, but I think he honestly feels very grateful to have the position. I understand he was grumbling to Mother that if he wasn't suffering this ‘pinch,’ he'd have declined. He'd accepted the offer, he said, only because
he considered himself an unscaworthy old tub that needed shelter from an imminent storm.”

Mrs. Shigeto's reply to my words was slightly off the mark, for it seemed she had already thought of putting an end to the discussion. So this is how the long
dropout
talk drew to a close, at least for the day.

“Ma-chan,” she said, ‘a person changes with his or her position, whatever it is—though, of course, you can't ignore the individual's inborn character.… Mr. Shigeto's former supervisor, who is still with the news agency, was just recently promoted to director. Mr. Shigeto attended the private party honoring the occasion and came home enervated. He told me the new director's speech was very long, and he got very tired just listening to him. So he drank to recover his vigor, and he overdid it. … Remember, Mr. Shigeto, you were still worn out the next morning, and you kept griping about your fatigue, citing some rules of Latin grammar?”

“My Latin grammar doesn't amount to much. It's only elementary stuff everybody knows,” Mr. Shigeto said
languidly.
“You see, when accentuating Latin words with vowel clusters,” he went on to explain, “the syllables with long vowels are important, and there are two kinds: essentially long, and long due to their position. In other words,
long by nature
and
long by position.

“My boss was, by nature, a guy who gave long speeches. But after he got the director's position, his speeches became longer. …”

Hearing the joke for the first time, I laughed out. loud, but Mrs. Shigeto laughed with such vigor that one might have thought it was new to her, too. Eeyore looked on happily as we laughed, while Mr. Shigeto, somewhat dramatically, sat there even more
languidly.

*  *  *

That night, after finally falling asleep, I had a really sad dream. In the pale glow of a still, seemingly everlasting desert twilight—probably on the Arabian Peninsula, because Mrs. Shigeto had briefly mentioned it—was a multitude of people, some standing, some squatting, but all peering in the same direction. Some were lying down, but they were frantically lifting up their heads, trying to see in that direction. It resembled a scene Father once told me about, in one of Blake's images, just before the Last Judgment. Father went through a period of reading Blake day after day, and he once told me about the scene, while referring to one of the memo cards on which he had written its translation. The powers-that-be had already been arrested in their golden palace, and it seemed they were being tormented. In the desert, the multitude rejoiced and sang as the bowlings of the arrestees readied them. The air was fraught with furious energy, charged, as though before the crashing of thunder. … “It's just like Blake's desert scene,” I reminded myself as I dreamed, as if I had actually been there. …

I didn't quite understand what Father's intention had been in telling me about Blake's desert scene, but the focus of his talk was on the babies who, though they had died before being baptized, and their bodies were already cold, were screaming. “… the children of six thousand years / Who died in infancy rage furious, a mighty multitude rage furious, / Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.” And in my dream, too, Eeyore and I were children again, standing quietly in the desert. Perhaps we reverted to childhood because of Eeyore's head disorder, and because I hadn't married. Our desert was different from Blake's in that our Last Judgment wouldn't come for another six thousand years, unlike Blake's
desert, where the Second Coming of Christ is imminent. Which gave me some relief, because this dream meant that Eeyore wasn't the antichrist.

I soon realized that Eeyore and I were truly
nobodies.
I knew that nobody cared about us; nobody, come hell or high water, would come to take us to some other place. And what made it even worse than having nobody to help us, Mrs. Shigeto, who had been on our side that afternoon, was peering over her silver-rimmed glasses, which made her look like an elderly German woman, and was sending us wordless, reproachful glances from across the pale-dark multitude. In her carry-on bag was a thin, hand-woven muffler that, though we were cold, she didn't dare lend us. …

It appeared that she was never going to forgive us, for despite the fact that we were
nobodies
, we were pretending otherwise, and she had seen through it. Needless to say, it wasn't because she believed we were self-conscious about Father being a fairly well-known writer. Actually, ever since I was a child, I resented it when someone mentioned his name to me. I tried to maintain as much distance as I could from those who did, even my homeroom teacher. There was no misunderstanding on Mrs. Shigeto's part here. To be sure, she was silently sending a tacit, condemnatory message that the wrong I'd been committing was in taking Eeyore's disorder to be a privilege: cherishing pride in him, believing that his prowess in understanding music, his disorder notwithstanding, had truly made him not a
nobody
; being proud of myself, too, for having decided I would follow him wherever he went. Then I came to this desert on the Arabian Peninsula, and I was thinking that the decision to follow Eeyore there entitled me to be something other than a
nobody.

“See in the pale glow how you compare with the people around you!” she said. “Look at you two! Retarded Eeyore!
And you, Ma-chan, you can't even hope for marriage! Even among other nobodies, you're a
dead-end dropout
!”

Neither Father nor Mother was beside us. They had gone to California to devote themselves to
matters of the soul
, and later left for some other place to pursue more. O-chan, too, may have been on this desert, but he's such a fundamentally independent and go-it-alone person that he was probably treading his own path somewhere far away from us. And with the expertise he had acquired on the orienteering team, he may have quickly made a map of the desert and could have been running on the sand toward the control points he had set up. I soon
robotized
under Mrs. Shigeto's glare, and could not even turn to see if Eeyore was at my side. I could no longer spot him in the horde of nobodies, and I had the feeling he had long ago forgotten me.

So we were going to stand on the Arabian desert for another six thousand years, the same way we had stood there for the six thousand that had already passed. …

As soon as I awoke, I began to weep, and I continued to weep for some time. The twilight desert in my dream was thoroughly arid, and my tears dried even before they welled up in my eyes. I thought of Mrs. Shigeto as I wept. Mrs. Shigeto is never the fear-instilling, inhumane person who appeared in my dream, but there was no denying that the dream portrayed a deep-rooted element in her person. I find her to be a “righteous person,” and I have to admit that the reproach, from a “righteous person” like her, had struck home. …

I waited until my eyes shed no more tears, then picked up “Diary as Home,” which I had put by my pillow, and started reading the part I had written about the fit Eeyore had had on the platform coming home from the Shigetos. Eeyore had protected
me from the stampede, though he had been in the midst of a fit, his mind was muddled, and on top of all this, his body was tormenting him. And I wrote then: “I began wondering it Eeyore, deep inside, embraced a malevolent force like that of the antichrist. Even if he were the antichrist, I would follow him wherever he went”—though I had added that even for me this was a
peculiar resolve.

Now why did I so naively think I could follow him wherever he went? I'm a
nobody
in the truest sense of the word. Sheer complacency had led me—a
nobody
and nothing more—to think the way I did, relying solely on Eeyore's handicap. … How pitifully sad it is, though, that I'm merely a
nobody
, neither beautiful nor strong, just a
robotizing
coward. …

It must have been this sadness, I thought in my weary, frayed heart, that had
substantialized
—that's how O-chan would put it—in my dream of a twilight desert.

In my heart, I apologized to Mrs. Shigeto for dreaming her to be a merciless person. But as the possessor of a mind as perverse as mine, only after the free leap in the dream was I, for the first time, able to associate her with the “righteous person” that she is. Ramifying thoughts of her continued to occupy my mind, making me feel nervous about seeing her the next time I took Eeyore to her place.

While I was having this selfish dream, and was alone ruminating on it, however, the real-life Mrs. Shigeto had met with a calamity totally undeserving of her benign person. What occasioned this, to begin with, was her behavior as a “righteous person.” Undue violence had been wrought upon her, an accident in which she had broken her clavicle in a complex way. …

Mrs. Shigeto had gone to pass out the handbills, the draft of which she'd been preparing the day I took Eeyore to his
lesson, to a place she had discerned would be best for the purpose: the prime minister's official residence, of all places, where the chairman of the Polish National Council was making his formal visit. And she had tried to hand one of her bills directly to Mr. Jaruzelski, the consequence of which was that she was knocked down by a security guard, and broke her clavicle. Mr. Shigeto asked his friend at a news agency to inquire of the police as to why a guard at the prime minister's official residence should exercise such brutality on a middle-aged woman, but both Mr. Shigeto and his wife understood it was not a situation that: warranted a tedious protest.

What Mrs. Shigeto had intended to do in front of the official residence was this: since people would be mobilized to welcome Chairman Jaruzelski, as the hour of his visit pressed closer, she would wait behind the welcoming crowd; and if, by any chance, the accompanying representatives came near her, she would hand the fliers to them. To avoid being excluded as a black sheep, she would not yet show the fliers to anyone among the welcomers who had been mobilized. Instead, she would wait until the chairman entered the building, and then get those interested in Japanese-Polish relations to read the fliers.

But Mrs. Shigeto, who surprisingly has an impatient side to her character, arrived there before the guards were stationed. And she saw an elderly Polish woman, evidently lost, walking to the intersection from the street down by the Diet Members' Hall. Mrs. Shigeto asked her if something was wrong, and learned that though she had waited and waited, her interpreter, a woman who had promised to meet her, hadn't come. So Mrs. Shigeto acted as the liaison between this woman and one of the security guards, whereupon she was mistaken for the woman's interpreter and was led in through the gate, together with the woman, who had an invitation card with her. Beside
the entrance, a band of media personnel was already waiting for Mr. Jaruzelski's arrival. Mrs. Shigeto asked one of the secretaries to accommodate the woman, while she herself joined the phalanx of media people and wailed with them. And when the members of the Polish delegation got out of their limousines, she scrambled out from among the cameramen to hand Mr. Jaruzelski one of her handbills. A security guard, panicking at this unforeseen event—his blunder—thrust her back with his outstretched arms, which hit her clavicle and knocked her down. …

The incident was conveyed to me over the phone by Mr. Shigeto. The conscientious person that he is, he called to tell me that an accident had occurred, compelling him to cancel Eeyore's composition lesson that day. When I expressed my wish to immediately visit Mrs. Shigeto with Eeyore, he fell silent for a moment and said, hesitantly, as if speaking the unspeakable, that we didn't have to come, since she was leaving the hospital very soon anyway. He went on to explain that his wife, in a hospital bed from the shock of the accident, was so despondent that she wouldn't give even him a decent answer. He said that the hospital she had been rushed to in an ambulance had five patients to a room, and one of them was rude. He wouldn't want Eeyore to experience something disagreeable.

Having been cussed at on the bus, and seeing a sad dream, paranoia had gotten the better of me. I imagined, for instance, Eeyore passing the rude patient's bed and tripping on the stand from which her IV bottle hung, and she shouting at him in her very fearsome adult voice,
Dropout!
Wouldn't even Mrs. Shigeto, who is so nice to Eeyore when she is healthy, also find it exasperating, when bedridden, to have to receive an unrelated person with a handicap? … Isn't this what Mr. Shigeto foresaw, and why he didn't welcome the idea of us visiting her? I was starting to see things with jaundiced eyes.

But no, Mr. Shigeto's tantalizing reserve in speaking his mind had stemmed from his concern for canceling, at his own convenience, a lesson Eeyore looked forward to as a matter of weekly routine.

“My wife's being in the hospital would not ordinarily come in the way of welcoming Eeyore for his lesson,” he said apologetically.

Mr. Shigeto added, however, that his wife was concerned about the handbills that she had prepared for distribution, and that he had read in the paper of a return-of-courtesy reception to be hosted by the Polish delegation that evening at. the Tokyo Kaikan, a hall by the Imperial Palace moat. He went on to say that his relationship with the petty officials at the Polish embassy had been sour for several years, and that he himself had received no invitation to the party, but that he wished, at least, to go and stand in front of the hall, and pass out fliers to the guests. The most important point of his phone call was that because of this, there was going to be no lesson that day.