Dreaming Spies (16 page)

Ninety seconds later I was eyeing the single shilling-sized biscuit on the plate and reflecting on how many meals my fickle stomach had caused me to miss during the past three weeks. Holmes had other things on his mind.

“Why have you brought us here?” he asked Miss Sato.

I took advantage of her distraction to sweep up the final offering, chewing it as subtly as I could.

“I received a message from my … employer, who is willing to meet with you. However, he—”

“Why should we wish to meet with your employer?”

For the first time, her composure slipped. Her mouth gaped, lacking words to fill it. It was clearly beyond her comprehension that anyone might question the gift of a meeting with her boss.

Her shock only lasted for a moment. She straightened her already ramrod-straight back and smiled. “I believe you would find it to your advantage.”

“I see.”

“However, he is a … proud man, and not fully accustomed to the ways of the West. I intend—that is, if you agree, I would like to spend two or three days here, helping you to become comfortable with Japanese manners, before you meet.”

Holmes appeared to think, then gave a shrug. “I have nothing more urgent to do than learn Japan from the inside. You, Russell?”

He was deliberately prodding her dismay, but this time she had herself under control, and her face remained dispassionate.

“What, forced to spend a couple of days on solid ground in a hotsprings spa?” I said. “I think I could manage the burden.”

Her hands relaxed. “Very good. Let us walk through the town while it is still light, and then I will introduce you to the baths.”

We reversed our progress through the spotless corridors, changing room shoes for public shoes, then those for our abandoned outside footwear.

Arima was a village nestled into a fold in the hills.
Sakura
—the famous Japanese cherry trees—that had been blooming near the coast, here showed but the smallest touch of pink in the buds. The hills were green, the village streets narrow and charming, and the inhabitants who clacked along the cobbles on wooden
geta
sandals curious but polite. The buildings were old, tiny, pristine, and magnificent.

Most blessed of all, the cool air swishing in and out of my lungs held not a trace of the sea.

For more than a thousand years, Miss Sato told us, people had come to Arima to soak in the hot springs. We wandered through the town, past the steaming pools that collected along the main street, stepping into curious shops and doll-sized alleyways, examining the painted plaster food displayed in a box at the front of a restaurant and the enormous variety of brushes and ink in the shop beside it. Many people laughed at the sight of us, but they were friendly about it, and bobbed at us in response to Miss Sato’s oft-repeated explanations. We ventured a few phrases, causing more laughter and friendly bobbing, and walked on.

Above the town was a Shinto shrine. There our guide showed us how to make our offering, ringing the bell and clapping to focus our attention—or perhaps that of the
kami
spirit who lived here. Further along, past a carefully nurtured garden of bamboo and moss, we climbed up until we came to a small log polished by a thousand sitters. As we sat gazing across the closely-woven rooftops, I felt as if my eyes had just been born.

Miss Sato told us stories: about the monk who founded it, the Emperors who had used it, the ills cured by its two different varieties of water—one golden, the other silver, beneficial for different ailments, external and internal. Her voice was pleasant and the sensation of limitless space after the constraints of the ship was a blessing. I could feel a tight knot begin to unclench.

Not entirely, however. Holmes was a devoté of Turkish baths, but public bathing never appealed much to me, less from innate modesty than from the scars I bear: they attract first attention, then sympathy, and finally, questions.

It was with a resigned sigh, then, that I stood in the bath-house an hour later and prepared to strip. There were some seven other women in the room, of all shapes and ages, sags and blemishes (although none had blonde hair, and not one came within a hand’s breadth of my height). All were utterly lacking in inhibitions, scrubbing and towelling as if they
were addressing each other from behind walls. And all were either marvellously well-mannered or selectively blind, because their conversations barely paused when I walked in with Miss Sato. When one or another did take notice of me, she would look at my face—particularly my fascinatingly blue eyes—and not at the puckered scar on my shoulder or the older scars down my arms and torso.

My companion, I was interested to see, also displayed a history of violence. In her case, the blood she had shed was not from gunshot or road accident, but sharp blades: three wounds, one of them—down the side of her right arm—from very long ago, indeed.

I left my spectacles on my folded garments, and sat where she indicated, on a low stool. The attendant began enthusiastically to scrub the accumulated soil from my skin (a ship’s baths of heated sea water did not actually cleanse). When I tingled all over, Miss Sato led me—sans glasses, less because of the irritation of them fogging than because without them, my mind was more willing to believe that everyone else was half-blind, too—towards a steaming pool populated with chatting heads. I felt like an adolescent, awkward and embarrassed, and was relieved to find the pool of silvery water nearly opaque with effervescence. My companion descended the steps and sank to her chin, making a little noise of welcome at the sensation; I stuck one foot in and yelped.

“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “That’s hot.”

She sat upright, bringing the thin scar on her shoulder into view, and gave me a frown. “This is the coolest of the three.”

“Do you cook lobsters in the hottest one?” I tried again, venturing one foot into the silver liquid, then the other. My behaviour was attracting the curious glances my mere epidermis had not, so I told myself that if the water was not boiling the flesh of the others, it would not harm mine. I gasped as I committed the greater part of me to the onsen, and patted around until I located a ledge to sit on, leaving my shoulders and head radiating furiously into the evening air.

Two middle-aged ladies bobbed their heads approvingly. I stretched my eyes wide and said, “
Mizu wa atsui des’!
” The water is hot!

The two giggled and launched into a conversation, of which I understood about three words. But I nodded and grinned back at them, and that seemed quite sufficient for their purposes.

After what felt like a very long time, head swimming and sweat pouring down my face, I said to my companion, “How long do you keep this up?”

“I am about finished here,” she said, then to my consternation added, “I thought I would move to the hotter bath for a while.”

Before I could moan too loudly, she raised her voice to speak past my shoulder. I looked behind me to see one of the attendants coming to help me from the water.

“I’ve told her to take you for a massage. I will join you in a quarter hour or so.”

I staggered from the tub, ridiculously weak and heavy, and leaned unabashedly on the tiny woman’s shoulder. She helped me back to the stools, rinsed me off, then guided me to an adjoining room, where I was allowed to collapse face-down on a long, low table. She “covered” me with a minuscule towel. I was warm, I was motionless, and in seconds, I was asleep.

When I swam back up, there were hands on me: strong, capable hands manipulating the edges of my scapula, easing out tension I did not know was there. My eyes drifted open. On the next table lay Miss Sato, eyes shut, a masseuse working on her left knee. I was vaguely aware of well-being from my shoulders down, and was faintly astonished to realise that I must have been the passive object of the hands’ attentions for quite some time—long enough for them to make the journey from toes to shoulders, turning muscle to limp rag all the way.

When she’d finished with my neck and the back of my head, I never wanted to move again. I’d have been happy to melt into the table and slide away on the steaming river that ran down the middle of the village, to feed the roots of those cedar trees and bamboo groves …

Were it not that I felt as empty as a clean bowl.

I became aware of a presence. I opened my eyes. Miss Sato’s face was inches from my own.

“Would you care for dinner, Russell-san?” The English honourific had become the Japanese, but as always, the R required her full attention.

“Maybe you should call me ‘Mary.’ ”

The dark eyes crinkled. “And I am Haruki.”

My eyelides drifted shut. “What does ‘Haruki’ mean, anyway?”

“Often means ‘Sunshine.’ But Father say means ‘Makes life clear.’ ”

Students taking an

Examination by bear

May need the scrub-brush
.

We stayed at the Arima spa for three days. All the while, Haruki-san watched our reactions—to strange clothing, stranger foods, uncomfortable customs, all the incomprehensible situations that travel brings.

That first day, after being parboiled and beaten, we were propped upright, wrapped in kimonos (mine with the woman’s stiff obi belt), and led away to the dining area, where we knelt until our legs were numb, picking our way through numerous courses of unrecognisable foods, most of them either raw or pickled. We slept on hard cotton mattresses laid on the floors, our heads perched on pillows stuffed, apparently, with gravel.

Fabulous luxury. For the first time since leaving Bombay, my night was dreamless.

The second day we spent in kimonos and
tabi
-socks with divided toes, sliding our feet into high wooden geta sandals when we went onto the cobbled streets. By midday my toe was blistered and my stomach querulous at the odd demands being made on it, my head spun with the relentlessness of the language, and I’d have cut off a finger for a cup of
coffee. Or even English tea. However, by sunset I was negotiating the cobbles without too much thought, I knew which of the peculiar foods were more tasty, and the attentions of the bath attendant were very nearly welcome. I walked fearlessly to the baths, threw the odd ungrammatical phrases at my companions, joined in their laughter at the attempts, and scarcely noticed that I was displaying a lot of skin.

Again, no dreams.

The third day was almost comfortable … until the evening. Instead of taking us through the hallways and verandas to the inn’s baths, Haruki-san led us down the narrow streets to a different bath-house.

We stood outside the doors, while attendants waited to welcome us inside. “In modern times,” our teacher told us, “there are few truly mixed bath-houses. Mostly they are used for families, or for … other forms of male entertainment. Even in old times, women who bathed with men not of their family were … suspect. However, there remain traditional onsen in which men and women bath together. If you wish to experience one of those, this is your opportunity.”

My immediate impulse was to say,
No thank you
, but her expression was so … watchful, it gave me pause. That look of scrutiny was all too familiar: the sensation that my every motion was being judged, that my reaction to every assignment, or even mild suggestion, was being weighed and set down in a mental ledger. Haruki-san wanted to see just how far we were willing to go in (so to speak) immersing ourselves in the culture.

I took a deep breath. “Will you and I be the only women among a gathering of men?”

She turned to the attendants. After half a minute of back-and-forth, she replied, “No, there are five men and two women in the onsen at the moment. Although the two women are both older.”

I wanted to ask how much older, but decided that even a woman of ninety must think of herself as a woman, and if Haruki-san was willing, I would keep up my side.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll try anything once.”

I was finding that nudity could be less a personal awareness than a social convention: that if everyone else in the room agreed, bare skin was
just another garment. So I took a deep breath and raised my chin, then more or less held that position for the next hour.

It may have helped that I did not have my spectacles on.

Afterwards, we were served a dinner that went similarly up on the squeamish front. However, a woman who has been asked to down nonchalantly a sheep’s eyeball is not easily daunted by the tentacles of sea creatures. And at least the miniature octopuses didn’t squirt as one’s teeth came down.

Of course, hefty jolts of warm sake helped.

When we took to our hard beds that night, we felt like honorary members of the Nippon empire.

And when we woke the next morning, we had been abandoned.

“Holmes, I do believe we’re being handed our hats.”

“So it would appear.”

There had been a sort of nervous finality in the service of breakfast, an unwillingness to meet our eyes. Also, Haruki-san did not join us, for the first time. So it was no huge surprise, when the maids came in to remove the trays, that they stayed to pack our valises.