I Am a Cat (75 page)

In any event, he got me into trouble. That is to say, after some three days at the inn I ran out of cigarettes. Ubako is an out-of-the-way place, miles up in the mountains with only a single inn and absolutely nothing else.

One can eat and one can bathe in the hot springs. But that’s all. Imagine what it’s like to run out of fags in Ubako. It put me under strain. When one is deprived of something, one begins to crave for it as never before.

Though I’m not much of a smoker, the moment I realized I was out of cigarettes I found myself aching for a puff. What made it worse was that the old man had brought with him a big stock of cigarettes carefully bundled up in a carrying cloth, from which he would take out several at a time, squat down right in front of me, and chain-smoke like a sooted chimney. If he’d smoked in an ordinary decently human sort of way, I would not have hated him so passionately, but he flaunted his tobacco wealth. He made smoke rings, blew the fumes out forward, sideways, straight up at the ceiling, in and out of his nostrils, and almost out of his ears until I could have killed him. Some men are born show-offs. This man was a smoke-off.”

“What d’you mean, a smoke-off?”

“If you flaunt your clothes or jewelry, you’re a show-off; if you flaunt your fags, you’re a smoke-off.”

“If it put you through such agony, why didn’t you simply ask him to let you have a few of his cigarettes?”

“There are things a man can’t do. To beg, I am ashamed.”

“So it’s wrong to ask for a cigarette?”

“Perhaps not actually sinful, but I could never beg.”

“Then what did you do?”

“As a matter of fact, I stole.”

“Oh, dear!”

“When the old man, clutching his personal hand towel, tottered off for a hot spring bath, I knew my chance had come. I looted his hoard and I smoked and smoked and smoked as fast as I could go. Just as I was smirking to myself, partly with the pleasure of smoking, partly with the even greater self-satisfaction of the successful thief the door opened and there he was again.”

“What happened to his bath?”

“Oh, he was certainly planning to take it, but when he’d gone some way down the corridor he suddenly remembered he’d left his purse behind so he came back to get it. Damn cheek! As if I’d steal someone’s purse. . .”

“Well, wouldn’t you? You seem to have been pretty quick with his cigarettes.”

“You must be joking. That’s not the same at all. Anyway, apart from his disgraceful behavior in that matter of the purse, the old man proved a person of real feeling. When he opened the door, the room was thick with at least two days worth of cigarette smoke. Ill news travels fast, they say. It didn’t take him long to read the situation.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He hadn’t lived all those years without growing more shrewd than that. Saying nothing, he wrapped some fifty or sixty cigarettes in a piece of paper; then, turning to me, he courteously observed, ‘Do please forgive their miserable quality, but if these cigarettes could be of any use to you, I’d be honored if you’d accept them.’Then he went off down to the bath.”

“Perhaps that’s what’s meant by ‘the Tokyo style.’”

“I don’t know if it’s Tokyo style or draper’s style; anyway, after that incident, the old man and I became firm friends and we spent a most enjoyable two weeks together.”

“With free fags for a fortnight?”

“Since you ask me, yes.”

My master finds it difficult to give in gracefully, but he sometimes tries. He accordingly closed his book, rolled off his stomach and said, as he sat up, “Have you finished with that violin?”

“Not yet. We’re just coming to the interesting part, so do please listen. As for that person flaked out on the
go
board—what was his name?—What? Singleman? Well, I’d like him to listen, too. It’s bad for him to sleep so much. Surely it’s time we woke him up.”

“Hey, Singleman, wake up. Wake up. This is an interesting story. Do wake up. They say it’s bad for you to sleep so much. Your wife is getting anxious.”

“Eh?” Singleman lifted up his face. Slobber had dribbled down his goatee to leave a long shining line as if a slug had trailed its slime across him. “I was sleeping,” he managed to get out, “like a white cloud on the mountain top. I’ve had a delightful nap.”

“We’ve all seen how delightfully you sleep. Suppose you wake up now.”

“I expect it’s time I woke. Has anyone had anything to say worth hearing?”

“Coldmoon’s been telling us about his violin. He’s just about to. . .

What was it he was going to do? Come on, Sneaze. What was it?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

Coldmoon intervened. “I am,” he said, ‘just about to play it.”

“He’s going to play his violin at last. Come over here and join us as we listen.”

“Still that violin? Bother.”

“You’ve no cause to be bothered because you’re one of those people who only play on stringless harps; Coldmoon here has every reason to be bothered out of his tiny skull because his screeching squawks are heard all over the neighborhood.”

“Ah, yes? Coldmoon, don’t you yet know how to play a violin without being heard by your neighbors?”

“No, I don’t. If there is such a way, I’d very much like to learn about it.”

“There’s really nothing to learn. Just concentrate, as all the Zen masters advise, on the pure, white cow which stands there in the alley.

Desire will drop away from you and, as enlightenment occurs, you’ll find you already know how soundless music can be played. And because you’ll already know, you’ll have no need to learn.” Singleman’s distorted messages from the Gateless Gate, even when he’s wide awake, are usually incomprehensible.

But Coldmoon simply assumed that the man babbled like that because his brains were still floating about somewhere in the land of Nod. So he deliberately ignored him and continued with his story. “After long thought I devised a plan. The next day, being the Emperor’s Birthday, was a national holiday and I proposed to spend it in bed. But I felt restless all day long and I kept getting up, first to lift and then to replace the lid of my wicker box. When, in due course, the daylight faded and the crickets in the bottom of my grandmother’s parting gift began to chirrup, I took my courage in both hands and lifted the violin and its bow from their biding place.”

“At wonderful last,” chirruped Beauchamp, “Coldmoon’s going to play.”

“Take it easy, now,” warns Waverhouse. “Gently, gently, Coldmoon.

Don’t do anything hasty. Let caution rule your twilight.”

“First I took out the bow and examined it from its tip to its guard. . .”

“You sound like some half-witted seller of swords,” chaffed Waverhouse.

“If you can take a bow in your hands and feel that it is your own soul that you’re holding, then you will have achieved that same spiritual condition which transfuses a
samurai
when he unsheathes his white-honed blade and dotes upon it in the failing light of autumn. Holding that bow in my hands I trembled like a leaf.”

“Ah, what a genius!” sighs Beauchamp.

“Ah, what an epileptic,” adds Waverhouse tartly.

“Please,” said my master, “please get on with playing it. And right away. Now.”

Singleman makes a wry face as though acknowledging the pointless-ness of trying to bring light to the invincibly ignorant.

“Happily the bow proved in perfect condition. Next I took the violin and, holding it close under the lamp, examined its front and back. All these preparations had taken about five minutes. Please now try to picture the scene. Tirelessly, from the bottom of their box, the crickets are still chirruping. . .”

“We’ll imagine anything you like. Set your mind at rest, take up your precious instrument and play.”

“No, not yet. Now I have checked it over and, like its bow, the violin is flawless. All is wonderfully well. I spring to my feet. . .”

“Are you going out?”

“Oh, do keep quiet and listen. I cannot tell this story if you keep interrupting every single phrase. . .”

“Gentlemen! We are to be silent. Hush!” calls Waverhouse commandingly.

“It’s you yourself who do the interrupting.”

“Oh, I see. I beg your pardon. Pray carry on.”

“With the violin beneath my arm, soft-soled sandals on my feet, I had taken some few steps beyond the outer glass door of my lodgings when. . .”

“I knew it. I knew it. I knew in my bones there was going to be a breakdown. Coldmoon cannot walk two steps or breathe two minutes without a hitch or hang-up.”

“I suppose you do realize,” said my master at his most sarcastic, “that there are no more dried persimmons hanging from the eaves. Even if you’re now very hungry there’s no point in turning home for them.”

“It is highly regrettable that two such scholars as you and you”—Coldmoon nodded at Waverhouse and Sneaze— “should persist in behaving like common hecklers. I shall have to address my further remarks to Mr. Beauchamp only. Now, Beauchamp, as I was saying, though I had left my lodgings, I was obliged to turn back for something I should need. Thereafter, having draped around my head a scarlet blanket (for which I’d paid three yen and twenty sen in my own hometown before I left it years before), I blew out the lamp. Unfortunately, in the consequent pitch darkness I could not find my sandals.”

“But why did you want to go out? Where were you off to?”

“Patience, patience. I shall come to that. At long last, outside in my scarlet blanket, my violin beneath my coat, I again found myself as on the previous night, ankle deep in fallen leaves under a star lit sky. I turned away to the right and, as I came to the foot of Mount Ko-shin, the boom of the temple bell on Eastern Peak struck through my blanket shrouded ears and penetrated to my inmost head. Beauchamp, can you guess what time it was?”

“This is your story, Coldmoon. I’ve no idea what the time was.”

“Beauchamp, it is nine; nine and the evening chill. I am now climbing through the early autumn darkness along a mountain path which rises nearly three thousand feet to a sort of terrace plateau which the locals call Big Flat. Timid as I am, at any other time I’d have been scared clean out of my wits, but it’s one of those strange things that, when the mind is truly concentrated upon one specific aim, all sense of being frightened or not frightened is wiped from one’s heart. Odd as it must sound, I had become a lion-heart by virtue of my single-minded lust to play a fiddle. This place, Big Flat, is a famous beauty spot on the south flank of Mount Ko-shin. Looking down from there on a fine day, one can see through the red pines the whole layout of the castle town below. I’d guess the level area must cover some four hundred square yards and, smack in the middle of it, a large, flat rock protrudes to form a low fifteen-square-yard platform. On the north side of Big Flat there’s a swampy pond called Cormorant’s Marsh, and around the pond there’s nothing but a thick stand of quite enormous camphor trees, each one no less than three arm-spans around. The place is deep in the mountains and the only sign of man is a small hut used by the camphor gatherers.

Even by day the pond oppresses the visitor with its air of sodden gloom.

Remote as it is, Big Flat is not too hard to visit because, on some long-ago maneuvres, the Corps of Engineers cut a pathway up the mountain-side. When I finally reached the flat rock, I spread out my scarlet blanket and sat down on it. I’d never climbed up here before on a night so cold and, as my pulse steadied, I began to feel the surrounding loneliness encroach upon me as a kind of cramp creeping ever deeper into my belly. When one is thus alone in the mountains the sheer intensity of that loneliness can fill the mind with a feeling of terror; but if that feeling can be emptied away, all that remains in the mind is an extraordinary sense of icy crystalline clarity. For some twenty minutes I sat there on my scarlet rug completely abstracted from my normal self and feeling as though I were totally alone in a palace of pure crystal. It was as though every bit of me, my body, even my soul, had become transparent, as if made of some kind of quartz, and I could no longer tell whether I was inside that palace of crystal or that freezing palace was within my belly.”

Not quite sure how to react to Coldmoon’s strange account, Waverhouse contented himself with a style of teasing more demure than his mocking wont. “How terrible,” he said. Singleman, however, was genuinely impressed by Coldmoon’s personal report of a state of consciousness not unknown to many meditation sects. “Quite extraordinary,” he observed. “Most interesting.”

“Had my condition of cold translucency persisted, I might well have stayed frozen on that rock until I melted in the morning sun. Then I should never have played my violin.”

“Have there been any earlier reports,” Beauchamp asked, “to suggest that Big Flat might be haunted? You know, by foxes, badgers, or any other such shape-changing creatures?”

“As I was saying, I couldn’t even tell whether I was my own self or not, and I scarcely knew if I were alive or dead when suddenly I heard a harsh screaming cry from the far end of the old marsh.”

“Aha,” says Waverhouse, “things are happening.”

“This awful cry, like a blast of autumn wind tossing the treetops, echoed away far and deep across the entire mountain; at its sound, I came to myself with a jerk.”