Mandarins (24 page)

“Sensei, you are so lovely! What beautiful eyes you have!”

I had the feeling—were I to overlook how they munched on unpeeled apples and removed the paper from their caramels—that these were not schoolgirls but rather full-grown women. A pupil seemingly older than the others happened to step on someone's toe as she was passing me. “Oh, I'm terribly sorry!” she exclaimed. It was precisely her relative maturity that made her the only one among them to typify a schoolgirl. The cigarette still hanging between my lips, I could not help ridiculing the contradictions in my own perceptions.

The electric lights in the train had already been illuminated when at last we pulled into a suburban station. A cold wind was blowing as I stepped out onto the platform. I crossed the overpass, intending to take the electric train, when quite by chance I encountered T, a company man of my acquaintance. As we were waiting, we discussed this and that, including the current recession, of which T naturally knew more than I. On one of his stout fingers he was wearing a splendid turquoise ring that seemed hardly congruent with our topic.

“That's quite something you have on display there!”

“Oh, this? A friend who'd gone off to Harbin on business got me to buy it from him. Now that he can't do business with the cooperatives, he's in quite a bind.”

Fortunately, the train that arrived was not as crowded as the one before. We sat down next to each other and continued talking. T had just returned to T
ō
ky
ō
in the spring from a position he had held in
Paris, and so it was this that dominated our conversation: Madame Caillaux, crab cuisine, the sojourn of an imperial prince . . .
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“The situation in France is not as bad as it appears. It's just that the French are stubbornly opposed to paying taxes, so the governments go on falling.”

“But the franc has plunged.”

“That's what one reads in the newspapers. But what do the newspapers there say about Japan? One would think that we have nothing but massive earthquakes and flood disasters.”

Just then a man in a raincoat sat down in front of us. Feeling a bit uneasy at this, I thought about telling T about the ghost, but he was now turning the knob of his cane to the left. Looking straight ahead, he said to me in a low voice:

“The woman over there . . . in the gray woolen shawl . . .”

“Wearing her hair in European style?”

“Uh-huh, with the cloth-wrapped bundle on her lap . . . She was in Karuizawa this summer. She was dressed in quite fashionable Western clothes.”

Nevertheless, to anyone's eye she would doubtlessly have appeared to be shabbily dressed. As I talked to T, I furtively looked at her. Something between her eyebrows suggested the expression of madness. Moreover, protruding from her bundle was a piece of sponge that somehow resembled a leopard.

“When I saw her in Karuizawa, she was dancing with a young American. How very—what should I say?—
moderne
!”

When I took my leave from T, the man in the raincoat was no longer there. I got off the train and walked to a hotel, satchel in hand. Nearly the entire way there were large buildings on both sides; I suddenly remembered the pine forest I had passed. At the same time, I saw coming into view objects quite strange. Strange? That is to say
constantly turning, semitransparent cogwheels. More than once I had already had this experience, the number of such gears steadily increasing until they half blocked my field of vision. This did not last long. Soon they were gone, but then my head would begin to ache. Such was the invariable pattern. The ophthalmologist had repeatedly ordered me to give up cigarettes as a means for ridding myself of these optical illusions (were they?), but I had suffered such since when I was in my teens, well before I took up smoking.
It's started again!
I thought to myself, covering my right eye to test my left, which showed no sign of the objects. But behind my other eyelid, there were many still turning. As I saw the buildings on my right disappearing one by one, I quickened my pace.

The cogwheels were gone by the time I entered the hotel lobby, but my head still ached. I checked my coat and hat at the desk and took the opportunity to reserve a room. I then called a magazine editor to discuss a question of payment.

The wedding reception appeared to be already well underway. I sat down at the end of a table and began moving my knife and fork. There were more than fifty guests, sitting perpendicular to the bride and groom, our tables forming a white, rectangular U. They were all, of course, in the best of spirits. For my part, I became increasingly melancholy as I sat under the bright electric lights. In the hope of fleeing my oppressive state of mind, I turned to the gentleman sitting beside me and engaged him in conversation. He was an old man, with a white beard that made him look quite like a lion. I knew him to be a renowned scholar of the Chinese classics, to which our conversation consequently turned.

“The
q
í
l
í
n
is really a unicorn, you know. And the
fènghu
á
ng
is the phoenix.”

The scholar seemed to take interest in these comments of mine,
but as I was talking quite mechanically, I found myself steadily yielding to a pathologically destructive impulse. I said that the sage kings Y
á
o and Shùn were, of course, strictly legendary personages and that the author of the
Spring and Autumn Annals
had lived long after his purported time, the work having surely been compiled in the Han Dynasty.

At this, the scholar's face took on an expression of undisguised displeasure; avoiding my gaze, he cut off remarks with a tigerish roar:

“If Y
á
o and Shùn did not exist, then we can only conclude that Confucius lied. But it is unimaginable that a great sage should lie.”

I did not reply, of course. Again, knife and fork in hand, I turned to the meat on my plate. At the edge of it, I saw a small maggot gently wriggling, making me think of the English word
worm
. Like
q
í
l
í
n
and
fènghu
á
ng
, it could only refer to a mythical animal. I put down my utensils and gazed at the glass into which champagne was being poured.

When the banquet was finally over, I walked to the room I had reserved—down a deserted corridor that gave me the feeling of being in a prison rather than in a hotel. Fortunately, however, at least my headache had faded.

Along with my satchel, my hat and overcoat had been brought to the room. I looked at the latter, hanging on the wall, and had the impression of seeing myself standing there. I hastily threw it into the clothes closet in a corner of the room. I then went to the mirror; staring at my reflection, I could see my facial bones beneath the skin. Suddenly the vivid image of a maggot floated up into the mind of that man there, myself, standing in front of the mirror.

I opened the door, went out into the corridor, and set off aimlessly. At the far end, where the corridor turned toward the lobby, I suddenly saw a tall electric lamp-stand covered with a green shade, the light
brightly reflected in the glass door. This gave a momentary feeling of peace. I sat down in a chair in front of it and thought of many things. Yet I was not meant to rest there for even five minutes: someone had with extraordinary carelessness tossed a raincoat onto the back of the adjacent sofa.

“But why a raincoat in this cold weather?” Brooding on the matter, I walked back down the corridor. At the other end was a personnel room. There was no one to be seen, but I could hear faint voices and a reply to something that was said in English: “All right.”

“All right”? I found myself straining to catch the exact meaning of this exchange. “
Ō
ru-raito”? “
Ō
ru-raito”? What in the world could be “
Ō
ru-raito”?

In my room there would, of course, be utter stillness. Yet the thought of opening the door gave me a strange sense of loathing. After a moment's hesitation, I went in. Trying not to look in the mirror, I sat down at the desk in an easy chair covered in blue Moroccan leather that looked quite like lizard skin. I opened my satchel and took out writing paper, intending to continue work on a short story. But the pen I had dipped in ink would not move, and when it finally did, it could only go on writing the same words over and over again: “
All right . . . All right, sir . . . All right . . .
”

Suddenly there was a sound next to my bed; it was the telephone. I bolted up in surprise and put the receiver to my ear.

“Yes? Who's calling?”

“I . . . I . . .”

It was my elder sister's daughter.

“What's wrong? What's happened?”

“Something dreadful . . . And so . . . It's dreadful . . . I've also just called Auntie . . .”

“Something dreadful?”

“Yes, so please come quickly. Quickly!”

The line immediately went dead. I replaced the receiver and reflexively pressed the button to call for a bellboy. At the same time, I was fully aware that my hand was trembling. There was no immediate response. I felt more distress than irritation, as again and again I pressed the button. But now I finally understood the words that destiny had spoken to me:
All right, all right
.

That afternoon my sister's husband had been struck and killed by a train in the open countryside, not far from T
ō
ky
ō
. The body had been found dressed unseasonably in a raincoat. And now I was here in this hotel room, continuing to work on that same short story. In the wee hours, there was no sound in the corridor, though sometimes I could hear from outside the door the sound of wings. Perhaps someone somewhere was keeping birds.

I awakened in my hotel room at about eight. When I tried to get out of bed, I could only find one of my slippers. For two years now I had been constantly plagued by such fears, remembering, moreover, the one-sandaled prince of Greek mythology.

I called for a bellboy and asked him to look for the missing slipper. A dubious expression on his face, he went about searching the small room.

“It's here,” he reported, “in the bathroom.”

“How could it have gone there?”

“I suppose it could have been a rat . . .”

After he left, I drank some coffee without cream and resumed my work. The square, tuff-framed window looked out on the snow-covered garden. Each time I set down my pen, my gaze would be lost in the snow, which, spread out under a budding winter daphne, was
besmirched by the soot of the city. It was somehow a painful sight. While smoking a cigarette, my pen again motionless, I let my mind wander over this and that. I thought of my wife, my children, and especially my sister's husband . . .

Just before committing suicide, he had been suspected of arson. The charge was hardly surprising in light of the fact that prior to the destruction of his house in a blaze, he had insured it for twice its value. He had also been given a suspended sentence for perjury. Yet a greater cause for my anxiety than his suicide was the awareness that whenever I returned to T
ō
ky
ō
I was sure to see a fire. Once from a train window I had seen passing hills aflame; another time I was in a taxi (with my wife and children) when I saw one in the area around Tokiwabashi. Even well before my brother-in-law's house had burned down, I thus had more than adequate reason for knowing myself to be possessed of pyric premonitions.

“Our house may burn down sometime this year.”

“Such ill-omened talk! It would be a catastrophe . . . We are so poorly insured . . .”

My wife and I had had such an exchange, but it was not our house that had burned . . . In an attempt to rid my mind of such obsessions, I picked up my pen once more and began to move it across the page, but I was at pains even to complete a single line. I finally stood up from the desk and lay down on the bed to read Tolstoy's
Polikoushka
. The novella's protagonist has a complex personality: a blend of vanity, morbidity, and ambition. Yet with but a few revisions, this tragicomedy struck me as a caricature of my own life. I had the eerie feeling that through this story I was hearing fate sardonically laugh at my own plight. Not an hour had passed before I abruptly sat up in bed and in the same motion threw the book with all my strength against the curtains in the corner of the room.

“Damn it all!”

At that moment I saw a large rat scampering diagonally from under the curtain to the bathroom. I bounded after it. Opening the door, I searched everywhere, but there was no sign of it, not even under the white tub. With a sudden sense of horror, I hurriedly threw off my slippers, donned my shoes, and ran out into the deserted corridor.

It was as dispiriting a prison as it had been the day before. With drooping head, I walked up and down the stairs and then found myself in the culinary quarters, which were surprisingly bright and cheery. On one side, several stoves were burning. I felt the cold look of several white-capped cooks as I passed on through and simultaneously had the sensation of having fallen into hell. At the moment, a prayer rose spontaneously to my lips: “Chastise me, Lord, but spare me Thy wrath, lest I should come to naught . . .”
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