One Morning Like a Bird (36 page)

    When Yuji leaves the cinema, Emile is so small he has to hold him in the palm of his hand like a frog. He goes into a restaurant, asks for a cup to put the child in. He is no bigger than a beetle now. A gang of soldiers arrives. They invite Yuji to drink with them. One, with movements both playful and threatening, makes a present of his bayonet. When they leave, Yuji looks for the cup, but there are cups everywhere, scores of them, spread over every table, all of them empty. He searches, his heart wrung by a terror not even the fire-dreams provoked. He has lost Emile! He has lost his son! (And what can he possibly tell Alissa?) There is an instant of deranged clarity in which, alone in the nightmare restaurant, he realises he must kill himself  . . . then he comes to, making some grief-noise in his throat, and staggers onto the platform, gulps mouthfuls of cold dawn air until he comes to his senses, but the dream stays with him for days. Even when he holds Emile, feels the packed robustness of his body, he cannot quite pick out a last splinter of anxiety.

    A telegram from Feneon. He is in Shanghai. He is well. He sends an embrace to his grandson. When Alissa shows it to Yuji, he reads it and passes it back without comment. She folds it, makes it small, then tucks it away in a pocket of the cardigan she is wearing. They look at the baby, play with the baby. When anything is in doubt, when the world threatens to force an entry, it is Emile they turn to, the power he has to root them in the present. His skin now has lost its look of long immersion and become smooth as a petal. The stump of umbilical cord that blackened and stank for a while has been shed to leave behind a clean, neat wound of separation. They lie him on the sofa, on the rug, on the bed. They examine him as though the human body was entirely new to them, their private discovery. One game, which entertains them for entire evenings, is to parcel out his features, divide them between Feneons and Takanos, between Orient and Occident. His eyes, in shape, are clearly Japanese, but their colour, hazel with gleams of new copper, comes from somewhere else. His mouth, his hands, the crown of his hair are, they agree, from the East. His nose, his feet, his skin tone, from the West. Yuji claims the child’s back, Alissa his ears, particularly the lobes. It is only during the third or fourth time they play the game that Yuji realises Alissa is hoping to assemble, from the unnattributed fragments, a picture of Suzette. As for the fear, the unvoiced fear of the child being lame, there is nothing visible, nothing in the vigour with which he writhes his limbs, to suggest any cruel inheritance. He is, in his way, perfect.

    They cook for each other, eat with gusto even the most unpromising results. They read aloud from what is left of Feneon’s library: Turgenev, Chekhov, the stories of Maupassant. When they have finished the wine Yuji asks Mr Fujitomi where he can buy more, and is given the address of a house in Koshikawa, the mansion of some junior branch of a
zaibatsu
family where a servant, a retired sumo, leads Yuji down to a cellar lined with a thousand dusty green ends of bottles.

    Fujitomi is the first person Yuji tells about Emile. They have spent half a day moving the contents of a failed shoe emporium from one end of the Low City to the other. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, working boots, high fashion. Yuji picks out a pair of fleece-lined women’s boots.

    ‘You’ve someone in mind for those?’ asks Fujitomi. ‘I don’t think they’ll be missed.’

    ‘There’s a girl,’ says Yuji, quietly.

    ‘Pretty?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Good for you.’

    ‘A foreigner.’

    ‘So your tastes run that way, do they?’

    ‘I’ve known her a long time.’

    ‘You’ll know the size of her feet, then.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Good for you.’

    ‘We have a child.’

    Silence. A beat of two. A beat of three.

    ‘A
child
?’

    ‘A baby boy.’

    ‘You’re kidding, right?’

    ‘No.’

    Fujitomi puts down the armful of rubber toilet slippers he is carrying, puffs out his cheeks, smoothes, with both hands, the skin of his scalp. ‘A little boy?’

    ‘Emile.’

    ‘Em  . . . ?’

    ‘
Emile
. It’s a French name.’

    ‘French  . . . You certainly know how to throw a surprise.’

    ‘He was born before the New Year.’

    ‘A Dragon boy?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘And the hour?’

    ‘Ox, I think.’

    ‘Highly auspicious.’

    They laugh together.

    ‘A little unofficial boy,’ says Fujitomi, a sudden fleeting melancholy in his expression. ‘A little international boy, well, well  . . . Who else knows about this? Your father?’

    Yuji shakes his head.

    ‘You better start thinking what you’re going to say. You won’t be able to keep something like this quiet for long.’

    ‘I know.’

    ‘And the girl, the one who’s going to be walking around in fleece-lined boots, what about her?’

    ‘She will leave.’

    ‘Leave?’

    ‘Japan.’

    ‘With the kid?
Em
 . . . ?’

    ‘Emile. Yes.’

    ‘Where will they go?’ He holds up a hand. ‘No. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.’ He grimaces. ‘If you’re asking for advice . . .’

    ‘I’m not asking for advice,’ says Yuji. ‘I know there’s nothing anyone can do.’

    ‘Do? Oh, I wouldn’t say
that
,’ says Fujitomi, rummaging for a box. He finds one and packs the boots carefully inside. ‘I hope she likes them,’ he says. It is difficult to read the message in his eyes. Perhaps it is just difficult to take it seriously.

13

On 22 February a telegram arrives from Hong Kong. It is as brief, as portentous, as the one that preceded it. The same day, in Hongo, there is a letter for Yuji from Father. They have been snowed in for more than two weeks, though now a thaw will allow him to reach the store on the road below the farm where mail is accepted and sent on to the city. Mother has caught a chill but seems otherwise to find the mountain beneficial. On three occasions she has joined the family for the midday meal. As for himself, he has become quite the rustic, cutting wood, clearing snow off the roof, feeding the hens (those the foxes have not yet caught). What is Yuji’s opinion of the situation in Setagaya? What are the doctors saying? He will, as soon as the weather permits, take the train to Tokyo.

    Two days after the telegram and the letter, Emile develops a fever. One moment he is lying placidly in Alissa’s lap, the next his limbs are rigid. He blinks, woken by some event deep in his body, then fires from his mouth a stream of creamy vomit. When it stops he howls. Alissa rocks him, gives him the breast his hands and mouth are fumbling for. Yuji cleans the vomit from the sofa, from the rug. Splashes of it have reached even the wall behind the table. He has just finished, is carrying the bucket back to the kitchen, when the baby, rolling his head from the nipple, is convulsed a second time.

    What is an infant’s grip on life? How tenacious? Can it slip away in an hour while his parents hover over him, ignorant and terrified?

    A third attack, a fourth.

    ‘There’s a woman,’ says Alissa, ‘opposite the fan shop at the end of the street. She has children of her own. I know she sometimes looks after others  . . .’

    Her name is Kiyama. She follows Yuji through the evening blue of the snow. She asks no questions. She has not even taken off her apron. She comes into the house, bows to Alissa, and kneels on the floor. The child, panting on his mother’s lap, lets the stranger handle him. She unpins his nappy and sniffs at it, gently palps the distended belly, looks over his skin for signs of something she evidently does not find.

    ‘What a ni-ice little baby,’ says the woman, sounding like a collector pleased to have found an unusual specimen so close to home.

    ‘Is it serious?’ asks Alissa. ‘Should we call a doctor? Every time he’s sick his whole body shakes  . . .’

    ‘You really speak Japanese!’ says the woman, laughing and showing off her tobacco-stained teeth. ‘How clever you must be. Don’t worry about baby. Keep giving him your milk. You have a lot of milk?’

    ‘I think so.’

    ‘Keep him close to you, against your skin, like a little husband.’ She laughs again and looks at Yuji. ‘You have to sleep somewhere else tonight. Mother doesn’t have strength for you too.’

    As he thanks her at the door, he digs a five-yen note from his pocket. ‘It’s too much,’ says the woman decisively. He takes out some change. In the end she accepts one yen and fifty sen, tucking the coins beneath her apron.

    The vomiting continues but the intervals between each attack grow longer. Eventually, a few minutes before eleven, it stops. Alissa and the child sleep on the sofa, a single creature again as if Saramago’s scissors had never put them apart. Yuji brings them a blanket from the spare room, then goes to the kitchen, rinses the cloths and hangs them to dry. Back in the salon, he puts wood into the stove, lets a little of the fragrant smoke spill out to cover the smell of sickness, yawns until he shudders, and sleeps in the armchair opposite the sofa, waking, moments later it seems, in a room packed with light, Alissa and Emile playing together on the floor. All sense of crisis has fled with the night. When he stirs, she looks at him, her face fresh as the morning.

    ‘I’m going to cut your hair,’ she says, grinning. ‘It’s starting to stick out over your ears. People will make comments.’

    He goes out for food. The sun, already high, glints on melting ice and snow. He buys croquettes from the stand by the university, then, out of sheer good spirits, stays to talk with the vendor. Is business better in the cold weather?

    ‘Better for the pocket,’ says the man, ‘but worse for the feet.’

    ‘We were up all night with our son,’ says Yuji. ‘He gave us quite a fright, but this morning he’s well.’

    ‘That’s how they are,’ says the man. ‘Your first?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he says. ‘I’ve got five.’ He gives Yuji an extra croquette, for free. ‘Nothing like a croquette for keeping up your strength,’ he says.

    At the house, the bag of steaming food and two cups of
mugi-cha
make an instant party. The child who seemed so sick is now entirely restored. They look at him, wonderingly, and recount to each other the incidents of the night before, the vomiting, the visit, their own alarm, as a kind of comedy. How odd the woman was! And how absurd she should be so surprised by Alissa speaking Japanese! (‘She must have seen me on the street for years.’) Wiping the grease of the food from her fingers, she sits at the piano, plays Mozart, Bach, Debussy. Last of all she plays the Chopin.

    ‘You remember it?’ she asks.

    He nods. The room is briefly filled with ghosts. She lowers the lid over the piano keys. After a while she says, ‘Let’s go outside.’

    In the garden, they walk slow circles round the magnolia tree, Alissa in her fleece-lined boots, Emile with his red wool bonnet on, a Christmas present from Rose or Sandrine, or perhaps Natasha. Needing one hand for her stick, she holds the baby in the curve of the other arm, and when the arm is tired she passes him to Yuji.

    ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she says, as motes of snow, the first of a fresh fall, dance around them, ‘if he could remember this.’

    ‘The garden?’ asks Yuji.

    ‘And us,’ she says. ‘All together.’

    Inside again, they read, doze, eat. In the warmth of the salon they are starting to have the intimacy of stabled animals. Dusk falls. From the street comes the scrape, scrape of someone shovelling snow. A woman calls her children in.

    Alissa takes a bath. ‘Do you want my water?’ she asks, leaning, pink-faced, into the salon. So he lies in her water. The bath is enamelled iron, forged, perhaps – the scale is suggestive – by the same foundry that made the stove. He has not been in a bath like this before. His toes are on a level with his nose. The hardware of the taps has a nautical gleam, industrial, but if this is a good example of a foreign bath, then the foreigners have not quite understood. How reassuring that is! A weakness at last. He lies with his head on the cushion of curled iron. The water smells of roses. A bulb behind a half-globe of white glass burns unevenly, and below, over a wooden rack, a pair of stockings is hanging next to three squares of drying cotton, the baby’s nappies.