Silence Once Begun (18 page)

They didn’t know what it was, so who I was, I guess, was meaningless. I went away and next I knew Sotatsu had been taken. He was in jail. He was the Narito Disappearer. Suddenly. I sat all day in the house and when it was nighttime, Kakuzo and I went and found something to eat.
Will it work? Will it work?
Kakuzo kept saying. There was a radio on in the restaurant. That’s how we heard the news.

++

It seems that people think of simple ways to say things or know them, but I was always taking the long way around. My mother always teased me. You go the long way every time. I do. I go the long way. When Sotatsu was in jail one day I went to see him. Something had changed for me in the room with Kakuzo and I felt cold all over, empty as a washed bottle. But in the jail I felt young. I had no idea what I was. I asked myself that. I said, Joo, what are you, as I went along the corridor and I truly had no idea.

When I came to his cell, he was sitting facing the wall. Sotatsu, I said, it is your Joo. From then on we were in an old tale. He looked at me and it was like I had lit him on fire, like he was an effigy I had set on fire at a festival. He knew what everything meant. I knew what everything meant. I said, I am coming here every day. We have a new life.

If some say that a man and woman must live together or that they must see each other, even that they must live in the same time in order to love, well, they are mistaken. A great lover has a life that prepares him for his love. She grooms herself for years without hope of any kind, yet stands by the crevice of the world. He sleeps inside of his own heart. She dries her hair with her tears and washes her skin with names and names and names. Then one day, he, she, hears the name of the beloved and it yet means nothing. She might see the beloved and it means nothing. But a wheel, far away, spins on thin spokes, and that name, that sight, grows solid as stone. Then wherever he is, he says, I know the name of my beloved, and it is … or I know the face of my beloved, and she is—there! And he returns to the place where she saw him, and she empties herself out—leaves herself like open water, beneath, past, in the distance, surrounding, able to be touched with the smallest gesture. And that is
how the great loves begin. I can tell you because I have been a great love. I have had a great love. I was there.

++

I wore a different face, of course, when I saw Kakuzo next. He did not know what happened. He knew nothing at all. But, he told me. You keep seeing him. Keep going. I will keep going, I told him. Hold Sotatsu to his confession. Help him be brave. He is brave enough, I said. This is his myth. It is, said Kakuzo. It is his myth. I want to say how it was that I lived with Kakuzo, that I slept in his bed and woke with him, that I knew him every day and that I was not his, that I was with Sotatsu, that I was Sotatsu’s, that I was in between the visiting of Sotatsu, the seeing of Sotatsu. I was in a life that occurred but once each day for ten minutes, for five minutes, for an hour, whatever we were given.

The girl Joo who went with Kakuzo where Kakuzo wanted to go, who lay with him, who sat in his lap, she was less than nothing. I set no store by her. She was a shell, a means of waiting and nothing more. Each day as I set out for the jail, I would put my life on like a garment and the blood would run out through my arms, my legs, my torso. I would breathe in and out, living, and go out, living, through the streets to my Sotatsu.

What was it for him? Some say I do not know. How could I know, they say. I never knew him. I visited. We spoke little. They say these things.

In fact, I know what it was for him. I will tell you it simply: he felt he was falling. He felt he fell through a succession of wells, of holes, of chasms, and that I was there at windows,
and we would be together a moment as he fell by. Then I would rush to the next window, down and down, and he would fall past, and I would see him again.

I am not a shouter. I did not shout to him, nor he to me. We were like old people of some town who write letters that a boy carries from one house to another. We were as quiet as that.

Of silence, I can say only what I heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave—and so speech isn’t itself, but its effect, and silence is the same. If there were a silent kingdom and but one could speak—he would be the king of an ageless beauty. But of course, here where we are, here there is no end to speaking and the time comes when speaking is less than saying nothing. But still we struggle on.

I imagined once that there were horses for everyone—that it might be we could all climb on horseback and make our way somewhere not waiting for any of the things deemed necessary. I would cry at the thought—I, a little girl, would cry to think of it, but it made me so happy I can’t tell you. I believe there was an illustration I had seen, in some book, of a sea of horses, and it made me feel just that—there were so many! There were enough for me to have one too, and for us all to leave.

Oh, the things I said to Sotatsu!

I said to him, I said, Sotatsu, last night, I dreamt of a train that comes once a year like a ship to some far-flung colony. I said, on the ship are all the goods that the colony needs. It
carries everything, this ship, and all the colonists must do is last until the ship comes again and all will be well. Out of the west, the train, this ship, it comes along the track. It dwarfs everything. This is my dream. The gigantic train is more real than the world that surrounds it. Sotatsu, I bring nothing to you, but it is what you need what I bring and I will bring it again and again and you will wait and be strong and fare well. We will not wait, you and I, we won’t wait for another life. This life, this is our life. We will have no other, nor need any other. Here all is taken care of. We have been set aside, set apart, like legs removed from a table. Our sympathies remain with each other entirely and when we lie touching, it is as though we are the whole table, as though the missing table moves back and forth between us, there where we touch, we two table legs.

I was always saying such things, and he would smile. He would turn his mouth like a person does when tying a knot or opening a letter. That was the smile that he developed in order to smile at me. I was so fond of it—let me tell you! For there were not all good times. He had lost all his strength when he was caught and it took time for him to regain it. Then he was moved and moved again. He was put on trial. He was removed from trial. He was put in a new place, and then another place, another new place.

In the first place, we soon made a routine. I would wear a coat so it could not be guessed, what I was wearing underneath. I would say, what color am I wearing? Am I wearing any color, any particular color? And he would say one color or another color, he would say a color. Then, I would off with the coat and we would see what color it was. Being wrong or right about something meaningless is very strong.
He would never guess correctly, though. I think he did it on purpose, but I don’t know. Like many things, this thing I know not at all with any certainty.

I would say to him, confess to me, to your Joo. Confess that you are in love with me. Say it.

Then he would say, my Joo, Joo of the coat and colors, Joo of all visits. He would say such things, meaning that he loved me.

When we were near to each other, he would become very stiff and still. He would stare at me. I wanted to pretend that nothing mattered, for it didn’t. Although it might have been pretending, if two pretend then it is no longer that. It becomes actual. I asked him to die. When he could say that he did not confess, that he did not agree with what he had said. When he could say the whole business right out, about Kakuzo, about the confession, and that he knew nothing … he realized, I am saying, he realized, because his brother came there and said it, he realized he could say that, and it would free him. But that same night, I was there with him, and he told me, and I said,

The line of trees that is at the horizon—they are known to you. You have not been to them, you have only seen them from far away, always for the first time. One looks out a window into the distance, or comes down a circling drive, turns a corner. There in the distance, the tree line, all at once. It is dark here and there. It moves within itself, within its own length. It is merely a matter of some sort of promise. One expects that the forest there is nothing like anything is, or has been. I will go there, one thinks, and enter there, between those two trees.

Sotatsu, I said. I am those two trees. We are entering that forest now, and the way out has nothing to do with anyone. You should not bother with anyone. They are just rasping stones that pull at you. Each person chooses his life from all the roles in all the theaters. We are a prisoner and his love. For I am sometimes one and sometimes the other. You are one and then the other. We are diving in the thin and wild air, as if the spring has just begun. We are diving but we are composing the water beneath us with our dreams, and what I see gives me hope. I will return to you, my dear, and I will return to you and return to you and return to you. You will be mine and no one else’s, and I will be the same. I will turn my face away, and look at you when I am elsewhere. I will look only at you.

Then he saw that I was right, that I was the only one for him, the only one turned entirely to him, the only one looking only at him. I earned him. He knew that with that moment, there was a possession as total as any to be gained; not even the earth, consuming the bodies of our children, can have something so completely—for only I would give myself again, again, again. Our deaths we give and they are gone. But this, we give and receive, give and receive, give and receive.

++

I went home to Kakuzo and I said, that brother told him to give up. He said, give up. I said, he told him to. He was going to. He said, he better not. For whom, I said. He’d better not, he said. You’d better tell him. I told him, I said. That’s good. He grabbed my face and he said, Joo, that’s good. You remind him.

Kakuzo was a foolish person. He was a fool, a person who is foolish as a job, as a profession. But not a fool in a court or a fool with a crowd. He was a solitary fool, his own fool. He was a fool because he did not know what made a life, and he could not see that I had made one right in front of him. He could not see the difference, couldn’t see: his Joo was gone and had been replaced by a gray woman with a raincoat who nodded and sat and cooked and blinked and blinked. He could not see that it must mean this: I was living elsewhere, like the boy who stares at an old photograph and leaves his body with a sigh.

Oh, my dear! I want so much to be again in that life. Speaking of it like this, writing it down: I am like a yard of shadows when the sun is even with the lowest clouds. I am multiplied, but only with my bags packed, only where I stand, at the station, my hat pulled low. Have you seen an old woman like me? I have been old a very long time.

++

How can I explain it, put it in a line for you? I can say there were a series of visits. I can number them and recount them one by one. I do not remember any of them. That’s true. Also, I remember every one without exception. It is most correct this way—I can say a thing about that time and know if it is true or not true. Then I write it down. I leave the false things on their own.

In the first part of my life with Sotatsu, he lived in a cell in a jail where the sun came south through the window on an avenue all its own where it was forced to stoop and stoop again until when it arrived at its little house it was hardly the sun at all, just a shabby old woman. Yet we were always
looking for her, this sun, when she would come, always eager to have her meager presents, her thin delineations. I would say, oh, Sotatsu, oh my Sotatsu, today you are like a long-legged cat of the first kind. He would smile and laugh, meaning, Joo, I have nothing to do with such a cat as you describe.

In the first part of my life with Sotatsu, he lived in a basket on the back of a wolf that was running westward. I was a flea in the wolf’s coat, and had all the privileges of my grand station. I could visit the prisoner. I could speak to the prisoner. I made the wolf aware of his important profession. I said to the wolf one day, actually, I said, you are carrying a most important prisoner, you know, away beyond the frontier. He said, flea of my coat, it is your work to tell me such things, and mine not to listen.

In the first part of my life, I told Sotatsu everything about myself. I told him I was the youngest of fourteen children (a lie). I told him I had a dress that I wore as a child with a fourteen-foot train and the other children would carry it, so becoming I was. I told him I had a course in fishing where seven would stand in a stream using fourteen hands to weave a rope and the fish would leap up and into the canvas bags we wore on our waists. Every lie was a lie of fourteen. I wanted him to know about me. I said what was true also. I said, I have seen nothing that was worthy of me until you were lying in this cell. I said, I am not my surroundings or my fate and you are not who anyone says. I said, I will say things and you can stop me, but no one else can. I will be a speaker and I will speak on all subjects like a tinny radio rustling in a shop window. I will make up all the world’s smallest objects and doings. I will confuse them, muddle them like a jar, and produce them at odd times. This will be
the tiniest edge, the tiniest corner of our love: so much you have yet to expect from me.

In the first part of my life, I knelt by the bars of a cell where my love lay and I called as a woman calls to pigeons when she is old and cannot see them. I made shooing noises with my mouth, for I was sure someone said once, someone said such noises would make birds come to you.

I draped myself on the bars like a blanket. I cried for him. I smiled and laughed. I was a playhouse of a hundred plays where there are no actors to do any but the one play, that first play, made when the theater, unbuilt, is first considered. If we should have a theater, this is the play we would do, and all we would need is one actor and a cloth for her to place before her face. I placed so many cloths, and taught my Sotatsu all manner of things that no one knew, not me or anyone. These were true things in our life, but empty in the common air.