The Laws of Evening: Stories (15 page)

“The window was open, the breeze was blowing in,” Sumiko continued, “and you could smell the iron heated up by the sun. We were so hungry in those days. And the eggs tasted so
good,
with a sprinkle of salt. It was a wonderful day.”

“Is that why you’re making this bag?”

His wife looked up, suddenly self-conscious. She regarded him for a moment, with dark eyes as unfathomable as a primate’s. “I thought it might be nice to take a train ride,” she said. “Just for a couple of stops.”

Kenji was jolted out of his own self-regard. His no-nonsense wife of thirty years, with her dinner party conversations—how long had she harbored such longings? He pictured her sitting alone by the window (did train windows even open anymore?), a woman past middle age, peeling an egg. He remembered her eating yam rice at the restaurant, and he felt a pity so deep he could not tell where it ended and his arrhythmia began.

“June is nice here in Kashigawa,” he said gently. Then, after a pause, “I know what you mean…. When I was a boy, I once picked mushrooms in the forest.” Nodding, his wife resumed her handicraft. They said no more.

This is married life, thought Kenji. Suddenly his underwater state seemed not so much a banishment but the entering of a new realm, with the slowly dawning kinship of divers who swim among the fish. In him welled up a strong allegiance with Sumiko, with his entire aging generation reaching back for their simple beginnings. What countless private Edens they had managed to extract from the war….

Sumiko got up to attend to something in the kitchen. Kenji remained sitting, in the evening light which now slanted low over the hills and cast pink shadows on the valley haze. And as effortlessly as the spreading light—not with the clean scientific click of old, but with a soft suffusion—his allegiance widened out over his entire flawed race, with its fierce need to create beauty for itself.

A memory floated up in his mind. Madagascar, early in his career: towering stone crags whose jagged outcroppings snapped beneath his boots with high-pitched pings, and below them, the famous sunken forests where lemurs lived. The forests had been created, millions of years ago, by earth collapsing into itself for kilometers around, destroying all life in its wake and forever changing the land’s topography. Kenji was a young man, and the forest’s lush beauty had astonished him.

“Isn’t life a resilient force,” one senior member of their party had remarked as the scientists gazed upward in wonder, faces tinted green from the virgin foliage, “turning the worst of its disasters into something like this.”