The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (10 page)

This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom. And Ryuji was more talkative than before, more animated. The change began one day in Honolulu when he received Fusako’s first letter. He became noticeably more friendly, even began to enjoy the gab sessions in the mess room. It wasn’t long after that before the
Rakuyo’s
officers knew all the details of his love.

“Do you feel like going up and saying hello to Noboru? He was so excited about seeing you, I’ll bet he didn’t get a decent night’s sleep either.”

Ryuji rose from his chair. It was clear now, beyond a doubt: he was the man they had been waiting for, the man they loved.

Taking a present for Noboru out of his suitcase, Ryuji followed Fusako up the same dark stairs he had climbed on trembling tiptoe that summer night. This time, his steps were the resolute tread of a man who has been included.

In bed upstairs, Noboru listened to the ascending footsteps. He was tense from waiting, his body under the covers stiff as a board, and yet, somehow, these weren’t quite the footsteps he had expected.

There was a knock on his door and it swung open. Noboru saw a reddish-brown baby crocodile.

The beast hovered in the doorway, floating in the watery light which was pouring into the room from the sky outside, clear now and bright, and for an instant the glittering glass-bead eyes, and the gaping mouth, and the stiffened legs paddling the air, seemed to come alive. A question struggled through the muddle of his slightly feverish mind: has anyone ever used something alive for a coat of arms? Once Ryuji had told him about the Coral Sea: the water inside an atoll was as still as the surface of a pond, but in the offing, huge waves thundered to pieces against the outer reef and the crashing crests of white foam looked like hugely distant phantoms. His headache, which, compared with yesterday’s, had receded into the distance, was like a white crest billowing beyond the atoll. And the crocodile was the headache’s coat of arms, the symbol of his own distant authority. It was true that sickness had touched the boy’s face with majesty.

“Like him? He’s for you.” Ryuji had been standing just outside the door, holding the crocodile at arm’s length. Now he stepped into the room. He was wearing a gray turtleneck sweater; his face was deeply tanned.

Noboru had prepared for Ryuji’s entrance by resolving not to smile with pleasure. Using illness as a pretext, he succeeded in maintaining a glum face.

“That’s strange! He was so happy and excited just a little while ago. Do you feel feverish again, dear?” An unwarranted little speech! Never before had his mother seemed such a petty person.

“A story goes with this,” Ryuji went on, unmindful of the tension in the room. He placed the beast next to Noboru’s pillow. “This crocodile was stuffed by the Indians in Brazil. Those tribesmen are authentic Indians. And when carnival time comes around, the warriors put crocodiles like this one or sometimes stuffed water fowl on their heads, in front of the feathers they wear in their hair. And they strap three little round mirrors to their foreheads. When those mirrors catch the light from the bonfires, they look just like . . . three-eyed devils. They string leopard teeth around their throats, and wrap themselves in leopard skins. And they all have quivers on their backs, and beautiful bows, and different-colored arrows. Anyway, that’s the story on this crocodile. It’s part of the ceremonial dress the Brazilian Indians wear at carnival time.”

“Thanks,” Noboru said. He ran his hand over the glossy bumps on the crocodile’s back and stroked the shriveled limbs. Then he inspected the dust which had accumulated beneath the red glass-bead eyes while the beast had crouched on a shelf in some Brazilian country store, and thought about what Ryuji had said. The room was too hot; the sheets were feverish, wrinkled, damp. The bits of skin on the pillow had flaked off Noboru’s dried lips. He had been picking at them furtively a few minutes before. Just as he began to worry that his lips might look too red, he glanced involuntarily toward the drawer that concealed the peephole. Now he had done it! He was in agony. What if the adults traced his gaze and leveled suspicious eyes on the wall? But no, it was all right. They were even more insensible than he had suspected: they were cradled in the numbing arms of love.

Noboru stared hard at the sailor. His sun-blackened face looked even more virile than before, the thick eyebrows and white teeth more sharply accented. But Noboru had sensed something unnatural about the sailor’s monologue, a forced attempt to relate to his own fancies, a truckling to the exaggerated sentiments he had set down in his frequent letters. There was something counterfeit about this Ryuji. When he couldn’t bear it any longer, Noboru spoke. “I don’t know—there’s something phony about this . . .”

“Are you kidding? Because he’s so small?” It was a good-natured misunderstanding. “Even crocodiles are small when they’re kids. Try going to the zoo sometime.”

“Noboru! I’m surprised at you. Now why don’t you stop being so impolite and show Mr. Tsukazaki your stamp album.”

But before he could move a hand, his mother had snatched the album from the desk and was showing Ryuji the carefully mounted stamps he had mailed to Noboru from ports around the world.

She sat in the chair with her face toward the light and turned the pages while Ryuji, one arm across the chair, looked over her shoulder. Noboru noticed they both had handsome profiles: the thin, clear winter light silvered the bridges of their noses. They seemed oblivious of his presence in the room.

“Mr. Tsukazaki, when will you be sailing again?” Noboru asked abruptly.

His mother turned to him with a shocked face and he could see that she had paled. It was the question she most wanted to ask, and most dreaded. Ryuji was posing near the window with his back to them. He half closed his eyes, and then, very slowly, said: “I’m not sure yet.”

Noboru was stunned. Fusako didn’t speak, but she looked like a bottle full of feeling boiling against the small cork stopper. Her expression might have meant joy or sorrow—a woman’s sodden face. To Noboru, she looked like a washerwoman.

A brief pause, and Ryuji calmly spoke again. His tone was sympathetic, the compassion a man feels when he is certain he holds the power to affect another’s fate: “At any rate, it’ll take at least until after New Year’s to get the ship unloaded. . . .”

Red with rage and coughing violently, Noboru pulled his diary from under the pillow as soon as they had left, and wrote a short entry.

Noboru put down his pen and thought for a minute while his anger mounted. Then he added:

But soon he began to feel ashamed of his anger. What good had been all that training in “absolute dispassion”? He carefully explored every corner of his heart to make certain not even a fragment of rage remained, and then reread what he had written. When he had finished, he was convinced: revision would not be necessary.

Then he heard a stirring in the next room. Apparently his mother had gone into the bedroom. Ryuji seemed to be there too . . . the door to his own room wasn’t locked. Noboru’s heart began to hammer. How, he wondered, in an unlocked room at this time of morning and quickly—that was important—could he remove the drawer and steal into the space in the wall without being discovered?

F
USAKO’S
present was an armadillo pocketbook. It was a bizarre affair, with a handle that looked like a rat’s neck, and crude clasps and stitching, but she left the house with it happily and displayed it proudly at the shop while Mr. Shibuya scowled his disapproval.

They spent the last day of the year apart: Fusako was needed at Rex and Ryuji had to take the afternoon watch. This time it seemed perfectly natural that they should go separate ways for half a day.

It was after ten when Fusako returned that evening. Ryuji had been helping Noboru and the housekeeper with the traditional New Year’s Eve cleaning and together they had managed to finish the job more quickly than in previous years. Ryuji issued brisk instructions as though he were directing a scrub-down on the deck, and Noboru, whose fever had come down that morning, carried out his orders with delight.

Fusako came in as they were descending the stairs with mops and pails after having cleaned all the upstairs rooms. Ryuji had rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and bound a towel around his head; Noboru was turbaned in the same fashion, his cheeks flushed and glowing. The scene surprised and delighted Fusako, but she couldn’t help worrying a little about Noboru’s health.

“Stop worrying so much! Working up a good sweat’s the best way to kick a cold.” The remark may have been crude as an attempt at reassurance but at least it was “man talk,” something Fusako’s house hadn’t heard for a long time. The walls and the old beams in the ceiling seemed to shrink from the masculine utterance.

When the whole family had gathered to listen to the midnight bells and feast on special buckwheat noodles, the housekeeper told an anecdote from her past which she repeated every New Year’s Eve: “At the Macgregors’—that’s the folks I used to work for—New Year’s Eve always meant a big party with lots of company. And at twelve o’clock on the dot everybody started kissing everybody else like it wasn’t anything! One time I even had an old Irish gentleman with whiskers smooch me on the cheek—he just hung on there like he was a leech or something. . . .”

Ryuji embraced Fusako as soon as they were alone in the bedroom. Later, when the first pale promise of the dawn appeared, he proposed something childish: why didn’t they walk over to the park and watch the first sunrise of the New Year? Fusako was captivated by the lunacy of racing into the cold. She jumped out of bed and bundled into everything she could get on—tights, slacks, a cashmere sweater, and a gorgeous Danish ski sweater over that; and tiptoeing down the stairs, they unlocked the front door and stepped outside.

The dawn air felt good against their heated bodies. Racing into the deserted park, they laughed out loud and chased each other in and out among the fir trees, and took deep breaths, vying to see who could exhale the whitest steam into the cold, dark air. They felt as though thin crusts of ice were coating their love-staled mouths.

It was well past six when they leaned against the railing that overlooked the harbor: Venus had banked into the south. Though the lights of buildings and the red lamps blinking on distant masts were still bright, and though the beacon’s red and green blades of light still knifed through the darkness in the park, outlines of houses could be discerned and the sky was touched with reddish purple.

Small and distant, the first cock call of the year reached them on the chill morning wind, a tragic, fitful cry. “May this be a good year for us all.” Fusako spoke her prayer aloud. It was cold, and when she nestled her cheek against Ryuji’s he kissed the lips so close to his and said: “It will be. It has to be.”

Gradually a blurred form at the water’s edge was sharpening into a building. As Ryuji stared at a red bulb blooming above an emergency exit, he became painfully conscious of the texture of shore life. He would be thirty-four in May. It was time to abandon the dream he had cherished too long. Time to realize that no specially tailored glory was waiting for him. Time, no matter if the feeble eaves lamps still defied the green-gray light of morning by refusing to come awake, to open his eyes.

Though it was New Year’s Day, a submerged tremolo pervaded the harbor. Every few minutes a barge unraveled from the moored fleet and hacked dryly down the canal. As a rosy hue stained the surface of the water and seemed to inflate itself into round abundance, the poles of light slanting away from anchored ships began to dwindle. Twenty minutes past six: the mercury lamps in the park clicked out.

“Are you getting cold?” Ryuji asked.

“My gums are stinging, it’s so cold—but I don’t mind. The sun will be coming up any minute now.”

Are you getting cold? . . . Are you getting cold? Ryuji asked again and again, and all the time he was directing another question to himself: Are you really going to give it up?
The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness?
The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was “beyond,” wrong or right, had always been “beyond.”
Are you going to give that up?
His heart in spasm because he was always in contact with the ocean’s dark swell and the lofty light from the edge of the clouds, twisting, withering until it clogged and then swelling up again, and he unable to distinguish the most exalted feelings from the meanest and that not mattering really since he could hold the sea responsible—
are you going to give up that luminous freedom?

And yet Ryuji had discovered on the return leg of his last voyage that he was tired, tired to death of the squalor and the boredom in a sailor’s life. He was convinced that he had tasted it all, even the lees, and he was glutted. What a fool he’d been! There was no glory to be found, not anywhere in the world. Not in the Northern Hemisphere. Not in the Southern Hemisphere. Not even beneath that star every sailor dreams about, the Southern Cross!

Now they could make out the lumber yards beyond the canal: roosters had crowed at the sky until a coy blush spread across her face. Finally the mast lamps blinked out and ships withdrew like phantoms into the fog that shrouded the harbor. Then, as an angry red began to smolder along the edges of the sky, the space of park behind them unfurled into whitish emptiness and the skirts on the beacon beam fell away, leaving only glinting needlepoints of red and green light.