The Snow Kimono (23 page)

It’s Sachiko, one of them says.

She rolls onto her back. Lies dazed, looking up into the pure sky.

Fear decides the boys. They back away. Turn, run, in high looping bounds, down the
slope.

Sachiko pushes herself to her feet. The pain has begun to ebb. She arches her shoulder,
winces. Brushes herself down. She sees the piece of wood that struck her. Its sharp
end bloodied. When she turns towards home, she sees the blood-red stain on the snow.
Its magnitude alarming. She reaches over her shoulder, pulls at the fabric of her
smock. Feels the sticky wetness, looks at her fingertips now painted red.

And knows there is no escaping the pain that now awaits her.

Why
did you go there, Sachiko? Why? Explain it to me again, how you fell?

It becomes her mother’s constant lament. Sachiko sees it in her every look. It comes
to occupy the space between them.

Her father was on the snow-covered slope above their house that day, doing what Sachiko
should have done, laying
out the new season’s kimono in the snow. How dazzling white
the white ones were. It hurt your eyes to look at them.

By chance he glanced up to see his distant daughter walking towards him. He knew
instantly that his world had changed. And because he had been the one to run to her—exclaiming,
broken-syllabled:
Sachiko, Sachiko
—he was held to blame. He had not been watching
over her.

Chapter 21

THE bus terminal is deep within the vast and teeming square. Even at this early hour,
traffic is jigsawed to a stop. Battered trucks, hand carts, buses, clog the interstitial
spaces. Schools of ancient bicycles swim through the narrow fissures. All around
them, a swirling tide of men ebbs and flows, shouldering their wares, heads bent.
Near and far, horns bark, men shout. High-pitched whistles shred the air. The bus
floats on a shallow sea of dust and diesel fumes. A smell as thick as fog seeps in
through its carapace.

The bus creeps forward, stops.

Is this it, Father? Sachiko says.

Yes, he says. This is where we get out.

She looks at the tumult around them. The buildings on the square’s far periphery
are like a distant shore. She wonders how they will get from here to there.

Stand up, Sachiko, her father says. Get your things.

The doors of the bus open like floodgates. The brutal outside floods in—the noise,
the pungent smell of rotting fish, the diesel fumes, the stench of men. Sachiko feels
herself being swept back into the bus. Which begins to fill. She cannot breathe.

Her father is behind her. He leans into her ear. Take this, he says. He hands her
his handkerchief.

Put this over your nose. You will get used to it. Here, hold on, step down.

Only a few passengers get off. Two or three exhausted businessmen, their suits dirty,
crushed, their eyes drawn. One of the old women, who smiles at Sachiko in the stairwell,
pats her arm.

Sachiko looks down at what awaits her. Then she steps into the swirling chaos. She
and her father are by the bus, pinned against it by the noise, the smell. By the
mass of bodies sweeping past them.

Wait here, her father says. I have to collect our luggage.

Here? she says. She can hear the panic in her voice.

I won’t be long, he says.

Wave upon wave of fetid, choking air washes over her. She grasps the wheel well of
the bus to stop herself from being dragged into the cross-currents. She is pulled
this way, then that. Unseen things touch her. She imagines hands reaching for her
from within this seething mass, tugging at her, touching her, sliding across her
body. She cannot move. She is embossed into the side of the bus.

There are no women here. Just men. Men with their carts.
Men with their pieces of
paper. Men with cigarettes. Men on their own, who stare.

You want to sell?

A hideous face looms up in front of her. One glaucous bulging eye faces skywards.
The other, with its small dark pupil, fixes on her, then turns to someone perched
above her. Someone Sachiko has not seen. It is one of the businessmen from the bus.
He is standing in the stairwell. He has not heard what the man has said. Instead,
he is looking out over the sea of heads, searching for something. Or someone.

You want to sell? the face repeats more loudly.

The sightless tallowed eye seems to move of its own accord. It scans the sky, as
though still trying to pinpoint exactly where the previous danger had come from.
Its owner tugs at the businessman’s trouser leg. Attracts his attention. He rubs
one stained finger against his thumb. Points to Sachiko.

What? the man in the suit says impatiently.

You sell?

The man indicates Sachiko again. He steps forward so that he is centimetres from
her face. He looks at her sideways with his one unclouded eye. At her hair. Her eyes.
Her mouth. Her skin. Assessing. Calculating. How old is she? Is she still fresh?
Sachiko can smell the stench of stale tobacco and something else on his breath. He
reaches out, grasps her arm. Tightly. He is pulling her away.

Father! she screams.

But the man in the stairwell has already leapt down from
the bus. He seizes her assailant
by the throat. She sees his knuckles blanch. The fingered grip around her arm goes
limp.

When she looks again to where the blind-eyed man should be, he has gone, swallowed
up by the turmoil around them. The man in the suit turns back to her.

Thank you, Sachiko says. Her eyes well with tears. She rubs her arm. A small bruise
has already begun to surface.

Her saviour barely glances at her. He is brushing down his coat. She pictures what
he sees. She knows what he is thinking. She wants to tell him that he is mistaken.
That she is here with her father. She is waiting for him. Surely he has seen her
on the bus. But he is no longer interested in her. He has already resumed searching
for the thing he has not yet seen.

She is shaking. Alone. The world is blurred. Her fingers find the tenderness in her
arm again. She dare not look down. She is dizzy. She does not know how much longer
she can stay afloat. And now the stranger is stepping down from the bus. He is leaving
her. She sees his retreating back. It is too late to cry out to him. To plead with
him to stay.

Miraculously, as she is watching, her father appears from the same void into which
the stranger has disappeared, as though he has been transformed into him. She is
overjoyed. Now her father has returned, she is safe.

But her ordeal is not yet over. A wagon laden with bamboo trunks passes between her
and her father. Then another. She looks left, then right. Where has he gone? A sea
of new faces sweeps up around her. It surges up against the bus, then cascades
down
on her again. Her panic returns. Where is he? Wave after wave of people crash over
her. Nausea, hot and thick and viscous, rises in her throat. The noise and heat and
fetid smells of the square press down on her, on her shoulders, her head. She feels
her legs grow weak. Her knees begin to buckle. The earth gives way. She is forced
under. Now she is drowning, struggling for breath.

Father, she cries out.

But there is no answer. Instead she feels a hand closing around her arm once again.
She sees the sickly clouded eye, how it turns in its socket. The buyer of young girls
has returned. She struggles to get free. But can’t.

Sachiko, Sachiko…

She hears her father’s voice calling. From a distance. As though from a dream. Sachiko…

When she opens her eyes, her father is crouched beside her. Is it night? Shadow figures
swim past her in the darkness. Pale spectral faces turn her way.

Sachiko…

She is lying in a sheltered doorway. They are no longer in the square. They are in
some kind of dim arcaded alley.

Are you all right, daughter? her father’s voice says.

Her heart is still pounding. Her eyes fill with tears.

Here, drink this, her father says.

He cups her head. She sips the water he has offered. Then he says to her the same
thing he said to her at the inn.

You must be careful, Sachiko, he says.

She remembers.

You must be careful.

Chapter 22

TO her, he is always the man without a face. Mr Ishiguro.

She recalled lying on a cold stone step in a darkened doorway. Hearing her father’s
voice, the dull-edged tumult of the square now distant. Faces turning her way.

Then her father is saying: Sachiko, we’re here…Sachiko.

Memories of a hand waylaying her, malevolent. Meaning her no good. Swirling around
her, a nightmare noise. She is tumbling beneath the waves. Trapped in a tangled mass
of limbs. Shadows close over her. She cannot breathe.

Sachiko?

Then she is awake.

Where are we? she says.

We’re here. You fell asleep.

She lies curled on the soft leather seat. Her father’s coat is folded under her head.
The pleated grey sky above her is horizoned with blue. She begins to surface. Leans
up on one
elbow. She and her father are encased in a car that is coming to a stop
so gradually it could be an ocean liner.

Outside, above the door sill, a smiling, hatted face, as round and full as a festival
balloon, bobs up and down. She imagines a small child, a tiny clenched fist tugging
on a string. When her father opens the door, the mask rises abruptly into the sky,
and is checked there. The light outside is blinding.

Ah, Yamaguchi, a voice says. Finally, you are here.

She sees that the smiling face is invisibly stitched to a suit. Her father is still
sitting beside her in the car. A hand reaches in. Takes her father’s hand. Shakes
it for a long time. It seems it will never let him go.

Ishiguro, her father says.

So this is the Ishiguro her father has spoken of. Whose name her father sometimes
calls out in his sleep. The Ishiguro about whom her mother endlessly complains. Whose
spirit has occupied their house for longer than she can remember.

Please, Mr Ishiguro says. He holds his other arm out, half-stepping aside to make
room for her father. He still has her father’s hand in his.

What happened? Ishiguro says.

I’m sorry, Ishiguro. We were trapped by the storm on the mountain last night. The
bus broke down.

Her father turns to Sachiko. Who is now sitting up. He reaches in, takes her hand.
Helps her slide along the seat. Then she too is standing beside the long black car,
its roof gleaming in the splintered sun.

Sachiko, her father says, this is Mr Ishiguro. I have told you about him. It is he
who buys the kimono your grandmother and mother make.

Miss Sachiko, Mr Ishiguro says.

He extends his hand, bows deeply. The gesture surprises her. This is not what a man
would normally do. Not with a girl her age.

His hand still waits. Her moment of hesitation passes. Her father is here. She is
safe.

Mr Ishiguro is smiling. Sachiko can see the fold of skin that encircles his face.
She thinks of the plump crease that separates a newborn’s hand from its wrist, as
though this is just a temporary hand, not yet permanently attached. The final choice
is yet to be made. She feels sure that, if Mr Ishiguro took off his hat, the mask
would come with it, and the something completely different that lies beneath would
be revealed.