The Snow Kimono (43 page)

Fumiko
Omura
. Not Fumiko Ikeda. How much had that cost him? To write that down, acknowledge
that.

And then he thought of Mathilde. His own daughter, the daughter
he
had not had. And
the photograph of her, her eyes looking back at him. Watching. Waiting.

Chapter 48

MARTINE was late. Jovert was sitting in Le Temps des Cerises, the café on the corner
of rue de la Cerisaie and rue du Petit-Musc, a place he hadn’t been to in years.

Except for a man in his forties—someone who looked as if he knew a thing or two about
life—sitting alone at a table with a half-finished drink in his hands, there was
no one else in the café.

On the way, he had walked past La Maison de Jerôme, the antique store where his
hippopotamane
had gone. It was no longer there. The space it had occupied was now full of junk.
He felt guilty seeing it gone. At least he had known where it was, even though it
was caged, even though it had nowhere to go. He wondered if he had walked past the
store so often just to check on it. To see if it was still looking out at him. Waiting
for him to change his mind, to take it home with him again.

He recalled the first time he had pointed Omura out to Martine. They were sitting
at La Pointe.

There he is, he said.

Who?

Omura. Over there. At the bus stop.

I can’t see him, she said.

See the man and the woman with the stroller. He’s behind them. Wait. See, there he
is. The little man in the coat and hat.

Why is he limping?

Is he?

Yes, look.

She was right. Omura was pacing slowly back and forth. And he was limping. It was
slight, but it was definitely there, nevertheless.

I don’t know, he said.

He reminds me of the Emperor Hirohito, she had said. With his hat, and those round
wire-rimmed glasses. Even the way he stoops. It’s just like him.

Jovert laughed.

Why are you laughing? she said.

Because that’s what I thought when I first saw him, when he was standing in the corridor
outside my apartment.

We did this project, at school, she said. On the bombing of Hiroshima. I remember
seeing a photo of this little man, wearing spectacles, and a hat, hands behind his
back, inspecting what was left of the city, the buildings that had been destroyed,
the rubble…The caption below the picture said:
The Emperor Hirohito inspecting the
devastation of Hiroshima
. I remember thinking not only how terrible it must have
been to be there, but also how small he was, the Emperor. How could anybody that
small be an Emperor?

Yes, he said. I know what you mean.

Inspector!

He looked up to see Martine walking towards him. The door was still closing behind
her. She was folding her wet umbrella.

I’m sorry I’m late, she said. This weather! She looked out the window, to where it
was raining, to where the wind was gusting. Is it ever going to stop?

He got up, reached out, took her hand.

That’s okay, he said. I just got here myself.

She looked down at his almost-empty glass.

Well, ten minutes ago, he said.

Fifteen, she said. You forget, I saw you at Le Bar l’Anise.

Yes, you’re probably right, he said. Fifteen. Please, won’t you take a seat?

The waiter came over and helped her off with her coat.

She sat down, rubbed her hands together.

What would you like to drink?

She took the wine menu, skimmed it expertly.

I think I’ll have the Mont-Redon, she said.

A bottle, or a glass?

Oh, God no. Just a glass. She laughed. She looked away then, as though she were remembering
something. Some other special time.

No, no. Just a glass, she repeated.

He signalled the waiter.

You know, she said. You have this habit. I was watching you when I came in. When
you’re thinking about something, or something someone’s said to you, you turn away,
as if the answer is written somewhere else. In the air outside, perhaps. On the roadway.
I noticed it at Le Bar l’Anise that first night.

And she was right, he had been doing exactly that, looking at the people hurrying
by in the rain, their coats folded tightly about them, their umbrellas held out,
shielding them against the wind, looking for the answers that lay scattered there.

The waiter brought Martine her glass of wine.

I’m sad he’s gone, he said. Omura.

Katsuo.

Katsuo.

You shouldn’t be. Omura was right, she said. Katsuo was a selfish, insensitive, narcissistic…She
searched for a word. But couldn’t find one. Who used people. Who
always
put himself
first. Who didn’t care, or have any idea, about the impact of what he did on others.
He was a jerk.

Katsuo? Insensitive? Or Omura? Which one was I talking to?

He reached for his pack of cigarettes. Loosened one from the rest. Offered it to
her.

No, no thanks, she said. I think I’m going to give up. Once I’ve found Mehdi. I might
as well start now.

Do you mind?

No, please. Go ahead.

He struck the match against the side of the box. It burst into flame with a hiss.
He held it up to his cigarette, then placed the still-lit match in the ashtray, where
it burned for a few seconds before extinguishing itself.

Well, whoever it was, Omura, Katsuo, I’m sorry he’s gone, he said.

She looked at him again.

It’s true. Tadashi. Katsuo. I miss him. His voice. It’s as though a special sound
in the world, something unique, has stopped. Forever.

That’s how I felt when Mehdi disappeared, she said. I used to see him every day…and
then there was nothing, he was gone.

I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? Even though it’s only been a week, Omura always had
something to tell me. Always. It was like I had access to another world. Even when
I resisted, he’d still persist. I never really knew
where
we were going. Where we’d
end up. But wherever it was, I knew we were going somewhere. When he was telling
me about Fumiko, about
Katsuo—about himself—Sachiko, Mariko, I felt inhabited by
him, by what he was telling me. And it all seemed somehow connected. Not just to
him. But to me as well.

He picked up his glass.

The other night, he said, the night we went down to Omura’s apartment, you said there
was something you wanted to ask me. What was it?

I wanted to ask you…I wanted to ask you, if you decided to go to Algeria, to find
Mathilde, would you take me with you? Help me find Mehdi.

I thought it might have been that.

He nodded to himself.

Yes, of course I will, he said.

When he looked up, her eyes were brimming with tears.

I’m sorry, she said. But I miss him too, my brother.

Then Jovert did something he had never done before. He reached out across the table
and took her hands in his.

Yes, of course I’ll take you, he said. I’ve already been there with you.

She did not look up.

Are you okay? he said.

She nodded. He went to pull his hands away, but he felt
the small renewed pressure of her fingers, holding him there.

He recalled a colleague, someone from another jurisdiction, someone he hadn’t seen
or heard from in a while, who had told him about a young woman he’d once seen sitting
in a café. She had been with this older man. The man had been holding the young woman’s
hands. His colleague had been close enough to see that, even though she had tears
in her eyes, she was smiling. He remembered his colleague telling him how this image
had stayed with him for some reason, how he had never been able to forget it.

He heard the man behind him put his glass down, heard the scrape of his chair as
he got up. Jovert was still holding Martine’s hands when the man walked by. They
must have exchanged glances, the man and Martine, because she smiled up at him through
her tears as he walked past, alone, unknown, to who knew what awaited him in the
streets outside.

What was it called, the bar? The one his colleague had mentioned. He thought for
a moment. It was something appropriate…Yes, now he remembered. The Winterset. The
Winterset, he thought. How could he forget.

He thought again about Martine, this young woman, whose hands he held, and whose
hands held his. He thought about her brother, who had killed their murderous step-father.
And the younger brother they had both lost. Four-year-old Luc. Who had stood there,
looking silently into the eyes of his rage-blinded father, waiting for the fatal
blow. Had he had any inkling of the final darkness that was about to befall him?

Perhaps, he thought to himself, another universe
did
exist. Some parallel, other
life. If only we gave it a chance. That he should be sitting here with this young
woman, holding
her
hands across the table; that there were tears in
her
eyes, through
which she was smiling, wasn’t a coincidence. It was something else, something greater.

He looked up at Martine. Her eyes. One dark tributary had survived her hand and now
lay imprinted on her cheek. He felt her fingers moving in his. Perhaps it was not
too late to atone, after all.

Chapter 49

WHENEVER Jovert stepped out the door onto rue St Antoine, he always had the feeling
that he was stepping into history. Did he imagine it, or was there not, each evening,
when he went to get his paper, some invisible flow against which he had to brace
himself? He had often thought about the masses sweeping down rue St Antoine to storm
the Bastille. He knew that this was not the case. There were no angry masses. It
hadn’t happened that way. But his boyhood imaginings had proved ineradicable, permanently
resistant to the later truth. The crowds still swept by. So close to him he could
almost hear their murmurings.

And from the time he was a boy, he had always been fascinated standing in the exact
spot where something significant had happened: an assassination; the death on the
Champs-Élysées of some poor poet whose name he could never remember, cruelly felled
mid-thought by a falling tree. He had stood on
the corner of rue Amyot, where Modigliani’s
eight-months-pregnant wife, Jeanne, had thrown herself from their fifth-floor window.
He had mourned her loss, as if some vestige of what had happened that day lay indelibly
inscribed on the pavement in front of him.

But hadn’t this always been the case, for him? How many crime scenes had he been
to in his life? Were there not hundreds of times when he had stood in the exact place
where someone had died some brutal and unnecessary death? Had it not been his job
to reimagine what prosaic horror had taken place there—in a bedroom, a kitchen, a
sixth-floor balcony? How many times had he traced a trail of blood on a staircase
from a now less frantically opened door down to the deserted landing below, where
the bigger pool lay? And had there not been, each time, a smaller, more mundane voice
of history still quietly sobbing there?

Sometimes, when he thought about what Omura had said, he found himself going over
it in his head, taking each individual word in his hands as though it were a pebble.
Examining them. One by one. Then reassembling them in exactly the same order, trying
to find the precise moment at which they ceased to be just a string of single words,
and they were transformed into something else, something much bigger, that flowered
in his brain. Or stopped him in his tracks.

He recalled doing the same thing when he was a boy, going over a phrase, a sentence,
a paragraph in a book, reading the words over and over again, trying to prise them
apart long enough to see into the secret cleft they had just described. But he never
could. The words closed over as quickly as a woman turning on her bed.

He had seen Ichiro’s father cradling his son in his arms. Had felt the crow’s clawed
feet tense on the young boy’s brow before it launched itself into the air. But where,
exactly, amongst these words, was
his
sorrowing? What strange metamorphosis was this?
Why was
his
heart aching?