The Wild Geese (11 page)

Suezo thought he had been out for quite some time, but when he glanced at his watch as he continued along
the edge of the river, it was eleven, only a half hour since his departure, perhaps less.

Though he didn't know where to go, he seemed, as he passed along, like a person on an important business trip. A short distance before the turn at Imagawa Lane, he saw a house advertising “Rice-in-Tea.” Inside, he could buy a tray of a few dishes with pickles and tea for only twenty sen. “I've a mind to go in,” he thought, but since it was too early for lunch, he went on turned right, and came into the broad street leading to Manaita-bashi.

Crossing, he noticed on the right side a shop dealing in various kinds of pet birds whose lively cries attracted the passersby. He stopped in front of the shop—you can still see it today—and looked up at the cages of parrots and parakeets hung high on the eaves, while on the floor he could see those of white doves and Korean pigeons. His glance moved to the cages of small song birds piled up row after row at the back of the shop. These little birds sang the loudest and flew about in the liveliest fashion. Among them the greatest in number and the noisiest in their singing were the light-yellow imported canaries. And as his eye brushed past them, he was attracted to the linnets, which sat quietly in their vivid colors. It suddenly occurred to him to buy a pair for Otama. “She could feed them. How charming to see her with them!” he thought.

Suezo asked the price, and, although the old shopkeeper seemed indifferent to making a sale, bought a brace of linnets. After he had paid for them, the shopkeeper asked: “How will you carry them?”

“Don't they come with a cage?”

“Of course not.”

Suezo almost had to beg the man to make another sale. The old man put his withered hand roughly into the cage and, catching two of the linnets, transferred them to an empty cage.

“Can you tell if they're male and female?” Suezo asked.

“I should think so,” said the old man reluctantly.

As Suezo retraced his steps, he carried the cage with the two linnets. His pace was unhurried then, and every so often he would lift the cage and look inside. The mood in which he had fled his house seemed to have been wiped away, and the tender feeling usually hidden inside him came to the surface. Perhaps frightened by the swaying of the cage, the birds, sitting motionless with their wings folded, clung tightly to the perch.

Each time Suezo looked at them, he felt as though he wanted to hurry off to Muenzaka to hang the cage in Otama's window.

But coming along Imagawa Lane, he stopped at the house of “Rice-in-Tea” for lunch. He put the cage behind the tray the waitress brought him and looked at the pretty birds. And thinking all the while of Otama, he ate the rather inferior meal with gusto.

S
UEZO
'
S
gift of the linnets to Otama provided the opportunity for Otama and Okada to speak to each other.

Their relationship reminds me of the weather of that autumn. At that time my father, who is now dead, had planted fall flowers in the garden behind his house, and one Sunday after returning from the Kamijo, I saw him tying stalks of flowers and agueweeds along with other types of plants to props of thin bamboo canes set in the ground, for a typhoon was expected September first, the so-called Two Hundred and Tenth Day. But the twenty four hours passed calmly. Next we thought the Two Hundred and Twentieth Day would be the dreaded one, but it wasn't. For several days after that, restless and threatening clouds were seen. Sometimes it was so hot that people thought summer had come again. The southeast wind seemed to gather strength but died away. “Two Hundred and Tenth Day,” said my father, “is being paid off in instalments.”

When I returned to the Kamijo from my home one Sunday evening, none of the students were in, and everything was quiet. I had gone to my room to relax, when I suddenly heard a match struck in the next room.

I wanted company, so I called out: “Is that you, Okada?”

I could hardly catch his reply. I had become friendly with him, and we had avoided all the polite formalities, but his answer struck me as odd.

I thought that he had been daydreaming. “Do you mind if I come in?” I asked, curious to see what was wrong.

“That's what I was hoping. I came back quite a while ago, and I've done nothing since. When I heard you, I was aroused and thought I'd light my lamp.” This time he answered me in a clear voice.

I went into the corridor and opened the sliding doors to my friend's room. He was sitting with his elbows on his desk and was looking into the outside gloom through his open window, which directly faced the Iron Gate.

Okada turned to me, saying: “It's unusually sultry, isn't it? And with these two or three mosquitoes in my room. . . . Annoying pests!”

I went to the side of his desk and sat there informally, saying: “My father calls it paying for Two Hundred and Tenth in instalments.”

“What? Oh. That's an interesting way of putting it. Well, maybe he's right. The weather was so unsettled— first clouding and then clearing—that I couldn't decide whether to go out or stay in. So I spent all morning just lying here and reading the
Kimpeibai
you lent me. I got to the point where I couldn't think straight, so I went out for a walk after lunch. And something strange happened.”

He said all this without looking at me. Instead he stared out the window.

“What was it?”

“I killed a snake,” he said, turning toward me.

“And rescued a beauty, eh?”

“No, only a bird. But it had something to do with a beauty.”

“Now this interests me! What's it about?”

T
HIS
IS
what Okada told me.

That afternoon the clouds moved quickly, and sporadic gusts of wind blew up the dust on the roads and then subsided. Okada's reading of his Chinese novel had given him a headache. He had gone out for some air and from habit had turned toward Muenzaka. He felt dizzy. In old Chinese novels, especially in the
Kimpeibai
, usually after every ten or twenty pages of innocent description, the author invariably throws in an indecent scene as if he were quite punctually fulfilling a promise.

“I must have looked awfully silly after reading that sort of book,” said Okada.

When he came to the stone wall of Iwasaki's mansion on the right where the slope begins to descend, he saw a group of people on the left. They stood in front of the house he always looked at in passing. This was the only fact that Okada didn't tell me at that time. There were about ten women present, and more than half of them were young girls talking as noisily as a group of singing birds. Okada couldn't see anything, and without any particular curiosity he turned toward them and took two or three steps from the middle of the road.

The women were looking at a single point, and as he followed their glance, he discovered the cause of the confusion: a bird cage hung in the window of the house. No wonder the women were upset. When Okada saw the
cage, he too was startled. A bird was rushing about inside, flapping its wings and shrieking. And looking more closely, Okada noticed a large snake with its head through the bars frightening the bird. The snake had wedged its way between two thin bamboo sticks without actually breaking the cage. But by forcing itself through, it had widened the gap between the bars as wide as its body.

Okada took a few steps forward to get a better view, and as a result he stood just behind the row of girls.

As if by common consent, the girls seemed relieved to have found a rescuer in him; they made room for him and pushed him forward, whereupon Okada discovered a new fact: the bird had not been alone.

The mate to the one fluttering about was trapped in the snake's mouth. And though only one of its wings was caught, it seemed to be dead, perhaps from fear, for its other wing drooped and its body looked like a piece of cotton.

At that moment a woman who was somewhat older than the rest and was apparently the mistress of the house said hurriedly to Okada, yet with modesty: “Can't you help? That awful snake!” And she added: “These girls from next door just came out, but it's beyond a woman's ability!”

“This lady here,” one of the girls said, “heard the birds making noise, so she opened the sliding windows. We heard her scream when she saw the snake. So we dropped our work and ran over. But we can't do anything. And our teacher's stepped out for a moment. But even if she were here now, she couldn't help. She's too old.” The
sewing teacher took her holiday on every fifth day of the month instead of on Sunday. That was why the girls had come that day.

When Okada was telling me this, he said: “The woman was quite beautiful.” But he didn't say that he had seen her before and that he had greeted her each time he passed her house.

Without answering, Okada stood under the cage and examined how the snake had got there. It had crawled up to the cage hanging in the window by approaching it from under the eaves between Otama's house and the house of the sewing teacher. Its body lay on a crossarm of the eave like a rope thrown over the support, and its tail was hidden around a post at the corner of the house. The snake was quite long. Probably, Okada thought, it had come from the thick growth of trees and grass on the estate across the street. And what with the strange weather, it had strayed out and come upon the birds.

Okada was temporarily confused by the situation. It was obvious that the women couldn't do anything.

“Do you have something sharp in the house?” he asked.

“Run in,” said the mistress to a small girl, “and get a knife from the kitchen.” Perhaps the girl was the maid, for even though she wore a summer kimono similar to the other girls', she had tucked up her sleeves with a purple sash.

The girl frowned as if to say: “I don't like the fish knife used for cutting snakes!”

“Don't worry,” her mistress said, “I'll buy you a new one.”

This satisfied the girl, and she ran in and quickly brought out the knife.

Okada took it from her impatiently, and letting his wooden clogs slip from his feet, he easily set one foot on the window sill; with gymnastic skill his left hand was already grasping the crossarm of the eave.

Okada knew that even though the knife was new it wasn't sharp, so he had no intention of cutting the snake in two at one blow. Pushing the snake's body against the beam with the knife, Okada moved the blade up and down a few times. He felt as though he were breaking glass as the scales of the body were pierced.

By this time the head of the bird had already been sucked into the snake's mouth, and when the snake felt itself being wounded, its body began writhing like the rise and fall of a wave. Yet it refused to disgorge its victim or to pull itself out of the cage.

After Okada had pushed and pulled the knife back and forth several times, the dull edge finally divided the snake in two like a chunk of meat on a chopping board. The lower part of its body, which had been in continual movement, first fell down with a thud on the beard grass just below the roof. But the other half, tumbling off the beam on which it had rested, dangled in the air, the head still stuck in the cage. The head had doubled in size because half the bird remained in the snake's mouth, and the bamboo bars, bent like bows, continued to hold it in place. The weight of the dead body inclined the cage about forty-five degrees. The surviving bird kept up its mad dance, its wings fluttering with an energy that was still wonderfully unexhausted.

Okada withdrew his hand from the supporting cross-arm and jumped to the ground. At this point a few of the girls, who had watched breathlessly all the while, returned to the sewing teacher's house.

“We've got to take down the cage and pull out the snake's head,” said Okada, looking at the mistress.

But neither she nor her maid had heart enough to go in to lower the linen string that kept the cage suspended, for the severed end of the dangling snake was bleeding on the window sill.

Just then a madcap voice said: “Should I take it down?”

Everyone turned to the speaker, the errand-boy of a saké dealer. He was the only one who had come along on this dreary Sunday afternoon while Okada was killing the snake. Holding a saké bottle bound with a rope in one hand and his account book in the other, the boy had stood there as an idle spectator. But when the lower portion of the snake landed on the grass, he had abandoned his bottle and book on the ground, and picking up a small stone, he had struck the raw flesh of the snake, every blow to the writhing body giving him much pleasure.

“I hate troubling you, but please do it for us,” said the mistress politely. The maid took the boy inside, and soon he reappeared at the window, climbed on the board with the flowerpot on it, and stretching himself as far as he could, barely managed to reach the string with his outstretched arms.

“Do you want it?” he asked the maid, but when she shrank from the cage, he jumped off the window sill and carried it through the house out to the entrance.

“I'm holding the cage, so you've got to wipe up the blood,” the boy said. “It's on the mats too!” he proudly advised the girl, who followed him out.