Women On the Other Shore (31 page)

the large, unfamiliar trees and dense grasses choking both sides of the road. Aoi could only suppose that this was the way to the young man's home, but when he finally pulled over it was in front of an obviously abandoned structure.

"Give me your money," he said as soon as they dismounted. The friendly manner he'd shown before was gone, replaced by a rough, threatening voice. Aoi's knees quavered beneath her, and she broke out in a cold sweat from her forehead to her armpits. Her mouth went instantly dry, and she couldn't speak. So it was a scam! The realization came all too late. At least he wasn't waving a knife at her; apparently she didn't need to fear for her life.
Don't panic, stay calm,
she told herself,
fust hand over the money without any fuss and get
yourself out of here as quickly as you can. Think of nothing else.

Two younger boys, probably not even high school age, came out of the tumbledown tin shack to stare menacingly at her. Making it clear she had no intention of resisting, Aoi lowered her knapsack, fished out a wallet, and handed all the bills it contained to the mugger.

"You've got more than that," he snarled. The two other boys kept up a constant string of chatter in the local language. The buzz of numberless insects in the surrounding underbrush was like a distant ringing in her ears. She in fact had three wallets in her knapsack.

The wallet she'd just emptied was the one she used for local currency; a second one held Japanese yen notes, and the third contained approximately the same sum in traveler's checks. Thinking quickly, she took out only the one with the traveler's checks, which she knew she could get replaced.

The youth reached for the thick stack of checks and briefly flipped through them before wedging them into his pocket. He apparently didn't even know they were worthless without a signature, Aoi noted scornfully, trying to steady her nerves. Although the sun blazed down with painful intensity, the skin on her arms remained cold with goose bumps.

Along with the kip notes and traveler's checks, the three youths relieved her of her camera, her lighter, her Walkman, and some tapes. That was all. The fact that they didn't take her passport or make her sign the checks suggested they were smalltime hoods, not part of an organized ring. The young mugger then ordered her back onto the motorcycle and drove her some distance before dropping her off in a place where nothing but makeshift shanties lined the road. As he was about to ride away, he flashed her a smile and said,

"Thank you." His boyish smile made him look like a little kid.

The road stretched out in both directions through a landscape of rice paddies dotted with stands of trees. Having no idea where she was, Aoi made her best guess and started walking. Every time she met someone coming the other way, she tried to ask for directions by saying, "Vientiane?" but the shabbily dressed men and women just eyed her curiously, or in some cases with wariness, and no one would tell her the right direction.

"I don't believe it! I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" Aoi muttered as she marched doggedly on. "I hate this country! In all the time I've been traveling, I've never had anything like this happen to me. Everybody's been so nice. Nobody's ever told me such rot-ten lies. A friend? Nanako? Letters and pictures? If he wanted my money, why couldn't he just demand it on the spot instead of con-cocting some stupid story? Hope they catch you trying to pass those unsigned checks, you dumbass!"

As she ranted on out loud, the trembling in her hands ceased, her gooseflesh subsided, and the fear that had tightened every nerve in her body slowly eased its grip. The sun continued to sizzle as it tilted lower in the sky. A dog with a large patch of missing hair came up from behind and slowly overtook her. Gnats flew in silent swirls.

"I don't believe it!" Aoi spat out again, but then caught her breath and stopped dead in her tracks on the red clay road.

It was like a bolt from the blue: she
had
believed. Until this very 240

moment, she had truly believed that she could count on people's good faith. It was a realization both marvelous and dumbfounding.

She had also believed without a shadow of a doubt that Nanako was still alive. Almost as if she had been there herself, Aoi had believed that Nanako, with that unguarded sociability she seemed to share with middle-aged country women, had engaged in conversation with the young man, joined him for a cup of tea at some open-air cafe, commemorated the occasion by taking a picture or two, and then written him a letter after returning to Japan.

A young mother with child in arms walked by, staring openly at the foreign woman standing like a pillar on the dusty clay road. An elderly woman emerged from what looked like a general store several doors ahead and stood staring as well. Suddenly everything before Aoi's eyes became magnified, then wavered gently as if she were underwater, and a moment later she realized she was crying. She resumed her march. T h e sun's powerful rays burned the top of her head. Tears kept rolling down her cheeks like beads of sweat. Flies buzzed about her arms and her face. Sniffling continually and wip-ing her tearstained cheeks with sunburned wrists, she walked on.

She heard a sound like the whine of a mosquito coming from behind and turned to see a small pickup truck heading toward her, still some distance away. She wondered if she should flag it down and ask for a ride into the city, but stood there, unable to move. She had no way of knowing who would be in the truck. Would they agree to take her to the city? T h e trembling that had gone from her hands a short while before slowly crept back up from her fingertips.

The truck approached, kicking up thick clouds of red dust in its wake. Children came running out of the shacks along the road to wave at the passing vehicle.

There was no assurance that the driver would take her where she asked. He could easily carry her off to some secluded spot again and force her to hand over the rest of her money. Or even if he did take 241

her into the city, he might demand some outrageous amount in pay.

ment. And yet... still... in spite of that...

Taking a deep breath and willing her rigid limbs to move, Aoi lunged out into the path of the oncoming pickup, waving her arms high and wide over her head to get its attention. The truck blared its horn and screeched to a halt several meters away. Clouds of dust bil-lowed up around it, momentarily obscuring it from view. Aoi stepped forcefully forward.

I've got to have faith. That's how it has to be. Right here, right now,
I've made up my mind.

"Vientiane!" Leaning in through the open passenger-side window, she shouted across the front seat at the middle-aged driver: "Vientiane! Samsentai! Pangam Guesthouse! Tat Luan!" One after the other she barked out the names of the street, her hotel, and the nearby temple, hoping he would understand what she wanted. The ferocity with which this string of words emerged seemed to bewilder him at first, but he finally nodded with recognition when she said the name of the Tarat Sao Market. He reached over to open the passenger door.

I've got to have faith. That's how I've made up my mind. I can't
shrink in fear. If there's a world where some jerk hoodwinks me and
scares me out of my money, there's another world where a kind stranger
sets his work aside and walks all over the place to find me an inexpensive hotel room, then disappears without even giving me a chance to
thank him. It's all the same. If there's a world where Nanako no longer
exists, then there must also be a world where she still lives and shares
a laugh with someone she's never met before. And in that case, I choose
to believe in the latter, fust as I choose to believe this pickup truck will
take me where I want to go.

The driver glanced at Aoi from time to time as he drove. Their eyes met and an awkward smile came to his lips. "Vientiane," he said quietly with a nod.

The cries of insects. The smell of the dust. Women walking bare-foot. The unrelenting glare of the sun. The unchanging landscape.

It all flowed by at breathtaking speed outside the window. The dusty wind blowing in on Aoi's face soon dried her tear-dampened cheeks.

When she graduated from college, Aoi launched a travel business catering mainly to students. The operation was like a glorified student activity group at first, with earnings so meager she had to take on side jobs to make ends meet. Students she'd gotten to know through her university's Rail Society and Travel Club dropped in frequently at her office, which was also her home. Young people she'd met on her travels would sometimes stay with her for several weeks while they looked for a place to live after getting back to Japan.

Far from finding it stressful to have all these people constantly hanging around her home-slash-office, Aoi enjoyed the company. She liked sharing her days with others, sleeping and waking and working together, then partying over dinner after their work was done. Quite simply, it was what she called fun.

As subcontracting requests from other travel companies increased and her cash flow stabilized, she moved to new quarters in Okubo and incorporated as a limited liability company. When she won a major contract to represent a consortium of hotels, she purchased a condominium unit nearby and reorganized as a joint stock company.

The students who'd hung around the office gradually stopped coming, and the rooms filled up instead with office desks, computers, and a large copier and fax machine combo.

She felt like she spent her days tallying up what she could do herself and what she just wasn't up to—with the latter always winning by a large margin. She wasn't very good with numbers or complicated calculations, she frequently forgot appointments she'd made, she had no idea how to manage a filing system, and she generally lacked office skills. But her long list of deficiencies did not particularly trouble her. If there was something she couldn't handle herself, all she had to do was hire someone who could. T h e r e were still bound to be things she could do that the people she hired couldn't.

As the years went by, the boom in student travel c a m e to an end, clients she counted on for work fell on hard times and closed up shop, world events made people reluctant to travel abroad, and suddenly Aoi found herself past the midway point of her thirties taking home less than her employees. She experienced a sense of foreboding she had never known before as the ground shook precariously beneath her feet.

Aoi realized she had grown tired of dealing with people. Hiring employees and working shoulder to shoulder with t h e m wasn't simply a matter of dividing up tasks according to each person's skills.

One person goofed off when she could and otherwise contributed nothing but complaints. A second would disarm you with a friendly smile and make off with your work. A third remained blind to her own shortcomings but never missed a chance to r e m i n d others of theirs. Although it should have been nobody's business, word somehow got around and staff members began prying into Aoi's past with prurient fascination. People came and went, one after t h e other.

One day it dawned on Aoi that dealing with people belonged on the list of things she wasn't equipped to do, and it sent a chill down her spine.

It was at this juncture that she interviewed a housewife from her alma mater for a new venture. She became convinced as soon as Sayoko started work that the decision to hire her was not a mistake. T h e way she immersed herself in meticulous detail, as if she were pains-takingly ironing each fold of a pleated skirt, in some ways seemed like a shell she crawled into because she wanted to shut other people out. But speaking strictly in terms of performance, Aoi could have asked for nothing more.

Through snatches of conversation here and there, Aoi sensed that Sayoko had begun to crack open her shell and was peering straight at her through the widening hole. It reminded her of herself in high school. As they talked, she sometimes felt like she was now playing the role that Nanako had played back then.

One day when she teamed up with Sayoko to clean a spectacularly grungy apartment, she found herself experiencing strong feelings of vu. Silently scrubbing the tub and splash area in the bathroom. Sweat trickling from temple to chin. The summer sun pouring through the window. Mind empty, face blank, hands unre-mittingly in motion. Noriko Nakazato's eagle eye. It reminded her so much of Izu. As she and Sayoko went about their separate tasks in separate rooms, Aoi felt her recent sense of foreboding slowly melting away. This was what she had always wanted to be doing: keeping in constant motion, always on the lookout for the next thing she could tackle, and working until she was ready to drop—then, at the end of the day, sharing her exhaustion and a smile with a colleague.

Perhaps the future she had longed to find as a teenager existed only somewhere on the far side of days like that. As one whose list of capabilities was probably shorter than most, perhaps what she'd really wanted to do was not to start up and run some fancy company, but simply something like this.

Except for their ages and alma mater, she and Sayoko had little in common. Their situations in life, their perspectives, what they had and didn't have—everything about them was different. To be honest, when Sayoko spoke of her family or her daughter or the nursery school, she might as well have been transmitting some secret code as far as Aoi was concerned. But Aoi also couldn't help feeling that they were ultimately climbing the same hill. Traveling by completely different routes, at times forging ahead regardless, at times sitting down to rest, at times ready to give up the trek altogether, they were slowly but surely ascending the same upward slope. No matter how far apart their situations and perspectives were, and no matter how 245

different the things they had and didn't have might be, Aoi had felt that someday the two of them would clasp h a n d s atop that hill, laughing and cheering together, "We did it! We did it!"

Yet here Sayoko sat, like so many others who had come and gone before, asking, with a hint of scorn tugging at her lips, about what had happened after the big leap.