The Ghost Brush (58 page)
“You remember them very well,” said Shino dryly.
“Parched to dust, wasn’t that the last?”
“These are the great doctrines. This is the great wisdom of the Lotus Sutra.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want it.”
“I understand,” said Shino. “What can we do?”
“I want brightness. I want my body, old friend that it is.”
Shino was thoughtful. And then she said, “We have a way.”
It had been practised by certain monks and nuns for centuries.
A
t night we went to the hot springs. We talked and laughed and stretched our feet so that they rose in the foam as we had done years before when I was a child. I told her my fears. That they wanted me gone. That my existence had become inconvenient, because how could the disciples forge Hokusai when his original “forger” could do it better? How could they forge Hokusai when the ghost brush was still painting and the works with the Hokusai 88 seal kept showing up?
“I want it to stop,” I said. I pulled the seal from my sleeve. “I would like to leave it with you in the Temple of Refuge, where no man would ever take it.”
T
HE ANCIENT CHINESE
HAD SOUGHT IMMORTALITY TOO
. They believed that by combining yin and yang, dark and light—specifically, mercury and lead, or yellow and the very dark colours—they might get an elixir to preserve the body forever. Shino had some ingredients. There were others that she had obtained from the Dutch scholars. We worked often to improve our pigment, and while she herself did not desire to be preserved, she began to hope that I would be successful at least for myself.
The flowers I needed for the final pigment grew in the fields above Kamakura. I collected the seeds of beni and ground them to a deep, deep red. I sometimes ventured down the mountain to the field of white butterflies, where my father had said, “It isn’t time. Go on, go on.”
I wanted him to recognize that my time was coming. But I never saw him again. Shino walked with me at first. But she was frail. Her porters ran behind and insisted that she ride.
Autumn came. The darkness fell earlier and earlier. It was the Hour of the Monkey, around five in the afternoon—in the old days, the time the parade of courtesans would begin—when we took our last walk. The leaves of the giant trees lay, coppery, pinkish, and wet, underfoot in the lamplight. The damp air pressed down on us. We could see in the west the sky shot with pink from the disappeared sun. Then we saw the moon rising in the east, enormous, glowing, round.
Both moon and sun at once! We knew it was a sign, although we assured each other that we did not believe in signs.
I went to sleep peacefully.
When I woke up there was a crowd in front of my little house. They wore the names and faces of my father; they were his disciples of old and of late—Isai, Tsuyuki Kosho, even Iwajiro was there. Iwajiro, the boy who had been my shadow. My enemies and even my friends were there, a rolling thunder of round heads.
“Give us the seal, Katsushika Oei,” one of them said. I couldn’t see in the dark. “We are the true heirs of Hokusai. We will carry on the name. No woman inherits the seal.”
“You are deluded,” I said. “The seal alone does not make one his heir.”
“If you don’t give us the seal we will make sure that you never work again,” they said.
“I cannot give it to you. It would be wrong. My father left it to me.”
I would have told them that my father was a fiction, that they had named themselves for and followed and set their lives upon a fabrication, and that they too were fabrications as a result.
“We will take it from you, then,” they said regretfully.
I was about to tell them that I did not have it. But I was cut down—a short sword in my ribs to immobilize me and a katana strike to the neck. It was not well done. My head was half lopped, right at the place my neck always bent, like a flower head snapped on its stem.
Blood beat out of me. I lay on the ground. I heard shouting and the guards’ feet pounding. The white gown of the abbess appearing, and her thin, weak body spinning this way and that, performing her ridiculous kata. The men disappeared. I wish I could say it was her prowess with her naginata. But alas, I think she just frightened them off. She looked like a vengeful spirit.
How did they know I was there? Who had followed me? Who had dared to enter the compound of the Temple of Refuge? Maybe they hadn’t intended to kill me, but my defiance, my usual defiance, inflamed them. Too late I recalled Shino’s advice to dissemble.
Shino leaned over me. Her sorrow was contained. This was her gift, the gift of containment. A feeling of ease came.
“Remember,” I said, “no fading. No putrefaction.”
I was heavy, heavy.
The blood that was in me ran and ran; it ran all over the stone in front of the door to the Treasure House and around to the back, where the guards were shouting and mounting their horses for the chase. This river of blood should have left my body empty, but it did not. I was as heavy as ten people when they tried to drag me off the doorstep.
“You cannot move her,” said Shino. “There is only one way for this corpse to be moved, and that is for her killer to return. If the killer returns and takes one hand I will take the other, and she will be light as a leaf and we will bear her away.”
The guards brought back the killer. I could not see his face. He was one of the forgers. It didn’t matter which. They were all the same—all manifestations of the father I had helped to create.
He took my left hand and Shino took my right. I stood and together we walked. That disciple’s face was not clear, but I could hear him. The guards took him away.
Shino and I retreated farther into the temple precinct.
T
HEY HAD THEIR POTIONS
, their pastes, and their medicaments. The chanting nuns laid my body out and washed me.
And they prepared me for paint with the heavy white coating we always used. Every bit of skin—my legs and my arms and the round ends of my fingers, the cracks between my toes, and the pale blue hollow behind my ears. They painted the lips of my labia, those private places that painters had seen before, and in the hollows between my thigh muscles. They painted the ridge of my spine and the bristling hair and slack skin under my armpits; the worn soles of my feet, with their many horizontal lines; my wrinkled, dry heels; my lips and the lids of my eyes. I felt the soft bristles of their brushes run over the stretched and plump stomach skin and the sensitive white place under my jutting chin. I swooned to their chanting.
They had a basin of my red pigment, which was intended to preserve the body. They took me up by my feet and my head, with two others at my hips, and laid me in the water. If a part of me floated above the surface, they gently pushed it under. When I was done, I was red as a berry all over and sealed to fight off decay. They dressed me in my white death clothes and stretched me in my coffin.
They made no record of this body. The nuns from the Temple of Refuge were powerful. I was gone from my country and my time. From my family and my friends. From art and from history, almost.
Vault
I AM LEFT TO MY OWN DEVICES.
I hear the drip of water from the roof in winter and see fireflies on summer nights. There are cats too, their bony spines rubbing against my coffin. For a time certain of my paintings surrounded me, but after Shino’s death the doors were cracked open and the works carried off. I wanted to see them again, see where they’d got to—one reason I interrupted this red-skinned repose. In that, I am satisfied. Partly. There are others, spread around that fractious world, in vaults or down in forgotten chests, that I will not see again. And here I lie.
Rebecca wandered by in the temple grounds not long ago. She examined the gravestones and tried to find the view over to the sea. She took her camera and snapped pictures of a tiny shrine where a flower had been left. Looking for me, I suppose. I didn’t call out.
I am the unbeautiful, the untended, the unintended, the unofficial painter.
At the age of fifty-seven, I felt a surge of tremendous power. At sixty-seven, I had disappeared and was presumed dead.
I am the brush. I am the line. I am the colour.
There are facts I would like to talk over with my father. The world is round. What does that mean for waves? Do they shoot off the edge? Or curl around and come back, licking the surface, like your tongue would a rice ball or an ice ball?
He was a scattered man, always pulling a geographical escape, always adopting a new name. His money he pissed up a wall—yes, I liked that expression. His talent he flashed and then grew bored of, flashed again so it burst out of the rock like some gusher—and then drought. He squandered. He wasted. His pride was immense. He tossed gold coins on the floor for us to count; he was above such things. He exploited us all, but mainly me.
He was my father.
“Go with him,” my mother said. “I have no more patience for it. You be the one. You love him.”
A life sentence, that one.
On this subject of love. Shino says it is the greatest of mysteries. I said once and I say it again: it is nothing but a rat’s fart in a windstorm.
You can quote me. I am Oei. Katsushika Oei. Katsushika I take from the place where Hokusai was born. Oei is what he called me. Some people say my father was difficult. I can’t agree. He was not difficult. He was impossible.
I am she, Hokusai’s daughter. Painter of deep pools of colour and perfect, fine lines. A woman who loved food and drink and tobacco. Soothsayer. Consumer of the mushroom that has, as promised, given me immortality. My body dyed red and wrapped in a winding sheet, I lie preserved, a great painter in my own right. A fine woman loved by more than one man. And who loved several in return. But none, I promise you, more than the Old Man.
It could be my epitaph. Perhaps it is. But you would have to find my grave to know.
And that you cannot do.
The Ghost Brush
Extended Edition
Katherine Govier
For Nick
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