Linnear 01 - The Ninja (52 page)

‘No,’ Nicholas said and Yukio shook her head.

‘I didn’t think so,’ the old man said. ‘In any case, you would be too young to remember the old city, to have seen it before the annihilation.’

‘Did you?’ Yukio asked.

‘Oh yes.’ He smiled, almost wistfully, and when he did, the wrinkles seemed to fade from his face. ‘Yes, Hiroshima was my home. Once. That seems very far away now, I think. Almost as if it were part of another life.’ He smiled again. ‘And in an important way it was.”

‘Where were you,” Nicholas said, ‘when it happened?’ ‘Oh, I was away in the hills.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, safely away from the firefall. Trees shook miles away and the earth convulsed as if in pain. There was never anything like it. A wound in the universe. It went beyond the death of man or animal or even civilization.’

Nicholas wanted to ask the old man what it was that went beyond all those things but he could not bring himself to do it. He stared, dry-mouthed.

‘It was lucky you weren’t in the city when the bomb fell.’ The old man regarded Yukio. ‘Luck?’ he said as if tasting the flesh of some unfamiliar fowl. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps luck might be a modern equivalent, though an inadequate one. If anything, it was karma. You see, I had been out of the country just prior to the war. I was a businessman in those days and went quite often to the continent. Mostly to Shanghai, where a majority of my selling was done.’ For the first time his hands came into view and Nicholas saw the unnatural lenght of his nails. They were perfectly manicured, buffed and gleaming with clear lacquer. The old man saw the look in Nicholas’s eyes, said, ‘An affectation I picked up there from the Chinese mandarins with whom I did business and who befriended me. I do not even notice them now, I’ve grown so accustomed to them. But, of course, these are only of quite a moderate length.’ He settled back more comfortably in the seat, began to speak as if telling a bedtime story to his grandchildren. He had a remarkable speaking voice, commanding yet gentle, as well modulated as a seasoned lecturer’s. ‘We took some time off over a long weekend and, all our business completed, we went into the countryside for a bit of relaxation. I had no idea what to expect, really. These were Chinese, after all. The mandarins have, ah, peculiar tastes in many things. But in business one must learn to be cosmopolitan in one’s thinking - especially when it conies to the matter of your clients’ personal tastes. Yes, I do not believe that it is good policy to be close-minded or, ah, traditional here. The world supports a myriad cultures, is that not so? Who is to say which is the more valid.’ He shrugged his thin sharp shoulders. ‘Certainly not I.’

Outside, the afternoon was waning, the oblique cloudbanks streaked with gold and pink on their undersides, a charcoal grey above. The sun was already out of sight below the horizon and in the east the sky was clear, a vast cobalt porcelain bowl, seeming translucent. High up, several first-magnitude stars could already be seen flung aloft as if by a giant hand. The world seemed suffused with an absolute stillness as at the midpoint of a long summer’s afternoon when time itself ceases to have any meaning. It was a magical time, made up of fantastic elements having all miraculously arrived at the same spot at one instant, the inaudible sigh the inner ear hears in that last moment in a theatre before the curtain rises.

‘They took me on a journey, my mandarin friends. To a town within a town, as I said, outside of Shanghai. It was -excuse me, my dear - a bordello. Not merely the building we went to, oh no. The entire town. Yes, that’s right, a city of pleasure. You will forgive me, young lady, parts of this tale. A marfon business for weeks at a time - one can ill afford to take one’s wife along on such trips for many reasons. And these things become, well, almost an expected part of the trip.

‘The mandarins regard sex very highly, oh my, yes, they certainly do. And I cannot say that I blame them.’ He gave a little chuckle, not at all smutty but rather avuncular. ‘It is, after all, both a necessary and an important part of life, so why not honour it.

‘Uhm, in any event it was the most sumptuous, the largest such place I had ever been to. The clientele was strictly mandarin and further, I gathered, only certain families. Extremely exclusive, yes.’ His eyes were big and dreamy. ‘One could live the rest of one’s life there quite easily, I daresay. But, of course, that is not possible. Such places are only for a small amount of time. That kind of rarefied atmosphere would, I imagine, pall after a time. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to chance it. Life would most certainly be not worthwhile if all such spectacular dreams were shattered. Everyone needs time in their life when reality can be set aside, hm?’ The train rattled onwards, across a trestle bridge, plunging into a bleak and scraggy forest of deciduous trees, as forlorn as the ragtag remnants of some defeated army. The light was dying, the clouds stark now in their blackness, only losing definition near the horizon where the haze rendered all colour indistinguishable. Night had swept them up as swiftly as a remonstrating parent.

‘So. Here we are in this place. But my purpose is not to tell you all the goings-on there.’ He smiled winningly. ‘You’re young enough not to need any help from me on that score. No. Rather, I wish to tell you about a man I met there.’ He held up one long, bony but perfectly straight finger. The long nail gleamed in the artificial light of the car, causing it to look like a street marker. ‘Curious. About this man, I mean. He was no client, of that I am certain. Yet neither did he appear to be an employee of the establishment. Certainly I never saw him at work.

‘Late in the night, or early in the morning, to be completely accurate, he could be found in the great first-floor parlour - the building had two storeys; it may have been British-made, though certainly for quite a different purpose originally - sitting in one of the overstuffed wing chairs playing a game with, red and black marked tiles I had never seen before -‘

‘Mah-jongg?’ Nicholas asked.

‘No, not mah-jongg. Another game entirely. One I could never fathom. He would sit there silent and motionless while the girls cleaned up and when they had finished and had left he would begin to play. Click-click. Click-click

The old man lifted out a cigarette and, with some difficulty, owing to the length of his nails, lit it with a thin gunmetal Ronson. He smiled as one eye squinted up with the smoke. He might once have been an oriental Humphrey Bogart, the expression came so naturally to his face. He twisted the lighter’s wide face so that the light glanced off it in a flare. ‘A memento of those days, so far away. Belonged to a British diplomat whom I helped out of a spot of trouble there. He insisted I take it. I would have lost face had I not.’ He pocketed the Ronson, drew briefly on the cigarette, let the smoke out so that his image was as hazed as the countryside rolling by outside.

‘It was impossible for me to sleep in that place - even after I had been satiated. I hope I am being delicate enough, young lady.’

‘Perfectly,’ Yukio said. Nicholas wondered what the old man would think if he heard the way she threw words around.

‘It was my habit to read late at night - I am an insatiable reader. Have been all my life. But one night I felt restless enough to put my book down - I was reading Moby Dick. In English, mind you - I don’t trust translations; you lose too much - and take a stroll through the first floor.

‘Click-click. Click-click. I heard the tiles as he moved them. I sat next to him and watched. In those days I was certainly a brash young man. Not rude, mind you. I was far too well brought up by my parents. But I had a spot of - what shall I say? - the impetuosity of youth, yes?

‘Now this man was older than I am today, a good deal older, I would say, but then I am an abysmal judge of age so you must not go by roe. Still, he was old. Anyone who saw him would certainly say that, yes.

‘The odd thing about him was that his nails were so long that he was obliged to wear sheaths to protect them from breaking. These sheaths were something I had read about before. The mandarins were fond of wearing them, as an affectation, I had always supposed, during the turn of the century. However this was the late 19305. Who in China still kept their nails thus? No one, I had thought. Now I knew differently.

‘Usually these sheaths were of lacquer but these, if my eyes did not lie, were made of gold. Solid gold. But how could this be? Tasked myself. How could the nails support such a weight? Still, I know gold and there was no doubt.

‘ “Why have you come here?” asked the man without looking up. Click-click, went the tiles. Click-click.

‘I was so startled that for a moment I could not find my voice and he was obliged to prompt me. “Come, come,” he said. Just like the click-click of his tiles. The same cadence.

‘ “Can’t sleep,” I said, still rather tongue-tied.

‘ “I never sleep,” he said. “But that is because of my advanced age.” He looked up at me. “When I was your age, I never missed a night. Perhaps that is why I don’t miss it now.” He spoke in a rather peculiar dialect. It was Mandarin all right,

but the inflections were odd, some nouns clipped at their ends, and so on. I could not place where he was from.

‘ “I don’t often have this trouble,” I said, still the dazzling conversationalist. “But you’re not that old.”

‘ “Old enough to know that I am going to die soon.”

‘ “Oh, I doubt that.”

‘He eyed me critically. “Well, sentiment is never very accurate.” He began to stack up his tiles, nine to a pile. “But there is no need for concern. I have no fear of death. In fact, I will happily leave here now. I do not want to see what is coming.”

‘ “Coming?” I said like a half-wit. “What is coming?”

‘ “Something terrible,” he said. His hands on the small lacquered folding table looked like shining alien artifacts, newly unearthed. “A new type of bomb with a power beyond anything you can imagine. With enough force to destroy an entire city.”

‘I shall never forget that moment. I sat as still as a statue, barely breathing. I remember hearing the chirruping of a cicada so clear and near that I thought it must have got itself trapped inside the house. Oddly, I found myself wanting to get up and find it, to free it into the vast darkness which surrounded us.

‘I could not move. It was as if his words had pierced my heart, riveting me to the chair in which I sat.

‘ “I don’t understand,” I said with a kind of opaque astonishment.

‘ “It is not likely that you would,” he said, finishing stacking his tiles. Then he put them away into an inside pocket of his robe.

‘He rose and, for an instant, I thought I might have known him or at least seen him at another, previous time. But I think now it was just the light which made it seem so.’

‘What happened then?’ Yukio asked.

‘What happened?’ The old man looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘Why, nothing. Nothing at all. “Good evening to you, sir,” he said in his somewhat formal way. “I wish you pleasant dreams.” Though how he could have meant it after what he had just told me I could not imagine.

‘The place was very still after he left and, slumped back in my chair, I imagined I could hear the sound of the grass growing outside where the tree frogs slept. A cloud of mosquitoes whined against the netting.

‘At some time I must have gone upstairs - though I have no real remembrance of doing so - to Ishmael and Ahab and the Pequod, though I could not well concentrate on even so great a world as Melville’s that night.

‘His words ran around my head as if he had somehow engraved them upon the grooves of my brain with a cunning scalpel.”

‘But how could he have known?’ Nicholas asked. ‘At that time not even the Americans who eventually comprised the Manhattan Project knew.’

The old man nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘That is often what I ask myself. From that day in August when I stood on that secluded hillside and felt the earth shake and the sky burn with colour and heard the heat wind coming, I have asked myself that same question. How could he know?’

‘And what is the answer?’

The old man looked at them and smiled wanly. ‘There isn’t one, my friend.’ The train was slowing as it came out of a downgrade. Cinders flew, whirled up and around by the wind eddies created by their passage. He stood up and bowed to them, long hands clasped against his flat stomach, nails like translucent chopsticks. ‘My station,’ he murmured. Time to get off.’

‘Hey!’ Nicholas said. ‘Wait a minute.’ Forgetting, in his anxiety to know more, his modes of speech, lapsing into the common formation; it lacked the necessary respect a younger person must show towards his elders. It did not matter, however, for the old man had gone, swinging lithely down off the car even before the train had come to its full panting stop. Clouds of steam obscured the windows.

Nicholas came back down the aisle, slumped down in the seat next to Yukio. ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘Too late.’

Now the train picked up speed for the last part of the journey towards Shimonoseki. It was quiet in the car. Even Yukio was silent. She stared at her hands while he looked out of the window.

The night was aflame. They were passing fairly close to one or another of the southern cities - he had no idea which one -which had been turned into a supportive structure for a vast

oil refinery. Giant flames leaped and spewed into the darkness like the corona of the sun seen close up in a kind of silent hellish dance. It seemed an inhuman place to work or live, a desolate dreamscape from which there was no exit. It went on and on as they travelled, the lines of red and orange lights leading in inevitable precise rows towards the refinery’s main building bulking blackly against the skyline, the bloated billowing flames.

‘What did you think of the old man’s story?’ Yukio said.

He turned his head. ‘What?’

“The old man. Did you believe him?’

For some reason he thought of So-Peng. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’

‘I didn’t.’ She crossed her legs at the knees, very American. ‘Something like that couldn’t have happened. Life’s just not like that.’

They spent the night in Shimonoseki, so near the water that they could hear it though they could not see it for the thick ground fog. Horns hooted mournfully, deepened by the night air, made somehow mysterious.