They had in common an ailment which they wished no one else to know of: old age. Everyone wants to talk about his ailments, and it was clever of them to have found the right listeners. What made them a little different from most couples was that Keiko felt no need for dissimulation or youthful airs.
Fussiness, bias, hostility toward youth, excessive attention to detail, fear of death, indiscriminate irritability, these things Honda and Keiko found in each other, but not in themselves. And when it came to obstinacy, each was provided with a stock that quite balanced the other’s.
They were very tolerant of young women and very intolerant of young men. They loved to complain about the young, and the Zengakuren and the hippies did not escape their lances. Smooth skins, rich black hair, a dreamy, bemused look, all of these were anathema, because attributes of the young. It is a sin for a man to be young, said Keiko, and Honda was pleased.
If old age was the reality most unpleasant to have to accept and most continuously to be lived with, then Honda and Keiko had each made the other a refuge from the reality. Their intimacy was not juxtaposition but a brushing past in the rush for a refuge. They exchanged empty houses and hurried to lock the doors behind them. Alone inside the other, each of them would breathe easily.
Keiko thought of her friendship with Honda as faithful adherence to Rié’s last testament. As she lay dying, Rié had taken Keiko’s hand and beseeched her to look after Honda. She thus saw to her husband’s future in the most sagacious manner.
One fruit of the union had been a trip to Europe the year before. Keiko became a substitute for Rié, who had obstinately refused to go. Rié had loathed the thought of travel abroad and, each time he had suggested it, had asked Keiko to go in her place. She knew perfectly well that her husband did not like to travel with her.
In the winter Honda and Keiko went to Venice and Bologna. The cold was a bit trying, but they found the quiet and decay of hibernal Venice enormously to their liking. There were no tourists, the freezing gondoliers had no business, bridges would emerge one after another like ashes of ruined dreams. In Venice was the end at its most beautiful, beauty being gnawed to a skeleton by sea and factory. Honda caught cold and ran a high fever. The swiftness with which Keiko found a doctor who could speak English, the thoroughness of her ministrations, made Honda see that a companion in old age is a necessity.
On the morning his fever abated, his gratitude found expression in boyish embarrassment. “All this gentleness and maternal affection. I can see why the girls love you.”
“The two are not the same at all.” In fine spirits, Keiko feigned anger. “I am only kind to friends. To be liked by women I have to be cruel. If the girl I liked best were running a fever like this, I’d have to throw over all my worries and run out on her. I’d rather die than have the sort of arrangement most of them do, living together as if they were husband and wife and taking care of each other in old age. There are plenty of haunted houses where mannish women are living with shrinking maidens of dreadful fidelity. Mushrooms grow in the dampness and that is what they feed on, and they spin soft cobwebs and sleep in them in each other’s arms. The mannish woman is always a worker, and so there they are cheek to cheek, figuring out their taxes. No, it’s not the sort of romance I want to be part of.”
Thanks to the ugliness of masculine old age, Honda was an amply qualified sacrifice to this dauntless resolution. Such are the unexpected blessings of old age.
By way of recompense, perhaps, Keiko poked fun at Honda because he carried with him a small wooden cenotaph in Rié’s memory. He had kept it secret; but when his fever went over a hundred he began leaving final instructions, sure that he was in the last throes of pneumonia. One was that she take the cenotaph back to Japan.
“That sort of love makes a person’s flesh crawl,” said Keiko, not at all gently. “She didn’t want to come, and so you dragged her along against her will.”
On the morning of his recovery Honda found the clear sky pleasant, and the tongue-lashing an added pleasure.
It was not clear to him, even after Keiko’s ungentle remarks, what he was asking of Rié. She had been a chaste wife to the end, of that he had no doubt; but there were thorns in all the hollows and on all the corners of the chastity. The sterile Rié made always manifest the reservations Honda himself had about humanity. His unhappiness she made her happiness, and she immediately saw what was behind an occasional show of gentleness and affection. Even farmers were taking their wives abroad these days. Given Honda’s affluence, his proposal was a very modest one. Her refusal was extraordinarily stubborn. Sometimes she even shouted at him.
“What are London and Venice and Paris to me? I’m an old woman, and what do you expect me to get out of it, being dragged around to places like that?”
A young Honda would probably have been put off by such brusqueness; but the old Honda wondered whether his proposal to take his wife abroad had really had in it any sort of affectionate solicitude at all. Rié had become accustomed to look with suspicion upon evidences of affection, and Honda had fallen into a similar habit. Perhaps his travel plans had embodied an urge to play the role of the virtuous husband. Making everything its opposite, making his wife’s resistance into womanly diffidence, her coldness into concealed ardor, he had sought evidence of his own benevolence. And perhaps he wanted to turn the whole voyage into a celebration marking the passage of some stage or other in life. Rié immediately picked out the vulgar motives behind his fabricated benevolence. She pleaded illness, and presently the averred illness became real. She drove herself into physical pain. Travel was out of the question.
Bringing the cenotaph with him was a post-mortem tribute to her honesty. If Rié had seen her husband tucking the cenotaph into his briefcase (the premise was of course a contradiction), how derisively she would have laughed! Today all manner of sentimental affection was permitted to Honda. And the one who permitted it was the new Rié.
On the night of their return to Rome, as if by way of compensation for her services in Venice, Keiko brought to their suite in the Hotel Excelsior a beautiful Sicilian girl she had picked up on the Via Veneto, near the hotel. The two enjoyed themselves the whole night through in Honda’s presence.
Later Keiko said: “Your coughing was wonderful. You weren’t entirely over your cold. You coughed all night, the strangest sort of coughing. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was listening to that funny old cough while I had that marble body to enjoy in the next bed. It was background music better than the best I could have bought. I felt as if I were doing something or other, I don’t quite know what, in a fine, luxurious tomb.”
“You were listening to the skeleton.”
“That’s it. I was between life and death. Their intermediary. But you’re not to say that you weren’t having a good time yourself.” Keiko was quite aware that Honda had come over and felt the girl’s foot.
In the course of the trip Keiko taught Honda how to play cards. Upon their return she invited him to a canasta party. After lunch four tables were put up in the parlor.
With Honda were Keiko and two White Russian women. One was old and the other a portly person in her fifties. It was a gloomy, rainy afternoon. Honda could not understand why Keiko, who was so fond of young girls, should invite only old and aging women to these parties. There were only two men besides Honda, a retired businessman and an elderly teacher of flower-arranging.
The Russian women had been in Japan for several decades; and it was a source of surprise to Honda that their only Japanese consisted of vulgar pidgin uttered in very loud voices. They sat down to cards immediately after lunch. The Russians promptly retouched their faces with rouge and lipstick.
Since the death of their husbands, also White Russians, they had continued to operate a family enterprise manufacturing foreign cosmetics. They were very niggardly, but they did not mind spending money on themselves. Taken with persistent diarrhea on a trip to Osaka and wanting to avoid the embarrassment of countless trips to the lavatory on the way back, they had chartered a plane, and on their return to Tokyo been taken to a hospital where they were known.
The old woman, her hair dyed brown, was wearing a turquoise pullover and a spangled cardigan, and her pearl necklace was too heavy. She was bent, but the fingers that took up the compact and lipstick were still powerful, so powerful that the wrinkled lower lip was pulled to one side. She was a fierce battler at the canasta table.
Her favorite subject was death. Her last canasta party, she was sure. By the next one she would be dead. She would await protests when she had made her declaration.
The intricate design of the cards scattered over Italian parquetry quite dazzled the eye; and on her powerful finger an amber-colored cat’s eye bobbed over the lacquer faces like a fisherman’s float. Crimson fingertips on splotched hands like the belly of a shark that had been stranded for some days on a beach rapped nervously at the table.
With a graceful fanning of cards, Keiko expertly shuffled the two decks. The decks were left face down after each player had received eleven cards, and a single card was left face up beside them. It was the three of diamonds, a sort of lunatic freshness in its red. Honda caught his breath. He saw three moles, stained in blood.
The special sounds of a card game: laughter as of a table fountain, sighs, little cries of astonishment. It was a zone where there need be no inhibitions in such matters as chuckling, uncertainty and unease, the craftiness of old age. It was like night in a zoo of emotions. Cries and laughter came from all the pens and all the cages.
“It’s your turn.”
“No, it’s yours.”
“Doesn’t anyone have a canasta yet?”
“But I’ll be scolded if I play out of turn.”
“She’s a very good dancer. Go-go too.”
“I’ve never been to a go-go hall.”
“I have. Just once. Like an insane asylum. Have a look at an African dance some time. It’s the same thing.”
“I like to tango.”
“I like the old dances.”
“The waltz and the tango.”
“The old dances are so graceful. These new ones are like spooks. The men and the women all dressed the same. And the colors. Like a nicky—you say?”
“A nicky?”
“You know. All sorts of colors in the sky.”
“Oh, a
niji.
A rainbow.”
“Yes. A
niji
, that’s what it’s like. Men and women, all sorts of colors.”
“But a rainbow is beautiful.”
“Rainbows will soon be animals too, at this rate. Rainbow animals.”
“Rainbow animals.”
“I haven’t much longer. I want just one more canasta before I die. That’s all I want, my very last wish. My last canasta, Mrs. Hisamatsu.”
“Don’t say it again, Galina.”
This curious exchange made Honda, whose hand came to nothing at all, think of waking up in the morning.
What he had seen first each morning since turning seventy was the face of death. Sensing the arrival of dawn in the faint light at the paper doors, he would be awakened by a strangling accumulation of mucus. During the night mucus accumulated into a red-black mass and nurtured its own nightmarish stiffness. Someday someone would perform for him the service of taking it between chopsticks and cleanly lifting it away.
The lump of mucus, like bêche-de-mer, would inform Honda afresh each morning that he was still alive. And with the awareness of life it would bring a fear of death.
Honda was in the habit of giving himself over to a flow of dreams each morning. Like a cow, he would ruminate.
The dreams were bright and sparkling, much fuller of the happiness of life than life itself. Gradually dreams of boyhood and youth came to predominate. In a dream he would taste the hotcakes his mother had made one snowy morning.
Why should a meaningless little episode be so insistent? No doubt precisely because it was a meaningless little episode remembered hundreds of times over a half century. Honda could not himself understand the hold on his memory.
The last traces of the old breakfast room had probably disappeared, so often had the Hongō house been rebuilt. A fifth-year student in the secondary course at Peers, Honda had on his return from school—it would have been a Saturday—gone with a friend to call at a faculty house, and so proceeded homeward, hungry and without an umbrella.
He usually came in through the kitchen door, but today he went around to look at the snow in the garden. The matting to protect the pines from the winter cold was flecked with white. The stone lanterns were capped with white brocade. His shoes squeaking across the snow, he caught a distant glimpse of his mother’s skirt at the knee-high window of the breakfast room. He was at home.
“You must be hungry. Come on in, but brush the snow off first.”
His mother pulled her kimono tight together. Taking off his coat, Honda slipped into the
kotatsu
. As if she were trying to remember something, his mother blew on the embers. She brushed a wisp of hair up away from the ashes.