The Sound of the Mountain (18 page)

‘I don’t mean hair tied up. I mean hair cut off.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. We both have too much hair.’

‘Kikuko is up and around?’ he asked in a low voice.

‘She’s been having a try at it. She doesn’t look at all well.’

‘She shouldn’t be taking care of the baby.’

‘Take care of her for a minute, please, Fusako said, and dumped her by Kikuko’s bed. The baby was sound asleep.’

‘Why didn’t you take her?’

‘I was washing my hair when she started crying.’ Yasuko went for his kimono. ‘I wondered if something might be wrong with you, too, you got home so early.’

Shingo called to Kikuko, who seemed to be going from the bath to her room.

‘Yes?’

‘Bring Kuniko in here.’

‘We’ll be there in a minute.’

Her hand in Kikuko’s, Kuniko was having a walk. Kikuko had put on a more formal obi.

Kuniko clutched at Yasuko’s shoulder. Yasuko, who was brushing Shingo’s trousers, took the baby on her knee.

Kikuko went off with Shingo’s suit.

Having put it away in the next room, she slowly closed the doors of the wardrobe.

She seemed taken aback by her face in the wardrobe mirror, and she wavered between going to her room and returning to the breakfast room.

‘Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?’ said Shingo.

‘Yes.’ A spasm passed across Kikuko’s shoulders. She went off to her room without looking back.

‘Doesn’t she seem strange to you?’ Yasuko frowned.

Shingo did not answer.

‘And it’s not at all clear what’s the matter. She gets up and walks around, and then starts breaking down again. I’m very worried.’

‘So am I.’

‘You have to do something about Shuichi and that affair of his.’

Shingo nodded.

‘Suppose you have a good talk with Kikuko. I’ll take the baby out to Fusako and while I’m about it do some shopping for dinner. That Fusako – she’s another one.’

Yasuko got up, the baby in her arms.

‘What business does she have at the post office?’

Yasuko looked back. ‘I wondered myself. Do you suppose she’s written to Aihara? They’ve been separated for six months. It’s almost six months since she came back. It was New Year’s Eve.’

‘If it was just a letter she could have put it in the mailbox down the street.’

‘I imagine she thinks it will be quicker and safer if she sends it from the post office. Maybe the thought of Aihara comes into her head and she can’t sit still a minute.’

Shingo smiled wryly. He sensed optimism in Yasuko.

It would seem that optimism put down deep roots in a woman who had been given charge of a household on into old age.

He took up the heap of newspapers, four or five days’ worth of them, that Yasuko had been reading. Though he was not really interested, his eye fell on a remarkable headline: ‘Lotus in Bloom, Two Thousand Years Old.’

The spring before, in the course of a Yayoi excavation in the Kemigawa district of Chiba, three lotus seeds had been found in a dugout canoe. They were judged to be two thousand years old. A certain ‘doctor of lotuses’ succeeded in making them sprout, and in April of this year the shoots were planted in three places, the Chiba Agricultural Experimental Station, the pond of a Chiba park, and the house of a sake brewer in Hatake-machi, Chiba. The brewer apparently had been among the sponsors of the excavation. He had put his shoot in a water cauldron and set it out in the garden, and his was the first to bloom. The lotus doctor rushed to the spot upon hearing the news. ‘It’s in bloom, it’s in bloom,’ he said, stroking the handsome flower. It would go from the ‘vase shape’ to the ‘cup shape’ to the ‘bowl shape’, the newspaper reported, and finally, at the ‘tray shape’, shed its petals. There were twenty-four petals, it was further reported.

Below the article was a picture of the bespectacled, apparently graying doctor, the stem of the opening lotus in his hand. Glancing back over the article, Shingo saw that he was sixty-nine.

Shingo looked for a time at the photograph of the lotus, then took the paper into Kikuko’s room.

It was her room and Shuichi’s. On the desk, which was part of her dowry, lay Shuichi’s felt hat. There was stationery beside it – perhaps she thought of writing to someone. A piece of embroidery hung over the drawer.

He seemed to catch the scent of perfume.

‘How are you? You shouldn’t be jumping out of bed all the time.’ He sat down by the desk.

Opening her eyes, she gazed at him. She seemed embarrassed that he should have ordered her to stay in bed. Her cheeks were faintly flushed. Her forehead was a wan white, however, and her eyebrows stood out cleanly.

‘Did you see in the paper that a lotus two thousand years old has come into bloom?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, you did,’ he muttered. ‘If you had only told us, you wouldn’t have had to overdo it. You shouldn’t have come back the same day.’

Kikuko looked up in surprise.

‘It was last month, wasn’t it, that we talked about a baby? I suppose you already knew.’

Kikuko shook her head. ‘No. If I had known, I would have been too embarrassed to say anything.’

‘Oh? Shuichi said it was squeamishness.’ Seeing tears in her eyes, he dropped the subject. ‘You won’t have to go to the doctor again?’

‘I’ll look in on him tomorrow.’

When he came back from work the next day, Yasuko was waiting impatiently.

‘Kikuko’s gone back to her family. They say she’s in bed. There was a call from the Sagaras, it must have been at about two. Fusako took it. They said that Kikuko had come by and wasn’t feeling well, and had gone to bed, and they wondered if they might let her stay and rest for two or three days.’

‘Oh?’

‘I told Fusako to say we’d send Shuichi around tomorrow. It was Kikuko’s mother, Fusako said. Do you suppose Kikuko went to Tokyo especially for that?’

‘No.’

‘What can be the matter with her?’

Shingo had taken off his coat and, lifting his chin, was slowly untying his tie.

‘She had an abortion.’

‘What!’ Yasuko was stunned. ‘Without telling us? Kikuko could do that? People these days are too much for me.’

‘You’re very unobservant, Mother,’ said Fusako, coming into the breakfast room with Kuniko in her arms. ‘I knew all about it.’

‘And how did you know?’ The question came of its own accord.

‘That I can hardly tell you. But there’s cleaning up afterwards, you know.’

Shingo could think of nothing more to say.

‘Father is a very interesting man, isn’t he, Mother?’ said Fusako, noisily loading the dinner dishes onto a tray. ‘He’s more reserved with his daughter than with the girl who came in from outside.’

‘Please, Fusako.’

‘But it’s true. If the spinach was overdone, why didn’t he come out and say so? It wasn’t as if I’d cooked it to a pulp. You could still see the shape of spinach. Maybe he should have it done in a hot spring.’

‘A hot spring?’

‘They cook eggs and dumplings in hot springs, don’t they? I remember you once gave me something called radium eggs, from somewhere or other, with the whites hard and the yolks soft. And didn’t you say they could cook a fine egg at the Squash House in Kyoto?’

‘Squash House?’

‘Oh, the Gourd House. Every beggar knows that much. I’m just saying you can squash your ideas about good and bad cooking for all the difference they make to me.’

Yasuko laughed.

But Fusako went on unsmiling. ‘If he takes it to a radium spring and watches the time and the temperature very, very closely, he’ll be as healthy as Popeye, even without Kikuko to look after him. Myself, I’ve had enough of all this moping.’ Pushing herself up from her knees, she went off with the heavy tray. ‘Dinner doesn’t seem to taste the same without a handsome son and a beautiful daughter-in-law.’

Shingo looked up. His eyes met Yasuko’s. ‘She does talk.’

‘Yes. She’s been holding back both the talk and the tears because of Kikuko.’

‘You can’t keep children from crying,’ muttered Shingo.

His mouth was slightly open, as if he meant to say more, but Fusako, staggering off toward the kitchen, spoke first. ‘It’s not the children. It’s me. Of course children cry.’

They heard her flinging dishes into the sink.

Yasuko half stood up. They heard sniffling in the kitchen.

Rolling her eyes up at Yasuko, Satoko ran off after her mother.

A most unpleasing expression, thought Shingo.

Yasuko put Kuniko on Shingo’s knee. ‘Watch her for a minute,’ she said, following them to the kitchen.

The baby was soft in his arms. He pulled her close to him. He took her feet in his hand. The hollow of the ankles and the swelling of the calves were also in his hand.

‘Does it tickle?’ But Kuniko evidently did not think so.

It seemed to Shingo that when Fusako, still a babe in arms, had lain naked, having a change of clothes, and he had tickled her armpits, she had wrinkled her nose and waved her arms at him, but he could not really remember.

Shingo had seldom spoken of what a homely baby she was. To speak of the matter would have been to bring back the image of Yasuko’s beautiful sister.

His hope that Fusako would change faces several times before she grew up had not been realized, and the hope itself had faded with the years.

His granddaughter Satoko seemed somewhat better favored than her mother, and there was hope for the baby.

Was he searching for the image of Yasuko’s sister even in his grandchildren? The thought made Shingo dislike himself.

And even while disliking himself, he was lost in fantasy: would not the child Kikuko had done away with, his lost grandchild, have been Yasuko’s sister, reborn, was she not a beauty refused life in this world? He was even more dissatisfied with himself.

As he loosened his grip on her feet, Kuniko climbed from his knee and started off toward the kitchen. Her arms were bent in front of her, and her legs were unsteady.

‘You’ll fall,’ said Shingo. But the baby had already fallen.

She fell forward and rolled to her side, and for a time did not cry.

The four of them came back into the breakfast room, Satoko clinging to Fusako’s sleeve, Yasuko with Kuniko in her arms.

‘Father is very absent-minded these days, Mother,’ said Fusako, wiping the table. ‘When he was changing clothes this evening, he was quite a sight. He was starting to put on an obi, and he had his kimono and
juban
^*
with the right side pulled over the left. Can you imagine it? I don’t suppose he’s ever done that before. He must be getting senile.’

‘I did it once before. I had the right side over the left, and Kikuko said that in Okinawa it didn’t matter whether you had the left side or the right side over.’

‘In Okinawa? I wonder if that’s true.’

Fusako was scowling again. ‘Kikuko knows how to please you. That was very clever of her. In Okinawa, was it?’

Shingo controlled his irritation. ‘The word
juban
comes from Portuguese. I don’t know whether they wear the left or the right side on top in Portugal.’

‘Another piece of information from Kikuko?’

Yasuko sought to intercede. ‘Father is always putting on summer kimonos inside out.’

‘There is a difference between accidentally putting a kimono on inside out and standing there like a fool bringing the right side over the left.’

‘Let Kuniko have a try at putting on a kimono. You can’t be sure which side will come out in front.’

‘It’s early for second childhood, Father,’ said Fusako, unflagging. ‘Isn’t it a little too much, Mother? So his daughter-in-law does go home for a day or two, that’s no excuse for losing track of which side of his kimono goes in front. Hasn’t it been six months now since his own daughter came home to Mother?’

It was true: six months had passed since that rainy New Year’s Eve. There had been no word from her husband, Aihara, nor had Shingo seen Aihara.

‘Six months,’ nodded Yasuko. ‘Not that there’s any relation between that and Kikuko.’

‘No relation? I think both have some relation to Father.’

‘You
are
his children. It would be nice if he could find an answer.’

Fusako looked down in silence.

‘All right, Fusako, now is your chance. Come out with everything. Say what you have to say. You’ll feel better. Kikuko is away.’

‘I was wrong, and I’m not going to complain. But I should think you could eat it even if it didn’t come from Kikuko’s hands.’ Fusako was weeping again. ‘Isn’t it the truth? You sit there grimly forcing it down. I’m not happy myself.’

‘Fusako. You must have all sorts of things to say. When you went to the post office the other day – I imagine it was to mail a letter to Aihara?’

A tremor seemed to pass over Fusako, but she shook her head.

‘I decided it had to be Aihara, because I couldn’t think of anyone else you’d have any reason to write to.’ Yasuko’s voice was not often so sharp. ‘Did you send money?’

So Yasuko had been giving Fusako money.

‘Where is Aihara?’ Shingo looked at Fusako, waiting for an answer. ‘He doesn’t seem to be at home. I’ve been sending someone around from the office once a month or so to have a look at the place. No, not that so much, really, as to give a little money to his mother. If you were there you might be the one to take care of her.’

Yasuko sat open-mouthed. ‘You send someone from the office?’

‘Don’t worry. He’s someone you can depend on. Someone who doesn’t give away secrets or ask questions. If Aihara were there I’d go and talk your problem over, but there’s no point in talking to a lame old woman.’

‘What is Aihara doing?’

‘Peddling drugs or something of the sort, it would seem. I imagine he was being used to peddle the stuff, and he moved from drink to drugs.’

Yasuko gazed at him in fright. It seemed possible that she was less frightened by the matter of Aihara than by her own husband, who had kept his secret so long.

Shingo went on. ‘But now it seems that the old woman isn’t there either. Someone else is in the place. In other words, Fusako no longer has a house.’