To Jun’s delight, the Fox was sitting at the front of the room, and was clearly a central figure in the gathering. He studied the crowd in the room, observing the odd-looking bearded man who seemed to be in charge of proceedings, the matronly middle-aged women, the girls who looked little older than high-school students, and the sprinkling of men in their dark mackintoshes, which smelled of sweat and rain. Then he took his notebook out of his pocket and jotted down a few first impressions as he waited for something to happen.
CHAPTER 9
The bearded man called the room to attention, the hum of conversation subsided into silence, and a very small woman with iron-grey hair and a worn but gentle face took her place at the lectern — which had to be adjusted so that she could see over the top of it — and began to tell her life story. She described how she had grown up in the mountains of central Japan and gone to Manchuria as a nurse with the Imperial Army during the war. She was left behind there when the Empire collapsed and Japan’s military forces fled for home, and was captured by Chinese communists and taken deep into the countryside to work for them, training peasant women to be midwives. The experiences she recounted were dramatic, and there was a warmth and affection in the way she described the courage of the Chinese women she had worked with. But she seemed very shy, and spoke softly and hesitatingly, pausing repeatedly, as though weighing up what to say next. Elly had to strain her ears to catch the woman’s words.
The crowded room was growing hot, and Elly, to her embarrassment, found herself starting to nod off. A couple of times, she felt her head droop forward, and then instantly jolted upright with a start, trying to force her eyes to stay open. She glanced at her neighbours, wondering if they had noticed, but both seemed intent on the lecture. The student next to her was scribbling notes in a little green notebook. At one point, though, he glanced briefly sideways at Elly and their eyes met. He had, she thought, very troubled eyes.
The nurse finished her talk and sat down to applause, and then Vida and another woman stepped forward and began to take turns reading poetry, first in Chinese and then in Japanese translation. Vida’s voice, Elly noticed, was surprisingly low and musical. She recited with feeling, but without the dramatic pomposity that Elly had sometimes noticed in poetry or short-story readings on the wireless. There was something about her that attracted the eyes of the audience and created a silence in the room as she spoke.
At the end of the recitation, Vida introduced her favourite Chinese song, and then began to sing it in a slightly husky voice. Most of the women in the room seemed to know the song too, for, one by one, they took up the melody, until almost everyone in the room was singing along, except for Elly and the student sitting next to her, who remained as a silent as herself. Elly couldn’t understand the lyrics, but she found the haunting intervals of the Chinese music oddly moving, as though they touched some chord that she had heard in the distant past and long forgotten.
After the last notes of the song had died away, an hour’s lunch break was announced. The study circle was to gather again at 2 p.m. for a discussion session. This was the moment for Elly to make her escape. She squeezed past the student, slipped swiftly out of the door, and was halfway down the stairway before she heard a voice behind her calling her name.
‘Elly. Elly Ruskin. It is you, isn’t it?’
God damn it, thought Elly, echoing her mother’s favourite phrase. Vida must have spotted her face in the crowd, and now she was going to have to make polite conversation with the woman, and pretend that their encounter was a happy accident. She wanted to flee, but could hardly do so with any dignity, as Vida was already standing just above her on the stairs. She turned reluctantly, with feigned surprise.
‘Oh!’ Pause for dramatic effect. ‘Of course, you’re a friend of Ted Cornish’s, aren’t you? Sorry, I should have recognized you earlier.’ White lies, Mother had taught her, are the tools of survival in a complicated world.
‘This is wonderful!’ cried Vida, ‘What a perfect coincidence. You’re just the person I want to talk to. Are you going to get some lunch? Let’s go together.’
And before she could think of a suitable response, Elly found that Vida had seized her arm and was propelling her across the alleyway to a café on the corner.
‘I hope you don’t mind this place,’ said the poet. ‘They haven’t got much choice, but it’s one of my favourites.’
* * *
The decor inside the little café was startling. The walls at either end were covered with large mirrors, which produced the illusion of being in a narrow tunnel that stretched infinitely in both directions, while the long side wall was decorated with a mural vaguely inspired, Elly guessed, by Picasso. It showed a geometrically fragmented female form with giant breasts and two eyes on one side of her face, reclining among a landscape of classical ruins.
Elly and Vida sat facing each other across a long, narrow table. To avoid looking at the disconcertingly round pink breasts in the mural, Elly studied the menu, which offered a choice of rice omelette or clubhouse sandwiches. The place was empty when they first entered, but soon began to fill with customers and cigarette smoke.
Vida leaned across the table and took Elly’s hands in her own. ‘I am so happy to meet you again,’ she said.
Her body language was completely unconventional, and Elly felt uncertain how to respond. Vida’s face, she noticed, was perfectly oval, very pale and devoid of makeup. She had a warm smile and a disconcerting way of looking directly at you, as though you were the only thing in the room that mattered.
‘Well, this is unexpected,’ said Elly, hearing how stiff and artificial her own words sounded. ‘I think the last time we met was at Ted Cornish’s Halloween party.’
‘I do believe it was,’ laughed Vida, with a playful echo of Elly’s formality. ‘And I don’t think I ever gave you my name-card.’ She bent down to fish in her large tapestry handbag, and produced an elegant rice-paper card decorated in one corner with an ink-brush image of willow leaves.
‘Vida Vidanto. Poet and Esperantist. Pleased to make your acquaintance. And of course,’ she added with a slightly mischievous smile, ‘I know the question that you’ll want to ask next: Is that your real name? Right?’
Elly felt herself blushing. It was precisely what she’d been wondering, though she wouldn’t have had the nerve to put the question so bluntly herself.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Vida, ‘people are always asking me that. And my response is always the same: What is a real name? You had another name before you were Elly Ruskin, didn’t you? And I guess you’re Eri in Japanese and Elly in English, am I right?’ She struggled with the pronunciation of ‘Elly’, elongating the ‘l’.
‘You can choose,’ she went on. ‘Your real name is the name you want to be called by, the name that your true friends use. Vida Vidanto is a name created for me in Esperanto by a dear friend who shared my love of the language. As far as I’m concerned, that’s who I am. According to my family register, I’m Toko Kasumi, but no one in the Toko family thinks I deserve that name, and I don’t want it either.’
‘Esperanto?’ asked Elly slowly, staring at the name-card. ‘That’s one of those invented languages, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the language of humanity,’ replied Vida earnestly. ‘No one’s a native speaker, so all speakers are equal. If I try speaking Chinese with my Chinese friends, or Russian with my Russian friends, they instantly hear my Japanese accent, and see me as the enemy. But when we speak Esperanto together, we’re all brothers and sisters. Isn’t that just what we need in an age like this?’
The question seemed to be rhetorical. Personally, Elly thought that there were more important things to be doing in life than learning made-up languages, so she kept her response non-committal. ‘Of course, I remember Fergus mentioning you were in China during the war. I hear he’s been doing some interviews with you for his newspaper.’
‘Yes, there were a few of us expatriates in wartime China, you know. Poets, philo
sophers and similar riff-raff,’ Vida gave a self-deprecating grimace, ‘all of us appalled at what Japan was doing to our Chinese neighbours.’
‘I had no idea,’ said Elly. ‘We were always told that everyone in Japan believed in the war. Everyone was happy to die for the emperor, that’s what we heard. It was just us overseas half-castes who had doubts.’
‘Oh — half-castes. Don’t use that awful word!’ exclaimed Vida.
‘But it is what people call us. Anyway, now I do know that there were people in Japan who spent the war in gaol because they opposed the military — in fact, today it seems as though half the population would like you to believe they were secret pacifists. But I didn’t know there were people who actually went to China to work for the other side.’
But Vida, it seemed, had other things on her mind. She turned to chat with the elderly café owner, and then, when they had ordered their lunches, said rather abruptly, ‘You know Ted may be leaving Japan soon?’
Elly’s heart sank. ‘No. Why?’
She hadn’t realized until that moment how much her faith in Fergus depended on Ted Cornish’s presence. Ted was her bulwark, her insurance policy against the suspicions that she had been trying so hard to suppress for the past week. Even Fergus, who could sometimes be dismissive of bourgeois conventions, would surely think twice about getting too deeply involved with his old friend’s sweetheart — was that the right word to describe Vida? — while Ted himself was on the scene. But with Ted gone, what then?
‘It’s not certain yet,’ Vida replied. ‘But he’s expecting to hear for sure any day now. He’s been feeling more and more uncomfortable about the way things are going here. You know Ted. He’s one of those crazy dreamers. He honestly believed he was creating some kind of perfect democracy on a clean slate. A new Japan. Free elections. Votes for women. A beautiful constitution. Ted put his heart into that constitution — the couple of lines he was responsible for, at any rate.’
Their plates of food and cups of rather bitter black coffee arrived, but Vida seemed to have little interest in eating. She toyed with the food on her plate, dividing her rice omelette into ever smaller squares as she talked.
‘But of course, the slate never was clean. Maybe it never can be. The pushback had started before Ted and his friends even put ink to paper, and now half the things he achieved are being undone, and the other people in his section are starting to see him as — what’s the word? — a liability. Too left wing. Associating with a dangerous Red like me doesn’t help, of course.’ Vida laughed again, but rather uneasily. ‘Ted thinks his time here’s almost up.’
Elly’s sandwich was difficult to eat without making a mess, as parts of the filling slid out as soon as she lifted it to her mouth, but it was surprisingly tasty. The café owner had turned on a gramophone, and the sinuous notes of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ were drifting through the little room.
‘You aren’t going with him?’ asked Elly.
‘Oh no. I couldn’t go to the States. I haven’t even got a current passport, and I’m sure they’d refuse me a visa.’
How, Elly wondered, will she survive? Does she earn an income from her poetry? Or does she have some kind of private means? Vida might have been disowned by her family, but something about her manner and the way she spoke suggested to Elly that she came from a wealthy background.
‘I’m sure you’ll miss Ted very much when he leaves,’ she said.
‘Terribly,’ said Vida with a disarming smile. ‘Of course, all our friends think we’re an odd couple. To be honest, I never imagined I’d fall for someone like Ted. You know his father’s a district court judge? But there’s something about him, I don’t know . . . He’s kind. He’s got a good heart. There are a lot of things we don’t see eye to eye on — politics, for one — but I’ve never doubted his sincerity. He’s a genuine idealist. A bit like your Fergus.’
‘Fergus! An idealist?’ Elly was so taken aback that she almost choked on a mouthful of sandwich, and had to take a couple of sips of coffee before replying. ‘I’d say Fergus was a world-class cynic!’
‘No,’ said Vida firmly. ‘The cynicism is just his journalist’s manner. All newspaper men feel they need to put on that worldly-wise act. But at heart, I’m sure Fergus really does believe in things that matter — human rights, peace, loyalty to his friends. Don’t you think?’ But before Elly could reply, Vida continued, ‘That reminds me. This is what I really needed to talk to you about.’
She rummaged in her bag again and extracted a bulky brown envelope. ‘I promised to give this to Fergus when he interviewed me last week. Do you think you could give it to him for me? I’d rather do it this way than entrusting this to the post. He’ll know what it is. But please could you remind him not to lose it. I need these back as soon as he’s finished. It’s very important.’ Her expression was almost pleading.
Elly took the envelope in both hands and placed it on her lap, running her fingers around its contours. It was not stamped, but was already sealed. The contents were rectangular and firm. A slim book, perhaps? About the same size and shape as the little poetry book she had found in Fergus’ study, but less flexible. Maybe a hard-backed book. But Vida had said ‘these’. A bundle of something? Elly considered asking what was inside, but didn’t want to let her curiosity show, so simply said, ‘Of course. He’s still in Okinawa, you know, but he’ll be back on Wednesday. I’ll give this to him then, and pass on your message.’
Elly had almost finished her lunch. Vida had left most of hers untouched, but seemed oddly reluctant to bring the encounter to an end.
‘I hope you won’t mind my mentioning this,’ said the poet hesitatingly, ‘but I heard that you and Fergus are thinking of adopting a child.’
Elly stared at her, startled and annoyed. What business did Fergus have sharing their private life with this woman?
‘It’s just something we’re considering,’ she replied coldly. ‘There are still a lot of processes to go through. I’d rather not discuss it at this stage.’
Vida reached out again and gently touched Elly’s hand. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry, but I just wanted to say I think it’s a wonderful thing to do. I admire you for trying, and I hope it all goes really well. There are far too many unwanted children in the world today. That’s what war does, of course. Giving a real home, even to one child, makes a world of difference. If there’s anything I can do help, let me know. Or if . . .’ She seemed to be about to say something more, but her words trailed off uncertainly.
‘Thank you,’ said Elly, still uneasy and eager to end the conversation.
But Vida hadn’t finished. ‘Do you ever wonder how they’re going to survive, the next generation, now that we have such terrible weapons in the world? I’m afraid of another world war. An atomic world war. It could start again at any moment, and if it did, where would it all end? I’ve seen far too much war already, war for good causes, war for bad. Even the wars that start off being for good causes end up being atrocious. I couldn’t bear to live through it all over again. And we wouldn’t live through it, would we? Not with the weapons that they’ve got now. It would be the end of the world, literally. You must feel that too, I’m sure. Fergus told me you were in an internment camp in Australia during the war. You must have seen more than enough of war to last you a lifetime.’
‘Oh, I never saw the war,’ said Elly, remembering the haunting night-time silence and the vast unclouded skies of Tatura. ‘That was the thing about being locked up in a camp in the middle of nowhere. We were fed and clothed, and the war was just a disaster going on a million miles away. All we had to deal with was the boredom and the endless uncertainty. Trivial, really, compared with what other people were going through.’
She slipped the envelope into her handbag and retrieved her umbrella. ‘I would have liked to stay for the rest of the day’s events,’ she lied, ‘but I have things to do at home. I need to get going. Let me treat you to this lunch. It’s been good to have a chance to talk to you.�
��
Am I wrong to resent her? Elly wondered, as they competed to pay the bill before eventually agreeing to split it. Maybe there was nothing more to Vida’s relationship with Fergus than shared interests and mutual admiration. And yet . . . She couldn’t make sense of the woman. There was something in her manner that she found at once unsettling and oddly appealing.
As they left the café, Elly noticed for the first time that the two people who had been sitting on either side of her in the Lotus Bookshop were there too, eating their lunches at separate tables at the back, facing the mirror wall: the middle-aged woman and the sad-looking student. She could see multiple reflections of their faces and the backs of their heads, repeated alternately in the greenish glass of the mirror, growing smaller and smaller as they disappeared into infinity.
* * *
The envelope lay on the table in Elly’s living room. She had placed it there so that Fergus would see it as soon as he returned. Next to it stood the photograph of Maya in the children’s home, which she had propped up against a tea caddy with patriotic British images celebrating the phantom coronation of Edward VIII: another of Fergus’ whimsical gleanings from the flea markets.
She sat mending a split in the seam of Fergus’ trousers and listening to a music request programme on the wireless, looking up occasionally to see the dusk thickening outside, and the lights appearing in nearby houses. The music was interrupted now and again by messages from the US military about missing soldiers — ‘Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Private Albert Zubrinsky, absent from Camp Zama since Sunday morning . . .’ Where were they, she wondered idly, all these lost soldiers? Happily asleep in some bar or in the arms of a Japanese girlfriend, or in hiding, homesick and terrified of being sent to the Korean front? And what would happen to them when they were found?
THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Page 11
