One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Good,’ she says, turning from him and starting to walk again. ‘That’s settled, then.’

  The Snow Goose is on the Ginza, opposite the billiard parlour where they celebrated Junzo’s twenty-first birthday. On the front of the restaurant, on the frosted window, a flight of geese are picked out with pieces of golden glass. The doors are open. A doorman pulls back a curtain of red plush. It’s noisy inside, and busy. They have to sit for half an hour on a velvet sofa, then a waiter – a waiter with a blond moustache! – escorts them to a small round table by the wall. He pulls out the table for Alissa, pulls back Yuji’s chair. On the starched linen the cutlery glitters. In the skins of the wine glasses twenty different lights are trembling.

  ‘I already know what I’m having,’ says Alissa. ‘Its called a Wiener schnitzel. Have you ever had it?’

  ‘Is it new?’

  ‘It’s the speciality here. A bit like tonkatsu, though made with veal instead of pork. You should try it. It’s delicious. And we should have a bottle of wine, too – unless you would rather drink something else?’ She picks up the wine list, runs a varnished but unpainted fingernail down the page. ‘I think . . . I think Papa might choose this one. A white from Alsace.’

  ‘Alsace?’

  ‘They sometimes think they’re German but they’re French really. We don’t have to worry.’

  ‘Your father said that drinking wine was his duty now. His patriotic duty.’

  She nods. ‘He fought the last time,’ she says. ‘He was wounded twice, the second time’ – she touches her breast – ‘a piece of shrapnel just missed his heart. Anyway, there’s no one to fight yet. I mean, they haven’t actually invaded or anything.’

  ‘Perhaps it will stay like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it might. The truth is, I mean, between you and me. I worry more about what’s happening on this side of the world.’ She throws a glance to the end of the room where a dozen young officers are drinking together, a party Yuji has already noted, then carefully ignored, not wishing to lock eyes with some drunken lieutenant fresh from Shanghai or the Mongolian border. Other than the waiters the only men in the restaurant not in uniform are at least twenty years older than him.

  Alissa orders the wine, the food. She is quite at ease in the Snow Goose, the elaborate etiquette of the place, and when the waiter pours a splash of golden wine into Yuji’s glass she prompts him with her eyes.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, hurriedly swallowing, ‘it’s quite nice’ though he is perturbed that the wine does not really taste of grapes at all but has, instead, a somewhat surprising flavour of stones.

  The waiter fills their glasses, sinks the bottle into an ice bucket, puts the bucket on a tripod next to the table, and with a nod of his blond head, withdraws.

  ‘What shall we speak now,’ asks Alissa, ‘French, or Japanese?’

  ‘Why not French for the first half of the bottle, then Japanese for the rest?’

  She smiles, agrees, but having chosen a language, they sit in silence, looking at the points of their cutlery.

  ‘Say something,’ she says at last. ‘Tell me something.’

  ‘What shall I tell you?’

  ‘Anything you like. It doesn’t really matter.’

  ‘Tonight,’ he says, ‘I remembered going on an outing.’

  ‘Long ago?’

  ‘I was, perhaps, seven years old. I was with Mother.’

  ‘A happy memory?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘I don’t even know her name.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Noriko.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Kenji.’ He laughs. Somehow it seems amusing to say Father’s name here. Comically indelicate.

  ‘Papa’s is Emile.’

  He nods.

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘It was written inside one of his books.’

  ‘You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?’

  Yuji feels himself reddening. Bien aimer. Bien aimer quelqu’un. ‘He treats me, mm, almost as an equal? He does not assume that what I have to say will be wrong or foolish. He listens to me.’

  ‘He would have liked to have had a son, I think.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He could have shared more with a son.’

  ‘His business?’

  ‘That . . . and other things, too.’

  ‘My father,’ says Yuji, ‘is not in the habit of sharing things.’

  ‘It’s rude of me,’ she says, ‘and please don’t say anything if you’d rather not, but for a long time I’ve wanted to ask you what happened to your father. I know some of it, of course, but it’s all second or third hand, and that’s not much better than gossip. I mean, obviously he’s completely innocent. But I’d like to know what the facts are.’

  ‘The facts,’ says Yuji, ‘might not be as interesting as the gossip.’ He takes another mouthful of wine, can feel it starting to work in him, to loosen his tongue. He leans towards her a little, his hands folded on the linen. ‘When Father was in his thirties, he published a book, a very long and technical book, on democracy and the constitution. One section, just a few pages, was about the relationship’ – he drops his voice – ‘between the Emperor and the Diet. In Father’s analysis the Emperor is simply another organ of the State. The Diet should take account of his wishes but it is not bound to follow them. Its decisions would be those of a freely elected body. In this way, I think, Father hoped the Emperor could be protected from those elements who might use his authority to justify extreme actions. The book was only read by a few specialists, people like Father. And the atmosphere was quite different then. The criticism didn’t start until after the coup attempt in ’36. They said he was tainted with Anglo-Saxon ideas, that he had failed to recognise the uniqueness of the Japanese situation, that he was a pacifist. I don’t think he took the charges very seriously. He used to tell us they were a symptom of the times and would cease as the times changed. I suppose you could say he misread history, even that he suffered from a certain arrogance.’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t say that. I would say he was principled and courageous.’

  ‘At the university he became a target for groups like the Black Dragons. His lectures were broken up, his office was ransacked. In the end almost no one would risk speaking up for him. He resigned to protect us, to protect his colleagues. He received no pension, though I suspect he would not have accepted one even if it had been offered.’

  ‘There was nothing he could do? Nobody he could appeal to?’

  ‘It’s been worse for others,’ says Yuji. ‘And I, of course, had no position to lose.’

  Their food arrives on big white plates, each plate with its piece of breaded meat crowned with a quartered lemon. In the centre of the table the waiter sets a silver dish of fried potatoes, a bowl of steamed rice. ‘Bon appetit,’ he says, a quick smile at Alissa.

  ‘And your father,’ says Yuji, nervous she will want to go on speaking about his own, that he will be tempted, in this public place, into indiscretions, ‘does he often stay in Yokohama?’

  She shrugs. ‘Once or twice a month. We lived there, remember, when we first came to Japan. We still have friends there . . . Miss Ogilvy, for example.’

  ‘Miss Ogilvy?’

  ‘An American. Actually, we knew her in Saigon. She has a house on the Bluff, with lots of cats.’

  ‘I only know Americans from the films,’ says Yuji.

  ‘I don’t think she’s a typical American. I don’t think she’s a typical anything.’

  ‘But your father stays in her house?’

  ‘Sometimes. He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going and I don’t always ask. We prefer it like that.’

  She forks her lemon, twists the juice from it. They start to eat. To Yuji, though he has used Western cutlery before, the knife and fork feel almost unusably heavy, unusably large, more like weaponry than implements for feeding himself
, but the food is good and he eats it gratefully.

  ‘You must,’ says Alissa, pouring wine for them both and taking them into the Japanese half of the bottle, ‘have wondered about my mother.’

  ‘I have,’ says Yuji, though this is not exactly true. He has simply assumed that Madame Feneon belongs among the distant dead. There are no pictures of her in the parts of the house he has been in, no fond mementos.

  ‘It’s not a secret,’ says Alissa. ‘At least, there’s no reason for it to be. Certainly there’s nothing I need to be ashamed of.’

  He nods vigorously, suddenly convinced she is about to tell him that the mysterious Miss Ogilvy is her mother. Instead, with a studied nonchalance, she says that she has never met her mother.

  ‘I mean, I must have glimpsed her in the moments after I was born. At least, I suppose I did, though naturally I can’t remember any of that. Does that count as meeting somebody?’

  ‘It could, I suppose.’

  ‘She wasn’t married to Papa or anything like that. She was a sort of companion of his, in Saigon. Probably they met at a dance or something, I don’t really know. There were always lots of parties. Anyway, one day she disappeared. No letter, no forwarding address. Just vanished. Seven months later an old woman came to the house carrying a basket with a baby inside. She gave the baby to one of the servants, a girl called Songlian. She said it was Suzette’s – that was my mother’s name – but that Suzette couldn’t look after it. Papa tried everything to find her of course, but he couldn’t even find the old woman. I stayed with Songlian. I slept with her in the servants’ quarters, was fed by her. One night, in the middle of the night, Papa came and sat beside us. He fanned me with his hat, watched me sleeping.’ She smiles. ‘He says he fell in love with me then and decided he would raise me, openly, as his daughter, though it wasn’t quite as easy as that. All sorts of people made their disapproval clear, the club people, the church people, but Saigon isn’t like here. It’s more chaotic, freer. Here, it would probably have been impossible.’

  ‘When you were little,’ says Yuji, struggling to make sense of her story, ‘you must have thought the servant was your mother.’

  ‘Don’t they say a duckling will follow whatever it sees first, even if it’s a dog or a monkey or the farmer’s wife? Later I realised there was something strange about it, though when I asked questions – I spoke good Cantonese by the time I was three – Songlian would only say, “Speak to Papa,” and when I asked him, it was always, “When you’re older.” I was eleven before he told me all this. He sat me down in the kitchen one night, cooked me oeufs en cocotte and poured me my first glass of wine.’

  ‘You were shocked?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. And Papa made it sound as though I was a little girl in a fairy tale, you know, arriving in a basket carried by an old woman who was obviously a sort of good witch. But later I went through a time of wanting, very desperately, to see her, Suzette, I mean. I would look at the women in the market, the ones with children my age, wonder if one of them was her, if she would look up and somehow recognise me. When we came to Japan, of course, that stopped. It was a relief, really . . .’

  ‘And she was French?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘Not, perhaps, in quite the way Papa is.’

  ‘No?’ He waits.

  ‘I have never,’ she says, ‘seen a photograph of her. I don’t think there is one. Papa tells me she was very pretty, that she was tall, that she was a good dancer. My mirror tells me she was also probably mixed race. Don’t you think so?’

  She looks at him, her eyes wide with some mute appeal, some silent defiance, and for several seconds they stare at each other until Yuji drops his gaze to his glass. Is this the answer to the riddle of Alissa Feneon? A mixed-race girl? Cautiously, he raises his eyes again. She has turned a little in her seat, turned away as though to make it easier for him to study her. And suddenly he believes he can see it, as though over the bones of her skull she is wearing a score of faces, tissue-thin, and one of these – not the top or the one below or the one below that – but one of them is a face out of the East, an intrusion.

  ‘I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell the others,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if it’s important or anything.’

  ‘No,’ says Yuji, manoeuvring the remains of his Wiener schnitzel to the edge of his plate. ‘No.’

  At the end of the room, the young officers have started to sing. Just two or three at first, but soon the others join in and all of them beat time with their glasses. A glass shatters. Alissa asks Yuji to call for the bill. When it comes (on a little silver salver) she pays with a note from the purse she keeps inside a fold of her obi.

  The waiter brings them their coats, helps Alissa into hers. ‘Vous êtes Française?’ he asks.

  ‘De Saigon,’ she says. ‘Et vous?’

  ‘Genève.’ He grins at her, the permitted intimacy of a fellow foreigner, then nods to Yuji, holds back the red plush curtain and they leave the Snow Goose with a chorus of ‘Oh! Our Manchuria!‘ ringing in their ears.

  On the pavements of the Ginza, the mild air has brought out an evening crowd of strolling couples, office workers, street hawkers, mobile fortune-tellers. Outside a drinking shop (a place that used to be known as the Lenin), the doorman claps his hands for business, while across the street a gang of students are ragging each other noisily in the neon shadows of the billiard parlour.

  Yuji has his usual trouble with the taxis, losing out to people who flagged them more aggressively or who, the moment they saw one approaching, sprinted recklessly into the middle of the road. When, at last, he succeeds in stopping one, he takes his place in the back beside Alissa. She gives the driver the address of the house in Kanda. From there – or so he assumes – he will collect his bicycle, make some remarks about how enjoyable the evening has been, about seeing each other at the next meeting of the club, then wave to her and ride home. But when they step down from the taxi and the taxi leaves, she tells him she has something she would like him to see. Would he mind coming inside for a few minutes?

  Hanako, who does not live at the house, has long since left. Alissa uses her own key to open the door. In the salon, Beatrice snorts, shakes with excitement. Alissa put on a side-lamp, drapes her coat over the back of the sofa, excuses herself. Yuji waits by the piano. He lifts the lid and touches, but does not depress, a white key at the bass end of the keyboard, then closing the lid, he walks to the half-open door of Feneon’s study.

  Through the unshuttered window, moonlight picks out a pattern in the rug and lacquers the familiar edges of things – the bookshelves, the Buddha, the metal lock of the projector box. He glances over his shoulder, then steps inside, performs a quick circuit of the room, swivels the swivel-chair, and made bold by the dark, sits in the chair, resting his palms presidentially on the desk’s broad surface, the thumb-deep slab of bolted mahogany, and decides that the West’s ascendancy – that dominance the generals and admirals seem so personally humiliated by – comes, in part, from the solidity of the objects they surround themselves with, while the Japanese live among what is fragile and evanescent, in homes any man in a moderate rage could pull apart with his bare hands. Would they really, one day, have to fight these pragmatists who long ago put their faith in iron and steel and high explosives? What is this inevitability everyone seems to have agreed to believe in? This urge to lie down together in the fire?

  When he hears Alissa, he moves hurriedly away the desk, from the impertinence of sitting where only Emile Feneon should sit. She pauses in the doorway, and before he can apologise to her, she says, ‘I love the smell in here. Don’t you? I’d like to have it in a little bottle so I could take it with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Go? Where would you go?’

  She shrugs. ‘Nowhere unless we have to.’

  ‘But your father has discussed it with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘You must have assum
ed it.’

  ‘You want to go to France?’

  ‘It’s far too late for that, don’t you think? Back to Saigon. Perhaps Hong Kong. As I said, we won’t go anywhere unless we have to. Japan is my home.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he says, ‘there will be no need for you to leave. I’m sure . . .’ He tries to think of some phrase, in Japanese or French, that will reassure her, but she says, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ And then, ‘Were you looking for something in here?’

  ‘What would I be looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know. The letter perhaps?’

  With the light behind her he cannot see her expression, but he recognises the tone of voice, the streak of silent amusement in it. ‘It would,’ he says stiffly, ‘be unforgivable. It would—’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But is it here?’

  She laughs. ‘Probably. Though it would take us all night to find it. It might even be in the attic. There are boxes and boxes up there.’

  ‘You’ve really read it?’

  ‘Years ago.’

  ‘And you remember nothing about it?’

  ‘He’s your hero,’ she says, ‘not mine. I prefer Hitomaro.’

  ‘Hitomaro!’

  “‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death. Now when the child whom she left in her memory cries and begs for her, all I can do is lift him and embrace him clumsily.” Isn’t it beautiful? But I was going to show you something,’ she says, ‘unless you’d rather stay here and start looking through the desk drawers?’

  He follows her out of the study, then through the salon to the bottom of the stairs. He has never been to the top of the house before, nor, as far as he knows, has any other member of the club. Upstairs was ‘interdit aux élèves’, and though he has been curious about it, has on occasion exercised his imagination on it, he has been content it should remain so, a place apart, a sanctum where the kami sleeps.

  Beatrice patters behind them. Alissa sends her back to the salon, then leads Yuji up to the landing, a narrow carpeted corridor where two windows look over the road. On the walls between the windows there are paintings, watery landscapes, a view of a town with tightly winding grey-stone streets.