One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And the girl, the one who’s going to be walking around in fleece-lined boots, what about her?’

  ‘She will leave.’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘Japan.’

  ‘With the kid? Em . . . ?’

  ‘Emile. Yes.’

  ‘Where will they go?’ He holds up a hand. ‘No. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business.’ He grimaces. ‘If you’re asking for advice . . .’

  ‘I’m not asking for advice,’ says Yuji. ‘I know there’s nothing anyone can do.’

  ‘Do? Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ says Fujitomi, rummaging for a box. He finds one and packs the boots carefully inside. ‘I hope she likes them,’ he says. It is difficult to read the message in his eyes. Perhaps it is just difficult to take it seriously.

  13

  On 22 February a telegram arrives from Hong Kong. It is as brief, as portentous, as the one that preceded it. The same day, in Hongo, there is a letter for Yuji from Father. They have been snowed in for more than two weeks, though now a thaw will allow him to reach the store on the road below the farm where mail is accepted and sent on to the city. Mother has caught a chill but seems otherwise to find the mountain beneficial. On three occasions she has joined the family for the midday meal. As for himself, he has become quite the rustic, cutting wood, clearing snow off the roof, feeding the hens (those the foxes have not yet caught). What is Yuji’s opinion of the situation in Setagaya? What are the doctors saying? He will, as soon as the weather permits, take the train to Tokyo.

  Two days after the telegram and the letter, Emile develops a fever. One moment he is lying placidly in Alissa’s lap, the next his limbs are rigid. He blinks, woken by some event deep in his body, then fires from his mouth a stream of creamy vomit. When it stops he howls. Alissa rocks him, gives him the breast his hands and mouth are fumbling for. Yuji cleans the vomit from the sofa, from the rug. Splashes of it have reached even the wall behind the table. He has just finished, is carrying the bucket back to the kitchen, when the baby, rolling his head from the nipple, is convulsed a second time.

  What is an infant’s grip on life? How tenacious? Can it slip away in an hour while his parents hover over him, ignorant and terrified?

  A third attack, a fourth.

  ‘There’s a woman,’ says Alissa, ‘opposite the fan shop at the end of the street. She has children of her own. I know she sometimes looks after others . . .’

  Her name is Kiyama. She follows Yuji through the evening blue of the snow. She asks no questions. She has not even taken off her apron. She comes into the house, bows to Alissa, and kneels on the floor. The child, panting on his mother’s lap, lets the stranger handle him. She unpins his nappy and sniffs at it, gently palps the distended belly, looks over his skin for signs of something she evidently does not find.

  ‘What a ni-ice little baby,’ says the woman, sounding like a collector pleased to have found an unusual specimen so close to home.

  ‘Is it serious?’ asks Alissa. ‘Should we call a doctor? Every time he’s sick his whole body shakes . . .’

  ‘You really speak Japanese!’ says the woman, laughing and showing off her tobacco-stained teeth. ‘How clever you must be. Don’t worry about baby. Keep giving him your milk. You have a lot of milk?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Keep him close to you, against your skin, like a little husband.’ She laughs again and looks at Yuji. ‘You have to sleep somewhere else tonight. Mother doesn’t have strength for you too.’

  As he thanks her at the door, he digs a five-yen note from his pocket. ‘It’s too much,’ says the woman decisively. He takes out some change. In the end she accepts one yen and fifty sen, tucking the coins beneath her apron.

  The vomiting continues but the intervals between each attack grow longer. Eventually, a few minutes before eleven, it stops. Alissa and the child sleep on the sofa, a single creature again as if Saramago’s scissors had never put them apart. Yuji brings them a blanket from the spare room, then goes to the kitchen, rinses the cloths and hangs them to dry. Back in the salon, he puts wood into the stove, lets a little of the fragrant smoke spill out to cover the smell of sickness, yawns until he shudders, and sleeps in the armchair opposite the sofa, waking, moments later it seems, in a room packed with light, Alissa and Emile playing together on the floor. All sense of crisis has fled with the night. When he stirs, she looks at him, her face fresh as the morning.

  ‘I’m going to cut your hair,’ she says, grinning. ‘It’s starting to stick out over your ears. People will make comments.’

  He goes out for food. The sun, already high, glints on melting ice and snow. He buys croquettes from the stand by the university, then, out of sheer good spirits, stays to talk with the vendor. Is business better in the cold weather?

  ‘Better for the pocket,’ says the man, ‘but worse for the feet.’

  ‘We were up all night with our son,’ says Yuji. ‘He gave us quite a fright, but this morning he’s well.’

  ‘That’s how they are,’ says the man. ‘Your first?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he says. ‘I’ve got five.’ He gives Yuji an extra croquette, for free. ‘Nothing like a croquette for keeping up your strength,’ he says.

  At the house, the bag of steaming food and two cups of mugi-cha make an instant party. The child who seemed so sick is now entirely restored. They look at him, wonderingly, and recount to each other the incidents of the night before, the vomiting, the visit, their own alarm, as a kind of comedy. How odd the woman was! And how absurd she should be so surprised by Alissa speaking Japanese! (‘She must have seen me on the street for years.’) Wiping the grease of the food from her fingers, she sits at the piano, plays Mozart, Bach, Debussy. Last of all she plays the Chopin.

  ‘You remember it?’ she asks.

  He nods. The room is briefly filled with ghosts. She lowers the lid over the piano keys. After a while she says, ‘Let’s go outside.’

  In the garden, they walk slow circles round the magnolia tree, Alissa in her fleece-lined boots, Emile with his red wool bonnet on, a Christmas present from Rose or Sandrine, or perhaps Natasha. Needing one hand for her stick, she holds the baby in the curve of the other arm, and when the arm is tired she passes him to Yuji.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she says, as motes of snow, the first of a fresh fall, dance around them, ‘if he could remember this.’

  ‘The garden?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘And us,’ she says. ‘All together.’

  Inside again, they read, doze, eat. In the warmth of the salon they are starting to have the intimacy of stabled animals. Dusk falls. From the street comes the scrape, scrape of someone shovelling snow. A woman calls her children in.

  Alissa takes a bath. ‘Do you want my water?’ she asks, leaning, pink-faced, into the salon. So he lies in her water. The bath is enamelled iron, forged, perhaps – the scale is suggestive – by the same foundry that made the stove. He has not been in a bath like this before. His toes are on a level with his nose. The hardware of the taps has a nautical gleam, industrial, but if this is a good example of a foreign bath, then the foreigners have not quite understood. How reassuring that is! A weakness at last. He lies with his head on the cushion of curled iron. The water smells of roses. A bulb behind a half-globe of white glass burns unevenly, and below, over a wooden rack, a pair of stockings is hanging next to three squares of drying cotton, the baby’s nappies.

  ‘There are towels in the cupboard,’ she calls through the door. ‘And I put out one of Papa’s old robes. It’s a bit moth-eaten . . .’

  He comes back into the salon wearing the robe. It’s maroon and gold silk, the sort of garment he imagines an African princeling wearing, perhaps in a place like Harar. There are indeed moth-holes in it.

  ‘Very nice,’ she says, looking as if she might start to laugh.

  ‘Is he feeding still?’

  ‘No,’ she says, glancing at the
baby’s head. ‘He’s asleep. Can you help me move him?’

  Kneeling by her feet (roses, roses . . .), he takes the child’s weight as she rolls him from her breast, then lifts him to the end of the sofa and lies him there. Though still asleep, the child pushes out his lips in some infant reflex of suckling.

  ‘It must be good milk,’ says Yuji. ‘He even dreams of it.’

  ‘I put a drop on my finger,’ she says. ‘I wanted to see what it tasted like.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A little bit sweet. Would you like to try some?’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be stealing it from him?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she says. ‘Even when he feeds half the night I wake up with my breasts so full they ache. See how swollen they are even now?’

  When his lips close round one of her nipples it stiffens against his tongue. He sucks but cannot at first make the milk come. He has forgotten how to. She touches his hair and with her other hand gently squeezes the base of her breast. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Is it coming now?’

  He slides his arms round her waist. His mind darkens with the old bliss. The milk comes surprisingly fast, warm as the skin it flows through and, as she told him, slightly sweet. He keeps some of it in his mouth, then lifts his head from her breast and lets the milk slide from his mouth into hers. She tenses, shivers, then bites his lip, nips it hard enough to bring a little blood away, just beside where her father cut him with his ring. He dabs it with his hand. ‘Sorry,’ she says, smiling and pushing a finger through one of the moth-holes in his gown. ‘What a mess we’re making of your beautiful face.’

  For a week of winter nights, the child in a crib at the end of the bed, they are cautious lovers. She has, she confides, not quite recovered from the birth. She does not give him details. He is grateful. She leads him into other ways, things she heard about perhaps during her confinement at the Bullseye Piano Academy, those idle hours in the company of Miss Ogilvy’s girls. When the baby wakes, they roll apart. For Yuji, there is something fascinating, something faintly unnerving, in the way she can, inside a few seconds, change the use, the aim of her body. One moment arched and hurrying after her pleasure, the next bent over the child, a mother entirely. And when the baby is soothed, she climbs up the bed with her appetite intact, as if all of it, nursing and lovemaking, were one continuous thought, one line of the brush.

  Tokyo, 3 March: the Festival of Dolls. They dress up but go nowhere. Baby Emile has his arms threaded through the sleeves of his Chinese jacket. Alissa wears the rose kimono with the dark blue obi. Yuji, after much teasing, much prompting, also puts on a kimono, one of Father’s, which he carries from the house in Hongo under the bemused gaze of Miyo. It is the first time he has worn a kimono since middle school, and looking at himself in the bathroom mirror at Kanda (with the pretty tiles all around it, silhouettes of courting couples in frocks and frock coats), he sees Father as a young man, clean-shaven and scowling. Sees Mother as a young man? But more than this – and beyond the fleeting irritation of realising that a person does not grow away from his parents but towards them – he sees a figure as Japanese as the Sumida river. This is the creature Feneon baulked at (‘You . . . ?). The native Japanese out of his borrowed fashion and dressed again as he was intended. An exotic to them. A little exotic even to himself. He tugs at the obi, tugs at the heavy grey collar. He is not even sure he is wearing it correctly, that he has done everything he should, and yet, as he straightens his back and softens his shoulders, it begins to belong on him. He tries out a half-dozen different faces, turns left and right in front of the glass. It strikes him that he might make a passable actor. Then, less comfortably, comes the thought that he might, if he is not careful, end up as nothing, a being with no convincing identity at all, a stranger among strangers.

  Alissa cooks the chicken Yuji paid excessively for at the butcher’s in Shitaya. A scrawny carcass but fresh. They roast it, eat it with bowls of rice, a salad of grated cabbage. They drink wine, more than usual. Alissa teaches Yuji, thigh to thigh on the piano stool, the first two bars of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, then, singing her own accompaniment, shows him one of the dances she learnt at Mrs Yamaguchi’s.

  ‘You’ll tire yourself out,’ he says.

  ‘What does that matter?’ she asks, a sudden sharpness to her voice he does not respond to, that he pretends not to understand.

  The moment passes but the day ends with a confused exchange of glances. She wants him to comfort her. He doesn’t know how. In the morning he works with Fujitomi. There has been no snow for a week, and on the verges of some of the roads they pass in the blue van the flowers of the plum blossom show themselves tenderly against the darker world behind.

  After lunch he goes back to Kanda. Alissa, her hair tied up in a cloth, is scrubbing the wooden boards of the hall. Yuji helps her to stand. Briefly, she rests her head against his chest, then sends him through to the salon where Emile is in a makeshift cradle of cushions on the sofa. Laboriously, the baby focuses on Yuji’s face, frowns to find it is not the face he expects, but does not cry.

  ‘I’ll take him into the garden,’ calls Yuji.

  ‘Be sure to wrap him warmly,’ she calls back.

  In the garden, he walks on the newly uncovered grass, alone with his son. For now, out here, on what might be the first true day of spring, there is not, it seems, a single troubled thought in that small, fragrant head. Rested, fed, cleaned, the child is between appetites, and lies with his cheek against Yuji’s arm, one hand drowsily fingering the air. What is he looking at? The pattern of the branches? A tail of cloud? Yuji talks to him. It is strange the things one says to an infant, the confidences, the declarations one drops into the wide, brown stare of such a child. How long will it last, that gaze unadorned as a dog’s? Another year? Less than that? What will this face be in two or three years? What will he sound like? How will he laugh?

  He is absorbed in this walking, this questioning, this careful circling of the tree, when he hears the doorbell. He has been expecting it, of course, privately counting off the days, so when he comes in to find Alissa in the salon, the unfolded telegram in her hand, his first emotion is relief. He waits, watching her, his fingers softly tapping a heartbeat on the baby’s back.

  ‘Papa,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s there. He’s found a house.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s sent for me.’

  The baby stretches, grows impatient in Yuji’s arms.

  ‘I am to go to Miss Ogilvy’s. She is arranging everything.’

  ‘Miss Ogilvy?’

  ‘Yes. The tickets. A ship.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’ The word barely audible. After a moment, and very gently, she takes the baby from him and steps back.

  ‘Will you come to Yokohama with us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Papa says you should look after the keys.’

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘To the house.’

  He nods. ‘If I have to leave, I’ll give them to Fujitomi.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And my uncle’s address. I’ll give you my uncle’s address. The farm.’

  ‘Yes.’ She brushes her lips on the baby’s head. ‘It’s been nice, though, hasn’t it?’

  He has hoped for another week, perhaps even two, but does not get them. After three days they are on the train to Yokohama, a pair of suitcases, far too big for the luggage rack, on the floor by their knees.

  At the academy, their ringing is answered by Miss Ogilvy in person. They drag the cases inside. In the billiard room, the table is covered with a dust sheet and all the chairs have been herded to the corners of the room. The walls are bare. The women have been taken down, put away somewhere, but it is not until the household is all together in the dining room that Yuji finally understands that the academy is finished with. Miss Ogilvy and at least three of her girls will be going with Alissa to Singapore. The rest, presumably, will be t
aking other ships to other destinations. No one is staying.

  ‘I have written to the President,’ says Miss Ogilvy, helping herself to a crab’s claw from one of the little boxes sent up from China Town. ‘I have offered this house as a headquarters for the army of occupation.’

  ‘The President?’ asks Yuji, to whom these remarks seem to have been addressed.

  ‘Of the United States,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘I seriously expect him to accept the offer.’ She fixes him with the kind of penetrating stare her narrow face is peculiarly suited to producing. ‘Unless,’ she says, ‘you think Japan will win the war.’

  ‘What war?’ asks Yuji, flummoxed. ‘A war with the United States?’

  She is sucking the meat from the claw. She nods.

  ‘The imperial navy,’ says Natasha, ‘can’t wait more than a few months. They won’t have any oil left.’

  ‘We were told that by an admiral,’ says Sandrine. ‘So we know what we’re talking about.’

  ‘You should learn English,’ says Rose. ‘When the Americans come, you can do business with them. Then Emile will have a rich daddy.’

  An hour later, without a word to Yuji or any sign at all of what in these last days has been between them, Alissa goes up to bed with Emile. The others sit on at the table playing cards and drinking. One by one they drift off.

  ‘Now you,’ says Miss Ogilvy, when it’s just her and Yuji left. ‘There won’t be much time in the morning. Go up and tell her how it will all be all right. Tell her you will see her again, that you will find a way. Tell her anything you think you can get her to believe.’

  ‘I would go if I could,’ says Yuji, quietly, furiously. ‘Is it my fault things are like this?’

  ‘In part,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘Though not entirely.’

  In the bedroom, Alissa does not answer his whispered enquiry. She is lying with the baby’s head tucked beneath her chin. He sits on the bed behind them, listening to the mingled rhythms of their breathing. Eventually he lies down. He does not undress or get under the covers. He has, he decides, already lost his briefly held right to such familiarity. Tomorrow – a few hours from now – they will separate, and it will not be for weeks or months but for years. It may, indeed, be for ever. That, in his heart, in the silence of his heart, is what he thinks it will be. For ever. The world will reach out for them, take them, hide them from each other. They will write at first, but soon it will not be safe to receive letters from Singapore because it will not be the postman who delivers them but the Tokko. And if she leaves Singapore? How will he ever know where they have gone? You can lose someone in Tokyo. What chance of finding a woman and a half-Japanese child in a world in ruins?