by Gail Jones
Haruko translated Uncle Tadeo’s words.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your bereavement.’
‘Bereavement?’ Alice felt that perhaps he had made an old man’s slippage in time.
‘Leo,’ said Uncle Tadeo. ‘Hiroshi told me about the death of Leo, and the flowers in the doorway, and your grief.’
Alice felt herself blush. It was three months ago. She hadn’t even known him. She hadn’t even spoken to him. What had Mr Sakamoto told his uncle?
‘Thank you,’ said Alice. ‘He was young …’ she heard herself add unnecessarily. Haruko somehow translated the hesitation to go on.
Uncle Tadeo spoke to his great-nieces in a way that Alice realised was the tale of Leo. Uncle Tadeo’s compassion was genuine and his concern complicated by the knowledge that his nephew was nearer than he to death. When he had finished his story, he looked up at Alice and nodded.
Alice asked again if she could see Mr Sakamoto, but was again denied.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Haruko. ‘I’ve already asked. I rang the hospital this morning.’
So here she was, in Japan, with no Mr Sakamoto to talk to. Alice felt the huge weight of her redundancy and dislocation.
‘You can stay with us,’ said Haruko, as if reading her thoughts.
Akiko, in her large coat, shifted in discomfort.
‘Thank you, but no,’ Alice responded immediately. There was no question of her staying in his absence, no wish to see what might happen to the sisters, to Uncle Tadeo. No wish to make the situation more difficult.
‘I’ll return home,’ she heard herself announce, even though she had not remembered making this decision. ‘I’ve been gone from Australia for over six months. Perhaps it’s time I saw my family.’
Haruko translated and Uncle Tadeo nodded sadly. Around the table, everyone was silent. They sipped green tea from delicate pink cups.
Outside a thunderstorm was booming above the house. Uncle Tadeo gestured to the ceiling with shrugged shoulders, and smiled wanly, as if asking forgiveness for the weather. Alice repeated his action. They liked each other. He was pleased she had come; he had wanted to meet her. He had heard daily accounts of the growth of her friendship with Hiroshi. Uncle Tadeo said something to Haruko and she rose from the table, left the room, and returned with a bulky manuscript, which she placed solemnly in Alice’s hands.
‘Uncle Tadeo thought you should see this. It’s my father’s book. The Voices of Alexander Graham Bell. He finished it only last month.’
Alice made a gesture of weighing it.
‘Yes,’ said Uncle Tadeo smiling. ‘It’s bigger than we all expected.’ He was proud of his nephew. His eyes brimmed with tears.
It occurred to Alice that they were talking as if Mr Sakamoto was already dead. She was not prepared to relinquish him. She had not even begun to accommodate the news of his condition.
What would she do, without Mr Sakamoto?
After lunch Uncle Tadeo insisted they listen to a Beatles record. Haruko sorted through their record collection, retrieved Abbey Road, with its vaguely funereal cover, and put it on an old turntable that stood beside a new stereo system. Akiko left the room without saying a word and Uncle Tadeo fell almost immediately asleep. So Haruko and Alice were left together, hearing ‘Come Together’, ‘Something’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, hearing the thunder and rain mingling with the historic tunes, which were playing from the past for a man who wasn’t there. When they reached ‘Octopus’s Garden’, both had had enough.
‘Not one of my father’s favourites,’ Haruko said, as if giving herself an excuse to stop the play.
The music gave them no pleasure. It sounded sham, empty. The voices spilled into the room, and leaked away.
On the drive back to the hotel, Haruko explained that when their mother died, Akiko began to feel very cold. Nothing warmed her. Nothing at all. She kept her coat on all the time, even in bed. Now, she was responding to fear of her father’s death in exactly the same way. Under cover. Retreating.
‘She doesn’t mean to be discourteous,’ Haruko said. ‘It’s just her way. She is trying to cope.’
‘Of course,’ said Alice. She gazed out of the car window, watching the reversed version of her journey.
‘“Yesterday”,’ Alice said.
‘Yesterday?’
‘It is one of his favourites. The song.’
‘Ah,’ said Haruko.
Her face was turned away. There was a complicity between them that adjusted and refined itself in these small exchanges. Rain-beat on the car roof soundtracked their pauses, made indirect intimacy possible, drew a film of wet silver over the too-sharp outlines of things.
Nagasaki was awash, shiny as cut opal in the drenching rains. A gem of light. The shuddering of fixed surfaces. Rain on the windshield distributed in fans.
What would she do, without Mr Sakamoto? What coat would she wear?
Adjectives, nouns, syntax, sequence: Japan was defeating Alice’s sense of the intelligibility of things. She watched television, night-long, with the sound turned off, seeing in the glass chamber another kind of alphabet – of gestures, expressions, sincere on-camera communication, bodies touching, or staying apart, advertisements of demented eccentricity, showroom voluptuousness and bargain sparkle, dramas with faces twitching in exaggerated reactions, comedy, hilarity, clownish falling over.
When at last she killed the television, Alice lay on her back in the dark. Somewhere Mr Sakamoto was lying like this, festooned by tubes, linked to machines. As she was about to fall asleep, thinking of hospitals and images of the body, Alice recalled a long-ago photograph, Norah’s X-ray photograph, that she had pinned for two years to her bedroom window.
When Norah was almost thirteen, she broke her right arm. It was encased in a heavy white plaster and she needed assistance with the simplest activities and actions. Alice was assigned to dress her, and to help her wash. Alice put on her shoes and socks, and tied her shoelaces. She plaited her sister’s hair and added a ribbon. She helped carry her schoolbooks and wrote out dictated homework. At first both sisters were resentful and ill-tempered; Norah hated her dependency and Alice hated her servitude. But as the weeks passed – there were six in all – they entered a state of unprecedented intimacy: the everyday touching, the solicitude of the body, brought them eventually together, destroyed whatever unmentionable barrier had for so many years held them apart. This injury was the ground of their reconciliation. As Norah allowed her buttons to be done up she looked closely at Alice’s face, concentrating on the task. She saw it, truly, for the very first time. Eyes, nose, cheeks, chin. Alice grew careful how she touched, and by degrees became as familiar with her sister’s body as she was with her own. They both began to joke and to find the humour in the situation. They learned to talk to each other, and to be patient, to spend time looping in and out of each other’s ideas, easy as swallows. At length, Alice and Norah found each other respectful. Sisterhood had taken this long to achieve.
At the window of Norah’s bedroom hung her X-ray photograph. It showed her arm, an ivory lever, floating in a cloud of smoke. The fracture was clearly discernible. In the centre of the ulna was a long dark crack, almost half the length of the bone. Norah and Alice both thought the photograph wonderful. Against the window, translucent, it revealed the glossy frame of the inner body, the architecture beneath flesh, the taut structure of being. It hung like an icon. Both girls felt that they possessed a special knowledge. It healed them, bound them, signified bizarrely their belated coming together.
Alice dreamed that night that she was lost in a sandy desert that was Japan. She struggled through dense, impeding dunes, feeling her legs massively heavy and her heart heaving with effort. Her skin was encrusted all over with tiny grains of sand, her eyes were full of grit, her vision was blurred.
Ahead she saw, miraculously, the edge of a wheatfield. She hurried towards it and found Mr Sakamoto there, lying on his back, looking up at the sky. All around rustled th
e desiccated stalks of wheat. They made a soothing sound, like the sound of falling rain. Mr Sakamoto did not seem to recognise her. He lay perfectly still, his arms outstretched in cruciform. Occasionally he blinked. He looked calm, composed.
Alice saw the blue sky reflected in his eyes. It looked like water. It looked to Alice like Mr Sakamoto was filling up with water.
And then, in the distance, Leo appeared. He wore earphones and was mutely nodding to his music, swaying a little, tapping his sneakered feet. Alice wondered in dream-land if he was dead or alive, if he had reached a drop-zone somewhere, of limbo, or perdition, or if this dumb show to futile, unprotecting sound was the condition, after all, of every soul: something is missing, something is always missing.
On her second morning in Nagasaki Alice felt even more lost. She woke early, carrying into consciousness her disturbing dreams, but felt unmotivated, inert and exhausted. She could not bear to remain here, waiting in a morbid vigil for Mr Sakamoto to die. She would change her airline ticket immediately and tell Haruko and Uncle Tadeo. Perhaps she would return to Japan another time. Akiko would be pleased to see her go. She had enough to deal with, without unwelcome visitors. Alice was haunted by the shape of her, crouching miserably in her overcoat, hunched like a survivor of war, like a refugee. A single death could do that: reshape an existence.
The rain had ceased but the sky was still overcast and gloomy. Hawks – or something like them – continued to wheel above the station. Alice had a dinner appointment with Haruko, but otherwise was free. Yet she felt unlike a tourist, more like an interloper. If she had been able to see him, she thought, she would be at rest; she would be able to encourage him to live, perform a miracle, or say goodbye. She would at least know what he looked like and how he was suffering. She would take bright flowers. She would kiss his forehead. She would speak to him in a low voice, there, at the bedside, tangled with tubes and medical machinery.
As it was, Alice stood in the hotel room looking down at the city, feeling as if someone had torn at her insides. She would try to read. Reading was a fissure she could fall into, a warm space with two walls, a sweet forgetfulness. She rocked on her heels, scanning for meaning. City-buzz streamed upwards carrying human and non-human sounds, the hot-wire rumble of alert machines, the cellphone chatter of a million telepresences.
‘I went nowhere,’ Alice confessed. ‘Nowhere at all. I stayed in my hotel room and read a novel.’
Haruko looked concerned. She offered to take her guest sightseeing, but Alice refused.
‘I will go to the Atomic Bomb Museum, perhaps tomorrow, because I feel I must. But otherwise, I will leave. This feels all wrong, Haruko. I have no wish to enjoy myself with him lying there …’ She could not say the word ‘dying’. Alice was having trouble containing her feelings. Haruko, however, appeared composed and wise. She seemed in manner very like her father. She wore a tan dress of raw silk and a tailored brown jacket. Alice felt shabby beside her and without emotional poise.
‘I’m sure you will return,’ Haruko said kindly, ‘in other circumstances.’
They were in the small private booth of a noisy restaurant. At intervals, unintrusive women in rustly kimonos slid aside their paper screen. They brought artfully constructed dishes, each small and compactly designed, on black laquered trays. Fish, rice, mushrooms, pickles. Alice wondered how Mr Sakamoto had been able to enjoy heavy French food served with a clunk on gigantic plates. She liked the fastidiousness of chopsticks and the sundry range of dishes. The slow processing through the meal. The frills, the flourishes, the garnishes that were pink and green and stacked as chrysanthemums or pagodas.
‘It is something’, Alice said, ‘your father and I share. A love of food. We had many meals together.’
‘He told me,’ said Haruko. ‘He once rang and said he had met a woman who talked as he did and was interested in food. You had just been out to the movies together. We thought he was falling in love. It was a shock to learn your age.’
Alice paused. ‘It’s a friendship,’ she said carefully.
Haruko smiled. ‘I know. Don’t worry. Uncle Tadeo was fascinated and he interrogated my father. We know all about you.’
Here Haruko smiled again. Alice felt uneasy.
‘You’ve heard, perhaps, of their special relationship – my father and Uncle Tadeo. It’s rare between men, I think. They know each other’s secrets. They tell their lives and thoughts in detail. They even tell each other their dreams. This time is hard on my Uncle Tadeo. He is missing the telephone calls. He is missing Hiroshi’s voice.’ Haruko fell silent. ‘It’s hard on all of us,’ she added.
After a few cups of warm sake, Alice and Haruko both began to relax. The noise in the restaurant was growing louder, but they seemed enclosed in a room of relative quiet. Alice wanted to say: I know things about you too, but instead, searching for a neutral bridge of words between them, she asked Haruko about the kamishibai man.
‘Ah, I suppose he said Akiko and I adored the kamishibai man. In truth he was the one who always suggested the visits. We wanted to watch television. My father has an affection for storytelling and redundant technologies. We used to go to the library with him and watch the kamishibai man perform. He was a man in his seventies, I suppose, and his equipment – the hyoshigi, the wooden clappers used to start the performance, the little stage he showed his pictures on – these were probably from the 1920s. But he was agile and gifted, especially with accents. We always resisted going, but when the story began we were always entranced. There was a particular folk tale we loved, “The Bamboo Princess”.’
‘Your father mentioned it,’ Alice said. ‘He told me the plot.’
Haruko looked up from her bowl of agadashi tofu.
‘My father hated the idea that the Bamboo Princess left her parents, so he made up his own endings. Did he tell you that?’
Alice shook her head.
‘In my father’s version, the Bamboo Princess takes her parents with her to live on the moon. No parent, he used to say, would exchange the elixir of life for separation. So there is a little family up there, never separated. Over time he added bits and pieces to the story. The Bamboo Princess recovered brothers and sisters she thought she had lost; she met a Bamboo Prince, with a similar history of exile. They fell in love, of course, and were married under earthrise. He used to sit between our beds as we were falling asleep and tell and retell ‘The Bamboo Princess’, adding each time a fresh detail to the story, a twist, an adornment … I actually believed she was up there, up in the moon. Sometimes, as a small girl, I talked to her. But I really didn’t believe my father’s happy family version. And I suppose I rather liked the idea that she had a space to herself, that she had deliberately chosen it, that she was at home, and remote.’
‘I was always told,’ said Alice, ‘that there was a man in the moon.’ She heard herself sounding trivial. She felt dull, boring.
‘No, no, not at all. You can see her face. She has a round Japanese face, pale as a geisha.’
Haruko laughed and leaned back from the table. Alice noticed her slender hands around the square wooden sake bowl. She wore no rings, no jewellery of any kind.
‘How did you meet my father?’
‘Uncle Tadeo didn’t tell you?’ Alice asked wryly. ‘We were on a train, between Chartres and Paris. An old-style train. One that rocks, that stops frequently, is rattly and slow. Someone played John Lennon’s ‘Instant Karma’ and we began talking. I liked him at once, his candour, his humour. Then we discovered we were both, in a sense, researching technology – he with his biography of Alexander Bell, I with a book on the poetics of modernity. He seemed to take for granted the idea that my project was worth pursuing. It gave me confidence. Our friendship consists almost entirely of shared meals and long talks. Talks about anything.’
‘Did he talk of my mother?’ Haruko asked.
‘Not very much.’
Alice told her the story of the Spanish astronaut and the abbreviated honeymoon. Of his
sense of despair.
Haruko looked down at the table. ‘It always seemed such an estranged marriage to me. I never understood how they got together.’
The screen slid open and a waitress came in to remove more dishes. Haruko spoke to her rapidly. Alice was feeling drunk and hoped she was not ordering more sake.
‘Green tea,’ Haruko said, when the panel closed. ‘Otherwise neither of us will be able to walk out of the building.’
Alice smiled at her and said nothing. She was again reading thoughts.
‘Do you want company at the museum tomorrow?’
‘No,’ said Alice firmly. ‘But I would like to say goodbye to Uncle Tadeo. Can I call on him sometime in the afternoon? I’ll catch a taxi.’
It was settled. Over whisked green tea in Hagi china bowls, they made a plan for Alice’s last day in Nagasaki. She felt the mixture of euphoria and despondency that drunkenness induces. Alice had spent her day in words, evading the real; now the physical world asserted its substance and irreducibility. When she stood up from the low table she misjudged the space and banged her knees, then as she caught herself toppling she knocked over a bowl. Haruko leaned forward across the table and held her elbow. The panel door opened, yet again, and a sash of orange light illuminated Haruko’s blouse. Everything was vague and receding. Haruko said something to the waitress and a pair of hands reached under Alice’s armpits and helped her from the cavity beneath the low table. She was embarrassed, and at a loss. She felt metaphysically uncoordinated. Huge kimono sleeves embraced her and almost carried her from the restaurant. There was an embroidered crane visible through her alcoholic haze. A decoration, perhaps, an unexpected vision of something illogically beautiful.
On the tram Alice counted the stops so that she would not miss the museum. She was standing up, crushed within a group of secondary school students, who talked across her, giggled, sent and received text messages on their mobile phones. The school uniform was dark blue, prim and formal, modified by the girls with hitched-up skirts and socks with lace trimming. Boys had loosened their ties and mussed their hair and looked a little rakish. Every school bag bore fluffy or plastic accessories. Alice was pleased to be travelling like this, in the embrace of this youthful exuberance. She felt she understood them. If she spoke Japanese she would strike up a casual conversation, discussing television or movies. As it was, standing so very close to their faces, she thought how attractive they appeared, their hair, their black eyes.
