“I like you.”
“And even so it’s no good?”
“No, not that.”
“Oh?”
“When I get married, will he know?”
“Yes.”
“How should I do it?”
“How did you do it?”
“How was it with your wife?”
“How was it, I wonder.”
“Tell me.”
“I have no wife.” He gazed into her serious face.
“It bothered me because it looked like her,” he said to himself as he moved the dog to the littering box.
The first puppy, in a caul, was born immediately. The mother did not know what to do with it. He opened the caul with the scissors and cut the cord. The second caul was a large one, and the two puppies, in a muddy green liquid, seemed to be dead. He quickly wrapped them in a newspaper. Three more were born, all in cauls. The seventh and last one was moving in its caul, but seemed shriveled and weak. He glanced at it, and without opening the caul wrapped it in a newspaper.
“Throw them away somewhere. In the West they weed out puppies, kill the ones that aren’t good. They get better dogs that way. We sentimental Japanese aren’t up to it. Give her a raw egg or something.”
He washed his hands and went back to bed. The fresh happiness of the birth of new life flowed over him, and he wanted to go out walking. He had forgotten that he had killed a puppy.
One morning, just when their eyes were opening, he found one of the puppies dead. He put it in his kimono. When he went out for his morning walk he threw it away. Two or three days later another was dead: the mother stirred up straw to make a nest for herself, and the puppies were buried under it. They did not yet have the strength to dig their way out. The mother did not bother to pull them out. Indeed she would lie on the straw under which they were buried. They would die in the night of cold and suffocation. She was like a foolish human mother who suffocated her baby at her breast.
“Another one’s dead.” Calmly slipping it into his kimono and whistling for the dogs, he took them for a walk in a nearby park. The terrier scampering joyously about, quite indifferent to the fact that she had just killed a puppy, made him think again of Chikako.
At the age of eighteen, Chikako had been taken off to Harbin by a dabbler in colonial ventures, and there for some three years she had studied dancing under White Russians. The adventurer had apparently failed in everything. With Chikako in the employ of an orchestra that did the rounds of Manchuria, they presently made their way back to Japan. No sooner had they settled down in Tokyo than Chikako left him and married the accompanist who had been with her in Manchuria. She appeared on the stage and had her own recitals.
In those days the man was counted among those who had ties with the world of music; but it was less that he understood music than that he was giving money every month to a certain music magazine. He went to concerts for purposes of exchanging banter with acquaintances. He saw Chikako dance. He was drawn to the savage decadence in her body. It fascinated him to compare her with the Chikako of six or seven years before. What secret could have made her over into such wildness? He wondered why he had not married her.
But that strange power seemed to collapse from about the fourth recital. He rushed to her dressing room, and despite the fact that, still in dancing clothes, she was taking off her makeup, he tugged at her sleeve and led her to a dark corner backstage.
“Take it away.” She pushed his hand from her breast. “It hurts when you even touch it.”
“What a stupid thing to do.”
“But I’ve always liked children. I’ve wanted one of my own.”
“Do you mean to bring it up? Do you think you can live with your dancing if you go in for womanish things? What can you do with a baby now? You should be more careful.”
“There was nothing I could do.”
“Don’t be a fool. Do you think it’s all that easy for an artist? What does your husband say?”
“He’s very pleased. He’s very proud of it.”
He snorted.
“It’s good that I can have a baby, after what I used to be.”
“You’d better give up dancing.”
“I will not.” Unprepared for the violence with which she said it, he fell silent.
She did not have a second child. And presently he stopped seeing her with the first. For that reason, possibly, her marriage began to go sour. He heard rumors about it.
Chikako could not have been as careless as the Boston terrier.
He could have saved the puppies if he had tried. He knew perfectly well that he could have prevented the later deaths if after the first one he had cut the straw finer, or put a cloth over it. But the last puppy went the way of the other three. He did not especially want the puppies to die; he did not especially want to keep them alive. His indifference had to do with the fact that they were mongrels.
Sometimes a dog would come up to him on the street. He would talk to it all the way home, he would feed it and give it a place to sleep. It pleased him that a dog should sense warmth in him. But after he came to keep his own dogs he no longer had an eye for mongrels. So it should be with human beings, he said to himself, scorning the families of the world while deriding his own loneliness.
So it was with the skylark. The feelings of pity with which he thought to take it in had quickly vanished. Telling himself that there was no point in saving a piece of garbage, he had left the children to torture it to death.
But in the moment he had been looking at the skylark, the kinglets had been too long in their bath.
In consternation, he took the bathing cage from the water. Both birds lay on the floor like wet rags. When he took them in his hand their legs twitched.
“Good. They’re still alive.”
In each hand he clutched a little body, cold to the core, the eyes closed, as if quite beyond hope of saving. He warmed them over the brazier, put more charcoal on, and had the maid fan it. Steam came from the feathers. The birds twitched spasmodically. He thought that the shock of the heat burning into them might give them strength to fight death, but he could not stand the heat himself. He spread a towel on the floor of the cage and put the birds on it, and held the cage to the embers. The towel was burned brown. Though one of the birds would occasionally beat its wings and roll over as if snapped by a spring, they could not stand up, and their eyes were still closed. Their feathers were quite dry; but when he took the cage from the fire they showed no sign of coming back to life. The maid went to the house that kept skylarks and was told that ailing birds should be given bitter tea and wrapped in cotton. Wrapping them in absorbent cotton, he took them up in his hands and put their beaks in tea. They drank. When he offered feed they stretched their necks to take it.
“They’ve come back to life.”
What a clean sort of happiness it was. He saw that he had spent four hours saving the birds.
But they fell each time they tried to sit on the perch. It seemed that their toes would not open. Clenched tight, they were hard and stiff, as if they would break like tiny dry twigs.
“Don’t you suppose, sir, that you scorched them?” said the maid.
The feet were a dry, brownish color. He had indeed scorched them—but that fact only added to his annoyance. “How could I possibly scorch them when I had them in my hands and on a towel? Go ask the man at the store what to do if they aren’t better by tomorrow.”
He locked the door of his study and warmed the feet in his mouth. The feel against his tongue was such as to bring tears. Presently the sweat from his hand was warming the feathers. Soaked in his warmth, the feet were softer. He carefully extended a toe that looked as if it might snap off, and curled it around his little finger. Then he put the foot in his mouth again. He took off the perch and transferred the feed to a small sauce dish on the floor of the cage; but the birds still seemed to have difficulty standing and eating.
“The bird man says that you probably did scorch them,�
� said the maid, back from the shop. “He says you should warm their feet in tea. But he says that birds generally pick away at their own feet until they’re healed.”
It was true. The birds were pecking and tugging at their own feet with the vigor of woodpeckers, as if to say: “What’s wrong, feet? Wake up, feet.” And they tried with great determination to stand. He wanted to cheer it on, the brightness in the life of these small creatures. They seemed to find it endlessly strange that something should be wrong with a part of them.
He soaked their feet in tea, but his mouth seemed to be more effective.
The birds had been wild, and when he had taken one into his hand there had been a violent pulsing at the breast; but within a day or two after the accident they were quite used to him, and indeed, chirping happily, would take feed while he was holding them. The change made him yet fonder of them.
But his ministrations seemed to have little effect, and he began neglecting them; and on the sixth morning, their clenched feet coated with dung, the two kinglets lay dead, side by side.
There is something particularly fragile and fleeting about the death of a small bird. Most often the corpses are there in the morning, quite unexpectedly.
The first bird to die in his house had been a linnet. In the night a rat pulled out the tails of a pair of linnets, and the cage was spattered with blood. The male died the next day, but the female, her rear parts red as a baboon’s, lived on and on. The males who came as mates died one after another. The female finally died of old age.
“Linnets don’t seem to do well here. I won’t have any more.”
He had never liked such birds as linnets, rather to a school-girl’s taste. He preferred, in their astringency, birds that took paste in the Japanese manner to birds that took Western-style birdseed. Among songbirds, he disliked canaries and bush warblers and skylarks and the like, birds with bright, showy songs. He had kept linnets all the same, but only because the dealer had given them to him. When one died he would but get a replacement.
With dogs, too, he did not like to have a breed he had kept, say a collie, die out. A man is drawn to a woman like his mother, loves a woman like his first sweetheart, wants to marry a woman like his dead wife. Is it not the same with birds and beasts? He lived with them because he wanted to savor in solitude a more independent kind of arrogance; and he stopped keeping linnets.
The next bird to die was a yellow wagtail. The yellow-green from the abdomen toward the tail, the yellow of the abdomen and breast, and still more the soft, plain lines, reminded him of a delicate bamboo grove. Especially tame, it would happily take food, if it was from his finger, even when it was not hungry, all the while joyously fanning its wings and chirping in a manner most pleasant; and because it would playfully peck at the moles on his face, he let it out of its cage. The result was that it died from too large a meal of crumbs or something of the sort. He thought he would like another, but gave up the idea, and put a Ryūkyū robin, a new bird for him, into the empty cage.
Regrets for the kinglets did not leave him, perhaps because his negligence had been responsible both for overdoing the bath and for wounding the feet. The dealer brought another pair immediately. Small though they might be, this time he did not for a moment leave the tub; and the same thing happened again.
Their eyes were closed and they were shivering when he took the bathing cage from the water; but, able somehow to stand up, they were in considerably better condition than the earlier ones. He would take care not to scorch the feet.
“I’ve done it again. Light the charcoal.” He spoke quietly, with some embarrassment.
“How would it be to let them die, sir?”
It was as if he had been startled from a slumber. “But you remember how it was last time. I can save them with no trouble at all.”
“You might save them, but not for long. I thought so last time, with their feet that way. It would have been better to let them die in a hurry.”
“But I could save them if I wanted to.”
“It would be better to let them die.”
“Oh?” He felt a sudden draining away of his strength, as if he might be fainting. He went upstairs to his study, and, putting the cage in the sunlight at the window, absently watched the kinglets die.
He was praying that the sunlight would save them. He was strangely sad. It was as if his own wretchedness lay there exposed to his gaze. He was unable to work at saving them as he had done for the others.
When, finally, they were dead, he took the wet bodies from the cage. He held them for a time in his hand, then put them back into the cage and shoved it into the closet.
He went downstairs. “They’re dead,” he said nonchalantly to the maid.
Small and weak, golden-crowned kinglets were quick to die. Yet other small birds, titmice and wrens, did well in his house. That he should have killed two pairs in the bath—he thought it fate, as if a linnet, for instance, had trouble living in a house where a linnet had died.
“That’s that between me and kinglets,” he laughed. Lying down in the breakfast room, he let the puppies tug at his hair. Then, selecting a horned owl from among the sixteen or seventeen cages, he took it up to his study.
When it saw him the owl would open its eyes wide with anger. Turning and turning its half-buried head, it would rattle its beak and hiss. It would eat nothing while he was watching. When he held out a bit of meat, it would snap angrily, and leave it dangling from its beak. He had spent one whole night in a contest of the wills. It would not look at feed while he was there. It would be motionless. But it got hungry as dawn came into the sky. He would hear it sliding along the perch in the direction of the feed. He would look around, and the head would snap up, horns back, eyes narrow, the expression such as to make one wonder whether there could be such evil and cunning in the world; and, hissing venomously, it would pretend that nothing had happened. He would look away. Again he would hear the feet. Their eyes would meet, and again the owl would pull away. Presently the shrike was noisily sounding the happiness of morning.
Far from resenting the owl, he took great comfort from it.
“I’ve been looking for a maid like this.”
“Very self-effacing of you.”
Frowning, he looked away.
“Kiki kiki,” he called to the shrike beside them.
“Kikikikikikikiki,” replied the shrike, its voice shrill as if to send everything fleeing. Though, like the owl, of violent habits, it was fond of feeding from his hand, and it took to him like a pampered little girl. It would call out when he coughed, or when it heard his footsteps coming home. When he let it out of the cage, it would fly to his shoulder or knee, and flutter its wings happily.
He kept it at his pillow as a substitute for an alarm clock. In the morning light it would call out beguilingly when he turned over or moved an arm or rearranged his pillow. It would even answer when he swallowed. And when it noisily set about awakening him, its voice would be bright as a bolt of lightning through the morning of life. When they had called back and forth several times and he was fully awake, it would chirp quietly in imitation of all the other birds.
The shrike was the first to make him feel the happiness of a a new day, and presently other songs would join in. Still in his nightgown, he would put feed on his finger, and the hungry shrike would peck violently at it. He took the violence as a mark of affection.
He seldom spent a night away from home. If he was away for so much as a night he would dream of his birds and beasts, and be awake. Because his habits were so fixed, he would become bored and turn back when he went out by himself to shop or to visit a friend. If he had no other woman companion, he would take the maid with him,
Now, on his way to see Chikako dance, he could not turn back. He had gone to the trouble of bringing the girl and the basket of flowers.
The recital that evening was sponsored by a newspaper. It was a sort of competition among fourteen or fifteen women dancers.
He had not seen
her dance in two years. Her dancing had so degenerated that he had to look away. All that was left of the savage strength was a common coquettishness. Form had gone to pieces with the decay of her body.
He took as his excuse, despite the views of the driver, that it was bad luck to have met a funeral, and that it was bad luck too to have dead birds at home, and sent the girl backstage with the flowers. Chikako sent back the message that she wanted to talk to him. Having seen her dance, he disliked the prospect of having a long talk with her. He took advantage of the intermission to go backstage. He pulled up short, and slipped behind the door.
Chikako was being made up by a young man.
On the still, white face, utterly given over to the man, the eyes were closed, the outstretched chin was slightly raised, the lips and the eyebrows and eyelashes had not yet been painted. It was like the face of a lifeless doll, a dead face.
Not quite ten years before he had thought of committing suicide with Chikako. They had had no special reason. He had been in the habit of saying he wanted to die. The thought was but a scum floating upon the solitary life he lived with his animals; and he decided that Chikako, who absently gave herself over to others as if asking that someone bring her hope, who was scarcely alive at all, would be a good companion. Chikako, the expression on her face the usual one, as if she did not know the significance of what she was doing, nodded childishly. She set but one condition.
“They say you kick at your skirt. Tie my legs up tight.”
Tying her legs with a thin cord, he was surprised anew at their beauty.
He thought: “They’ll say that I died with a beautiful woman.”
She lay with her back to him, her eyes calmly closed, her head up. Then she brought her hands together in prayer. He was struck, as by lightning, by the joy of emptiness.
“We are not to die.”
He had of course not been of a mind to kill and to die. He did not know whether or not Chikako had been serious. Her face revealed nothing. It was a midsummer afternoon.
Quite taken by surprise, he neither spoke nor thought again of suicide. The knowledge echoed deep in his heart that whatever happened he must treasure this woman.
House of the Sleeping Beauties Page 12
