“We can talk about that later on,” I said. “The first thing is whether or not Mariye will agree to sit for the painting. That’s the first step. She’s a very quiet girl, like a bashful cat. She might not want to model. Or else her parents might not give permission. They don’t really know my background, so they’ll be pretty wary, I would imagine.”
“I know Mr. Matsushima very well, the man who runs the arts-and-culture center,” Menshiki said coolly. “And I’m also, coincidentally, an investor, a financial supporter of the school. I think if Mr. Matsushima puts in a good word, things will go smoothly. You’re an upright person, an artist with a solid career, and if he recommends you, I think it will assuage any concerns that her parents might have.”
He’s already got it all mapped out, I thought. He’s already anticipated what might happen, like the opening moves of a game of go. Nothing coincidental about it.
Menshiki went on. “Mariye Akikawa’s unmarried aunt takes care of her. Her father’s younger sister. I believe I mentioned this before, but after Mariye’s mother died, this aunt came to live with them and has been like a mother to Mariye. Her father is too busy with work to be very involved. So as long as the aunt is persuaded, things should work out fine. Once she agrees to have Mariye model, I would expect the aunt to accompany her to your house as her guardian. There’s no way she’d allow a young girl to go by herself to the house of a man living alone.”
“But will she really give permission for Mariye to model?”
“Let me handle that. As long as you agree to paint her portrait, I’ll take care of any other practical issues that come up.”
I had little doubt he’d be able to “take care of” any of these other “practical issues.” That was his forte. But was it good for me to get so deeply involved in those problems—all these complex interpersonal relations? Didn’t Menshiki have his own plans and intentions that went beyond what he was revealing to me?
“Can I be totally honest with you?” I said. “Maybe it isn’t my place to say this, but I’d like you to hear me out.”
“Of course. Say whatever you want.”
“Isn’t it better, before you put this plan into action, that you determine whether or not Mariye Akikawa really is your child? If you find out she isn’t, then there’s no need to go to all this trouble. It might not be easy, but there has to be a way. I think if anyone could discover that, you could. Even if I paint her portrait, and it’s hanging next to yours, that’s not going to solve anything.”
Menshiki paused before replying. “If I wanted to scientifically determine if Mariye Akikawa is related by blood to me, I could. It might take some effort, but it’s not impossible. The thing is—I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because whether she’s my child or not isn’t a determining factor.”
I gazed at him, mouth shut. He shook his head, his abundant white hair waving, like it was fluttering in the breeze. When he spoke, his voice was calm, like he was explaining to some large, intelligent dog how to conjugate simple verbs.
“I’m not saying either way is fine. It’s just that I don’t feel like determining the facts. Maybe Mariye Akikawa is my biological child. And maybe she isn’t. But what if I do determine that she’s my real child—then what? I announce to her that I’m her real father? Try to get custody? I can’t do that.”
Menshiki shook his head again, rubbing his hands together on his lap like it was a cold night and he was warming himself before a fireplace. He continued.
“Mariye Akikawa is living a peaceful life in that house with her father and her aunt. Yes, her mother died, but the family—despite some issues her father has—is relatively healthy and functional. She’s close to her aunt. She’s made a life for herself. If I suddenly appear on the scene announcing that I’m her real father, even if I could prove it scientifically, will that solve anything? The truth will actually confuse things. And it’s not going to make anyone happy. Including me.”
“So you’d prefer to keep things the way they are, rather than let the truth come out.”
Menshiki spread his hands on his lap. “In a word, yes. It took some time for me to arrive at that conclusion, but my feelings are firm. I plan to live the rest of my life holding on to the possibility that Mariye Akikawa is my real child. Watching, from a distance, as she grows up. That’s enough. Even if I knew for sure she was my child, that wouldn’t make me happy. The sense of loss would be all the more painful. And if I knew she wasn’t my child, that would, in a different sense, also deepen the sense of loss. Or maybe crush me. Either way there’s no happy result. Can you follow what I’m trying to say?”
“I think so. At least in theory. But if I were in your position, I’d want to know the truth. Theory aside, it’s natural for people to want to know the truth.”
Menshiki smiled. “You’re still young, so that’s why you say that. When you get to be my age, you’ll understand how I feel. How much loneliness the truth can cause sometimes.”
“So what you’re after is not to know the unmitigated truth, but to hang her portrait on your wall, gaze at it every day, and ponder the possibilities. Are you sure that’s enough?”
Menshiki nodded. “It is. Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. I choose to surrender myself to that instability. Do you think that’s unnatural?”
I did indeed. Or at least I didn’t see it as natural. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it unhealthy, though. But that was Menshiki’s problem, not mine.
I glanced over at the Commendatore seated on top of the Steinway. Our eyes met. He raised both index fingers upward and spread them apart, as if to say, Let’s put that answer on hold. Then he pointed with his right index finger to a watch on his left wrist. Of course the Commendatore wasn’t wearing a watch. He was just pointing to where one would be. And of course what that meant was, We should be leaving soon. The Commendatore’s advice to me, as well as a warning. I decided to heed it.
“Could I have a little time to get back to you on this? It’s a delicate matter, and I need time to consider it.”
Menshiki held up his hands from his lap. “Of course. Consider it as long as you’d like. I’m not trying to rush you. I know I may be asking too much.”
I stood up and thanked him for the dinner.
“Ah, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you,” Menshiki said, as if suddenly remembering. “It’s about Tomohiko Amada. We talked earlier, didn’t we, about how he’d studied abroad, in Austria? About how, just before World War Two broke out, he rushed back home?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I researched it a bit. I’m interested, too, in what was behind all that. It happened a long time ago, and I don’t have all the facts, but there were rumors then of some sort of scandal.”
“A scandal?”
“That’s right. Amada was apparently caught up in an aborted assassination attempt in Vienna. It turned into a political crisis, and the Japanese embassy in Berlin got involved and secreted him back to Japan. According to certain rumors. This was right after the Anschluss. You know about the Anschluss, I assume?”
“That was when Germany annexed Austria in 1938.”
“Correct. Hitler incorporated Austria into Germany. There was a lot of chaos, and the Nazis finally took over all of Austria pretty much by force, and the nation of Austria vanished. This was in March 1938. The place was in turmoil, and in the confusion of the moment a lot of people were murdered. Assassinated, or murdered and made to look like suicides. Or else sent to concentration camps. It was during this time that Tomohiko Amada studied in Vienna. Rumor had it that he fell in love with an Austrian woman and got mixed up with an underground resistance group comprised largely of college students, who plotted to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi official. Not the sort of thing either the German government or the Japanese government would condone, for
they’d signed a mutual defense pact only a year and a half before this, and the relationship between the two countries was growing closer all the time. Both were dead set on avoiding anything that would hinder their pact. Though Tomohiko Amada was still young, he had already made a name for himself as an artist in Japan, and his father was a large landowner, a locally politically influential person. A person like that couldn’t just be secretly blotted out.”
“So Tomohiko Amada was sent back to Japan?”
“Correct. Rescued is more like it. Thanks to the political considerations of higher-ups, he narrowly escaped getting killed. If the Gestapo had gotten hold of him under suspicion of something that serious—even if they hadn’t had any clear-cut evidence—that would have been the end of him.”
“But the assassination didn’t happen?”
“No, it was abortive. There was an informant in the group, and the plan was leaked to the Gestapo. There was a wholesale arrest of the members.”
“There would have been a real uproar if they’d gone through with it.”
“The strange thing is, there was no talk of it at the time,” Menshiki said. “There were whispers about a scandal, but there doesn’t seem to be any public record of it. For various reasons, it was covered up.”
So the Commendatore in the painting Killing Commendatore might represent that Nazi official. The painting might be a hypothetical depiction of the assassination that never actually happened in Vienna in 1938. Amada and his lover were connected with this plot, and then it was discovered by the authorities. The two of them were torn apart, and the woman most likely killed. And after he returned to Japan Amada transferred that horrific experience in Vienna onto the very symbolic canvas of a Japanese-style painting. Adapting it, in other words, into a scene from the Asuka period, set over a thousand years ago. Killing Commendatore was a painting Tomohiko Amada painted for himself alone. He felt compelled for his own sake to paint it to preserve that awful, bloody memory from his youth. Which is precisely why he never made the painting public, why he wrapped it up tightly and hid it away in the attic.
Perhaps that incident in Vienna was one reason he made a clean break with his career as an artist of Western paintings and converted to Japanese-style painting. He might have wanted to decisively separate himself from the self he used to be.
“How did you find out about all this?” I asked.
“It didn’t take a lot of effort on my part. I asked an organization run by an acquaintance to investigate it for me. But it happened such a long time ago, and they can’t be held responsible for how much of it is really true. They did check with multiple sources, though, so I think the information can basically be trusted.”
“Tomohiko Amada had an Austrian lover. She was a member of an underground resistance group. And he was involved in that assassination plot.”
Menshiki inclined his head a bit and then spoke. “If that’s true, then it’s a pretty dramatic series of events. But most of the people involved are dead by now, so there’s no way for us to really know what happened. Facts have a tendency to get embellished, too. At any rate, though, it’s pretty melodramatic.”
“No one knows how deeply he was involved in that plot?”
“No. We don’t know. I’ve just given it my own dramatic touch. Amada was deported from Vienna, bid his lover farewell—or maybe wasn’t even able to do that—was put on a ship in Bremen, and returned to Japan. During the war he remained silent, holed up in rural Aso, then debuted as a painter of Japanese-style paintings soon after the end of the war. Which took people by complete surprise. Another pretty dramatic development.”
Thus ended the story of Tomohiko Amada.
* * *
—
The same black Infiniti I’d arrived in was quietly awaiting me in front of the house. A faint drizzle was still intermittently falling, the air wet and chilly. The season when you needed a coat was just around the corner.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Menshiki said. “My thanks, too, to the Commendatore.”
It is I who should be doing the thanking, the Commendatore murmured in my ear. His voice, of course, was only for me to hear. I thanked Menshiki once more for dinner. It was an amazing meal, I said. I couldn’t be more satisfied. The Commendatore seemed grateful as well.
“I hope bringing up all of those boring details after dinner didn’t spoil the evening,” Menshiki said.
“Not at all. But about your request: I need some time to think about it.”
“Of course.”
“It takes me time to consider things.”
“It’s the same for me,” Menshiki said. “My motto is: Thinking three times is better than two. And if time allows, thinking four times is better than three.”
The driver had the rear door open, waiting. I got inside. The Commendatore should have boarded at the same time, though I didn’t see him. The car started up the asphalt slope, drove out the open gate, then proceeded slowly down the mountain. Once the white mansion disappeared from view, everything that happened that night seemed like part of a dream. It was getting harder to distinguish what was normal from what was not, what was real and what was not.
What you can see is real, the Commendatore whispered in my ear. What you need to do is open your eyes wide and look at it. You can judge it later on.
Even with my eyes wide open, there could be many things I was overlooking, I thought. I may have actually murmured this aloud, since the chauffeur shot me a glance in the rearview mirror. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the seat. And thought this: How wonderful it would be to put off judging things forever.
I got home a little before ten p.m. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, changed into pajamas, slid into bed, and fell right asleep. Predictably, I had a million dreams, all of them strange, disconcerting. Swastika flags flying over the streets of Vienna, a huge passenger ship easing out of Bremen harbor, a brass band playing on the pier, Bluebeard’s unopened room, Menshiki playing the Steinway.
26
THE COMPOSITION COULDN’T BE IMPROVED
Two days later I got a call from my agent in Tokyo. They’d received the transfer of funds from Mr. Menshiki, the payment for the painting, and after taking the agent’s fee out of it the rest had been deposited into my bank account. When I heard the total amount I was astonished. It was much higher than what I’d originally heard.
“The finished painting was better than he’d anticipated, so he added a bonus. There was a message from Mr. Menshiki requesting that you accept this as a token of his gratitude,” my agent said.
I groaned faintly, but no words would come.
“I haven’t seen the actual painting, though Mr. Menshiki attached a photo. From the photo, at least, it looks like an amazing work. Something that goes beyond the boundaries of portrait painting, yet remains a convincing portrait.”
I thanked him and hung up.
A little while later my girlfriend called. Did I mind if she came over tomorrow morning? That would be fine, I told her. Friday was when I taught art class, but I’d have enough time to make it.
“Did you have dinner at Mr. Menshiki’s place?” she asked.
“Yes, a really excellent meal.”
“Did it taste good?”
“It was amazing. The wine was great, too, and the food was outstanding.”
“What was the house like inside?”
“Beautiful,” I said. “It’d take me half a day to describe it all.”
“Could you tell me all about it when I see you?”
“Before? Or after?”
“After’s good,” she said simply.
* * *
—
After I hung up the phone, I went into the studio and looked at Tomohiko Amada’s Killing Commendatore. I’d seen it so many times, but now, after what Menshiki told me, it took on a strangely g
raphic reality. This was not simply some historical picture of a past event, reproduced in an old-fashioned format. It felt—from the expressions and movements of each of the four characters (excluding Long Face)—like you could read their reactions to the situation. The young man piercing the Commendatore with his long sword was perfectly expressionless. He’d shut away his heart, hiding his emotions. In the Commendatore’s face, one could read the agony as his chest was stabbed, but also a sense of pure surprise, the sense of How could this possibly be happening? The young woman watching this take place (in the opera, this character is Donna Anna) was torn apart by violently conflicting emotions. Her lovely face was contorted in anguish, her lovely white hand held to her mouth. The stocky man, a servant by the look of him (Leporello), was gasping for breath, gazing up at the sky. His hand was stretched out as if trying to reach something.
The organization was perfect. The composition couldn’t be improved. It was a superb, polished arrangement. Each character maintained a vivid dynamism in their actions, instantaneously frozen in time. And now I saw the events of the aborted assassination that may have occurred in 1938 Vienna overlaying the painting. The Commendatore was dressed not in Asuka period costume but in a Nazi uniform. Maybe the black uniform of the SS. And in his chest was a saber or perhaps a dagger. Perhaps the one stabbing him was Tomohiko Amada himself. And who was the woman gasping nearby? Was this Amada’s Austrian lover? And what was it that was rending her heart in two like that?
I sat on the stool, gazing for a long time at Killing Commendatore. My imagination could come up with all sorts of allegories and messages contained therein, but these were, in the final analysis, nothing more than unsubstantiated hypotheses. The background—what I took as background, that is—that Menshiki had talked about was not historical fact, but nothing more than rumor. Or else just a melodrama. Everything remained on the level of perhaps.
A thought suddenly struck me: I wish my sister were here.
Killing Commendatore Page 32
