Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

  But it took some time before I actually became her lover. Yuzu had another man she’d been seeing for two years. Not that she was head over heels in love with him.

  “He’s really handsome. Though a bit boring sometimes,” she said.

  Very handsome but boring…There was no one I knew like that, so I couldn’t picture that type of person. What came to mind was a dish of food that looked delicious but ended up tasting bland. Would anyone be happy with that kind of food?

  “I’ve always had a weakness for good-looking men,” she said, as if making a confession. “Whenever I meet a handsome man it’s like my brain goes out the window. I know that’s a problem, but I can’t do anything about it. I can’t get over that. That might be my biggest weakness.”

  “A chronic disease,” I said.

  She nodded. “That could be. An incurable disorder. A chronic disease.”

  “Not exactly great news for me,” I said. Handsome features weren’t my strongest selling point.

  She didn’t deny that, and just laughed happily. At least she didn’t seem bored when we were together. She had a lot to say, and laughed a lot.

  So I waited patiently for things to not work out between her and this handsome boyfriend. (He wasn’t merely good-looking, but had graduated from a top university and had a high-paying job at a top corporation. I bet he and Yuzu’s father got along famously.) All this time she and I talked over all sorts of things, went to all sorts of places. We got to understand each other better. We kissed, held each other, but didn’t have sex. Having a physical relationship with several partners at the same time wasn’t her style. “I’m a bit old-fashioned that way,” she said. So all I could do was bide my time.

  This went on for about half a year. For me, it felt like eternity. Sometimes I just wanted to give up. But I managed to hang in there, convinced that someday soon she would be mine.

  And finally she and her handsome boyfriend broke up (at least I think they broke up—she never said a word about it, so it was conjecture on my part), and she chose me—not much to look at, not much of a breadwinner—as her lover. Soon after we decided to get married.

  I remember very well the first time we made love. We’d gone to stay at a small hot-springs town in the country, and spent our first night together there. Everything went really well. Almost perfect, you could even say. Maybe a little too perfect. Her skin was soft and pale, and silky smooth. The somewhat slick hot mineral water of the hot springs bath, combined with the pale glow of the early-autumn moonlight, may have contributed to the beauty and smoothness of her skin. I held her naked body for the first time, went inside her, she moaned quietly in my ear, and dug her nails hard into my back. The autumn insects were in full chorus then, too. A cool mountain stream burbled in the background. I made a firm pledge to myself then: Never, ever, let this woman go. This may have been the most sublime moment of my life up till then. Finally making Yuzu mine.

  After I got the short letter from Yuzu I thought about her for a long time. About when we’d first met, that autumn night when we first made love. About how my feelings for her had basically never changed, from the first moment up to the present. Even now I didn’t want to lose her. That much was clear to me. I’d signed and sealed the divorce papers, but that didn’t change things. No matter how I felt about it, though, the fact was that she’d suddenly left me. Gone far away—probably very far away—where even the most powerful binoculars couldn’t afford me a glimpse of her.

  Somewhere, while I was oblivious to it, she must have found a new, handsome lover. As always, her brain went out the window. I should have picked up on this when she started refusing to sleep with me. Having a physical relationship with several partners at the same time wasn’t her style. If only I’d thought about it, I soon would have realized that.

  A chronic disease, I thought. A serious illness with no prospects for a cure. A physical inclination that doesn’t respond to reason.

  That night (a rainy Thursday night) I had a long, dark dream.

  In that small seaside town in Miyagi I was driving the white Subaru Forester (it was now my car). I had on an old black leather jacket, and a black golf cap with a Yonex logo. I was tall, deeply suntanned, my salt-and-pepper hair short and stiff. In other words, I was the man with the white Subaru Forester. I was stealthily following my wife and the small car (a red Peugeot 205) the man she was having an affair with was driving. We were on the highway that ran along the coast. I saw the two of them go into a tacky love hotel on the outskirts of town. The next day I came up behind my wife and strangled her with a narrow, white belt from a bathrobe. I was used to physical labor and had powerful arms. And as I strangled her with all my might, I screamed something. I couldn’t hear what I’d yelled out—a meaningless roar of pure rage. A horrific rage I’d never experienced before had control over my mind and body. White spittle flew as I roared out.

  As she desperately gasped for air, I saw my wife’s temples convulse a little. I saw her pink tongue ball up and twist inside her mouth. Blue veins rose up on her skin like an invisible-ink map. I smelled my own sweat. An unpleasant smell I’d never smelled before rose up from my body like steam from a hot springs. It reminded me of the stink of some hairy beast.

  Don’t you dare paint me, I ordered myself. I violently thrust out an index finger at myself in the mirror on the wall. Don’t paint me anymore!

  And there I snapped awake.

  I knew now what had frightened me most in bed in that love hotel in the seaside town. Deep in my heart I feared that in the last instant I really would have strangled to death that girl (the young girl whose name I didn’t even know). “You can just pretend,” she said. But it might not have ended with just that. It might not have ended with just pretend. And the reason for that lay inside me.

  I wish I could understand myself, too. But it’s not easy.

  This is what I’d told Mariye Akikawa. I remembered this as I wiped the sweat away with a towel.

  * * *

  —

  The rain let up on Friday morning, the sky turning beautifully sunny. I hadn’t slept well, felt worked up, and to calm down went for an hour’s walk around the neighborhood later in the morning. I went into the woods, walked behind the little shrine, and checked out the hole for the first time in a long while. It was November now and the wind was much colder than before. The ground was covered with damp, fallen leaves. The hole was, as before, tightly covered over with several boards. Many-colored leaves had piled up on the boards, and there were several heavy stones to hold the boards down. But the way the stones were lined up seemed a little different from when I’d last seen them. Nearly the same, yet ever so slightly positioned differently.

  I didn’t worry about it. There wouldn’t be anyone else other than Menshiki and me who would tramp all the way out here. I pulled away one of the boards and peered down inside, but no one was there. The ladder was leaned up against the wall like before. Like always, that dark, stone-lined chamber lay there, deep and silent, at my feet. I put the board back on top and placed the stone back where it had been.

  It didn’t bother me, either, that the Commendatore hadn’t appeared for a good two weeks. Like he said, an Idea has a lot of business to attend to. Business that transcended time and space.

  The following Sunday finally came. A lot of things happened that day. It turned out to be a very hectic day.

  32

  HIS SKILLS WERE IN GREAT DEMAND

  Another prisoner approached us as we talked. He was a professional painter from Warsaw, a man of medium height with a hawk nose and a very black mustache on his fair-skinned face…His distinctive figure stood out from afar, and his professional status (his skills were in great demand in the camp) was evident. He was certainly no one’s nonentity. He often talked to me at length about his work.

  “I do color paintings, portraits, for the Germans. They bring
me photos of their relatives, wives, mothers and children. Everyone wants to have pictures of their closest kin. The SS describe their families to me with emotion and love—the color of their eyes, their hair. I produce family portraits from amateurish, blurry black-and-white photos. Believe me, I would rather paint black-and-white pictures of the children in the piles of corpses in the Lazarett than the Germans’ families. Give ’em pictures of the people they murdered; let ’em take them home and hang them on the wall, the sons of bitches.”

  The artist was especially distraught on this occasion.

  —SAMUEL WILLENBERG, Revolt in Treblinka, p. 96. © Copyright by Samuel Willenberg, 1984. Lazarett was another name for the execution facility in the Treblinka concentration camp.

  PART 2

  THE SHIFTING METAPHOR

  33

  I LIKE THINGS I CAN SEE AS MUCH AS THINGS I CAN’T

  Sunday was another fine clear day. No wind to speak of, and the fall colors in the valley sparkling in the sunlight. Small white-breasted birds hopped from one branch to the next, deftly pecking the red berries. I sat on the terrace, soaking it all in. Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor. Like time—no, scratch that, time could be a different story. Money may help us buy a little extra of that.

  The bright blue Toyota Prius rolled up the slope to my door at ten on the dot. Shoko Akikawa was decked out in a thin beige turtleneck and snug-fitting slacks of pale green. Around her neck, a modest gold chain gave off a muted glow. As on her past visit, her hair was perfectly done. When it swayed I could catch a glimpse of the lovely line of her neck. Today, though, she had a leather bag, not a purse, slung over her shoulder. She wore brown loafers. It was a casual outfit, yet she had clearly spent time choosing each piece. And the swell of her breasts was very attractive too. I had the inside scoop from her niece that “no padding” was involved. I felt quite drawn to those breasts—in a purely aesthetic way, of course.

  Mariye was dressed in straight-cut faded blue jeans and white Converse sneakers, a 180-degree turnaround from the formality of her first visit. Her jeans had holes in them (strategically placed, of course). She had on the sort of plaid shirt a lumberjack might wear in the woods, with a thin gray windbreaker draped over her shoulders. Underneath the shirt, as before, her chest was flat. And, just as before, she had a sour expression on her face. Like a cat whose dish has been whisked away halfway through its meal.

  Just as I’d done the previous week, I went into the kitchen, made a pot of tea, and brought it to the living room. Then I showed them the three dessan I had made.

  Shoko seemed to like them. “They’re all so full of life,” she exclaimed. “So much more like Mariye than photographs.”

  “Can I keep them?” Mariye asked.

  “Sure,” I answered. “Once your portrait is finished. I may need them until then.”

  Her aunt looked worried. “Really? Aren’t you being too—…”

  “Not at all,” I said. “They’re of no use to me once the portrait’s done.”

  “Will you use one of these dessan for your underdrawing?” Mariye asked.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I did them just to get a three-dimensional feel for who you are. The you who I put on canvas will be altogether different.”

  “Can you tell what that’s going to look like?”

  “No, not yet. The two of us still have to figure that one out.”

  “Figure out how I look three-dimensionally?” Mariye asked.

  “That’s right. A painting is a flat surface, but it still has to have three dimensions. Do you follow me?”

  Mariye frowned. I guessed she might somehow associate the word “three-dimensional” with her flat chest. In fact, she shot a glance at the curves beneath her aunt’s thin sweater before looking at me.

  “How can somebody learn to draw this well?” Mariye asked.

  “You mean like these dessan?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, like dessan, croquis, things like that.”

  “It’s all practice. The more you practice the better you get.”

  “I think there are a lot of people,” she said, “who don’t improve, no matter how much they practice.”

  She sure hit that one on the head. I had attended art school, but loads of my classmates couldn’t paint their way out of a paper bag. However we thrash about, we are all thrown in one direction or another by our natural talent, or lack of it. That’s a basic truth we all have to learn to live with.

  “Fair enough, but you still have to practice. If you don’t, any gifts or talents you do have won’t emerge where people can see them.”

  Shoko gave an emphatic nod. Mariye looked dubious.

  “You want to learn to paint well, correct?” I asked her.

  Mariye nodded. “I like things I can see as much as things I can’t,” she said.

  I looked in her eyes. A light was shining there. I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what she meant. But that inner light was drawing me in.

  “What a strange thing to say,” Shoko said. “Like you were speaking in riddles.”

  Mariye didn’t respond, just studied her hands. When she did look up a short while later, the light was gone. It had only been there a moment.

  * * *

  —

  Mariye and I went to the studio. Shoko had already pulled out the same thick paperback—at least, it looked identical to the one she had brought the previous week—and settled down on the sofa to read. She seemed totally engrossed in the book. I was even more curious than before as to what it might be, but I didn’t ask.

  Mariye and I sat across from each other about six feet apart, just as we had the last time. The only difference was that now I had an easel and canvas in front of me. No paints or brush, though—my hands were empty. My eyes hopped back and forth, from Mariye to the canvas to Mariye again. All the while, the question of how best to portray her “three-dimensionally” was running through my mind. I needed a story of some sort to work from. It wasn’t enough to just look at the person I happened to be painting. Nothing good could result from that. The portrait might be a passable likeness, but no more. To turn out a true portrait, I had to discover the story that must be painted. Only that could get the ball rolling.

  We sat there for some time, me on the stool, Mariye on a straight-backed chair, as I studied her face. She stared back at me without blinking, never averting her eyes. She didn’t look defiant so much as ready to stand her ground. Her pretty, almost doll-like, appearance sent people the wrong signal—at her core, she had a strong sense of herself, and her own unshakable way of doing things. Once she’d drawn a straight line, good luck getting her to bend it.

  There was something in Mariye’s eyes that reminded me of Menshiki, though I had to look closely to see it. I had felt the similarity before, but it still surprised me. Their gaze had a strange radiance—“a frozen flame” was the phrase that leapt to mind. That flame had warmth, but at the same time, it was cool and collected. Like a rare jewel whose glow came from deep within. That light expressed naked yearning when projected outside. Focused inward, it strove for completion. These two sides were equally strong, and at perpetual war with each other.

  Did Menshiki’s revelation that his blood might be running through Mariye’s veins influence me? Perhaps that had led me to unconsciously link the two of them together.

  Whatever the case, I had to transfer that glow in her eyes to the canvas, to capture how special it was. The core element in her expression, the thing that cut through her modulated exterior. Yet I still hadn’t located the context that made such a transfer possible. If I failed, that warm light would come across as an icy jewel, nothing more. Where was the heat coming from, and where was it headed? I had to find out.

  I sat there for fifteen minutes, gazing at her face, then at the canvas and back again, before finally
giving up. I pushed the easel aside and took a few slow, deep breaths.

  “Let’s talk,” I said.

  “Um, sure,” she answered. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I want to know more about you. If that’s okay.”

  “Like?”

  “Well, what sort of person is your father?”

  Mariye gave a small smirk. “I don’t know him very well.”

  “You don’t talk?”

  “We hardly see each other.”

  “Because he’s busy with work?”

  “I don’t know anything about his work,” Mariye said. “I don’t think he cares about me that much.”

  “Doesn’t care?”

  “That’s why he handed me over to my aunt to raise.”

  I took a pass on that one.

  “How about your mother—can you remember her? You were six when she passed away, right?”

  “I can only remember her in patches.”

  “What do you mean, in patches?”

  “My mom disappeared all of a sudden. I was too little to understand what dying meant, so I didn’t really know what had happened. She was there and then she just wasn’t. Like smoke.”

  Mariye was quiet for a moment.

  “It happened so quickly, and I couldn’t understand the reason,” she said at last. “That’s why I can’t remember much about that part of my life, like right before and after her death.”

  “You must have been pretty confused.”

  “It’s like there’s this high wall that divides when she was with me and when she was gone. I can’t connect the two parts together.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Do you get what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said. “My sister died when she was twelve. I told you that before, right?”