The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  “I came because it was you, Aunt.” she said.

  Because I had been an aunt to her, of sorts, the word drove my guilt in deeper. I had prayed for something to happen—anything to make Nao leave—and here it was in front of me, veiled Consequence. “He would have come himself,” I said. “His leg is broken; he can’t get out of bed.”

  She did not seem to respond to what I’d said. Instead she asked, “Would you do something for me?” At this I leaned closer, almost touching the barred gate. “I want to stay and train to be a nurse,” she said. “If you’re a novice, you can stay for three years and then decide if you want to stay for life. In three years I could learn how to do something besides sew and clean. I could go anywhere. You get books, Aunt, and you get to learn the foreign names of body parts and medicines, see?” She tapped different parts of her arm and shoulder while reeling off words that sounded like the Church Latin I’d heard as a child.

  Hearing that voice, so very much hers, I felt outrageous hope well up in me. I reached through the gate to the hand that held the shears. “Miss Aki, you’re both alive. You could marry him. You could elope.”

  She took a step back from me, turning away. This wasn’t what I’d meant to do. I’d meant to come and listen contritely, to offer any help she wanted, to subtly feel out what Kenji could hope for. “Please! Wait—” I said. As she turned, warily, toward me again, I noticed something. She seemed a shade less painfully thin than she had at home, like the difference between the first and the second day of a crescent moon. A thought struck me: “You’ve been eating this week, haven’t you?” I kept my voice tender and coaxing. “You stopped so you wouldn’t get your monthlies?”

  “They just started yesterday,” she whispered, about to bolt. “Please—”

  “Shh,” I said. Deliberately changing my tack, I assured her, “Even if you can’t stay here, no one’s going to marry you off the day you leave.” She drew closer as I told her about Toru. “So you could still—” Instead of marry Kenji, I said, “—come back if you wanted, right?”

  Aki coughed a little laugh and pressed on with her suit. “Listen, they said usually your parents have to pay a dowry if you join a convent, but at this one, they pay for some of the girls themselves. They say they’ll let me stay for a little while, and they’ll ask their mothers in Rome if I can become a novice. Sister Theresa says I shouldn’t, because they need to spend their money on truly fallen women, not girls like me. But even she said if I had a dowry, they’d let me in right away. They wrote this for me.” She reached deep into the sleeve of the kimono she was wearing under her gardener’s coat and handed me a letter written in English and Japanese. I had spent a lifetime running from nuns, and here was Aki, running to them. “Do you think you could ask my father for me? Or maybe Okusama?”

  I tucked the letter away and stared at the veiled young woman behind the gate, this tea plucker, this beekeeper. I had lived beside her and never known her. “I will if you tell me what happened.”

  She folded her arms. “What do you want to know?” she said, her voice hard.

  I sat down on a bench, no doubt for visiting family, positioned across from another behind the convent gate. “Why don’t you come tell me what happened after you got into the jinrikisha with the Kamo Shrine water? Was it really sacred water, by the way? Or did Kenji just put any old water in the storeroom tower?” We’d followed the map with ease and found, as instructed, a bentwood jar festooned like a Shinto shrine with paper zigzags and straw rope.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “I can try to get you the money, or I can tell Kenji where you are, and once he’s mended, you know he’ll come here every day until they make you leave. It’s up to you.” Not seeing her face—and my anger at her for nearly killing herself—made me feel bossy. “Why not sit down?”

  She sat down. She said nothing for a moment, then began. “I took the jinrikisha and I brought the letters, and then he asked me to wait for him at the shrine while he talked to his father. He told Great Teacher he was going to visit home and take another look at Miss Mariko for himself.”

  Aki paused, then spoke again, her voice deeper. “The shrine was up on a hill, and there was nobody around except for the hawks flying. It was so beautiful up there. Do you remember? We stopped there on the way home from Sesshu-ji a long time ago, when I was a little girl. I remember the wind, the pines, the far-off hills so blue, like another color of sky. I felt—something different. Like except for him, nobody in the world knew where I was, and I liked that. I saw two hawks flying in circles; their wings were gold. That’s the two of us, I thought, flying above the world. My heart felt so big inside me. I shouted and I flapped my arms.” She giggled a little, a girlish sound dimmed with regret. “And then I saw a hawk flying all alone.”

  She hesitated and began again on a different tack. “When I was little he once gave me a pair of emperor and empress dolls for Girls’ Day, and in my mind I always thought those dolls were us. I never said anything. But then, when I was older, when he first—when we first—well, he said he’d thought they were us too.”

  She turned away as if she had forgotten that I couldn’t see her face behind the veil. “But here I was alone in secret,” she said, “and there he was lying to his father about Miss Mariko. Suddenly I felt so small. Like once I walked out the torii gate, this would be my life from now on, waiting and secrets. I watched that hawk all alone in the air until he came to me.”

  I was surprised that Aki was so forthright when she continued: “There was a veranda where you could bring a picnic, off past the shrine. He brought food and mosquito netting and we stayed there all night on the hillside. We never spent a whole night together before.” Her voice was soft and open, and she said half a line from an old poem: “While we lay there, in our overlapping clothes, the moon rose over the trees. We looked at each other. We were both thinking about Mariko Kato, and that moon-viewing pond.”

  I was awed by the certainty of the voice, just inches from me, that knew what its lover was thinking. “He said he’d rather die in my arms in that pond than visit it as a son-in-law. When I heard that, I felt so big and so small at the same time, and I said, ‘Prove it.’” Her voice was forceful and clear.

  “You know the rest,” she said. “We filled our sleeves with rocks.” She reached up and lifted the gauze in front of her face, and I willed myself not to recoil.

  Her right cheek was a thick ring of greenish scab, the center of which, including much of her closed eye, looked like raw meat. I shuddered, remembering that shallow, murky water, those sharp stones. “You lost your eye,” I whispered.

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to open it yet, but it’s already better.”

  I made myself continue to look, carefully and tenderly, at what I had been trusted to see. The outside of the scab was crusty and white with repairing skin, and the whole right side of her face was heavily bruised. The left side of her precious face was unbroken but darkly bruised as well, in a pattern like clouds. Or a man’s hand.

  “What happened?” I breathed, spreading my own hand over my own cheek. “He did that?”

  I could barely hear her for a second, as she said yes. Then she spoke louder, pushing me away a little. “When we were tied together in the water. It was an accident,” she said, shrugging.

  We were both quiet for a moment. “I didn’t know how much the body wants to live and breathe,” she said, “but it does. His did. More than it wanted to die, or love. Mine too.” She lowered the gauze as she said this, so I could not see the expression on her face. “I know in my heart it was an accident,” she said in a voice both pitiless and forgiving. “But it was a lesson too.”

  KENJI WOULD HAVE WANTED me to come straightaway, but my head was full of hawks and shrines and hand-shaped bruises. I told Yukako first.

  “How much does she want?” she asked, opening the letter from the nuns. I remembered that morning on the Canal Street bridge, the way I felt like I was ho
lding my breath as I watched her contemplate a marriage between Aki and her son. How still she had stood then, as if pausing at a closed door. How quickly she read now, signaling with a fingertip for more tea. I poured. She looked up. “Done.”

  Had I ever seen her spend money so fast? I felt, inside my happiness for Aki, a jab of disappointment, enough to knock the held breath clean out of me. Before her tea even cooled, Yukako had counted out coins and summoned a jinrikisha. “Her father’s not here,” she sighed sharply. We’d had no news of him all week. “But I can bring Kuga. We’ll have them hold the money in trust for Aki until we can get Nao’s approval.” Kuga was still untying her kimono sleeves from their work strings when the jinrikisha pulled them away.

  As I finished chopping the eggplants and cucumbers left on the block, I felt my stomach go cold over telling Kenji. I washed the rice, I salted the vegetables, I opened the trapdoor in the kitchen floor and gave the pickle tubs their daily stir. I dried lacquer dishes that were already dry. Just as I decided it was better he hear it from me than his mother, I saw a young man standing in the doorway. He knows, I thought, dreading his eager eyes and stumping gait. But it was Tai.

  Rough where his brother was smooth, quick where his brother was brooding, Master Teacher burst in, sunny and brash. “I thought it might be you. Those look good,” he said, helping himself to a dewy slice of cucumber. “Aunt, I wanted to ask something of you.” You too? I looked at him in disbelief, which he mistook for encouragement. He took something out of the breast of his kimono, a white packet tied in red cord. “About Miss Sono…” he said.

  “Pardon me,” I said, scuttling off to the toilet as if I hadn’t heard him. I had enough young lovers to worry about. I was touched, though, thinking about the little white package. His elaborately knotted cord not only alluded to the red thread binding two destinies, it was a play on Tsuko’s name: tsuna meant rope; tsunagu was to tie; tsunagari was a relationship. Lucky boy, to like the girl his mother chose for him. Someone else would help him, I was sure. I slipped outside and went to find Kenji.

  “I’M FEELING A LITTLE better today,” the boy said, smiling in his futon. “Look, I walked around some. I brought this down for you.” He nodded at a slender book with starry violet binding-knots.

  “Lady Shonagon,” I murmured. Jiro had shown it to me once, and the Mountain had lent it to me. I never had deciphered it. “Your mother read it as a girl.”

  “Un,” he said, opening the volume. Layered into the fold of each page was a loose sheet in Kenji’s lovely writing, rendered with great clarity, with explanatory characters beside each of his kanji. “I did this for Aki,” he said. “It was written in the Heian era, almost nine hundred years ago, so these pages,” he said, pointing to the printed book, “are written in the old style. And these,” he said, pointing to his own sheets, “I rewrote the way people talk now. All her lists. Adorable things. Depressing things. Things that gain by being painted,” he recited. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, wishing I’d brought a flask of tea or something so I could just put it down for him and leave. “We only read about half of it together. But maybe someday…” he sighed. “So, did you go with Mother to Advisor Kato’s?”

  What a long, long day I’d had. “Never mind about the reading lesson,” I said. And then I told him.

  “Oh,” he said. He lay there for a long time, utterly silent. And then he drew both whole and broken legs up toward him as if he were wadding all his hopes into a sack. His voice when he spoke was numb. “Could you get that book out of here?”

  THE FIRST DAY he could walk outside, Kenji was gone for hours. He’d stopped talking to me, beyond a grunt or two when I brought his tray, as had Tai, once his Sighting went without a hitch, no help from me. That evening, when Kenji came home, I saw his slack face taut with resolve. “This is for you,” he said. “One of the nuns gave it to me.”

  “You found her?” I said. I had avoided telling him where Aki was the day I saw her, and he hadn’t asked since.

  “How many convents are there in Kyoto?” he asked.

  “Oh.” I opened the note and moved quickly through its careful kana. It said, You already know I thank you. Please thank Okusama too. And tell him he can wait all day if he wants; I’m not coming out.

  AND HE DID. Except on the day of his brother’s wedding, Kenji went to the convent every day and sat by the gate. His father sent for him regularly, but the boy did not go back to Sesshu-ji that summer, and Aki did not leave Mother Margaret’s. Yukako, perhaps by way of apology, told the go-between to hold off at least until next spring brought its new class of girls. In Tokyo that season, Kato’s friend the Minister of Taxation was killed in his jinrikisha by an unknown gunman, sparking all kinds of rumors and grandstanding, but after the upset died down, Mariko was engaged, we heard, to the canal engineer, Mr. Tanabe. At her insistence, and to our surprise, her father declared that she was not to marry until she’d taught tea for two years.

  THE NIGHT I found Aki, long after Yukako had returned, eaten, and scrubbed, I found I was too awake to bed down in my corner of the room beside the kitchen. I took a lamp and Kenji’s book and stole out to Baishian. Without its paper, the teahouse stood forlorn as a mouthful of missing teeth. I lit a mosquito coil and sat quietly in the two-mat room, looking at the night floating in squares around me. I thought about all the people I had seen that day: Yukako on the bridge, Aki at the gate, Kenji with his crumpled hope. The hand-tinted Emperor, Alice Starkweather, the nuns. Those bald-toad monks chattering in French. Well, Monsieur. That’s the natives for you. When in Rome. When in Rome. When in Rome. My stomach lurched. I knew that voice. It belonged to a man who had once fed me.

  I lay on my back, took deep breaths until the dizziness passed, and sat up again. “Sa,” I said to myself. Brother Joaquin never left Kyoto. Very well. I blinked back a pair of splayed black boots, a burning house, a glinting gold statue. The next time I saw Aki, would she still be Aki, or would she be shriven and wimpled, Lourdes or Agnes or Pauline?

  I fingered Shonagon’s book, written close to the year 1000. A lady-in-waiting to the Empress, Sei Shonagon kept a notebook in the hollow compartment of her pillow, and so her jottings are known as The Pillow Book. I opened it at random: One is startled by the sound of raindrops; the wind blows against the shutters. In the same section, I also saw, One’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. I was glad Kenji had reminded me that Shonagon was a list-maker because the sentences confused me at first. I moved backward and found the title of the list: Things that make the heart beat faster.

  I added: The voice of a monk. A hand-shaped bruise. The word Eurasian. One learns the shallowness of water where lovers have failed to drown.

  AND I ADDED, though even as I did, I knew the words belonged, not to me, but to an Urako whose mistress had never disappointed her, one whose heart beat faster with desire, and not, as mine did, with wariness: One’s employer enters the bath, her hair loosely piled with ivory combs. She spreads her long, pale arms across the lip of the steaming tub. Her eyelids droop with relief, her slight breasts rise with her deep intake of breath. When her head eases to one side, a lock of hair no thicker than a writing brush dips suddenly into the water.

  31

  1891

  SHONAGON MIGHT INDEED have written the last term in my list, had she been privileged to see her Empress in the bath. She noted every time she was allowed to grind ink for her sovereign, every gift of paper or silk, every time she was chosen to attend Her Majesty in some other woman’s place. I recognized, at a pained remove, my own loyalty in hers.

  Shonagon’s book came just in time for me that summer, as I faced even less time alone with Yukako. Wanting to avoid the long and failed engagement she had herself experienced with Akio, as well as any chance of Baron Sono changing his mind, Yukako pushed to have the wedding as quickly as possible. Before July was out, Tai and Tsuko were ensconced in the privacy of the room above the kitchen where Yukako and I had slept until that s
pring. Though Tai and his mother continued to share the garden study as an office, I noted that one book at a time, one brush, his things seemed to climb their way upstairs. Yukako continued to sleep just a folding screen away from the girls in the room above the sewing house, and I could count on seeing her alone only when I brought her breakfast. Now that she was family, Tsuko attended Okusama on all her outings, and at night they took their baths together while I soaked nearby.

  “How did your and Mr. Kenji’s visit go with the Katos today?” suko asked in the water, her voice soft and precise. What visit? I looked up. I couldn’t believe Kenji had finally agreed to go. Perhaps he had accepted his reprieve from the marriage market as the only contrition Yukako was able to offer.

  “You know I wanted to try to smooth things over,” Yukako said. “And it’s good that Advisor Kato accepted our gifts and Kenji’s apology. But now he won’t even come to tea,” she lamented. “I can understand, first the shame on his daughter, then his friend’s murder. Poor man. But at this rate I’ll never get a crack at the boys’ schools.” She paused, worried. “At least I’ll have this meeting with the Minister to make my case.”

  Tsuko wrung the hot washcloth over Yukako’s exposed shoulders and the older woman sighed with gratitude. “I wonder if we shouldn’t set you and Master Teacher up in Tokyo, near Court,” Yukako murmured half to herself. “Would you like that?”

  “Whatever you think best,” Tsuko said diplomatically. She misses Tokyo, I thought.

  “Wise girl.” ukako laughed a little roughly and closed her eyes for a moment. Would Yukako go with them to Tokyo? Would I be brought along? Perhaps nothing would come of this plan, but it was galling to learn of it in passing, to overhear instead of being told.