The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  Only once do I think of Mushanokoji. I am coming back from the coin-laundry by Central Urawa Station, my arms full of cleanness, when something falls from the bundled clothes. It is a wad of paper, the ink leached through the pulp, but I recognise it even so. The indecipherable and useless details of Mr Three Diamonds’s life.

  The autumn breeze is warm against my arms. The pulp edges away and I stop it with the tip of one boot. I think of the old man’s touch, his touching finger, the blood on his wrist like veins in marble. He has pushed me off course, and now I can’t find a way back. I’m no longer even sure if I want to.

  My arms are full. I step over the paper and keep going. It is late, between dusk and nightfall, and the last cicadas have gone quiet in the road trees. When I get back Nicola offers me a beer, and we drink together, looking out at the overpass, the sun setting behind it. Talking about her work, the money she has saved, her country, my country, nothing, nothing.

  The flyers work. The Pleasant Palace fills up, three to every room. No one has a working visa. Everyone except me could do with one. Once I take the train back to Tokyo Bay, as if I could have left something behind there, a findable energy. I come across nothing except Tsukiji, the city’s market, where giant bluefin are tailed and flash-frozen, mist rising from their ranked amphora, buyers stooping between them.

  I have nowhere to go. Most days I sit alone under the unpleasantly grime-caked air-conditioner, the notebooks spread across the floor. They cover half the room, worn as old basalt. Opened, their diagrams and transcriptions seem to come together, to make a complete and complex pattern, although this is a lie. They will always be incomplete. They remind me of a man I once saw, in Ephesus, stealing tesserae from a thousand-year-old mosaic. He picked out the squares of travertine and azulista and put them in the pockets of his empire-building shorts. His face blank, as if it could deny what the hands were doing.

  No one saw him except me, and I didn’t stop him. Now I wish that I had. He stole the tesserae, not as if he was destroying something, but as if he could carry the mosaic home in his pocket. There was a need in him directed towards something impossible. When I have finished with the books I put them away and sleep. The bullet train shudders through its shackles in my dreams.

  A drunk takes up residence under the stanchions. Every morning, from the bedroom window, I check to see if he is still there. He is always in the same green creaseless nylon suit, leant against the torus of a pillar, or hunched into himself like a netsuke carving. He is almost completely bald, with only shadows of hair left above each ear.

  Then one day he is gone. I wake early. It is half-dark. My cheek aches where the bruise is fading. The New Zealanders breathe softly in their safe dreams. I get up and cross to the window.

  The overpass is uninhabited. A wish creeps up on me, softly, like wakefulness. I want to know where the drunk has gone. Which doorway he is sleeping in, or what kind of life he has gone back to. His face cleaned, the eyes calmed. I wonder who would take him back. The man in the creaseless suit, unremarkable in a shopping crowd or on a rush-hour train.

  I dress quietly. I am thin, and shadows catch in the hollows of my collarbones. My boots are in my bag. I go downstairs and put them on by the house door. Outside, the air feels new and cool. I walk, not quickly. Settling into the familiar rhythm, looking for something I know I can’t find.

  It is miles into Tokyo. I follow the bullet train line southeast through the quiet suburbs. Dawn traffic accumulates around me. By the time I reach Asakusa it is noon. I go into the first department store I come to, a riverside high-rise, letting the crowd carry me past pearskin lacquer furniture and cobra-top ghetto blasters, orthopaedic mattresses and sumptuous silk underwear, bean cakes and gold leaf jellies, the half-timbered Piccadilly Pub, the puffer-fish eatery and Haagen Dazs ice-cream parlour in one building, the open atrium where stallholders sell turtles’-blood elixir, seaweed tea, cyberpets and boar-tusk seals. There is an energy here, a sense of purpose. A belief that anything can be had, at a price.

  It has been too long since I walked. It helps in a way I had forgotten it could. Mushanokoji is a fortnight behind me. I stop at a Circle-K, buy a rice parcel seasoned with salmon eggs, and eat without stopping. At the Sumida river I cross eastwards, away from the high-rises, into the wooden back streets. It is some time more before the road softens underfoot.

  I look down and find I am walking on yellowed grass. I am in a municipal park, boulders and ornamental pines between cheap fifties conurbations, prefabricated buildings that should have been demolished decades ago. Immigrants sit on the benches or walk together. At the far end of the park, shielded by gingko trees, a motorway cuts across the sky.

  There is a fountain ahead of me. Koi carp lip at pondweed. The fountain spout is rusted and dry. Foreign men sit around the pool’s rim. They have dark hair and olive skins, and I am reminded of Diyarbak’r. They smoke steadily, looking at the ground and their own cheap shoes.

  I sit. Now I have stopped moving, the drive goes out of me quickly. It is a long way back to the Pleasant Palace. My feet ache and I look down at them and at my hands. Turning them.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He has dark skin with dark hair and beard. Dirty nylon suit trousers and a fake Gucci belt. He is holding out a packet of Fortuna cigarettes.

  ‘No. Thanks.’

  The man sits down. Takes out a cigarette, then puts it back. I feel him lean towards me across the pool. ‘I had to introduce myself. You have the most lovely blue eyes of any Japanese woman I have seen.’

  ‘I’m not Japanese.’

  ‘Really?’

  I smile a little. Despite myself.

  ‘I am also not Japanese. My name is Pavlov.’ He holds out his hand.

  I raise mine. Pull back instinctively. There is a frog on his outstretched palm, small as the ball of his thumb. It blinks at me, green with gold irises. The man talks fast. ‘My name is Pavlov, and this is Pavlov’s Frog. This frog is famous to science. If you ring a bell, she will roll out her tongue.’

  ‘You’re hurting it. Your skin is too warm.’

  His grin falters. The frog hops back into the pool. Under the beard his face is older than I would have guessed, seamed with smile lines. ‘I am sorry. I meant to make you laugh. Laughing is good for the soul.’

  ‘Even for frogs?’

  ‘Especially for them. Where I live, the frogs laugh all night.’ He cleans his hand on his trousers. Gets out the cigarette again, lights it while I watch. The lighter is slim, plastic, patterned with red and green glacé cherries. A woman’s accessory, or a child’s.

  ‘Where are you from, Pavlov?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not Japan.’

  ‘What do you do here?’

  ‘When it rains I sell umbrellas.’

  ‘And when it doesn’t rain?’

  ‘Then I sell parasols.’ The beard pulls up around his lips.

  ‘You have a family?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nods. ‘You have good eyes. And what do you do…?’

  ‘Katharine.’

  ‘Katharine. I think maybe you come to Japan to teach English.’

  ‘No.’ A siren goes past. The park men move, as if a wind has passed through them. ‘I came here looking for something.’

  ‘World peace? Happiness for all people?’

  Now I smile. ‘Nothing so unselfish.’

  ‘That’s good. Because then I can help you.’

  ‘You don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘Yet still I can help you. Isn’t it good? I am Mister Lost and Found. The secret is this: computers. I have the best in Tokyo. Tokyo has the best in the world. So, if you look on my computer, you will find what you have lost.’

  ‘I haven’t lost anything–’

  He raises a hand. ‘No, I will not hear it. This is the modern world. The morning of the new millennium. If you can’t find what you are looking for, you are not using the modern world correctly. You are not following the instructions on the box. Why do you
hate computers?’

  ‘I don’t.’ I look up, feeling the sun and wind, harsh against my face. ‘Do you really have parasols?’

  ‘Listen, I have whatever you want. Eh?’ He is extracting a billfold from his trouser pocket. Inside is a wad of business cards. No cash. He holds a card out. ‘Please. An invitation. We will put your question on my computer. In no time you will have a thousand answers, from all over the world. When a good answer comes in I will telephone you, and then we will celebrate, and then you will find whatever you are looking for. Yes?’

  I take the card. On it is a name in tiny italicised characters: Pavlov Bekhterev, Trader, and, larger, an address in Japanese, English and Cyrillic.

  ‘Two blocks from here.’

  ‘Thanks. It was nice to meet you, anyway.’ We shake hands. He looks at his watch. ‘You have a business appointment?’

  ‘Ah, no. This park is next to the nursery. I must pick up my children.’

  ‘Pavlov’s sprogs.’ His face remains blank and I laugh. ‘It means children.’

  ‘Sprogs. Exactly. Ring a bell and they all at once shit their nappies.’

  At the park gate he waves goodbye. With the card I wave back. Later, in the Pleasant Palace, I turn its thin possibilities in my fingers and wonder what I have to lose.

  Screenlight bathes his face. Softens it. ‘So, now. You will have to tell me what you are looking for.’

  ‘A jewel.’

  ‘A jewel.’ He types as he talks. ‘And what do we call it?’

  ‘Lewis.’

  ‘Lewis. An unusual name for a stone.’

  ‘I want to know about everyone called Lewis on the island of Shikoku. To start with.’

  ‘No problem. It is also a strange name for the Japanese. And then we will eat. Anna is cooking now. Do you like okroshka? I love it. In summer I pick the cherries myself, in the park.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that is.’

  ‘Then I will introduce you. Okroshka, Katharine; Katharine, okroshka.’

  The apartment has a kitchenette and bathroom, a squat toilet, two bedrooms floored with worn-out tatami. It overlooks a rice field, the field in turn overshadowed by the Morinaga Milk Caramel Factory. The children, Alexander, Valentin, Elena, are one, two, three and a half, each with the same bow-lipped face, like Russian dolls. Anna is tall and sallow, her smile sweet as Pavlov’s but more halting, as if it remembers more. She has no English and no Japanese. At supper we talk in broken German, the children already put to bed. I wonder if they are refugees, but I don’t ask from what and they don’t say.

  The best computer in Tokyo is a Toyota laptop with a cheap modem attached at the back. After pork cutlet and chilled cherry soup, nursing coffee and vodkas, we go to see what Pavlov has caught.

  ‘Nothing.’ He shrugs. Adjusts the flat blue screen. ‘But this is only a kind of search engine we have used. The Internet is like an ocean, very wide, and there are other ways to travel. On it, in it, or under it. If there are Lewises on Shikoku I can find them, undoubtedly. They can run but not hide. With this mean baby I can check all bills, the working permit, Alien Registration Card, the driving licence, the registered parking space, the multi-generation mortgage. Birth certificate, death certificate. All the ID in a life.’

  I sip the coffee’s sweet tar. ‘Can anyone see you doing it?’

  ‘See? No.’ He moves through boxes, screens, indexes. ‘What kind of people?’

  ‘Anyone.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘In computers, with money, one can see anything. Do these people have money?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘Those are the worst kind of people. The anyones no one knows anything about.’

  He turns out of the screen’s illumination. The apartment is dark. It smells of Russia. Somewhere a child cries. ‘This will take some time. When I have your names, in a few days, I will call you.’ His face breaks into a grin. ‘Now, did you ever play chess? Chess Katharine, Katharine chess. Sit down, sit. Pick a hand.’

  It is late by the time I leave. Pavlov offers to drive me home, but it is too far, his eyes glisten with drink, and when I turn him down Anna gives me a shy glance of thanks. I imagine us careering into the rice field, sinking into the fresh harvest mud. The last of the bog people in the last of their bog Honda.

  Outside the air is warm with the smell of cooking caramel. From the field beside me comes the sound of frogs. There are fewer of them now the rice is gone. Pavlov says they are laughing. To me it sounds more like singing. Listening to them, I cross away from the light of the flats, through the dark, up to the far shore of the factories.

  The last train waits for me at Cherry Blossom station. The seats are hard and straight-backed and I’m glad of them. I don’t know how far I could go if I slept, or where the line ends. My eyes close only once, not for long. In the dark, it seems to me that the carriage fills with people.

  I can hear them breathing. Asian the driver sits next to Asian the waiter. Leyla leans by Araf, still smiling without understanding. There is Graf the auctioneer and beside him, the Japanese woman, searching for her father’s sword. Hassan and Eva, R. F. von Glött and the moon-faced hostess, their hands on their knees, like old gods. George Pyke, his shoes scrubbed as church steps. Ismet with his assessor’s eyes.

  They are waiting for me to look at them. All the people who have brought me here, even if they didn’t know it, even if we have never met. In the dark of my head I realise they are like Anne’s letters. They have all stayed with me, all this time, although I will never see them again.

  * * *

  ‘They say she is small as a child.’

  ‘So she is.’

  ‘You have seen her?’

  ‘Just the once.’

  ‘They say she speaks only German.’

  ‘Now William, not nervous?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You, Daniel?’ George Fox’s voice in the leathered dark. It was 1837, the first Monday in December. The window up, the cold shut out.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Any man might be nervous, going before a queen. They say her first English was: “Off with his head”.’

  Laughter. The flare of a match. Fox bent over the business of his pipe. In the company carriage, George Fox, John Bridge, William Bennett, Daniel Levy. Knee to knee, Rundell’s door-to-door salesmen. Picked for their charm, sweating in tails. Bridge in breeches. William’s hands holding on to themselves.

  Daniel turned away from them. In the packed space he could smell their anxiety, like that of animals. The carriage window was fogged with breath and he cleaned a space and looked out at London in its element. Snow had fallen overnight. There is more to come, he thought. The light felt defined by its imminence.

  London. In four years he had grown to like the city. He had never expected that; nor had he thought Salman would come to hate it. His brother had no time for the capital’s dark months, the clip of English on the tongue, the promise written on a banknote. When he was paid Salman took it in coin, as if he trusted only the physical value of things. The equivalence of worth and beauty. At Rundell’s he worked long hours and spoke little when he was done. Daniel missed him. Once he had come awake to see his brother sitting upright, shouting curses at the empty air. Not English, but their old language, its Hebrew, Persian, Arabic. Daniel no longer thought of it as his own.

  He blinked and the world outside came back. Workmen stood in Trafalgar Square, killing time by a brazier under work-site hoardings. Daniel took out his spectacles, hooked them on. As the carriage turned onto the Mall he could see Marble Arch ahead, a squat sentinel over frozen parkland. Buckingham Palace rising beyond it.

  ‘Watch Mister Bridge, boys. Do as he does and you’ll cope nicely.’

  ‘Now, George.’ The Young Oil an old man in old-fashioned clothes. His skin damp with the remnant of a winter sickness. A deal case in his hands, deep as a hatbox.

  ‘You’ll see that his back is remarkably flexible.
’

  ‘Really, George, you do me–’

  ‘No man in London, I’m sure, can bow lower or oftener than Mister Bridge.’

  Laughter again, sharp with tension. The arch gates were locked. It was only when the carriage started up again, the gravel giving way to smooth sand, that Daniel felt any unease.

  The palace loomed overhead. He followed the walls upwards with his eyes. The windows were net-curtained blanks. He thought: I don’t belong here. This is Salman’s dream, not mine. It is my brother, the jewel worker, who wishes for palaces. This is what he meant us both to come to, but I have arrived without him. And it is not what I want.

  He leant forward, as if the feeling of guilt were something he could leave behind. He wondered, suddenly, what it was he did want. All he could think of was Rachel. And already the wings of the palace were enclosing them, the carriage turning in its court, and the warders were coming in their red tails, the maids of honour stooping to lead them inside.

  Vistas of red carpet. Rooms of white and gold. A butler stepping out of a mirror, the door closing softly behind him. The salesmen were ushered inwards so quickly that Daniel was left only with faint impressions of the complex around him. Forms in white marble. Faces in oil.

  The waiting room smelt of sewage. The fire stood empty, although the wall above it was stained with soot. A servant came and took their hats and coats, leaving William and George stamping in the cold. John Bridge sat down, laying his case on the chair beside him. He looked tired already, sweating with slight fever.

  Daniel walked to the window. It was sealed shut with congealed layers of paint. He resisted the urge to try to open it, to cut the stale air with that outside. The sky had brightened over the whiteness of Green Park. Reaching into his waistcoat he took out his watch, and opened it in his palm while Fox sucked his teeth and rubbed his hands and talked of nothing.

  ‘Just like them, to skimp on a pennyworth of coal. Now we wait while she washes her dogs, no doubt. William, your choker. No, and no. Now! There stands my gentleman. What have you there, Mister Levy?’