A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  He checked his phone and saw the messages stack up in comforting fashion. Life might be looking down, but at least coms were up. It took just the briefest skim of his messages for all comfort to vanish. Now he could only ponder how strange it was that you could move at these outrageous speeds through the air and know everything known and still control nothing. For example, during this one quick flight his father had died, and the bony young councilman, the Prince of Koisks, had kicked him off the project. Also, there was an email from the airline he’d just flown explaining how much they respected his time and offering consolation for his current difficulties. Worse than robots, really.

  Caperton called the only person he could call. Daphne answered and told him to hold on. Another voice came on the line.

  ‘This is Miles.’

  ‘Jesus, I thought she made you up.’

  ‘No, I’m very much an entity of your dimension. Somebody who could find you and stomp on your urethra in what we foolishly call real time. Did you not receive the text message?’

  ‘I did,’ Caperton said.

  ‘But you thought calling was OK?’

  ‘Did you say you were the nanny?’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr –’

  ‘No, Miles, please don’t hang up. Just stay on the line for a minute. For sixty seconds. That’s all. I’m having a bad moment. I don’t need Daphne. You’ll do fine. My father just died. Please just … I just …’

  ‘Why don’t you emulate your old man,’ Miles said, hung up.

  Caperton groaned, shook, curled up in his seats, and watched people stand and grope at the overhead bins. He heard the Beast barrel through the throng behind him. Here he loomed again.

  ‘Caught the end of your call.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Caperton said.

  ‘We’ll be here awhile, waiting for all these people. Shove over.’

  Caperton slid toward the window and the Rough Beast sat down. He patted Caperton’s knee.

  ‘Terrible about your pops. Mine went easy. Keeled over on his city snowplow up in Rochester. But that doesn’t make it any better for you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s OK. You’re with me now. Everything will be OK. Cry for your father. What man doesn’t cry for his father? Let it out.’

  Caperton cooled his forehead on the window. The Beast stroked his back.

  ‘They say it’s a cycle, but there is no cycle. You get jerked in and reamed out. That’s all.’

  Caperton could not cry again. Also, he thought he might be onto a new phase. Lumped nullity. Drool drooped from his lip. He looked up and saw that the plane was empty.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ one of the flight attendants said. ‘But it’s time to leave.’

  ‘We’ll leave soon,’ the Beast said. ‘When it’s time.’

  ‘But it’s time now.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ the Rough Beast shouted, cocked his hand for a karate chop. ‘This man’s in the middle of a fucking hinge moment! I’ll waste you all!’

  One of the flight attendants called security on her walkie-talkie. The others dashed for the door.

  Caperton, who now felt a wider and more fiery belt of perhaps increasingly frequent sorrow begin to singe him, slid to his knees and crushed his face into the seat back. The underside of the locked and upright tray, cool and vaguely pebbled, was heaven on his skin.

  SIX DAYS IN GLORIOUS VIENNA

  Yoko Ogawa

  [Translated by Stephen Snyder]

  Fourteen tourists had signed up for ‘Six Days in Glorious Vienna: Open Plan,’ and since Kotoko and I were the only singles in the group, it was inevitable that we ended up rooming together at the hotel. Kotoko turned out to be a plump woman in her sixties who had been widowed some years earlier.

  On our first night in Vienna, she kneeled politely on the bed and bowed.

  ‘I’m afraid I snore,’ she said. ‘I hope it won’t bother you.’ And with that she climbed under the covers.

  I’d thought women her age were chatty, but not Kotoko. When the rest of us had gathered at the airport or in the lobby of the hotel, talking excitedly about the trip, she had stood a bit apart, looking uncomfortable. She clutched the strap of a brown vinyl shoulder bag that was stuffed to the gills and eyed us uneasily, as though she’d wandered into our midst by mistake. Other than the fact that it was the first trip abroad for both of us, we seemed to have nothing in common.

  Still, it didn’t matter much. Since the tour was self-guided, and we would be on our own for the next six days, there was no need for us to get better acquainted, even if we were to be roommates. I hadn’t come to Vienna to hear her go on about her grandchildren or badmouth her daughter-in-law; nor did I want her prying into my private life. I had been saving everything I’d earned at my tutoring job to celebrate my twentieth birthday with this trip.

  As she had knelt there on the bed, Kotoko had looked a bit like a decorative object. Her face was round with folds of fat at the chin; her breasts hung down on her round belly. Generous layers of fat covered every part of her – eyelids, ears, shoulders, back, knees, fingers – each tracing its own distinctive curve, and there, next to the bed, lay the swollen bag, as if mimicking the shape of her body.

  It was true that she snored, but so quietly that I was able to fall asleep almost immediately.

  Kotoko knelt on the bed again the next morning as I was getting ready to go out. She seemed to be hesitating about something as she would take a map from her bag, sigh a bit, and then put on the cardigan she’d just taken off.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured without looking up. ‘Would you mind writing the name of the hotel?’ she said, holding out the palm of her hand. ‘I’m afraid of getting lost and not being able to find my way back. I know it sounds silly, but I can’t read foreign words.’ The springs of the mattress groaned as the bow made her round body even rounder.

  ‘It’s written right here,’ I said, but she stopped me as I reached for the phone pad and held her hand up again.

  ‘But I might lose the paper. If you write it here, I’m sure to have it.’

  Her hand, too, was layered with fat, and the feeling as the tip of the pen buried itself in her palm was somehow satisfying. On it I wrote ‘König von Ungarn’ with a permanent marker. I had to admit that I wasn’t exactly sure how to pronounce the complicated foreign name myself.

  Kotoko studied her palm for a moment, tracing the pen marks with her finger, but then she began to squirm again, as though some new source of anxiety had occurred to her. She looked up and met my gaze, and then quickly looked down again. She seemed to be at considerable pains to let me know that she had something else to ask me but was finding it difficult to do so.

  ‘Where are you going today?’

  It was a simple question, and I asked it without thinking and without any real interest in the answer, but it proved to be the start of all my troubles.

  Kotoko had come to Vienna with a single purpose: to visit an old lover who was hovering near death in the hospital wing of nursing home in the suburbs. The announcement startled me, since I had never imagined she would be uttering a phrase like ‘old lover.’

  I had originally intended to go with her as far as the streetcar terminal at Schottentor Station. She had explained that to get to the nursing home she would need to take the No. 38 streetcar from Schottentor to a stop called Grin-something or other.

  ‘That’s the No. 38 over there,’ I told her. ‘See, it’s written in big numbers on the side. You take it and stay on till your stop – as simple as that.’

  ‘Ahh …’ she murmured, seeming reluctant to let go of my arm, which was raised in the direction of the trolley. The vinyl of her handbag and the skin of her chest pressed against me.

  ‘But what if I don’t get off when I’m supposed to? I imagine the names of the stops will be written in alphabet letters, too. Of course they will, we’re in Austria. I know I’m being such a baby. But how am I going to ask for directions to the nursing home? The truth is I have a weak hear
t and even standing here in a crowd like this is making it flutter … But no, please don’t worry about me. It happens all the time, so I’m used to it. But you see, I’ve brought along money for your trolley fare, too. This should be enough for the round trip, and I’d be happy for you to keep whatever’s left over.’

  Kotoko forced a wadded bill into my pocket. I took it out and found the image of Sigmund Freud, so wrinkled as to be barely recognisable, staring back from a fifty-schilling note. I did a quick – though pointless – calculation and realised that the sum would, indeed, be enough for the fare.

  As we stood there, she clung closer and closer to me, and the No. 38 tram appeared ready to depart.

  ‘We don’t want to miss it,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Half amazed and half resigned, I climbed aboard with Kotoko. What was so wrong about spending a little of my time in Vienna with a widow with a bad heart who couldn’t read the alphabet? Besides, I was sure I’d feel better helping her than leaving her to fend for herself. Or so I told myself as we sat on the streetcar.

  Kotoko’s expression was radiant now, but she clung resolutely to my arm, refusing to relax her vigilance. From time to time, she would reach into her bag and produce chewing gum or chocolate or rice crackers and offer them to me. Tools to curry my favour appeared one after the other: a bottle of water when we were thirsty, a comb when the wind blew, throat spray when I coughed. But as they did, I found myself silently planning my afternoon – a visit to St Stephen’s Cathedral, a picture in front of the statue of Mozart, followed by a piece of Sachertorte at a café.

  The story that Kotoko told en route of her long-ago love affair was a fairly simple one. Forty-five years previously, when she was nineteen, she had worked at a factory that produced ham, and when thirty-four-year-old Johan had come from Vienna to serve as technical manager, they had immediately fallen in love. As she put it, his pupils were like caramel candies, his golden hair like the softest dandelion fluff – and when, after ten months, Johan’s time in Japan came to an end and he was headed home, he had promised to come back for her.

  ‘But he never did,’ I said.

  ‘How did you know?’ said Kotoko, he eyes wide with surprise.

  ‘I suppose because it’s a common enough story. And no doubt he had a wife back in Vienna.’

  ‘You’re young, but not much gets by you. How lucky for me to be rooming with someone so clever.’ Kotoko nodded to herself and started rooting around in her bag again. I smiled, taking a bite of the chocolate bar she had given me. There was no trace of bitterness in her manner, despite the ancient betrayal.

  ‘His wife died years ago and he’s been in the nursing home for some time. But it appears he doesn’t have much longer. He made a list of people he wanted contacted when the end was near, and my name was on it, along with the address of the ham factory. Mine was the very last name, apparently. They said they contacted me early since Japan is so far away.’

  The tram stop was Grinzing, which was easy enough to find, but the route to the nursing home was long and complicated. Kotoko would never have found her way alone. We passed through a residential district, walked by a museum dedicated to Beethoven, and along a path by a stream. The building we were seeking appeared suddenly as we came to the entrance to a forest.

  Tall, narrow windows were arranged on the plain, imposing façade at regular intervals. The carefully tended garden on the far side of the wrought iron gate merged into the forest beyond. Birds chirped in the trees.

  For a woman who was about to meet her lover for the first time in forty-five years, Kotoko seemed surprisingly calm. In fact, as we approached the nursing home, her grip on my arm finally began to loosen and she fell back a step, hiding behind me as if to suggest she was just keeping me company.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said. Kotoko contented herself with a noncommittal sigh.

  A receptionist led us along a winding corridor to a spacious ward facing an inner courtyard. Metal beds lined the walls in two neat rows, with stools for the visitors. I counted sixteen beds, each occupied by an elderly patient.

  Though I had no experience with this sort of thing, I could see right away that the ward was reserved for those who were not long for this world. There was no life in their faces, and they were so emaciated that their bones were visible under the blankets. Most lay with their eyes closed, either sleeping or unconscious, and the few open eyes were little more than hollow cavities. There were several other visitors in the ward, but no one said a word. The only sounds were an occasional groan or hiccup or rattling of a throat.

  I looked around the room. The patients were nearly indistinguishable to me. The subtle differences in hairstyle, the shape of an ear or thickness of the lips were swallowed up in the shadow of death. They were all cloaked in a shroud of old age that concealed their former appearance.

  Kotoko went down one row and I the other, checking the nametag tied to the foot of each bed.

  Kotoko let out a quiet exclamation when she found Johan. He was in the fifth bed in the row on the south side of the ward, resting quietly like the other patients. His blonde hair had been reduced to thin fuzz, leaving a scalp crusted with scabs. The eyes that had looked like caramels were hidden now under wrinkled lids.

  We sat down on the stools and watched over him for a while. His blanket and pillow were clean and the floor around the bed was spotless. Sunlight shone through the window, illuminating every corner of the ward, and a light breeze blew from time to time. The poppies and daisies and violets in the beds outside looked fresh and alive, and bees flew among the petals gathering nectar. A resident of the nursing home walked slowly across the courtyard leaning on a cane.

  ‘Why don’t you try talking to him?’ I said.

  ‘But …’ Kotoko hesitated, fiddling with the strap on her bag. ‘It would be a shame to wake him.’

  ‘I doubt he’d be angry. It’s the first time you’ve seen each other in forty-five years. He may just be resting.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ She cleared her throat a couple of times and then murmured his name. ‘Johan.’

  There was no response.

  ‘You have to be louder than that,’ I told her. ‘He’s an old man.’

  ‘I know. I’ll try again.’

  This time her voice was a bit more assertive, but it did nothing to disturb his deep sleep.

  ‘Why don’t you try kissing him?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly!’ she said, flinching.

  ‘He’s Austrian,’ I told her. ‘That’s how they greet each other. Besides, you must have kissed him when he was your boyfriend.’

  ‘Well, I suppose, but that was a long time ago …’ Her eyes never left her lap.

  ‘If you don’t let him know you’re here, what’s the point of having spent the money to come all this way?’

  ‘I know, but …’

  Perhaps because the bed was made for tall Europeans, Kotoko was forced to stand on the tips of her toes in order to reach Johan. Bracing her left hand on the pillow and her right close to his head, she stretched even further over the bed. Her breasts pressed into the railing, her calves trembled, but still she seemed uncertain. For his part, Johan remained oblivious to what was about to occur.

  Finally making up her mind, she put her lips against his cheek – and though her posture was too painfully awkward to conjure up a long-lost romance, a kiss was, indeed, a kiss. A trace of her lipstick was visible on Johan’s sunken cheek as proof.

  She took a damp tissue out of her bag and wiped away the lipstick; turning the tissue over, she cleaned his mouth and around his eyes. Then, for the longest time, she sat next to him, folding and unfolding the tissue, as if reluctant to throw it away.

  At noon, she treated me to lunch at the nursing home cafeteria, no doubt feeling that the change from the tram ticket was insufficient compensation.

  ‘Now that I’ve found Johan at last, I’m starved,’ she said. She ate a piece of boiled beef with a large portion of mashed po
tatoes, and, still not satisfied, had two helpings of ice cream for dessert.

  ‘Why do you suppose he put your name on the list?’ I asked her. ‘After all, he hadn’t heard from you in forty-five years.’

  ‘Maybe he came across some old document with the address of the ham factory when he was packing and getting ready to move to the nursing home,’ Kotoko answered, seeming strangely calm.

  ‘Do you think he wants to ask for forgiveness?’

  ‘I suppose he would have felt rather guilty.’

  ‘After he left, did you go on waiting for him to come back for a long time?’

  ‘For years,’ she said. ‘When no word came, I told myself all sorts of stories – his parents had locked him in the tower of their castle to keep him from me or he’d been in an automobile accident and had amnesia – but they were just stories.’

  ‘You should have come to Vienna back then and forced the issue.’

  ‘I could never have done something like that. Instead, I just stuffed myself with the new ham he’d taught us to make. But it never sold well and we stopped producing it soon afterward.’ She ladled the melted ice cream from the bottom of the bowl and slurped it noisily from the spoon.

  ‘He wasn’t like that when I knew him,’ she said, staring into the empty bowl.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  ‘He was stylish, very elegant, but with powerful arms – bigger than our hams – that could sweep me up as though I was light as a feather.’

  The cafeteria was empty, perhaps because it was getting late. The tables were covered with white tablecloths and each one had a small vase with a single flower – apparently picked from the flowerbeds in the garden. Some of the residents were playing chess in the sunroom that connected to the cafeteria on the south side.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘I was happy just knowing that someone in a far-off place might be thinking about me, if only for a moment. That thought was a comfort on sleepless nights. I would picture that distant land and fall peacefully to sleep.’