Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Bedded down in dark and rain, we felt both a wonderful security, warm and dry in our bed, and a sharp awareness that we didn’t know where in the world we were. That swamp grew there since they printed the map, she said. I feel, I said, as if we were all alone in the middle of a wood as big as Vermont. We could be six feet from the lake, or on the merest island of trees in the world’s biggest swamp. I don’t care where we are, she said. We’re here, we’re dry, we’re not in that swamp. We hugged awhile, and then lay on our backs to distribute the rock weight of our exhaustion, a hand on each other’s tummy for sympathy and fellowship. You saw a mill? she said. A fine old water mill, of red brick, about a hundred years old, I suppose. As plain as day. I said that I was both glad and a bit frightened to have seen it, a superimposition of desire on reality. The first ghost I’d ever seen, if a mill can be a ghost. If it had been real, we would have had a hot supper, with coffee, and could have set up house, and got laid, twice running, after a wonderful long time of toning things up beforehand, with porcupines standing on their hind legs and looking through the windows. But she was asleep.

  How cold the white sickle moon above the dark valleys of Mount Haguro. How many clouds had gathered and broken apart before we could see the silent moon above Mount Gassan. Because I could not speak of Mount Yudono, I wet my sleeves with tears. Tears stood in my eyes, Sora wrote, as I walked over the coins at Yudono, along the sacred way. Next day we came to Tsuru-ga-oka Castle, where the warrior Nagayama Shigeyuki welcomed me and Zushi Sakichi, who had accompanied us from Haguro. We wrote a book of linked verse together. We returned to our boat and went down the river Sakata. Here we were the guests of Dr. Fugyoku. I wrote: Cool of the evening in the winds crisscrossing the beach at Fukuura, and twilight: but the tip of Mount Atsumi was still bright with the sun. Deep into the estuary of Mogami River the summer sun has quenched its fire. By now my fund of natural beauty was bountiful, yet I could not rest until I had seen Lake Kisagata. To get there I walked ten miles along a path, over rocky hills, down to sandy beaches and up again. The sun was touching the horizon when I arrived. Mount Chokai was hidden in fog.

  We woke next morning to find that we were no more than twenty yards from the campsite we were trying to reach. Golly, she said, looking out of the sleeping bag. A black lake lay in a cedar wood whose greenish dark made its shores seem noonbright in early morning. We rose naked and put our clothes on bushes in the sun. She spied blueberries for our mush. I managed to get wood ash in our coffee, and we had to eat with the one spoon, as mine had got lost. The lake was too brackish to swim in, so we stood in the shallows and soaped each other, dancing from the chill of the water. I was rinsing her back with handsful of water poured over her shoulders when I saw a pop-eyed man gaping at us from beyond our breakfast fire. His face was scholarly and bespectacled and he wore a Boy Scout uniform. The staff in his hand gave him a biblical air. He was warning away his troop with a backward hand. Hi! she hailed him. We’re just getting off some grime from the trail. We got lost in the rain last night and came here through the swamp. We’ll give you time, he said with a grin. Oh for Pete’s sake, said she, proceeding to soap up my back. We’re just people. They’ve seen people, haven’t they?

  If the halflight and the rain were so beautiful at Kisagata, how lovely the lake would be in good weather. Next day was indeed brilliant, I sailed across the lake, stopping at the mere rock of an island where the monk Noin once meditated. On the far shore we found the ancient cherry tree of Saigyo’s poem, in which he compares its blossoms to the froth on waves. From the large hall of the temple Kanmanjuji you can see the whole lake, and beyond it Mount Chokai like a pillar supporting Heaven, and the gate of Muyamuya faintly in the west, the highway to Akita in the east, and Shiogoshi in the north, where the lake meets the breakers of the ocean. Only two lakes are so beautiful: Matsushima is the other. But whereas Matsushima is gay and joyful, Kisagata is grave and religious, as if some sorrow underlay its charm. Silk tree blossoming in the monotonous rain at Kisagata, you are like the Lady Seishi in her sorrow. On the wet beach at Shiogoshi the herons strut in the sea’s edge. Some sweetmeat not known elsewhere is probably sold at Kisagata on the feast days. Teiji has a poem about Kisagata: In the evening the fishermen sit and rest in their doorways. Sora wrote of the ospreys: Does God tell them how to build their nests higher than the tide?

  I loved her for her brashness. Her seventeen-year-old body, in all the larger and speculative senses aesthetic and biological, was something to see. It was Spartan, it was Corinthian: hale of limb, firmnesses continuing into softnesses, softnesses into firmnesses. There was a little boy’s stance in the clean porpoise curve of calf, a tummy flat and grooved. Corinth asserted itself in hips and breasts, in the denim blue of her eyes, the ruck of her upper lip, in the pert girlishness of her nose. We aren’t proud, she said. I can’t recommend the pond here, as it’s full of leaf trash from several geological epochs back. The blueberries over there on that spit are delicious. By this time there were Boy Scout eyes over the scoutmaster’s shoulders. We went back to our stretch of the beach, dried in the sun while making more coffee, and fished shirts from our packs in deference to our neighbors. It was further along the trail that day that we found in a lean-to a pair of Jockey shorts, size small, stuck full of porcupine quills. One of our Boy Scouts’, she said. Do you suppose he was in or out of them when Brother Porky took a rolling dive?

  Leaving Sakata, we set out on the hundred-and-thirty-mile road to the county seat of Kaga Province. Clouds gathered over the mountains on the Hokuriku Road, down which we had to go, and clouds gathered in my heart at the thought of the distance. We walked through the Nezu Gate into Echigo, we walked through the Ichiburi Gate into Ecchu. We were nine days on the road. The weather was wet and hot all the way, and my malaria acted up and made the going harder. The sixth of July, the nights are changing, and tomorrow the Weaver Star and the Shepherd Star cross the Milky Way together. At Ichiburi I was kept awake by two Geisha in the next room. They had been visiting the Ise Shrine with an old man, who was going home the next day, and they were plying him with silly things to say to all their friends. How frivolous and empty their lives! And next day they tried to attach themselves to us, pleading that they were pilgrims. I was stern with them, for they were making a mock of religion, but as soon as I had shooed them away my heart welled with pity. Beyond the forty-eight shoals of the Kurobe, we came to the village of Nago and asked to see the famous wisteria of Tako.

  Hephaistiskos, our Renault bought in Paris, who had slept in a stable in Villefranche, kicked a spring outside Tarbes, and spent the night under the great chestnut tree in the square at Montignac, under palms at Menton, and under pines at Ravenna, was hoisted onto the foredeck of the Kriti at Venice for a voyage down the Adriatic to Athens. We had no such firm arrangements for a berth. Along with two Parisian typists of witty comeliness; two German cyclists blond, brown, and obsequious; a trio of English consisting of a psychiatrist and her two lovers, the one an Oxford undergraduate, the other the Liberal Member from Bath; and a seasoned traveler from Alton, Illinois, a Mrs. Brown, we were billeted on the aft deck, in the open air, with cots to sleep on. All the cabins were taken by Aztecs. Mexican Rotary and their wives, explained the lady psychiatrist, who had Greek and who had interviewed the Captain, leaving a flea in his ear. The sporting bartender had shouted to us over the Greek band, in a kind of English, that it was ever the way of the pirate who owned this ship to sell all the tickets he could, let the passengers survive by their wits. It’s only a week. No say drachma, say thrakmé.

  The wisteria of Tako, I was told, was five lonely miles up the coast, with no house of any sort nearby or along the way. Discouraged, I went on into Kaga Province. Mist over the rice fields, below me the mutinous waves. I crossed the Unohanayama Mountains, the Kurikara-dani Valley, and came on the fifteenth of July to Kanazawa. Here the merchant Kasho from Osaka asked me to stay with him at his inn. There used to live in Kanazawa a poet named Issho, whose verse wa
s known over all Japan. He had died the year before. I went to his grave with his brother, and wrote there: Give some sign, O silent tomb of my friend, if you can hear my lament and the gusts of autumn wind joining my grief. At a hermit’s house: This autumn day is cold, let us slice cucumbers and mad-apples and call them dinner. On the road: The sun is red and heedless of time, but the wind knows how cold it is, O red is the sun! At Komtasu, Dwarf Pine: The right name for this place, Dwarf Pine, wind combs the clover and makes waves in the grass. At the shrine at Tada I saw the samurai Sanemori’s helmet and the embroidered shirt he wore under his armor.

  The Liberal Member from Bath, the Oxford undergraduate name of Gerald, and the lady British psychiatrist demonstrated the Greek folk dances played by the band. A Crimean Field Hospital, I said of our cots and thin blankets set up as our dormitory on the fantail of the Kriti. Exactly! said the Liberal Member from Bath, accepting us thereby. Rather jolly, don’t you think? The Parisian typists chittered and giggled. Pas de la retraite! Que nous soyons en famille. Mrs. Brown of Alton tucked a blanket under her chin and undressed with her back to the Adriatic. The Parisian typists came to her aid, and they became a trio, with their cots together, like the English. They stripped to lace bras and panties, causing the Liberal Member from Bath to say, O well, there’s nothing else for it, is there? The German boys undressed pedantically to pissburnt briefs of ultracontemporary conciseness. We followed suit, nothing daunted, and the Liberal Member from Bath did everybody one better, and took off every stitch, a magnified infant, chubby of knee, paunchy, with random swirls and tufts of ginger hair. The Parisian typists squealed. The Germans looked at him with keen slit eyes. He was surely overstepping a bound.

  Sanemori’s helmet was decorated with swirls of chrysanthemums across the visor and earflaps; a vermilion dragon formed the crest, between two great horns. When Sanemori died and the helmet was enshrined, Kiso Yoshinaka wrote a poem and sent it by Higuchi-no-Jiro: With what wonder do I hear a cricket chirping inside an empty helmet. The snowy summit of Shirane Mountain was visible all the way to the Nata Shrine, which the Emperor Kazan built to Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. The garden here was of rocks and pines. The rocks are white at the Rock Temple, but the autumn wind is whiter. At the hot spring nearby, where I bathed: Washed in the steaming waters at Yamanaka, do I need also to pick chrysanthemums? I was told by the innkeeper that it was here that Teishitsu realized his humiliating deficiencies as a poet, and began to study under Teitoku when he returned to Kyoto. Alas, while we were here, my companion Sora began to have a pain in his stomach, and left to go to his kinpeople in Nagashima. He wrote a farewell poem: No matter if I fall on the road, I will fall among flowers.

  The Liberal Member from Bath had indeed overstepped a bound in taking off all his clothes on the fantail of the Kriti. Just as the lady psychiatrist was urging her other lover, the Oxford undergraduate, to join him in cheeking these outrageous foreigners for booking us passages and then deploying us out here under the sky in what the American archaeologists so aptly dub The Crimean Field Hospital, the Captain of the ship, together with the Steward, made their way through a tumult of pointing Mexican Rotarians and arrived in our midst whirling their arms. The Liberal Member stared at them pop-eyed. What’s the Pirate King saying? Who can understand the blighter? He says you must put on your clothes, I offered. He says you are an affront to morals and an insult to decency. He does, does he? said the lady psychiatrist. Gerald dear! Off with your undershorts. She then, with help from Gerald dear and the Liberal Member, set out on a speech in Greek which we realized with an exchange of glances was a patchwork of Homeric phrases, more or less syntactical on the psychiatrist’s part, but formulaic from her chorus, so that her what an overweening hatefulness has crossed the barrier of thy teeth was seconded by Gerald dear’s when that rosyfingered dawn had shed her beams over mortals and immortals together.

  When Sora left me, because of his illness, I felt both his sadness and mine, and wrote: Let the dew fade the words on my hat, Two Pilgrims Traveling Together. When I stayed at the Zenshoji Temple, they gave me a poem of Sora’s that he had left there for me: All night I heard the autumn wind in the hills above the shrine. I too listened to the wind that night, grieving for my companion. Next morning I attended services, ate with the priests, and was leaving when a young monk ran after me with inkblock, brush, and paper, begging for a poem. I wrote: For your kindness I should have swept the willow leaves from the garden. Such was my sweet confusion at being asked for a poem that I left with my sandals untied. I rented a boat at Yoshizaki and rowed out to see the pine of Shiogoshi. The beauty of its setting is best caught in Saigyo’s poem: Urging the wind against the salt sea, the Shiogoshi pine sheds moonlight from its branches. At Kanazawa I had been joined by the poet Hokushi, who walked with me as far as the Tenryuji Temple in Matsuoka, far further than he had meant to go.

  We notice the ugliness of the Hellenistic and Roman style of Greek lettering as compared to the Archaic. Small columns of marble lying about that look as if they might have been grave markers. The Tower of the Winds with its curious figures that look Baroque: a few columns left standing, forming a corner of the street. This sort of ruin is actually what is most prevalent, especially at the theatres and at Eleusis, dismantled Roman ruins built on top of the Greek. An excavation trench near the church with a large urn only half dug out, under an olive tree. More piles of marble, looking very unorderly and as if the archaeologist had never been there: no attempt to order, classify, straighten. Little indication of street levels, except around the standing columns, these being straight shafts of marble, rather than sections fitted together. The Greek snails. We photographed a snailshell in your hand held beside a piece of marble ornament. What a motif. The pattern on the snails much more closely resembling the Geometric and Cycladic jars. The snails are caught by the sun as they climb a column and cooked there in their shells, which cling to the stone. Their spiral design is a chestnut brown band separated from a charcoal band by a thin white line.

  It was only three miles to Fukui. The way, however, was dark, as I had started thither after supper. The poet Tosai lived there, whom I had known in Edo ten years before. As soon as I arrived I asked for him. A citizen directed me, and as soon as I found a house charmingly neglected, fenced around by a profusion of gourd vines, moonflowers, wild cockscomb kneedeep, and goosefoot blocking the way to the front door, I knew this was Tosai’s home and no other’s. I knocked. A woman answered, saying that Tosai was downtown somewhere. I was delighted that he had taken a wife, and told him so with glee when I routed him out of a wineshop later. I stayed with him for three days. When I departed, saying that I wanted to see the full moon over Tsuruga, he decided to come with me, tucking up his house kimono as his only concession to the road. The peak of Shirane gave way to that of Hina. At Asamuzu Bridge we saw the reeds of Tamae in bloom. With the first migrating geese in the sky above me. I entered Tsuruga on the fourteenth. The moon was to be full the next night. We went to the Myojin Shrine of Kei, which honors the soul of the Emperor Chuai, bringing, as is the custom, a handful of white sand for the courtyard.

  Most of them are plants that are abundantly represented in nearly all the more recent deposits, such as Taxodium Europaeum, found all the way from the Middle Bagshot of Bournemouth to the Pliocene of Meximieux, Ficus liliaefolia, Laurus primigenia, and Cinnamomum lanceolatum, abundant in nearly all the Oligocene and Miocene beds of Europe. Quercus chlorophylla occurs in the Mississippi Tertiary as well as at Skopau in Sachs-Thüringen, and is also abundant in the Miocene, and Ficus tiliaefolia is found in the Green River formation at Florrisant, Colorado. The two species of hazel, and also the sensitive fern from the Fort Union deposits regarded by Dr. Newberry as identical with the living forms, must be specifically so referred until fruits or other parts are found to show the contrary. Forms of the Gingko tree occur not only in the Fort Union beds, but in the lower Laramie beds at Point of Rocks, Wyoming Territory, which differ inappreciably except in s
ize of leaf from the living species. A few Laramie forms occur in Cretaceous strata.

  This was a custom begun by the priest Yugyo, so that at the full of the moon the area before the shrine would be as white as frost. The pure full moon shone on Yugyo the Bishop’s sand. But on the night of the fifteenth it rained. But for the fickle weather of the north I would have seen the full moon in autumn. The sixteenth, however, was fine, and I went shell-gathering on the beach. A man named Tenya came with me, and his servants with a picnic. We savored the loneliness of the long beaches. Autumn comes to the sea, and the beach is more desolate than that at Suma. Clover petals blown into the sea roll up with fine pink shells in the waves. I asked Tosai to write an account of our day’s excursion and to deposit it at the temple for other pilgrims. My friend Rotsu met me when I returned, and went with me to Mino Province. We rode into Ogaki on horseback, and we were met by Sora. At Joko’s house we were welcomed by Zensen, Keiko, and many other friends who acted as if I had returned from the dead. On the sixth of September I left for the shrine at Ise, though I was still tired from my journey to the far north. Tight clam shells fall open in the autumn, just as I, no sooner made comfortable than I feel the call of the road. Friends, goodbye!

  THE CHAIR

  The Rebbe from Belz is taking his evening walk at Marienbad. Behind him, at a respectful distance, walks a courtier carrying a chair by its hind legs. This is for the Rebbe to sit on, should he want to sit.

  The square seat of this upraised chair, its oval back upholstered with a sturdy cloth embroidered in a rich design of flowers and leaves, its carved, chastely bowed legs, and the tasteful scrollwork of its walnut frame, give it a French air. Like all furniture out of context it seems distressed in its displacement. It belongs in the company of capacious Russian teacups and deep saucers, string quartets by Schumann, polite conversations, and books with gilt leather bindings.