by Неизвестный
19
“Yes. Just before I reached Tsuji, I did meet a medicine peddler from Toyama. He started out on the same trail, a little ahead of me.”
“I see.” She smiled as if she had guessed something right, then glanced over at the horse. She looked as if she couldn’t help but smirk.
She seemed to be in a better mood, so I spoke up. “Perhaps he came by this way.”
“No. I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She suddenly seemed to distance herself again, and so I held my tongue. She turned to the man, who was standing meekly before the horse, dusting himself off. “Then I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” she said in a resigned tone and hurriedly untied her sash. One end of it dangled in the dirt. She pulled it up and hesitated for a moment.
“Ah, ah.” The idiot husband let out a vague cry. As he reached out with the long, skinny arm that was constantly fanning the air, the woman handed him her sash. Like a child, he placed it on his lap, then rolled it up and guarded it as if it were a precious treasure.
She pulled the lapels of her kimono together and held them with one hand just below her breasts. Leaving the house, she quietly walked over to the horse.
I was struck with astonishment as she stood on tiptoe. She gracefully raised her hand in the air then stroked the horse’s mane two or three times.
She moved around and stood directly in front of the horse’s huge muzzle, seeming to grow taller as I watched. She fixed her eyes on the animal, puckered her lips, and raised her eyebrows as if falling into a trance. Suddenly her familiar charm and coquettish air disappeared, and I found myself wondering if she were a god, or perhaps a demon.
At that moment, it was as if the mountain behind the cottage and the peak directly across the valley—in fact, all the mountains that surrounded us and formed this world that was set apart from all others—suddenly looked our way and bent over to stare at this woman who stood facing the horse in the moonlight. Turning ever darker, the deep mountains grew more lonely and intense.
I felt myself being engulfed in a warm, moist wind as the woman slipped her kimono off her left shoulder. Then she took her right hand out of its sleeve, brought it around to the fullness of her bosom, and lifted her thin undergarment. Suddenly she was naked, without even so much as the mountain mist to clothe her.
The skin on the horse’s back and belly seemed to melt with ecstasy and drip with sweat. Even its strong legs became feeble and began to tremble. The animal lowered its head to the ground and, blowing froth from its mouth, bent its front legs as if paying obeisance to her beauty.
At that moment, the woman reached under the horse’s jaw and nimbly tossed her undergarment over the animal’s eyes. She leaped like a doe rabbit and arched her back so she was looking up at the ghastly, hazy moon. Threading the undergarment between the horse’s front legs, she pulled it from its eyes as she passed beneath the belly of the horse and stepped off to the side.
The old man, taking his cue from her, pulled on the halter. And the two started walking briskly down the mountain trail and soon disappeared into the darkness.
The woman put on her kimono and came over to the veranda. She tried to take her sash from the idiot, who refused to give it back. He raised his hand and tried reaching for her breasts. When she finally brushed off his hand and gave him a scornful look, he shrank back and hung his head.
All this I witnessed in the phantasmal flickering of the dimming lantern. In the hearth, the faggots were now aflame, and the woman, in order to tend to the fire, rushed back into the cottage. Coming to us from the far side of the moon, the faint echoes of the horseman’s song reverberated in the night.
20
It was time for dinner. Far from mere carrots and gourd shavings, the woman served pickled vegetables, marinated ginger, seaweed, and miso soup with dried wild mushrooms.
The ingredients were simple but well prepared, and I was practically starving. As for the service, it couldn’t have been better. With her elbows resting on the tray in her lap, and her chin cupped in her hands, she watched me eat, apparently gaining great satisfaction from it.
The idiot, tired of being left alone, started crawling limply toward us. He dragged his potbelly over to where the woman was seated and collapsed into a cross-legged position. He mumbled as he kept pointing and staring at my dinner.
“What is it?” she asked him. “No. You can eat later. Don’t you see we have a guest tonight?”
A melancholy look came over the idiot’s face. He twisted his mouth and tossed his head from side to side.
“No? You’re hopeless. Go ahead, then. Eat with our guest.” She turned to me. “I beg your pardon.”
I quickly set my chopsticks down. “Not at all. Please. I’ve put you through too much trouble already.”
“Hardly. You’ve been no trouble at all.” She turned to the idiot. “You, my dear, are supposed to eat with me, after our guest finishes. What am I going to do with you?” Saying this to put me at ease, she quickly set up a tray identical to mine.
Good wife that she was, she served the food quickly, without wasting a single movement. Yet there was also something refined and genteel about her.
The idiot looked up with dull eyes at the tray set before him. “I want that. That,” he said while glancing goggle-eyed around the room.
She looked at him gently, in the way a mother might look at her child. “You can have that any time you want,” she said. “But tonight we have a guest.”
“No. I want it now.” The idiot shook his entire body. He sniveled and looked as if he was about to burst into tears.
The woman didn’t know what to do, and I felt sorry for her. “Miss, I know next to nothing about your situation here,” I said. “But wouldn’t it be better just to give him what he wants? Personally, I’d feel better if you didn’t treat me like a guest.”
“So you don’t want what I’ve fixed?” she asked the idiot. “You don’t want this?”
She finally gave in to him, as he looked as if he was about to cry. She went over to her broken-down cupboard, took something from a crock, and put it on his tray, though not without giving him a reproachful look.
“Here you go.” She pretended to be peeved and forced a smile.
I watched from the corner of my eye, wondering what kind of food the idiot would be chewing in his huge mouth. A blue green snake stewed with vegetables in thick soy and sugar? A monkey fetus steam-baked in a casserole? Or something less grotesque, like pieces of dried frog meat? With one hand the idiot held his bowl. With the other he picked up a piece of overpickled radish. It wasn’t sliced into pieces either, just chopped into a big chunk so the idiot could munch on it as if eating a cob of corn.
The woman must have been embarrassed. I caught her glancing over at me. She was blushing. Though she hardly seemed like an innocent-minded person, she nervously touched a corner of her towel to her mouth.
I took a closer look at this young man. His body was yellow and plump, just like the pickled radish he had just devoured. By and by, satisfied with having vanquished his prey, he looked the other way, without even asking for a cup of tea, and panted heavily with boredom.
“I guess I’ve lost my appetite,” the woman said. “Maybe I’ll have something later.”
She cleared the dishes without eating dinner.
21
The mood was subdued for a while after that. “You must be tired,” she finally said. “Shall I make up your bed right away?”
“Thank you,” I replied. “But I’m not the least bit sleepy. Washing in the river seems to have revived me completely.”
“That stream is good for any illness you might have. Whenever I’m worn out and feel withered and dry, all I have to do is spend half a day in the water, and I become refreshed again. Even in the winter, when the mountains turn to ice and all the rivers and cliffs are covered with snow, the water never freezes in that spot where you were bathing. Monkeys with gunshot wounds, night herons with broken legs, so many animals
come to bathe in the water that they’ve made that path down the cliff. It’s the water that has healed your wounds.
“If you aren’t tired, maybe we could talk for a while. I get so lonely here. It’s strange, but being all alone in the mountains like this, I even forget how to talk. Sometimes I get so discouraged.
“If you get sleepy, don’t stay up on my account. We don’t have anything like a real guest room, but on the other hand, you won’t find a single mosquito here. Down in the valley they tell a story about a man from Kaminohora who stayed the night there. They put up a mosquito net for him, but since he had never seen one before, he asked them for a ladder so he could get into bed.
“Even if you sleep late you won’t hear any bells ringing, nor any roosters crowing at dawn. We don’t even have dogs here, so you can sleep in peace.”
She looked over at the idiot. “That fellow was born and raised here in the mountains. He doesn’t know much about anything. Still, he’s a good person, so there’s no need to worry on his account. He actually knows how to bow politely when a stranger visits, though he hasn’t paid his respects to you yet, has he? These days he doesn’t have much strength. He’s gotten lazy. But he’s not stupid. He can understand everything you say.”
She moved closer to the idiot, looked into his face, and said cheerfully, “Why don’t you bow to the monk? You haven’t forgotten how, have you?”
The idiot managed to put his two hands together on the floor and bowed with a jerk, as if a wound-up spring had been released in his back. Struck by the woman’s love for the fellow, I bowed my head. “The pleasure’s mine.”
Still facing down, he seemed to lose his equilibrium. He fell over on his side, and the woman helped him back up. “There. Good for you.”
Looking as if she wanted to praise him for what he had done, she turned to me and said, “Sir, I’m pretty sure he could do anything you asked of him. But he has a disease that neither the doctors nor the river can heal. Both of his legs are crippled, so it doesn’t do much good to teach him new things. As you can see, just one bow is about as much as he can tolerate.
“Learning things is hard work. It hurts him, I know, so I don’t ask him to do much. And because of that, he’s gradually forgotten how to use his hands or even how to talk. The one thing he still can do is sing. Even now he still knows two or three songs. Why don’t you sing one for our guest?”
The idiot opened his eyes wide and looked at the woman, then at me. He seemed shy as he shook his head.
22
After she encouraged and cajoled him in various ways, he cocked his head to one side and, playing with his navel, began to sing.
On Mount Ontake in Kiso.
Let me give
A double-lined kimono
And tabi socks as well.
The woman listened intently and smiled. “Doesn’t he know it well, though.”
How strange it was! The idiot’s voice was nothing like you might expect, having heard his story. Even I couldn’t believe it. It was the difference between the moon and a turtle, clouds and mud, heaven and earth! The phrasing, the dynamics, the breathing—everything was perfect. You wouldn’t think that such a pure, clear voice could emerge from the throat of that young man. It sounded as though his former incarnation was piping a voice from the other world into the idiot’s bloated stomach.
I had been listening with my head bowed. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, unable to look up at the couple. I was so moved that tears came to my eyes.
The woman noticed I was crying and asked me if something was wrong. I couldn’t answer her right away, but finally I said, “I’m fine, thanks. I won’t ask any questions about you, so you mustn’t ask about me either.” I mentioned no details, but I spoke from my heart. I had come to see her as a veritable Yang Guifei, a voluptuous and alluring beauty who deserved to be adorned with silver and jade pins for her hair, gossamer gowns as sheer as butterfly wings, and pearl-sewn shoes. And yet she was so open and kind to her idiot husband. That was the reason I was moved to tears.
She was the sort of person who could guess the unspoken feelings of another. She spoke up as if she immediately understood exactly what I was feeling. “You’re very kind.” She gazed at me with a look in her eyes that I cannot begin to describe. I bowed my head and looked away.
The lantern dimmed again, and I wondered if this perhaps was the idiot’s doing; for just then, the conversation lagged and a tired silence overcame us. The master of song, apparently bored, yawned hugely, as if he were about to swallow the lantern before him.
He started to fidget. “Want sleep. Sleep.” He moved his body clumsily.
“Are you tired? Shall we go to bed?” The woman sat up and, as if she had suddenly come to her senses, looked around. The world outside the house was as bright as noon. The moonlight poured into the cottage through the open windows and doors. The hydrangeas were a vivid blue.
“Are you ready to retire?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry to inconvenience you.”
“I’ll put him to bed first. Make yourself comfortable. You’re right out in the open here, but in the summer this bigger room will be better for you. We’ll sleep in the inner room, so you can get a good rest. Wait just a moment.” She stood and hurriedly stepped down onto the earthen floor. Because her movements were so vigorous, her black hair, which had been twisted into a bun, fell down over the nape of her neck.
With one hand touching her hair and the other on the door, she looked outside and said to herself, “I must have dropped my comb in all the excitement.”
She was obviously talking about when she had passed beneath the horse’s belly.
23
Here the monk paused his story. The night was still, and we could clearly distinguish slow, quiet steps in the hallway downstairs. It sounded like someone going to the bathroom. One of the rain shutters opened with a rattle; then came the sound of hands being washed. “The snow’s piling up,” came a voice. Most surely, it was the owner of the inn.
“I guess the merchant from Wakasa found some other place to spend the night,” the monk said. “I hope he’s having sweet dreams.”
“Please, finish your story. What happened next?” I urged Monk Shūchō to continue.
Well, the night grew late, he resumed. As you can understand, no matter how tired a person gets, when you’re in an isolated cottage in the middle of mountains like that, it’s hard to fall asleep. Besides, I was bothered by something that kept me from dozing off. In fact, I was wide-awake. I kept blinking my eyes, but, as you might expect, by that time I was so exhausted that my mind had become clouded. All I could do was wait for dawn to brighten the night sky.
At first I listened, out of habit, for the morning temple bells. Will they ring now? Are they about to ring? Surely enough time had passed since I had retired for the night. But then I realized there wouldn’t be any temples in a place as isolated as this, and suddenly I became uneasy.
Then it happened. As they say, the night is as deep as a valley. As soon as I could no longer hear the sound of the idiot’s slovenly breathing, I sensed the presence of something outside.
It sounded like the footsteps of an animal, one that hadn’t come from very far away. At first I tried to comfort myself, thinking that this was a place where there was no scarcity of monkeys and toads. But the thought did little to reassure me.
A bit later, when it seemed the animal had stepped up to the front of the house, I heard the bleating of a sheep.
My head was pointed in its direction, which meant that the beast must have been standing right beside my pillow! A bit later I heard the sound of beating bird’s wings just to my right, under the spot where the hydrangea was blooming.
Then came the sound of another animal crying kii, kii on the rooftop. I guessed it was a flying squirrel or some such thing. Next a huge beast, as big as a hill, came so close I felt as though I were being crushed by it. It bellowed like a cow. Then came another two-legged creature that sounded
as if it must have come running from far away with straw sandals on its feet. Now all kinds of creatures were circling and milling around the house. All together, there must have been twenty or thirty of them, snorting, beating their wings, some of them hissing. It was like a hellish scene from the Realm of Suffering Beasts. In the light of the moon, I could see the silhouettes of their ghastly figures cavorting and dancing in front of the house. Were these the evil spirits of the mountains and rivers?
The leaves on the trees shuddered. I held my breath. From the room where the woman and the idiot were sleeping came a moan and then the sound of someone drawing a long breath. It was the woman, overcome by a nightmare.
“We have a guest tonight,” she cried out.
A few seconds passed before she spoke again, this time in a clear, sharp voice. “I said we have a guest.”
I could hear the woman tossing in bed and a very quiet voice that said, “We have a guest.” Then followed more tossing.
The beasts outside stirred, and the entire cottage began to shake back and forth. Frightened out of my senses, I began reciting a dharani.
He who dares resist the heavens
And vainly tries to block truth’s route,
May his head be split in seven
Like the young arjaka sprout!
His sin is worse than patricide,
His crushing doom without relief
His scales and measures telling lies
Like Devadatta, we despise
Offenders of belief!
I chanted the sacred prayer with heart and soul. And suddenly the whirlwind twisting in the trees blew away to the south, and everything became still. From the couple’s bed came not a sound.
