by Неизвестный
After my friend died, though, I couldn’t think of death in such a naive way. Death is not the opposite of life. Death is already inside me. And I couldn’t shake that thought. The death that took my seventeen-year-old friend on that May evening took hold of me as well.
That much I understood, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. This was no easy task. I was still just eighteen, too young to find some neutral ground to stand on.
After that I dated her once, maybe twice, a month. I guess you could call it dating. Can’t think of any better word for it.
She was going to a women’s college just outside Tokyo, a small school but with a good reputation. Her apartment was just a ten-minute walk from the college. Along the road to the school there was a beautiful reservoir that we sometimes took walks around. She didn’t seem to have any friends. Same as before, she was pretty quiet. There wasn’t much to talk about, so I didn’t say much either. We just looked at each other and kept on walking and walking.
Not that we weren’t getting anywhere. Around the end of summer vacation, in a very natural way, she started walking next to me, not in front. On and on we walked, side by side—up and down slopes, over bridges, across streets. We weren’t headed anywhere in particular and didn’t have any plans. We’d walk for a while, drop by a coffee shop for some coffee, and off we’d go again. Like slides being changed in the projector, only the seasons changed. Fall came, and the courtyard of my dorm was covered with fallen zelkovia leaves. Pulling on a sweater, I could catch a scent of the new season. I went out and bought myself a new pair of suede shoes.
At the end of autumn when the wind turned icy, she began to walk closer to me, rubbing up against my arm. Through my thick duffel coat I could feel her breath. But that was all. Hands stuck deep in the pockets of my coat, I continued to walk on and on. Both of us had shoes with rubber soles, and our footsteps were silent. Only when we crunched over the trampled down sycamore leaves did we make a sound. It wasn’t my arm she wanted, but someone else’s. Not my warmth, but the warmth of another. At least that’s how it felt at the time.
Her eyes looked even more transparent than before, a restless sort of transparency. Sometimes, for no particular reason, she’d look deep into my eyes. And each time she did, a feeling of sadness washed over me.
The guys at the dorm always kidded me whenever she called or when I went out to see her on Sunday mornings. They thought I’d made a girlfriend. I couldn’t explain the situation to them, and there wasn’t any reason to, so I just let things stand as they were. Whenever I came back from a date, invariably someone would ask me whether I’d scored. Can’t complain, was my standard reply.
So passed my eighteenth year. The sun rose and set; the flag was raised and lowered. And on Sundays I went on a date with my dead friend’s girlfriend. What the hell do you think you’re doing? I asked myself. And what’re you going to do next? I hadn’t the foggiest. At school I read Claudel’s plays, and Racine’s, and Eisenstein. I liked their style, but that was it. I made hardly any friends at school, or at the dorm, either. I was always reading, so people thought I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to be anything.
Many times I tried to talk with her about these feelings. She of all people should understand. But I could never explain how I felt. It was like she said: whenever I struggled to find the right words, they slipped from my grasp and sank into the murky depths.
On Saturday evenings, I sat in the lobby of the dorm where the phones were, waiting for her call. Sometimes she wouldn’t call for three weeks at a stretch, other times two weeks in a row. So I sat on a chair in the lobby, waiting. On Saturday evenings, most of the other students went out, and silence descended on the dorm. Gazing at the particles of light in the still space, I struggled to grasp my own feelings. Everyone is looking for something from someone. That much I was sure of. But what came next, I had no idea. A hazy wall of air rose up before me, just out of reach.
During the winter, I had a part-time job at a small record store in Shinjuku. For Christmas I gave her a Henry Mancini record that had one of her favorites on it, the tune “Dear Heart.” I wrapped it in paper with a Christmas tree design and added a pink ribbon. She gave me a pair of woolen gloves she’d knitted. The part for the thumb was a little too short, but they were warm all the same.
She didn’t go home for New Year’s vacation, and the two of us had dinner over New Year’s at her apartment.
A lot of things happened that winter.
At the end of January, my roommate was in bed for two days with a temperature of nearly 104. Thanks to that, I had to call off a date with her. I couldn’t just go out and leave him: he sounded like he was going to die at any minute. And who else would look after him? I bought some ice, wrapped it in a plastic bag to make an ice pack, wiped his sweat away with a cool wet towel, took his temperature every hour. His fever didn’t break for a whole day. The second day, though, he leaped out of bed as though nothing had happened. His temperature was back to normal.
“It’s weird,” he said. “I’ve never had a fever before in my life.”
“Well, you sure had one this time,” I told him. I showed him the two free concert tickets that had gone to waste.
“At least they were free,” he said.
It snowed a lot in February.
At the end of February, I got into a fight with an older student at the dorm over something stupid and punched him. He fell over and hit his head on a concrete wall. Fortunately he was OK, but I was called before the dorm head and given a warning. After that, dorm life was never the same.
I turned nineteen and finally became a sophomore. I failed a couple of courses, though. I managed a couple of Bs, but everything else was Cs and Ds. She was promoted to sophomore, too, but with a much better record: she passed all her courses. The four seasons came and went.
In June she turned twenty. I had trouble picturing her as twenty. We always thought the best thing for us was to shuttle back and forth somewhere between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen comes nineteen, after nineteen comes eighteen—that we could understand. But now here she was twenty. And the next winter I’d be twenty, too. Only our dead friend would stay forever as he was, seventeen years old.
It rained on her birthday. I bought a cake in Shinjuku and took the train to her place. The train was crowded and bounced around something awful; by the time I got to her apartment, the cake was a decaying Roman ruin. But we went ahead and put twenty candles on it and lit them. We closed the curtains and turned off the lights, and suddenly we had a real birthday party on our hands. She opened a bottle of wine, and we drank it with the cake, and had a little something to eat.
“I don’t know, but it seems kind of idiotic to be twenty,” she said. After dinner we cleared away the dishes and sat on the floor drinking the rest of the wine. While I finished one glass, she helped herself to two.
She’d never talked like she did that night. She told me these long stories about her childhood, her school, her family. Terribly involved stories that started with A, then B would enter the picture, leading on to something about C, going on and on and on. There was no end to it. At first I made all the proper noises to show her I was following along but soon gave up. I put on a record, and when it was over, I lifted up the needle and put on another. After I finished all the records, I put the first one back on. Outside it was still pouring. Time passed slowly as her monologue went on without end.
I didn’t worry about it, though, until a while later. Suddenly I realized it was 11:00 p.m. and she’d been talking nonstop for four hours. If I didn’t get a move on, I’d miss the last train home. I didn’t know what to do. Should I just let her talk till she dropped? Should I break in and put an end to it? After much hesitation, I decided to interrupt. Four hours should be enough, you’d think.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I finally said. “Sorry I stayed so late. I’ll see you again real soon, OK?”
I wasn’t sure whether my wor
ds had gotten through. For a short while she was quiet, but soon it was back to the monologue. I gave up and lit a cigarette. At this rate, it looked like I’d better go with plan B. Let the rest take its course.
Before too long, though, she stopped. With a jolt, I realized she was finished. It wasn’t that she’d finished wanting to talk; her well of words had just dried up. Scraps of words hung there, suspended in midair. She tried to continue, but nothing came out. Something had been lost. Her lips slightly parted, she looked into my eyes with a vague expression as if she were trying to make out something through an opaque membrane. I couldn’t help feeling guilty.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” I said slowly, weighing each word. “But it’s getting late, so I thought I’d better get going . . .”
It took less than a second for the teardrops to run down her cheeks and splash onto one of the record jackets. After the first drops fell, the floodgate burst. Putting her hands on the floor she leaned forward, weeping so much it seemed like she was retching. I gently put my hand out and touched her shoulder; it shook ever so slightly. Almost without thinking, I drew her near me. Head buried in my chest, she sobbed silently, dampening my shirt with her hot breath and tears. Her ten fingers, in search of something, roamed over my back. Cradling her in my left arm, I stroked the fine strands of her hair with my right. For a long while, I waited in this pose for her to stop crying. But she didn’t stop.
That night we slept together. That may have been the best response to the situation, maybe not. I don’t know what else I should have done.
I hadn’t slept with a girl for ages. It was her first time with a man. Stupid me, I asked her why she hadn’t slept with him. Instead of answering, she pulled away from me, turned to face the opposite direction, and gazed at the rain outside. I looked at the ceiling and smoked a cigarette.
In the morning the rain had stopped. She was still facing away from me, asleep. Or maybe she was awake all the time, I couldn’t tell. Once again, she was enveloped by the same silence of a year before. I looked at her white back for a while, then gave up and climbed out of bed.
Record jackets lay scattered over the floor; half a dilapidated cake graced the table. It felt like time had skidded to a stop. On her desktop there was a dictionary and a chart of French verb conjugations. A calendar was taped to the wall in front of the desk, a pure white calendar without a mark or writing of any kind.
I gathered up the clothes that had fallen on the floor beside the bed. The front of my shirt was still cold and wet from her tears. Putting my face to it, I breathed in the odor of her hair.
I tore off a sheet from the memo pad on her desk and left a note. Call me soon, I wrote. I left the room, closing the door.
A week passed without a call. She didn’t answer her phone, so I wrote her a long letter. I tried to tell her my feelings as honestly as I knew how. There’s a lot going on I don’t have a clue about, I wrote; I’ll try my damndest to figure it all out, but you’ve got to understand it doesn’t happen overnight. I have no idea where I’m headed. All I know for sure is I don’t want to get hung up thinking too deeply about things. The world’s too precarious a place for that. Start me mulling over ideas, and I’ll end up forcing the people around me to do things they hate. I couldn’t stand that. I want to see you again very much, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do . . .
That’s the kind of letter I wrote.
I got a reply in the beginning of July. A short letter.
For the time being I’ve decided to take a year off from college. I say for the time being, but I doubt I’ll go back. Taking a leave of absence is just a formality. Tomorrow I’ll be moving out of my apartment. I know this will seem pretty abrupt to you, but I’ve been thinking it over for a long time. I wanted to ask your advice, many times I almost did, but for some reason I couldn’t. I guess I was afraid to talk about it.
Please don’t worry about everything that’s happened. No matter what happened or didn’t happen, this is where we end up. I know this might hurt you. And I’m sorry if it does. But what I want to say is I don’t want you to blame yourself, or anyone else, over me. This is really something I have to handle on my own. This past year I’ve just been putting it off, and I know you’ve suffered because of me. Perhaps that’s all behind us now.
There’s a nice sanatorium in the mountains near Kyoto, and I’ve decided to stay there for a while. It’s less a hospital than a place where you’re free to do what you want. I’ll write you again someday and tell you more about it. Right now I just can’t seem to get the words down. This is the tenth time I’ve rewritten this letter. I can’t find the words to tell you how thankful I am to you for being with me this past year. Please believe me when I say this. I can’t say anything more than that. I’ll always treasure the record you gave me.
Someday, somewhere in this “precarious world” if we meet again I hope I’ll be able to tell you much more than I can right now.
Good-bye.
I read her letter over a couple of hundred times, and every time I did, I was gripped by an awful sadness. The same kind of disconcerting sadness I felt when she gazed deep into my eyes. I couldn’t shake that feeling. It was like the wind, formless and weightless, and I couldn’t wrap it around me. Scenery passed slowly before me. People spoke, but their words didn’t reach my ears.
On Saturday nights, I still sat in the same chair in the lobby. I knew a phone call wouldn’t come, but I had no idea what else I should do. I turned on the TV and pretended to watch baseball games. And gazed at the indeterminate space between me and the set. I divided that space into two and again in two. I did this over and over, until I’d made a space so small it could fit in the palm of my hand.
At ten I turned off the TV, went back to my room, and went to sleep.
At the end of that month, my roommate gave me a firefly in an instant-coffee jar. Inside were some blades of grass and a bit of water. He’d punched a few tiny air holes in the lid. It was still light out, so the firefly looked more like some black bug you’d find at the beach. I peered in the jar, though, and sure enough, a firefly it was. The firefly tried to climb up the slippery side of the glass jar and slipped back down each time. It’d been a long time since I’d seen one so close up.
“I found it in the courtyard,” my roommate told me. “A hotel down the road let a bunch of fireflies out as a publicity stunt, and it must have made its way over here.” As he talked, he stuffed clothes and notebooks inside a small suitcase. We were already several weeks into summer vacation. I didn’t want to go back home, and he’d had to go out on some fieldwork, so we were just about the only ones left in the dorm. His fieldwork was done, though, and he was getting ready to go home.
“Why don’t you give it to a girl?” he added. “Girls like those things.”
“Thanks, good idea,” I said.
After sundown, the dorm was silent. The flag was gone, and lights came on in the windows of the cafeteria. There were just a few students left, so only half the lights were lit. The lights on the right were off; the ones on the left were on. You could catch a faint whiff of dinner. Cream stew.
I took the instant-coffee jar with the firefly and went up to the roof. The place was deserted. A white shirt someone had forgotten to take in was pinned to the clothesline, swaying in the evening breeze like some cast-off skin. I climbed the rusty metal ladder in the corner of the roof to the top of the water tower. The cylindrical water tank was still warm from the heat it had absorbed during the day. I sat down in the cramped space, leaned against the railing, and looked at the moon in front of me, just a day or two short of full. On the right, I could see the streets of Shinjuku; on the left, Ikebukuo. The headlights of the cars were a brilliant stream of light flowing from one part of the city to another. Like a cloud hanging over the streets, the city was a mix of sounds, a soft, low hum.
The firefly glowed faintly in the bottom of the jar. But its light was too weak, the color too faint. The way I remem
bered it, fireflies were supposed to give off a crisp, bright light that cuts through the summer darkness. This firefly might be growing weak, might even be dying, I figured. Holding the jar by its mouth, I shook it a couple of times to see. The firefly flew for a second and bumped against the glass. But its light was still dim.
Maybe the problem wasn’t with the light but with my memory. Maybe fireflies’ light wasn’t that bright after all. Was I just imagining it was? Or maybe, when I was a child, the darkness that surrounded me was deeper. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even recall when I had last seen a firefly.
What I could remember was the dark sound of water running in the night. An old brick sluice gate, with a handle you could turn around to open or close it. A narrow stream, with plants covering the surface. All around was pitch black, and hundreds of fireflies flew above the still water. A powdery clump of yellow light blazed above the stream and shone in the water.
When was that, anyway? And where was it?
I had no idea.
Everything was mixed up, and confused.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm myself. If I kept my eyes shut tight, at any moment my body would be sucked into the summer darkness. It was the first time I’d climbed the water tower after dark. The sound of the wind was clearer than it had ever been. The wind wasn’t blowing hard, yet strangely left a clear-cut trace as it rushed by me. Taking its time, night slowly enveloped the earth. The city lights might shine their brightest, but slowly, ever so slowly, night was winning out.
I opened the lid of the jar, took out the firefly, and put it on the edge of the water tower that stuck out an inch or two. It seemed like the firefly couldn’t grasp where it was. After making one bumbling circuit of a bolt, it stretched out one leg on top of a scab of loose paint. It tried to go to the right but finding it had reached a dead end, went back to the left. It slowly clambered to the top of the bolt and crouched there for a time, motionless, more dead than alive.
