by Yoko Ogawa
“The earthquake must have warped the floor.” Though we were separated from R by no more than the thickness of a single board, his voice sounded distant and weak.
“I’m sure that’s it. The door is jammed into the floorboards.” The old man put his hand to his chin to ponder the problem.
“What if we can’t get it open? He’ll starve to death, or suffocate.” The words came rushing out.
“Is the ventilation fan working?” asked the old man.
“No, I think the electricity has been cut off.” Since it was midday, I hadn’t noticed until now, but the power was, indeed, off.
“Then it’s pitch-black in there?” the old man called down to R.
“Yes.” R’s voice seemed to be slowly retreating from us.
“We have to hurry,” I said, getting up from the floor. “We’ll get it open—I’ll go find a chisel or a saw.”
* * *
. . .
The old man worked quietly and precisely, as he always did, and in no time at all the trapdoor had been opened. I stood by, feeling useless, my one contribution being that I’d gone to the neighbors across the street to borrow the tools. There were chisels among the sculpting tools in the basement studio, but it would have been impossible to find them with everything in such a mess, and the old man’s tools had been washed away with the boat, so there was no other choice but to ask. The ex-hatmaker agreed readily, but he insisted that he should come along to help.
“How terrible! Are you all right? Do you need anything?”
“Thank you, but I’m fine. I can manage.”
“A young woman, all by herself?”
“No, the old man is there as well.”
“You can never have too many hands in an emergency,” he said. Smiling, I wracked my brain for an excuse that would avoid hurting his feelings but also keep from arousing suspicion.
“To tell the truth, the old man’s face is broken out in a rash—eczema of some sort. He looks terrible and says he doesn’t want anyone to see him. He must feel embarrassed, even at his age, and he can be quite stubborn at times.”
So it was that I managed to put off the hatmaker.
The trapdoor gave way in a shower of splinters, accompanied by cries of joy from all three of us. The old man and I immediately got down on our bellies and peered into the opening. R, crouching at the bottom of the ladder, was looking up at us with an expression of exhaustion and relief. His hair was flecked with chips of wood from the shattered door.
We made our way down the ladder, uttering meaningless grunts in greeting as we patted and embraced one another. Though it was difficult to see in the dim light, it was clear that the hidden room had been battered by the earthquake. The slightest movement meant treading on the scattered contents of R’s shelves. But we did not need to move, content to hold hands and stare at one another for a long time. There seemed to be no other way to reassure ourselves that we had all come safely through the ordeal.
The town never did completely recover. People made attempts to repair their homes, but the cold and shortages of materials slowed the work. Mud, sand, and the ruins of collapsed houses remained piled along the streets, and dirty snow covered all, making for a pitiful sight.
Debris that had been floating near the shore was gradually washed out to sea and carried away on the current. The only thing left visible was the stern of the boat, still protruding above the waves. Its appearance, like an animal that had suffocated by plunging its head into the ground, bore no resemblance to the ship that had once been the old man’s home.
On the afternoon of the third day after the quake, I was out walking near my office along the street where the tramway ran when I spotted the Inuis. Or, to be more precise, I saw only a pair of gloves, but I was sure—though I wished I hadn’t been—that they belonged to the Inui family.
My boss had sent me to run errands, and I was about to enter the stationery store when one of the dark green covered trucks passed me. The back seemed to be tightly packed with people, and the vehicle rolled from side to side as it lumbered along. Nearby cars and pedestrians moved away and waited for it to pass.
I stood with my hand on the doorknob at the stationer’s, trying not to stare at the truck. Still, I caught sight of the gloves, peeking out from the one corner of the canvas cover that had been turned up. Startled, I stared at those gloves—the small sky-blue hand-knit pair with a strand of chain stitching to hold them together.
They belonged to the Inuis’ boy. I remembered that I had cut his fingernails for him in my basement. The soft, transparent clippings had fluttered to the floor, and I recalled again the softness of his hands and the gloves that had lain nearby.
The cover over the back of the truck made it impossible to see bodies or faces, but the gloves seemed terribly sad, barely protruding into the outside world. I wanted to follow them, but I knew that it was pointless. A moment later, the truck was gone.
I’d heard rumors that people who had been in hiding were forced to wander the streets when their homes were destroyed by the earthquake or the fires that followed it. And that the Memory Police had been rounding them up and taking them into custody one after the other. But I had no way to know whether the Inui family had actually been in that truck or not. All I could do was pray that someone had continued to cut the little boy’s fingernails and that the blue gloves were still protecting him.
* * *
. . .
The old man came to live in my house. I’d already decided this would be best and had begun preparations for the move, so it was no trouble for me. But he had seemed strangely subdued since the earthquake and I’d begun to worry about him. Of course, it was natural for him to be in shock—he had lost his home and all his possessions with no warning. Furthermore, though he had spent time at my house and knew it well, that was different from actually living here. He just needed time to get used to things—or so I tried to convince myself.
And, in fact, when it came to the project of putting my house back in order after the earthquake, he seemed to revive and pitch in with great energy. We were fortunate that there was no real damage to the structure, but inside was in such a terrible state that it was difficult to know where to begin. Still, the old man set to work, and in no time at all he had put everything back in its place.
First, he righted all the toppled furniture and fixed the pieces that were broken. If something was beyond repair, he chopped it up and burned it in the garden. Then he sorted everything that had been strewn around the house and put it back where it belonged. He even waxed the floors. Finally, he fixed the frame on the trapdoor to the hidden room and all the other doors and windows that had been damaged, so they worked as well as they ever had.
“The wound on your face doesn’t seem to be healing very quickly. You should take it easy,” I told him.
“No, no, no time for that. It’s easier just to get this kind of thing done all at once. By the way, I ran into the man who lives across the street and he asked me about my eczema, said he could still see traces of it on my face, and told me to take care of myself.” He laughed as he went off, tapping here and there with his hammer.
* * *
. . .
While the old man and I were cleaning up the basement we found some mysterious objects.
The basement had always held random stacks of old things, but the disorder after the earthquake was extreme, and there was barely anyplace to walk when we made our way down the stairs. I had decided I would use this as an opportunity to get rid of things I no longer needed, but everything I touched—sketchbooks, chisels, everything—reminded me of my mother, and in the end I was unable to make any progress at all.
“Young lady, could you come over here for a moment?” said the old man. He was squatting next to a cupboard.
“What is it?” I asked, my gaze following his pointing finger. Insid
e the cupboard were my mother’s sculptures, the ones the Inuis had left with me for safekeeping, fallen now from the shelves where they had been stored. The tapir she had given them as a wedding present, the doll she’d made when their daughter was born, and three more abstract objects she’d sent them before she was taken away.
“Look here,” the old man said, still pointing. While the tapir and doll seemed to be intact, the other three were cracked or broken in places. But I quickly realized that he had not called me over to inspect the damage, but rather because there appeared to be things hidden inside that were now visible through the cracks.
“I wonder what those are,” I said, carefully gathering up the three objects in my hands and setting them on the table. We sat down for a few moments and just looked in silence at the objects peeking out from the broken statues.
“Shall I take them out?” I said.
“I suppose so. We can’t tell much just staring at them like this. But please be careful. They might be dangerous.”
“I doubt it. Not inside my mother’s sculptures.”
I pinched them between my thumb and index finger and pulled them out one by one.
One was a rectangular piece of paper, folded over a number of times. It had yellowed and was ripping at the creases. There were letters and numbers barely visible on it.
The second was a metallic square about the size of a chocolate bar. Tiny holes covered one side of it.
And finally, there was a plastic bag that contained several white tablets that looked like medicine.
“My mother hid these inside the statues,” I said, as soon as they were lined up on the table.
“That certainly seems to be the case,” said the old man, moving around the table to examine the objects from every angle. I soon realized that these were all things that had been kept in the secret drawers in my mother’s chest. I gathered up the broken pieces of the statues and set them at one end of the table. A careful search for more hidden treasures turned up nothing more. The scrap of paper, metal bar, and white lozenges seemingly had nothing in common, but they all shared a certain gentle modesty.
“I wonder if the Inuis knew about this.”
“If they had, I would think they’d have told you about it when they left the statues with you.”
“I suppose so. Then that means these things have been hidden for fifteen years without anyone knowing about them.”
We sat again at the table, resting our chins in our hands, and studied the mysterious objects. The heater in the basement was working no better today than it ever had, and though it had been running a long time, the room was still cold. Snow beat against the transom window, but the sky was invisible. The ice floes on the river outside made creaking noises from time to time.
“What should we do with them?” I asked.
“I wonder…” The old man reached out to pick up the metal bar, but his hand was trembling and closed on nothing but the empty air. The more he tried to reach for the objects, the more his hands seemed to move off in unexpected directions.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him, and he quickly used his left hand to pull back his right arm and place it on his knees.
“Nothing, nothing at all. I’m just a little nervous seeing all these unusual things.”
“Something’s wrong with your arm. Show me.”
“No, no. It’s nothing, really.” He turned, trying to shield his right arm.
“You must be tired. Let’s just leave all this and get some rest.” He nodded silently. “But we should take these up to R’s room. I’m sure they’re the kinds of things that can exist only there.”
* * *
. . .
“Did your mother make other sculptures between the time she got the summons and the day they took her away?” R asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, clutching the quilt as I spoke. “But if she did, I think the three the Inuis left are the only ones here in the house.” The three objects were lined up now on R’s bed. “The other sculptures she left my father and me were made long before they ordered her to report to the ministry.”
“And she didn’t store her work anywhere else?”
“The only place I can think of is the cabin we have up near the source of the river, but I haven’t been there in years. It must be a ruin.”
“Still, I bet that’s where they are. She must have hidden her sculptures there, or rather, hidden things that had disappeared inside the sculptures—to protect them from the Memory Police.” He pushed his hands down into the bed and recrossed his legs. The springs groaned.
“That’s why the things in the secret drawers disappeared at some point?” I looked up at him.
“That’s right.”
He picked up the piece of paper first. It seemed extremely fragile, so he set it in the palm of his hand and gently unfolded it.
“Do you remember this?” he asked.
“No,” I sighed.
“It’s a ticket for the ferry.” His tone was gentle.
“A ferry…ticket…?”
“That’s right. Look. It’s badly faded, but the destination and the fare are printed here. This ticket would have taken you far to the north, to a very big island. Everyone bought a ticket and boarded the ferry. The same ferry the old man worked on.”
I held my breath and stared at the soiled scrap of paper with unblinking eyes. In the center was a picture of a boat sailing over the sea. I wondered what the name of the boat had been. The letters painted on the hull of the old man’s ship had long ago faded in the salt spray—just as the print on the ticket was faded and illegible.
“I seem to remember something, but it’s very vague.” My eyes hurt and l wanted more than anything to close them, but I forced myself to keep looking, afraid that if I didn’t the slight stirring in my memory would fall still. “It’s nothing specific about this piece of paper, nothing as distinct as that, not like your memories.”
“It’s not a contest. We just want to gather up every memory you have. Go ahead, try to recall something, anything at all.” R set his hands on my knees, and our shoulders touched.
“I remember only one thing. I remember how it looked when I saw it with my mother in the basement. It was folded just as it is now, sitting quietly there in the drawer. When I pulled the handle, the paper seemed to tremble, as if I’d startled it. And I recall my mother, as she unfolded it as gently as you just did. It was always night when I went to the basement, with the moon shining through the high window. The room was strewn with splinters of wood and pieces of stone and plaster. The river whispered outside. My mother’s warm, strong hands were dirty, crusted with modeling clay and cuts from her chisels. I think I touched the ticket, too. I took it from her as carefully as I could, looking back and forth between her and the ticket. I felt my heart beating hard, though not from pleasure or excitement exactly. It was more that I was afraid that the ticket would slip through my fingers and be lost. But my mother gave me an encouraging smile. The ticket was nothing more than a worn scrap of paper that might have been rescued from a trash can, and I had no idea why she had guarded it with such care. Still, not wanting to disappoint her, I treated it as carefully as she had.”
Having said all this almost in a single breath, I placed my hands on my chest and bent forward. I had concentrated so completely on this memory that I was having trouble breathing. A pain ran through my chest, deep under my ribs.
“Don’t overdo it. You should rest a bit.” He put the ticket down on the bed and brought me a cup of tea. Supplies of tea were so low now that it was little more than colored water, but it was comforting nonetheless.
“It’s always like this. I can never remember anything that can satisfy you.”
“It’s not about satisfying me, it’s about waking up your sleeping soul.”
“My sleeping soul. I wish it were just
sleeping, instead of completely gone.”
“But it’s not. Didn’t you just remember something about the ferry ticket? The handle on the drawer, the palm of your mother’s hand, the sound of the river?”
He stood up to turn down the lamp and then sat on the bed again. The hidden room had been almost completely restored after the earthquake, and the mirror, razor, and bottles of pills were back in their places. The only visible difference was the trapdoor, which had been repaired with new boards.
I realized that the two of us always talked on this simple, sturdy bed that the old man had made in a great hurry. This bed draped in a fluffy quilt I made sure to air out every few days. We had no place to be, other than this small rectangular space. It was here we talked, and ate, and gazed at each other, here where our bodies came together. It was the one space that had been granted to the two of us. It seemed impossibly cramped and vulnerable.
“When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing. Because that’s how you’ve written all your novels,” he said. Then he picked up the object that looked like a bar of chocolate wrapped in silver foil and brought it to his mouth. As I was wondering whether it was really something to eat, he began to breathe in and out, his eyes smiling, and as he did, sounds began to emerge from the bar.
“Oh!” I cried out, but R didn’t answer, since his mouth was filled with the bar. Still, the noises continued.
The sound was different from the music box. Fuller somehow, and strong enough to fill every corner of the hidden room, and yet, from time to time, it wavered forlornly. Unlike the music box, the bar did not repeat the same melody over and over. Each sound seemed to have its own distinct characteristics.
He gripped either end in his hands, pressed his lips against it, and then began moving it back and forth. The farther he went to the right, the higher the pitch, to left, the lower. The bar had completely vanished into his folded hands, so that it almost seemed the sound was coming from his lips themselves.
