“Open the gates,” Yuki said, and sent me out on my own.
I opened the gates.
“Are you …” the man said. He came closer.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “I’m the American, yes.”
The man apologized. “I apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you.” He spoke fast, as though he were afraid he might never speak again if he stopped. “My boy just died,” he said. “We’ll bury him tomorrow and we don’t have a picture of him. We never took his picture. My wife won’t look at me now, but I know she would have liked me to come here. We heard, someone told us — Tenyo, was it, or someone else? — someone told us you were taking pictures. Your wife was taking pictures. You had a camera, someone told us. Tenyo, was it? It wasn’t Tenyo, I don’t think.” Then the man held his cap and watched me in silence.
I told him to wait there. I told him I’d be back right away. I rounded the corner and bowed, fell to the ground. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t. It was that bad. Back in the house, I told Yuki what the man had come to ask for.
“We can’t say no,” she said. “We have no right to say no. But I can’t come with you. I can’t stomach this.”
“You’re coming,” I said. “You’re not leaving me alone. Do you hear me, Yuki? We’re going together.” We turned on the camera. We made sure the batteries were charged. We made sure there was room on the memory card. We made sure the strap wasn’t tangled.
The Gypsy was looking at the Moskvich outside. He nodded at my wife. He kissed her hand. He thanked us. He apologized again. “Mighty good car,” he said at the Moskvich. He ran his hand over the bump in the fender. “I can fix this for you. Bring it to my place. I could use some work.”
He invited us to his cart. I was relieved we wouldn’t have to drive. He helped Yuki get in. We sat in the back and he lashed the donkey. “Diy,” he called. “Diy, Marko. Git.”
The cart rattled. We went through the village and I could see people watching us as we passed. The sun was still high and there was no wind and the air felt stuffy, unbearably hot. I touched Yuki’s elbow, but she wiggled away. She was pale and her lips were chapped. She looked thirsty. She held the camera in her lap with both hands the way she had held a live chicken at the neighbors, afraid it would flap its wings or scratch her.
“We have to tell him,” she said. She whispered.
“He can’t understand you.”
“We have to tell him.”
The Gypsies lived on the other end of the village. They’d made a little hamlet for themselves. The man’s house wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. They had a satellite dish, a garden with flowers in it. There were many people in the yard, and cars all up the street, with license plates from other places. More people were arriving and the air smelled of boiled cabbage and car exhaust.
The Gypsy spoke only once, just before we got out, and I didn’t know if he spoke at us at all. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “How did it happen?”
We walked in the yard and all the people there stood up to meet us. They all wore black, even the children. Some of the women were sobbing behind black shawls. One by one the men came to us and shook our hand.
“Why are they doing this?” Yuki asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to run. I wanted to turn around and run and never look back. They took us inside the house. We walked through a curtain of bamboo beads — with flies perched along the strings, waiting for someone’s hand to grant them passage.
“The flies,” I heard a voice say as we stepped inside and saw a few shoot in. The whole house smelled of the cabbage I’d noticed before. In the hallway we walked by a large round mirror that was covered with a white sheet, so the boy’s bodiless soul wouldn’t catch a glimpse of itself. There were women in the kitchen making salads and stirring pots. Someone was cleaning fish and I smelled that too. The women looked at us when we passed and nodded. Yuki sought my hand. We held hands as they led us in the room with the boy.
The boy lay on a small bed and looked the way we remembered him. His mother sat on a chair by his side and fended the flies off his face with a newspaper. She didn’t look at us. She flapped the paper. For a moment she adjusted his collar with her free hand. The boy was dressed in black pants, a brown sweater, a white shirt underneath. He had black shoes on, which they had tried to polish. His hair was combed neatly to one side. He looked as though any moment now he’d sit up, rub his head and smile. I searched his face for bruises, but saw none. His fingers were entwined, and I recognized the shadows of the grease his mother had tried to wash off, but couldn’t.
I retracted my own fingers into the shell of my fist. Yuki started to cry. It seemed like that’s what the women were waiting for. They tore their head scarves and tossed them up in the air, and wailed like bagpipes in the head-scarf rain. But the mother hushed them. “A curse on you, furies. You’re scaring him. He’s watching us now and you’re scaring him with your wailing.”
“Yuki,” the father said. He knew her name. He said it beautifully. “Is this a good place for the picture? Or is it too dark?”
My wife was in no shape to answer. It was very difficult for me to speak, but I said it was too dark here. Our camera was cheap, I said, and made poor pictures indoors. The flash was bad. I had to shut myself up. I had to force myself to be quiet.
I led Yuki outside by the hand. I told her to breathe deeply. Someone brought water and she drank. She asked for more. She sprinkled some on her face. Finally they carried the boy out.
Everyone huddled to the sides as though the boy and the people were magnets facing each other with the same pole. They brought a chair and sat the boy in it.
I could see what they were trying to do.
“Oh, no,” I said. I had not expected them to do such a thing.
“They can’t,” Yuki said. “He’s not …”
But they brought pillows to steady his body. His brothers and sisters stood around him and held him upright. Then the mother joined her children on one side and the father stood on the other, but she said something to him in their language I couldn’t understand. He said something back. He begged her, but she said no, no, no. She chased him away from the picture.
Careful not to expose my grease-stained fingers, I held them locked inside the LCD screen — a box in which their two-dimensional images would remain linked forever, in which time did not exist, nor did the need to breathe. There were no living in this box, no dead. Just perfect stillness.
“We are ready,” the mother said at last. “Take the picture.”
•
The Gypsies insisted we stay for dinner. They fixed a long table in the yard and started to bring food. They put bricks on the ground and long planks on the bricks for sitting.
“No,” I said.
“Né, né, né,” said Yuki. She waved about.
“You can’t say no,” the father said. “Sit down. You can’t say no.”
We sat almost in the middle of the table. We held hands. People crowded on the planks, like fat swallows along a wire.
“Eat as much as you like,” the mother told us. “This is fresh cabbage. This is lamb soup. This is river fish, so watch out for the bones. It’s all very good.”
No one spoke. We heard only spoons against the metal plates, the licking of fingers. Someone sucked marrow from a bone, and outside, on the road, a bicycle bell rang.
“Is it nice in America?” a man asked us.
“Not really,” I said.
“Is it nice in Japan?”
“I haven’t been yet. I would like to go.”