“Hatsumomo-san, I know you don’t like me,” I said. “If you would be kind enough to tell me what I want to know, I’ll promise never to bother you again.”
Hatsumomo looked very pleased when she heard this and came walking toward me with a luminous happiness on her face. Honestly, I’ve never seen a more astonishing-looking woman. Men in the street sometimes stopped and took their cigarettes from their mouths to stare at her. I thought she was going to come whisper in my ear; but after she’d stood over me smiling for a moment, she drew back her hand and slapped me.
“I told you to get out of my room, didn’t I?” she said.
I was too stunned to know how to react. But I must have stumbled out of the room, because the next thing I knew, I was slumped on the wood floor of the hallway, holding my hand to my face. In a moment Mother’s door slid open.
“Hatsumomo!” Mother said, and came to help me to my feet. “What have you done to Chiyo?”
“She was talking about running away, Mother. I decided it would be best if I slapped her for you. I thought you were probably too busy to do it yourself.”
Mother summoned a maid and asked for several slices of fresh ginger, then took me into her room and seated me at the table while she finished a telephone call. The okiya’s only telephone for calling outside Gion was mounted on the wall of her room, and no one else was permitted to use it. She’d left the earpiece lying on its side on the shelf, and when she took it up again, she seemed to squeeze it so hard with her stubby fingers that I thought fluid might drip onto the mats.
“Sorry,” she said into the mouthpiece in her raspy voice. “Hatsumomo is slapping the maids around again.”
During my first few weeks in the okiya I felt an unreasonable affection for Mother-something like what a fish might feel for the fisherman who pulls the hook from its lip. Probably this was because I saw her no more than a few minutes each day while cleaning her room. She was always to be found there, sitting at the table, usually with an account book from the bookcase open before her and the fingers of one hand flicking the ivory beads of her abacus. She may have been organized about keeping her account books, but in every other respect she was messier even than Hatsumomo. Whenever she put her pipe down onto the table with a click, flecks of ash and tobacco flew out of it, and she left them wherever they lay. She didn’t like anyone to touch her futon, even to change the sheets, so the whole room smelled like dirty linen. And the paper screens over the windows were stained terribly on account of her smoking, which gave the room a gloomy cast.
While Mother went on talking on the telephone, one of the elderly maids came in with several strips of freshly cut ginger for me to hold against my face where Hatsumomo had slapped me. The commotion of the door opening and closing woke Mother’s little dog, Taku, who was an ill-tempered creature with a smashed face. He seemed to have only three pastimes in life-to bark, to snore, and to bite people who tried to pet him. After the maid had left again, Taku came and laid himself behind me. This was one of his little tricks; he liked to put himself where I would step on him by accident, and then bite me as soon as I did it. I was beginning to feel like a mouse caught in a sliding door, positioned there between Mother and Taku, when at last Mother hung up the telephone and came to sit at the table. She stared at me with her yellow eyes and finally said:
“Now you listen to me, little girl. Perhaps you’ve heard Hatsumomo lying. Just because she can get away with it doesn’t mean you can. I want to know… why did she slap you?”
“She wanted me to leave her room, Mother,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
Mother made me say it all again in a proper Kyoto accent, which I found difficult to do. When I’d finally said it well enough to satisfy her, she went on:
“I don’t think you understand your job here in the okiya. We all of us think of only one thing-how we can help Hatsumomo be successful as a geisha. Even Granny. She may seem like a difficult old woman to you, but really she spends her whole day thinking of ways to be helpful to Hatsumomo.”
I didn’t have the least idea what Mother was talking about. To tell the truth, I don’t think she could have fooled a dirty rag into believing Granny was in any way helpful to anyone.
“If someone as senior as Granny works hard all day to make Hatsumomo’s job easier, think how much harder you have to work.”
“Yes, Mother, I’ll continue working very hard.”
“I don’t want to hear that you’ve upset Hatsumomo again. The other little girl manages to stay out of her way; you can do it too.”
“Yes, Mother… but before I go, may I ask? I’ve been wondering if anyone might know where my sister is. You see, I’d hoped to send a note to her.”
Mother had a peculiar mouth, which was much too big for her face and hung open much of the time; but now she did something with it I’d never seen her do before, which was to pinch her teeth together as though she wanted me to have a good look at them. This was her way of smiling-though I didn’t realize it until she began to make that coughing noise that was her laugh.
“Why on earth should I tell you such a thing?” she said.
After this, she gave her coughing laugh a few more times, before waving her hand at me to say that I should leave the room.
When I went out, Auntie was waiting in the upstairs hall with a chore for me. She gave me a bucket and sent me up a ladder through a trapdoor onto the roof. There on wooden struts stood a tank for collecting rainwater. The rainwater ran down by gravity to flush the little second-floor toilet near Mother’s room, for we had no plumbing in those days, even in the kitchen. Lately the weather had been dry, and the toilet had begun to stink. My task was to dump water into the tank so that Auntie could flush the toilet a few times to clear it out.
Those tiles in the noonday sun felt like hot skillets to me; while I emptied the bucket, I couldn’t help but think of the cold water of the pond where we used to swim back in our village on the seashore. I’d been in that pond only a few weeks earlier; but it all seemed so far away from me now, there on the roof of the okiya. Auntie called up to me to pick the weeds from between the tiles before I came back down. I looked out at the hazy heat lying on the city and the hills surrounding us like prison walls. Somewhere under one of those rooftops, my sister was probably doing her chores just as I was. I thought of her when I bumped the tank by accident, and water splashed out and flowed toward the street.
About a month after I’d arrived in the okiya, Mother told me the time had come to begin my schooling. I was to accompany Pumpkin the following morning to be introduced to the teachers. Afterward, Hatsumomo would take me to someplace called the “registry office,” which I’d never heard of, and then late in the afternoon I would observe her putting on her makeup and dressing in kimono. It was a tradition in the okiya for a young girl, on the day she begins her training, to observe the most senior geisha in this way.
When Pumpkin heard she would be taking me to the school the following morning, she grew very nervous.
“You’ll have to be ready to leave the moment you wake up,” she told me. “If we’re late, we may as well drown ourselves in the sewer…”
I’d seen Pumpkin scramble out of the okiya every morning so early her eyes were still crusty; and she often seemed on the point of tears when she left. In fact, when she clopped past the kitchen window in her wooden shoes, I sometimes thought I could hear her crying. She hadn’t taken to her lessons well-not well at all, as a matter of fact. She’d arrived in the okiya nearly six months before me, but she’d only begun attending the school a week or so after my arrival. Most days when she came back around noon, she hid straightaway in the maids’ quarters so no one would see her upset.