Back in the car, Honda felt too tired to look up. He directed the driver to a hotel on Nihondaira, where he had taken rooms for the night.
“I want a quick bath and a massage.” Then, casually, he said something that left Keiko open-mouthed. “I’m going to adopt that boy.”
11
He had idle visitors frequently enough. The building seemed to arouse curiosity. Most of them had children and came in at the children’s urging. Tōru would lift them up to the telescope, and that would be that. This pair had been different. They had come as if trying to pry into something, and left as if they had stolen something. Something that Tōru himself had not been aware of.
It was five in the afternoon. Rain was threatening, and darkness came early.
The long line of indigo across the sea was like a great badge of mourning. It gave an air of repose. A single cargo ship was visible, far to the right.
There was a telephone call from Yokohama informing him of a sailing. There were no other calls.
It was time for dinner, but he was not hungry. He turned on the desk light and leafed through pages of ship funnels. They were good for driving away boredom.
He had his favorites among them, and reveries about them. He liked the mark of the Swedish East Asia Line, three yellow crowns on a white circle, and he liked the elephant of Osaka Dockyards.
On the average of once a month a ship bearing the elephant came into Shimizu. The white elephant over a yellow crescent on a black ground was visible from a considerable distance. He liked that white elephant riding in from the sea on its moon.
He liked the Prince Line of London, a coronet with three rakish feathers. When a Canadian transport came in, it seemed to him that the white ship was a gift and the mark was a brisk greeting card.
None of these marks was a continuing part of Tōru’s consciousness. When they came within range of the telescope they were with him for the first time. Like bright cards scattered over the world, they had been part of a gigantic game in which he had not been a participant.
He loved only distant images that were no reflection of himself. If, that is to say, he loved anything.
Who and what might the old man have been?
Here in the room he had only been someone for that spoiled, overdressed old woman to bother; but now a separate presence remained behind, that of a quiet old man.
Tired, erudite, intelligent old eyes, a voice so low that Tōru had had difficulty in catching it, a politeness that almost seemed to verge on ridicule. What was he enduring?
Tōru had never before met anyone quite like him. He had never before seen the will to dominate take such quiet form.
Everything should have been old knowledge; and yet there was something in the old man that caught on a corner of Tōru’s awareness like a rock snag and would not give way. What might it be?
But presently cool arrogance returned, and he ceased to speculate. The old man was a lawyer in retirement. That was enough. The politeness was a professional manner, nothing more. Tōru detected and was ashamed of a tendency in himself toward rustic wariness.
Getting up to warm his dinner, he threw a wad of paper into the wastebasket, and caught a glimpse of the withered hydrangea.
“Today it was a hydrangea. She poked it in my hair as she left. Yesterday a cornflower. The time before a gardenia. The wanderings of a demented mind? Or have they some meaning? Maybe it’s not just her idea. Maybe someone puts a flower in her hair every day and she carries some sort of signal without knowing it? She always does all the talking, but next time I have to ask her.”
Perhaps there was nothing of the accidental or the random in events that took place around Tōru. Suddenly it seemed that a fine pattern of evil was taking shape around him.
12
“Are you coming to my room?” she asked as they left the table. “Or shall I go to yours?”
Always when they traveled together they went after dinner to the room of one or the other and talked over whiskey. If either pleaded fatigue the other understood.
“I’m not feeling as tired as I did. I’ll be with you in maybe a half hour.” He took her wrist and looked at the number on her key. She found endlessly amusing the pride he took in this little public display of intimacy. He could be amusingly intimate one instant and somberly, threateningly judicial the next.
She changed clothes. She would make fun of him. But she reconsidered. She saw that she could make fun of him without restraint when the matter was a serious one; but it was a law between them that the frivolous must always be serious.
They sat at the small table by the window. Honda ordered the usual bottle of Cutty Sark. Keiko was looking at the swirls of mist outside. She took out a cigarette. Cigarette in hand, she wore a sterner, tenser expression than usual. She had long ago given up the foreign affectation of waiting for him to light a match. He had always disliked it.
Abruptly she spoke. “I’m shocked, utterly shocked. The idea of taking in a child you know nothing about. I can think of only one explanation. You’ve kept your proclivities hidden from me. How blind I’ve been. We’ve known each other for eighteen years and I never suspected. I see now. There can be no doubt about it. We’ve had the same urges all along, and all along they’ve brought us together and made us feel secure, comrades and allies. Ying Chan was just a stage property. You knew about her and me, and were playing your part. A person can’t be too careful.”
“That isn’t it at all. She and the boy are identical.” He spoke with great firmness.
Why, she asked over and over again. How were they identical?
“I’ll tell you when the whiskey comes.”
It came. She had no choice but to await his words. She had lost the initiative.
Honda told her everything.
It pleased him that she should listen so carefully. She refrained from the usual overgeneralized response.
“You have been wise to say and to write nothing about it.” Whiskey had produced a voice of smooth charity and benevolence. “People would have thought you mad. The trust you have built up would have collapsed.”
“Trust no longer means anything to me.”
“That’s not the point. Something else you’ve kept hidden from me is your wisdom. No, a secret as violent as the most violent poison, capable of everything horrible, a secret that makes any sort of social secret seem like nothing at all. You could tell me that there are three lunatics in your immediate family, you could tell me you have sexual inclinations of a most curious sort, you could tell me the things most people would be most ashamed to tell me. It would be a social secret, nothing at all. Once you know the truth then murder and suicide and rape and forgery are easy, sloppy things. And what an irony that a judge should be the one. You find yourself caught up in a ring bigger than the skies, and everything else is ordinary. You have discovered that we’ve only been turned out to graze. Ignorant animals, out on loose tether.” Keiko sighed. “Your story has cured me. I think I have fought rather well, but there was no need to fight. We are all fish in the same net.”
“But it is the final blow for a woman. A person who knows what you know can never be beautiful again. If at your age you still wanted to be beautiful, then you should have put your hands over your ears.
“There are invisible signs of leprosy on the face of the one who knows. If leprosy of the nerves and leprosy of the joints are visible leprosy—then call it transparent leprosy. Immediately at the end of knowledge comes leprosy. The minute I set foot in India I was a spiritual leper. I had been for decades, of course, without knowing it.
“Now you know too. You can put on all your layers of makeup, but someone else who knows will see through to the skin. I will tell you what he will see. A skin that is too transparent; a spirit standing dead still; flesh that disgusts by its fleshiness, deprived of all fleshly beauty; a voice that is hoarse; a body stripped of hair, all the hair fallen like leaves. We will soon be seeing all the symptoms in you. The five signs of the decay of the one who sees.