But there was no point in worrying at this late date. All he had to do was enjoy the movements before him. He thought of the ships that would come into the harbor after he was dead, and sail off for sunny lands. The world overflowed with hopes of which he was not part. If he were a harbor himself, however hopeless a harbor, he would have to give anchorage to a number of hopes. But as it was, he might as well declare to the world and to the sea that he was a complete superfluity.
And if he were a harbor?
He glanced at the single little boat in Honda Harbor, Tōru here beside him, engrossed in the unloading operations. A boat that was exactly the same as the harbor, rotting with the harbor, refusing forever to leave. Honda, at least, knew it. The ship was cemented to the pier. They were a model father and son.
The great dark holds of the Chung Lien were agape. The cargo overflowed the mouths of the holds. The figures of stevedores in brown sweaters and green bellybands of gold-threaded wool were half visible on the mountains of cargo, their yellow helmets bobbing as they shouted up at the cranes. The myriad iron lines of the derrick shook with their own shouts, and as the cargo wavered precariously in the air it blotted out and then revealed again the gold-lettered name of the passenger ship tied up at Central Pier.
An officer in a white cap was supervising the operations. He was smiling. It would seem that he had shouted a loud joke to encourage the stevedores.
Tired of the unloading operations, the father and son walked to a point from which they could compare the stern of the Chung Lien with the prow of the Soviet ship.
The prow was astir with life, the low stern was deserted. Ochre vents pointed in several directions. Rough piles of garbage. Ancient casks with rusty iron hoops. Life jackets on white railings. Ships’ fittings. Coils of ropes. The delicate white folds of lifeboats under ochre covers. An antique lantern still burned under the Panamanian flag.
The stillness was like that of a Dutch still life, tinged over with the sadness of the sea. It was as if napping with its private parts exposed to the forbidden gaze of landsmen, all the long hours of tedium aboard ship.
The black prow of the Soviet ship with its thirteen silver cranes pressed down from above. The rust of the anchor clinging to the hawse pipe had streaked the hull with red spider webs.
The ropes tying them to land marked off great vistas, three crossed ropes each, trailing beards of Manila hemp. Between the immovable iron screens moved the unresting bustle of the harbor. Each time a little tug with old black tires hanging at its side or a white streamlined pilot boat moved past, it would leave a smooth track in its wake, and the dark irritability would for a time be soothed.
Tōru thought of Shimizu as he had studied it alone on holidays. Something was wrested from his heart each time, he would feel something like a sigh from the great lungs of the harbor, and as he covered his ears against the shouting and roaring and grating, he would taste simultaneously of oppression and liberation, and be filled with a sweet emptiness. It was the same today, though his father had an inhibiting effect.
“I think it was a good thing,” said Honda, “that we broke off with the Hamanaka girl early in the spring. I can talk to you now that you have gotten over it and seem so lost in your studies.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Annoyed, Tōru put a touch of boyish melancholy and gallantry into his words. They were not enough to stop Honda. Honda’s real purpose lay not in apology but in the question he had long been wanting to ask.
“But that letter. Doesn’t it strike you as altogether too stupid? Wasn’t it really too much to have a young girl speak openly of what we had been perfectly aware of and closed our eyes to? Her parents made all sorts of excuses, and the man who first came with the proposal had nothing to say at all when he saw the letter.”
It displeased Tōru that Honda, who had until now not touched upon the matter, should be speaking so plainly, almost too plainly. He sensed that Honda had taken as much pleasure in breaking the engagement as in making it.
“But don’t you suppose all the proposals that come to us are the same?” Elbows on the railing, Tōru did not look up. “Momoko was honest, and so we were able to take early measures.”
“I quite agree. But we mustn’t give up. We’ll find a good girl yet. But that letter—”
“Why should you be so worried about it now?”
Honda gave Tōru a gentle nudge with his elbow. Tōru felt as if he had been jabbed by a bone. “You had her write it?”
Tōru had been expecting the question. “Suppose I did. What would you do?”
“Nothing at all. The only point is that you have found a way of getting through life. We must describe it as a dark way, with no sweetness in it.”
Tōru’s self-respect had been affronted. “I would not want to be thought sweet.”
“But you were very sweet while it was all in process.”
“I was doing as you wanted me to do, I should imagine.”
“Yes.”
Tōru shuddered as the old man bared his teeth to the sea wind. They had reached a point of agreement, and it brought Tōru to thoughts of murder. He could easily enough let them have their way by pushing Honda over; but he feared that Honda was aware of even that impulse. It left him. To have to live was blacker than the most cheerless black. To have to see every day a man who sought to understand, and did understand, the deepest thing inside him.
They had little more to say. After a round of the terminal building, they stood for a time looking at the Philippine ship on the far side.
Directly in front of them was an open door to the crew’s cabins. They could see the scarred linoleum, glowing dully, and, around a corner, the iron rail of a stairway leading downward. The short, empty corridor of the quotidian, of frozen human life, never for a moment away from human beings, on whatever remote seas. In the great white transient ship, that one spot was representative of a dark, dull afternoon corridor in every house. In a vast, unpeopled house as well, where lived only an old man and a boy.
Honda ducked. Tōru had just made a violent motion. Honda caught a glimpse of the word “Notebook” on the rolled-up tablet Tōru had taken from his briefcase. He flung it past the stern of the Philippine ship.
“What are you doing?”
“Notes I don’t need. Scribblings.”
“You’ll be fined if they catch you.”
But there was no one on the pier, and on the ship only a Philippine sailor who looked down at the sea in surprise. The rubber-bound tablet floated for an instant and sank.
A white Soviet ship with a red star on its prow and the name “Khabarovsk” in gold letters was being brought against the pier by a tugboat with masts the color of a thorny broiled lobster. There was a cluster of welcomers at the rail, their hair blowing in the wind. Some were on tiptoes. Children on the shoulders of adults were already shouting and waving.
26
This state of affairs was to be explained not only by the September incident. They were now in the fourth year since Honda had adopted Tōru. Through most of those years Tōru had seemed quiet and docile, and there had been little change in him; but this spring he had reached maturity and entered Tokyo University, and everything was changed. He had suddenly come to treat his father as an adversary. He was prompt in putting down every sign of resistance. After Tōru had hit him on the forehead with a fire poker, Honda went to a clinic for a few days to have the wound treated—he told the doctors that he’d had a bad fall. Thereafter he was most attentive in reading and deferring to Tōru’s wishes. Tōru was studiously rude to Keiko, whom he recognized as Honda’s ally.