‘Mr Shi?’
He turned to me. In the piebald shadows of the corridor he seemed suddenly pale. ‘What is beyond this?’
‘The garden. Open it.’
He hesitated a moment, then pulled back the screen and stared out through the grimy window. In the glaring white sunlight the garden was breathless and still, not a thing moving in that ticking, throbbing heat. The trees and creepers seemed dusty and almost unreal. Shi Chongming stood for a long time until I wasn’t sure if he was breathing or not. ‘I’d like to go into the garden, if I may. Let us take our tea in the garden.’
I’d never been down there. I wasn’t even sure there was access to it. The Russians had both gone out so I had to wake up Jason and ask. He came to the door crumpled and yawning, pulling on a T-shirt – a cigarette between his teeth. He looked Shi Chongming up and down wordlessly, then shrugged. ‘Yeah, sure. There’s a way.’ He led us down to where, only two rooms along from mine, an unlocked door opened on to a tiny wooden staircase.
I was astonished. I hadn’t realized there were staircases going down – I had imagined the ground floor to be completely sealed. But there, at the bottom of the dark stairwell, was one room, empty of furniture, only drifts of dead leaves on the stone floor. Facing us was a ripped paper shoji screen, coloured green by the underwater light of the garden beyond. Shi Chongming and I stood for a moment, looking at it.
‘I’m sure there’ll be nowhere to sit,’ I said.
Shi Chongming rested his hand on the screen. Something mechanical, a nuclear buzz like a small generator, maybe one of the air-conditioners on the Salt Building, echoed from beyond. He paused for a moment, then pulled. The screen was rusty: it resisted briefly, then gave suddenly, rolling back, and the bitter, coiled underbelly of a jungle filled the doorway with green. We stood in silence, staring out at it. A wisteria, as thick and muscled as the woody wrists of a fighter, had been so long ignored that it no longer flowered but had become a living cage stretching outwards from the doorway. Hair moss and tropical creepers coiled round it, mosquitoes hovered in its dark spaces, untidy persimmon and maple battled for space, festooned with moss and ivy.
Shi Chongming walked out into the thicket, moving quickly on his cane, the green and yellow light dappling the back of his strange head. I followed, treading carefully, balancing the tray. The air was thick with heat, insects and stinging, bitter tree saps. A huge winged beetle sprang from under my feet, hinged like a man-made bird, and whirred out of the undergrowth towards my face. I took a step back to avoid it, spilling a little tea on the lacquer tray, and watched it spiral past my face and up, crystalline and mechanical, clack-clack-clack, into the branches. It sat above me, as big as a wren, stretching its polished chestnut wings and began to make the electrical buzz I’d taken for a generator. I stared up at it, thrilled. The poet Basho’s semi-no-koe, I thought. The voice of the cicada. The oldest sound in Japan.
Ahead of me Shi Chongming had emerged into a clearing. I followed, stepping out into the glare, shrugging at the cobwebs on my arms and squinting in the sun at the glittering white Salt Building, flat against the blue sky. The garden was even bigger than I’d imagined: on my left lay a boggy area, a lotus pond, congested with rotting leaves, clouds of gnats hovering in the shadows of a giant acer that trailed into it.
Next to this, in the mossed and derelict remains of a Japanese rock garden, Shi Chongming had stopped. He was looking back across the garden, his head moving from side to side, as if he was straining for a fleeting glimpse of something, like a man who has let a dog run off into a forest and is trying to catch sight of it from the outskirts. He was so intent that I turned to look in the same direction. Tucked behind swathes of bamboo I could see glimpses of the red-ochre security grilles on the ground-floor windows, I could see a crumbling ornamental bridge spanning the lotus pond, but I couldn’t see what had so captured Shi Chongming’s attention. I looked again at his eyes, followed their trajectory and eventually settled in the region of a stone bench and stone lantern, the latter standing next to the lotus pond.
‘Mr Shi?’
He frowned and shook his head. Then he seemed to recover himself, noticing for the first time that I was carrying a tray. ‘Please.’ He took it from me. ‘Please, let’s sit down. Let’s drink.’
I found some mildewed steamer chairs and we sat at the edge of the rock garden in the shade, out of reach of the white flashes of sunlight. It was so hot that I had to do everything very slowly – pouring the tea, passing Shi Chongming a mochi on an individual lacquer tray. He took the tray and inspected it, then took the fork and carefully drew a line down the centre of the cake, cutting it so it fell open in two halves. A mochi is a floury, pale colour until it is opened, when it reveals a startling purple-red paste, like raw meat against a sliver of pastel skin. Shi Chongming’s face changed minutely when he saw it: I saw him hesitate, then politely lift a very small section to his mouth. He chewed it cautiously, swallowing painfully. Just as if he’s afraid of eating, I thought.
‘Tell me,’ he said at last, sipping his tea and patting his mouth with a handkerchief, ‘you seem much happier than when I first met you. Are you? Are you happy here in Tokyo?’
‘ Happy? I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’
‘You have somewhere to live.’ He raised his hand to the house, to the upper floor gallery where a few puffy clouds were reflected in the dirty windows. ‘A safe place to live. And you have enough money.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you like your job?’
I looked down at the plate. ‘Sort of.’
‘You work in a club? You said you work in the evenings.’
‘I’m a hostess. It’s not exciting.’
‘I’m sure it’s not. I know a little about these clubs, I’m not the ignorant old man I appear. Where do you work? There are two chief areas – Roppongi and Akasaka.’
‘Yotsuya.’ I waved my hand in the vague direction. ‘The big building in Yotsuya. The black one.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I do know.’
Something in his voice made me look up. But he wasn’t looking at me, instead his milky eyes were focused in mid-air, as if he was thinking about something very puzzling.
‘Professor Shi? Have you come to tell me about the film?’
He inclined his head, his eyes still distant. It wasn’t a yes, and it wasn’t a no. I waited for him to continue but he didn’t, he seemed for a while to have forgotten that I was there. Then he said suddenly, in a quiet voice, ‘Do you know? To conceal the past is not such a rare trick.’
‘What?’
He regarded me thoughtfully, as if he was thinking not about Nanking but, rather, about me. I stared back at him, my face getting redder and redder.
‘ What? ’
‘It’s not such an unusual thing. It’s a trick that relies only on silence.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He reached inside his pocket and produced what looked like a small origami crane about the size of a matchbox, made from vivid red and purple washi paper. Its head was held back, its wings were extended dramatically. ‘Look at this – this perfect bird.’ He put the crane on my palm. I stared down at it. It was heavier than it looked; it seemed to be bound round the base with a complex structure of rubber bands. I looked up at him questioningly. He was nodding, his eyes on the little bird. ‘Imagine that this, this calm little bird, is the past. Imagine.’