Once he tried to strike up a conversation about the future, but the answer he received was:
‘In the Japanese language there is no future tense, only the past and the present.’
‘But something will happen to us, to you and me,’ Erast Petrovich insisted stubbornly.
‘Yes,’ she replied seriously, ‘but I haven’t decided exactly what yet: “The autumn leaf” or “The sweet tear”. Both endings have their advantages.’
He went numb. They didn’t talk about the future any more.
On the evening of the fourth day Midori said:
‘We won’t touch each other today. We’re going to drink wine and talk about the Beautiful.’
‘How do you mean, not touch each other?’ Erast Petrovich asked in alarm. ‘You promised me “The silver cobweb”!’
‘“The silver cobweb” is a night spent in exquisite, sensitive conversation that binds two souls together with invisible threads. The stronger this cobweb is, the longer it will hold the moth of love.’
Fandorin tried to rebel.
‘I don’t want this “cobweb”, the moth isn’t going anywhere in any case! Let’s do “The fox and the badger” again, like yesterday!’
‘Passion does not tolerate repetition and it requires a breathing space,’ Midori said in a didactic tone.
‘Mine doesn’t require one!’
She stamped her foot.
‘Which of us is the teacher of jojutsu – you or me?’
‘Nothing but teachers everywhere. No life of my own at all,’ muttered Erast Patrovich, capitulating. ‘Well, all right, then, exactly what is “the Beautiful” that we are going to talk about all night long?’
‘Poetry, for instance. What work of poetry is your favourite?’
While the vice-consul pondered, Midori set a little jug of sake on the table and sat down cross-legged.
‘Well, I don’t know…’ he said slowly. ‘I like “Eugene Onegin”. A work by the Russian poet P-Pushkin.’
‘Recite it to me! And translate it.’
She rested her elbows on her knees and prepared to listen.
‘But I don’t remember it off by heart. It’s thousands of lines long.’
‘How can you love a poem that has thousands of lines? And why so many? When a poet writes a lot, it means he has nothing to say.’
Offended for the great genius of Russian poetry, Fandorin asked ironically:
‘And how many lines are there in your favourite poem?’
‘Three,’ she replied seriously. ‘I like haiku, three-line poems, best of all. They say so little and at the same time so much. Every word in its place, and not a single superfluous one. I’m sure bodhisattvas talk to each other only in haiku.’
‘Recite it,’ said Erast Petrovich, intrigued. ‘Please, recite it.’
Half-closing her eyes, she half-declaimed, half-chanted:
‘Dragonfly-catcher,
Oh, how far ahead of me
Your feet ran today…’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Fandorin admitted. ‘Only I didn’t understand anything. What dragonfly-catcher? Where has he run off to? And what for?’
Midori opened her eyes and she repeated wistfully in Japanese:
‘Doko madeh itta yara… How lovely! To understand a haiku completely, you must have a special sensitivity or secret knowledge. If you knew that the great poetess Chiyo wrote this verse on the death of her little son, you would not look at me so condescendingly, would you?’
He said nothing, astounded by the profundity and power of feeling suddenly revealed in those three simple, mundane lines.
‘A haiku is like the casing of flesh in which the invisible, elusive soul is confined. The secret is concealed in the narrow space between the five syllables of the first line (it is called kami-no-ku) and the seven syllables of the second line (it is called naka-no-ku), and then between the seven syllables of the naka-no-ku and the five syllables of the third and final line (it is called shimo-no-ku). How can I explain so that you will understand?’ Midori’s face lit up in a crafty smile. ‘Let me try this. A good haiku is like the silhouette of a beautiful woman or an artfully exposed part of her body. The outline and the single detail are far more exciting than the whole thing.’
‘But I prefer the whole thing,’ Fandorin declared, putting his hand on her knee.
‘That’s because you are a little urchin and a barbarian.’ Her fan smacked him painfully across the fingers. ‘It is enough for a sophisticated individual merely to glimpse the edge of Beauty, and in an instant his imagination will fill in all the rest, and even improve it many times over.’
‘That, by the way, is from Pushkin,’ the titular counsellor growled, blowing on his bruised fingers. ‘And your favourite poem may be beautiful, but it is very sad.’
‘Genuine beauty is always sad.’
Erast Petrovich was astonished.
‘Surely not!’
‘There are two kinds of beauty: the beauty of joy and the beauty of sadness. You people of the West prefer the former, we prefer the latter. Because the beauty of joy is as short-lived as the flight of a butterfly. But the beauty of sadness is stronger than stone. Who recalls the millions of happy people in love who have quietly lived their lives, grown old and died? But plays are written about tragic love, and they live for centuries. Let’s drink, and then we shall talk about the Beautiful.’
But they were not fated to discuss the Beautiful.
Erast Petrovich raised his little cup and said: ‘I drink to the beauty of joy.’
‘And I drink to the beauty of sadness,’ Midori replied, and drank, but before he could do likewise, the night was split asunder by a frenzied bellow: ‘TSUME-E-E!’ [xix] The response was a roar that issued from an entire multitude of throats.
Fandorin’s hand shook and the sake spilled out on to the tatami.
As his hand trembled,
Wine spilled on to the table.
An evil omen
A BIG FIRE
Not that it happened often, but sometimes he did come across a woman who was stronger than him. And then the thing to do was not thrust his chest out and put on airs, but quite the opposite – pretend to be weak and defenceless. That made the strong women melt. And then they handled everything themselves; all he had to do was not get under their feet.
In the village of the accursed shinobis there was only one object of any interest to a connoisseur of female charm – seventeen-year-old Etsuko. She was no beauty, of course, but, as the saying went, in a swamp even a toad is a princess. Apart from her, the female population of the village of Kakusimura [xx] (Masa had invented the name himself, because the shinobi didn’t call the village anything) consisted of the old witch Neko-chan (what a lovely little pussy-cat!), [xxi] pock-faced Gohei’s pregnant wife, one-eyed Sae, and fifteen-year-old Nampopo. And two snot-nosed little girls of nine and eleven who didn’t even count.
Masa didn’t try to approach his chosen prey on the first day – he watched her from a distance, drawing up a plan of action. She was a fine girl, with qualities that made her interesting. Hard working, nimble, a singer. And it was interesting to wonder how the kunoichi – ninja women – were made down there. If she could do a jump with a triple somersault or run up a wall on to the roof (he’d seen that for himself), then what sort of tricks did she get up to in moments of passion? That would be something to remember and tell people about.