“No Sansho,” Kitae said distractedly. She looked over to a brown dog that was trying to climb the fence. Normally, she would have insisted I sit down and keep her company. I waited a little, wondering if something was wrong, but she didn’t say anything more.
The sun was nearly directly overhead. The light, which spent the morning thwarted by the apartment building, would soon overcome it and blaze triumphantly down onto the bench. Picturing Kitae’s perfectly pale hair frizzling under its rays, I didn’t feel right just leaving, and asked her, “Would you like to go to a café?”
Am I overstepping? Until now, we’d only met at the vet and the dog run. For a moment I worried, but Kitae glanced up with a look of mild surprise and said, “Sure. Let’s go. There’s a place I know near here that does a good red-bean shaved ice.” With that, she started walking with powerful steps that belied her age.
We headed for a café off the main shopping street. It was an old-fashioned establishment with sooty lace curtains in the window. Kitae sat down at a corner table, took out a white terrycloth handkerchief from her pocket, and wiped her brow. “You know, I feel like a neapolitan spaghetti. Won’t you have a bite to eat too?”
I decided to follow her recommendation of a red-bean shaved ice. I’d just had egg-and-lettuce fried rice for lunch.
It seemed presumptuous to ask whether something had happened, so I picked at the shaved ice for a while, listening to the sound of the TV filtering out from behind the counter, until Kitae abruptly stopped stirring her glass of water with her fork.
“Don’t think me heartless,” she said. When she saw I was at a loss as to how to respond, she continued, “I’m sorry, that’s a lie. I’d rather you did think so.”
Either way, I thought, this doesn’t sound like a conversation to be taken lightly. “Of course, no, neither of those,” I said, dismantling the mound of ice with my spoon.
“It’s about Sansho,” Kitae started, looking down at the neapolitan spaghetti the server had brought over. “His accidents just wouldn’t clear up.”
If I remembered right, it had been midsummer last year that the accidents had started. Kitae had been going to the vet with this problem for almost a whole year.
“I took him around to all the best clinics, but nothing seemed to help.” Kitae let out a sigh as she reached for the grated cheese.
Our cat, Zoromi, had also gone through a phase of peeing outside her litter box when she’d first arrived as a kitten, perhaps as a form of protest at having been separated from her mother. The smell of cat urine had been overwhelming, and no amount of scrubbing with cleaner would get rid of it. What was more, once a spot on the rug was marked with her pee, Zoromi kept using the same spot. It was an expensive rug we’d invested in right after we got married, but, exhausted by the strain of repeatedly taking it in for dry cleaning, we’d tearfully evicted it from the apartment.
While our issue had resolved in about a month, when I thought of the despair I felt, wondering whether we’d be locked in the urine battle forever, I still broke out in a sweat. Because I hadn’t heard any more about Sansho’s problem, I’d assumed it had cleared up too.
But Kitae had been dealing with it all this time. Half admiringly, I asked, “So how is it now?”
It must have been the strain of having kept quiet about it for nearly a year: the lid popped off Kitae’s mouth like a cork shooting out of a bottle.
“I thought I was going to have a breakdown. I know you had your rug issue, but Sansho started in the hallway just inside our entrance. In the beginning I looked on the bright side, thinking at least laminate was easy to clean. But he kept going in the same corner, and eventually it soaked into the wood. The smell got worse, and after a while I had to tape up a litter pad there where the wall met the floor. It was no time to worry about appearances, I tell you.”
Having said that much without stopping for breath, Kitae finally let go of the canister of grated cheese she’d been clutching. A thick layer of cheese had settled on her spaghetti, like the aftermath of a major snowfall.
“But that was only the beginning,” she continued. “Maybe it never would have happened if I hadn’t interfered.”
Feeling, perhaps, that he’d been deprived of his chosen spot, Sansho started to go to the toilet on anything and everything fabric in the apartment. He went around deliberately marking cushions, laundry, the couch, and even the bed where Kitae and her husband slept. The two of them tried every tactic suggested by the vets, but nothing worked. They upholstered the sofa and the bed in litter pads and packing tape. They even covered their comforter and their pillows. As a result, there was an unpleasant rustling sound when they tried to sleep. At one point, they tried confining Sansho to his cat carrier. But he kept up such a piteous cry you’d have thought he was watching his mother die, and Kitae couldn’t stand it. That was when an acquaintance mentioned that a change of scenery had cured their cat of the same problem. Kitae had started taking Sansho outside as though clinging to a lifeline.
“Do you know how many litter boxes we have around the apartment right now, San?” Kitae said, watching the back of the bored-looking waitress who’d just topped up our water. “Thirteen. Thirteen! I don’t know anymore whether the cat lives with us or if we’re the ones staying in the cat’s bathroom!”
Kitae laughed. I still didn’t know what to say, so I just kept on ferrying the red beans one by one to my mouth. Her whole situation seemed like a muddy bog where struggling would only get you sucked in deeper.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“We’ve had to decide to let him go.” Of course, they would have preferred to find him another home, but there was no way someone would take him. They considered leaving him in the grounds of a shrine, but it seemed unlikely that Sansho, at nearly eleven, could start over as a stray. They’d searched and searched for a solution, until Kitae had stopped being able to eat.
That explains why I haven’t seen her for a while, I thought.
“Which was why we thought of the mountains.”
“The mountains?” I said.
There were tears in Kitae’s eyes. “Yes, we thought the mountains, that could work.”
Having said that much, Kitae finally started on her untouched neapolitan spaghetti. I realized I’d grown quite chilly because of the red-bean ice, and asked the server, who was watching TV behind the counter, to turn down the AC. I glanced at Kitae, who looked like a shrunken balloon, gazing down at her spaghetti and moving her fork obscurely in the noodles.
For our honeymoon, we’d gone to the Andes.
My husband, who had happened to see a clip of Machu Picchu on TV while we were deciding on our destination, had suggested we might as well take the opportunity to go to South America.
With no background knowledge whatsoever, we’d signed up for a package tour recommended by the travel agent. I only found out after we’d paid the fee that Machu Picchu was a historic ruin of an ancient city that came into view atop a cliff at an altitude of approximately 2,400 meters above sea level. To get there, we’d have to take a plane, a bus, a train, and then another bus. It wasn’t a trip to be taken lightly. Every informational website I checked emphasized the importance of making sure we were physically prepared for the rigors of what would be a demanding route.
We decided to start taking nightly walks to build up our stamina. But my husband would stop after a thirty-minute circuit of the local park, saying he’d had enough.
“If it comes to it, San, I’ll just rest at the hotel, and you can record it all on video for me,” he said.