I stood up and made a circuit of the room. I studied the floor, stared up at the ceiling, sat on the table, leaned against the wall, gave the doorknob a quick twist, turned the switch of the floor lamp on and off. The doorknob didn't budge, of course, and the lamp was dead. The window was blocked from the outside. I listened for any sounds I could make out, but the silence was like a smooth, high wall. Still, I felt the presence of something here that was trying to deceive me, as if the others were holding their breath, pressing themselves flat against the wall, obliterating their skin color to keep me from knowing they were there. So I pretended not to notice. We were very good at fooling each other. I cleared my throat again and touched my fingers to my lips.
I decided to inspect the room once more. I tried the floor lamp again, but it produced no light. I opened the whiskey bottle and sniffed what was left inside. The smell was unchanged. Cutty Sark. I replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the table. I brought the receiver to my ear one more time, but the phone could not have been any deader than it was. I took a few slow steps to get a feel of the carpet against my shoes. I pressed my ear against the wall and concentrated all my attention in an attempt to hear any sounds that might have been coming through it, but there was, of course, nothing. I stepped to the door and, knowing that to do so was pointless, gave the knob a twist. It turned easily to the right. For a moment, I could not absorb this fact as a fact. Before, the knob had been so solid it could have been set in cement. I went back to square one and tried again, taking my hand from the knob, reaching out for it again, and turning it back and forth. It turned smoothly in my hand. This gave me the strangest feeling, as if my tongue were swelling inside my mouth.
The door was open.
I pulled the knob until the door swung in just enough for a blinding light to come streaming into the room. The bat. If only I had the bat, I would have felt more confident. Oh, forget the bat! I swung the door wide open. Checking left, then right, to be sure no one was there, I stepped outside. It was a long, carpeted corridor. A short way down the corridor, I could see a large vase filled with flowers. It was the vase I had hidden behind while the whistling waiter was knocking on this door. In my memory, the corridor was a long one, with many turns and branches along the way. I had managed to get here by coming across the waiter whistling his way down the corridor and following after him. The number plate on the door had identified this as Room 208.
Stepping carefully, I walked toward the vase. I hoped I could find my way to the lobby, where Noboru Wataya had been appearing on television. Many people had been in the lobby, moving to and fro. I might be able to find some clue there. But wandering through the hotel was like venturing into a vast desert without a compass. If I couldn't find the lobby and then was unable to find my way back to Room 208,1 might be sealed up inside this labyrinthine place, unable to return to the real world.
But now was no time for hesitation. It was probably my last chance. I had waited every day in the bottom of the well for six months, and now, at last, the door had opened before me. Besides, the well was going to be taken from me soon. If I failed now, all my time and effort would have been for nothing.
I turned several corners. My filthy tennis shoes moved soundlessly over the carpet. I couldn't hear a thing-no voices, no music, no TV, not even a ventilator fan or an elevator. The hotel was silent, like a ruin forgotten by time. I turned many corners and passed many doors.
The corridor forked again and again, and I had always gone right, on the assumption that if I chose to go back, I should be able to find the room by taking only lefts. By now, though, my sense of direction was gone. I felt no nearer to anything in particular. The numbers on the doors had no order, and they went by endlessly, so they were no help at all. They trickled away from my consciousness almost before they had registered in my memory. Now and then I felt I had passed some of them before. I came to a stop in the middle of the corridor and caught my breath. Was I circling back over and over the same territory, the way one does when lost in the woods?
As I stood there wondering what to do, I heard a familiar sound in the distance. It was the whistling waiter. He was in perfect tune. There was no one who could match him. As before, he was whistling the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie-not an easy tune to whistle, but it seemed to give him no trouble. I proceeded down the corridor in the direction of the whistling, which grew louder and clearer. He appeared to be heading in my direction. I found a good-sized pillar and hid behind it.
The waiter carried a silver tray again, with the usual bottle of Cutty Sark and an ice bucket and two glasses. He hurried past me, facing straight ahead, with an expression on his face that suggested he was entranced by the sound of his own whistling. He never looked in my direction; he was in such a hurry that he couldn't spare a moments wasted motion. Everything is the same as before, I thought. It seemed my flesh was being carried back in time.
As soon as the waiter passed me, I followed him. His silver tray bobbed pleasantly in time with the tune he was whistling, now and then catching the glare of a ceiling light. He repeated the melody of The Thieving Magpie over and over like a magic spell. What kind of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in the house when I was a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini. Compared with Claudio Abbado's youthful, fluid, contemporary performance, Toscaninis had had a blood-stirring intensity to it, like the slow strangulation of a powerful foe who has been downed after a violent battle. But was The Thieving Magpie really the story of a magpie that engaged in thievery? If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these questions by then.
The whistling waiter continued walking straight ahead, with all the mechanical regularity of a robot, and I followed him at a fixed distance. I knew where he was going without even having to think about it. He was delivering the fresh bottle of Cutty Sark and the ice and glasses to Room 208. And indeed, he came to a stop in front of Room 208. He shifted the tray to his left hand, checked the room number, drew himself up, and gave the door a perfunctory knock. Three knocks, then another three.
I couldn't tell whether there was any answer from within. I was hiding behind the vase, watching the waiter. Time passed, but the waiter went on standing at attention, as though planning to challenge the limits of endurance. He did not knock again but waited for the door to open. Eventually, as if in answer to a prayer, the door began to open inward.
32 The Job of Making Others Use Their Imaginations (The Story of Boris the Manskinner, Continued)
Boris kept his promise. We Japanese war prisoners were given partial autonomy and allowed to form a representative committee. The colonel was the committee chairman. From then on, the Russian guards, both civil and military, were ordered to cease their violent behavior, and the committee became responsible for keeping order in the camp. As long as we caused no trouble and met our production quotas, they would leave us alone. That was the ostensible policy of the new politburo member (which is to say, the policy of Boris). These reforms, at first glance so democratic, should have been great news for us prisoners of war.