The Changeling (11 page)

Kogito could feel the amusement breaking through his old friend’s subdued mood, but then Goro lapsed into a dark silence and went back to guzzling whiskey with an undisguisedly sorrowful look in his eyes. Kogito couldn’t resist offering some unsolicited advice; it was an old habit of his, dating back to their days as schoolboys.

“Why don’t you try looking at it this way?” he suggested. “Between your last meeting in America and your departure for Spain there’s what, two or three months or so? In that case, when you finally get together again you’ll be overflowing with pent-up passion—at least for the first three days. And soon after that, you’ll take off for location shooting at special sites around the Spanish countryside, and there will be days when you don’t go back to the hotel at all. And then when you do return to the hotel, after being away for a few days, you’ll probably be thrilled to be reunited with Amy again, and your reunion will have a kind of nostalgic freshness.”

Goro was completely drunk now, and his extreme intoxication was probably part of the reason why his voice suddenly sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. “You may write dark, heavy, gloomy novels,” he said, “but when you say something like that it makes me think that you’re really a fundamentally optimistic person. You don’t really act like it, though. I mean,
even though you married someone totally down-to-earth like Chikashi, who isn’t in the least bit needy or demanding, you still choose to spend your nights alone on a monastic cot in your library. Still, I really can’t believe that you’re a completely solitary, pessimistic guy at heart—especially when you start going on about thrilling reunions and ‘nostalgic freshness’!”

As it happened, Goro’s Spanish rendezvous with the American film journalist turned out unexpectedly well; indeed, everything transpired in almost exact accordance with the comforting scenario that Kogito had conjured up out of thin air in an attempt to alleviate Goro’s anxieties. According to the story Goro told Kogito much later, on the day Amy arrived at the hotel that would be the crew’s base of operations, she and Goro ended up having sex twice while the sun was still high in the sky, and again late that night, and then one more time the next morning. Afterward Goro broke out in a cold sweat, thinking that twenty more days of this would be absolute hell, but fortunately the bacchanal was brought to a halt after only four days when the Spanish investors whisked the actors away to Madrid.

And then, just as Goro was wondering why they were all partying in Madrid instead of working on the film, it was announced that the Spanish location shooting had been canceled. In order to placate one of the backers, who had made his fortune by exporting inexpensive Spanish wine, the producers had initially promised to shoot at a typical wine-producing location, but apparently the production side wasn’t serious about this plan, and the majority of the supplies and equipment hadn’t even been shipped.

That was the situation, and it was a mess. As a result, it was decided that the location shooting would move within the
week to Flores Island, in Indonesia, and Goro spent the better part of his final two days in Spain engaging in genuinely warm, friendly, heartfelt sexual intercourse with the American journalist. In order to catch her plane, which left long before the film crew’s flight to Indonesia, Amy had to crawl out of bed while it was still dark, so there was no time for a voracious sexual farewell, and this richly experienced woman of the world said good-bye to Goro with the solemn, dignified air of someone who knows how to control her desires ... if she really has to.

Goro’s obvious exhaustion from shooting a movie in the tropics over a long, hot summer could have been a factor as well, but as he shared this tale of adventure, Kogito got the impression that he was lost in contemplation of some sort of hardship or suffering that Kogito couldn’t even begin to imagine. Whatever else might have happened, Kogito thought that Goro’s heroic performance on the day the plump, insatiable American woman arrived in Spain from California, when he managed to perform sexually four times in less than twenty-four hours, was a triumph of perseverance and effort. And as he listened to the story, Kogito felt a resurgence of the childish feelings of respect and esteem for his old friend that had first sprouted when they were in high school.

6

In Russia, before the revolution, there was a craze for building vacation villas in Berlin, and one Russian millionaire spent a small fortune erecting an enormous mansion, complete with Greek-style murals on the façade and cylindrical columns supporting the roof. The exterior still retained its original opulence, but the interior of the building had been remodeled and turned into apartments for the faculty of the Center for Advanced Research. Kogito’s flat was on the third floor, overlooking a lake.

After the Christmas holidays, and after the birth of the new millennium had been celebrated with a noisy all-day eruption of fireworks that continued until midnight on December 31, 1999, the Free University opened its doors again and Kogito resumed his routine of riding the bus to and from work. The entire journey took no more than thirty minutes. From nearby Hagenplatz (where Kogito always went on foot to buy wine and groceries) he boarded the bus that ran down Königstrasse, and when he got to Rathenauplatz he changed to a bus that originated just before the busy boulevard of Kurfürstendamm, better
known as Ku’damm. Even on days when the frozen lake was piled high with snow in the morning, the white stuff always stopped falling by midday, and although there were days when the city streets seemed to have been turned into frozen ice
bahn
s, traffic always went on running smoothly under perpetually cloudy skies.

One afternoon, after Kogito had finished both his formal lecture and the subsequent Q-and-A session with students known as office hour, he had just stepped out into one of those typically dark, overcast Berlin afternoons, where the sun isn’t really shining but doesn’t seem quite ready to set, either, when he heard the familiar voice of a Japanese female calling his name.

In short order, the woman caught up with him as he walked down the narrow road, which was piled high on both sides with plowed snow. She looked rather odd, wrapped in a heavy greatcoat that fell nearly to her ankles, but even though Kogito had been approached by a large number of people during his stay in Berlin, he remembered this person immediately, with her cryptic talk of a
Mädchen für alles
and her curiously puffy, oblong harmonica mouth.

“I hope you won’t mind if I keep you company while you’re riding home on the bus,” the woman said. “Though I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to say everything I want to in such a short time.” Without waiting for a reply she fell into step beside Kogito, so close that their shoulders were almost touching. And then, abruptly, her previously polite way of speaking changed into a style somewhere between inappropriate intimacy and outright intimidation. “Just as I thought, you don’t have any sort of assistant or
Mädchen für alles
yourself, do you?” she demanded.
“I’ve tried telephoning you a number of times at the office, but even when the switchboard forwards the call to your apartment, there’s never any answer!”

During all his years in Tokyo, Kogito had hardly ever been subjected to this sort of behavior: having someone lie in wait for him, then brashly invite themselves to keep him company. In Berlin, though, it took a good ten minutes to walk to the bus stop from the Free University’s classroom buildings (which, as mentioned before, were in a residential district), and Kogito seldom walked alone on his customary route, which involved trudging down the slope of a wide, shallow former pond that had, at some point, been drained and turned into a park, then climbing up the path on the other side. Most often, he was accosted by students who still had questions about the lecture he’d just given; other times, he was joined by Japanese expatriates who were auditing his class or young journalists from Taiwan who were living in Berlin and sending articles back to publications in Taipei. If he could just manage to get past his instinctive negative reaction to the intrusions, he sometimes ended up feeling that the ensuing conversations weren’t entirely meaningless.

As for this vivacious person who was marching along beside him with long strides, kicking up the hem of her ankle-length overcoat: although she was clearly the same person who had first approached him on the night of the panel discussion, on this day she seemed very different from that rather glum, tired-looking Japanese woman, teetering on the brink of late middle age. Indeed, she reminded him of a certain type of local woman he often saw around Berlin, standing on some street corner waiting impatiently for the light to change—extremely
energetic and completely self-centered. The things she said when she approached him this time had an aggressive edge that seemed to be in keeping with her costume and even with her way of striding along, like a man.

“You hear this a lot here,” she said, after she had finished berating him for not answering his phone every time it rang. “The German people I’ve been around often say that Japanese people talk too much about personal matters—even the writers and film directors who have given public talks here. I’ve had my doubts about that, but after hearing your lecture today I found myself thinking they were right. Maybe it’s just because you are who you are, but you really do seem to talk an awful lot about your private life.”

“As you know, my English pronunciation can be hard to follow, so I’ve been distributing copies of lectures that I’ve given in the past at universities in America,” Kogito responded. “Then, while reading those lectures aloud to the class, I incorporate additions and digressions, rather like footnotes. When the text is something with a hard context, I add personal notes from time to time in the hopes of softening the lecture a bit.”

“I sat in on your lecture today, and I noticed that the text you used was the same speech you gave in Stockholm,” the woman said. “That lecture began with some personal reminiscences, right? You started off by talking about the music composed by your disabled son, Akari, and from there you extrapolated into universals. It was very moving, but I suspect that there are some Germans who might feel that it was more than they wanted to know about your personal life. Too much information, as they say.”

“No doubt you are entirely correct about that,” Kogito said stiffly.

They had reached the basinlike bottom of the slope, and the notoriously frigid Berlin wind was swirling around them. Kogito’s head felt feverish from the strain of having been forced to speak English (not his strong point) for two solid hours, and the radical disparity between that cerebral heat and the profound chill that permeated his body left him feeling somehow detached, as if he were suspended in midair between the two extremes. The woman evidently sensed his discomfort and adroitly changed the subject.

“There’s a high place over there, where the snow is still piled up because no one steps on it. Down at the bottom, a woman is walking her dog—do you see? And the man she’s with is sitting on a big, round boulder? They say that rock was dislodged by a glacier somewhere around Norway, and it ultimately ended up tumbling all the way down to Germany.”

“That one rock came all the way from Norway, by itself?”

“That hardly seems likely,” the woman retorted. “Surely there must have been others.”

When their climb brought them to an overpass above the train tracks, Kogito spotted a tall bus approaching in the far distance, but he couldn’t very well say an abrupt good-bye and sprint off to catch it. Office hour had ended around four o’clock, and he knew that this bus ran only three times an hour, so he resigned himself to being trapped in a prolonged conversation with this woman while he waited for the next one to come along.

That was when the woman got down to business. “I wanted to introduce myself again, properly,” she began. “Please don’t lose
this
one.” As she spoke, she thrust a business card in the
direction of Kogito’s sternum. She evidently expected him to be less than eager to accept it, because she held on to the card for a few extra seconds even after he had it firmly in his hand.

“I think you’ve probably heard about me from Goro, by my former name,” she continued. “The name I’m using now is a combination of my own surname and that of my current husband. He came here from what used to be East Germany, and he’s involved in the redevelopment of the East Berlin area. Let’s just say he’s in the real-estate business. But he’s very cultured, and from the beginning he has been very good about allowing me to continue doing my own work, without restrictions.

“One important aspect of my work is still in progress, but perhaps you might have heard something about it from Goro? In any case, there are some very talented people in the new generation of German filmmakers—following in the footsteps of Volker Schlöndorff, the famous director—and the plan was to have some of them work on bringing one of Goro’s screenplays to life. And then that heartbreaking thing happened to Goro ...

“Anyway, as I told you before, that whole thing with the tabloids was the revenge of the
Mädchen für alles
—the girl Friday from hell. All that turmoil and scandal caused poor Goro to suffer so much. Be that as it may (and quite aside from the earlier work that Goro and I did together) I really do feel, after all is said and done, that Goro meant to entrust me with his posthumous request, and I’m determined to make this project happen. He even sent his written declaration of intent, both by fax and in a personal letter. Anyway, there’s someone I’d like you to meet, in connection with that project. He is a very distinguished man in film circles, one generation older than the
director whose name I mentioned a while ago, Schlöndorff. The current generation of filmmakers values him as a master and a mentor. At present he has stopped making movies and is concentrating his energies on philosophical writing. However, he’s still involved in creating a long-form series for serious television. This illustrious person is interested in making a new program, focusing on Goro’s life and work. As part of that process, he told me that he is very eager to do a one-hour interview with you while you’re in Berlin. The time has been tentatively set for next Sunday morning, and, on the assumption that you would be free then, I went ahead and talked to a professor of Japanese studies at the university. He agreed to come along as your interpreter, so how about it? Will you join us?” Overwhelmed by the torrent of persuasion, Kogito could only nod in silent agreement.