The Changeling (42 page)

Ida has no way of knowing the cause of that condition (though an adult reader might be tempted to diagnose post-partum depression), but she seems resigned to the fact that her mother spends a good deal of time in a doleful daze beneath the trees, and that’s just the way it is. Ida has taken over the baby’s care, and even if some difficulty should arise, she wouldn’t dream of turning to her obviously ineffectual mother for assistance. And then, something really
does
happen.

Back in the house, Ida is trying to mollify the fretful baby by playing her French horn. Before long she is so completely caught up in the music that she becomes oblivious to what’s going on around her. Facing a window that frames a bevy of gigantic, blooming sunflowers, Ida plays her horn with tremendous verve, and the baby, too, seems enraptured by the music. Just then, two interlopers appear; all we can see of them is dark shadows in hooded coats, climbing up a ladder from a window in the background.

The goblins grab the baby, who is so surprised that no sound comes out when it tries to scream, and they spirit it off through the window. In the kidnapped infant’s place they leave a substitute: a grotesque, grayish-white, bug-eyed replica made from ice. Poor Ida, not knowing what has happened, picks up
the changeling—for that is the subject of Sendak’s picture book, according to the discussion that took place at the Berkeley seminar—and holds it close. And then she murmurs, “Oh, how I do love you!” As she places her cheek on the floppy yellow cap the baby always wears, Ida is lost in her own reverie, and she doesn’t realize that what she’s holding in her arms is an expressionless little monster made of ice.

The sunflower-filled window through which the goblins made their escape changes into a sort of video screen that shows a scene from a distant place, and we see a sailing vessel pitching and rolling as it tries to navigate a suddenly storm-tossed sea. On this page, the sunflowers peeking in through the window (on whose sill Ida has left her horn) seem to be aggressively encroaching and increasing in both size and number, while their ever more fecund leaves run wild. This scene gave Chikashi an impression so intense that it was close to pain. She wasn’t able to explain in words why the sunflowers seemed to be somehow synergistic with Ida’s emotions, but she felt she understood it well enough from an artistic point of view.

There’s Ida, down on her knees hugging the ice baby, with what might have been a look of remorse or regret on her face, even though she hasn’t yet realized that the baby she is holding is a changeling. That’s what Chikashi was thinking, anyway. Wasn’t that because while she was playing her horn, she became completely free on a soul-deep level? Maybe losing herself in playing the horn was the equivalent, for Ida, of wishing that the baby had never been born or at least that it would go away and leave her in peace.

Chikashi had a visceral memory of having experienced exactly that sort of remorseful regret herself. As a baby and also
as a young girl, she’d had a swarthy face, like the dark brown seed of a persimmon. Goro, on the other hand, had been such an angelically beautiful child that even his sister felt proud to be from the same family. But deep down, Chikashi would naturally have been feeling something more complicated than pride in her extraordinary sibling. Even though she didn’t share Goro’s intense interest in psychology, Chikashi knew there were children who wished that the baby who came after them (whether it was a brother or a sister) had never been born—or, once born, would just go away. But Chikashi always felt, strangely, that Goro wasn’t really her younger brother, even though she was born before him. On the contrary, he seemed more like an older brother whose rights she was violating by appearing on the scene. She wasn’t yet three when it really hit Chikashi that in relation to her charismatic younger brother, she was like someone who had tried to seize power from a rival and had totally botched the job.

Ida, though, realized very soon what had happened. The changeling was beginning to drip and melt, and all it did was stare at the floor. According to the narrative, when Ida figured out what the goblins had done she became terribly angry. While the hideous changeling was rapidly melting into a puddle on the floor, its head drooping ever lower, Ida showed her anger by shaking her fist at the window.

Meanwhile (the story continues), beyond that open window we see a stormy sea, and as lightning flashes, the white-sailed tall ship runs aground and its shattered mast slowly sinks beneath the waves. Galvanized by determination, Ida stands with her outsized feet planted firmly on the floor, while the eerily expressive crowd of sunflowers peers through the window like
a throng of inquisitive faces. “They stole my sister away to be a nasty goblin’s bride!” Ida cries, and the text on that page ends with “Now Ida in a hurry ...”

Once again, Chikashi was startled. So the baby—which, until then, she had assumed was male—was a girl? But what a cruel and tragic fate, to be forced to marry a nasty goblin!

On the next page, the reason for Ida’s haste becomes clear. She was in a hurry to go and fetch her mother’s luminous, yellowish-gold rain cloak, which is evidently endowed with some sort of magical properties. After wrapping herself in the commodious rain cloak and shoving her horn into one large pocket, Ida makes what the text calls a “serious mistake.”

She goes and jumps—or rather, falls—out of the window
backwards
! The illustration shows Ida wafting through the air faceup with her legs and arms extended in front of her, as if she were floating on her back in the ocean. And there she goes, bundled up in her mother’s sunflower-yellow rain cloak, flying upside down against the backdrop of a sky that’s just beginning to clear. (The moon is even visible, emerging from behind a charcoal-gray cloud.) In the distance, in the lower part of the scene, we see the goblins in their seaside hideout, along with a red ladder, a small boat, and the kidnapped, none-too-happy baby.

Kogito explained this scene and the next with obvious relish, analyzing them in terms of myth and folktale: “The secret of life and death isn’t in the bright heavens above; it’s hidden in the subterranean darkness. That’s why it’s a mistake to fly looking up. You have to fly looking down or else you won’t be able to observe the chthonic secrets.”

Eventually Ida hears her father singing a song. The lyrics explain, helpfully, that she needs to turn around and head in
the right direction, instead of flying “backwards in the rain.” After heeding this advice, Ida eventually manages to infiltrate the grottolike den of the shape-shifting goblins. But everyone there has more or less the same face and form as her kidnapped baby sister, so how is she supposed to find the real human child amid this crowd of tiny doppelgängers?

Putting her heart and soul into it, Ida starts to play her horn. The babies begin to walk toward the water, dancing all the while, but this is no simple, innocuous promenade. Soon, all the goblins begin to feel so unwell that they want desperately to lie down and rest, but they can’t stop moving—not as long as Ida keeps playing “a frenzied jig, a hornpipe that makes sailors wild beneath the ocean moon”! The dancing goblins are obviously suffering, but Ida is fiercely determined. Striding forward with her large, magnificent feet, she goes on relentlessly playing her horn.

On the next page, the goblin babies have strayed off into the frothing water, presumably to drown, while Ida, having accomplished her goal, stands on the shore looking calm and poised, holding her horn in one hand as she checks for one last time to make sure all the goblins are gone. And then, with a rush of affection, Ida looks down at her little sister, who is sitting in the shell of a giant egg, stretching one chubby hand toward her rescuer.

Now all they need to do is to find their way home. Carrying the baby, Ida is walking along a forest path that runs beside a creek, while in a little summerhouse on the opposite shore, who should be playing a pianoforte but Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, complete with powdered wig! As Chikashi gazes at this scene, she shares Ida’s evident sense of relief, but at the same time an unresolved feeling is tugging at her heart.

There’s probably nothing particularly strange, in a fantastic story like this, about having Mozart suddenly appear in a red-roofed house on the other side of the river, playing the piano. After all, Chikashi thought, here at home we, too, make Mozart’s music part of our daily lives (just as Maurice Sendak does). But what was the meaning of the ominous-looking tree branches that seemed to be blocking the way as Ida headed for home with the baby in her arms—and what was the significance of the five creepy-looking butterflies that were flitting around?

Chikashi had a profound sense that this picture book was telling her a number of important things about her own life. She also realized that she needed to go on reading it over and over, concentrating on the details of the illustrations rather than on the text, in order to understand some crucial metaphors that were still unclear to her.

The more she read and reread this uncanny picture book, the more certain Chikashi felt that she was Ida, and Ida was herself. Chikashi had gone through a great many books since she first learned to read, but until now—and she was past fifty—she had never encountered a literary character with whom she identified so completely. Nevertheless, as she sat staring into space with the book on her lap after reading it for the umpteenth time, Chikashi couldn’t help feeling that she must look very much like Ida’s poor mama, who sat under the arbor for hours on end, lost in melancholy thought.

3

Chikashi’s older brother was exceedingly good-looking, lavishly talented, and loved by many people—indeed, even when he was a child, people used to adore him with a sort of awestruck reverence. But from a certain time on, she felt that there was an unknowable part hidden inside of him, and he seemed to have turned into someone subtly different from the person he used to be. Even after that, he was still a brother Chikashi could be proud of, and she could always rely on him for kindness and moral support. But it had occurred to Chikashi more than once that this Goro wasn’t the “real” Goro—and now, thanks to Sendak’s book, she had learned a word that made it possible for her to accurately express for the first time what the other, different Goro was: a
changeling
.

After she and Kogito were married, while she was waiting for their first child to be born, Chikashi found herself thinking that this might be a chance to retrieve the real Goro.
In place of my own mother
, she thought,
I will try to give birth (or rebirth) to the beautiful child that was Goro. And then the Goro who disappeared will be brought into the world once again as a new baby
. And now, thanks to Sendak’s picture book, she was finally able to express this properly: If only she could have been as brave and heroic as Ida and somehow brought Goro back ...

Crazy as it sounded, Chikashi thought now that even if she had never put it into those exact words, she had made up her mind to do just that. But, she wondered, what role would Kogito have played in her wild transubstantiation scheme? Chikashi was unable to come up with an answer to that hypothetical question. She felt as if she were gazing at a mysterious landscape that was forever enveloped in fog. Only, of course, that perpetually misty landscape existed only in her mind. And the mystery remained:
Why did I choose Kogito to be the father of the child I wanted to bring into the world as a means of retrieving the Goro who was taken away?

When she thought back on it Chikashi realized that, for her, Kogito had always been a person she could never fully understand. In the beginning, she didn’t perceive him as an independent entity but just as one of Goro’s sidekicks. After she got the sense that Kogito was making an effort to do things that would please Goro, Chikashi started to think of (and treat) Kogito more warmly than any of Goro’s other friends.
But then
, Chikashi reflected,
when I began to talk about getting engaged to Kogito, Goro was violently opposed. Ultimately, I did marry Kogito, but I always felt that I didn’t really understand what led me to make that decision
.

But now
, Chikashi thought,
an unexpected solution to that mystery has floated to the surface, out of nowhere. When I tried using the Sendak book as a clue, I realized that deep down in my heart this is probably what I’d been feeling all along. Marrying this person, Kogito, was the same as flying out of the window at night in order to retrieve the real Goro. But maybe I made a mistake and jumped out the wrong way: faceup and backwards. The thing is, I had to fly out of the window at night in a hurry. And I couldn’t afford to lose this person, this Kogito, because he was the last person who was with that beautiful Goro, before he was stolen away
.

I remember that when Kogito was still a boy, he and Goro—who was about the same age—went to a place I’ll call “Outside Over There,” a place where something terrible happened, and after surviving that dreadful experience they came straggling back in the middle of the night. When I think about it now, even before that evening, Goro had definitely been changing, little by little. Even so, I think that was the night when Goro passed the point of no return
.

After spending two days in a place I knew nothing about, Goro came home in the middle of the night. He must have stood in the front garden of the temple where we were lodging, calling out once or twice in a soft voice. If he hadn’t kept his voice down, I would have been nervously worrying that a light might suddenly go on in the room of the head priest’s eldest daughter, which was in a nearby part of the temple compound. Earlier that night, and all through the night before, I had been straining my ears, listening anxiously for any sign that Goro might have returned. When I slid open the wooden doors of the temple, being careful not to disturb the perfect stillness, the dim lamplight seeping out from behind me fell on two young boys who, even to my girlish eyes, looked extremely pathetic and bedraggled
.