The Japanese Lover (7 page)

Nathaniel's entry into the boys' school put an end to the performances in the attic theater. Together with his studies and the sustained effort to defend himself, his time was devoted to metaphysical anguish and a studied gloominess that his mother sought to remedy with spoonfuls of cod liver oil. There was barely time for a few games of Scrabble or chess, if Alma managed to catch him before he shut himself in his bedroom to hammer away at his guitar. He was discovering jazz and the blues but looked down on fashionable dances: he would have been paralyzed with embarrassment on a dance floor, where his inability to follow a rhythm, a long-­standing Belasco family trait, would have immediately become evident. He looked on with a mixture of sarcasm and envy when Alma and Ichimei demonstrated the Lindy Hop to arouse his interest. The two of them had practiced with two scratched records and a broken phonograph Lillian had thrown away but Alma had rescued from the garbage. Ichimei had then used his nimble fingers and patient intuition to dismantle it and restore it to working order.

Secondary school, which began so badly for Nathaniel, continued to be an ordeal for him throughout the following years. Although his classmates grew tired of ambushing him to beat him up, they subjected him to four years of taunts and ostracism; they couldn't forgive his intellectual curiosity, his good grades, and his physical awkwardness. He never overcame the feeling that he had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to participate in sports, because they were a central part of this English-style education, and so he suffered the repeated humiliation of coming in last and not being wanted on anyone's team. At fifteen he shot up in size: his mother had to buy him new pairs of shoes and to get his trousers lengthened every couple of months. After starting out as the smallest in his class, he finally reached a normal height. His legs, arms, and nose all grew; the outline of his ribs was visible beneath his shirt, and the Adam's apple in his scrawny neck became so prominent that he took to wearing a scarf even in summer. He knew his profile made him look like a plucked buzzard, and so he tended to sit in corners, where people had to look at him face on. He was spared the acne that plagued his enemies, but not the typical teenage complexes. He could never have imagined that in less than three years his body would be well proportioned, his features would have settled down, and he would become as handsome as a movie star. He felt ugly, unhappy, and alone; he began to toy with the idea of suicide, something he admitted to Alma in one of his harshest moments of self-criticism. “That would be a waste, Nat. Better complete your schooling, study medicine, and then go out to India and take care of lepers. I'll go with you,” she replied without much sympathy, because compared to her family's situation, her cousin's existential crises seemed laughable.

The age difference between the two of them was barely noticeable, because Alma had developed early, and her tendency toward solitude had made her very mature for her age. Whereas Nathaniel swam in what seemed like an insurmountable adolescence, the seriousness and strength that her father had instilled in Alma and that she saw as essential virtues only became more pronounced. She felt abandoned by her cousin and by life. She could imagine the intense self-loathing Nathaniel had experienced when he entered high school, because she felt something similar, if less acutely, but she did not allow herself the luxury of studying herself in the mirror to spot her defects, or of complaining about her fate. She had other worries.

With apocalyptic hurricane force, war had descended on Europe. Alma only caught blurred black-and-white images of it in cinema newsreels: jumbled battle scenes, faces of soldiers covered with the stubborn soot of gunpowder and death, planes dropping bombs that fell through the sky with absurd elegance, explosions of fire and smoke, crowds baying their devotion to Hitler in Germany. She no longer had a clear memory of her country, the house she grew up in, or the language she spoke as a child, but her family was constantly present in her yearnings. On her bedside table she kept photographs of her brother and the last one of her parents on the quayside at Danzig, and kissed them every night before going to sleep. The war images pursued her by day, popped up in her dreams, and never allowed her to behave truly like the girl she was. When Nathaniel gave in to the illusion that he was a misunderstood genius, Ichimei was left as her only confidant. He had not grown much, so that she was now a half a head taller than him, but he was intelligent, and always found a way to distract her when she was overcome by ghastly visions of war. Ichimei would make arrangements to reach the Belascos' mansion by trolley bus, by bicycle, or in the gardening van, if he could persuade his father or a brother to give him a lift; Lillian would send him home later with her driver. If two or three days went by without their meeting, he and Alma would find some time at night to whisper to each other on the phone. Even the most trivial comments took on transcendental importance during these furtive calls. It never occurred to either of them to ask permission, since they thought telephones eventually could be used up, and thus would never be at their disposal.

The Belasco family followed the alarming news from Europe with increasing dread. The Germans had occupied Warsaw, and four hundred thousand Jews were crammed into a ghetto of 1.3 square miles. They had learned from Samuel Mendel in London, where he was an RAF pilot, that their relatives were among them. The Mendels' wealth could not save them; early on in the occupation they lost all their possessions in Poland, as well as access to their Swiss bank accounts. They had to quit the family mansion, requisitioned and turned into offices by the Nazis and their collaborators, and found themselves reduced to the same level of unimaginable misery as the other inhabitants of the ghetto. It was then that they discovered they did not have a single friend among their own people. That was all that Isaac managed to establish. It was impossible to get in touch with them, and none of his attempts to rescue them was successful. He used his connections with influential politicians, including a couple of senators in Washington and the secretary of war, who had been a fellow law student at Harvard, but they all replied with vague promises that they never kept, because they had to deal with far more urgent matters than a rescue mission in the hell of Warsaw. The Americans were watching and waiting, still believing that the war on the far side of the Atlantic had nothing to do with them, despite the Roosevelt government's subtle propaganda to turn the public against the Germans. Behind the high wall marking the boundary of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews survived in extremes of hunger and terror. There was talk of large-scale deportations; of men, women, and children being dragged off to cargo trains that vanished into the night; of the Nazis' determination to wipe out not only the entire Jewish race but other undesirables as well; of gas chambers, cremation ovens, and other atrocities that were impossible to confirm and therefore hard for the Americans to give credence to.

I
n 2013, Irina privately celebrated her third anniversary of working for Alma Belasco by gorging on cream cakes and drinking two cups of hot cocoa. Over that period she had come to know Alma very well, although there were secrets in the old woman's life that neither she nor Seth had managed to uncover, partly because they had not yet seriously set about doing so. As she sorted through Alma's boxes, Irina had been gradually discovering the Belasco family. She became acquainted with Isaac, with his stern prominent nose and kindly eyes; Lillian, who was short, ample bosomed, and had a beautiful face; their daughters, Sarah and Martha, homely but extremely well dressed; Nathaniel as a boy, skinny and lost looking, and then as a young man, slender and very handsome, and at the end of his life, his features ravaged by illness. She saw Alma as a child, newly arrived in America; as a twenty-one-year-old, studying art in Boston; in a black beret and a detective's trench coat, a masculine fashion she adopted after liberating herself from her aunt Lillian's choice of wardrobe, which she had never liked; Alma as a mother, seated in the pergola of the garden at Sea Cliff, with her three-month-old son, Larry, on her lap and her husband standing behind her with one hand on her shoulder, posing as if for a royal portrait. Even as a girl, there were telltale signs of the woman she would grow up to become: she looked imposing, with the white stripe of hair across her brow, her slightly crooked mouth, and the dark circles under her eyes. Irina was supposed to arrange the photographs in chronological order in the albums following Alma's instructions, but she didn't always remember where or when they had been taken. Apart from Ichimei Fukuda's portrait, there was only one other framed photograph in her apartment: the family in the main room at Sea Cliff when Alma was celebrating her fiftieth birthday. The men were in tuxedos, and the women wore long dresses. Alma was in black satin, as haughty as a dowager empress; her daughter-in-law, Doris, looked pale and tired in a gray silk dress pleated at the front to conceal her second pregnancy: she was expecting her daughter, Pauline. Seth, eighteen months old, was standing, clutching his grandmother's dress with one hand and the ear of a cocker spaniel with the other.

As time went by, the relationship between Alma and Irina became increasingly like that of aunt and niece. Their routines were so settled that they could spend hours together in the cramped apartment without talking or even glancing each other's way, both of them caught up in their own activity. They needed each other. Besides sorting through the boxes from Sea Cliff, Irina was also responsible for filing Alma's papers, taking dictation, going to the shops or the laundry, accompanying Alma on her errands, taking care of her cat, and organizing her minimal social life. Irina considered it a privilege to be able to count on Alma's trust and support, whereas the older woman was thankful for the young woman's loyalty. She was flattered by Irina's interest in her past, and she depended on her for practical matters as well as for maintaining her independence and autonomy. Seth had told Alma that when the time came that she needed more help, she ought to either return to the family home at Sea Cliff or take on someone to assist her full-time in her apartment, since money would be no problem. Alma, who was about to turn eighty-two, planned to live another ten years before she needed that kind of support: she did not want anybody to feel they had the right to decide on her behalf.

“I was terrified of being dependent too, Alma,” Dr. Catherine Hope told her one day. “But I've realized it's not such a big deal. You get used to it, and are grateful for the assistance. I can't dress or take a shower on my own, I have problems brushing my teeth and cutting the chicken on my plate, but I've never been more contented than I am now.”

“Why's that?” Alma asked her friend.

“Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don't have to prove anything, I'm not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest.”

Catherine Hope was still in this world thanks only to her fierce determination and the marvels of modern surgery; she knew what it meant to be incapacitated and to feel constant pain. For her, becoming dependent on others had not come gradually, as is usually the case, but overnight, after an unfortunate accident. While mountain climbing, she had fallen down a crevasse and gotten trapped between two rocks, with her arms, legs, and pelvis smashed. Her rescue was a heroic effort that was reported live on the TV news as it was filmed from the air by helicopter. This showed the dramatic scenes from a distance but was unable to get close to the deep chasm where she was lying, in a state of shock and hemorrhaging. It was only a day and a night later that two mountain rescuers succeeded in climbing down to her, in a daring maneuver that almost cost them their lives, and hoisted her up in a harness. Cathy was taken to a hospital that specialized in war traumas, where they began the task of resetting her numerous broken bones. Two months later, she woke up from her coma and, after asking after her daughter, announced she was glad to be alive. That same day, from India the Dalai Lama had sent her a
kata
, a white scarf he had blessed. Following fourteen complicated operations and years of brave rehabilitation, Cathy was forced to accept that she would never walk again.

“My first life is over, this is the start of the second one. If you see me depressed or exasperated, don't pay any attention, because it won't last,” she told her daughter.

Zen Buddhism and her lifelong habit of meditation gave her a great advantage in this situation, since she could bear being immobile in a way that would have driven any other person as athletic and energetic as her crazy. She was also able calmly to accept the loss of her companion of many years, who was less able to come to terms with the tragedy and left her. She discovered that she could practice medicine as a surgery consultant from a studio equipped with TV cameras hooked up with the operating room, but her ambition was to work with patients face-to-face, as she had always done. When she decided to live at the second level in Lark House, she visited a couple of times to talk to the residents who would be her new family and soon saw that there were more than enough opportunities for her to work as she wished.

Barely a week after her arrival she was already planning a free pain clinic for residents with chronic illnesses, and an office where she could attend to lesser complaints. Lark House had doctors on standby, but Catherine Hope convinced them that she was not competing with them, but would complement their work. Hans Voigt offered her a room for the clinic and suggested to the ­trustees that they pay her a salary; however, she preferred to offer her services as a volunteer and not to have to pay the home's monthly charges. This agreement suited both parties. Cathy, as everyone called her, quickly became the mother who greeted the new arrivals, listened to their secrets, comforted those who were sad, guided the dying, and handed out the marijuana. Half of the residents had medical prescriptions for its use, and Cathy, who doled it out at her clinic, was generous toward those who had neither permits nor enough money to buy it under the counter. It was not uncommon to see a line of clients waiting outside her door to get the grass in many different forms, including delicious biscuits and sweets. Voigt did not intervene—why deprive them of innocuous relief?—and only demanded they refrain from smoking in the corridors or common spaces, because smoking tobacco was forbidden, and it would be unfair if the same did not apply to marijuana. Even so, some of the smoke escaped through the heating or air-conditioning systems, and occasionally even the residents' pets were as high as kites.