The Sound of the Mountain (16 page)

Ceremonial tea was being served in a curtained-off space near the stone. Kikuko had given Fusako tickets.

The tea in the open sunlight had its own special color. Shingo wondered whether Satoko too would drink it. Satoko clutched at the edge of the bowl with one hand. It was a most ordinary bowl, but Shingo reached to help her.

‘It’s bitter.’

‘Bitter?’

Even before she had tasted the tea, Satoko’s face announced that it was bitter.

The little dancing girls came inside the curtain. Perhaps half sat down on stools by the door. The others crowded in front of them, one against another. They were all heavily made up and had on long-sleeved festive kimonos.

Behind them, two or three young cherries were in full bloom. Defeated by the powerful colors of the girls’ kimonos, they seemed pale and wan. The sun was shining on the green of the tall trees beyond.

‘Water, Mother, water,’ said Satoko, glaring at the dancers.

‘There is no water. You can have some when we get home.’

Suddenly Shingo too wanted water.

One day in March, from the Yokosuka train, Shingo had seen a girl about Satoko’s age drinking at a fountain. She laughed in surprise when, as she turned it on, the water shot high in the air. The laughing face was very pretty. Her mother adjusted the fountain for her. Watching her drink as if it were the world’s most delicious water, Shingo thought to himself that this year too spring had come. The scene returned to him now.

He wondered what it was about the cluster of little girls dressed for dancing that had made both him and Satoko want water. Satoko was grumbling again. ‘Buy me a kimono, Mother, buy me a kimono.’

Fusako got up.

Among the girls was a most appealing one a year or two older than Satoko. Her eyebrows were painted on in thick, short, sloping lines, and at the edges of her eyes, round as bells, there was rouge.

Satoko stared at the girl as Fusako led her off, and as they started out through the curtain, lunged in her direction.

‘A kimono,’ she persisted. ‘A kimono.’

‘Grandfather said he’ll buy you one for Three-five-seven Day,’
^*
said Fusako insinuatingly. ‘She hasn’t once worn a kimono. Only diapers from an old cotton kimono, an outcast of a kimono.’

They went into a tea stall, and Shingo asked for water. Satoko gulped down two glasses.

They had left the precincts of the Great Buddha and were walking toward home when a girl in a dancing kimono hurried past on her mother’s hand, apparently also on the way home. This would not do, thought Shingo, taking Satoko by the shoulder; but he was too late.

‘A kimono,’ said Satoko, reaching for the girl’s sleeve.

‘Don’t!’ Pulling away, the girl tripped over her long sleeve and fell.

Shingo gasped and brought his hands to his face.

The child was being run over. Shingo heard only his own gasp, but it seemed that numbers of other people had cried out.

The automobile screeched to a stop. Three or four ran forward from among the horrified outlookers.

The girl jumped up. Clinging to her mother’s skirt, she began screaming as if set afire.

‘Good, good,’ someone said. ‘The brakes worked. An expensive car.’

‘If it had been a broken-down wreck you wouldn’t be alive.’

Satoko was terrified. Her eyes were rolled back into her head as if she were having a convulsion.

Was the girl hurt, had she torn her kimono, asked Fusako, apologizing profusely to the girl’s mother. The mother was looking absently into space.

When the girl had finished screaming, her thick powder had run; but her eyes were shining, as if washed clean.

Shingo had little to say the rest of the way home.

They heard the baby wailing.

Singing a lullaby, Kikuko came out to greet them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Fusako. ‘I have her crying. I’m a failure.’

Perhaps led on by her sister, perhaps surrendering now that she was safe at home, Satoko too was wailing.

Ignoring Satoko, Fusako pulled her kimono open and took the baby from Kikuko.

‘Just look, will you. I’m all in a cold sweat here in the hollow between.’

Shingo glanced up at a framed inscription that purported to be a Ryokan:
^*
‘In the heavens, a high wind.’ He had bought it when Ryokans were still cheap, but it was a forgery all the same. A friend having pointed this fact out, he could see that it must be true.

‘We had a look at the Akiko stone,’ he said to Kikuko. ‘It’s in Akiko’s own hand, and it says “Sakyamuni”.’

‘It does, does it?’

After dinner Shingo went out alone to look through the new and used kimono shops.

But he found nothing that seemed appropriate for Satoko.

The matter weighed even more heavily on his mind.

He felt a dark foreboding.

Did even so young a girl covet another’s bright kimono?

Was it only that Satoko’s envy and greed were somewhat stronger than the usual? Or were they quite extraordinarily powerful? In either case, the outburst had struck Shingo as lunatic.

What would be happening now if the girl in the dancing clothes had been run over and killed? The pattern of the girl’s kimono came up vividly before him. There was seldom anything so festive in the shop windows.

But the thought of returning empty-handed made the street seem dark.

Had Yasuko given Satoko only old cotton kimonos to be made into diapers? Or was Fusako lying? There had been poison in the remark. Had Yasuko not given the girl a swaddling kimono, or a kimono for her first visit to a shrine? Had Fusako perhaps asked for western clothes?

‘I forget,’ he muttered to himself.

He had forgotten whether or not Yasuko had consulted with him in the matter; but if they, he and Yasuko, had paid more attention to Fusako, they might have been given a pretty grandchild even by so ill-favored a daughter. Feelings of inescapable guilt dragged at him.

‘Because I know how it was before birth, because I know how it was before birth, I have no parent to love. Because I have no parent, neither have I child to be loved by.’

A passage from a No play came to Shingo, but that alone scarcely brought the enlightenment of the dark-cloaked sage.

‘The former Buddha has gone, the later not yet come. I am born in a dream, what shall I think real? I have chanced to receive this human flesh, so difficult of receiving.’

Had Satoko, about to pounce upon the dancing girl, inherited her violence and malice from Fusako? Or did she have them from Aihara? If from Fusako, then did Fusako have them from Yasuko or from Shingo?

If Shingo had married Yasuko’s sister, then probably he would have had neither a daughter like Fusako nor a granddaughter like Satoko.

This was hardly a proper occasion to stir in him so intense a yearning for a person long dead that he wanted to rush into her arms.

He was sixty-three, and the girl who had died in her twenties had been older than he.

When he got home, Fusako was in bed, the baby in her arms. The door between her room and the breakfast room was open.

‘She’s asleep,’ said Yasuko. ‘Her heart was pounding and pounding, and Fusako gave her sleeping medicine. She went right off to sleep.’

Shingo nodded. ‘Suppose you pull the door shut.’

‘Yes.’ Kikuko got up.

Satoko was tight against Fusako’s back. But her eyes seemed to be open. She had a way of staring at a person, silently and rigidly.

Shingo said nothing about having gone out to buy her a kimono.

It appeared that Fusako had not told her mother of the crisis that had arisen from Satoko’s desire for a kimono.

He went into his room. Kikuko brought charcoal.

‘Have a seat,’ he said to her.

‘In just a second.’ She went out, and came back with a pitcher on a tray. One did not need a tray for a pitcher; but there seemed to be flowers beside it.

‘What are they?’ He took a flower in his hand. ‘
Kikyo
,
^*
maybe?’

‘Black lilies, I’m told.’

‘Black lilies?’

‘Yes. A friend I take tea lessons with gave them to me a little while ago.’ She opened the closet door behind Shingo and took out a little vase.

‘Black lilies, are they?’

‘She said that on the anniversary of Rikyu’s death this year the head of the Enshu School arranged a tea ceremony in the museum tea cottage. There was an old narrow-necked bronze vase in the alcove with black lilies and white hyacinths in it. A very interesting combination, she said.’

‘Oh?’

Shingo gazed at the black lilies. There were two of them, with two flowers on each stem.

‘It must have snowed eleven or thirteen times this spring.’

‘We did have a lot of snow.’

‘She said that there were four or five inches of snow on the anniversary of Rikyu’s death. It was very early in the spring, and black lilies seemed even more unusual. They’re mountain flowers, you know.’

‘The color is a little like a black camellia.’

‘Yes.’ Kikuko poured water into the vase. ‘She said that Rikyu’s testament was on display, and the dagger he committed suicide with.’

‘Oh? Your friend gives tea lessons?’

‘Yes. She’s a war widow. She worked hard, and now the returns are coming in.’

‘What school?’

‘Kankyuan. The Mushanokoji family.’

This meant nothing to Shingo, who knew little about tea.

Kikuko waited, ready to put the flowers in the vase, but Shingo still had one in his hand.

‘It seems to droop a little. I don’t suppose it’s wilting?’

‘No. I had them in water.’

‘Do
kikyo
droop too?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It seems a little smaller than
kikyo
.’

‘I believe so.’

‘At first it looks black, but it isn’t. It’s like dark purple, but not that either – touched with crimson. I’ll have to have a good look at it tomorrow in daylight.’

‘In the sun it’s a transparent purple touched with red.’

The flowers, fully opened, would be scarcely an inch across. There were six petals. The tips of the pistils parted in three directions, and there were four or five stamens. The leaves spread in the four directions at stages about an inch apart. They were small for lily leaves, not two inches long.

Finally Shingo sniffed at the flower.

‘The smell of a dirty woman.’ It was a badly chosen remark.

He had not meant to suggest wantonness, but Kikuko looked down and flushed slightly around the eyes.

‘The smell is a disappointment,’ he corrected himself. ‘Here. Try it.’

‘I think I’ll not investigate as thoroughly as you, Father.’ She started to put the flowers into the vase. ‘Four is too many for a tea ceremony. But shall I leave them as they are?’

‘Yes, do.’

Kikuko set the vase in the alcove.

‘The masks are in that closet, the one you took the vase from. Would you mind getting them out?’

He had thought of the No masks when that passage from a No play had come to him.

He took up the
jido.
‘This one is a sprite. A symbol of eternal youth. Did I tell you about it when I bought it?’

‘No.’

‘Tanizaki, the girl who was in the office. When I bought it I had her put it on. She was charming. A great surprise.’

Kikuko put the mask to her face. ‘Do you tie it behind?’

No doubt, deep behind the eyes of the mask, Kikuko’s eyes were fixed on him.

‘It has no expression unless you move it.’

The day he had brought it home, Shingo had been on the point of kissing the scarlet lips. He had felt a flash like heaven’s own wayward love.

‘It may be lost in the undergrowth, but while it still has the flower of the heart …’

Those too seemed to be words from a No play.

Shingo could not look at Kikuko as she moved the glowing young mask this way and that.

She had a small face, and the tip of her chin was almost hidden behind the mask. Tears were flowing from the scarcely visible chin down over her throat. They flowed on, drawing two lines, then three.

‘Kikuko,’ said Shingo. ‘Kikuko. You thought if you were to leave Shuichi you might give tea lessons, and that was why you went to see your friend?’

The
jido
Kikuko nodded.

‘I think I’d like to stay on with you here and give lessons.’ The words were distinct even from behind the mask.

A piercing wail came from Satoko.

Teru barked noisily in the garden.

Shingo felt something ominous in it all. Kikuko seemed to be listening for a sign at the gate that Shuichi, who evidently went to visit the woman even on Sunday, had come home.

In summer and in winter, the bell in the temple rang at six; and in summer and winter, Shingo told himself, when he heard it, that he was awake too soon.

This did not necessarily mean that he got out of bed.

Six o’clock was of course not in summer what it was in winter. Because the bell rang at the same time, he could tell himself that it was six; but in summer the sun was already up.

He had a large pocket watch at his pillow. He had to turn on the light and put on his glasses, however, and so he seldom looked at it. Without his glasses, he had trouble distinguishing the hour hand from the minute hand.

He had no worries about oversleeping. The trouble was the reverse, that he woke too early.

Six of a winter morning was very early, but, unable to stay in bed, Shingo would go for the paper.

Since the maid had left them, Kikuko had been getting up to do the morning work.

‘You’re early, Father,’ she would say.

‘I’ll sleep a little longer,’ Shingo would reply, embarrassed.

‘Yes, do. I don’t even have hot water yet.’

With Kikuko up, Shingo would feel that he had company.

At what age had it been that he had begun to feel lonely, waking before the winter sun was up?