The Sound of the Mountain (17 page)

With spring, the waking became warmer.

Mid-May had passed, and after the bell he heard the cry of a kite.

‘So it’s here again,’ he muttered to himself, listening from bed.

The kite seemed to be strolling grandly over the roof, and then it flew off toward the sea.

Shingo got up.

He scanned the sky as he brushed his teeth, but the kite was not to be seen.

But it was as if a fresh young voice had departed and left the sky over the roof serene.

‘Kikuko. You heard our kite, I suppose?’ he called to the kitchen.

‘No, I didn’t. Careless of me.’ Kikuko was transferring rice, hot and steaming, from the pot to the serving cask.

‘It makes its home with us. Wouldn’t you say so?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘We heard a lot from it last year, too. What month was it, I wonder? About now? My memory isn’t what it ought to be.’

With Shingo looking at her, Kikuko untied the ribbon around her hair.

It would seem that she sometimes slept with her hair tied up.

Leaving the cask uncovered, she hurried to make Shingo’s tea.

‘If our kite is here, then our buntings ought to be here too.’

‘Yes. And crows.’

‘Crows?’ Shingo laughed. If it was ‘our’ kite, then it should also be ‘our’ crows. ‘We think of it as a house for human beings, but all sorts of birds live here too.’

‘And the fleas and mosquitoes will be coming out.’

‘That’s a nice thought. But fleas and mosquitoes don’t live here. They don’t live over from one year to the next.’

‘I imagine the fleas do. We have them in the winter.’

‘I’ve no idea how long fleas live, but I doubt if this year’s fleas are last year’s.’

Kikuko looked at him and laughed. ‘That snake will be coming out one of these days.’

‘The
aodaisho
^*
that scared you so?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s the master of the place.’

Back from shopping, one day last summer, Kikuko had seen the snake at the kitchen door, and come in trembling with fright.

Teru ran up at Kikuko’s scream and raised a mad barking. Teru would lower her head as if to bite at the snake, jump back four or five feet, and come in for the attack again. The process was repeated over and over.

The snake raised its head and put out a red tongue, then turned and slithered off past the kitchen doorsill.

From Kikuko’s description, it stretched more than twice the width of the door, or more than two yards; and it was thicker than her wrist.

Kikuko was greatly agitated, but Yasuko was calm. ‘It’s the master of the place,’ she said. ‘It was here I don’t know how many years before you came.’

‘What would have happened if Teru had bitten it?’

‘Teru would have lost. She would have gotten all tangled up in it. She knew it well enough, and that’s why she only barked.’

Kikuko was still trembling. For a time she avoided the kitchen door, and went in and out through the front door.

It bothered her to think that there was such a monster under the floor.

But it probably lived on the mountain behind and rarely came down.

The land behind the house did not belong to Shingo. He did not know whose it was.

The mountain pressed down in a steep slope upon Shingo’s house, and for animals there seemed to be no boundary marking off his garden, into which leaves and flowers from the mountain fell liberally.

‘It’s back again,’ he muttered to himself. And then, cheerfully: ‘Kikuko, the kite seems to be back.’

‘Yes. This time I hear it.’ Kikuko glanced at the ceiling.

The crying of the kite went on for a time.

‘It flew off to the sea a few minutes ago?’

‘So it seemed.’

‘It went off for something to eat and then came back.’

Now that Kikuko had said so, that seemed a most likely possibility. ‘Suppose we put fish out where it will see them.’

‘Teru would eat them.’

‘Some high place.’

It had been the same last year and the year before: Shingo felt a surge of affection when, on waking, he heard the call of the kite.

He was not alone, it would seem. The expression ‘our kite’ was current throughout the house.

Yet he did not know for certain whether it was one kite or two. It seemed to him that he had, one year or another, seen two kites dancing on the roof.

And was it the same kite whose voice they heard year after year? Had a new generation taken the place of the old? Had the parent kite perhaps died, and was its young now calling out in its place? The thought came to Shingo this morning for the first time.

It seemed to him an interesting thought, that the old kite had died last year, and that, without knowing it, half asleep and half awake, they should be listening to a new kite this year, and thinking it their own.

And it seemed strange that, with all the mountains in Kamakura, the kite should have chosen to live on the mountain behind Shingo’s house.

‘I have met with what is difficult of meeting, I have heard what is difficult of hearing.’
^*
Perhaps it was so with the kite.

If the kite was living with them, it let them have the pleasure of its voice.

Because Shingo and Kikuko were the early risers, they could say what they had to say to each other early in the morning. Shingo talked alone with Shuichi only when the two of them happened to be on the same train.

‘We’re almost there,’ he would say to himself as they crossed the railway bridge into Tokyo and the Ikegami grove came in sight. It was his habit to look out the window of the morning train at the grove.

But, for all the years he had taken the same train, he had but recently discovered two pine trees in the grove.

The pine trees stood out above the grove. They leaned toward each other, as if about to embrace. The branches came so near that it was as if they might embrace at any moment.

Since they so stood out, the only tall trees in the grove, they should have caught his eye immediately. Now that he had noticed them, it was always the two pines he saw first.

This morning they were blurred by wind and rain.

‘Shuichi,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with Kikuko?’

‘Nothing in particular.’ Shuichi was reading a weekly magazine.

He had bought two in Kamakura station and had handed one to his father. Shingo’s lay unread.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Shingo repeated quietly.

‘She complains of headaches.’

‘Oh? The old woman says she was in Tokyo yesterday and went to bed when she got back last night. She’s not her usual self. Something happened in Tokyo, the old woman thinks. She didn’t have dinner last night, and when you got home and went to your room, it must have been about nine, we heard her crying. She tried to smother it, but we could hear.’

‘She’ll be all right in a few days. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.’

‘Oh? She wouldn’t cry if it were only a headache. And wasn’t she crying again early this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fusako says that when she went in with breakfast, Kikuko refused to look at her. Fusako was very unhappy about it. I thought I might ask you to tell me what’s wrong.’

‘All the eyes in the family seem to be on Kikuko.’ Shuichi cocked an eye up at his father. ‘She gets sick occasionally, like everyone else.’

‘And what is the ailment?’ he asked irritably.

‘An abortion.’ Shuichi flung out the words.

Shingo was aghast. He looked at the seat ahead of them. It was occupied by two American soldiers. He had started the conversation on the assumption that they would not understand.

He lowered his voice. ‘She went to a doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yesterday?’ It was a hollow mutter.

Shuichi had laid down his magazine. ‘Yes.’

‘And came back the same day?’

‘Yes.’

‘You had her do it.’

‘She wanted it done, and wouldn’t listen to anything I said.’

‘Kikuko wanted to? You’re lying.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Why? What could make her feel that way?’

Shuichi was silent.

‘Don’t you think it’s your fault?’

‘I suppose so. But she said she didn’t want it now and that was that.’

‘You could have stopped her if you’d tried.’

‘Not this time, I think.’

‘What do you mean, this time?’

‘You know what I mean. She won’t have a baby with me as I am.’

‘While you have the other woman?’

‘I’d say so.’

‘You’d say so!’ Shingo’s chest was tight with anger. ‘It was half a suicide. Don’t you think so? It wasn’t so much that she was getting back at you as that she was half killing herself.’ Shuichi fell back before the assault. ‘You’ve destroyed her spirit and the damage can’t be undone.’

‘I’d say her spirit is still pretty strong.’

‘But isn’t she a woman? Your wife? If you’d done one thing to comfort her she’d have been happy to have the baby. Quite aside from the other woman.’

‘Oh, but it isn’t quite aside.’

‘Kikuko knows how much Yasuko wants grandchildren. So much that she feels guilty about taking so long. She doesn’t have the baby she wants to have, and that’s because you’ve murdered her spiritually.’

‘It’s a little different, actually. She has her own squeamishness.’

‘Squeamishness?’

‘Resents being put in that situation.’

‘Oh?’ It was a matter between husband and wife. He wondered whether Shuichi had in fact made Kikuko feel so debased and insulted. ‘I don’t believe it. She may have talked and acted as if she felt that way, but I doubt if she really did. For a husband to make so much of his wife’s squeamishness is a sign that he’s short on affection. Does a husband take a fit of pouting so seriously?’ Shingo had somewhat lost his momentum. ‘I wonder what Yasuko will say when she hears she’s lost a grandchild.’

‘I’d think she’d feel relieved. She knows now that Kikuko can have children.’

‘What’s that? You guarantee that she will have children later?’

‘I’m prepared to guarantee it.’

‘Anyone who can say that has no fear of heaven and no human affection.’

‘A difficult way to put it. Isn’t it a simple enough matter?’

‘It’s not simple at all. Think about it a minute. Think about the way she was crying.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want children myself. But with things between us as they are now, I doubt if it would be a very superior child.’

‘I don’t know about things with you, but there is nothing wrong about things with Kikuko. It’s only you that things are wrong with. She’s not that way. You do nothing to help her get rid of her jealousy. That’s why she lost the child. And maybe more than the child, too.’ Shuichi was looking at him in surprise. ‘Suppose you have a try at getting blind drunk with that woman and coming into the house with your dirty shoes on and putting them on Kikuko’s knee and having her take them off for you.’

Shingo went to the bank that morning on company business, and had lunch with a friend who worked there. They talked until about two-thirty. After telephoning the office from the restaurant, he started for home.

Kikuko was sitting on the veranda with Kuniko on her lap.

She got up hastily, surprised at his early return.

‘No, please.’ He came out to the veranda. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘I was about to change her diaper.’

‘Fusako?’

‘She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.’

‘What business does she have at the post office? Leaving the baby behind.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Kikuko to the baby. ‘I’ll get out Grandfather’s kimono first.’

‘No, please. Get her changed first.’

Kikuko looked up smiling. Her small teeth showed between her lips.

‘He says I’m to get you changed first.’ She was in
déshabillé
, her bright silk kimono tied with a narrow obi. ‘Has it stopped raining in Tokyo?’

‘Raining? It was raining when I got on the train, but clear when I got off. I didn’t notice where it stopped.’

‘It was raining here until just a few minutes ago. Fusako went out when it stopped.’

‘It’s still wet up the hill.’

Laid face up on the veranda, the baby raised her bare feet and took her toes in her hands. The feet moved more freely than the hands. ‘Yes, have a look up the mountain,’ said Kikuko, wiping the baby’s rear.

Two American military planes flew low overhead. Startled by the noise, the baby looked up at the mountain. They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope. Probably the baby saw them too.

Shingo was touched by the gleam of surprise in the innocent eyes.

‘She doesn’t know about air raids. There are all sorts of babies who don’t know about war.’ He looked down at the baby. The gleam had already faded. ‘I wish I had a picture of her eyes just now. With the shadow of the airplanes in it. And the next picture …’

Of a dead baby, shot from an airplane, he was about to say; but he held himself back, remembering that Kikuko had the day before had an abortion.

In fact, there were numberless babies like Kuniko as he had seen her in the two pictures.

Kuniko in her arms and a rolled-up diaper in one hand, Kikuko went off to the bath.

Shingo had come home early out of concern for Kikuko. He went into the breakfast room.

‘What brings you back so soon?’ said Yasuko, joining him.

‘Where were you?’

‘I was washing my hair. It stopped raining and the sun came blazing out, and my head got to feeling all itchy. An old person’s head seems to itch for no reason at all.’

‘Mine doesn’t.’

‘Probably because it’s such a good head,’ she laughed. ‘I knew you were back, but I thought if I came in with my hair all which-way I’d get a scolding.’

‘The old woman’s hair all undone – why not cut it off and make a tea whisk out of it?’

‘Not at all a bad idea. Men have their whisks too. It used to be, you know, that both men and women cut their hair short and pulled it back like a tea whisk. You see it in the Kabuki.’