Dreams of Speaking (18 page)

Alice flicked through the notes she had brought with her on her travels. Among the articles and photocopies were several e-mails from Mr Sakamoto, who after departure from Paris had sent regular titbits on technologies and inventions. Since she had no phone, he said, he was obliged to e-mail. He apologised. He said too that he missed hearing her Australian voice. He missed their friendly conversations. Her answering smile.

The hotel room in Nagasaki was like the hotel room in Tokyo, except that it was smaller. Alice squeezed with her luggage through the door, which would not fully open because of the proximity of the bed, and saw before her an almost identical room – the brown walls, the suspended television, the green plastic slippers wrapped in cellophane. Outside the window was an electric Mitsubishi billboard, which she would discover alternated at night between Japanese and English script in white, orange and pink. The window opened. The hotel was near the railway station. Below her, straining her head out of the window, Alice saw a tram stop, with its arching tracks, what seemed like thousands of taxis, massed in waiting, and the monumental station itself, which incorporated a hotel, cinemas and a shopping centre. One façade of the shopping centre screened perpetual advertisements, like a colossal television, devoted to selling. It was early evening, still watery
light, and pedestrians in restless movement filled the spaces between buildings, flowed over a footbridge, cinematically, to and from doors beneath the shiny screen.

Alice prepared to ring Mr Sakamoto. He had suggested she ring from Tokyo, so that he could meet her at Nagasaki station, and then take her home, but she had decided to surprise him, to ring ‘out of the blue', with a gift-call for both of them.

A woman's voice answered the phone, speaking Japanese.

‘
Moshi, moshi?
'

‘May I speak', said Alice in English, ‘to Mr Sakamoto?'

There was confused conversation at the other end. Someone was being called to the phone.

‘Yes?' said another woman's voice, this time in English.

‘May I speak to Mr Sakamoto? I am Alice Black, from Australia.'

There was a silence, then more background Japanese conversation. Alice thought at first she had rung the wrong number; she may have mistranscribed from the e-mail and lost her friend's details. But then the voice at the other end introduced herself as Haruko, Mr Sakamoto's daughter, and said that he was ill, and could not come to the phone.

‘But I'm ringing', Alice insisted, ‘from Nagasaki. I have come to visit. Your father invited me.'

Alice heard Japanese conversation once again and felt troubled by the evident alarm she had caused. There were tones of enquiry, of consternation.

Haruko's voice returned. ‘My father is in hospital,' she said. ‘We didn't know you were coming.'

Alice could hear an old man's voice, a thread she had not detected before.

‘Our uncle', Haruko went on, ‘says you must visit us tomorrow. I will pick you up, if it is convenient, for lunch. One o'clock? Please tell me your address.'

Alice was reeling. She read out her address from the hotel card.

‘In the lobby, then. See you tomorrow.'

Alice heard a click and the voice was gone. She had not even had a chance to discover what was wrong with Mr Sakamoto, what hospital he was in, how she might reach him. There had been a tremor of anxiety in Haruko's voice by which Alice construed that her father's condition was serious.

Alice stared at the wall. It had been a foolish thing, not to tell Mr Sakamoto the date of her arrival. A girlish fancy. A trouble to everyone.

The room felt oppressive. Alice undressed and entered the small moulded shower cubicle. Under the warm water she closed her eyes.
The sand came down like a waterfall.

When she was clean and had changed her clothes and dried her hair, Alice stepped into the streets of Nagasaki. They were lively, abundant. Streams of purposeful people parted before her as she walked, and her sense was of entering gusty circuits, all movement and energy. The shops were boxes of light, like television, and she was blown past them, randomly. There were clothes of remarkable elegance, stores of handbags, knick-knacks. Booths selling mobile phones were excessively visible. Alice saw again the baby-phone, with its bumptious smile. She headed away, into smaller, dimmer streets. In restaurants plates of plastic-modelled food ornamented the windows: Alice paused and looked closely at their garish forms. Parted
noren
curtains above doors, in the brightest indigo, waved customers in. She was hungry, she realised, but did not want to eat alone, conspicuously, in a restaurant. Alice wandered back to the area near the railway station and located a department store. When she entered, shop-girls in stiff uniforms bowed and greeted her with a sing-song chorus of ‘
Irashaimase! Irashaimase!',
and then she descended, like Orpheus,
level after level, to the food hall she rightly surmised was below. There Alice bought a box of sushi, a capped glass tumbler of sake, and a French pastry sealed in a silver metallic wrap, all of which she took back with her to her hotel room. There, on the bed, beside the technicolour sign, she set out her simple meal and allowed herself at last to worry about her friend, Mr Sakamoto, somewhere else in this city, somewhere beyond the telephone.

She had been sleeping in awkward shapes. Her body ached when she woke.

In her rectangle of window Alice saw that the sky was overcast and drizzling, and that large birds, which looked like hawks, were circling above the railway station. The birds surprised her: she had seen their cousins in Australian deserts, but somehow here they appeared ominous and insidiously misplaced. Alice stood at the window, quietly looking down. Hundreds of umbrella shapes moved beneath her, grouping and ungrouping, forming designs, dispersing. Everything was oyster-coloured, dappled. The scene had a grave and unusual beauty. A print might be made of it. A modern-day Hokusai.

Alice dressed quickly and left the hotel in search of coffee. She was restive and disturbed. Not knowing Mr Sakamoto's condition had tilted her off balance. Alice drank two cups of strong coffee, then visited the Tourist Information Centre, which she had spotted in the same street as her hotel. She bought a tram pass and picked up pamphlets and a map of the city. She discovered she could visit Christian martyr sites and the Atomic Bomb Museum; she could go to the Peace Park or look at Western-style colonial houses or the reconstruction of an early Dutch settlement. It was still raining gently and the sky looked hazy. Alice returned instead to her
hotel, to her small brown room. She lay on her bed, reading a novel by Murakami. Waiting like an impatient schoolgirl for lunchtime.

When Haruko met her in the lobby, Alice felt instantly relieved. She was dressed casually and had a relaxed and friendly manner; she seemed untroubled. Nothing serious, Alice told herself. Everything, after all, was going to be all right.

‘Uncle Tadeo told us all about you,' she said, extending her hand. ‘He knew you were coming, but wasn't sure when. My sister, Akiko, is at the hospital. She will join us later.'

‘How is he?' asked Alice.

‘I'm sorry I couldn't tell you on the phone. I had to look up the word in the dictionary. He has had what you call a stroke; he is blind and paralysed and will not recover.'

Alice simply stood. Haruko sounded brutally conclusive.

‘But he was so healthy,' she said in a weak response.

‘It happens, the doctor said. We were told not to hope.'

Told not to hope.
Alice felt shocked and tearful. Haruko only now seemed to notice the measure of Alice's distress.

‘Come to lunch, we will talk.'

‘Can I visit him, then?'

‘I'm sorry, only family.'

‘How long …?'

‘About a week ago. He has declined since then.'

What did she see, in the wreckage of such shattering news? Mr Sakamoto's city from a watery car window, passing alongside her swiftly, like a ground-zero dream. Old-fashioned-looking trams, new-fashioned-looking shops, steep hills around the outskirts, holding up fragile-looking houses. A goddess statue, very erect, high up on a slope. A glimpse of the harbour, and slow, enormous ships. Haruko drove fast and was trying to point out sites of interest, but her heart wasn't in it. It was as if
her practised cheerfulness had suddenly lapsed. They both fell silent for the second half of the journey. The rain grew heavier. Storm clouds in deep purple massed and gathered to the east.

Mr Sakamoto's house was in the traditional style; it was on a sheltered spur of the hillside and had survived the bombing, along with a small nearby cluster of other old wooden buildings. Rain darkened the wood. Alice and Haruko shared an umbrella from the car to the front door, and stood at the entrance, damp and dishevelled. Drips spattered in cherry blossom shapes on the floor.

Uncle Tadeo was there, awaiting Alice's arrival. He rose from his chair, bowed, and extended his arms widely, in a gesture of welcome. Alice was reminded of her dream of Mr Sakamoto in the Paris Métro. And although she was a stranger and had never seen him before – this wizened pale man, bald and frail and with the trace of a tremble – she walked into his embrace, rested her face on his chest, and began to weep. Uncle Tadeo touched Alice's hair and said something soothing. Haruko did not translate. It was not necessary. It was understood. Haruko too began to weep, and the three of them, together, were at once bonded in distress.

Akiko arrived at the family house soon after, looking strained and tired. She was wearing a heavy winter coat, which she did not remove. She said little to Alice, barely acknowledging her presence, and seemed to regard her as an intruder. Unlike Haruko, she was not confident in speaking English and settled as a silent, brooding presence. The small pattern of commiseration that Uncle Tadeo, Haruko and Alice had established was less stable in her company, and less able to be expressed. Alice apologised for her inability to speak Japanese: in this situation she felt blundering, reduced to clumsy gestures.

Haruko translated Uncle Tadeo's words.

‘I was very sorry to hear about your bereavement.'

‘Bereavement?' Alice felt that perhaps he had made an old man's slippage in time.

‘Leo,' said Uncle Tadeo. ‘Hiroshi told me about the death of Leo, and the flowers in the doorway, and your grief.'

Alice felt herself blush. It was three months ago. She hadn't even known him. She hadn't even spoken to him. What had Mr Sakamoto told his uncle?

‘Thank you,' said Alice. ‘He was young …' she heard herself add unnecessarily. Haruko somehow translated the hesitation to go on.

Uncle Tadeo spoke to his great-nieces in a way that Alice
realised was the tale of Leo. Uncle Tadeo's compassion was genuine and his concern complicated by the knowledge that his nephew was nearer than he to death. When he had finished his story, he looked up at Alice and nodded.

Alice asked again if she could see Mr Sakamoto, but was again denied.

‘I'm sorry,' said Haruko. ‘I've already asked. I rang the hospital this morning.'

So here she was, in Japan, with no Mr Sakamoto to talk to. Alice felt the huge weight of her redundancy and dislocation.

‘You can stay with us,' said Haruko, as if reading her thoughts.

Akiko, in her large coat, shifted in discomfort.

‘Thank you, but no,' Alice responded immediately. There was no question of her staying in his absence, no wish to see what might happen to the sisters, to Uncle Tadeo. No wish to make the situation more difficult.

‘I'll return home,' she heard herself announce, even though she had not remembered making this decision. ‘I've been gone from Australia for over six months. Perhaps it's time I saw my family.'

Haruko translated and Uncle Tadeo nodded sadly. Around the table, everyone was silent. They sipped green tea from delicate pink cups.

Outside a thunderstorm was booming above the house. Uncle Tadeo gestured to the ceiling with shrugged shoulders, and smiled wanly, as if asking forgiveness for the weather. Alice repeated his action. They liked each other. He was pleased she had come; he had wanted to meet her. He had heard daily accounts of the growth of her friendship with Hiroshi. Uncle Tadeo said something to Haruko and she rose from the table, left the room, and returned with a bulky manuscript, which she placed solemnly in Alice's hands.

‘Uncle Tadeo thought you should see this. It's my father's book.
The Voices of Alexander Graham Bell.
He finished it only last month.'

Alice made a gesture of weighing it.

‘Yes,' said Uncle Tadeo smiling. ‘It's bigger than we all expected.' He was proud of his nephew. His eyes brimmed with tears.

It occurred to Alice that they were talking as if Mr Sakamoto was already dead. She was not prepared to relinquish him. She had not even begun to accommodate the news of his condition.

What would she do, without Mr Sakamoto?

After lunch Uncle Tadeo insisted they listen to a Beatles record. Haruko sorted through their record collection, retrieved
Abbey Road
, with its vaguely funereal cover, and put it on an old turntable that stood beside a new stereo system. Akiko left the room without saying a word and Uncle Tadeo fell almost immediately asleep. So Haruko and Alice were left together, hearing ‘Come Together', ‘Something', ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer', hearing the thunder and rain mingling with the historic tunes, which were playing from the past for a man who wasn't there. When they reached ‘Octopus's Garden', both had had enough.

‘Not one of my father's favourites,' Haruko said, as if giving herself an excuse to stop the play.

The music gave them no pleasure. It sounded sham, empty. The voices spilled into the room, and leaked away.

On the drive back to the hotel, Haruko explained that when their mother died, Akiko began to feel very cold. Nothing warmed her. Nothing at all. She kept her coat on all the time, even in bed. Now, she was responding to fear of her father's death in exactly the same way. Under cover. Retreating.

‘She doesn't mean to be discourteous,' Haruko said. ‘It's just her way. She is trying to cope.'

‘Of course,' said Alice. She gazed out of the car window, watching the reversed version of her journey.

‘“Yesterday”,' Alice said.

‘Yesterday?'

‘It is one of his favourites. The song.'

‘Ah,' said Haruko.

Her face was turned away. There was a complicity between them that adjusted and refined itself in these small exchanges. Rain-beat on the car roof soundtracked their pauses, made indirect intimacy possible, drew a film of wet silver over the too-sharp outlines of things.

Nagasaki was awash, shiny as cut opal in the drenching rains. A gem of light. The shuddering of fixed surfaces. Rain on the windshield distributed in fans.

What would she do, without Mr Sakamoto? What coat would she wear?

Adjectives, nouns, syntax, sequence: Japan was defeating Alice's sense of the intelligibility of things. She watched television, night-long, with the sound turned off, seeing in the glass chamber another kind of alphabet – of gestures, expressions, sincere on-camera communication, bodies touching, or staying apart, advertisements of demented eccentricity, showroom voluptuousness and bargain sparkle, dramas with faces twitching in exaggerated reactions, comedy, hilarity, clownish falling over.

When at last she killed the television, Alice lay on her back in the dark. Somewhere Mr Sakamoto was lying like this, festooned by tubes, linked to machines. As she was about to fall asleep, thinking of hospitals and images of the body, Alice
recalled a long-ago photograph, Norah's X-ray photograph, that she had pinned for two years to her bedroom window.

 

When Norah was almost thirteen, she broke her right arm. It was encased in a heavy white plaster and she needed assistance with the simplest activities and actions. Alice was assigned to dress her, and to help her wash. Alice put on her shoes and socks, and tied her shoelaces. She plaited her sister's hair and added a ribbon. She helped carry her schoolbooks and wrote out dictated homework. At first both sisters were resentful and ill-tempered; Norah hated her dependency and Alice hated her servitude. But as the weeks passed – there were six in all – they entered a state of unprecedented intimacy: the everyday touching, the solicitude of the body, brought them eventually together, destroyed whatever unmentionable barrier had for so many years held them apart. This injury was the ground of their reconciliation. As Norah allowed her buttons to be done up she looked closely at Alice's face, concentrating on the task. She saw it, truly, for the very first time. Eyes, nose, cheeks, chin. Alice grew careful how she touched, and by degrees became as familiar with her sister's body as she was with her own. They both began to joke and to find the humour in the situation. They learned to talk to each other, and to be patient, to spend time looping in and out of each other's ideas, easy as swallows. At length, Alice and Norah found each other respectful. Sisterhood had taken this long to achieve.

At the window of Norah's bedroom hung her X-ray photograph. It showed her arm, an ivory lever, floating in a cloud of smoke. The fracture was clearly discernible. In the centre of the ulna was a long dark crack, almost half the length of the bone. Norah and Alice both thought the photograph wonderful. Against the window, translucent, it revealed the
glossy frame of the inner body, the architecture beneath flesh, the taut structure of being. It hung like an icon. Both girls felt that they possessed a special knowledge. It healed them, bound them, signified bizarrely their belated coming together.

Alice dreamed that night that she was lost in a sandy desert that was Japan. She struggled through dense, impeding dunes, feeling her legs massively heavy and her heart heaving with effort. Her skin was encrusted all over with tiny grains of sand, her eyes were full of grit, her vision was blurred.

Ahead she saw, miraculously, the edge of a wheatfield. She hurried towards it and found Mr Sakamoto there, lying on his back, looking up at the sky. All around rustled the desiccated stalks of wheat. They made a soothing sound, like the sound of falling rain. Mr Sakamoto did not seem to recognise her. He lay perfectly still, his arms outstretched in cruciform. Occasionally he blinked. He looked calm, composed.

Alice saw the blue sky reflected in his eyes. It looked like water. It looked to Alice like Mr Sakamoto was filling up with water.

And then, in the distance, Leo appeared. He wore earphones and was mutely nodding to his music, swaying a little, tapping his sneakered feet. Alice wondered in dream-land if he was dead or alive, if he had reached a drop-zone somewhere, of limbo, or perdition, or if this dumb show to futile, unprotecting sound was the condition, after all, of every soul: something is missing, something is always missing.

On her second morning in Nagasaki Alice felt even more lost. She woke early, carrying into consciousness her disturbing dreams, but felt unmotivated, inert and exhausted. She could
not bear to remain here, waiting in a morbid vigil for Mr Sakamoto to die. She would change her airline ticket immediately and tell Haruko and Uncle Tadeo. Perhaps she would return to Japan another time. Akiko would be pleased to see her go. She had enough to deal with, without unwelcome visitors. Alice was haunted by the shape of her, crouching miserably in her overcoat, hunched like a survivor of war, like a refugee. A single death could do that: reshape an existence.

The rain had ceased but the sky was still overcast and gloomy. Hawks – or something like them – continued to wheel above the station. Alice had a dinner appointment with Haruko, but otherwise was free. Yet she felt unlike a tourist, more like an interloper. If she had been able to see him, she thought, she would be at rest; she would be able to encourage him to live, perform a miracle, or say goodbye. She would at least know what he looked like and how he was suffering. She would take bright flowers. She would kiss his forehead. She would speak to him in a low voice, there, at the bedside, tangled with tubes and medical machinery.

As it was, Alice stood in the hotel room looking down at the city, feeling as if someone had torn at her insides. She would try to read. Reading was a fissure she could fall into, a warm space with two walls, a sweet forgetfulness. She rocked on her heels, scanning for meaning. City-buzz streamed upwards carrying human and non-human sounds, the hot-wire rumble of alert machines, the cellphone chatter of a million telepresences.