Dreams of Speaking (9 page)

When he was reunited with his daughters, Hiroshi resumed his daily life with as much regularity as possible. He met them after school, and let them watch too much television. He
prepared simple meals, and the girls began, through his poor efforts, to take an interest in cooking.

Once a week he saw a doctor from the clinic, a kindly man who shared his interest in literature and with whom he exchanged his favourite
haiku.
So Hiroshi moved again into the solace of seventeen syllables, into the space of the meticulous image and the precise meditation. He found there a nonchemical repose, an amethyst light. Drops of water, chrysanthemums, the beat of moth wings in smoky air: these noticed felicities, these forms of simple praise, reconfigured by small degrees the entire world. As he dipped the brush and created the ink characters, he felt as if old Masa Tanaka was still sitting at his side. And although his own efforts often seemed inept, he enjoyed, most of all, the task of attention, and practised
haiku
as a spiritual exercise.

Each day Uncle Tadeo spoke to him on the telephone. Hiroshi grew to cherish their quirky conversations. His uncle was more fluent and open on the telephone than face to face, and an intimacy grew between them that had not existed before. Even Hiroshi found himself whispering into the mouthpiece things he would not have been able to say directly, personal things, about Clare and Mie, childhood things, about the old Nagasaki, fearful things, about what he held within him, about his darkness, his memories, his crater of nightmares.

Once Hiroshi told Uncle Tadeo at length a dream from the night before: how he had seen Harold O'Toole, his blond hair a helmet of flame, shouting to him for water, shouting, and then screaming, screaming, and then chasing him, like a monster, dragging fire. The telling of this dream was a surrender of feeling into words. It was an unprecedented relief. It allowed Hiroshi to release into voice alone, into the unseeable chamber that lay between him and Tadeo, what
had seemed physically to inhabit him, to rest corrosively within, to lock him into abstract and timeless isolation. He heard his own voice expelling phantom presences and wounding secrets. He gave up ghosts. He exhaled poisons. Gradually, too, Uncle Tadeo began to speak to his nephew of the war, telling for the first time his experiences of shame and desolation. In the wires of the telephone, in the windy space between mouths, they became father and son; they spoke the truth; they expressed their love. Their voices floated into each other, in a disincarnate embrace. Each time he put down the telephone receiver, Hiroshi felt he had been kissed.

Akiko and Haruko both had difficult experiences of adolescence. When they were little, Hiroshi had delighted in watching his daughters, with their Hello Kitty scarlet school bags, their lacy ankle socks, their fluffy hair ornaments and novelty keyrings, walking hand in hand as they entered the schoolyard. They looked decorated, happy. But in their teenage years Akiko became withdrawn and tormented, as if she had inherited her father's sadness, and Haruko took to exhibitionist forms of identity. At one stage – and to her older sister's great embarrassment – Haruko became a
ganguro
, tanning her face dark in sun-bed salons, dying her hair green, wearing an assortment of PVC and chains, and acting aggressively. Tadeo counselled patience, and said that grief takes many guises. Grief, he said, is a mysterious subtraction of the self; one then builds self again with whatever resources are available. When the sisters at last finished their schooling, both, in a new concord, entered the world of finance. They enjoyed the rigour of numbers and strict calculation. Fractions, decimal points, neat lists of figures. There was a quiet there, within numbers, a clean, stable space. Arithmetic saved them. Akiko and Haruko became independent, adult. The
apartment they shared was a paradigm of neatness and order.

Hiroshi Sakamoto began travelling again, sliding in jet planes from country to country. Wherever he went he telephoned Uncle Tadeo every day, often speaking in sunlight to his uncle at night, or speaking in the night to his uncle at breakfast. The size and rotation of the planet did not interfere with their daily conversations. Words sped over mountains and rivers and ignored whole continents. Only on the telephone could Hiroshi utter his truths. Only there did he find expression and relief. At some point or other, at some foreign location, Hiroshi conceived of a project to which he wished finally to devote his skills and time. He would write a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, the Scotsman, the inventor of the telephone. His beloved Uncle Tadeo thought this a splendid idea.

The bistro was cramped, in the French style, with too much chunky wooden furniture, and suffused with the mingled odours of baking and cigarette smoke. Two fussy waiters in long aprons moved sideways in the narrow spaces between the tables, their plates held high. They seemed at war with each other and carried perpetual sneers.

Alice and Mr Sakamoto discussed the buzzing world. Over onion soup, trout with almonds, and chocolate mousse, they began gradually to know each other, to exchange ideas, opinions and stories. Mr Sakamoto was staying in Paris for an indefinite period, for no reason, he said, other than to revisit cherished sites and attend screenings of old movies. He was staying in a simple hotel on rue des Ecoles, just up from a small art cinema that showed only movies from the thirties, forties and fifties. So far, he had seen four comedies by Ernst Lubitsch and three police dramas in a Bogart retrospective.

‘Movies? What do you think of movies?' Mr Sakamoto asked. ‘Do you have movies in your book?'

‘Not yet,' said Alice shyly. ‘I'm still thinking about it.'

‘When I was a child,' he said, ‘before the catastrophe, my sisters often took me on outings to the movies. My father never quite approved, but he indulged us anyway, believing that
American cinema, in particular, was somehow culturally educative.
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
: that was one of my favourites. And anything with Gary Cooper.
Morocco, Beau Geste.
Beau had two brothers, John and Digby, and they all joined the Foreign Legion and ended up fighting Arabs in the desert. It was all about glamorous sacrifice; I found it very appealing. I suppose I wanted brothers … One of the scenes I remember most clearly is from early on in the movie. The three brothers are little boys and they are playing at setting up a Viking funeral. It's a noble burning. A splendid death. I remember discussing this afterwards with my English tutor, and he too liked the idea of a Viking funeral … For whichever of us dies first, he joked, the other will perform a Viking funeral. Then we shook hands.'

Mr Sakamoto paused in his monologue. He took a sip of wine.

‘I've seen very few old movies,' Alice admitted. ‘Some on TV. Some at festivals.'

‘Then you must come with me. This afternoon. Lubitsch's
Ninotchka
is screening, starring Greta Garbo. How can you write on modernity if you haven't seen
Ninotchka
?'

Mr Sakamoto was smiling at her. Alice saw that this was a man of true generosity and spontaneous joy. He wiped a trace of mousse from his chin with a napkin.

‘You'll love it,' he added. ‘I promise.'

They agreed to meet in front of the cinema later that afternoon. Mr Sakamoto kissed Alice twice on both cheeks and again waved broadly as they parted. His post-prandial nap awaited him, he said. Alice watched as he climbed the steep street to the rue des Ecoles, with a faltering, uneven step she had not noticed before.

The weather had turned chilly and Alice hurried off in the opposite direction, winding her grey woollen scarf as she went.
She would take the Métro to the Village Voice bookshop, and buy a book. A novel. Something difficult. Something fashionable and new. Dining out had given her a spendthrift inclination.

But when Alice entered the Métro, she immediately heard below her loud, abusive shouting and a woman's high-pitched screams. The voices sounded echoic, enlarged and thick with emotion. She found herself running down the steps into cavernous yellow shadows, impelled by instinct, rushed on by fear, or adventure, or foolishness. Around the bend of the tunnel, at the foot of the tiled stairwell, a man was kicking, again and again, a woman lying prostrate before him. Other people hurried by, studiously ignoring them. A single old woman stood at a distance, remonstrating, jabbing her finger towards the man and shouting in a knotted language that was certainly not French. The couple were young and dark-haired. They had the distracted, edgy look of smack-hungry junkies. Alice hurled herself at the man, and pushed him bodily away. He stumbled backwards, for a second or two dumbfounded, but then swung at Alice, missing, and turned a wide arc in a kind of drunken reel, swearing to himself and kicking at the wall. Alice bent and lifted the woman to her feet. She was about twenty years old and had blood seeping in channels from her nose. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her face was marbled with distress. Tendrils of damp hair clung to her cheeks. Without thinking, Alice wiped the woman's bloody nose with the end of her scarf, as if she were tending an injured child. The woman shrugged off her help and also turned away, following her abuser, with limping gait, towards the far exit.

There was a roar of noise and wind and a semi-dark smearing of outlines. Light-emitting diodes composed the time in a dangling box. The train had come and left; Alice stood numbly on the platform. The old woman, who seemed also to have
missed her train, pulled at Alice's sleeve and said something reassuring. She may have been speaking in Polish, or Yiddish; in any case, it was an expression of friendship and approval. Alice nodded, submissively. The encounter with the bleeding woman had left her with a giddy anticipation of despair. Random violence, no matter how minor, had this predictable effect: the shuddering sensation of watching the concussive recoil of flesh, the general sense of a collapse of civility, the reminder, above all, of graver, sorrowful things that exist beneath the hyper-shine and fast-motion of cities. Alice smiled at the speaking woman, and they waited together, side by side, for the next underground train.

When it came, they entered the same sliding door, and sat looking at each other. The woman pulled up the sleeve of her coat. There, on her forearm, were blue tattooed numbers. The woman nodded at the numbers, then smiled sadly at Alice. She knew, Alice thought. She knew what this all meant. Alice nodded back. It was the barest of communications, a wordless understanding. Alice found herself, like an author, constructing a biography. The supposition of a life that carried a tattoo. Film footage played from somewhere. Visions pre-emptive. Photographs of disaster in hazy tones of brown. When the woman left the train before Alice she did not look back. She moved away into the crowd and was almost immediately obscured.

Arrived at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in
immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James's
Portrait of a Lady
. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment, a choice that retrieved something swept away, rudely disintegrated, by blows struck against a young woman's body in the dark arcades of the Métro.

Speed perturbed and excited her. It was the penetration of vicinity, the counteraction of sensible space. Chronometers, speedometers – instruments supercharged against the desolation of the still.

When Alice was a child she liked to watch the weather report on television. Each evening, before the list of tidal figures and temperatures and barometric predictions, one of the stations showed a wide-angled prospect of the city, taken from its tallest building, looking out across the river, across bridges and highways. Eight hours were filmed and condensed to one or two minutes; this process was contrived to make heaven itself speed. Light arose and receded, clouds streamed in from the ocean, gathered and dispersed, rain filtered down in drifting, diaphanous waves, swept the screen with shadow, then disappeared in an instant. Boats and ferries on the river whisked past like apparitions, their wakes unfurling in patterns that looked like stitches sewn into the water. In the corner of the screen, barely discernible, a digital clock flicked figures with alarming swiftness, showing not time's arrow, but time's perpetual superfluity. Fleetingness. Relentlessness. Irretrievability. The film of the weather was transfixing because it was so unnatural, yet it provided the illusionist gratification, at once terrifying and beautiful, that one might speed up time, that one might push nature faster, that there was a perspective, somewhere, somewhere up very high, of panoramic relativity.

Norah also loved the speedy weather. The sisters watched it together, sucking at ice cubes, lying on their bellies with their four legs waving in the air. Time-travelling in their lounge room with the aid of the camera's shrewd lie.

Mr Sakamoto was waiting in drizzling rain outside the cinema. His felt hat bore a fringe of raindrops along the rim. He had already bought the tickets. When he saw Alice approach, he looked concerned.

‘What have you done to yourself?' he asked, his tone alarmed.

And Alice realised that all afternoon she had worn the bloody scarf, strident as a blazon, decorating her chest as if she were the survivor, the one who was walking wounded, as if she had been kicked with steel boots in the pit of the Métro. Alice unwound the scarf with some embarrassment and stuffed it into her shoulder bag.

‘Someone was hurt,' she said cryptically. ‘Don't worry; it's not my blood.'

And although she could tell Mr Sakamoto wanted to know more, Alice fell silent.

 

What happens in a movie theatre? There is a transitional phase between the real and the screen, in which one views ironically, with everyday scepticism. Then at some point one falls headlong into the screen – there is an occult coalescence, a portal, a transfer, where the evidence of the senses is suddenly hijacked into fakery and exaggeration. It is a kind of release of self, a benign absorption.
Ninotchka
told the story of a Bolshevik apparatchik (Greta Garbo), who came to Paris in the thirties to supervise a delegation of three idiots, abroad with the task
of selling jewels confiscated from White Russians. It was farcical and lighthearted, with a witty script. Ninotchka began as an ideologue, but was converted through love to enjoy the decadence of the capitalist West, which she nevertheless insisted was crumbling into destruction. Paris was a city of lavish attractions and overflowing desire. At the nadir of her ideological betrayal, Ninotchka wore a ridiculous hat, which she had bought as a guilty secret. This, and learning to laugh, were the symbols of her defection.

All through the movie Alice could hear Mr Sakamoto's response. He snorted, chuckled, exclaimed, laughed outright. Around them other cinema patrons also laughed; in the extraterrestrial light of the black-and-white movie they looked glazed with pleasure, heightened and abstracted into filmy emotions. Alice could see the rumbling of their shoulders and their backward jerks of amusement. It was something childish; it was something profoundly of the body. Encouraged by this disinhibition, Alice began also to laugh, and found that the spirit of sadness she had carried all afternoon, the taint of the Métro, and the woman who had stained her, gradually dissipated. When they swept outside, into the cold street, she felt she had been cleansed by comedy.

Mr Sakamoto was still cheerfully smiling. ‘Wasn't it wonderful?' he exclaimed. ‘I love the scene where Ninotchka finally laughs.'

Over drinks in a small bar Alice told Mr Sakamoto of the incident in the Métro, of the journey to the bookshop. She told him about the woman with the tattooed arm. Then she said that although she was studying modernity, she had bought a novel by Henry James.

‘So what is the problem?' he asked. ‘You are large enough to contain contradictions. We are all large enough – are we not? – to contain contradictions.'

Mr Sakamoto had first seen
Ninotchka
when he was eight years old. He had understood nothing of the plot – although his sisters had tried to explain Bolshevism and the idiotic delegation – but was seduced by Greta Garbo's luminous white face (‘as though she wore Japanese rice powder') and the perceptibly sexual cadence of her laugh.