Shibumi (20 page)

“But, sir—”

Kishikawa-san lifted his hand for silence. “I decided I would not face this final humiliation. But I had no way to release myself. I have no belt. My clothes, as you see, are of stout canvas that I have not the strength to tear. I eat with a wooden spoon and bowl. I am permitted to shave only with an electric razor, and only under close surveillance.” The General smiled a gray smile. “The Soviets prize me, it would appear. They are concerned not to lose me. Ten days ago, I stopped eating. It was easier than you might imagine. They threatened me, but when a man decides to live no longer, he removes the power of others to make potent threats. So… they held me down on a table and forced a rubber tube down my throat. And they fed me liquids. It was ghastly… humiliating… eating and vomiting all at once. It was without dignity. So I promised to start eating again. And here I am.”

Throughout this minimal explanation, Kishikawa-san had riveted his eyes on the rough surface of the table, intense and defocused.

Nicholai’s eyes stung with brimming tears. He stared ahead, not daring to blink and send tears down his cheeks that would embarrass his father—his friend, that is.

Kishikawa-san drew a long breath and looked up. “No, no. There’s no point in that, Nikko. The guards are looking on. Don’t give them this satisfaction.” He reached across and patted Nicholai’s cheek with a firmness that was almost an admonitory slap.

At this point, the American sergeant straightened up, ready to protect his Sphinx compatriot from this gook general.

But Nicholai scrubbed his face with his hands, as though in fatigue, and with this gesture he rid himself of the tears.

“So!” Kishikawa-san said with new energy. “It is nearly time for the blossoms of Kajikawa. Do you intend to visit them?”

Nicholai swallowed. “Yes.”

“That’s good. The Occupation Forces have not chopped them down, then?”

“Not physically.”

The General nodded. “And have you friends in your life, Nikko?”

“I… I have people living with me.”

“As I recall from a letter from our friend Otake shortly before his death, there was a girl in his household, a student—I am sorry, but I don’t remember her name. Evidently you were not totally indifferent to her charms. Do you still see her?”

Nicholai considered before answering. “No, sir, I don’t.”

“Not a quarrel, I hope.”

“No. Not a quarrel.”

“Ah, well, at your age affections ebb and flow. When you get older, you will discover that you cling to some with desperation.” The effort to make Nicholai comfortable with social talk seemed to exhaust Kishikawa-san. There was really nothing he wanted to say, and after his experiences of the past two years, nothing he wanted to know. He bowed his head and stared at the table, slipping into the tight cycle of abbreviated thoughts and selected memories from his childhood with which he had learned to narcotize his imagination.

At first, Nicholai found comfort in the silence too. Then he realized that they were not together in it, but alone and apart. He drew the miniature Gô board and packet of metal stones from his pocket and set it on the table.

“They have given us an hour together, sir.”

Kishikawa-san tugged his mind to the present. “What? Ah, yes. Oh, a game. Good, yes. It is something we can do together painlessly. But I have not played for a long time, and I shall not be an interesting opponent for you, Nikko.”

“I haven’t played since the death of Otake-san myself, sir.”

“Oh? Is that so?”

“Yes. I am afraid I have made a waste of the years of training.”

“No. It is one of the things one cannot waste. You have learned to concentrate deeply, to think subtly, to have affection for abstractions, to live at a distance from quotidian things. Not a waste. Yes, let’s play.”

Automatically returning to their first days together, and forgetting that Nicholai was now a far superior player. General Kishikawa offered a two stone advantage, which Nicholai of course accepted. For a time they played a vague and undistinguished game, concentrating only deeply enough to absorb mental energy that would otherwise have tormented them with memories, and with anticipations of things to come. Eventually the General looked up and sighed with a smile. “This is no good. I have played poorly and driven all
aji
out of the game.”

“So have I.”

Kishikawa-san nodded. “Yes. So have you.”

“We’ll play again, if you wish, sir. During my next visit. Perhaps we’ll play better.”

“Oh? Have you permission to visit me again?”

“Yes. Colonel Gorbatov has arranged that I may come tomorrow. After that… I’ll apply to him again and see.”

The General shook his head. “He is a very shrewd man, this Gorbatov.”

“In what way, sir?”

“He has managed to remove my ‘stone of refuge’ from the board.”

“Sir?”

“Why do you think he let you come here, Nikko? Compassion? You see, once they had removed from me all means of escape into an honorable death, I decided that I would face the trial in silence, in a silence as dignified as possible. I would not, as others have done, struggle to save myself by implicating friends and superiors. I would refuse to speak at all, and accept their sentence. This did not please Colonel Gorbatov and his compatriots. They would be cheated out of the propaganda value of their only war criminal. But there was nothing they could do. I was beyond the sanctions of punishment and the attractions of leniency. And they lacked the emotional hostages of my family, because, so far as they knew, my family had died in the carpet bombing of Tokyo. Then… then fate offered them you.”

“Me, sir?”

“Gorbatov was perceptive enough to realize that you would not expose your delicate position with the Occupation Forces by making efforts to visit me unless you honored and loved me. And he reasoned—not inaccurately—that I reciprocate these feelings. So now he has his emotional hostage. He allowed you to come here to show me that he had you. And he does have you, Nikko. You are uniquely vulnerable. You have no nationality, no consulate to protect you, no friends who care about you, and you live on forged identity papers. He told me all of this. I am afraid he has ‘confined the cranes to their nest,’ my son.”

The impact of what Kishikawa-san was saying grew in Nicholai. All the time and effort he had spent trying to contact the General, all this desperate combat against institutional indifference, had had the final effect of stripping the General of his armor of silence. He was not a consolation to Kishikawa-san; he was a weapon against him. Nicholai felt a medley of anger, shame, outrage, self-pity, and sorrow for Kishikawa-san.

The General’s eyes crinkled into a listless smile. “This is not your fault, Nikko. Nor is it mine. It is fate only. Bad luck. We will not talk about it again. We will play when you come back, and I promise to offer you a better game.”

The General rose and walked to the door, where he waited to be escorted out by the Japanese and Russian guards, who left him standing there until Nicholai nodded to the American MP, who in turn nodded to his opposite numbers.

For a time, Nicholai sat numbly, picking the metal stones off the magnetic board with his fingernail.

The American sergeant approached and asked in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Well? You find out what you were looking to?”

“No,” Nicholai said absently. Then more firmly: “No, but we’ll talk again.”

“You going to soften him up with that silly-assed gook game again?”

Nicholai stared at the sergeant, his green eyes arctic.

Uncomfortable under the gaze, the MP explained, “I mean… well, it’s only a sort of chess or checkers or something, isn’t it?”

Intending to scour this prole with his disdain for things Western, Nicholai said, “Gô is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.”

But obtuseness is its own protection against both improvement and punishment. The sergeant’s response was frank and naïve: “No shit?”

A needle-fine rain stung Nicholai’s cheek as he stared across from the Bridge of Dawn to the gray bulk of the Ichigaya Barracks, blurred but not softened by the mist, its rows of windows smeared with wan yellow light, indicating that the Japanese War Crimes Trials were in progress.

He leaned against the parapet, his eyes defocused, rain running from his hair, down his face and neck. His first thought after leaving Sugamo Prison had been to appeal to Captain Thomas for help against the Russians, against this emotional blackmail of Colonel Gorbatov. But even as he formed the idea, he realized the pointlessness of appealing to the Americans, whose basic attitudes and objectives regarding the disposition of Japanese leaders were identical with the Soviets’.

After descending from the tramcar and wandering without destination in the rain, he had stopped at the rise of the bridge to look down for a few seconds and collect his thoughts. That was half an hour ago, and still he was stunned to inaction by a combination of churning fury and draining helplessness.

Although his fury had its roots in love of a friend and filial obligation, it was not without base self-pity. It was anguishing that
he
should be the means by which Gorbatov would deny Kishikawa-san the dignity of silence. The ironic unfairness of it was overwhelming. Nicholai was still young, and still assumed that equity was the basic impulse of Fate; that karma was a system, rather than a device.

As he stood on the bridge in the rain, his thoughts descending into bittersweet self-pity, it was natural that he should entertain the idea of suicide. The thought of denying Gorbatov his principal weapon was comforting, until he realized that the gesture would be empty. Surely, Kishikawa-san would not be informed of his death; he would be told that Nicholai had been taken into custody as hostage against the General’s cooperation. And probably, after Kishikawa had disgraced himself with confessions that implicated associates, they would deliver the final punishment: they would tell him that Nicholai had been dead all the time, and that he had shamed himself and involved innocent friends in vain.

The wind gusted and drilled the needle rain into his cheek. Nicholai swayed and gripped the edge of the parapet as he felt waves of helplessness drain him. Then, with an involuntary shudder, he remembered a terrible thought that had strayed into his mind during his conversation with the General. Kishikawa had spoken of his attempt to starve himself to death, and of the disgusting humiliation of being force-fed through a tube shoved down his gagging throat. At that moment, the thought flashed through Nicholai’s mind that, had he been with the General during this humiliation, he would have reached out and given him escape into death. The plastic identity card in Nicholai’s pocket would have been weapon enough, used in the styles of Naked/Kill. The thing would have been over in an instant.*

* In the course of this book, Nicholai Hel will avail himself of the tactics of Naked/Kill, but these will never be described in detail. In an early book, the author portrayed a dangerous ascent of a mountain. In the process of converting this novel into a vapid film, a fine young climber was killed. In a later book, the author detailed a method for stealing paintings from any well-guarded museum. Shortly after the Italian version of this book appeared, three paintings were stolen in Milan by the exact method described, and two of these were irreparably mutilated.

Simple social responsibility now dictates that he avoid exact descriptions of tactics and events which, although they might be of interest to a handful of readers, might contribute to the harm done to (and by) the uninitiated.

In a similar vein, the author shall keep certain advanced sexual techniques in partial shadow, as they might be dangerous, and would certainly be painful, to the neophyte.

The image of releasing Kishikawa-san from the trap of life had scarcely sketched itself in Nicholas’s mind before he rejected it as too ghastly to consider. But now, in the rain, within sight of that machine for racial vengeance, the War Crimes Trials, the idea returned again, and this time it lingered. It was particularly bitter that fate was demanding that he kill the only person close to him. But honorable death was the only gift he could offer. And he recalled the ancient adage: Who must do the harsh things? He who can.

The act would, of course, be Nicholai’s last. He would attract to himself all their fury and disappointment, and they would punish him. Obviously, suicide would be easier for Nicholai than releasing the General with his own hands. But it would be pointless… and selfish.

As he walked in the rain toward the underground station, Nicholai felt a chill in the pit of his stomach, but he was calm. Finally he had a path.

There was no sleep that night, nor could Nicholai abide the company of the vigorous, life-embracing Tanaka sisters, whose peasant energy seemed part of some alien world of light and hope, and for that reason both banal and irritating.

Alone in the dark of a room that gave out onto the small garden, the panels slid back so he could hear the rain pattering on broad-leafed plants and hissing softly in the gravel, protected from the cold by a padded kimono, he knelt beside a charcoal brazier that had long ago gone out and was barely warm to the touch. Twice he sought retreat into mystic transport, but his mind was too charged with fear and hate to allow him to cross over the lower path. Although he could not know it at this time, Nicholai would not again be able to find his way to the small mountain meadow where he enriched himself by being one with the grass and yellow sunlight. Events were to leave him with an impenetrable barrier of hate that would block him from ecstasy.

In the early morning, Mr. Watanabe found Nicholai still kneeling in the garden room, unaware that the rain had stopped and had been succeeded by a raw cold. Mr. Watanabe closed the panels fussily and lighted the brazier, all the while muttering about negligent young people who would ultimately have to pay the price in poor health for their foolishness.

“I should like to have a talk with you and Mrs. Shimura,” Nicholai said in a quiet tone that staunched the flow of Mr. Watanabe’s avuncular grumpiness.