Shibumi (36 page)

“You devil!” he shouted as he came.

She was laughing as she climaxed a few seconds later.

She lay on her stomach, humming sleepily in appreciation as he slowly inched the razor over her buttock, a perfect object blending the fineness of her Japanese blood with the useful shape of her Black. He kissed it gently and continued the Delight.

“In two months your tenure with me is over, Hana.”

“Hmm-hmm.” She did not want to break her languor by speaking.

“Have you considered my suggestion that you stay on with me?”

“Hmm-hmm.”

“And?”

“Unh-nh-nh-nh-nh.” The prolonged sound through slack lips meant, “Don’t make me talk.”

He chuckled and turned her over onto her back, continuing the thrill massage with close attention to technique and detail. Hana was in a perfect state. She was in her midthirties, the youngest a woman can be and still possess the training and experience of a grand lover. Because of the excellent care she took of her body and because of the time-annihilating effects of her ideal blend of Oriental, Black, and Caucasian strains, she would be in her prime for another fifteen years. She was a delight to look at, and to work on. Her greatest quality lay in her ability to receive pleasure completely and graciously.

When the Delight of the Razor had closed to her centers and had rendered her moist and passive, he concluded the event with its classic quick finish. And for a time they lay together in that comfortable lover’s twine that knows how to deal with the extra arm.

“I
have
thought about staying on, Nikko,” she said, her voice buzzing against his chest. “There are many reasons that might prompt me to do so. This is the most beautiful spot in the world. I shall always be grateful to you for showing me this corner of the Basque country. And certainly you have constructed a life of
shibumi
luxury here that is attractive. And there is you, so quiet and stern when you deal with the outside world, so boyish in lovemaking. You are not without a certain charm.”

“Thank you.”

“And I must also confess that it is much rarer to find a well-trained man than an accomplished woman. But… it is lonely here. I know that I am free to go to Bayonne or Paris whenever I wish—and I have a good time when I do go—but day to day, despite your attention and the delights of your conversation, and despite the bawdy energy of our friend Le Cagot, it is lonely for a woman whose interests and appetites have been so closely honed as mine have been.”

“I understand that.”

“It is different for you, Nikko. You are a recluse by nature. You despise the outside world, and you don’t need it. I too find that most of the people out there either bore or annoy me. But I am not a recluse by nature, and I have a vivid curiosity. Then too… there is another problem.”

“Yes?”

“Well, how shall I put this? Personalities such as yours and mine are meant to dominate. Each of us should function in a large society, giving flavor and texture to the mass. The two of us together in one place is like a wasteful concentration of spice in the course of an otherwise bland meal. Do you see what I mean?”

“Does that mean that you have decided to leave when your tenure is up?”

She blew a jet of breath over the hairs of his chest. “It means that I have not yet made up my mind.” She was silent for a time, then she said, “I suppose I would really prefer to have the best of both worlds, spending half of every year here, resting and learning with you, and half of each year out there, stunning my audience.”

“I see nothing wrong with that.”

She laughed, “It would mean that you would have to make do for six months each year with the bronzed, long-legged, mindless nymphs of the Côte Basque. Actresses and models and that sort. Could you do that?”

“As easily as you could make do with round-armed lads possessing excellent muscle tone and honest, empty eyes. For both of us, it would be like subsisting on hors d’oeuvres. But why not? There is some amusement in hors d’oeuvres, though they cloy without nourishing.”

“Let me think about it, Nikko. It is an attractive idea.” She raised herself onto one elbow and looked down into his half-closed, amused eyes. “Then too, freedom is also attractive. Maybe I won’t make any decision at all.”

“That’s a kind of decision.”

They dressed and went to shower beneath the perforated copper cask designed for the purpose by the first enlightened owner of the château nearly three hundred years before.

It was not until they were taking tea in the cream-and-gold east salon that Hel asked about the visitor.

“She is still asleep. When she arrived yesterday evening, she was desperate. She had walked from the village after flying in to Pau from Rome and hitchhiking to Tardets. Although she tried to chat and follow the forms of politeness, I could tell from the first that she was very distraught. She began weeping while she was taking tea. Weeping without knowing she was doing it. I gave her something to calm her and put her to bed. But she awoke during the night with nightmares, and I sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and humming to her, until she was calm and dropped off again.”

“What is her problem?”

“She talked about it while I stroked her hair. There was a nasty business at the airport in Rome. Two of her friends were shot and killed.”

“Shot by whom?”

“She didn’t say. Perhaps she didn’t know.”

“Why were they shot?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did she tell you why she came to our home?”

“Evidently all three of them were on their way here. She had no money, only her plane ticket.”

“Did she give you her name?”

“Yes. Hannah Stern. She said her uncle was a friend of yours.”

Hel set his cup down, closed his eyes, and pushed out a long nasal sigh. “Asa Stern was a friend. He’s dead. I am indebted to him. There was a moment when, without his help, I would have died.”

“And this indebtedness, does it extend to the girl as well?”

“We’ll see. Did you say the blow-away in Rome International happened yesterday afternoon?”

“Or morning. I am not sure which.”

“Then it should be on the news at noon. When the girl wakes up, please have her come and see me. I’ll be in the garden. Oh, and I think Le Cagot will take dinner with us—if he finishes his business in Larrau in time.”

Hel worked in the garden for an hour and a half, trimming, controlling, striving for modest and subtle effects. He was not an artist, but he was sensitive; so while his garden, the major statement of his impulse to create, lacked
sabi,
it had the
shibui
features that separate Japanese art from the mechanical dynamics of Western art and the florid hyperbole of Chinese. There was that sweet melancholy, that forgiving sadness that characterizes the beautiful in the Japanese mind. There was intentional imperfection and organic simplicity that created, then satisfied, aesthetic tensions, functioning rather as balance and imbalance function in Western art.

Just before noon, a servant brought out a battery radio, and Hel listened in his gun room for the twelve o’clock broadcast of BBC World Service. The news reader was a woman whose distinctive voice has been a source of amusement for the international Anglophone community for years. To that peculiar pronunciation that is BBC’s own, she adds a clipped, half-strangled sound which the world audience has long taken to be the effect of an uncomfortable suppository, although there is lively dispute and extensive wagering between those who maintain that the suppository is made of sandpaper and those who promote the ice-cube theory.

Buried among the trivia of collapsing governments, the falling dollar, and Belfast bombings was a description of the atrocity at Rome International. Two Japanese men, subsequently identified from papers on their persons as Red Army members working in behalf of the Black Septembrists, opened fire with automatic weapons, killing two young Israeli men, whose identities are being withheld. The Red Army assassins were themselves killed in an exchange of gunfire with Italian police and special agents, as were several civilian bystanders. And now for news of a lighter note…

“Mr. Hel?”

He switched off the radio and beckoned to the young woman standing in the doorway of the gun room. She was wearing fresh khaki walking shorts and a shortsleeved shirt with three top buttons open. As hors d’oeuvres go, she was a promising morsel: long strong legs, slim waist, aggressive bosom, reddish hair fluffy from recent washing. More soubrette than heroine, she was in that brief desirable moment between coltishness and
zaftig.
But her face was soft and without lines of experience, giving the strain she was under the look of petulance.

“Mr. Hel?” she said again, her tone uncertain.

“Come in and sit down, Miss Stern.”

She look a chair beneath a rack of metal devices she did not recognize to be weapons and smiled faintly. “I don’t know why, but I thought of you as an older man. Uncle Asa spoke of you as a friend, a man of his own age.”

“We were of an age; we shared an era. Not that that’s pertinent to anything.” He looked at her flatly, evaluating her. And finding her wanting.

Uncomfortable under the expressionless gaze of his bottle-green eyes, she sought the haven of small talk. “Your wife—Hana, that is—has been very kind to me. She sat up with me last night and—”

He cut her off with a gesture. “Begin by telling me about your uncle. Why he sent you here. After that, give me the details of the events at Rome International. Then tell me what your plans are and what they have to do with me.”

Surprised by his businesslike tone, she took a deep breath, gathered her thoughts, and began her story, characteristically enough, with herself. She told him that she had been raised in Skokie, had attended Northwestern University, had taken an active interest in political and social issues, and had decided upon graduation to visit her uncle in Israel—to find her roots, discover her Jewishness.

Hel’s eyelids drooped at this last, and he breathed a short sigh. With a rolling motion of his hand he gestured her to get on with it.

“You knew, of course, that Uncle Asa was committed to punishing those who committed the Munich murders.”

“That was on the grapevine. We never spoke of such things in our letters. When I first heard of it, I thought your uncle was foolish to come out of retirement and attempt something like that with his old friends and contacts either gone or decayed into politics. I could only assume it was the desperate act of a man who knew he was in his final illness.”

“But he first organized our cell a year and a half ago, and he didn’t become sick until a few months ago.”

“That is not true. Your uncle has been ill for several years. There were two brief remissions. At the time you say he organized your cell, he was combating pain with drugs. That might account for his crepuscular thinking.”

Hannah Stern frowned and looked away. “You don’t sound as though you held my uncle in much esteem.”

“On the contrary, I liked him very much. He was a brilliant thinker and a man of generous spirit—a man of
shibumi.”

“A man of… what?”

“Never mind. Your uncle never belonged in the business of terror. He was emotionally unequipped for it—which of course says a good deal in his favor as a human being. In happier times, he would have lived the gentle life of a teacher and scholar. But he was passionate in his sense of justice, and not only for his own people. The way things were twenty-five years ago, in what is now Israel, passionate and generous men who were not cowards had few options open to them.”

Hannah was not used to Hel’s soft, almost whispered prison voice, and she found herself leaning close to hear his words.

“You are wrong to imagine that I did not esteem your uncle. There was a moment in Cairo sixteen years ago when he risked his safety, possibly his life, to help me. What is more significant, he also risked the success of a project he was devoted to. I had been shot in the side. The situation was such that I could not seek medical assistance. When I met him, I had gone two days with a wad of blood-soaked cloth under my shirt, wandering in the back streets because I didn’t dare try a hotel. I was dazed with fever. No, I esteem him a great deal. And I am in his debt.” Hel had said this in a soft monotone, without the histrionics she would have associated with sincerity. He told her these things because he thought that, in fairness to the uncle, she had a right to know the extent of his debt of honor. “Your uncle and I never met again after that business in Cairo. Our friendship grew through years of exchanging letters that both of us used as outlets for testing ideas, for sharing our attitudes toward books we were reading, for complaining about fate and life. We enjoyed that freedom from embarrassment one only finds in talking to a stranger. We were very close strangers.” Hel wondered if this young woman could understand such a relationship. Deciding she could not, he focused in on the business at hand. “All right, after his son was killed in Munich, your uncle formed a cell to aid him in his mission of punishment. How many people, and where are they now?”

“I am the only one left.”

“You
were within the cell?”

“Yes. Why? Does that seem—”

“Never mind.” Hel was convinced now that Asa Stern had been acting in dazed desperation, to introduce this soft college liberal into an action cell. “How large was the cell?”

“We were five. We called ourselves the Munich Five.”

His eyelids drooped again. “How theatrical. Nothing like telegraphing the stunt.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Five in the cell? Your uncle, you, the two hit in Rome—who was the fifth member? David O. Selznik?”

“I don’t understand what you mean. The fifth man was killed in a café bombing in Jerusalem. He and I were… we were…” Her eyes began to shine with tears.

“I’m sure you were. It’s a variation of the summer vacation romance: one of the fringe benefits of being a committed young revolutionary with all humanity as your personal flock. All right, tell me how far you had got before Asa died.”