The Changeling (7 page)

Kogito looked at the landscape painting, which was on soft, thick, pale-sepia paper with slightly ragged edges, like a pricey wedding invitation. In classic Goro style, the paper had been roughly torn into a rectangular shape. The centerpiece of the composition was a huge tree, seen from above: stout trunk, barren treetops, and a chaotic tangle of leafless branches with attenuated tips, all minutely detailed in such a way as to delineate the subtleties of light and shade amid the homogeneous hues of gray and brown. The only green came from the perennial creepers that snaked around the tree trunk, while patches of deep blue sky thickly sprinkled with fluffy white clouds could be glimpsed through the lacy jumble of bare, thin branches.

“These leafless white-barked trees in the painting, the ones whose skinny branches are draped in something that looks like the hair of a doll made from woolen yarn? I think they’re called European white birches, and in the springtime they put forth leaves that are smaller than the leaves of our Japanese white birches. There were some in front of the window of my office at Berkeley,” Kogito remarked.

“Goro must have wanted to paint that sky because it was such a gorgeous color,” Chikashi said. “I think this was when he went to Berlin the last time, for the film festival. It had been quite a while since he and Katsuko broke up, so he no longer
had the contacts from her film-importing business, and even though his movies were very well known over there, most of the attention was probably going to younger directors, so he seems to have been a bit dejected. I remember he told me on the phone that Berlin was cloudy every day, from morning on, and then it got dark around four
PM
. He said things like ‘Berlin in winter isn’t a fit place for a human being.’ But that makes it seem even more remarkable that this painting is so bright and full of life. He was probably walking around the city when an unusual set of colored pencils in an art-supply store caught his eye, and he just bought them on the spur of the moment. And then when he was looking out his hotel window at the first clear sky since he’d arrived, he suddenly felt like painting it. He didn’t have any proper drawing paper, so he must have used the back cover of the film-festival program or something. The thing is, Goro really wasn’t the type of person who would make a sketch of the view from his window while he was alone in his hotel room, was he? Remember when he was working at a commercial-art studio, and whenever he reached the final-design stage on one of his posters, he used to send you a telegram at your student lodgings, because he needed you to be there with him? Anyway, he told me, ‘There was someone there with me, watching me paint this picture. It was the person who was working as my interpreter/attendant, so no one was likely to gossip about her being in my hotel room. She was a really nice girl, and it’s only because she was there that I was able to make that sketch in an easy, relaxed way.’ Goro said that when he finished the picture, it seemed quite possible that the young woman might have asked impulsively whether she could have it. As he put it, ‘It would have been hard to refuse a request like that, so I took
preemptive action: I told her I was going to send it to my younger sister, whom I’d been neglecting for far too long. I knew the address, of course.’ That’s the explanation Goro gave me, when I thanked him for the gift. But, you know, Goro never had much confidence in his art, even though he sometimes allowed his drawings to be published as illustrations for his writing, and he simply couldn’t bring himself to give his paintings to anyone.”

“I wonder what became of those watercolor pencils?” Kogito asked, momentarily awestruck by Chikashi’s unusual burst of eloquence. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful, subtle colors.”

“Goro told me that they were too bulky to pack in his trunk, and the pencil leads would probably have gotten broken in transit, so it just seemed easier to give the set to that girl. Apparently she had taken the university entrance exams, but decided to work in an office for a while before starting classes—I gathered that a lot of young people do that, in Germany. That’s how she came to be working as an interpreter/attendant, and the film festival assigned her to help Goro get around the city. At the time, I remember thinking that I would rather have had the colored pencils than the drawing, but now, of course, I’m very glad to have this picture.”

Kogito enjoyed doing handicraft projects, and he happily set to work on installing Goro’s watercolor painting in a suitable frame.

CHAPTER ONE
One Hundred Days
of Quarantine (I)

1

As he began his solitary sojourn in Berlin, Kogito wondered whether it would be even slightly easier to distance himself from Goro—or rather, from Goro’s spirit—there than in Tokyo. Kogito knew himself well enough to realize that this was a delicate question.

True, he had left Tagame and the small duralumin trunk stashed in his study at home. But if he started to feel a desperate need to have these things with him, all he had to do was call Chikashi, and she could send them by international mail. (They were already packed in a vinyl box, wrapped in strong paper, and addressed to his lodgings in Berlin, just in case.) The arrival of the sea-mail boxes bearing the books he had shipped from Tokyo to Berlin before his departure had been delayed for some reason, so Kogito was using that emergency process to obtain the German dictionaries and other books that he needed right away. When he stopped to think about it, though, the very act of using Tagame as a means of contacting Goro on the Other
Side was nothing more than an arbitrary rule of the game he and Goro had set up. If Goro felt an urgent desire to get in touch with Kogito from his new dimension, surely he would find a more direct method.

As soon as Kogito had boarded his All-Japan Airlines/Lufthansa flight from Narita to Frankfurt, he put on the headphones that were provided. He jabbed repeatedly at the various switches and buttons on the side of his seat, hoping to find some clue or conduit that would lead him to a new message from Goro. But there was nothing, not even a whisper, and Kogito figured that was probably the way Goro wanted it.

After all, it was Goro who had broached the idea of going into quarantine in order to rescue Kogito from his unhealthy addiction (though Goro was talking about Kogito’s obsession with the “scumbag journalist,” not about Tagame). But it was Kogito himself, already feeling cornered by Chikashi’s request for a moratorium, who had seized on that suggestion and made it a reality by accepting the invitation to live and work in Germany for three months. Surely a brief period of separation at this point wouldn’t matter to Goro, who had moved on to eternity.

In any case, after moving his own earthly headquarters to Berlin, Kogito didn’t make any further attempt to contact Goro. There was no word from the Other Side, either, but it wasn’t long after his arrival that Kogito received some unsolicited information about Goro’s time in Berlin.

Due to the unconventional way the campus of the Berlin Free University had come into being, its buildings were scattered around a leafy residential district. In one of those buildings—the assembly hall of the School of Comparative
Culture—a meet-and-greet panel discussion took place one night, with Kogito as the primary participant. The audience included students, faculty members, people from the publishing company that was endowing the commemorative chair, and a media contingent. It was also open to local residents who were interested in Kogito’s presence in Berlin.

After the formal meeting was over and most of the crowd had dispersed, Kogito was approached by a stranger who appeared to have some information about Goro’s previous sojourn in Berlin—information that might have some bearing on his subsequent life, and death. When he thought about it, now that he was living alone in this foreign place, with no one to shield him from other people the way Chikashi always did in Tokyo, Kogito wasn’t able to pick and choose among the potential informants who descended upon him. Because of that, he found himself standing before them unprotected and utterly vulnerable.

The hall was rather small, and it was filled to bursting. After a panel discussion that featured an animated exchange of questions and comments, a crowd gathered around Kogito and the assistant professor of Japanese studies who was acting as his interpreter. Kogito remained standing, leaning against the tall table next to him while he signed paperback copies of the German translations of his books.

From one side of the lectern, a Japanese woman approached and stood very close to him. She was enveloped in a cloud of heavy perfume, and her voice had a distinct Kansai accent (that is, typical of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area). “I’d like to talk to you about Goro and the new generation of German filmmakers,” she announced abruptly, and then continued in a pretentious manner,
sprinkled with knowing bits of German, evidently in the hopes of forcing Kogito to listen closely to her every word.

“Please don’t worry,” she said, “I have no interest whatsoever in discussing any dreary tabloid scandals. That’s just the revenge of the
Mädchen für alles
, anyway. In case you aren’t familiar with that expression, it originally meant ‘maid of all work,’ but in the latest editions of German-Japanese dictionaries, it’s now translated, with impeccable political correctness, as ‘factotum’ or ‘a person who will do anything for you.’ In English, they might say ‘girl Friday,’ though in my mind it implies something a bit more, shall we say,
personal
than that.” Kogito had no idea what the woman was referring to, although he would learn the true meaning of the German expression soon enough, and he was shocked by the barely concealed scorn he heard in her voice. (He hadn’t had a chance to look at her because he was still busy signing books.)

Meanwhile, the next person in line told Kogito, in English, that the book was a Christmas gift for his mother and asked him to write a specific greeting. But as Kogito started to inscribe the title page his mind went completely blank, and when he asked the student to repeat the request he found himself, inexplicably, speaking French. After those little glitches, he finally got the book signed and handed it back to the student. Then, for the first time, he turned and looked directly at the woman who was standing beside him. He was surprised to see that she was considerably older than she sounded; she looked tired, and she seemed to be surrounded by an aura of impenetrable gloom.

“About that
Mädchen
... that girl Friday you mentioned. Was she Goro’s interpreter while he was here?” Kogito asked.

“Heavens, no!” the woman exclaimed. “She could barely speak German herself. And she wasn’t what you would call a legitimate assistant, either, if you get my drift. That’s why I used the term ‘girl Friday.’”

The woman appeared to be from the same generation as Kogito, which is to say well into late middle age. Her small face was completely overwhelmed by the unnaturally dark, voluminous mass of deep-black hair that was piled on top of it—hair that seemed to be at odds with her years—and when she closed her mouth there was a conspicuous puffiness around her lips, almost as if she were holding something in her mouth.

Kogito couldn’t think of anything to say to keep the conversational ball rolling, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. Handing him her business card, she said, “It’s great that you have so many fans in Germany, but you seem to be awfully busy today, so I’ll say good-bye for now. As I mentioned earlier, I’d like to have a long talk with you about Germany’s new generation of filmmakers, so please keep that in mind.”

As the woman walked away, Kogito noticed that a television cameraman who had been filming the panel discussion had turned his lens on her retreating back. Petite though she was, she walked with long, bold strides, like a man.

“Are you planning to film this kind of conversation, too?” Kogito asked.

“No,” replied a Japanese producer, sticking his head out from behind the cameraman. “It’s just B-roll footage, to set the scene. By the way, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I was surprised to hear that an expression like ‘
Mädchen für alles
’—which is what you might call seriously un-PC—is still floating around. Germany’s very strong on feminist issues, you know.”

Afterward, Kogito somehow managed to leave the woman’s card behind on the table where he had been signing his books. The truth is, he was only interested in one of Goro’s female acquaintances in Berlin: the “really nice girl” who had been with him when he painted that watercolor of trees in winter.

As for the “scandalous” woman who figured in the Tokyo tabloid story that had catalyzed (if not precipitated) Goro’s death, even if she turned out to be the same person who was supposedly getting her revenge for having been treated as a
Mädchen für alles
, Kogito could not have cared less about that sordid bit of ancient history.

2

As it turned out, Kogito wasn’t able to free himself from the attentions of the big-haired, heavily scented Japanese woman that easily. The S. Fischer memorial lectureship formally began the following week, with sessions every Monday and Wednesday. Kogito taught from twelve till two, but as he learned from the German assistant professor of comparative literature who came to pick him up at his apartment on the first day of classes, there was a custom called the Academic Fifteen, which required instructors to arrive at their classrooms fifteen minutes late and leave fifteen minutes early. Kogito didn’t want to spend the fifteen extra minutes before his lecture killing time in the classroom, so instead he dropped by the department’s office to say hello. When he peeped into the pigeonhole that had only just been assigned to him, he found a notecard from the woman whose business card he had “accidentally” lost.

Someone—a German university student—kindly let me know that one of my business cards had been “dropped”
at the meeting hall the other day. I have
never
dropped one of my business cards in my life.