The Earthquake Bird (9 page)

* * *

I told Teiji of my hobby the same night I told him of my childhood—of Lizzie, Noah, and the Rosetta Stone—while he slept like
a baby. I held him and continued with my story because it had proved a soothing rock-a-bye. I didn’t want him to awaken yet,
not while he was so fragile in my arms. I have never held a real baby, but that night I could imagine how it might feel. A
calming of the heartbeat, a warmth that I knew would stay in my arms long after he had awakened and gone. I kept him there,
rocked him, and I told him just a little more, the in-between verses, the adventures I had in Tokyo before I found him by
the puddle in Shinjuku.

Not long after arriving in Tokyo, I was given a second-hand cello. I had mentioned my cello-playing past to a high-school
girl I taught privately. Two weeks later the student’s mother presented me with her old cello saying that they had no space
to keep it anymore. I was touched but a little nervous. I hadn’t played for years and felt a certain responsibility in having
my own cello suddenly. I played in my apartment for some weeks but found myself at war with my uncultured neighbor. Had she
just complained it would have been simple; I would have ignored her and continued to play. Unfortunately she did not opt for
the mature response. She switched on her vacuum cleaner every time I started my practice. She opened the windows and doors
of her apartment and drowned the voice of my cello’s strings. I can only assume she was angry because the infernal noise of
my cello prevented her from the pleasure of hearing the cars screeching on and off the tarmac below. I gave up.

But the music had got into my head and wouldn’t go away. At work I hummed the pieces I’d played long ago at school. I could
remember them note for note, not the melodies, though, just the cello part. I suppose it didn’t sound impressive. My Western
colleagues complained and glared as I hummed and whistled at my desk, opened and shut the photocopier in time with my droning.
I knew it was annoying—Lucy would have glowered at anyone behaving in that manner—but I couldn’t stop.

Natsuko said to me one day, “I think you like music.”

“I think everybody likes music. But I was in the middle of learning something on the cello and now I can’t play anymore.”

Natsuko told me about Mrs. Yamamoto, her old calligraphy teacher, who played the violin with a couple of friends. Mrs. Ide
played second violin and Mrs. Katoh the viola. They had been together for several years but their previous cellist died of
a brain tumor. They never gave concerts. Natsuko said they were good but not so brilliant as to be intimidating. At first
I wasn’t sure they would want me. I am at least twenty years younger than the youngest, Mrs. Ide. My conversational Japanese
was still not so hot. I could translate the works of Mishima and Tanizaki with relative ease but sometimes found it hard to
buy a stamp in a post office. And, of course, I was worried that I would never be a replacement for my predecessor. They told
Natsuko they would be pleased to have a cellist in the group. I said to her that I didn’t think it was practical to carry
a cello from one side of Tokyo to the other every week. Natsuko reported back that Mrs. Yamamoto would let me keep the cello
in her spare bedroom.

I lugged the cello to the station and took the Yamanote line from Gotanda to Nippori. I entered an older, quieter part of
Tokyo. There were small rickety houses here, a few old wooden temples, stoic survivors of the Great Kanto earthquake and the
firebombing of World War Two. I stopped in the Yanaka Cemetery to consult my map and to have a short rest.

It is a beautiful cemetery, a place to lift your heart and make you sing. I began to hum “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Tombs spread in each direction, gray geometric shapes ordered into rows by narrow paths. There were obelisks, stone lanterns,
flat headstones. Cherry trees and occasional pines flanked the paths. Some of the tomb plots were spacious, considering the
size of rooms allotted to the living in parts of Tokyo. There were graves in elaborate stone enclosures, raised above the
ground with one or two steps leading up. I found one that I particularly liked, leaned the cello against a stone lantern,
and sat on the step. I was touched to see that in front of the tall headstone some devoted person had left two pretty vases
containing purple and white orchids. I tried to read the characters of the deceased person’s name, but they were too obscure
for my Japanese. I looked around. I could see one or two people dotted in the distance. I thought how nice it would be to
be buried here—so peaceful yet still an organic part of the city—and to have my bones and ashes tended to by these kind people.

Natsuko once told me of her grandfather’s cremation. Grandpa slid into the oven like a pizza on a tray. When he came out,
minus his flesh, his bones were dismantled and presented to the relatives. The guests took long chopsticks and placed the
bones into two urns, one for the temple and one for the earth. Grandfather’s most special bone was his
nodobotoke
, his Adam’s apple. As it was Buddha-shaped, it had to go into the smaller urn to be preserved at his temple. At the end,
the ashes and bits of bone remaining were swept up by a crematorium employee with a small dustpan and brush. That was the
part that upset Natsuko. Her grandfather in a dustpan and brush.

Lucy would have no objection to being cremated and demolished by her friends but would not want her remains to be confined
to an urn. She would rather be placed directly in the earth, no coffin, no body bag, to come alive again in wriggling worms
and grubs. But we don’t always get to choose.

A small but sharp breeze stung my lips and made my eyes water. I looked at the sky. Crows flew overhead, circling and crying
like bad omens. One flew down and settled beside me with a piece of white card in its beak. For a moment I thought that it
was bearing a message, but it took no notice of Lucy Fly and proceeded to peck and shred the paper. I realized it was part
of a cigarette pack and felt foolish. The bird’s black eye gleamed in every direction but it had no interest in me. Once it
had extracted the silver paper from inside, it discarded the flattened box and flew up into the sky. I lost sight of it among
the others.

I didn’t want to be late for my first rehearsal so I grabbed the cello by its neck once again and set off into the narrow
streets. I followed the efficient directions that Natsuko had written for me and soon found the place. I opened the gate to
a two-story house with a small mossy garden. The front of the house was covered in wisteria. Its leaves trailed over the door
frame. I pushed them aside to find the doorbell, excited to be entering a proper house. For months I had been only in apartments
and offices, and I longed for the cozy domesticity of a real home.

Mrs. Yamamoto opened her door to me and beamed in the porch. She had short silver hair and small round glasses. She was tall
and slim.

“O jama shimasu,” I said.
I am disturbing you
. I slipped off my shoes and followed her into the tatami room.

Two middle-aged women knelt at the far side of the low table. The sun shone through the paper doors behind them. The woman
to the left spoke first. She was stocky with a round face and pudding-bowl haircut.

“Konnichiwa. Ide to moushimasu.” She smiled broadly.

“Hajimemashite,” I said, tipping my head slightly. The other woman smiled nervously and bowed.

“Katoh desu. Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.”

She was small with frizzy gray hair and birdlike features. Her eyes darted quickly between the three of us and later I learned
that this was natural to her. She could not rest her eyes upon a person or object for more than a few seconds but she had
a nervous giggle that followed every utterance and gesture, except when she was playing her viola.

“Lucy desu,” I said. “Lucy Fly. Fly Lucy. Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.”

I knelt on the tatami. It was soft and had a summery smell of grass and dust.

Mrs. Yamamoto served us green tea and pink bean-paste cakes from a lacquer tray. We sat silently as the cups and teapot clinked,
tea poured into the cups. The silence was, for me, a good sign. I looked forward to the pleasure of being with people without
the strain of perpetual talking and listening.

I had not been in Japan long enough to appreciate the bitter taste of the tea and the sickly sweetness of the bean paste.
That first day each mouthful was an effort. But over the following weeks I began to associate the sweet-bitter taste with
pure, silent enjoyment. Somehow the smell of the tatami and the resin for our bows became part of that taste and I can still
find it on my tongue. I grew accustomed to slicing through the soft cake with my shard of wood, eating it in slivers between
sips of hot tea, looking forward to hours of shared music.

The first Sunday I was surprised when Mrs. Ide and Mrs. Katoh drank up their tea and then began to scrutinize the cups. I
realized that it was polite to do so and copied them. The cups were all different. Mrs. Yamamoto had a collection. When I
held my cup to the light, gold flecks glittered and made me smile. I didn’t want to put the cup down again. Of course I did,
because Miriam’s reedy voice resonated in the room. “People don’t buy cups to have them picked up and gawped at. You’ll have
it in pieces.”

That morning, between silences, we talked about the consistency of the tea, the differences between making Japanese tea and
English tea (green tea is best made with water at a temperature of eighty to ninety degrees, never boiling). We discussed
the cake, the
wagashi
. The soft, sticky bun was wrapped in a leaf. I didn’t know what tree it was picked from but it tasted sharp and sweet.

Mrs. Yamamoto whisked away our cups and plates and invited us through to her Western-style living room. I was a little disappointed
to leave the peace of the tatami room, but for our musical purposes I could see that we needed to be on chairs.

Mrs. Yamamoto set up the music stands. She led us through some scales and basic studies to warm up. When her bow touched the
strings we followed obediently. I was out of practice and missed a few sharps and flats, but no one commented. When we were
ready to play music, my mind was clear and focused.

Mrs. Yamamoto passed around the music and we spent the morning playing Haydn. We stopped whenever Mrs. Yamamoto frowned and
we played sections or phrases repeatedly until between us we found their meaning. We hardly spoke. The music pulled us together.
Though I’d played in the orchestra at school and had been told many times to listen to the other players, this was the first
time that I had ever felt compelled to do so. When Lizzie the trombonist was my musical partner, I had to concentrate hard
on not listening to her because she was so loud. I got into the habit of playing with my ear almost touching the strings so
I could be sure I was hitting the right notes. This was different.

Inside the music, I was comfortably alone with my own thoughts. I had a burst of optimism about Japan. Of course I knew I
would be here a long time—I had known that before I came—but for the first time I felt a kind of thrill. What would I do here?
What kind of person could Lucy become, so far away from home?

We stopped briefly for lunch and then moved on to Mozart and played until sunset. There were wrong notes, unarticulated sections,
shaky rhythms. We were not professionals but the way the three women played together was beautiful. Though it took me time
to locate my own place in the group, their support was like the thick hot water of an onsen. By the time we put down our bows
and folded the music stands, I didn’t need to be told that I was a full quarter of the whole.

Mrs. Yamamoto’s teenage daughter brought coffee and then they told me their stories. Mrs. Ide—the pudding bowl—was born in
Manchuria, just before the Pacific War. She remembered nothing of the war itself but immediately afterward her family had
to return to Japan. They walked at night, hundreds of miles to the coast. There was no map or compass but in the darkness
they followed the stars until they reached the coast of the Yellow Sea. Mrs. Ide’s younger sister never made it. She disappeared
along the way and Mrs. Ide was never told where she went or why.

Mrs. Katoh was from Sado Island in the Sea of Japan. All she told me was that she had left her husband and son a few years
before and had come to live in Tokyo, alone.

“I exiled myself,” she said. “I’ll never go back there. Throughout history people were sent to Sado Island as exiles, but
I did it the other way around. You should go there if you have the opportunity, though. It’s Japan’s secret jewel. People
forget it’s there, poked up there in the sea, but it’s beautiful.” She giggled.

I wondered what had happened to make her leave Sado, but I never found out.

For several years I played my cello with the threesome almost every Sunday. It was the high point of my week and I started
looking forward to it on Wednesday or Thursday. I never thought those days would end but they did.

One Sunday the telephone rang as I was about to leave my apartment. It was Mrs. Katoh. There would be no practice that day.
Her voice was deeper, flatter than usual and she didn’t giggle. There would be no practice again. Mrs. Yamamoto had met with
an accident. She had gone upstairs that morning to dust the spare bedroom. She didn’t know that Lucy had set a deadly trap
in there, but neither did Lucy. Normally, after a session, I lugged my cello up to the spare room and left it next to the
wardrobe. The last time, for a reason I still cannot fathom, I’d rested it behind the bed, a little out of the way. Evidently,
Mrs. Yamamoto hadn’t noticed, and while she was dusting the wardrobe she tripped backward over my instrument and hit her head
on the floor. When her husband found her, she was no longer breathing.

I didn’t want to play the cello again. I didn’t want to meet Mrs. Ide and Mrs. Katoh anymore. I didn’t contact them, nor did
I ever ask about reclaiming the cello from the Yamamotos’ spare room. Her death had upset me more than I could have imagined,
as if I’d lost a lifelong friend. There were aspects of those days, though, that I wanted to keep in my life.