The Persimmon Tree (59 page)

‘Does that include my big Dutch feet in these ridiculous
tabi
?’ Anna laughed, then turning, she hugged the mayor’s wife. ‘Thank you, that is a lovely compliment, Yasuko. Now dry your tears; you have to go and prepare green tea for me to take in to
Konoe-san
.’ Anna’s eyes widened for emphasis. ‘Can you imagine if we are even one minute late?’ A look of terror crossed the
mama-san
’s face.

They arrived at the door of Konoe Akira’s rooms. It was one minute to eight when the mayor’s wife handed the tray containing the pot of green tea and yellow cups to Anna. They waited a further thirty seconds, then Yasuko knocked twice and turned, first touching Anna lightly on the shoulder before she hurried away.

Anna waited and as the big hand of her watch hit the hour the door opened to reveal Konoe Akira. About three metres behind him was a wall composed of light wooden frames with delicate rice-paper panels. The light from the room beyond gave the rice paper a rich and elegant glow.

The Japanese officer was wearing a
yukata
, the lightweight summer robe, and bowed, followed by the usual ‘Ho!’

Anna bowed low in the perfect formal manner while holding a tray. ‘Thank you for your generous welcome,
Konoe-san
,’ she said in Japan-speak.

Konoe Akira turned and indicated that she walk to her left where, at the end of the wall, were two sliding
shoji
screen doors of a wooden grid pattern. Anna was to learn that this was the guest’s entrance, while the host’s entrance was set into the adjoining wall to her far right, so the host could enter from another part of the house. Sliding back the paper and wooden-framed doors to the guest entrance, he permitted Anna to enter, bowing and then turning to move to the far end of the wall and round the corner so he could enter via the host entrance.

The floor of the room, Anna observed, was made of
tatami
mats set in wooden frames, each a formal area and in Japanese tradition always of the same size. In this room, reserved for the formality of serving tea, the mat configuration denoted where guests were required to sit while the host always occupied a
tatami
mat of their own.

The centre of the room contained a low table of polished dark wood and a single cushion where it was intended Anna would sit. Instead of a cushion for Konoe Akira, placed on the host
tatami
, directly opposite the table where she sat, was a small stool. Anna immediately understood that this was a concession to tradition because of his stiff leg. Seated, as was customary, on a cushion, he would be unable to rise and would require help to lift him to his feet. The Japanese officer, Anna knew, would perish rather than ask for help of any kind. In the corner to the right of the colonel stood a simple polished glass vase containing a single perfect yellow chrysanthemum.

Anna, who had been schooled in a simplified version of the Japanese tea ceremony by the two
okami-san
, proceeded to pour the tea in silence while waiting for her host to speak.

Konoe Akira remained silent for twenty minutes while drinking his tea, then finally placed the cup on the table, pushing it away from Anna to indicate he required no more. ‘It will be by starlight,’ he said.

‘If you wish,
Konoe-san
,’ Anna replied, secretly relieved. She was nervous about seeing him naked and now her fingertips would be her eyes. She knew that her ultimate fate would be delivered within the next two hours. She was afraid but didn’t panic, trusting that the seventh
okami-san
had trained her well and knowing that if she hadn’t, then her own fate would be sealed.

With great difficulty Konoe Akira began the process of rising from his stool. Anna, fearing for his dignity if he should fall, desperately wished to help him to his feet but dared not touch him. In a few minutes her hands would play across his entire naked body as she assessed the requirement of the rope. But now she was forced to remain seated while he struggled, his eyes fierce with determination and his lips pulled tight. She sighed, inwardly relieved when at last he stood. She too rose, ready to bow. Instead her host walked over to the yellow blossom and removed it from the slender vase. ‘Now I shall go to my bedchamber, First Vase,’ he announced, then indicated the host door. ‘Then you must follow in five minutes. I shall place this blossom at the doorway to my bedchamber so that you know where to enter.’ He bowed. ‘Ho!’

Anna returned his bow. She was to learn that the interior of the entire left wing of the brewer’s mansion had been converted into an authentic Japanese house to form the colonel’s private quarters. Yasuko would, of course, have known this, but she’d never mentioned it to Anna. Perhaps, she concluded, it was another of his many ‘forbiddens’.

After five minutes she left the tea ceremony room and soon enough found the door with the formal yellow chrysanthemum. It had been placed in a duplicate glass vase, the Japanese officer’s sense of perfection unable to allow him to simply abandon it on the heavy teak floorboards that extended to the entrance of the rice-paper doorway.

Without knocking, Anna entered into a room that contained no furniture except an inbuilt cupboard with sliding doors that was used to store the futon, padded quilt and bean-filled pillow. Now all of these lay in the required format in the centre of the room. The wooden platform, though more carefully made than the one built in her bedroom, was constructed to exactly the same dimensions. It was, as Anna had previously guessed, another concession to Konoe Akira’s stiff leg.

Anna had long ago realised that Konoe Akira, trained from the very beginning of his military career to exercise command, was a man who thought everything out and left nothing to chance. It would have been his idea to have the platform built in her bedroom. She knew now that if she had been trained by the
okami-san
to work on the floor, kneeling in the traditional manner instead of learning to adopt a new and slightly different posture, when suddenly confronted by a platform her technique would have been entirely wrong. Anna now saw that beside the platform lay the cotton bag containing the hemp ropes.

‘I will switch off the lights and remove my
yukata.
Then I shall hand it to you so that you may return it to me when it is over.’ He pointed to the cotton bag. ‘Perhaps you would like to arrange them?’

‘That will not be necessary,
Konoe-san
,’ Anna said softly. ‘With your permission I will first have to explore your whole body with my fingers, you should enjoy the —’

‘You may do as you wish, First Vase,’ he said, cutting her short. Anna realised for the first time that he too was nervous. She was his work of art and he was about to find out whether he had created in her the perfection of the ‘Divine Threefold Experience’, his sole reason for bringing her into his complicated emotional life.

Konoe Akira switched off the light, plunging the entire Japanese house into darkness. Moments later Anna received the gown from him and placed it where she could retrieve it again.

This was the moment, the first time she had ever touched the severe and often frightening Japanese colonel. She could hear the words of Korin, the seventh
okami-san
, in her head: ‘Anna-san
, do not trust your eyes; before you begin, even if it is light, close them, then feel the texture and the tone of the skin, work the whole body with your hands and the tips of your fingers, let the rope find its own path, pull it tight not only with your hands but also with your heart and spirit, respect what you are doing, honour your patron and he will willingly grant you power over him.
’

Anna’s hands began to work in the dark, gently massaging and stimulating various parts of his body and discovering its secrets as well as every curve and hollow. Finally, after about twenty minutes, she took up the first length of rope.

She had been trained well and discovered the wrapping was an easier task when performed on a firmer male body. She listened to the pitch of his groans as she moved him into the required asymmetrical position while still accommodating the stiff knee. Sometimes he’d emit a soft moan or sigh of satisfaction as her pliant fingers travelled ahead of the rope, feeling, judging, listening, massaging and finally sensing the agony and ecstasy in his mind.

It took her almost an hour to wrap him before she came to the part the seventh
okami-san
had called the ‘Exquisite Pain’, the wrapping of the genitals. Anna had only performed this process on the suede imitations and now didn’t know what to expect. From this point on she knew she was on her own. If she failed, then the skill that had preceded this moment would be utterly without merit.

Anna worked slowly, carefully judging exactly the right pressure with her fingers until the Japanese officer’s erection climaxed at the precise moment she delivered the final wrap to send a shock through his body that, mixed with his ejaculation, created the ultimate moments of perfection, the ‘Exquisite Pain’. She allowed the pleasure and the pain to build and build until she had completely drained Konoe Akira’s senses and he lay whimpering like a small child in the dark.

It was then, as if from nowhere, she felt complete power over her
uke
surge through her body. Anna knew with absolute certainty that she was safe as long as Colonel Konoe Akira remained alive.

She began to unwrap him, massaging the parts where the ropes had tightened. It took Anna almost fifteen minutes to disentangle him and to return the blood flow to parts of his exhausted body. She then placed the
makura
, a bean-filled pillow, behind his head and the light summer
kakebuton
,
the comfort blanket, over him before squatting in the geisha manner on her heels beside the platform to wait.

The seventh
okami-san
had told her that sometimes patrons slept an hour, sometimes eight hours, exhausted; their bodies completely drained. But after only fifteen or so minutes Konoe Akira sat up and called for his
yukata.
Without turning on the light, since his eyes and hers were now adjusted to the dark, he rose from the futon. ‘I will bathe and return soon, First Vase. Please wait in the room you entered when you came.’

It was the first time he had ever couched a request with a casually polite ‘please’ since she’d known him. ‘I am at your service,
Konoe-san
,’ Anna replied.

‘You are everything I had hoped for, First Vase. Yellow highlighted by white — perfection!’ She could see the outline of his tall body as he bowed. ‘Ho!’ he said, then turned abruptly to cross the room.

Anna bowed in the prescribed manner. ‘I am glad you are pleased,
Konoe-san
,’ she said to his retreating back. In the dark, even if he had faced her, he would not have seen that she was smiling to herself. Anna Van Heerden was no longer afraid.

The lights suddenly came back on and Anna returned to the tea ceremony room, where she placed the pot and cups back on the tray. She took it through the door Yasuko had knocked on that led to the colonel’s rooms and placed it at the side to take back to the kitchen when she returned upstairs to change into a sarong prior to going home. Then she went back to the first room, where she sat and waited on the guest cushion provided for her.

Anna was not sure how she felt. She knew she had crossed a line where there was no return and gained a power over her captor that would keep her safe. But she felt as if she wanted to go somewhere very quiet to weep. The four-and-a-bit months of her second instruction had almost been a game; now she knew her innocence was gone, lost in the dark to ‘the starlight’. She had been temporarily blessed by the fact that she was no longer in danger, but wondered if she had the right to know what she had come to learn in the second instruction and exploit for the first time tonight. Was it a knowledge that would taint her soul forever?

Konoe Akira, with his hair still wet and combed in the Western manner and wearing a fresh
yukata
, came through the host door. He carried a flat silver box with slightly rounded edges about twice the size of his cigarette case and again twice the depth. He placed it silently on the table and Anna noted that his name had been inscribed in Japanese on the lid. From his gown he withdrew a highly polished, black persimmon chopstick, the same as the ones she remembered were made from the heartwood of the sacred tree. This too he placed beside the box. Then he opened the elegant silver object and she saw that it contained four glass ampoules and two gleaming stainless-steel syringes.

‘I would like your cooperation, First Vase,’ Konoe Akira said, speaking for the first time.

‘Willingly,
Konoe-san
, but I have not received instruction in this. With these syringes,’ Anna added lamely.

The Japanese officer smiled. ‘Be thankful for that, but the task does not require training.’ He withdrew a clean white handkerchief from his gown and wrapped it around his left upper arm, binding it once and holding the ends. ‘Place the heartwood where I am about to tie the knot, First Vase,’ he instructed.

Anna moved to his side of the table and taking up the chopstick placed its centre across the first bind, holding it steady while Konoe Akira finally secured it in place with the second tie. She realised that it was a task he could, with a little effort, perform himself; that now he simply desired her involvement. Then he reached out and removed an ampoule and syringe from the box, snapped off the glass top and inserted the syringe, drawing the liquid upwards into the thirsty stainless-steel cylinder. ‘Now twist the heartwood around so that it tightens. I will tell you when to stop.’ Anna did what she was told while Konoe Akira clenched and released his fist. ‘Thank you, that is sufficient.’