The Snow Kimono (22 page)

The engine noise rises. The men at the front of the bus begin to pull. The road is
now a river of mud. We see their feet slipping. The men at the rear have braced themselves,
ready to push. The engine revs again. The bus seems to move. The wheels begin to
churn. The bus falls back. The engine rises again. The two groups of men are shouting
to one another. Trying to establish a rhythm. Forward, then back. Forward a little
more. We can see their straining faces in the headlights.
The road is slippery, the
ropes are wet. Forward, back. Forward, back. The bus begins to break free. The wheels
begin to emerge. The engine noise is deafening.

The bus is almost out—all but one of the men behind it have stood back. Then the
wheels begin to spin. For an instant, nothing happens. The men at the front, who
have begun to relax, who have already seen themselves triumphant, brace themselves
again. The wet ropes snap tight. It is as if something ugly has been lurking in the
darkness above us. The bus begins to slip backwards. One of the men shouts a warning
to his companion, who is still behind the bus. Inexplicably, he is still pushing.
The brake lights come on. There is another shout. The man half-turns. And we all
see who it is. It is Hiroshi.

Unobserved, he has joined the men at the rear of the bus. Now he stands there alone,
open-mouthed, wild-eyed, looking back at us over his shoulder through the beating
rain. The bus looms over him. Someone, a woman, cries out. But now the bus appears
to rush, to lunge at him. It clubs him heartlessly backwards into the water. Which
seems to open up and swallow him. The underside of the bus hits the water with a
tremendous thump. A wall of water and mud bursts up over the semicircle of men at
the pool’s edge. Then it begins to settle, to drain back into the pool. We all think
Hiroshi will just rise up out of the water, coughing and spluttering. Looking foolish.
But he doesn’t. Instead, a brief, inhuman cry erupts from beneath the bus. A single,
strangled howl. Then nothing. The muddied surface begins to still.

It is clear that Hiroshi is trapped. The men at the rear leap forward, into the water.
Two of them begin reaching around, arms deep in the water, searching for him. There
is shouting. Some of the women drop their umbrellas. They rush to the front of the
bus, yelling to the men:
Pull, pull!
One of them is pounding on the driver’s door,
screaming something up to Mr Nakagawa, who realises something terrible has happened.
The engine roars again. The wheels begin to spin. The water churns. Steam from the
exhaust billows up over the bus. The two men have found Hiroshi. They have him by
one of his arms. They are pulling on it, trying to drag him free. I can see his wet
and bloodied hand above the men’s bent backs. It is opening and closing, as though
it is some ghastly mouth able to suck air down into his drowning body. But it isn’t.
And the bus refuses to move.

An hour or so after sunrise, we come around a bend in the road and there, sprawled
below us, is Osaka. The city spills down the mountainside towards the bay which lies
motionless in the early morning haze. Further south, along the coast, it is impossible
to see where the city ends. It dissolves into the grey and indeterminate horizon
beyond.

It took more than an hour to pull the bus free. In the rain. In the dark. The light
from the lamps grown dim. With everyone shaken, silent, as if we were all already
aware that each of us had been brought there for some obscure and terrible
reason
to witness what had unfolded. We all felt guilty. We could not look at each other.
But we all understood one thing. We had escaped. Only Hiroshi had been made to pay.
And his father.

When the bus was finally pulled clear, Hiroshi had bobbed to the surface like a cork.
No one moved. At first. We all stared at his floating body, watching it turn slowly
in the rain. Then his father, and one of the other men, waded into the pool to lift
him free.

I can still see Mr Nakagawa kneeling at the rear of the bus, in the yellow mud, on
his own, with his dead idiot son cradled in his lap, rocking him slowly back and
forth, saying something over and over, which I cannot hear.

How many times has Sachiko told Katsuo this story? How many times have they sat on
the terrace at night looking down at the jewelled city, or in the darkness of the
lit garden, listening to the frogs, the slow tock, tock, tock of the water clock,
the strings of a shamisen?

Some nights, they would walk through the maze of narrow streets above the house,
to find out where the music was coming from. As they walked the sound seemed to change
location, echoing softly off the hillside, or a stone wall, or the air itself. Sometimes
far off, sometimes near, it constantly circled around them, a kind of playful living
thing. And yet so melancholy.

And all the time, at his urging, Sachiko would be talking to him.

Tell me again about helping your grandmother lay the kimono out on the snow, tell
me about the horses, or Kimiko, he would say. Tell me about the night you stole away,
about the lovers in the pool.

And he would see Sachiko’s shadow darting through the trees as they walked. Once,
on their way home, Sachiko stopped, grasped his sleeve.

Listen, she said. It sounds like the music is coming from our house.

They listened for a long time. She was right. It did sound like it was coming from
their house. But, of course, it wasn’t, and never could have been.

In the garden, Katsuo pictures the anvilled clock’s tipping. Slow, then quick, the
water spilling from its bamboo lip. Then faster still, as if it too is hurrying back
to its tock, tock, tock.

How many times had he listened to her voice in the darkness? Each time she added
something new. Some just remembered thing. He kept having to go back, to change what
he had written.

No longer. Now there is nothing more she can tell him.

Chapter 20

SHE hears them first. Their hooves, thundering up the slope. The sound hangs in the
crystalline air. Two horses, black as night, rise up out of the snow like phantoms.

The mare stands still in the sharp morning light. Ears twitching. Vigilant. The stallion,
wild-eyed, circles. His dark flanks steaming. Rippling with uncontained energy. Anticipation.
Their shadows etching the radiant snow.

Sachiko lies hidden in her thicket, in the field above her house. She is a twelve-year-old
girl watching two horses circle each other. Their shadows coupling, uncoupling, then
coupling again. Their fogged breath. The steam clings to these apparitions in the
snow, like spirits reluctant to depart.

She sees the tremors pass in waves along the stallion’s flank. One after another
after another, like a shadowed sea. He paws the snow-covered ground. Nuzzles the
mare. Butts her haunches with his head, trying to turn her. She stands her ground.

He charges away from her, a sudden dark-hooved fury. Possessed by something he does
not understand.

Sachiko waits.

She hears the echoes of his hooves. Circling, elusive. Then, from a different bearing
altogether, the stallion rises up out of the snow again. He comes thundering back.
He stops just short of the mare. Tosses his head. With a start he veers away from
her again. Circles. She is his pivot. The locus about which his momentary being revolves.
His breath comes now in short exhortations. He paws the ground, is still.

She has never seen anything like it before. It is like some new and unimagined life
form, a creature as long and thick and smooth as her arm. That has come out to graze
from some hidden place deep within the stallion’s belly. It makes no sense. It hangs
there, its dark weighted head swaying just centimetres above the snow, as if it is
searching for something it has lost.

And then she understands.

The realisation is catastrophic. Her brain is reeling. This, she knows, has something
to do with her. Her future.

She watches the horses intently now. The two are coiled. Every muscle tensed. The
stallion so perfectly still he could be an artefact. Until his surface breaks. Without
warning, he lunges. Tears viciously at the mare, her mane. He rears.

Sachiko watching.

Now he strikes at the mare’s neck with his hooves. Again and again. He shies away,
turns a tight pirouette. Returns. Lunges at her neck again. His eyes glazed. There
is a kind of madness here.

She can see a dark trickle of blood issuing from the mare’s torn flesh. On the white
snow, a chain of blood-red looping drops. She, too, is locked in their trance.

The mare can no longer move. She is transfixed. Her bulging eyes waiting.

The stallion paws the ground again.

Their coupling is beyond imagination, beyond reasoning. Nothing has prepared Sachiko
for this. The awkward, urgent, clumsy manoeuvring. Confused hooves jostling in the
kicked-up snow. Their slow turning purposeful. They dance a dance to steps that only
they know. It is impossible. What they want. But, at last, the desired union. Images
from a grotesque dream. The stallion still bends to tear the mare’s already bloodied
neck, as if to anchor himself there.

Sachiko’s first instinct is to run, to intervene. To stop this bloody onslaught.
Now, watching, she cannot turn away.

Without warning, something white erupts against the stallion’s flank. Another explosion,
higher up, on the horse’s neck. A white peony bursting from the horse’s flesh. Then
another.

Sachiko knows what these are. She sees the concealed stones falling. Sees them instantly
swallowed by the snow.

Now they come in volleys. Their short arc brief against the perfect sky. As they
fall, white against white, it is impossible to see them. It is only when they hit
their mark that they are visible again. These snowballs packed with stone.

Then, miraculously, as though they too have risen up out
of the snow, half a dozen
boys are charging. They have been lying in wait. Now they emerge from behind the
snow-covered bushes. They are running, churning the soft snow, yelling, hurling their
missiles at the rutting horses. Who stop, still united, in the face of this incomprehensible
thing.

Sachiko emerges from her cover. Runs. Shouts: No! No! Don’t hurt them. Leave them
be.

But it is too late. The horses have broken apart. Another wave of snow-stones plummets
down on them. Then, with the spell irrevocably broken, the horses return to their
separate worlds. They pull away from each other. They turn, and plunge down the slope
again, away from her, their phantom shapes absorbed once more into the morning snow.

Sachiko feels her anger rise. The boys too have watched the horses disappear.

Why, she yells at them.

The boys turn to her, this girl who has spoilt their fun. There is a strange hiatus,
a recalibration. What to do to restore the equilibrium? One of the older boys steps
forward. He wedges his feet into the snow, leans back with his arm outstretched.
He is now a human catapult. He launches a snowball high into the air. It plummets
down. Disappears into the snow a metre or two in front of her. Then there is another.
Closer this time. Sachiko looks up to see each of the boys readying themselves. They
are all human catapults now. She turns to run. But the soft snow impedes her. She
can hear the thuk of snowballs landing around her. Unseen by her, one of the boys
has found a piece
of wood. He throws it after her. It turns end over end in the air.
It strikes her, high on her shoulder. It pierces Sachiko’s skin through her blouse.
She stumbles. Falls. Then she feels the pain, like a knife blade in her back. The
boys stop. They stand some distance away from her. This is not what they came here
for.