The Snow Kimono (27 page)

How strange life is.

Katsuo waits.

She told me you had saved it for me…How it rippled in the light when Ume laid it
out!

Sachiko pushes herself up on her elbows. Katsuo cradles her head in his lap. Her
forehead is burning.

Oh, Katsuo, Katsuo…I’m so sorry. I cannot bear the pain. When will they come for
us?

Soon, he says. I am here with you. Just keep talking to me. It will help to take
away the pain.

He looks about. At the now moonlit sky. The attendant trees. Their ghostly blue shadows.
How quiet they all are. The snow silent all around them. Then he looks down at Sachiko.
At her swollen belly. Her snow kimono. Which has begun to bleed.

Now that he has seen this, his heart has ceased to beat.

Oh, my beloved Sachiko, he says to her. Talk to me. Talk to me. Please, he begs her.
Do not go to sleep.

After a moment in which the universe itself seems to hold its breath, she begins
to speak again. Her words weave themselves around the many already woven into his
memory. In the moonlight he can see her lips moving, he can see her fitful, cooling
breath, but he no longer knows whether she is speaking to him or not.

Chapter 27

SHE is a bird above the garden.

Ume has shown her the viewing platform. There are things up here that cannot be seen
from anywhere else. Twisted tree trunks reach up through the penumbral light. Boulders,
stone seats, small waterfalls, bridges. Pathways across the water. Small swarms of
tiny white camellia buds move about the garden like fireflies. She watches them disappear.
Moments later, further up the slope, another group appears. Then another, lit by
invisible beams of light. Here and there, she can see the reflected surfaces of the
flagstone paths. Elsewhere, half-hidden statues watch from the shadows.

The sound of a car engine drifts up to her. From its rise and fall she knows that
it is making its way slowly up the mountain road, the same one she and her father
drove up earlier that day. She recalls what Mr Ishiguro had said.

A car will come to pick you up at nine, Hideo.

She glimpses headlights through the trees. They disappear, reappear, disappear. She
waits. Then she sees them sweep around the last tight curve leading up to the driveway.
She hears the engine change pitch, and change pitch again. She sees the probing headlights
dip as the car comes to a stop. She watches the twin beams dim, dim, dim, as the
wrought-iron gates open. The car is now a glow advancing between the deeply creviced
hedgerows. Then its low dark form appears in the lights either side of the driveway.
A door to the house closes beneath her. The headlights disappear beneath the unseen
terrace.

She stands, her hands on the platform railing, listening. The garden fidgets below
her. Then, in quick succession, the sound of two car doors closing. A moment later,
a third. Headlights sweep across the tree tops at the far end of the house. A patch
of driveway lights up, begins to move. The outline of the great car follows in its
wake. Two small red lights gather in the road behind.

As it moves away from her, she can see that the car’s interior lights are on. Its
two almond-shaped rear windows are illuminated dimly. In them, like the pupils of
two eyes looking back up at her, she can see the silhouettes of two heads. The car
floats down the driveway. Out through the gates. Then it turns onto the road, towards
the beckoning city.

Chapter 28

IN her room, Sachiko stands looking out into the garden. She holds her breath, listens.
There is no breeze. No movement. No leaf stirs. The surface of the pond is mirror-still.
The lunar edges of the water-lilies lie flat and snug against their reflections.

She goes to the door. Opens it quietly. Looks out into the corridor. She tiptoes
barefooted into the half-darkened sitting room. The vast uncurtained windows look
out onto the terrace. Its shadowed surface is waiting.

She pulls the sliding glass doors aside and half-runs to the balustrade. How cold
the stone is on her feet. The sea unmoving. The glittering city lies suspended below
her. At its furthest ends, denser webs of light shimmer in the cool air.

The moon, huge and red, begins to rise above the horizon. Part-hoisted, it seems
to pause. A ribbon of light unfurls across the sea’s dark mass. It zigzags up to
her across the flat tiled rooves of the houses below.

Sachiko imagines herself scaling the balustrade, skipping down across these rooftop
stepping stones to the waiting sea. She sees herself dashing, barefooted, across
this glowing ribbon of light, plunging into the safe embrace of the moon. But she
is already too late. She has missed her chance. The moon has begun to move again.
With one last heft, it pushes itself free of the horizon. It hovers there unsteadily
for a moment, like a weightlifter lifting a weight, then rises effortlessly into
the sky.

She hears her father’s voice. He is calling her again.

Sachiko, Sachiko…

She goes to the sliding door, tries to open it. But it is locked. She pulls on the
handle.

Who would lock me out? she thinks.

Her father is standing inside the half-lit room, pacing back and forth. She realises
that he isn’t calling her after all. He is merely calling her name: Sachiko, Sachiko,
he is saying again and again.

Sachiko…

How was it that a name could contain so much sorrow, so much pain?

Father? she calls out.

But he does not answer. He seems deaf to her. She pounds on the glass with her fists,
runs closer to where he is standing. She pounds again. She waves her arms. Still
he does not see her. Instead, he keeps pacing.

Father!

She looks for a side door. But there isn’t one. A solid sheet
of glass now extends
seamlessly from one side of the terrace to the other. Keeping her out. She runs back
to where the handle was. It too has disappeared.

Father! she calls again, more urgently.

The moon is now high overhead. She is a tiny figure poised on the teetering horizon,
imploring the moon to return, to come back, to save her.

She awakes in the darkness of her room to voices. At first she thinks they are part
of her dream. But they come again. A man, two, and a woman. She hears the woman laugh,
her laughter like a ball bouncing down a staircase. She cannot place where they are.
Something crashes to the ground. Shatters. She hears a man’s voice, entreating his
companions to be quiet.

I thought that, at last, you had come home, she says. I pictured you raising a finger
to your lips.

The house returns to stillness. But now Sachiko is awake. She will not go back to
sleep.

She reaches for the lamp, turns it on. She is lying on her
still-made bed. She is
no longer wearing the snow kimono. Instead, she is wearing a loose night wrap. She
imagines Ume finding her in her room, asleep. Still dressed. She pictures Ume undoing
her kimono, rolling her gently to one side, then scooping up the armfuls of snow.
She sees her laying the night wrap out.

But surely she would have woken.

The snow kimono hangs against the wall like a sentinel. She lies there on the bed,
thinking about the voices she has heard. It is after midnight. The events of the
day jostle in her head. They settle for a moment. Then, like a flock of birds at
dusk, they take to the air, whirling round and round in the sky above her.

She sits up, rises, pulls her night wrap tightly around her. She goes to the door,
slides it open. The cool floor of the corridor on her bare feet reminds her again
of her dream. She makes her way down the darkened hallway. She stops outside her
father’s room. Listens. No sound comes from within.

Halfway down the corridor, a skewed lozenge of light floats on the floor. Vague aquatic
shadows are circulating there. In the darkness, she waits for her eyes to adjust.
She can see a fissure of light at the corridor’s far end. She can just make out the
panelled shadows of the door above it.

Then she hears their voices. A muffled exchange. A man’s voice, then a woman’s.

She stays standing in the corridor like this, listening. Barely breathing. A faint
shadow passes fleetingly through the bar of light beneath the door. She starts to
walk towards it.

She stands in the pool of light on the corridor floor, looking up through the window.
Tier after tier of half-illuminated tree limbs are etched against the night sky.
The tops of the trees are swaying. The whole garden seems to be moving. And yet there
is no sound. No frogs calling, no crickets. Even the water clock has stopped. It
is as though she is tethered to the ocean floor and is gazing up through the thick
and vitreous water, at a forest of strange and exotic sea plants undulating silently
above her. The voices come again.

I thought it was you, she tells Katsuo. I thought that you had come home. Then I
am outside the door, waiting, listening, my toes lit by the light coming from under
the door. I can feel my heart beating.

What if you open the door? I think. How will I explain my presence here? What will
I say? I am a guest in your house, someone whom you have not yet met. Or seen. Could
I lie? Could I say that I had become disoriented, that I was looking for my father’s
room?

I hear another noise. Like a mattress settling, or a floorboard creaking. I hear
a voice, a woman’s voice, something low, guttural, repeated. As if she is in pain.

I feel the heat rising to my face.

How shameful it would be to be discovered here, I think again. Outside your door,
listening.

Then I hear your laugh. Except that it isn’t your laugh. It is someone else’s. Someone
I know well.

It is my father’s.