The Snow Kimono (28 page)

Suddenly the world is all turmoil. All the roosting birds have taken flight. The
dark-limbed trees have erupted into the sky. Now all the birds are wheeling about,
screaming. I am the crouched heart at the centre of this swirling mass. I raise my
hands to protect myself. To block the noise out. But a thousand wings beat at my
face.

My father, I think. What is he doing here?

As if to answer my question, I hear the woman’s laugh.

And then I understand the history of my father’s visits. I see how pathetic, how
old, how out of place he is. I see Mr Ishiguro’s fixed smiling face. I see my father
led astray. I see his tormented homecomings. The days that follow. His silences.
His inward-falling.

I recall his absences on the nights that follow his return. His descent into town.
To get drunk. To seek oblivion. I see his penitent returns. His pitiful remorse.
How he cannot look at me.

Does my mother know?

I see her face, resigned, bitter, defeated. And I know she knows.

Now that I understand, I know that there is no going back. I can never forgive my
father.

I have left my childhood behind. It has been wrenched from me. I am on my own.

Ume has told me something she should not have. She begs me not to tell you. You kept
the snow kimono for me. Petals are falling from the sky. The bath has tiny red boats
floating in it. Ume stirs them in with a wooden paddle. When I open my eyes, someone
is staring back at me. She has a white face. Red lips. It is raining again. The rain
beats down like stones. I think the roof is caving in. Who amongst them did they
want to punish? Ichiro has not come home. My beloved son is lost. You still have
not returned. Whose words are these?

I start to piece things together. Although not in the way things turned out. I had
no idea, then, that I was coming here to be with you. But I had already guessed that
I had not journeyed down to Osaka with my father merely to accompany him, or to work
for Mr Ishiguro.

This is not now. In the snow. Not anymore. This is memory.

Sachiko is sitting on the ledge in the garden, swinging her bare, hypnotic feet;
she is standing on the terrace, looking down into the rain-cleansed city; she is
walking with him in the quiet streets above the house. She never tires of answering
his questions. And he never tires of asking them.

Sachiko has stopped talking. The trees have edged closer. Terror has finally found
him out. The long journey is over. There is nowhere to go. No one to help him. He
leans down into the sorrowing snow. To see if she is still breathing.

Part VI

JOVERT

Chapter 29

WHAT had Professor Omura said?
We can only see our lives through the eyes of another.
Did this include history? Hindsight?

Jovert went to the Bibliothèque Nationale. He phoned ahead, to arrange to see their
maps of Algiers.

All of them? the woman on the other end of the line asked.

He pictured her with the
phone tucked under her chin—prim, efficient, glasses, early fifties. Her hair tied
up. The type to tap her bundles of paper on the top of her pristine desk. Line them
up. Tap, tap, tap. Squeeze the straightened pile in the middle.

How many of them are there?

Just a moment. He heard her fingernails skittering on the keyboard. She was talking
to herself.

Let-me-see…No, no, I won’t be a minute. I’m-on-the-phone. The exasperated ‘o’ arched
like a playing card.
Merde
. Ask Gilles…I don’t know. What time is it? For God’s sake,
under
her breath. Here we go. Hmm…There are—eight hundred and seventy-nine. Yes.
Now a tiny three-point rapier flash: 8–7–9… Inspector?

That many?

Merde
? Okay. Younger. Early thirties? Yes, definitely, he could hear it in her voice
now. Maybe even younger.

Yes, that many. What, precisely, are you after?

He told her. He was looking for maps of the inner city. The Kasbah. The streets just
east of it. The harbour. Preferably from the fifties. And, if they had any, something
more recent. From the eighties—1985. Or last year, perhaps. To compare.

Algeria: 1958–59

That March morning, the light in the harbour had been blinding. Madeleine had lain
in their cabin. Still sick. Or sick again. She had spent the last twenty-six hours
crouched over the toilet, her head on her arm, throwing up.

Oh God, she had said. More than once. And he had knelt down beside her. His hand
on her back, rubbing her shoulders.

Oh God, oh God.

And her back would arch again.

It’s okay, Auguste. You should try and get some sleep. I’ll be all right.

His knees ached from kneeling. He thought of his six months training in Dien Bien
Phu. What it felt like to be tortured.
You have to
know
, their commander had said.
Kneeling forward. Bent over, hands tied behind their backs. The weighted helmet on
their heads. Another kilogram. The sharpened twin-tined bamboo spikes beneath their
necks mercifully capped. But it hurt. It hurt so badly you screamed. You wanted to
die. Until, in the end, your muscles—there were so many you didn’t know you had—collapsed.
You begged. Help me. Help me. Oh God, please, please. Get me
up
!

The competition between them fierce. How long could each of them last before they
gave up their secret word?

Or suspended upside down. Hands tied behind their backs. The madness set in train.
Their manacled ankles ratcheted apart. Until they were sure they were going to be
torn in two. Because this time they didn’t stop, even when you begged. Instead, they
left you alone. To think: Had something ghastly happened? Had they forgotten you?
Accidents did happen. They all knew that.

Later, you would see the film.

It was worse if you’d had breakfast first. With its tasteless supplement undeclared.
Today’s exercise is…Without telling you. That took half an hour before it took effect,
before your guts began to churn.

No, you don’t need to change. Yet.

The laughter nervous.

God, what now?

Only five got through to the next phase.

Some didn’t last. Were
never
the same.

Oh God, she says again.

The ship’s doctor came to see her, twice.

Madame Jovert, Capitaine.

How many months pregnant was she? Five. The middle of the second trimester. Had she
ever been seasick before? Jovert noted the assumption. He meant, on her previous
trips home.

Was it obvious she was not French, but French-Algerian? She didn’t have an accent.
If she did, he’d know. He was an expert in that kind of thing. The best in his class.
Madeleine had lived in Marseille most of her life, had studied there. Her skin was
no darker than anyone else’s from the south. The epidermal texture no different.

Maybe it was her eyes. The thing about her he loved most. Some tiny genetic inflection.
Their shape? Colour? Their deep aquatic green? But you had to be close to her to
see that.

The afternoon on their first day was the worst. The storm that had been building
all morning finally delivered up its wrath. The ferry began to heave, to make its
endlessly repeated slow ascent up the face of each oncoming wave, each one steeper
than the last, to balance briefly at the top, before the apex sideways-twisting roll,
the vertiginous descent. Into the next trough. A tiny calm. Then, the same slow climb
again.

The doctor would not prescribe her anything. A palliative. Which only made her worse.

He heard the toilet flush again.

The night before they left, he imagined them standing on the deck together, his arm
on her shoulder, the sea air fresh, watching the approaching city. But now it was
only him.

He remembered the morning calm on deck, Algiers on the horizon, raising his hand
to shade his eyes. The whitewashed walls of the houses impastoed onto the surrounding
hills concentrated the light like a lens, pinning the ferry to the coruscated sea
like a tiny upturned beetle. Exhausted, half-dead, still struggling on its back.
The reflected light an invisible membrane, keeping the tiny ferry at bay. He felt
the slow harmonic rise and fall of the engines beneath his feet. They were yet to
find their way in.

A departing tanker passed so closely it was like a moving wall. It loomed over him,
blocking out the sun. He watched the repeated pattern of its welded plates, the twin
hemline of rivets above the surging waterline a racing blur. He felt dizzy, the churning
water reaching out to pull him in. He pushed against the railing with his hands.
He saw the broken line of tankers stretching dreamlike out behind him towards the
horizon. All escaping back to Marseille.

And then they were there. An invisible wave of harbour stench washed over him: diesel
fumes, sea-ditched refuse, rotting fish, vegetables, sweat, excrement—donkey, human,
who knew what else; the smell of burning rubber. All concentrated by the governing
sun into its lush constituents, pungent, caustic, inescapable. It would seep down
the gangways now, and into the corridors, the passageways; it would seep under every
closed door, into the holds, the engine room, into every cavity, every blameless
empty space.

And there was something else, a delicate hint of something sweet, like an aftertaste
floating on the air. A note from somewhere
past. A memory. Bastille Day. The night
sky twitching. Fireworks exploding. The echoing scent of cordite.

Madeleine came up from her cabin to find him. She saw him at the rail. She went to
stand with him. Leant unsteadily against his arm, strands of her long hair twisting
about her face in the breeze.

I heard the engines slow, she said. I knew we must be here. Then I smelt the harbour.

How are you feeling now? he said. He put his hand up to her face.

I think there’s nothing left, she said. But the memory of her night turned her away.
She dry-retched over the side.

Oh dear, she said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, inspected the thin
moist smear.