Masako Togawa - The Master Key

At this moment, prompted by the child’s innocent question, the true answer stirred deep down in a corner of her mind. Her arm quivered as she wrestled with the problem; she tried to put it into words and failed. So once again she recited the lie, the fiction which she always produced when confronted with the question.

‘Well, a long time ago your teacher had a very close friend. We always used to practise the violin together. We were just like sisters; we attended the same Academy of Music, we shared this very room. We shared everything. But one day a competition was held; the winner would get a scholarship and be sent abroad to study. We both entered the contest. As the set piece was one at which I excelled, I took first place. My friend came second; she congratulated me with a smile, but deep in her heart there was bitterness and resentment. Shortly afterwards, she left this apartment and went back to her home in the country. She took with her one single strand of my hair, and do you know what she did? She made a straw effigy of me with my hair in the centre; everyday she would take it to the garden shed and drive a nail through the middle finger of the left hand of the doll. It was because her middle finger had let her down in the competition, you see.’

The child froze. He gazed intently at Suwa’s left hand, and said,

‘Oh what a terrible woman she was! She was jealous of you, Teacher!’

These words, the reverse of the real truth, stirred Suwa’s heart. Once again she felt the anguish of having come second in the contest. How bitter it had been for her! She wanted to blurt out the truth, to say,

‘I didn’t fail from want of skill. It was just that I didn’t have a decent instrument. Now she was all right—she had an Italian violin. Her parents were rich, whilst I was poor. I was beaten by money…’

For thirty years, this speech had been on the tip of Suwa’s tongue. Now once again it floated around her mind.

Well, she thought, as a result she went to Europe to complete her studies, whilst I was doomed to spend my days teaching children the fundamentals of music from Holman’s Primer . People would call it destiny, but I can’t just accept it like that. The old French Professor at the Conservatory—what was it he was always saying— ’C’est la vie, c’est la vie’ … But I’m not a fatalist—I resisted to the end. I felt sure that I would win.

She looked up at the corner cupboard that hung in her room. On top of it, covered in dust, she saw a battered old violin case. The renewed sense of defeat which had suffused her mind began to fade. She had not realised before how much the real answer to the question lay in that old violin case which had altered her whole life.

‘Well, let’s get back to practice. Now I’ve told you the reason, you’ll see that I can only play with three fingers whilst you can use four. So you should be able to do better than me, shouldn’t you?’

The child nodded his head. For the remaining thirty minutes of the lesson, he could not tear his eyes away from that frozen middle finger, the object of witchcraft and a curse.

When he had left, Suwa sat in a trance in the chilly classroom, which was divided from the rest of her room by a curtain.

On top of the piano there were several classical-style busts of famous composers. They glared down at Suwa, their features contorted by the agonies of genius, their hair wild and ruffled. She looked back at them, reflecting that artistic genius brings torments in its train, and that therefore much must be forgiven those who suffer it. The busts seemed to agree with her, and their expression towards her changed to one of soft forgiveness.

Ishiyama Noriko squeezed through a gap in the slate wall and made her way back into the inner garden of the building. It was five am and still half-dark, but a glow in the eastern sky and the crisp freshness of the air proclaimed that dawn was at hand. She was carrying a bottle of milk that had only just been delivered. At first it had chilled the palm of her hand, but now the temperature had risen to match her own and a light dew had formed on the glass. Certain sounds still echoed in her ears—the sound of the milkman sliding open the wooden gate, the jangle of bottles, the tinkle of the bell fixed to the gate. She was still trembling with excitement, and felt that she never wanted to take such risks again, but in her heart she knew that before the week was out she would steal another bottle of milk. Every day she would creep out as was her custom and forage for wood shavings for her stove; sometime soon she would again chance upon a freshly delivered bottle of milk that had carelessly been left within her reach. Just like a ripe fruit growing in someone’s garden, hanging over the wall, waiting to be picked… But sometime she would surely be caught by a furious householder—crime always brought punishment in its wake. She thought back to the first time when she had chanced upon a milk bottle waiting for her in a delivery box with a broken lock. She had not meant to steal it at all. She had slipped her fingernail under the cap, opened the bottle and just drunk a mouthful. But so small a quantity seemed to lack flavour. She replaced the cap; it seemed to her that no one would be able to detect what she had done. All would be well, she thought, and was about to return the bottle to its box when suddenly the first rays of the sun appeared, shining directly onto the bottle in her hand. They lit up the glass revealing her fingerprints which she felt had been etched onto the bottle so that they could never be removed.

There was nothing for it but to take the bottle home. And since then, every morning, she felt the challenge of milk bottles tempting her to do the same again.

‘Fingerprints.’ Few other words in the language seemed to exercise such a deep hold upon her. Two years earlier, when she had picked up a man’s wooden clog which had been abandoned by a dog, she had fallen into the hands of the owner, a cross-grained old gentleman who had dragged her off to the nearest policeman and accused her of theft. In order to scare her, the officer had told her that it would be a simple matter to apply a little powder to the clog, and that the fingerprints of the culprit would invariably be revealed. He had then released her with a caution, but his words had left their effect. The thought that a little powder could reveal her fingerprints on anything that she had touched unnerved her so much that the words burned themselves into her subconscious. Calcium … Fingerprints …

The inner garden was surrounded on three sides by the brick building. There were a few flowerbeds, but apart from a small greenhouse everything was covered by straw matting in winter. There was a large incinerator with a chimney in the middle of the garden. She skirted the garden along its eastern edge and made her way to the fire escape. Her room was just next to the window giving access to the third floor, and by placing an old wooden box on the stair she could get in and out with ease and without being observed. Such was her regular custom, and today was no different. She made her way quietly up the stairs, treading the iron steps cautiously with her rubber-soled shoes, and then, when she reached the second floor, she chanced to glance back and catch sight of something she had not noticed before. On top of the incinerator was a pile of old newspapers. Their whiteness was picked out by the early-morning sun.

She made her way back down the stairway and retrieved them. They were bound neatly with string, with a sheet of cardboard at the top and the bottom to hold them in shape. The cardboard in particular would come in useful for kindling her stove. Thinking no more of the matter, she returned with them to her room. It was not until that evening that she discovered something of significance in her find.