Andrew Miller - One Morning Like a Bird

‘When you were little,’ says Yuji, struggling to make sense of her story, ‘you must have thought the servant was your mother.’

‘Don’t they say a duckling will follow whatever it sees first, even if it’s a dog or a monkey or the farmer’s wife? Later I realised there was something strange about it, though when I asked questions — I spoke good Cantonese by the time I was three — Songlian would only say, “Speak to Papa,” and when I asked him, it was always, “When you’re older.” I was eleven before he told me all this. He sat me down in the kitchen one night, cooked me oeufs en cocotte and poured me my first glass of wine.’

‘You were shocked?’

‘No, I don’t think so. And Papa made it sound as though I was a little girl in a fairy tale, you know, arriving in a basket carried by an old woman who was obviously a sort of good witch. But later I went through a time of wanting, very desperately, to see her, Suzette, I mean. I would look at the women in the market, the ones with children my age, wonder if one of them was her, if she would look up and somehow recognise me. When we came to Japan, of course, that stopped. It was a relief, really . .’

‘And she was French?’ asks Yuji.

‘Not, perhaps, in quite the way Papa is.’

‘No?’ He waits.

‘I have never,’ she says, ‘seen a photograph of her. I don’t think there is one. Papa tells me she was very pretty, that she was tall, that she was a good dancer. My mirror tells me she was also probably mixed race. Don’t you think so?’

She looks at him, her eyes wide with some mute appeal, some silent defiance, and for several seconds they stare at each other until Yuji drops his gaze to his glass. Is this the answer to the riddle of Alissa Feneon? A mixed-race girl? Cautiously, he raises his eyes again. She has turned a little in her seat, turned away as though to make it easier for him to study her. And suddenly he believes he can see it, as though over the bones of her skull she is wearing a score of faces, tissue-thin, and one of these — not the top or the one below or the one below that — but one of them is a face out of the East, an intrusion.

‘I think I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell the others,’ she says. ‘It’s not as if it’s important or anything.’

‘No,’ says Yuji, manoeuvring the remains of his Wiener schnitzel to the edge of his plate. ‘No.’

At the end of the room, the young officers have started to sing. Just two or three at first, but soon the others join in and all of them beat time with their glasses. A glass shatters. Alissa asks Yuji to call for the bill. When it comes (on a little silver salver) she pays with a note from the purse she keeps inside a fold of her obi.

The waiter brings them their coats, helps Alissa into hers. ‘ Vous êtes Française ?’ he asks.

‘ De Saigon,’ she says. ‘ Et vous ?’

‘Genève.’ He grins at her, the permitted intimacy of a fellow foreigner, then nods to Yuji, holds back the red plush curtain and they leave the Snow Goose with a chorus of ‘Oh! Our Manchuria!‘ ringing in their ears.

On the pavements of the Ginza, the mild air has brought out an evening crowd of strolling couples, office workers, street hawkers, mobile fortune-tellers. Outside a drinking shop (a place that used to be known as the Lenin), the doorman claps his hands for business, while across the street a gang of students are ragging each other noisily in the neon shadows of the billiard parlour.

Yuji has his usual trouble with the taxis, losing out to people who flagged them more aggressively or who, the moment they saw one approaching, sprinted recklessly into the middle of the road. When, at last, he succeeds in stopping one, he takes his place in the back beside Alissa. She gives the driver the address of the house in Kanda. From there — or so he assumes — he will collect his bicycle, make some remarks about how enjoyable the evening has been, about seeing each other at the next meeting of the club, then wave to her and ride home. But when they step down from the taxi and the taxi leaves, she tells him she has something she would like him to see. Would he mind coming inside for a few minutes?

Hanako, who does not live at the house, has long since left. Alissa uses her own key to open the door. In the salon, Beatrice snorts, shakes with excitement. Alissa put on a side-lamp, drapes her coat over the back of the sofa, excuses herself. Yuji waits by the piano. He lifts the lid and touches, but does not depress, a white key at the bass end of the keyboard, then closing the lid, he walks to the half-open door of Feneon’s study.

Through the unshuttered window, moonlight picks out a pattern in the rug and lacquers the familiar edges of things — the bookshelves, the Buddha, the metal lock of the projector box. He glances over his shoulder, then steps inside, performs a quick circuit of the room, swivels the swivel-chair, and made bold by the dark, sits in the chair, resting his palms presidentially on the desk’s broad surface, the thumb-deep slab of bolted mahogany, and decides that the West’s ascendancy — that dominance the generals and admirals seem so personally humiliated by — comes, in part, from the solidity of the objects they surround themselves with, while the Japanese live among what is fragile and evanescent, in homes any man in a moderate rage could pull apart with his bare hands. Would they really, one day, have to fight these pragmatists who long ago put their faith in iron and steel and high explosives? What is this inevitability everyone seems to have agreed to believe in? This urge to lie down together in the fire?

When he hears Alissa, he moves hurriedly away the desk, from the impertinence of sitting where only Emile Feneon should sit. She pauses in the doorway, and before he can apologise to her, she says, ‘I love the smell in here. Don’t you? I’d like to have it in a little bottle so I could take it with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life.’

‘Go? Where would you go?’

She shrugs. ‘Nowhere unless we have to.’

‘But your father has discussed it with you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘You must have assumed it.’

‘You want to go to France?’

‘It’s far too late for that, don’t you think? Back to Saigon. Perhaps Hong Kong. As I said, we won’t go anywhere unless we have to. Japan is my home.’

‘I’m sure,’ he says, ‘there will be no need for you to leave. I’m sure . .’ He tries to think of some phrase, in Japanese or French, that will reassure her, but she says, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ And then, ‘Were you looking for something in here?’

‘What would I be looking for?’

‘I don’t know. The letter perhaps?’

With the light behind her he cannot see her expression, but he recognises the tone of voice, the streak of silent amusement in it. ‘It would,’ he says stiffly, ‘be unforgivable. It would—’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mean . .’

‘No.’

‘Of course not.’

‘But is it here?’

She laughs. ‘Probably. Though it would take us all night to find it. It might even be in the attic. There are boxes and boxes up there.’

‘You’ve really read it?’

‘Years ago.’

‘And you remember nothing about it?’

‘He’s your hero,’ she says, ‘not mine. I prefer Hitomaro.’

‘Hitomaro!’

“‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death. Now when the child whom she left in her memory cries and begs for her, all I can do is lift him and embrace him clumsily.” Isn’t it beautiful? But I was going to show you something,’ she says, ‘unless you’d rather stay here and start looking through the desk drawers?’