Andrew Miller - One Morning Like a Bird

For a week of winter nights, the child in a crib at the end of the bed, they are cautious lovers. She has, she confides, not quite recovered from the birth. She does not give him details. He is grateful. She leads him into other ways, things she heard about perhaps during her confinement at the Bullseye Piano Academy, those idle hours in the company of Miss Ogilvy’s girls. When the baby wakes, they roll apart. For Yuji, there is something fascinating, something faintly unnerving, in the way she can, inside a few seconds, change the use, the aim of her body. One moment arched and hurrying after her pleasure, the next bent over the child, a mother entirely. And when the baby is soothed, she climbs up the bed with her appetite intact, as if all of it, nursing and lovemaking, were one continuous thought, one line of the brush.

Tokyo, 3 March: the Festival of Dolls. They dress up but go nowhere. Baby Emile has his arms threaded through the sleeves of his Chinese jacket. Alissa wears the rose kimono with the dark blue obi. Yuji, after much teasing, much prompting, also puts on a kimono, one of Father’s, which he carries from the house in Hongo under the bemused gaze of Miyo. It is the first time he has worn a kimono since middle school, and looking at himself in the bathroom mirror at Kanda (with the pretty tiles all around it, silhouettes of courting couples in frocks and frock coats), he sees Father as a young man, clean-shaven and scowling. Sees Mother as a young man? But more than this — and beyond the fleeting irritation of realising that a person does not grow away from his parents but towards them — he sees a figure as Japanese as the Sumida river. This is the creature Feneon baulked at (‘ You . . ?). The native Japanese out of his borrowed fashion and dressed again as he was intended. An exotic to them. A little exotic even to himself. He tugs at the obi, tugs at the heavy grey collar. He is not even sure he is wearing it correctly, that he has done everything he should, and yet, as he straightens his back and softens his shoulders, it begins to belong on him. He tries out a half-dozen different faces, turns left and right in front of the glass. It strikes him that he might make a passable actor. Then, less comfortably, comes the thought that he might, if he is not careful, end up as nothing, a being with no convincing identity at all, a stranger among strangers.

Alissa cooks the chicken Yuji paid excessively for at the butcher’s in Shitaya. A scrawny carcass but fresh. They roast it, eat it with bowls of rice, a salad of grated cabbage. They drink wine, more than usual. Alissa teaches Yuji, thigh to thigh on the piano stool, the first two bars of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, then, singing her own accompaniment, shows him one of the dances she learnt at Mrs Yamaguchi’s.

‘You’ll tire yourself out,’ he says.

‘What does that matter?’ she asks, a sudden sharpness to her voice he does not respond to, that he pretends not to understand.

The moment passes but the day ends with a confused exchange of glances. She wants him to comfort her. He doesn’t know how. In the morning he works with Fujitomi. There has been no snow for a week, and on the verges of some of the roads they pass in the blue van the flowers of the plum blossom show themselves tenderly against the darker world behind.

After lunch he goes back to Kanda. Alissa, her hair tied up in a cloth, is scrubbing the wooden boards of the hall. Yuji helps her to stand. Briefly, she rests her head against his chest, then sends him through to the salon where Emile is in a makeshift cradle of cushions on the sofa. Laboriously, the baby focuses on Yuji’s face, frowns to find it is not the face he expects, but does not cry.

‘I’ll take him into the garden,’ calls Yuji.

‘Be sure to wrap him warmly,’ she calls back.

In the garden, he walks on the newly uncovered grass, alone with his son. For now, out here, on what might be the first true day of spring, there is not, it seems, a single troubled thought in that small, fragrant head. Rested, fed, cleaned, the child is between appetites, and lies with his cheek against Yuji’s arm, one hand drowsily fingering the air. What is he looking at? The pattern of the branches? A tail of cloud? Yuji talks to him. It is strange the things one says to an infant, the confidences, the declarations one drops into the wide, brown stare of such a child. How long will it last, that gaze unadorned as a dog’s? Another year? Less than that? What will this face be in two or three years? What will he sound like? How will he laugh ?

He is absorbed in this walking, this questioning, this careful circling of the tree, when he hears the doorbell. He has been expecting it, of course, privately counting off the days, so when he comes in to find Alissa in the salon, the unfolded telegram in her hand, his first emotion is relief. He waits, watching her, his fingers softly tapping a heartbeat on the baby’s back.

‘Papa,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s there. He’s found a house.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s sent for me.’

The baby stretches, grows impatient in Yuji’s arms.

‘I am to go to Miss Ogilvy’s. She is arranging everything.’

‘Miss Ogilvy?’

‘Yes. The tickets. A ship.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’ The word barely audible. After a moment, and very gently, she takes the baby from him and steps back.

‘Will you come to Yokohama with us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Papa says you should look after the keys.’

‘Keys?’

‘To the house.’

He nods. ‘If I have to leave, I’ll give them to Fujitomi.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And my uncle’s address. I’ll give you my uncle’s address. The farm.’

‘Yes.’ She brushes her lips on the baby’s head. ‘It’s been nice, though, hasn’t it?’

He has hoped for another week, perhaps even two, but does not get them. After three days they are on the train to Yokohama, a pair of suitcases, far too big for the luggage rack, on the floor by their knees.

At the academy, their ringing is answered by Miss Ogilvy in person. They drag the cases inside. In the billiard room, the table is covered with a dust sheet and all the chairs have been herded to the corners of the room. The walls are bare. The women have been taken down, put away somewhere, but it is not until the household is all together in the dining room that Yuji finally understands that the academy is finished with. Miss Ogilvy and at least three of her girls will be going with Alissa to Singapore. The rest, presumably, will be taking other ships to other destinations. No one is staying.

‘I have written to the President,’ says Miss Ogilvy, helping herself to a crab’s claw from one of the little boxes sent up from China Town. ‘I have offered this house as a headquarters for the army of occupation.’

‘The President?’ asks Yuji, to whom these remarks seem to have been addressed.

‘Of the United States,’ says Miss Ogilvy. ‘I seriously expect him to accept the offer.’ She fixes him with the kind of penetrating stare her narrow face is peculiarly suited to producing. ‘Unless,’ she says, ‘you think Japan will win the war.’

‘What war?’ asks Yuji, flummoxed. ‘A war with the United States?’

She is sucking the meat from the claw. She nods.

‘The imperial navy,’ says Natasha, ‘can’t wait more than a few months. They won’t have any oil left.’

‘We were told that by an admiral,’ says Sandrine. ‘So we know what we’re talking about.’

‘You should learn English,’ says Rose. ‘When the Americans come, you can do business with them. Then Emile will have a rich daddy.’

An hour later, without a word to Yuji or any sign at all of what in these last days has been between them, Alissa goes up to bed with Emile. The others sit on at the table playing cards and drinking. One by one they drift off.