Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing

“People mix you up a lot?”

“Yeah, ‘til the time we were eight. That was the year I lost a finger; after that, nobody mixed us up again.”

Saying that, like a concert pianist concentrating, she set her hands down on the counter, her fingers lined up neatly. I took her left hand, and gazed at it carefully in the light from the recessed lighting. It was a small hand, cool as a cocktail glass, looking completely natural, as if it’d been that way since birth, four fingers lined up happily. That naturalness was almost a miracle, at least it was more charming than if she’d had six fingers.

“My pinky was cut off by a vacuum cleaner’s motor when I was eight years old. Popped right off.”

“Where is it now?”

“Where’s what?”

“Your pinky.”

“I forget,” she said, laughing, “you’re the first one to ever ask me that.”

“Doesn’t it bug you, not having a pinky?”

“Yeah, when I put on gloves.”

“Other than that?”

She shook her head.

“I’d be lying if I said I never worried about it. Still, I’m only as worried about it as other girls are about the thick hairs growing on their necks.”

I nodded.

“What do you do?”

“I’m in college. In Tokyo.”

“You’re visiting home.”

“Yeah.”

“What’re you studying?”

“Biology. I like animals.”

“Me too.”

I drank the rest of the beer in my glass and nibbled on a few French fries.

“Hey…there was this famous panther in Bhagalpur, India who, over three years, managed to kill 350 people.”

“And?”

“So they called this panther hunter, an Englishman, Colonel Jim Corvette, and he shot that panther and one hundred twenty-five panthers and tigers. Knowing that, you still like animals?”

She snuffed out her cigarette, then took a sip of her wine and gazed at my face as if admiring it.

“You’re definitely a little strange, you know?”

Half a month after my third girlfriend died, I was reading Michelet’s La Sorciere. I knew that book well. In it, there’s a line that goes something like this:

“In the Lorraine region, there was a prominent Judge Remy who burned eight hundred witches, and was jubilant in his ‘Purge of Witches’. He’d say, ‘My justice is widespread, the other day we caught sixteen persons, and without hesitation we drowned them posthaste.’”

-Shinoda Ichiro, Translator

If I say my justice is widespread, it might be better to say nothing at all.

The phone rang.

My face was sunburned from my trip to the pool, and I was in the midst of cooling it off with calamine lotion. After letting it ring ten times, I brushed the checkerboard of neatly cut cotton strips off my face and rose from the chair to take the receiver.

“Afternoon. It’s me.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You in the middle of something?”

“Nope, nothing at all.”

I took the towel draped around my shoulders and wiped my stinging face.

“I had fun yesterday. Most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

“That’s great.”

“Hm, yeah…you like beef stew?”

“Yep.”

“I made some, but it’d take me a week to eat all this all by myself. Wanna come over and eat some?”

“If it’s all right.”

“Okay, be here in one hour. If you’re late, I’m pitching it all into the garbage. Understand?”

“Yes…”

“I just hate waiting, that’s all.”

Saying that, she hung up before I’d had a chance to open my mouth.

I lied back down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for about ten minutes, listening to the Top 40

on the radio, then I took a shower and shaved my face cleanly with hot water, then put on a shirt and Bermuda shorts just back from the dry cleaner’s. It was a pleasant-feeling evening.

Watching the sun set parallel to the beach as I drove, I stopped at a place by the highway on-ramp to buy chilled wine and two cartons of cigarettes. She’d cleaned the table, and in the space between the shining white dishes, I was using the edge of a fruit knife to wrest the cork out of the bottle. The moist steam from the beef stew made the room humid.

“I didn’t think it’d get this hot. It’s like Hell.”

“Hell is much hotter.”

“Sounds like you’ve been there to see it.”

“I heard it from someone. As soon as you’re about to go crazy from the heat, they move you somewhere cooler. As soon as you recover a little, they toss you back into the heat.”

“Just like a sauna.”

“It’s like that. But sometimes, when people go crazy, they don’t put them back in.”

“What do they do with them?”

“Drop ‘em off in Heaven. Then they make ‘em paint the walls. After all, the walls always have to be perfectly white. They get real upset if there’s even a single spot. Hurts their image.

“Thanks to the constant painting from morning ‘til night, these guides usually ruin their windpipes.”

She didn’t ask any more after that. After carefully picking the debris from the cork from the inside of the bottle, I poured us two glasses.

“Cold wine, warm heart,” she said when we toasted.

“What’s that from?”

“A television commercial. Cold wine, warm heart. You ever seen it?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t watch television?”

“I watch it a little. I used to watch it all the time. My favorite was Lassie. The original Lassie, I mean.”

“You really do like animals.”

“Yeah.”

“If I had the time, I’d watch it all day. Anything. Yesterday, I was watching this panel discussion with biologists and chemists. You see it?”

“Nah.”

She took a sip of wine and then shook her head slightly, as if remembering something.

“You know, Pasteur had a lot of scientific intuitiveness.”

“Scientific intuitition?”

“…what I mean is, normal scientists think this certain way. A equals B, B equals C, so it follows that A equals C, you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“But Pasteur was different. He already had A equaling C in his head, is what I mean. No proofs or anything. But the correctness of his theories was proven by history; during his life he made countless useful discoveries.”

“The smallpox vaccine.”

She set her wineglass on the table and narrowed her eyes at me.

“Um, wasn’t Jenner the one who made the smallpox vaccine? You sure you’re in college?”

“…rabies antibodies, then pasteurization, yeah?”

“Bingo.”

She managed to laugh without showing her teeth, a seemingly practiced skill, and then she drank her glass dry and poured herself a new one.

“On that panel discussion show, that’s where they called it ‘scientific intuition’. Do you have it, too?”

“Almost not at all.”

“Don’t you wish you did?”

“It’d probably come in handy for something. I’d probably use it when there’s a girl I wanna sleep with.”

She laughed and went into the kitchen, then came back with the pot of stew and a bowl of salad and some rolls. Little by little, a cool breeze finally started to blow in through the open window.

We took our time eating while we listened to her record player. During that time she mostly asked me about college and my life in Tokyo. Nothing too terribly interesting. About the experiments where we used cats (of course we don’t kill them, I told her. mostly just psychological experiments, I said. However, in truth, in eleven months I killed thirty-six cats, large and small.), and the demonstrations and strikes. Then I showed her the scar from when the riot policeman knocked out my front tooth.