S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

He sits down inside. He looks around him, tries to imagine how her absence will change every object, every piece of furniture and every ornament. He tries to imagine how a world without her would look.

He gets up and goes outside, feels the mince. It’s half-thawed. Watery blood is dripping onto the floor tiles. When he comes back inside and looks up, she is sitting on the sofa where he has just been, in his stead. Like her own future ghost. He is startled. He blinks.

‘Hello,’ she says softly, all innocence.

One corner of her mouth twitches into a little smile. She has noticed his consternation and patently understands what he is thinking. It’s the last time, he thinks, that she will remember how to smile.

Late afternoon the phone rings. The landline this time. Hisashi. He should never have given out the number.

‘I’m here now.’

‘Where?’

‘In a guest house.’

‘Where?’

The new lodgings, it turns out, are just around the corner.

Why? he wants to ask, but he contains himself. He curses himself for ever giving out the address. He does not invite him to the house, but agrees to meet him somewhere nearby for coffee.

‘Unfortunately, I have only ten minutes,’ he tells Hisashi.

They meet at a coffee shop in a shopping centre where the muzak and human noises drift up to the high glass ceilings, creating a constant undertone.

‘Do you remember Philippe?’ Hisashi asks. ‘He is dead.’

‘What? When? I didn’t hear.’

‘Month ago. Someone at the Alliance mentioned. Somewhere in Asia, drowned in a hotel swimming pool.’

He wants to hear more, but that is all Hisashi knows. What a banal end, he thinks. Too much champagne in the blood, perhaps — the accumulated residue of years of sipping the nectar of European civilisation. There is silence while Hisashi chews his cake.

‘I can help you here,’ Hisashi says in between crumbs. ‘Allow me.’

He is instantly furious. How dare he? What is it that’s driving this clumsy Japanese man’s behaviour, that’s keeping him here? Is there nothing, or no one, waiting for him in Tokyo?

‘No, Hisashi, you can’t.’

‘Come on, let me help.’

Does the man have the thick hide of a walrus?

From the Perfume Pagoda they travel to the coast, to Halong Bay. Dragon Bay. A large expanse of water, with two thousand islands. The islands resemble the rock peaks inland around the Perfume Pagoda. Steep and pointed, rising like mountains from the water, tropically overgrown. In between, wooden junks are navigating like warships: sails aloft, dragon heads spewing flames at the bows. He and Hisashi negotiate a price and sail out on a junk. They get a cabin. They will spend the night on the water.

The air is murky and turbid. Some little islands have inlets with floating villages. Rows of floats with wooden houses and moored boats. A woman is sitting on her knees on the edge of a float, gutting fish. Scales drift away from her in silver patterns. She bobs up and down in the junk’s wake, not looking up.

The anchor is dropped. Kayaks are lowered into the water. He and Hisashi row around one of the islands. On one side is a low entrance, so that, at ebb tide, one can only just row through. You have to pull your head into your shoulders, the rocky roof against your crown. When you can tilt your face to the sun again, you gasp: a perfectly round lake, inside the islet.

‘This island is a doughnut!’ Hisashi says, and laughs.

Steep, tropically overgrown slopes around the lake. Absolute silence. Something moving in the hanging branches. A tail appearing and disappearing amidst the foliage. He has read about the generations of shy monkeys that spend their lives here. They know every tree, every branch, even before they are born, a map of the slopes etched into their genes. He cannot get a proper view of any of them. Just flickerings of movement from the corner of the eye.

He hears a splash behind him. Then silence. When he looks around, Hisashi’s kayak is lying bottom up. The boat is in the middle of the lake. Ripples move towards the edges and the water settles again. Only he is left. And the invisible monkeys.

For a moment he enjoys the peace. Then he takes a deep breath, rolls over and dives down into the cold water. He gropes around, grabs onto a soft arm. He drags the weight to the surface. At least the fatty are lighter in water. Hisashi gulps for air. He bursts out laughing, spluttering and coughing. He himself finds nothing to laugh about.

Rowing back, they are chilled to the bone. In their cabin, he and Hisashi take turns in the shower. ‘You first,’ Hisashi says. His eyes are shiny.

His throat constricted earlier at the thought of the two of them together in this little cabin, but a calmness has come over him now. He is being emptied; his thoughts fill with water. He showers, wraps himself in a blanket. Hisashi takes too long and his shower is too hot. Steam fills the small room. The Japanese emerges, naked and shiny like a seal. He looks at the large smooth surfaces of the dark body. It is the first time he has thought of Hisashi as sensual. Hisashi stands there smiling; steam keeps rising from him. Hisashi stays standing like that until he pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders and walks out onto the deck.

Hisashi follows after a while, now also wrapped in a blanket. A child is approaching them slowly out of the mist, rowing a small boat standing up. He offers his wares: cans of Coke, a glittering fish. He quotes prices in dong and dollar. Hisashi leans forward, towards the water. He and the child have a conversation without understanding each other.

Out of the murkiness, more children come rowing towards them. The little boats cluster against the junk, bumping gently against the wooden hull. The children look up, stretching their hands towards the two figures in blankets, as if towards gods. Hisashi reaches out to them, their fingertips touching. The blanket slips from his shoulders. The children’s clothes are thin and dirty, their feet flapping in leaked water like misshapen fish. Children of the floating world. Water monkeys.

Shadows rise up from the water. Dusk. When he looks up, the haziness lifts for a moment. The current has fanned out the scales from all the villages’ fish scrubbers into a veil drifting from the bay, following the sun. Beyond the islets, the deep sea is gleaming. He suddenly wonders what the inhabitants of the floating villages do with their dead, whether they just quietly slip them over the edge. He can feel the earth tilting into darkness.

He wants to rejoice, drop onto his knees and pray into the empty winter wind. Yesterday he did not think she would survive the night. This morning she ate a scrap of toast the size of a thumb. And three black grapes. He counts the stems to which shreds of grape flesh still cling. Over and over. Like a child learning numbers. The number three: one plus one plus one. It moves him to tears.

The more she ingests without vomiting, the more his hand is strengthened. There is no longer any excuse. He looks over her shoulder while she loads rice onto her fork, grain by grain. She puts the fork down. Slowly, she shifts the plate towards him across the bed. It is almost too heavy for her. The pile of rice remains almost untouched, as white as the sheet stretching between them like a frozen sea. They look at each other. He is adamant. A tear runs down her nose. Slowly she props herself up on an elbow, stretches out a hand. With a fingertip she picks up a grain, brings it to her lips. She falls back.

‘There. I can’t do more than that for you.’

She is hardly audible. He leaves her in peace.

In the kitchen he looks at the plate. For all the toil and struggle and strategising, she has, over the last week, eaten less food than would fit into the palm of a child’s hand. The euphoria was misplaced. He is losing.