S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

He relents. For the rest of the day he stops trying to feed her. He can see the pain taking hold of her. He keeps asking how she is feeling, how much it hurts, over and over. Every other minute, until she can no longer answer. Initially, the answer stays the same; later it becomes just a movement of the head. He ascends the stairs to his room, back down, through the kitchen and out to the garden. The familiar route.

The gate bell rings. There is a video intercom for keeping out danger. It is Hisashi’s face that appears on the screen.

‘Hello!’ Hisashi bellows into the microphone, his wide forehead against the camera.

Then, louder, so that the speaker inside vibrates: ‘Hello?’

He lets him in.

‘And now?’

‘I’m dropping by to see how things are going!’ Even jollier than on the phone.

Hisashi walks further into the house, looking around avidly.

‘She’s sleeping, Hisashi, it’s not a good time—’

His mother’s voice from the bedroom, stronger than before: ‘I’m awake. Show the guest in.’

Hisashi walks ahead of him down the corridor. Then he stops, bends down. On the wooden floor, Hisashi finds an insect wing. Green and red with black spots. That of a locust, the kind that sweeps in swarms through wheat fields leaving not a grain behind. He holds it against the light, stretching it between his fingertips like a fan. In the bedroom his mother is waiting.

From Hanoi they fly together to Tokyo. Hisashi’s flat is so small that one has to fold away the kitchen counter to access the bath. It slots together like a three-dimensional puzzle: the water from the kitchen sink drains into the bath, the little dining table slides away on a track to allow the bed above the study corner to hinge out of the wall. Like a Rubik’s Cube. Click-click. A flap in the kitchen is lowered to reveal the bathroom mirror. Lights tilt in different directions. Doors slide away. Television and computer screens swing from niches. Paraphernalia fits into drawers.

He and Hisashi have to fold and brush past each other too. Each of them sleeps on an edge of the double bed, facing outward. He sleeps badly, dreaming that the bed snaps into the wall with them in it and that he is smothered together with Hisashi. He wakes up with Hisashi’s sleepy breath on his neck. The Japanese man has turned around and moved closer.

They spend as little time as possible in the flat. They attend a Monday-afternoon Kabuki performance. As tradition dictates, the male and female characters are played by men who have for decades acted the same role, their acting polished to perfection. The stage movements are stiff, stylised. The theatre is filled with Tokyo housewives who gasp with joy when an old man with swollen feet and a prominent Adam’s apple changes into a delicate young girl right before their eyes. The audiences know the piece, they anticipate each movement, each word, each note. They could see it another hundred times. Or a thousand. It will never bore them.

When they walk back to the flat, Hisashi pulls him by the sleeve.

‘Come, I want to show you something.’

They walk up a narrow staircase. At the top, a young woman is awaiting them. She smiles a broad smile. She takes him by the arm and leads him deeper into the building, but Hisashi gesticulates, no, it is he himself who is the client.

‘Ah!’ she says, as if having an epiphany.

She makes Hisashi sit down in front of a mirror. She holds up in front of him a catalogue with photos — coquettish schoolgirls with an index finger in the mouth, middle-aged housewives, bashful geishas, office ladies in pencil skirts. A short conversation follows, a negotiation. Hisashi points decisively at a picture.

She takes the make-up palette in her hand and starts working on Hisashi’s face. He is standing to the side, watching. From time to time she stands back, admiring her handiwork. Moves closer to add a detail or scrape something away. Then Hisashi gets a wig. Black straight hair styled in a bob. Excitedly, she pitter-patters to the next room. She is dragging Hisashi — a shy hand clutched over his mouth — behind her. He follows the giggling pair. She disappears between rows of clothes hangers and reappears with an outfit — a frock of cerulean silk. Then shoes. Hisashi undresses, standing there in his underwear, his face carefully made up and white against the shapeless brown body. Once he is dressed, they trot in single file to the next room, Hisashi now in high heels.

In this room, there is a runway, like at a fashion show. She makes Hisashi practise his walking in heels, one hand on the hip, mirrors all around. He is doing his best, but she shakes her head, claps with her hands, repeats her instructions emphatically. She shrugs her shoulders, turns to him as if he could help. She gives up, leaves the room muttering. The transformation is incomplete. Hisashi is unperturbed, looking at himself in the mirror over his shoulder, at his substantial derrière cocooned in silk.

They are back in the flat. Hisashi is himself again. His own face, his own clothes. The place transforms like a machine. Kitchen becomes bathroom, living room becomes bedroom. One can travel between rooms without moving an inch. Panels snap open and hinge and slide and swing. Drawers fit in their niches. Clasps click shut.

He is lying awake; Hisashi is snoring. When at last he dozes off, he dreams of Hisashi lying in a rice paddy, slowly swelling into enormity as gallons of water ooze into him.

Hisashi sits down in the room with her. He now keeps arriving unannounced at any hour of the day, simply making himself at home. Coincidentally, it happens whenever she is having a better day. She talks to him. She sits up, asks for tea, even eats a tiny corner of toast without prompting.

He withdraws, sits down outside in the garden. He opens up a blank notebook on a table of steel mesh under a red chestnut tree. Now and then a leaf falls on the page. Sprinklers switch on automatically, wetting the lawn. He wants to write a belated journal of his and Hisashi’s trip two years ago. A thorough report, day by day. He is trying to remember, to figure out what happened during the trip, if anything, and what it has to do with what is happening here now. The silver drops from the sprinklers hypnotise him. His pen hovers above the page.

On the surface it could well look like something else, this struggle of minute movements and intense strategy. Owing to unknown causes, his big toe has become infected. Overnight it has swollen like a clown’s nose. His mother notices it when he walks into her room barefoot. (Little escapes her gaze.) She is deeply concerned; she becomes fixated on the toe.

‘In the pantry,’ she says. ‘Epsom salts.’

‘It’s not important,’ he says.

‘Bring it.’

She makes him prepare a strong solution in a bowl with boiling hot water. It is virtually scorching him.

‘Keep it in.’

For almost an hour he has to sit like this under her supervision. Only once does she send him to fetch more boiling water. His wet sole leaves the single track of a cripple.

‘Let the solution draw out the infection.’

She flickers up somewhat, talks a little while his foot, so it feels, is sucking up water rather than expelling the impurity. He wants to take it out of the bowl.

‘Not yet. Wait.’

The next morning, when he wakes up, the toe is back to normal. She is sick as can be. Vomiting. Pain. Tiredness absorbing her into the earth. She exposes her shoulder with the morphine plaster. A little square of transparent plastic film. She pulls it off and drops it on the carpet, where it curls up and disappears in the sunlight.

‘And now?’

‘Doesn’t help anyhow.’

He presses his knuckles against his teeth.

‘Pills then? Even just paracetamol?’