Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

What lay beyond that door was beyond my powers of imagination. The door closed, and Sumire wouldn’t be coming back.

I went back to the cottage and made a simple dinner from things I found in the fridge. Tomato and basil pasta, a salad, an Amstel beer. I went out to sit on the veranda, lost in thought. Or maybe thinking of nothing. Nobody phoned. Miu might be trying to call from Athens, but you couldn’t count on the phones to work.

Moment by moment the blue of the sky turned deeper, a large circular moon rising from the sea, a handful of stars piercing holes in the sky. A breeze blew up the slopes, rustling the hibiscus. The unmanned lighthouse at the tip of the pier blinked on and off with its ancient-looking light. People were slowly heading down the slope, leading donkeys as they went. Their loud conversation came closer, then faded into the distance. I silently took it all in, this foreign scene seeming entirely natural.

In the end the phone didn’t ring, and Sumire didn’t appear. Quietly, gently, time slipped by, the evening deepening. I took a couple of cassettes from Sumire’s room and played them on the living room stereo. One of them was a collection of Mozart songs. The handwritten label read: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Walter Gieseking (p). I don’t know much about classical music, but one listen told me how lovely this music was. The singing style was a bit dated, but it reminded me of reading some beautiful, memorable prose—it demanded that you sit up straight and pay attention. The performers were right there in front of me, it seemed, their delicate phrasing swelling up, then retreating, then swelling up again. One of the songs in the collection must be “Sumire”. I sank back in my chair, closed my eyes, and shared this music with my missing friend.

I was awakened by music. Far-off music, barely audible. Steadily, like a faceless sailor hauling in an anchor from the bottom of the sea, the faint sound brought me to my senses. I sat up in bed, leaned towards the open window, and listened carefully. It was definitely music. The wristwatch next to my bed showed it was past one o’clock. Music? At this time of night?

I put on my trousers and a shirt, slipped on my shoes, and went outside. The lights in the neighbourhood were all out, the streets deserted. No wind, not even the sound of waves. Just the moonlight bathing the earth. I stood there, listening again. Strangely, the music seemed to be coming from the top of the hills. There weren’t any villages on the steep mountains, just a handful of shepherds and monasteries where monks lived their cloistered lives. It was hard to imagine either group putting on a festival at this time of night.

Outside, the music was more audible. I couldn’t make out the melody, but by the rhythm it was clearly Greek. It had the uneven, sharp sound of live music, not something played through speakers.

By then I was wide awake. The summer night air was pleasant, with a mysterious depth to it. If I hadn’t been worried about Sumire, I might very well have felt a sense of celebration. I rested my hands on my hips, stretched, looking up at the sky, and took a deep breath. The coolness of the night washed inside me. Suddenly a thought struck me—maybe, at this very moment, Sumire is listening to the same music.

I decided to walk for a while in the direction of the sound. I had to find out where it was coming from, who was playing it. The road to the hilltop was the same one I’d taken that morning to go to the beach, so I knew the way. I’ll go as far as I can, I decided.

The brilliant moonlight lit everything, making walking easy. It created complex shadows between the cliffs, dyeing the ground with unlikely shades. Every time the soles of my running shoes crushed a pebble on the road, the sound was amplified. The music grew more pronounced as I made my way further up the slopes. As I’d surmised, it was coming from the top of the hill. I could make out some kind of percussion instrument, a bouzouki, an accordion, and a flute. Possibly a guitar. Other than that, I couldn’t hear a thing. No singing, no people shouting. Just that music playing endlessly, at a detached, almost monotonous pace.

I wanted to see what was taking place on top of the mountain, yet at the same time I thought I should keep my distance. Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear. Still, I had to go forward. I felt as if I was in a dream. The principle that made other choices possible was missing. Or was it the choice that made that principle possible that was missing?

For all I knew, a few days before Sumire had awakened to the same music, her curiosity getting the better of her as she clambered up the slope in her pyjamas.

I stopped and turned to look behind me. The slope twisted palely down towards the town like the tracks of some gigantic insect. I looked up at the sky then, under the moonlight, and glanced at my palm. With a rush of understanding I knew this wasn’t my hand any more. I can’t explain it. But at a glance I knew. My hand was no longer my hand, my legs no longer my legs.

Bathed in the pallid moonlight, my body, like some plaster puppet, had lost all living warmth. As if a voodoo magician had put a spell on me, blowing my transient life into this lump of clay. The spark of life had vanished. My real life had fallen asleep somewhere, and a faceless someone was stuffing it in a suitcase, about to leave.

An awful chill swept through me and I felt choked. Someone had rearranged my cells, untied the threads that held my mind together. I couldn’t think straight. All I was able to do was retreat as fast as I could to my usual place of refuge. I took a huge breath, sinking in the sea of consciousness to the very bottom. Pushing aside the heavy water I plunged down quickly and grabbed a huge rock there with both arms. The water crushed my eardrums. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed, held my breath, resisting. Once I made up my mind, it wasn’t that difficult. I grew used to it all—the water pressure, the lack of air, the freezing darkness, the signals the chaos emitted. It was something I’d mastered again and again as a child.

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited. Sharp images—just the images alone—passed down dark corridors, like jellyfish, like souls adrift. But I steeled myself not to look at them. If I acknowledged them, even a little, they would envelop themselves in meaning. Meaning was fixed to the temporal, and the temporal was trying to force me to rise to the surface. I shut my mind tight to it all, waiting for the procession to pass.

How long I remained that way, I don’t know. When I bobbed to the surface, opened my eyes, and took a silent breath, the music had already stopped. The enigmatic performance was finished. I listened carefully. I couldn’t hear a thing. Absolutely nothing. No music, no people’s voices, no rustle of the wind. I tried to check the time, but I wasn’t wearing a watch. I’d left it by my bedside.

The sky was now filled with stars. Or was it my imagination?

The sky itself seemed to have changed into something different. The strange sense of alienation I’d felt inside had vanished. I stretched, bent my arm, my fingers. No sense of being out of place. My underarms were clammy, but that was all.

I stood up from the grass and continued to climb uphill. I’d come this far and might as well reach the top. Had there really been music there? I had to see for myself, even if only the faintest clues remained. In five minutes I reached the summit. Towards the south the hill sloped down to the sea, the harbour, and the sleeping town. A scattering of streetlights lit the coast road. The other side of the mountain was wrapped in darkness, not a single light visible. I gazed fixedly into the dark, and finally a line of hills beyond floated into sight in the moonlight. Beyond them lay an even deeper darkness. And here around me, no indication whatsoever that a lively festival had taken place only a short while before.