Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

“Ah yes,” said Menshiki. “Now that you mention it, we did talk about that. I’d totally forgotten. Yes, we should talk about that again sometime. But there’s no rush. We can talk about it again once we take care of the matter at hand.”

After that I couldn’t concentrate. I tried reading, listening to music, cooking, but all I could think of was what lay beneath those ancient stones in the woods. I couldn’t shake the thought of a blackened mummy, shriveled up like a dried fish.

Menshiki called me that night to let me know that the work would begin the next morning, Wednesday, at ten.

Wednesday morning it was drizzling off and on, but not hard enough to delay the work. It was a fine rain, and a hat or raincoat with a hood was enough. No need for an umbrella. Menshiki had on an olive-green rain hat, the kind the British might use for duck hunting. The leaves of the trees, starting to turn fall colors, took on a dull color from the nearly invisible rain that soaked them.

The workers used a flatbed truck to move in a small backhoe. A very compact piece of equipment, with a tight turning radius, made to work in confined spaces. There were four workers altogether—one backhoe operator, one foreman, and two additional workers. The shovel operator and the foreman drove the truck. They all had on matching blue rainwear, jackets and trousers, and muddy thick-soled work boots, and wore protective helmets made of heavy-duty plastic. Menshiki and the foreman were apparently acquainted, and they talked for a while, the two of them beaming, next to the little shrine. I could tell, though, that the foreman remained on his best behavior toward Menshiki.

Menshiki must have had a lot of clout to arrange for this many people and equipment in such a short time. I watched this whole process half impressed, half bewildered. I had a slight sense of resignation, too, as if everything were already out of my hands. Like when I was a child and the little kids would be playing some game and bigger kids would come around and take over. I remembered that feeling.

They started the operation by using shovels and some material and boards to create a flat foothold for the backhoe to move, and then they began to actually remove the stones. The backhoe soon trampled down the thicket of pampas grass surrounding the mound. Menshiki and I stood to one side watching as they lifted the stones from the mound one by one and moved them to a spot a little ways away. There wasn’t anything special about the operation. Probably the same sort of operation that takes place every day, all around the world. The workers looked ordinary too, like they were matter-of-factly following procedures they’d done a thousand times. Occasionally the backhoe operator would stop and call out in a loud voice to the foreman, but it didn’t seem like there was any problem. They just exchanged a few words, and he didn’t switch off the engine.

But I couldn’t calmly watch the operation. Each time one of the square stones was removed, my anxiety only deepened. It was like some dark secret that I’d hidden away for years was being revealed, layer by layer, by the powerful, insistent tip of that machine. The problem lay in the fact that even I didn’t know what secret I was hiding. Several times I felt I had to get them to stop the operation. Bringing in some large machinery like this backhoe couldn’t be the solution. As Masahiko had told me on the phone, all “mysterious things” should be left buried. I was seized by the urge to grab Menshiki’s arm and shout, “Let’s stop this! Put the stones back where they were.”

But of course I couldn’t do that. The decision had been made and the work begun. Several other people were already involved. A not-insubstantial sum of money was changing hands (the amount was unclear, but I assumed Menshiki was footing the bill). We couldn’t just stop at this point. The work continued, beyond my will.

As if he knew what I was going through, at a certain point Menshiki came over beside me and lightly patted me on the shoulder.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said in a calm voice. “It’s going smoothly. It’ll all be finished soon.”

I nodded in silence.

Before noon all the stones had been moved. The ancient stones that had been piled in a jumble in a crumbling mound were now piled up in a neat, official-looking pyramid a little ways away. The fine drizzle silently fell on the pile. Even after removing all those stones, though, the ground hadn’t appeared. Below the stones lay more stone. These stones were flat and had been methodically laid out there like a square stone flooring. The whole thing was about six feet on each side.

“I wonder why it’s like that,” the foreman said after coming over to where Menshiki was. “I was sure that the stones were just piled up on top of the ground. But they weren’t. There seems to be an open space underneath that stone slab. I inserted a thin metal rod into a gap and it went down pretty far. Not sure yet how deep it goes, though.”

Menshiki and I gingerly tried standing on top of the freshly uncovered slab. The stones were darkly wet and slippery in spots. Though they’d been artificially cut and evened up over time, the edges had become more rounded off, with gaps between the stones. The nightly sound of the bell must have filtered out through those gaps. And air could probably get in through those too. I crouched down and stared through a gap inside, but it was pitch black and I couldn’t make out a thing.

“Maybe they used flagstones to cover up an ancient well. Though for a well, its diameter is a bit big,” the foreman said.

“Can you remove these flagstones?” Menshiki asked.

The foreman shrugged. “I’m not sure. We hadn’t planned on this. It’ll make things a little complicated, but I think we can manage it. Using a crane would be our best bet, but we’d never get one in here. Each stone doesn’t look that heavy. And there’s a gap between them, so with a little ingenuity I think we can manage with the backhoe. We’re coming up on our lunch break, so I’ll work out a good plan then and we’ll get to work in the afternoon.”

Menshiki and I went back to the house and had a light lunch. In the kitchen I threw together some simple ham, lettuce, and pickle sandwiches and we went out on the terrace to eat as we watched the rain.

“This whole operation is delaying what we should be working on, finishing the portrait,” I said.

Menshiki shook his head. “There’s no rush with the portrait. Our first priority is solving this weird matter. Then you can get back to work on the painting.”

Did this man seriously want his portrait painted? I couldn’t help but wonder. This doubt had been smoldering in a corner of my mind from the very start. Did he seriously want me to paint his portrait? Wasn’t he just using the portrait as a mere pretext, and had some other reason for getting to know me?

But what could it be? I couldn’t figure it out. Was his goal unearthing what was under those stones? This didn’t make sense. He hadn’t known about them. That was something unforeseen that only came up after we started on the portrait. Still, he seemed overly enthusiastic about digging them up. And he was shelling out quite a bit of money for the operation, even though it had nothing to do with him.

As I was mulling over all this Menshiki asked, “Did you read the story ‘Fate over Two Generations’?”

“I did,” I told him.

“What did you think? A very strange tale, isn’t it?” he said.

“It certainly is,” I said.

Menshiki looked at me for a while, then said, “To tell the truth, that story has tugged at me for a long time. It’s one of the reasons this discovery has aroused my interest.”