The boy pretended to be lost in his work. But Honda knew that in point of fact he had no work when there were no ships in sight.
“When is the next ship due?”
“About nine in the evening. This has been a slack day.”
He answered with an air of bland efficiency; and his ennui and curiosity came through like strawberries through plastic walls.
It may have been a matter of pride for the boy not to make himself more formal—in any case he put on nothing over his undershirt. In the hot air, still even with the window open, there was nothing unnatural in his way of dress. The fair body, with no fullness of flesh but with rather a sort of botanical slenderness, sent the immaculate shirt down from the shoulders in two circles and thence over the roundness of the stooped chest. It was a body with a firm coolness about it, and no suggestion of softness. The profile, aristocratic eyebrows and nose and lips, was well formed, as on a somewhat worn silver coin; and the eyes with their long lashes were beautiful.
Honda could see what the boy was thinking.
He was still embarrassed about the flower in his hair. He had had no trouble covering the embarrassment as he received his guests, but he was spun up in it as in a swirl of red threads. And since they had of course had a glimpse of the girl’s ugliness he had to put up as well with misunderstanding and concealed smiles of solicitude. The cause of it all was in his own magnanimity. It had inflicted an incurable wound upon his pride.
Of course. One could scarcely believe that the ugly girl was his paramour. They were altogether too ill-matched. One had only to look at the frangibility of the earlobes, like the most delicately wrought glass, and at the supple whiteness of the neck to know that the boy was one who did not love. Love was alien to him. He washed his hands industriously after crushing the flower, he had a white towel on the desk, he was constantly wiping at his neck and armpits. The freshly washed hands on the ledger were like sterilized vegetables. Like young branches trailing out over a lake. Aware of their own elegance, the fingers curved haughtily, intimate with the supernal. They clutched at nothing material, and their business seemed to be with the void. They seemed to stroke the invisible, but without humility or petition. If there are hands to be used only for addressing the infinite and the universe, they are a masturbator’s hands. I have seen through him, thought Honda.
Beautiful hands for touching the moon and the stars and the sea, meant for no practical work. He wanted to see the faces of the persons who sought to hire them. When they hired a man, they learned nothing from such tiresome details as family and friends and ideology and transcripts of grades and state of health. It was this boy himself they had hired, knowing none of these things; and he was unmixed evil.
Look at it if you will. Unmixed evil. The reason was simple. The insides of the boy were wholly and utterly those of Honda himself.
An elbow against the table at the windowsill, pretending to gaze unblinkingly out to sea, under a natural covering of senile gloom, Honda from time to time stole a glance at the boy’s profile, and felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life.
The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself. But there was a ray of light in the empty window. India. India, with which he had had his encounter as he became aware of evil and wanted to flee it for even an instant. India, which taught that there had to exist in response to moral needs the world he had been so intent on denying, enfolding in itself a light and a fragrance which he had no devices for touching.
But his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing—complete destruction and finality. He had not succeeded; and now at the end of it, as he approached his own separate finality, he had come upon a boy sending out identical shoots of evil.
Perhaps it had all been an illusion. Yet, after missteps and failures, he could congratulate himself on an ability to see through pretense. His vision, so long as it was not obstructed by desire, did not fail him. Most especially in what did not suit his deeper inclinations.
Sometimes evil took a quiet, botanical shape. Crystallized evil was as beautiful as a clean white powder. This boy was beautiful. Perhaps Honda had been awakened and bewitched by the beauty of his own self-awareness, which had sought to recognize neither self nor other.
Somewhat bored, Keiko was putting on lipstick. “Perhaps we should go?”
Faced with the old man’s equivocation, she took on protective coloring from her dress and began slipping around the room like a great languid tropical serpent. Her discovery was that the shelf nearest the roof was divided into some forty compartments, and each of them contained a dusty little flag.
Drawn to the bright reds and yellows and greens of the loosely rolled flags, she stood gazing up at them for a time, arms folded. Then, suddenly, she laid a hand on the sharp, gleaming ivory of the boy’s naked shoulder.
“What are these flags for?”
He pulled back in surprise. “We’re not using them just at the moment. They’re signal flags. We only use the blinker. At night.”
He pointed at the signal light in the corner of the room. Hurriedly his gaze returned to the desk. Keiko looked over his shoulder at sketches of ship funnels. He paid no attention.
“May I see one?”
“Please.”
He had been hunched as low as possible over the desk. Now he stood up and moved to the shelf, avoiding Keiko as he might avoid a hot jungle undergrowth. He passed in front of Honda. Standing on tiptoes, he took a flag from the shelf.
Honda had been lost in his own thoughts. He looked at the boy, arms outstretched beside him. A faint sweet smell flooded Honda’s nostrils. There were three moles on the left side of the chest, yet whiter, until now covered by the undershirt.
“You’re left-handed,” said Keiko, not one for reticence.
The boy darted a glance of annoyance at her as he took down the flag.
Honda had to be quite sure. He came nearer the boy. The arm was folded once more, like a white wing; but at each motion two moles were darkly hidden behind the hem of the undershirt, and a third was exposed. Honda’s heart raced.
“What a beautiful design. What is it?” Keiko spread out a flag of checkered yellow and black. “I’d like a dress made of it. What do you suppose the material is? Linen?”
“I wouldn’t know about the material,” said the boy roughly, “but it’s an ‘L.’”
“‘L.’ For ‘love.’”
The boy went back to his desk, now openly annoyed. “Take your time,” he mumbled, as if to himself. “There’s no hurry.”
“So this is an ‘L.’ Not at all what I would expect an ‘L’ to be. Let’s see, now. ‘L’ should be a murky green. Black and yellow checkers are entirely wrong. Heavier and stronger, like knights at a joust. A ‘G’ maybe?”
“‘G’ is yellow and blue vertical stripes,” said the boy, somewhat desperately.
“Yellow and blue vertical stripes? Entirely wrong. ‘G’ is as far from vertical stripes as it can be.”
“I’m afraid we’re keeping you from your work. Thank you very much indeed. I hope you won’t mind if I send candy or something from Tokyo? Do you have a card?”
Surprised at this rather exaggerated politeness, Keiko put the flag on the desk and went to take her sombrero from the little binoculars at the east window.
Honda laid his card politely before the boy. The boy took out a card of his own with the address of the signal station. “Honda Law Offices” on the card before him seemed to dispel his suspicions.
“You seem to have heavy responsibilities,” said Honda casually. “Can you manage all by yourself? How old might you be?”
“Sixteen.” It was a brisk, businesslike answer that deliberately omitted Keiko.
“Very
useful work. Keep at it.” Each syllable formal and precise through his false teeth, Honda cheerfully motioned Keiko toward the door and started to put on his shoes. The boy saw them downstairs.
Back in the car, Honda felt too tired to look up. He directed the driver to a hotel on Nihondaira, where he had taken rooms for the night.
“I want a quick bath and a massage.” Then, casually, he said something that left Keiko open-mouthed. “I’m going to adopt that boy.”
11
TŌRU WAS FEELING irritable and restless.
He had idle visitors frequently enough. The building seemed to arouse curiosity. Most of them had children and came in at the children’s urging. Tōru would lift them up to the telescope, and that would be that. This pair had been different. They had come as if trying to pry into something, and left as if they had stolen something. Something that Tōru himself had not been aware of.
It was five in the afternoon. Rain was threatening, and darkness came early.
The long line of indigo across the sea was like a great badge of mourning. It gave an air of repose. A single cargo ship was visible, far to the right.
There was a telephone call from Yokohama informing him of a sailing. There were no other calls.
It was time for dinner, but he was not hungry. He turned on the desk light and leafed through pages of ship funnels. They were good for driving away boredom.
He had his favorites among them, and reveries about them. He liked the mark of the Swedish East Asia Line, three yellow crowns on a white circle, and he liked the elephant of Osaka Dockyards.
On the average of once a month a ship bearing the elephant came into Shimizu. The white elephant over a yellow crescent on a black ground was visible from a considerable distance. He liked that white elephant riding in from the sea on its moon.
He liked the Prince Line of London, a coronet with three rakish feathers. When a Canadian transport came in, it seemed to him that the white ship was a gift and the mark was a brisk greeting card.
None of these marks was a continuing part of Tōru’s consciousness. When they came within range of the telescope they were with him for the first time. Like bright cards scattered over the world, they had been part of a gigantic game in which he had not been a participant.
He loved only distant images that were no reflection of himself. If, that is to say, he loved anything.
Who and what might the old man have been?
Here in the room he had only been someone for that spoiled, overdressed old woman to bother; but now a separate presence remained behind, that of a quiet old man.
Tired, erudite, intelligent old eyes, a voice so low that Tōru had had difficulty in catching it, a politeness that almost seemed to verge on ridicule. What was he enduring?
Tōru had never before met anyone quite like him. He had never before seen the will to dominate take such quiet form.
Everything should have been old knowledge; and yet there was something in the old man that caught on a corner of Tōru’s awareness like a rock snag and would not give way. What might it be?
But presently cool arrogance returned, and he ceased to speculate. The old man was a lawyer in retirement. That was enough. The politeness was a professional manner, nothing more. Tōru detected and was ashamed of a tendency in himself toward rustic wariness.
Getting up to warm his dinner, he threw a wad of paper into the wastebasket, and caught a glimpse of the withered hydrangea.
“Today it was a hydrangea. She poked it in my hair as she left. Yesterday a cornflower. The time before a gardenia. The wanderings of a demented mind? Or have they some meaning? Maybe it’s not just her idea. Maybe someone puts a flower in her hair every day and she carries some sort of signal without knowing it? She always does all the talking, but next time I have to ask her.”
Perhaps there was nothing of the accidental or the random in events that took place around Tōru. Suddenly it seemed that a fine pattern of evil was taking shape around him.
12
HONDA WAS SILENT through dinner, and Keiko was too startled to talk.
“Are you coming to my room?” she asked as they left the table. “Or shall I go to yours?”
Always when they traveled together they went after dinner to the room of one or the other and talked over whiskey. If either pleaded fatigue the other understood.
“I’m not feeling as tired as I did. I’ll be with you in maybe a half hour.” He took her wrist and looked at the number on her key. She found endlessly amusing the pride he took in this little public display of intimacy. He could be amusingly intimate one instant and somberly, threateningly judicial the next.
She changed clothes. She would make fun of him. But she reconsidered. She saw that she could make fun of him without restraint when the matter was a serious one; but it was a law between them that the frivolous must always be serious.
They sat at the small table by the window. Honda ordered the usual bottle of Cutty Sark. Keiko was looking at the swirls of mist outside. She took out a cigarette. Cigarette in hand, she wore a sterner, tenser expression than usual. She had long ago given up the foreign affectation of waiting for him to light a match. He had always disliked it.
Abruptly she spoke. “I’m shocked, utterly shocked. The idea of taking in a child you know nothing about. I can think of only one explanation. You’ve kept your proclivities hidden from me. How blind I’ve been. We’ve known each other for eighteen years and I never suspected. I see now. There can be no doubt about it. We’ve had the same urges all along, and all along they’ve brought us together and made us feel secure, comrades and allies. Ying Chan was just a stage property. You knew about her and me, and were playing your part. A person can’t be too careful.”
“That isn’t it at all. She and the boy are identical.” He spoke with great firmness.
Why, she asked over and over again. How were they identical?
“I’ll tell you when the whiskey comes.”
It came. She had no choice but to await his words. She had lost the initiative.
Honda told her everything.
It pleased him that she should listen so carefully. She refrained from the usual overgeneralized response.
“You have been wise to say and to write nothing about it.” Whiskey had produced a voice of smooth charity and benevolence. “People would have thought you mad. The trust you have built up would have collapsed.”
“Trust no longer means anything to me.”
“That’s not the point. Something else you’ve kept hidden from me is your wisdom. No, a secret as violent as the most violent poison, capable of everything horrible, a secret that makes any sort of social secret seem like nothing at all. You could tell me that there are three lunatics in your immediate family, you could tell me you have sexual inclinations of a most curious sort, you could tell me the things most people would be most ashamed to tell me. It would be a social secret, nothing at all. Once you know the truth then murder and suicide and rape and forgery are easy, sloppy things. And what an irony that a judge should be the one. You find yourself caught up in a ring bigger than the skies, and everything else is ordinary. You have discovered that we’ve only been turned out to graze. Ignorant animals, out on loose tether.” Keiko sighed. “Your story has cured me. I think I have fought rather well, but there was no need to fight. We are all fish in the same net.”
“But it is the final blow for a woman. A person who knows what you know can never be beautiful again. If at your age you still wanted to be beautiful, then you should have put your hands over your ears.
“There are invisible signs of leprosy on the face of the one who knows. If leprosy of the nerves and leprosy of the joints are visible leprosy—then call it transparent leprosy. Immediately at the end of knowledge comes leprosy. The minute I set foot in India I was a spiritual leper. I had been for decades, of course, without knowing it.
“Now you know too. You can put on all your layers of makeup, but someone else who knows will see through
to the skin. I will tell you what he will see. A skin that is too transparent; a spirit standing dead still; flesh that disgusts by its fleshiness, deprived of all fleshly beauty; a voice that is hoarse; a body stripped of hair, all the hair fallen like leaves. We will soon be seeing all the symptoms in you. The five signs of the decay of the one who sees.
“Even if you don’t avoid people, you’ll find, slowly, that you are being avoided. Unknown to themselves, those who know give off an unpleasant warning odor.
“Fleshly beauty, spiritual beauty, everything that pertains to beauty, is born from ignorance and darkness and from them alone. It is not allowed to know and still to be beautiful. If the ignorance and darkness are the same, then a contest between spirit that has nothing at all to hide them and flesh that hides them behind its own dazzling light is no contest at all. Beauty is only beauty of the flesh.”
“Yes, it is true. It was true of Ying Chan,” said Keiko, light reminiscence in her eyes as she looked out at the mists. “And that I suppose is why you told neither Isao the Second nor Ying Chan the Third.”
“A cruel sort of solicitude, I suppose, from a fear of obstructing fate. It kept me from speaking. But it was different with Kiyoaki. I did not then know the truth myself.”
“You want to say that you were beautiful yourself.” She cast a sarcastic eye from his head to his feet.
“No. I was industriously polishing the instruments to let me know.”
“I understand. I am to keep it absolutely secret from the boy until he is twenty and ready to die.”
“That is correct. You only have to wait four years.”
“You are quite sure you won’t die first?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We must make another appointment with the Cancer Research Institute.”
Glancing at her watch, Keiko took out a small box filled with multicolored pills. She quickly selected three with her nail tips and drank them down with Scotch.