Apocalypse for Beginners (18 page)

Walking along the chain-link fence, she watched the activity on the other side. Forklifts scurrying around, droning like huge beetles. Workers shouting over the noise. The clanging of metal. Various rumbling noises. And in the background, the hulking orange mass of the
Aron Habrit
, a container ship in the process of being unloaded.

Hope passed the wall of containers and continued on to the unloading area. A crew of longshoremen were extricating a bulky object from a battered container in order to load it onto a truck. Posted at a sensible distance, three men in business suits watched the scene while exchanging remarks.

Curious to see the object that would soon come into view, Hope leaned against the fence. An old Korean tank? Gold ingots? A freeze-dried mammoth? In any case, the thing was awfully heavy, judging by the groans of the hoist.

What emerged from the container, centimetre by centimetre, was a concrete monolith. The surface was scarred and the edges bristled with the rusted stumps of steel rods. One side was completely covered with an interlacing of colourful graffiti, which to Hope looked vaguely familiar.

Before Hope’s eyes was an enormous fragment of the
Grenzmauer
newly arrived from Berlin!

With her fingers hooked into the chain-links, she watched in disbelief. What was this artefact doing in Tokyo? She tried to ask the workers, but none of them spoke English and her guidebook was not at all helpful

“Can you help me? I’m injured / infected / contagious.” (
Kega o shi te i masu / osen sa re te i masu / kansen shi te i masu. Te o kashi te morae masu ka
?)

One of the business-suited men crossed the loading zone and came toward Hope with a friendly expression. They exchanged small bows of the head. He explained that the section of wall, a gift of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland to the Tokyo prefecture, would soon be part of the permanent exhibition of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

The Berlin Wall—modern art? Hope tried to mask her bewilderment.

The hoist operator deposited the precious object on the truck bed as softly as a snowflake. The truck’s suspension sagged with a painful creak. Immediately, the longshoremen strapped the fragment down on the bed, while the men in suits signed various papers.

The truck lurched away and lumbered onto the boulevard with its two tons of Cold War. A moment later it disappeared in a curve, behind a bulwark of containers.

Brushing the palm of her hand over her shirt pocket, Hope felt the reassuring bulge of the nail clipper.

70. THE GYRE

It was nearly midnight when Hope came within sight of the Jaffa. The only source of light in the narrow lane was the window of a laundry, as blue and spectral as a chunk of iceberg. The bar’s neon signs were turned off and the steel grille was rolled halfway down. Stationed near the entrance, Merriam was smoking a cigarette.

“Do you realize what time it is? I was worried.”

Hope rubbed her arms under the thin cloth of her blouse.

“It’s freezing!”

“Of course it’s freezing! It
is
still March! Come on, I’ve just made some tea.”

Hope slipped under the grille, which Merriam closed behind her with a hefty shove. Two twists of the key and they were sheltered from looters and the living dead. As far as bunkers went, this one was unbeatable. Reggae music in the background, chairs tipped up on the tables, the unobtrusive swish of the dishwasher. Near the cash register a large teapot released a graceful question mark of steam.

Merriam tossed an old University of Tel Aviv sweatshirt on the counter, and Hope, shivering, pulled it over her head.

“Still, you might have given me a call.”

“I got slightly lost.”

“Didn’t you have your guidebook?”

“The layout of the streets doesn’t make any sense!”

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to.”

“I was on the wrong block. For a while I thought the Jaffa had been razed to the ground during the afternoon and replaced by a Holiday Inn.”

Merriam smiled and poured two glasses of tea.

“There’s no chance of that happening. The City of Tokyo put this crumbling shack on its list of protected heritage sites in 1971.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s one of the few buildings from the Edo period that has survived the 1923 earthquake, the 1945 bombing raids and the urban renewal wave of the 1960s. You can’t change so much as a lock without a permit. Speaking of which …”

She took a heavy set of keys out of a drawer and slipped off an old copper key, which she handed to Hope.

“From now on, if you ever find the steel grille locked, you can just go up the emergency stairway.”

Hope thanked her with a nod. The reggae music ebbed and flowed on the speakers, disappearing from time to time—a tidal movement typical of overused cassette tapes. While Hope warmed her hands on the cup of tea, Merriam began to add up the contents of the cash register.

“Need any help?”

“Thanks, but it’s not a problem. The sales never add up to very much.”

The Jaffa, Merriam explained as she mechanically smoothed out ¥1000 bills between her thumb and index finger, was located smack in the middle of the Sargasso Sea: a gyre bounded by three metro stations, eight hotels and one of the Tokyo University campuses. The surrounding neighbourhood swarmed with students, convention delegates and North American tourists, yet the Jaffa was unable to tap into this clientele. Whenever customers happened to wander in, it was because they were looking for something else. A phantom youth hostel, for instance.

The bar’s clientele was made up exclusively of regulars, mostly anthropology students who nursed their beers for hours while reviewing their course notes. As a result, the proceeds were chronically thin and the profit was nil. In fact, the place operated at a loss every other month, a situation to which the owner seemed completely indifferent. This, according to Merriam, lent credence to the tax-shelter hypothesis.

“He bought the bar in the late fifties. At the time, he owned a small light bulb factory in Kobe. Today he manufactures printed circuits in three countries. So he may have totally forgotten that he owns this building. In any case, I’ve never seen him.”

“Never?”

“Never. The accountant comes to check the books every quarter and takes a look at the inventory. It almost never takes more than twenty minutes. In other words, we’re in the blind spot. Which reminds me—would you like to call Canada?”

“Call Canada?”

“Your family. Your friends. Your boyfriend. Anyone you like. In any case, just feel free to use the bar phone. The bill disappears on one of the boss’s six hundred accounts.”

She arranged the bundles of money as she spoke and then scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper, slipped the (meagre) earnings into an envelope and locked everything into a small safe hidden under the counter. Then she rubbed her hands together in satisfaction and glanced at the clock. Twenty past midnight. Out of a drawer she pulled a large cloth-bound edition of the Torah, which concealed a bag of tender green buds, a pack of rolling papers and a plastic lighter.

Hope watched her crush a bud and blend it with tobacco on the cover of the Torah, brush a small amount into a piece of the thin paper and roll it with her thumbs. She flicked her tongue back and forth across the edge of the paper, and voilà! Then, like some manic engineer, she examined the joint to ensure it was properly shaped. Hope smiled and took a gulp of tea.

“Nice work!”

“Thanks. I’ve had lots of spare time since I moved to Japan.”

The smell of sulphur and resin floated into the air. Merriam took two ceremonious puffs and offered the joint to Hope, who declined with a little wave.

“You’re wrong not to accept. It’s an excellent remedy for jet lag. What’s more, this stuff is aeroponic: the plants grow with their roots exposed to the air. A method developed by the Japanese Space Agency to make farming possible in a weightless environment.”

Hope laughed.

“Who’d want to farm in a weightless environment?”

“Good question. I guess it would be someone who had doubts about the future of the planet.”

71. CARPET BOMBING

An oceanic wind swept over the roof of the building and the sound of ten highways kilometres away was clearly audible, rumblings transported by the biting cold.

Leaning against the guardrail, Hope admired the city lights—billions of lumens, radiating and then evaporating in space. Tokyo was no doubt visible from the moon.

Merriam yawned and pulled out a pack of No. 9. A flash of the lighter and then there was another little red light shining in Tokyo.

“The Americans tested napalm around here, you know.”

“Oh?”

“A few months before Hiroshima. Everything you see around us, forty square kilometres—levelled. In one night. A B-29 every two minutes. Eight tons of bombs per plane. I’ll let you do the arithmetic.”

The tip of the cigarette pulsated against the darkness like a heartbeat, appearing almost alive.

“According to the census there were forty thousand people per square kilometre living in this district. Large families crowded into houses made of wood and paper.”

“Like this house?”

“Not really, no, but the materials used were similar. Once the fire started it was impossible to put out. Also, napalm has the consistency of jelly. It sticks to clothing, and hair.”

She took two long drags on her cigarette.

“When the bombardment ended, at about five in the morning, the U.S. Air Force had killed a hundred thousand people and left a million homeless. In military jargon it’s called carpet bombing. You flatten the landscape down to carpet level.”

Hope fought back a shiver, either from horror or the cold—she couldn’t quite tell.

“Hard to believe it happened right here …”

Merriam took one last puff and rubbed her cigarette out in a muddy ashtray standing near the Shinto shrine.

“Wait a minute, I think I have a picture.”

They took off their shoes and went inside the house. Merriam brought out a battery lamp and a gas radiator. The radiator coughed a little as it started up. Merriam rubbed her hands for a moment in the lukewarm breath of the heater. Then she searched through her bookcase and drew out a large illustrated book.

The History of Tokyo, she translated.

She riffled the pages and stopped on an aerial photo of the neighbourhood taken the day after the bombing. A cemetery, or a crater—no, more like a mass grave. It was possible to make out the bodies heaped together in the streets and at the intersections. And in the exact centre of the still-smoking scene was the building that now housed the Jaffa, inexplicably upright.

Merriam unrolled the futon with a kick and flopped down on her back without bothering to look for a pillow or a quilt.

“The building survived due to a combination of factors. On the north side, the adjacent building had already burned, and there was a lane on the south side that served as a firebreak. Miraculous, all the same.”

She yawned, groped around until she found her pack of No. 9, stuck a last cigarette between her lips and forgot to light it. A second later she was asleep.

Standing in the middle of the room, Hope was unable to tear herself away from the sight of those hundreds of bodies, blackened and twisted beyond recognition, piled on top of each other like dead branches. A dress rehearsal for the end of days.

72. IN SPACE AND TIME

Hope liked Merriam, and vice versa, even though they basically knew almost nothing about each other. Merriam asked no questions—at any rate, no tactless questions (why Hope never called Canada, for example)—and when asked about her own life, she usually broke her answers off in mid-sentence.

All the information that Hope had patiently gleaned could fit into a short paragraph.

Born in Jerusalem in the midfifties, Merriam grew up in a kibbutz on the Negev plateau. Her mother was an agronomist and her father, Japanese. She lived in Tel Aviv, and then Greece, studied archaeology at the Sorbonne for several years before finally settling in Tokyo in 1987 at the beginning of the economic bubble. The yen was strong then, the Nikkei went soaring into a cloudless sky, and there was a labour shortage throughout the archipelago.

But economic bubble or not, Hope was no closer to unravelling the mystery as to what may have prompted someone with a Ph.D. in archaeology from the Sorbonne to come eke out a living in a seedy Tokyo bar. Perhaps the explanation lay in those unopened fancy envelopes from the Israeli embassy that were gathering dust on the table.

Merriam was a woman of contradictions. For instance, she could hold forth on carbon dating, the human genome or infrared photography, and then, the very next minute, smoke a joint as long as your arm and listen to Stevie Wonder with the volume cranked up, while staring into space (what she called “taking leave of the planet”). She never left the Jaffa except to do her shopping in the neighbourhood, yet she still knew Tokyo like the back of her hand. And not once had she asked Hope why she insisted on meeting Hayao Kamajii, which did not prevent Merriam from going all-out to support Hope’s Mission.

The weeks passed with each day looking much like the day before.

Every morning, Hope and Merriam woke up at dawn (which, in Merriam’s time zone, meant ten o’clock), grabbed a quick breakfast, called directory assistance, asked for the new address of the Mekiddo Kabushiki Gaisha, please, chose a means of transport (bicycle, metro, Tony Lamas) and dashed over to the aforementioned address.

Unfortunately, the directory assistance databases always lagged a few hours—sometimes days—behind reality. With each sortie, Hope and Merriam found themselves looking at buildings that were abandoned or for sale, vacant spaces, makeshift parking lots, demolition sites or, more rarely, brand-new buildings that had sprung up overnight like mushrooms.

This business went on repeatedly for two weeks, at which point Merriam decided that it would be smarter to call Mekiddo directly, speak to Kamajii and arrange to meet him.