Killing Commendatore: A novel (36 page)

And there I snapped awake.

I knew now what had frightened me most in bed in that love hotel in the seaside town. Deep in my heart I feared that in the last instant I really would have strangled to death that girl (the young girl whose name I didn't even know). “You can just pretend,” she said. But it might not have ended with just that. It might not have ended with
just
pretend
. And the reason for that lay inside me.

I wish I could understand myself, too. But it's not easy.

This is what I'd told Mariye Akikawa. I remembered this as I wiped the sweat away with a towel.

The rain let up on Friday morning, the sky turning beautifully sunny. I hadn't slept well, felt worked up, and to calm down went for an hour's walk around the neighborhood later in the morning. I went into the woods, walked behind the little shrine, and checked out the hole for the first time in a long while. It was November now and the wind was much colder than before. The ground was covered with damp, fallen leaves. The hole was, as before, tightly covered over with several boards. Many-colored leaves had piled up on the boards, and there were several heavy stones to hold the boards down. But the way the stones were lined up seemed a little different from when I'd last seen them. Nearly the same, yet ever so slightly positioned differently.

I didn't worry about it. There wouldn't be anyone else other than Menshiki and me who would tramp all the way out here. I pulled away one of the boards and peered down inside, but no one was there. The ladder was leaned up against the wall like before. Like always, that dark, stone-lined chamber lay there, deep and silent, at my feet. I put the board back on top and placed the stone back where it had been.

It didn't bother me, either, that the Commendatore hadn't appeared for a good two weeks. Like he said, an Idea has a lot of business to attend to. Business that transcended time and space.

The following Sunday finally came. A lot of things happened that day. It turned out to be a very hectic day.

Another prisoner approached us as we talked. He was a professional painter from Warsaw, a man of medium height with a hawk nose and a very black mustache on his fair-skinned face…His distinctive figure stood out from afar, and his professional status (his skills were in great demand in the camp) was evident. He was certainly no one's nonentity. He often talked to me at length about his work.

“I do color paintings, portraits, for the Germans. They bring me photos of their relatives, wives, mothers and children. Everyone wants to have pictures of their closest kin. The SS describe their families to me with emotion and love—the color of their eyes, their hair. I produce family portraits from amateurish, blurry black-and-white photos. Believe me, I would rather paint black-and-white pictures of the children in the piles of corpses in the
Lazarett
than the Germans' families. Give 'em pictures of the people they murdered; let 'em take them home and hang them on the wall, the sons of bitches.”

The artist was especially distraught on this occasion.

—SAMUEL WILLENBERG
,
Revolt in Treblinka,
p. 96. © Copyright by Samuel Willenberg, 1984.
Lazarett
was another name for the execution facility in the Treblinka concentration camp.

Sunday was another fine clear day. No wind to speak of, and the fall colors in the valley sparkling in the sunlight. Small white-breasted birds hopped from one branch to the next, deftly pecking the red berries. I sat on the terrace, soaking it all in. Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor. Like time—no, scratch that, time could be a different story. Money may help us buy a little extra of that.

The bright blue Toyota Prius rolled up the slope to my door at ten on the dot. Shoko Akikawa was decked out in a thin beige turtleneck and snug-fitting slacks of pale green. Around her neck, a modest gold chain gave off a muted glow. As on her past visit, her hair was perfectly done. When it swayed I could catch a glimpse of the lovely line of her neck. Today, though, she had a leather bag, not a purse, slung over her shoulder. She wore brown loafers. It was a casual outfit, yet she had clearly spent time choosing each piece. And the swell of her breasts was very attractive too. I had the inside scoop from her niece that “no padding” was involved. I felt quite drawn to those breasts—in a purely aesthetic way, of course.

Mariye was dressed in straight-cut faded blue jeans and white Converse sneakers, a 180-degree turnaround from the formality of her first visit. Her jeans had holes in them (strategically placed, of course). She had on the sort of plaid shirt a lumberjack might wear in the woods, with a thin gray windbreaker draped over her shoulders. Underneath the shirt, as before, her chest was flat. And, just as before, she had a sour expression on her face. Like a cat whose dish has been whisked away halfway through its meal.

Just as I'd done the previous week, I went into the kitchen, made a pot of tea, and brought it to the living room. Then I showed them the three dessan I had made.

Shoko seemed to like them. “They're all so full of life,” she exclaimed. “So much more like Mariye than photographs.”

“Can I keep them?” Mariye asked.

“Sure,” I answered. “Once your portrait is finished. I may need them until then.”

Her aunt looked worried. “Really? Aren't you being too—…”

“Not at all,” I said. “They're of no use to me once the portrait's done.”

“Will you use one of these dessan for your underdrawing?” Mariye asked.

“No.” I shook my head. “I did them just to get a three-dimensional feel for who you are. The you who I put on canvas will be altogether different.”

“Can you tell what that's going to look like?”

“No, not yet. The two of us still have to figure that one out.”

“Figure out how I look three-dimensionally?” Mariye asked.

“That's right. A painting is a flat surface, but it still has to have three dimensions. Do you follow me?”

Mariye frowned. I guessed she might somehow associate the word “three-dimensional” with her flat chest. In fact, she shot a glance at the curves beneath her aunt's thin sweater before looking at me.

“How can somebody learn to draw this well?” Mariye asked.

“You mean like these dessan?”

She nodded. “Yeah, like dessan, croquis, things like that.”

“It's all practice. The more you practice the better you get.”

“I think there are a lot of people,” she said, “who don't improve, no matter how much they practice.”

She sure hit that one on the head. I had attended art school, but loads of my classmates couldn't paint their way out of a paper bag. However we thrash about, we are all thrown in one direction or another by our natural talent, or lack of it. That's a basic truth we all have to learn to live with.

“Fair enough, but you still have to practice. If you don't, any gifts or talents you do have won't emerge where people can see them.”

Shoko gave an emphatic nod. Mariye looked dubious.

“You want to learn to paint well, correct?” I asked her.

Mariye nodded. “I like things I can see as much as things I can't,” she said.

I looked in her eyes. A light was shining there. I wasn't sure I understood exactly what she meant. But that inner light was drawing me in.

“What a strange thing to say,” Shoko said. “Like you were speaking in riddles.”

Mariye didn't respond, just studied her hands. When she did look up a short while later, the light was gone. It had only been there a moment.

Mariye and I went to the studio. Shoko had already pulled out the same thick paperback—at least, it looked identical to the one she had brought the previous week—and settled down on the sofa to read. She seemed totally engrossed in the book. I was even more curious than before as to what it might be, but I didn't ask.

Mariye and I sat across from each other about six feet apart, just as we had the last time. The only difference was that now I had an easel and canvas in front of me. No paints or brush, though—my hands were empty. My eyes hopped back and forth, from Mariye to the canvas to Mariye again. All the while, the question of how best to portray her “three-dimensionally” was running through my mind. I needed a
story
of some sort to work from. It wasn't enough to just look at the person I happened to be painting. Nothing good could result from that. The portrait might be a passable likeness, but no more. To turn out a true portrait, I had to discover
the story that must be painted
. Only that could get the ball rolling.

We sat there for some time, me on the stool, Mariye on a straight-backed chair, as I studied her face. She stared back at me without blinking, never averting her eyes. She didn't look defiant so much as ready to stand her ground. Her pretty, almost doll-like, appearance sent people the wrong signal—at her core, she had a strong sense of herself, and her own unshakable way of doing things. Once she'd drawn a straight line, good luck getting her to bend it.

There was something in Mariye's eyes that reminded me of Menshiki, though I had to look closely to see it. I had felt the similarity before, but it still surprised me. Their gaze had a strange radiance—“a frozen flame” was the phrase that leapt to mind. That flame had warmth, but at the same time, it was cool and collected. Like a rare jewel whose glow came from deep within. That light expressed naked yearning when projected outside. Focused inward, it strove for completion. These two sides were equally strong, and at perpetual war with each other.

Did Menshiki's revelation that his blood might be running through Mariye's veins influence me? Perhaps that had led me to unconsciously link the two of them together.

Whatever the case, I had to transfer that glow in her eyes to the canvas, to capture how
special
it was. The core element in her expression, the thing that cut through her modulated exterior. Yet I still hadn't located the context that made such a transfer possible. If I failed, that warm light would come across as an icy jewel, nothing more. Where was the heat coming from, and where was it headed? I had to find out.

I sat there for fifteen minutes, gazing at her face, then at the canvas and back again, before finally giving up. I pushed the easel aside and took a few slow, deep breaths.

“Let's talk,” I said.

“Um, sure,” she answered. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to know more about you. If that's okay.”

“Like?”

“Well, what sort of person is your father?”

Mariye gave a small smirk. “I don't know him very well.”

“You don't talk?”

“We hardly see each other.”

“Because he's busy with work?”

“I don't know anything about his work,” Mariye said. “I don't think he cares about me that much
.
”

“Doesn't care?”

“That's why he handed me over to my aunt to raise.”

I took a pass on that one.

“How about your mother—can you remember her? You were six when she passed away, right?”

“I can only remember her in patches.”

“What do you mean, in patches?”

“My mom disappeared all of a sudden. I was too little to understand what dying meant, so I didn't really know what had happened. She was there and then she just
wasn't
. Like smoke.”

Mariye was quiet for a moment.

“It happened so quickly, and I couldn't understand the reason,” she said at last. “That's why I can't remember much about that part of my life, like right before and after her death.”

“You must have been pretty confused.”

“It's like there's this high wall that divides when she was with me and when she was gone. I can't connect the two parts together.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “Do you get what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said. “My sister died when she was twelve. I told you that before, right?”

Mariye nodded.

“She was born with a defective valve in her heart. She had a big operation, and everything was supposed to be okay, but for some reason there was still a problem. So she lived with a time bomb ticking inside her body. As a result, everyone in our family was more or less prepared for the worst. Her death didn't hit us like a bolt from the blue, like when your mother was stung by hornets.”

“A bolt…?”

“A bolt from the blue,” I said. “A bolt of lightning that strikes from a cloudless sky. Something sudden and unexpected.”

“A bolt from the blue,” she said. “What characters is it written with?”

“The ‘blue' is written with characters for ‘blue sky.' ‘Bolt' is really complicated—I can't write it myself. In fact, I've never written it. If you're curious, you should look it up in a dictionary when you get back home.”

“A bolt from the blue,” she repeated. She seemed to be storing the phrase in her mental filing cabinet.

“At any rate,” I went on, “we all had an idea what might happen. When it actually did, though—when she had a sudden heart attack and died, all in one day—our preparations didn't make a bit of difference. Her death paralyzed me. And not just me, my whole family.”

“Did something change inside you after that?”

“Yes, completely. Both
inside
and
outside
. Time didn't pass as it had before—it flowed differently. And, like you said, I had a problem connecting how things were before her death with the way they were after.”

Mariye stared at me without speaking for a full ten seconds. “Your sister meant a lot to you, didn't she?” she said at last.

“Yes,” I nodded. “She did.”

Mariye studied her lap for a moment. “It's because my memory is blocked,” she said, looking up, “that I have trouble recalling my mom. The kind of person she was, her face, the things she said to me. My dad doesn't talk much about her either.”

All I knew about Mariye's mother was the blow-by-blow account Menshiki had given me of the last time they had had sex. It had been on his office couch—the moment of Mariye's conception, perhaps—and it was violent. Not a big help at the moment.

“You must remember something, even if it's not much. After all, you lived with her till you were six.”

“Just the smell.”

“The smell of her body?”

“No, the smell of rain.”

“Rain?”

“It was raining then. So hard I could hear the drops hit the ground. But my mother was walking outside without an umbrella. So we walked through the rain together, holding hands. I think it was summer.”

“A summer shower, then?”

“I guess so. The pavement was hot from the sun, so it gave off that smell. That's what I remember. We were high in the mountains, on some kind of observation deck. And my mother was singing a song.”

“What kind of song?”

“I can't remember the melody. But I do remember some of the words. They were like, ‘The sun's shining on a big green field across the river, but it's been raining on this side for so long.' Have you ever heard a song like that?”

It didn't ring a bell. “No,” I replied. “I don't think so.”

Mariye gave a little shrug. “I've asked different people, but no one knows it. I wonder why. Do you think maybe I made it up in my head?”

“Maybe she invented it there on the spot. For you.”

Mariye looked up at me and smiled. “I never thought about it like that before. If that's true—it's pretty cool.”

I think it was the first time I'd seen her smile. It was as if a ray of sunlight had shot through a crack in an overcast sky to illuminate one special spot. It was that kind of smile.

“Could you recognize the place if you went there again?” I asked. “Back to that same observation deck in the mountains?”

“Maybe,” Mariye said. “I'm not sure, but maybe.”

“I think it's pretty cool that you carry that scene inside you.”

Mariye just nodded.

After that, we just sat back and listened to the birds chirping. The autumn sky outside the window was perfectly clear. Not a wisp of cloud anywhere. We were each in our own inner world, pursuing our own random thoughts.

It was Mariye who broke the silence. “Why's that painting facing the wrong way?” she asked.

She was pointing at my oil painting (to be more precise, my attempted painting) of the man with the white Subaru Forester. The canvas was sitting on the floor, turned to the wall so that I wouldn't have to look at it.

“I'm trying to paint a certain man. It's a work in progress, but it's not progressing right now.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure. I've just started it, though. I have a long way to go.”

I turned the canvas around and placed it on the easel. Mariye got up from her chair, walked over, and stood before it with her arms folded. The sharp gleam in her eyes had returned. Her lips were set in a straight line.

I had used three colors—red, green, and black—but still hadn't given the man a distinct shape. My initial charcoal sketch was now totally obscured. He refused to be fleshed out any further, to have more color added to his form. But I knew he was there. I had grasped the essence of who he was. He was like a fish caught in a net. I had been trying to pull him out of the depths, and he was fighting me at every turn. At that point in our tug of war I had set the painting aside.