The Snow Kimono (20 page)

I watch as he plucks the drops of water suspended from his
nose with the tips of
his fingers. He spreads his arms in a low arc, bends his knees, draws his child’s
belly up into his chest. Then, with an inelegant leap, he launches himself off the
rock. His little boy’s outstretched arms rotate quickly in the air as he plummets.
I hear a splash as he hits the water. Laughter.

Now, between the pillars of bamboo, I see his friend—another boy his age, whose name
I do not know. He emerges from the shadowed edge of the pool, glides out into the
sunlight. Only his head pokes out above the cool dark plane of water. Their clothes
lie in disarray on the stones of the bank opposite.

Above the sighing wind, I think I hear a sound from somewhere behind me. I turn,
half-expecting to see another child on the path down which I have just come. But
it is empty. I think to myself how inviting the water looks. Then I, too, am standing
half-naked on the bank, my clothes folded on the flat stones at my feet. I step into
the sunlight at the edge of the pool.

It is Ichiro who sees me first. He must think I am an apparition. He has just surfaced
from a shallow dive. Water is still flowing from his eyes. He shakes his head. One
hand reaches up to his mouth. He looks across to his companion who is swimming back
to shore.

He has probably never seen a half-naked girl before. A shiver passes through his
body. He remains motionless in the water. I smile at him. He smiles shyly back, uncertain.
He brushes the remaining water from his eyes.

Sachiko, he says.

I slip into the water. Its coolness sweeps up my legs and
along my body. I glide
out into the centre of the pool. Ichiro has swum to the shore. He is standing with
his companion on one of the topmost boulders. They are both looking at me. I float,
looking up at them. The sound of insects fills the air above me.

I see Ichiro grasp his friend by the shoulder. He points at the bank behind me. He
calls out something to me, waves, points. At first, I can’t see what he is pointing
at. But then I see Hiroshi emerge from the shadows of the path. In his half-stooped
giant way, he staggers over to where my clothes are lying in the sun. He leans down,
picks up my trousers. He has them by one leg. The other dangles in the water. He
brings them up to his face. Smells them. Turns them over. Smells them again. Then
he gathers both legs up in his hands, looks for the waist. He goes to put them on.

Hiroshi, I shout. No, Hiroshi, no!

He stops, locates me in the water. He holds the garment out to me.

No, I yell again.

Then he drops them into the water. He turns to look behind him, then turns back to
me. Across the water, I see his face change, grow ugly. A chill runs through my body.
His mouth has dropped open, and he has begun to bob up and down. I know what he is
thinking. That I am alone. That there is no one here to see him. That no one will
know. He looks around again, mouth gaping. Listening. Looking into the bamboo forest.
Then his gaze sweeps back to me.

I have swum into the shadows at the far side of the pool, to where little Ichiro
and his friend were jumping. The water is deep here. I keep my legs, my arms, moving.
Hiroshi steps into the water fully clothed. He strides out towards me. Immediately
a plume of water, like a ghostly white arm, shoots up out of the water in front of
him. Then another. He stops, confused, unable to make out what is happening. He looks
at the water around him, as though this is where the attack is coming from. He doesn’t
see the black stone curving down. It strikes him on the shoulder. He looks up. Another
is on its way. It appears to have launched itself up over the boulders above the
pool of its own accord. Hiroshi’s hand goes up to catch it. But he misjudges, and
the stone strikes him again. He bellows like an ox.

More stones begin to rain down. I can hear the two boys’ demented laughter. Abruptly
the stones stop. Hiroshi is waist-deep in the water staring open-mouthed into the
silence above him. He looks at me. I have circled around to where I can feel the
rocks on the bottom of the pool. I watch his eyes fall from my face to my breasts.
I cover myself with my hands. His mouth closes. Still he does not move.

Out of the corner of my eye I see two small heads poke out over the top of a boulder
behind him. Then their straining small-boy bodies appear. Their legs are bent. Between
them they are carrying a rock the size of a man’s head. Ichiro and his friend struggle
to hoist the stone up to their chests. They are intoxicated by what they are doing.
Their effort is heroic. But they must know it’s futile. They could never reach Hiroshi
from
where they are. I can hear their suppressed, grunting giggles. They steady themselves.

Just as the stone leaves their uncoiled arms, Hiroshi looks up. It hits the water
with a loud smack. The rock seems to crack open the very surface of the pool. A thick
column of water shoots into the air. Hiroshi is caught in the spray. Ichiro and his
friend are running about triumphantly in the sunlight on top of the boulder. Hiroshi
has seen them now. He lunges angrily after them. It is as if he believes he can step
up directly out of the water and up into the air to get them. He stumbles. His head
and body disappear beneath the surface. He comes up coughing, thrashing about. He
turns, wades unsteadily back to shore, wipes his eyes. Then he lurches up the slope
towards the boulder upon which the boys have been standing. But they have gone. The
moment he disappears, Ichiro materialises from behind the bamboo thicket beside which
my clothes are lying. He picks them up, gestures rapidly to me.

When I am before him, still soaked, half-naked, he reaches up with his small hand
and gives my clothes to me. I can feel the water trickling off my body, the sun on
my shoulders. His arm remains outstretched as I take my clothes from him.

I kneel and kiss him on his forehead, touching the small kernel of his shoulder.

Thank you, Ichiro, I say, for saving me.

Before turning to run back along the path through the bamboo, before disappearing,
he reaches up to touch my face. Even now, I can still feel the tips of three small
fingers
on my cheek, and see the look of disbelief, of wonderment, in his young boy’s
eyes.

Standing in the marketplace, I realise that this memory is not about me. Or Hiroshi.
Or the pool. It is about Ichiro. About the night, a few months later, when Ichiro’s
father comes banging on our door.

It is well after dark. Perhaps ten or eleven o’clock. The tourist crowds have all
gone home. We are asleep. And, all at once, someone is pounding on our door. I hear
my father get up. He says something to my mother. Goes to the door. I hear voices.
Men’s voices. Then I hear my mother. I sneak down the hallway to listen. It is Ichiro’s
father.

Ichiro hasn’t come home, he is saying. He hasn’t come home.

My father says something, but Ichiro’s father is still talking.

I left him on the mountain, he says. I wanted
to teach him a lesson…and now he hasn’t returned.

I peek around the door jamb.

My father and mother have their backs to me. Ichiro’s father is between them, by
the still-open door. His head is bowed. My father has one hand on his shoulder, trying
to calm him. But he is swaying back and forth. Shaking. Wringing his hands. He keeps
repeating the same words.

I left him on the mountain. I left him on the mountain.

Ichiro, his beloved son.

My grandmother and I are on the verandah peering through the darkness at the lights
gathering in the marketplace far below. Lanterns, torches, poles wrapped with burning
oil-soaked cloth. We can see clotted groups of men forming and re-forming. Their
fragmentary voices waft up to us on the warm night air.

The lights divide, separate into groups. Each to search a different part of the surrounding
forest.

Later that night, lying in my bed, I can hear their distant voices calling:
I-chi-ro,
I-chi-ro…I-chi-ro.

Of course, it is Ichiro’s father who finds him. The men have all returned home after
midnight without him.

His half-unhinged father gets up before dawn. I’m not supposed to know. But the next
evening I hear my mother and father in the kitchen, and I creep down again to stand
outside the door.

Ichiro’s father has gone back to the cliff face high above the village, to walk its
length. He thinks perhaps Ichiro has stumbled in the dark. Perhaps he has fallen
onto the rocks below. A father’s intuition drives him.

An hour after sunrise, in the cruel early morning light, he sees the crow. He is
climbing up through the small rocky ravine when he comes upon it. This big, solitary,
black bird. He sees
it half-obscured between the rocks, ready to take flight.

He stops. The bird’s hard, bright-yellow eye does not move. It is watching him. Calculating.
Measuring. He sees the crow cock its head. It takes one last look at what lies beneath
its feet. There is time enough. The gluttonous black beak plunges, plunges again.
The tremulous swallowing quick. Pitiless.

Even as he is running, Ichiro’s father knows. And even though he is now a madman,
shouting, waving his arms, his booted feet pounding across the furrowed ground, the
crow remains for a moment where it has been, on the boy’s forehead, the perfect place
from which to pierce the eyeless lidded skin.

Ichiro isn’t dead. He isn’t badly injured. Just unconscious. Concussed. In a couple
of hours, he will wake, and try to open eyes he no longer has.

I have often wondered what it must have been like for him, Ichiro’s father, to have
knelt down, scarcely able to breathe from running, to cradle his newly dark-worlded
son, with the sound of the crow’s scooping wings still echoing in his ears as it
rises into the air and peels away across the yellow morning slope.