Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [124]
He climbs the winding road from the harbour. In the brilliant sunlight his blond hair is almost white. Even from afar he looks American. He pauses, turns and waits.
Hobbling to catch up with him, Suzuki calls breathlessly, ‘It was easier before they rebuilt this as a proper road; I find the surface painful to my feet.’ She adds, ‘I remember watching your father walk up this hill to the house in his white uniform. He was so handsome.’
What Joe recalls is a tired man, with big hands, hair dulled to a dusty non-colour, who sang along with Bing on the radio.
Listening to her describe the events of that day, dim, blurred like a landscape seen through rain, twisted into so many puzzling shapes in his mind, Joe takes from his pocket the battered spinning top, its paint long ago rubbed off, flakes of red and yellow clinging to the surface. Suzuki glances at the top and exclaims, ‘You still have that! The top! I ran down the hill and bought it for your father to give you!’
And here it is again, the unreliable truth. Whose version will it be this time? Are all his memories to be stolen from him, one by one? Surely the top was a present from his mother? How can he remember that so wrong? Is nothing to be trusted?
They are approaching a cluster of buildings when Suzuki says, ‘I shall rest here for a few minutes. Please go ahead.’
She points out the remains of the house, and then the path is at his feet – just a few steps to the door with the stone lintel step where he sat. Didn’t he? He can recall the cool, hard feel of it beneath his small buttocks. While voices came from the room behind him, he sat here, leaning forward to pick up a snail. He had brought the snail up close, the gleaming slime sticky on his fingers. The waving horns twitched in response to his warm breath. Then someone knocked the snail from his hand, startling him. That must have been his father; he recalls a white sleeve, a tanned wrist with fine gold hairs. What happened next is a jumble. Was that when they took the child’s hands and walked him down the hill? When he remembered his spinning top and pulled his hands free, ran back—
The child screaming, tugging, tugging at the woman’s white sleeve, so that her hand fell away from her throat, the knife dropped to the floor, the blood flowing . . .
The breath is sucked from his body, and he groans – Suzuki’s head twitches as she hears the sound and then she has covered the ground between them and is holding him, the small woman soothing, rocking the muscular young body that is shaking with a grief for so long blanked out.
The roof and wooden walls are gone, door blown away. To the right of the doorway one wall survives, damaged by the blast but still standing.
He stares into the shell of the house, into what had been a room, and Suzuki, resting her hand on his arm, fills in the blank places: Henry, who had come running from town, who had rushed his mother to the doctor. How the two of them watched over her. How angry she had been, afterwards.
‘Henry used to say she never forgave him for saving her life.’
They have spent hours picking their way through the maze of the distant past; the three years of the waiting, when Cho-Cho endlessly repeated, as though invoking a spell, that one fine day Pinkerton would return, sail into the harbour, walk up the hill. Until the long-awaited day arrived, with all that followed.
As Suzuki talked and talked, the silent one, the servant, the observer who had enabled the others to lead their chosen lives, who knew everything and now had someone who was listening, she found herself for the first time playing a central role. And as the words flowed, an unsuspected bitterness went too, leaving her emptied, serene within, as she had always outwardly appeared to be.
When she paused, he had questions and more questions; he mined her for the gold of information.
They walked back together down the hill towards the harbour. He told her he would be departing for America when he could get leave, to attend to a couple of things. He tried to