Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [125]
‘She has listened often to her original heart. I’d like to set her mind at rest.’
She took his arm, allowing him to guide her steps.
‘You have your own giri. You are a good American son.’
‘She’s not my mother, but she did everything—’
‘We have an old saying.’
‘What is it with you people . . .’ He stopped. ‘What is it with us, and old sayings?’
‘You could call it another form of ancestor worship.’
‘And the old saying?’
‘Umi-no-oya-yori sodate no oya.’
‘The ones who care for you are your real parents,’ he repeated.
He studied her square, heavy face, not beautiful but pleasing, reassuring. He felt her quietness.
‘You and Henry were together a long time.’
‘A good, kind man. He was devoted to your mother.’ She said no more and Joe was aware of much left unsaid here.
‘Thank you.’
Did she know he was thanking her for the years, the caring for Cho-Cho? For peopling the empty places of his past.
‘For the spinning top,’ he said.
*
He took the train back to Tokyo, watching the less damaged outskirts give way to rubble as he approached the centre. Everywhere people were at work, rebuilding. Slowly Tokyo would rise from the ashes.
He had thought once that he was American. Later, old, frail ties tugged him in another direction and he saw himself, as though in the last shot of a movie, riding off into the Land of the Rising Sun. But it was too late to put down roots. Here, or anywhere else.
Overhead the birds swept in a dark filigree patterning the sky. When the swallows nest again, Pinkerton told Butterfly, I will return. Suzuki had repeated the words to him with sad amusement.
Wave upon wave, the lacy arrows headed into emptiness. Perhaps the birds could provide his answer: like them he would take off, crossing land and sea, and settle in the chosen place, for a while. And when some inner solstice gave the signal, he would head east – or west, depending on the season.
Yasuko would be busy, ruthlessly organising her fragmented family into shape; goading them back to life, like an irritable sheepdog snapping at their heels. Because they were important. And for once there was something he wanted to hold on to; a need for attachment.
‘I’ll be back,’ he told her as they lay curled together on the shabby futon. She gave him her cool, distanced look, one eyebrow raised:
‘I won’t count on it.’
‘Do,’ he said.
There was much he wanted to do here: walk the spine of this broken bracelet of islands from Okinawa to Hokkaido; rebuild Cho-Cho’s house – it was his, Suzuki told him; Cho-Cho had made her arrangements with typical efficiency. Before he left they had surveyed the small strip of blasted wasteland between house and road.
‘Maybe if I try very hard I might make a Zen garden.’
She murmured a phrase and he laughed ruefully. ‘Not appropriate?’
‘She always wanted an American garden.’
‘I can’t do that.’ Mimicking her: ‘Not appropriate. D’you think she’d forgive me?’
‘It is not question of forgiving. She would see your point of view.’
When they said goodbye she gave him a small metal box, once decorated with elaborate moulding and enamel. It was blackened, the surface rough, like a rash of Braille beneath his fingers; an emblem of enigmatic messages.
‘She placed her letters in it, written to you, year after year.’
‘Never posted.’
‘She hoped one day you would read them and understand maybe a little more.’
Heat had warped the lid. He managed to prise it open and looked into the box: the pages, carbonised in the heat of the explosion curled black and brittle, rustling silkily, like burnt onion skins.
When he had first seen the house from afar, approaching from the path that curved up the hill, it had seemed almost untouched. But close up, it was revealed as a ruined shell. He had stared at this absence of a house, feeling cheated: no trace remained of his mother.
And then Suzuki’s fingertips touched his arm, she