Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [8]
From across the room Cho-Cho was murmuring that she knew only a few words of this foreign tongue, gleaned from travellers calling on her father. She glanced again at the view from the window. She would like to acquire some American words; to speak, and to understand. She was known to be quick to learn. Could Sharpless-san do her the honour of giving her some help; perhaps there was a book she could study . . .?
‘I’m sure we have some books in the consulate library,’ he said, and found himself adding, ‘I could give you a lesson or two. It is not a difficult language.’
‘Not like Japanese, you mean?’ He saw that the girl had a feeling for humour.
‘In return,’ he suggested, ‘you can correct my mistakes.’
‘Oh! Your Japanese is perfect, Sharpless-san.’ She hesitated, and added, barely audibly, ‘Almost.’
He watched her mouth curve into a smile, the bright glance she threw his way, and felt a pang, sweet yet painful. A paternal feeling? Or something less admissible? He bowed and moved briskly to the door. He reminded himself she was just a child.
4
The first night, after dinner, rising with aching knees from the floor cushion, Pinkerton made a mental note to bring in a couple of chairs and maybe a proper table. How uncomfortable did life have to be to qualify as ‘traditional’? He had once visited an Amish family back home and had come to the conclusion then that anyone who refused the advantages of the modern world needed his head examining. His mother had had the good sense to get herself one of Mr Hoover’s vacuum cleaners and declared herself tickled pink.
Dinner itself had been tricky, an array of mostly uneatable bits and pieces, but he managed a little rice and slices of something that might or might not have been pork. The sake was okay but he couldn’t see it knocking bourbon off the market.
In fact the whole evening had hardly gone according to plan; somehow all this Japanese . . . ceremonial had sent him off course.
Now he intended to lead the girl swiftly to bed but before he could make a move she slid open the door and waved a hand at the sky. He looked up. Nodded.
‘Right. Full moon.’
He waited. The waiting was getting him down. The silence was getting him down, the famous Japanese silences that, Sharpless told him, ‘spoke between the words’.
The consul had recited an old Japanese poem to him when they first met; something about a pond and a frog that jumps in. The last line was ‘The sound of water.’ The line, Pinkerton had commented, rang no poetical bells for him.
‘Ah,’ Sharpless said. ‘We Americans might translate that line as “Splash!” But for the Japanese there needs to be an awareness of the silence between the jump and the splash. They would wait to learn the sound from the silence. Hence, “the sound of water”. That does it. Do you see?’
No he did not. For Pinkerton, a poem should make sense, describe something properly. And rhyme. At school they read Longfellow, learned verses by heart. You didn’t need to hang around waiting for the silence to tell you what in hell Longfellow was driving at.
The girl was still looking up at the moon, he could see its light reflected in her eyes. Then she folded her hands and made a small bow, towards the sky, like a greeting. She turned her head slightly; now she seemed again to be waiting for something. He took a chance and inclined himself in a sort of bow in the general direction of the moon. She smiled.
In the bedroom he unwound her sash, lifted the kimono from her shoulders – the nape of her neck above the collar was as frail as a child’s and for a moment he wondered just how young she was, nobody had mentioned her age, but too late to worry about that now. Pinkerton was not inexperienced, but something about this light, yielding body was unexpectedly arousing. In his urgency he ripped the fragile undergarment