As Boris had promised, about a month later, Party Central removed the Georgian politburo member from office and sent a new member to take his place two days after that. Another two days went by, and three Japanese prisoners of war were strangled during the night. They were found hanging from beams to make the deaths look like suicides, but these were clearly lynchings carried out by other Japanese. The three must have been the informers Boris had mentioned. There was never any investigation. By then, Boris practically had the camp in the palm of his hand.
The Bat Vanishes
•
THE THIEVING MAGPIE Returns
Wearing a sweater and my pea coat, wool hat pulled down low almost to my eyes, I scaled the back wall and lowered myself into the alley. The sun would not be up for a while, and people were still asleep. I padded my way down the alley to the Residence.
Inside, the house was just as I had left it six days earlier, complete with dirty dishes in the sink. I found no written messages and nothing on the answering machine. The computer screen in Cinnamon’s room was as cold and dead as before. The heat pump was keeping the place at normal room temperature. I took off my coat and gloves, then boiled water and made myself some tea. I had a few crackers and cheese for breakfast, washed the dishes in the sink, and put them away. Nine o’clock came again, with no sign of Cinnamon.
•
I went out to the yard, took the cover off the well, and leaned over to look inside. There was the same dense darkness. I knew the well now as if it were an extension of my own body: its darkness, its smell, and its quiet were part of me. In a sense, I knew the well better than I knew Kumiko. Her memory was still fresh, of course. If I closed my eyes, I could bring back the details of her voice, her face, her body, the way she moved. I had lived in the same house with her for six years, after all. But still, I felt there were things about her that I could not bring back so clearly. Or perhaps I simply could not be sure that what I was remembering was correct—just as I could not recall precisely the curve in the tail of the cat when he came back.
I sat on the well curb, thrust my hands into my coat pockets, and surveyed my surroundings once again. It felt as if a cold rain or snow might begin falling at any time. There was no wind, but the air had a deep chill to it. A flock of little birds raced back and forth across the sky in a complex pattern as if painting a coded hieroglyph up there, and then, with a rush, they were gone. Soon I heard the low rumble of a jet, but the plane stayed invisible above the thick layer of clouds. On such a dark, overcast day, I could go into the well without worrying that the sunlight would hurt my eyes when I came out.
Still, I went on sitting there for some time, doing nothing. I was in no hurry. The day had hardly begun. Noon would not be here for a while. I gave myself up to thoughts that came to me without order as I sat on the well curb. Where had they taken the bird sculpture that used to be in this yard? Was it decorating another yard now, still urged on by an endless, pointless impulse to soar into the sky? Or had it been discarded as trash when the Miyawakis’ house was demolished last summer? I recalled the piece fondly. Without the sculpture of the bird, I felt, the yard had lost a certain subtle balance.
When I ran out of thoughts, after eleven, I climbed down the steel ladder into the well. I set foot on the well bottom and took a few deep breaths, as always, checking the air. It was the same as ever, smelling somewhat of mold but breathable. I felt for the bat where I had left it propped against the wall. It was not there. It was not anywhere. It had disappeared. Completely. Without a trace.
•
I lowered myself to the well floor and sat leaning against the wall, sighing.
Who could have taken the bat? Cinnamon was the only possibility. He was the only one who knew of its existence, and he was probably the only one who would think to climb down into the well. But what reason could he possibly have had for taking the bat away? This was something I could not comprehend—one of the many things I could not comprehend.
I had no choice today but to go ahead without the bat. That would be all right too. The bat was, finally, just a kind of protective talisman. Not having it with me would be no problem. I had managed to get into that room all right without it, hadn’t I? Once I had presented myself with these arguments, I pulled on the rope that closed the lid of the well. I folded my hands on my knees and closed my eyes in the darkness.
As had happened last time, I was unable to achieve the mental concentration I wanted. All kinds of thoughts came crowding in, blocking the way. To get rid of them, I tried thinking about the pool—the twenty-five-meter indoor ward pool where I usually went for exercise. I imagined myself doing the crawl there, doing laps. I’m not trying for speed, just using a quiet, steady stroke, over and over. I bring my elbows out smoothly with a minimum of noise and splashing, then stroke gently, fingers first. I take water into my mouth and let it out slowly, as if breathing underwater. After a while, I feel my body flowing naturally through the water, as if it’s riding on a soft wind. The only sound reaching my ears is that of my own regular breathing. I’m floating on the wind like a bird in the sky, looking down at the earth below. I see distant towns and tiny people and flowing rivers. A sense of calm envelops me, a feeling close to rapture. Swimming is one of the best things in my life. It has never solved any problems, but it has done no harm, and nothing has ever ruined it for me. Swimming.
Just then I heard something.
I realized I was hearing a low, monotonous hum in the dark, something like the droning of insect wings. But the sound was too artificial, too mechanical, to be that of insect wings. It had subtle variations in frequency, like tuning changes in a shortwave broadcast. I held my breath and listened, trying to catch its direction. It seemed to be coming from one fixed point in the darkness and, at the same time, from inside my own head. The border between the two was almost impossible to determine in the deep darkness.
While concentrating all my attention on the sound, I fell asleep. I had no awareness of feeling sleepy before that happened. All of a sudden, I was asleep, as if I had been walking down a corridor with nothing particular on my mind when, without warning, I was dragged into an unknown room. How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I had no idea. It couldn’t have been very long. It might have been a moment. But when some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another darkness. The air was different, the temperature was different, the quality and depth of the darkness was different. This darkness was tainted with some kind of faint, opaque light. And a familiar sharp smell of pollen struck my nostrils. I was in that strange hotel room.
I raised my face, scanned my surroundings, held my breath.
I had come through the wall.
I was sitting on a carpeted floor, my back leaning against a cloth-covered wall. My hands were still folded atop my knees. As fearfully deep as my sleep had been just a moment before, my wakefulness now was complete and lucid. The contrast was so extreme that it took a moment for my wakefulness to sink in. The quick contractions of my heart were plainly audible. There was no doubt about it. I was here. I had finally made it all the way into the room.
•
In the fine-grained, multiveiled darkness, the room looked exactly as I remembered it. As my eyes became used to the darkness, though, I began to pick out slight differences. First, the telephone was in a different place. It had moved from the night table to the top of a pillow, in which it was now all but buried. Then I saw that the amount of whiskey in the bottle had gone down. There was just a little left in the bottom now. All the ice in the bucket had melted and was now nothing but old, cloudy water. The glass was dry inside, and when I touched it I realized it was coated with white dust. I approached the bed, lifted the phone, and put the receiver to my ear. The line was dead. The room looked as if it had been abandoned, forgotten for a very long time. There was no sense of a human presence there. Only the flowers in the vase preserved their strange vividness.
There were signs that
someone had been lying in the bed: the sheets and covers and pillows were in slight disarray. I pulled back the covers and checked for warmth, but there was none. No smell of cosmetics remained, either. Much time seemed to have gone by since the person had left the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, scanned the room again, and listened for sounds. But I heard nothing. The place was like an ancient tomb after grave robbers had carried off the body.
•
All of a sudden, the phone began to ring. My heart froze like a frightened cat. The air’s sharp reverberations woke the floating grains of pollen, and the flower petals raised their faces in the darkness. How could the phone have been ringing? Only a few moments before, it had been as dead as a rock in the earth. I steadied my breathing, calmed the beating of my heart, and checked to make sure I was still there, in the room. I stretched out my hand, touched my fingers to the receiver, and hesitated a moment before lifting it from its cradle. By then, the phone had rung three or perhaps four times altogether.
“Hello.” The phone went dead as I lifted the receiver. The irreversible heaviness of death weighed in my hand like a sandbag. “Hello,” I said again, but my own dry voice came back to me unaltered, as if rebounding from a thick wall. I set the receiver down, then picked it up again and listened. There was no sound. I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to control my breathing as I waited for the phone to ring again. It did not ring. I watched the grains in the air return to unconsciousness and sink into the darkness. I replayed the sound of the telephone in my mind. I was no longer entirely certain that it had actually rung. But if I let doubts like that creep in, there would have been no end to them. I had to draw a line somewhere. Otherwise, my very existence in this place would have been open to question. The phone had rung; there could be no mistake. And in the next instant, it had gone dead. I cleared my throat, but that sound, too, died instantly in the air.
I stood up and made a circuit of the room. I studied the floor, stared up at the ceiling, sat on the table, leaned against the wall, gave the doorknob a quick twist, turned the switch of the floor lamp on and off. The doorknob didn’t budge, of course, and the lamp was dead. The window was blocked from the outside. I listened for any sounds I could make out, but the silence was like a smooth, high wall. Still, I felt the presence of something here that was trying to deceive me, as if the others were holding their breath, pressing themselves flat against the wall, obliterating their skin color to keep me from knowing they were there. So I pretended not to notice. We were very good at fooling each other. I cleared my throat again and touched my fingers to my lips.
I decided to inspect the room once more. I tried the floor lamp again, but it produced no light. I opened the whiskey bottle and sniffed what was left inside. The smell was unchanged. Cutty Sark. I replaced the cap and returned the bottle to the table. I brought the receiver to my ear one more time, but the phone could not have been any deader than it was. I took a few slow steps to get a feel of the carpet against my shoes. I pressed my ear against the wall and concentrated all my attention in an attempt to hear any sounds that might have been coming through it, but there was, of course, nothing. I stepped to the door and, knowing that to do so was pointless, gave the knob a twist. It turned easily to the right. For a moment, I could not absorb this fact as a fact. Before, the knob had been so solid it could have been set in cement. I went back to square one and tried again, taking my hand from the knob, reaching out for it again, and turning it back and forth. It turned smoothly in my hand. This gave me the strangest feeling, as if my tongue were swelling inside my mouth.
The door was open.
I pulled the knob until the door swung in just enough for a blinding light to come streaming into the room. The bat. If only I had the bat, I would have felt more confident. Oh, forget the bat! I swung the door wide open. Checking left, then right, to be sure no one was there, I stepped outside. It was a long, carpeted corridor. A short way down the corridor, I could see a large vase filled with flowers. It was the vase I had hidden behind while the whistling waiter was knocking on this door. In my memory, the corridor was a long one, with many turns and branches along the way. I had managed to get here by coming across the waiter whistling his way down the corridor and following after him. The number plate on the door had identified this as Room 208.
Stepping carefully, I walked toward the vase. I hoped I could find my way to the lobby, where Noboru Wataya had been appearing on television. Many people had been in the lobby, moving to and fro. I might be able to find some clue there. But wandering through the hotel was like venturing into a vast desert without a compass. If I couldn’t find the lobby and then was unable to find my way back to Room 208, I might be sealed up inside this labyrinthine place, unable to return to the real world.
But now was no time for hesitation. It was probably my last chance. I had waited every day in the bottom of the well for six months, and now, at last, the door had opened before me. Besides, the well was going to be taken from me soon. If I failed now, all my time and effort would have been for nothing.
I turned several corners. My filthy tennis shoes moved soundlessly over the carpet. I couldn’t hear a thing—no voices, no music, no TV, not even a ventilator fan or an elevator. The hotel was silent, like a ruin forgotten by time. I turned many corners and passed many doors. The corridor forked again and again, and I had always gone right, on the assumption that if I chose to go back, I should be able to find the room by taking only lefts. By now, though, my sense of direction was gone. I felt no nearer to anything in particular. The numbers on the doors had no order, and they went by endlessly, so they were no help at all. They trickled away from my consciousness almost before they had registered in my memory. Now and then I felt I had passed some of them before. I came to a stop in the middle of the corridor and caught my breath. Was I circling back over and over the same territory, the way one does when lost in the woods?
•
As I stood there wondering what to do, I heard a familiar sound in the distance. It was the whistling waiter. He was in perfect tune. There was no one who could match him. As before, he was whistling the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie—not an easy tune to whistle, but it seemed to give him no trouble. I proceeded down the corridor in the direction of the whistling, which grew louder and clearer. He appeared to be heading in my direction. I found a good-sized pillar and hid behind it.
The waiter carried a silver tray again, with the usual bottle of Cutty Sark and an ice bucket and two glasses. He hurried past me, facing straight ahead, with an expression on his face that suggested he was entranced by the sound of his own whistling. He never looked in my direction; he was in such a hurry that he couldn’t spare a moment’s wasted motion. Everything is the same as before, I thought. It seemed my flesh was being carried back in time.
As soon as the waiter passed me, I followed him. His silver tray bobbed pleasantly in time with the tune he was whistling, now and then catching the glare of a ceiling light. He repeated the melody of The Thieving Magpie over and over like a magic spell. What kind of opera was The Thieving Magpie? I wondered. All I knew about it was the monotonous melody of its overture and its mysterious title. We had had a recording of the overture in the house when I was a boy. It had been conducted by Toscanini. Compared with Claudio Abbado’s youthful, fluid, contemporary performance, Toscanini’s had had a blood-stirring intensity to it, like the slow strangulation of a powerful foe who has been downed after a violent battle. But was The Thieving Magpie really the story of a magpie that engaged in thievery? If things ever settled down, I would have to go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia of music. I might even buy a complete recording of the opera if it was available. Or maybe not. I might not care to know the answers to these questions by then.
The whistling waiter continued walking straight ahead, with all the mechanical regularity of a robot, and I followed him at a fixed distance. I knew where he was going without even having to think about it. He was delivering the f
resh bottle of Cutty Sark and the ice and glasses to Room 208. And indeed, he came to a stop in front of Room 208. He shifted the tray to his left hand, checked the room number, drew himself up, and gave the door a perfunctory knock. Three knocks, then another three.
I couldn’t tell whether there was any answer from within. I was hiding behind the vase, watching the waiter. Time passed, but the waiter went on standing at attention, as though planning to challenge the limits of endurance. He did not knock again but waited for the door to open. Eventually, as if in answer to a prayer, the door began to open inward.
The Job of Making Others Use Their Imaginations
(The Story of Boris the Manskinner, Continued)
•
Boris kept his promise. We Japanese war prisoners were given partial autonomy and allowed to form a representative committee. The colonel was the committee chairman. From then on, the Russian guards, both civil and military, were ordered to cease their violent behavior, and the committee became responsible for keeping order in the camp. As long as we caused no trouble and met our production quotas, they would leave us alone. That was the ostensible policy of the new politburo member (which is to say, the policy of Boris). These reforms, at first glance so democratic, should have been great news for us prisoners of war.
But things were not as simple as they seemed. Taken up with welcoming the new reforms, we were too stupid to see the cunning trap that Boris had set for us.
Supported by the secret police, Boris was in afar more powerful position than the new politburo member, and he proceeded to make over the camp and the town as he saw fit. Intrigue and terrorism became the order of the day. Boris chose the strongest and most vicious men from among the prisoners and the civilian guards (of which there was no small supply), trained them, and made them into his own personal bodyguards. Armed with guns and knives and clubs, this handpicked contingent would take care of anyone who resisted Boris, threatening and physically abusing them, sometimes even beating them to death on Boris’s orders. No one could lay a hand on them. The soldiers sent out on an individual basis from regular army units to guard the mine would pretend not to see what was happening under their noses. By then, not even the army could touch Boris. Soldiers stayed in the background, keeping watch over the train station and their own barracks, adopting an attitude of indifference with regard to what went on in the mine and the camp.