The Narrow Road to the Deep North

  Pall Malls, eh? she said, taking a cigarette out of the bright-red pack. Not Woodbines for Jack. Something a little posh to make up for all that cursing. He always was quarterflash, Jack. Quarterflash and half-cut with a fulsome woman, he used to say, what fool isn’t happy?

  She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

  She rolled the cigarette end around in the ashtray.

  Do you?

  Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs—with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking—and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe.

  I don’t, she said. No, I don’t. It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I’m tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded . . . right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That’s beautiful. I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I’m not very good with words. But that’s what we were. Jack and me. We didn’t really know each other. I’m not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he’s gone. And everything is silent.

  I was with Jack, he began. At the end. He was keen for a Pall Mall.

  13

  THE MATTRESS WAS lumpy and had a small crater at its centre unsatisfactorily padded out with an old North Hobart football jumper. He turned onto his side, manoeuvred his body around its contours, its wadis and plains, its inclines and depressions and ravines. Having formed himself into the shape of the mattress, he leant into her, pushing his knees up under her knees, his thighs under her thighs, and, resting an elbow on her hip, brought his hand around her, and in this way he held her. There seemed to be a deep relief to speak of so many things that troubled both of them without confusing any of them with words. She couldn’t bear to be alone. Perhaps they lay together for warmth. Perhaps they held each other against the silence. Hoping for that sound to come back. Both knowing the person lying next to them understood it never would. He could hear sleet beginning to brush the tin roof. It was enough to be warm with her. Perhaps that’s all there was. He felt an immense age. He would be thirty-four come July. They held each other without words until he heard the horn of the brewery truck at the top of the drive.

  After he left she tipped the medals into the range fire. A few days later she raked out the ash, and for a moment was unsure what the melted slag in her hearth pan was as she threw it into the chook yard. Nineteen years later the great fire of ’67 swept through, taking all before it. The hop farm, now run by her son, her timber home and his newer brick home, the photos of her and Jack, all went in the flames. And over half-buried slag that had once been medals in what had once been a chicken pen a new layer of ash deposited itself. After more years passed, there grew out of it water ferns and dogwood and myrtles, until what had been the dream of Jack’s life was a forest and the forest dropped leaves and bark and branches, and over more time the ash disappeared under more layers of rot and peat and new life.

  She married a younger man who was good to her and she to him, but it was not the same thing as Jack Rainbow and she had been. He died in a tractor accident and so she outlived him too.

  Near the end of her life, she realised she could no longer remember what Jack looked like. Nor what he sounded like, or smelt like, or how he had held her and caressed her, slowly puffing on his Pall Malls while the snow fell outside. Sometimes she thought she smelt the smoke of his Pall Malls as she fell into sleep. Sometimes she remembered a room humming. But she could not hold the smell or the thought or the sound, and sleep was taking her somewhere deeper, ever further away. She was trying but she could remember nothing except that for a time, a short time, she had not been lonely and cold.

  As the truck made its way back down the mountain, Dorrigo Evans talked with the brewery driver as strangers sometimes do, explaining a little why he was there.

  They had something, he said. He’s dead and I am alive, but he had something I’ve never known.

  What’s that?

  He was a couple, said Dorrigo Evans.

  A couple, said the brewery driver. My mum and dad, they were a couple. Me, the missus, well, we’re D-day. Every day.

  He double-declutched, almost standing up on the brakes to drop the truck back to a crawl to take one of the many hairpin bends that formed the writhing road through the forest. When the road straightened out, he got the truck back into second and continued talking.

  But a couple? I mean, no. She’s a good woman. But love?

  Love, said Dorrigo Evans. Yes, I guess love.

  The brewery truck driver pondered on it for a mile or two. And then he said:

  Maybe a lot of people never know love.

  The idea had never occurred to Dorrigo Evans.

  Maybe not.

  Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it’s gone. You know it and then you don’t know it. Maybe we don’t control any of it. No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.

  That’s it?

  So she goes, said the truck driver. Where did you say you’re from?

  The mainland.

  Thought so, said the truck driver, for whom this revelation seemed both to explain and end an overly personal conversation.

  As the afternoon flight to Melbourne banked around and levelled out, Dorrigo Evans could see the snowy mountain backdropped by a perfect blue sky through the plane porthole. The world is, he thought. It just is. Then it disappeared into white and he found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and he pushed his fingers into air, as though he might yet find that femoral artery in time.

  You can feel the chill coming through from here, said a pleasant voice in the cocoon of intimacy that existed within the deafening throb of the great propellor engines. Dorrigo Evans turned and for the first time realised that there was an attractive woman sitting next to him. Her corn-blue jacquard blouse revealed the beginnings of a cleavage defined by the swelling cusp of very white breasts.

  You can, he said.

  And where are you heading? she asked.

  He smiled.

  Your hands look freezing, she said.

  So she goes, he said, suddenly conscious of his fingers held outwards, pushing and shoving emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.

  In this world

  we walk on the roof of hell

  gazing at flowers.

  Issa

  1

  TENJI NAKAMURA’S THROAT had been oddly hoarse for some weeks when,
after a long interview for the position of deputy accounts manager he had sat in on, he rubbed his stiff neck and felt a strange swelling. He paid no heed—indeed, he could afford to pay no heed because his job in the personnel department was busier than ever, and he was in line for a senior manager’s position and couldn’t afford to give in to ideas of sickness.

  But his throat grew sorer. When he began to find swallowing food painful, he reduced his eating to a minimum and lived on a diet consisting in the main of miso soup. Only after he began coughing up blood did he relent and go to the doctor. The diagnosis was unequivocal: Nakamura had throat cancer.

  The tumour was removed, and though his speaking voice was somewhat affected by the surgery, Nakamura took this blow with grace. He had come to view himself as a survivor, and wore his new, thin, reedy voice as a badge of honour. He felt blessed beyond belief. But three months later, when he ran his finger along his neck, he felt a small bump, taut and strange. He put it out of his mind. But the bump grew and there was more surgery, along with radiotherapy that left him feeble and aged far beyond his years. His saliva glands were burnt out, and he now could swallow only wet food, and even that with difficulty. And through this ordeal he came to recognise what an extraordinary woman Ikuko was. For she devoted herself to his care, was unfailingly light and pleasant, and seemed not to mind his dry and reeking body. When he was recovering from the ravages of his treatment he grew very conscious of how fresh and pleasant she always smelt, of how lustrous her skin remained, as though her very body was the sum of goodness. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed by the health she radiated, which seemed best caught in her seemingly ceaseless lazy smile.

  Every morning before she left for work, she would rise an extra two hours early in order to attend to all his needs. He admired her practical nature, but what he loved was simply her presence and touch. After a time he would do anything to have her sit next to him and gently run the backs of her fingers down the side of his face. And though she thought that doing nothing—as she put it—was a complete waste of her time, that same nothing was the most important thing in Nakamura’s life. Then he felt no fear, his pain was again for a short time bearable, and he wondered how he could have been oblivious to his wife’s goodness for so long.

  And more, moreover: for his wife’s goodness brought out so much that was good in him. He bore his illness with stoicism and humour. He made time to see others who were even sicker than he; and even did some work with a charity that took meals to the old. He was kinder and more thoughtful about one and all: his family, his friends, his neighbours, even strangers. Tenji Nakamura was stunned by this discovery of such goodness in himself. I am, he decided, a good man. And this thought gave him immense comfort and a tranquillity in the face of his cancer that amazed all who knew him.

  2

  IT WAS AT this time, when Tenji Nakamura was frail but regaining his strength, when he had come to realise how blessed he was in his life, that a letter found him from Aki Tomokawa, who had been part of his platoon on the railway. His old corporal had been searching for his commander for some years and wrote that he hoped that this letter might finally have found him.

  Tomokawa had always irritated Nakamura with his narrowness and obsequiousness, but he now saw his old corporal in an entirely different light—as a noble and good man with whom he had shared much. And Nakamura was touched by Tomokawa’s loyalty, which seemed to him of a piece with the goodness of his wife, with the kindness of his daughters, who every evening sat and talked with him, and which demanded of him some reciprocal act of goodness. Ever since that day at the Shinjuku Rashomon when he had read his name among the list of suspected war criminals, Nakamura had made it a rule to avoid any contact with his old comrades, and—other than the accident of his having ended up working for Kota—he had stuck by it.

  But now this attitude struck him as both selfish and absurd. The time for retribution on the part of the Allies was long past. Tomokawa, who had ended up on the northern island of Hokkaido, seemed to have tracked down many of their old comrades and to know of their various and varied fates. Not only that, but a group of railway engineers from their old regiment had even been back to Thailand—as Siam was now known—and had found the rusting hulk of the first locomotive to have made its way along the full length of the Siam–Burma railway in 1944. They were in the process of restoring it, with the ultimate aim of bringing it back to Japan, where it might be displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in honour of their great achievement.

  Hearing of this marvellous work, Tenji Nakamura realised that, among the other blessings he was accumulating with age, he no longer had to fear. And with fear gone, he now wished to be proud, and to share in the pride of others. Tomokawa’s letter marked in his mind the moment when he finally escaped the yoke of fear that he had lived under since that day at the Shinjuku Rashomon. Nakamura decided that, in spite of his illness, he would travel to the frigid town of Sapporo in the far north to once more meet with his old comrade.

  It was midwinter when he arrived, and preparations for the city’s annual snow festival were in full swing. Nakamura had seen on television how the snow festival’s theme for 1966 was to be the monsters that had become so popular in Japanese movies and on Japanese television. As he travelled in a taxi from the Sapporo airport to the Tomokawas’ apartment, he saw soldiers from the Japanese Self-Defence Force helping make gigantic ice sculptures.

  The driver insisted on naming them as they drove by: Gamera, the fire-breathing turtle, Godzilla, Giant Robo, Red Cobra with his huge forehead and protruding upper teeth, Mothra, the giant caterpillar, and Guillotine the Emperor with his huge head and tentacles. None of the names meant anything to Nakamura, but he admired the exquisite Japanese workmanship, the indomitable Japanese spirit such an endeavour represented.

  Tomokawa lived in a high-rise government housing unit and Nakamura got lost in the complex. By the time he found the right unit, he was exhausted from the search and the cold. Still—Tomokawa! How good it was to see him again! He was fatter, balder and, thought Nakamura, even shorter, but the same old daikon-headed Tomokawa—even if the daikon was a little blemished from the liver spots that mottled his face, putting Nakamura in mind of something vaguely reptilian. And if he was still somewhat annoying, Tomokawa was so delighted to see his old commander, so frank and unaffected, that what Nakamura had once found irritating he was now determined to find endearing and even charming.

  Tomokawa’s wife was even shorter than her husband, with an unfortunate underbite that meant she sometimes gave the impression of eating her words rather than speaking them. In spite of this, or because of it, she was a confident woman—a little too much so for Nakamura’s liking, but he chose to find her over-familiarity with him as evidence of warmth and kindness, and as such being qualities that marked Mrs Tomokawa out as a special woman.

  Such a man of talents, Commander, said Mrs Tomokawa, showing him into their living room, done up in the western style, complete with two very large soft armchairs. A soldier, a businessman and our very own Hokusai!

  Tenji Nakamura hid his confusion with a smile, unsure whether she had confused him with the immortal painter or just eaten half a word. But there was no confusion.

  Do you still paint, Commander?

  She was holding a military postcard and passed it to Nakamura. It bore a small painting of Tomokawa as he had been on the railway in 1943. It was clear Mrs Tomokawa thought Nakamura had painted it, for on the back of the card Nakamura had written a greeting and a short note saying Tomokawa was in the best of health.

  Outside the day was black with snow clouds.

  Forgive me, said Nakamura, but I must rest for a moment.

  He asked to sit down. The western armchair he found spiritually coarse and physically unpleasant; sitting in it felt like being embraced and smothered by something monstrous. The trip had wearied him far more than he could have believed possible and the morphine medication, which he had tried to minimise for the trip so he wouldn’t appea
r stupefied, seemed nevertheless to be affecting him more than usual.

  He felt a strange sense of drift and separation that was not entirely unpleasant and at the same time he became intensely aware of every sound in the room, every odour and even the movement of the air. The furnishings were living things, even the wretched armchairs were alive to him, and he felt he understood all things, but every time he tried to put this understanding into words it ran away from him. Suddenly he wanted to go home, and he knew that would not be possible until the formalities of his visit to the Tomokawas were ended. He kept his eyes closed, conscious that all around him the world lived as he had never known it had lived, and, just as he finally opened himself up to this joy, he also realised that he was dying.

  3

  AS DORRIGO EVANS filled out in middle age, his looks grew to be outsized and quixotic, as though he was overdone and overwrought in every sense, as if, Ella was fond of saying, the volume was turned up to eleven: formidable in presence but with an odd remove and strange, inquiring eyes. For his admirers it added up to charm, elegance even. For his detractors it was one more element of his infuriating difference. His masculine resolve remained. Aided by his height and a middle-aged stoop, he understood that it was often misunderstood as gravitas, and he was not ungrateful for the mask such confusion afforded.

  Through the decades following the war he felt his spirit sleeping, and though he tried hard to rouse it with the shocks and dangers of consecutive and sometimes concurrent adulteries, outbursts, and acts of pointless compassion and reckless surgery it did no good. It slumbered on. He admired reality, as a doctor, he preached it and tried to practise it. In truth, he doubted its existence. To have been part of a Pharaonic slave system that had at its apex a divine sun king led him to understand unreality as the greatest force in life. And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter—professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space—was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter—pleasure, joy, friendship, love—was deemed somehow peripheral. It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally.