Suddenly, the Manager spoke up. "It's because of the rumor."
"The rumor?" I repeated, taken aback.
"It's the rumor that's keeping them away," he said, beginning his explanation as if he were telling a favorite story. "In February, one of the students suddenly disappeared. 'Disappeared' is the only way to describe it—it was as if he dissolved into thin air without so much as a whimper. I wouldn't have believed that a human being with a brain, a heart, with arms and legs and the power of speech could have simply vanished like that. There was nothing about him that suggested he would disappear. He was a freshman, studying mathematics. A brilliant student who had received a prestigious scholarship. He was popular, and he went out with his girlfriend from time to time. His father teaches at a university somewhere, and his mother writes children's books. There was a cute little sister, too. He seemed to have everything going for him. So it didn't make sense that he would suddenly vanish."
"There were no clues at all? A call, a note?"
The Manager shook his head.
"The police did a thorough investigation. They seemed to think he'd got himself mixed up in some sort of bad business, but there was no real evidence. When he disappeared, the only things he had with him were a mathematics text and a notebook."
The broom that had been propped on his shoulder fell to the ground, but he ignored it and went on with his story.
"The police called me in for questioning. . . . I was apparently a suspect. They wanted to know everything I'd done during the week he disappeared. Every word of the conversations I'd had with him, what books I'd read and what they were about, who had called me and what they wanted, what I'd eaten, how often I'd been to the bathroom—everything. They took down every word, recopied it, edited it, read it back to me. It was like sifting through every grain of sand on the beach. It took them three weeks to go over one week of my life—but in the end it was all a waste of time. And I was completely exhausted. The stump on my leg got infected and hurt like the devil. But they never found him."
"But I don't understand," I said. "Had you done something to him? Why did they suspect you?"
"I don't know. But the residents and the neighbors knew that I'd been questioned, and that was enough. They didn't say anything to my face, but the rumors must have been cruel. And since then almost everyone has moved out."
"How awful!"
"Rumors have a life of their own. But what bothers me more is that enormous file they made on my private life. I have no idea where it ended up, and that gives me a sick feeling."
He closed his eyes and started coughing. He tried to say something, apologize perhaps, but ended up coughing even harder. Finally, he was bent double and gasping.
"Are you all right?" I asked, resting my hand on his back. As I did so, I realized that it was the first time I had ever touched him. The material of his kimono was coarse and thick, but the body under it was so fragile I was afraid it might break from the weight of my hand. The vibrations ran through me as he continued to cough. "You should lie down," I said, putting my arm around his shoulder. Without arms, his body felt slight and somehow bereft.
"Thank you. I've had this cough lately, and pain in my chest." His body was stiff. We stood for a moment as the bee buzzed around our feet. Eventually, as if summoning up its courage, it made a quick circle around our heads and flew away.
There were patches of sunlight in the garden, but the dormitory was dark. Only the windows caught the light, sparkling brilliantly. Somewhere, behind one of those windows, someone had disappeared; I was here on the porch, rubbing the Manager's back; and my cousin was held up because someone had thrown himself in front of a train. There was nothing to connect these three facts, but for some reason they had melted together in the reflection from the window.
The Manager finally caught his breath. "Could I ask a favor?" he said. "Would you mind coming with me to look at his room?" The request seemed so odd that I hesitated. "I go there from time to time," he continued. "I keep thinking we must have missed a clue. Maybe you'll notice something, seeing it for the first time."
He was still having trouble breathing. I told him I'd be happy to go with him.
But I didn't find anything, either. It was a perfectly ordinary dorm room, with a desk and chair, a bed, and a chest of drawers. It wasn't particularly neat and clean, nor was it messy. The traces of the student's life had been left just as they were. The sheets were wrinkled and a sweater was draped over the back of the chair. A notebook filled with numbers and symbols lay open on the desk, as if he had got up from his studies for just a moment to go get something to drink.
The bookshelf held a mixture of travel guides, mysteries, and books on mathematics. The calendar on the wall was still turned to February, with notes jotted down here and there—"Ethics paper due," "Seminar Party," "Tutoring"—and above a line drawn from the fourteenth to the twenty-third, "Ski Trip."
"What do you think?" the Manager said, glancing around the room.
"I'm sorry," I said, without looking at him. "I see the room of a normal, well-rounded student, but I can't tell much more."
We stood for some time without speaking, as if we thought the missing student might suddenly reappear if we waited long enough. Finally, the Manager spoke again.
"He disappeared on the thirteenth, the day before he was due to go skiing. He was so excited about the trip. He was learning to ski, and I suppose he was just getting to the point where it was fun. When I told him I liked to ski myself, he wanted to know all about how I did it—what kind of boot I wore on my fake leg, how I held the poles. There was something very innocent and childlike about him when it came to things like that."
I ran my finger over the square marked "13" on the calendar. The paper was cool and rough. A pair of skis was propped against the bookshelf, still in their cover. A ticket for the overnight bus to the ski slope was tucked into the pocket of his bag.
"There was something special about the fingers of his left hand," the Manager said. His gaze was fixed, as if he were trying to recapture the image of the boy that lingered in the room.
"His left hand?"
"That's right. He was left-handed—he did everything with his left: combed his hair, rubbed his eyes when he was tired, dialed the telephone. He also made delicious coffee, and he often invited me in for a cup. We would sit together right here." As he said this, the Manager sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. His leg made a loud creak.
"He would show me how to solve math problems. Simpler ones that anyone would find interesting, ones that had to do with everyday life: how a mountain as huge as Mount Fuji could be reflected in something as tiny as an eye, how to move an enormous temple bell with your little finger—things like that. I had no idea that you could use math to figure out that sort of thing." Though I was still standing behind him, I nodded and he went on.
"He'd always start by saying, 'It's pretty simple if you think about it this way . . .'; and no matter what kinds of naïve or stupid questions I asked, he never lost his patience. Actually, he seemed to love the questions. He always had a sharp pencil in his hand, and he'd scribble down numbers and symbols as he explained what formula he was using and why. His handwriting was rounded and neat—very easy to read. And in the end, a simple solution would appear, as if by magic. 'Pretty interesting, isn't it?' he'd say, smiling at me as he underlined the answer."
He took a deep breath before continuing.
"When he sat there with his pencil in his hand, he seemed to be spinning a beautiful web rather than just writing numbers. The strange mathematical symbols he wrote were like delicate little works of art, and even the regular numbers seemed extraordinary. I drank his coffee and listened to his explanations, and the whole time I couldn't take my eyes off of the beautiful fingers on his left hand. They were constantly in motion, as if moving made them happy. It wasn't a particularly masculine hand. The fingers were pale and slender— like exotic hothouse flowers. But each part seemed to have its own expressive quality—as i
f the nail on the ring finger could smile, or the joint of the thumb was shy."
His tone was so passionate that I could only nod. I looked once more at the things that had been left in the room—the pencil sharpener and the paper clips and the compass that the boy's pale fingers must have pinched and rubbed and held. The notebook on the desk looked expensive but well worn. It occurred to me that the wrinkles in the sheets would probably never be smoothed out, the sweater never put away in the drawer, the mathematics problems never completely solved.
The Manager began to cough again. The sound was so forlorn that I thought for a moment he was sobbing. The cough echoed in the empty room.
The next day I went to the library to learn more about the boy's disappearance. It was a small branch library in one corner of a park, the kind of place children go to find picture books. But they were able to get me all the newspapers from February 14, and I went through the articles in each local edition. The papers formed a sizable stack on the table in front of me.
There had been various noteworthy incidents that day. A housewife who had been painting her bathroom had died after being overcome by fumes. An elementary school student had been found trapped inside a refrigerator that had been left at a garbage dump. A sixty-seven-year-old man was arrested for swindling women he had pretended to marry. And an elderly woman was taken to the hospital after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. Apparently, the world was full of complicated matters that I'd never dreamed of, but all these horrible misadventures were little more than fairy tales to me. What mattered at the moment was the boy's beautiful fingers.
No matter how much I read, however, I made little progress with the mountain of newspapers; and no matter how many articles I scanned, I found no mention of those hands. My own fingers were black with ink and my eyes were stinging. There were any number of poisonings and asphyxiations and swindles, but nothing to point me in the direction of the boy. I could tell from the light coming in the window that the sun was going down.
I don't know how long I was there, but at some point a man carrying a large ring of keys appeared in front of me.
"We're closing soon," he said, sounding apologetic.
"I'm sorry," I said, gathering up the newspapers. It was pitch black outside.
When I got home, there was a letter from my husband. The bright yellow envelope, the foreign woman on the stamp, and the unfamiliar letters on the postmark all reminded me that the letter had come from someplace far away. It was hiding at the bottom of the postbox.
The letter was long, with a detailed description of the large house where we would live in the small seaside town in Sweden. There was a market on Saturday mornings where you could get fresh vegetables, and a bakery near the station that made delicious bread. The sea, which was always stormy, was visible from the bedroom window, and squirrels came to play in the garden. It was a very pastoral sort of letter. And then on the last page there was an itemized list of things he wanted me to do:
Renew your passport.
Get an estimate from the moving company.
File a change of address form at the post office.
Go to say good-bye to the boss.
Go jogging every day. (You need to be in shape— it's damp and cold here.)
I read the letter several times, stopping here and there to reread a line and then going back to the beginning when I reached the end. But somehow I couldn't really understand what he was trying to say. The words—"market," "squirrel," "passport," "moving company"—were like obscure philosophical terms. The formulas written in the missing boy's notebook seemed much more real to me. The notebook held the reflection of the steaming coffee, the left hand, the Manager's watching eyes.
There was something irreconcilable between Sweden, wrapped up in the yellow envelope, and the Manager, coughing pitifully in his room at the dormitory; and yet they were together. There was nothing to do but put the letter in the back of the drawer.
Ten days later I went to check on the Manager again. This time I took custards. My cousin was off in the mountains at a handball camp.
It was raining after a long dry spell. The Manager was in bed, but he sat up as I lowered myself into a chair. I put the box of custards on the night table.
The Manager seemed even thinner than usual. I rarely noticed the empty spaces where his arms and leg should have been, but as he lay motionless in bed, the lack was inescapable. I sat watching him until my eyes began to ache from staring at nothing.
"How are you feeling?" I asked.
"Well enough," he said, smiling weakly for a moment.
"Have you been to the hospital?" I asked. He shook his head. "I don't mean to pry, but shouldn't you go see someone? You seem to be in a lot of pain."
"You aren't prying," the Manager said, shaking his head.
"I have a friend whose husband is a doctor. He's a dermatologist, but I'm sure he could give us the name of the right specialist. And I'd be happy to go with you."
"Thank you," he said. "It's good of you to be so concerned. But I'm fine. I know my own body."
"You're all right, then?" I said, pressing the point. "You'll get over this soon?"
"I'll never get over it." His tone was so matter-of-fact that I didn't understand at first. "It will keep getting worse. It's an irreversible condition, like late-stage cancer or muscular dystrophy. But in my case it's simpler. I've been living all these years in this unnatural body, and now it's just wearing out. It's like the rotten orange in the crate that ruins all the good fruit around it. At this point it seems to be my ribs—they're caving in on my heart and lungs."
He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if trying to avoid adding to the pain in his chest. At a loss for words, I stared at the raindrops making their way down the windowpane.
"I did go to see a doctor at one point," he continued. "One of the students who lived in the dormitory went on to become an orthopedist. He showed me the X-rays he'd taken. Have you ever seen an X-ray of your chest? Normally, the ribs are symmetrical, and the heart and lungs fit neatly inside. But the X-ray showed that my ribs are bent out of shape, like tree branches that have been hit by lightning. And the ones around my heart are the worst of all—it looked as if they were about to pierce right through it."
The Manager took a breath and tried to compose himself. His throat made a rasping sound. A silence settled between us, and I counted the raindrops on the window, gliding down one after the other. When I got to fifty, I looked back at him.
"Isn't there something they can do to keep the ribs from caving in?" I asked.
"It's too late," he said, without any hesitation. "They said it would help a bit if I lay quietly on my back, but there's not much they can do."
"What about surgery?"
"No operation can bring back my arms and leg, and as long as I have to do everything with my chin and collarbone and this one leg, my ribs will continue to contract."
"So there's nothing to be done?" I said. The Manager blinked instead of answering.
The rain continued. At times it was so fine it seemed to have stopped, but when I looked carefully, I could see that it was still falling.
Pale lavender tulips were blooming in the flower bed. Every time I came to visit, the tulips were a different color. The moist petals glistened like mouths smeared with lipstick. And as always, bees were buzzing around the flowers. I found myself wondering whether bees normally came out in the rain, having no recollection of having seen them on stormy days. But these were definitely bees.
They flew here and there in the rain-streaked garden. One would disappear from sight, high in the sky, while another flew down in the tangled grass. They were constantly in motion, but for some reason each one glistened brilliantly, and I could see every detail, down to the delicate patterns on wings so fine they seemed about to dissolve.
The bees would hesitate for a moment before approaching the tulips. Then, as if making up their minds, they came to rest on the thinnest edge of a petal, their striped abdomens qui
vering. The wings seemed to melt in the rain.
As we sat silently in the Manager's room, the buzzing seemed to grow. The thrumming, which had been muffled by the rain, became more and more distinct, filtering into my head like a viscous fluid seeping through the tubes of my inner ear.