I thought hard.
I had the feeling that if I lied now, everything would turn into a lie.
There’s the surface, and then what we see under the surface. Delicious tea, a dusty room, the lake glittering outside the window …
I tried my best to bring it all together into a single impression, layer upon layer, like a slice of mille-feuille. And then I answered.
“They didn’t seem unhappy to me. Not at all,” I said. “They didn’t seem especially happy, either. They looked like they must have unhappy moments, and happy moments, too.”
“I’m glad.” Nakajima seemed relieved.
Talking with him could be like a battle of wills, but I didn’t mind.
In fact, I kind of liked it.
“You know, Chihiro, it’s true. You’re really extremely unusual,” Nakajima said. “You don’t use emotional violence against people, or hardly ever anyway.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I’ve got scary sides, too, I’m sure. Everyone does.”
“I’m not saying you don’t have any. I’m just saying you’ve got less of that. And that’s good enough for me. I was afraid of losing you, so I didn’t want to get too close. But that didn’t matter, you were still there every day, in your own world, free from worries about other people. There’s nothing uncertain about you, out there painting, moving your hands and your body, and I feel so at ease because of that. Except that you’re so optimistic—that kind of worries me. I get afraid, because I can’t trust that. But I’m drawn to you. Sometimes I feel this urge to just go ahead and mess all this up, but I can’t, because I love you.”
Nakajima smiled, just a little.
“It’s great you can talk like that now, isn’t it? That’s progress,” I said truthfully.
“Hmph. I’m not going to Paris with you if you’re going to be like that,” he said, sounding like a child.
“All right.” I laughed. “Why don’t you go by yourself, then?”
“That’s fine with me. I’ll go all alone, and I’ll be waiting. I’ve been thinking, though—sometime do you think you’d come to Shimoda with me? I’d like to go visit that place eventually, and go to that riding club and say thank you to the people there, and above all to the horses. It would still be too hard for me to do that now, though. There’s no way, it’d be totally impossible.”
“Why don’t we go when we come back from Paris for a visit, then, just make it part of the trip? We could go swimming together if we go in the summer.”
Nakajima and I ambled off through the familiar neighborhood, just like always, chatting back and forth—not in a particularly happy way, but not in a sad way, either. There was a real sense of comfort, and yet at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little thing we said, these conversations, at any moment they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now.
Why were we so far apart, even when we were together?
It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.
“But before we do that,” I said, “let’s go back to the lake, to see Mino and Chii. Let’s go see the lake when the cherry trees are in bloom, all around it.”
“You’d go again? Really?” Nakajima said.
“If we go enough, maybe things will be all right,” I said. “All kinds of things.”
Here we were, two ridiculously fragile people, sliding along on a very thin layer of ice all the time, each of us ready to slip and take the other down at any moment, the most unsteady of couples—and yet I believed what I had said. It would be all right.
Going along like that, I felt like we were high above the clouds, shining.
“I’m sure they’d like that, too,” Nakajima said.
“Maybe someday I’ll even be able to see Chii when she’s better, up and about.”
That was unlikely, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can’t warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?
“For the time being, let’s go back home and I’ll make us some tea with some really good water,” I said. “Even if it won’t be as delicious as Mino’s.”
Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
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