Loon Lake

21

Every morning she swept the dirt path outside the monastery wall. She always wore the same thing, a simple kimono and those wooden slippers, you know? She was fifteen or sixteen years old but her hair was cut in the bowl cut of young children. Hair as black as night. She never smiled, but when she glanced at me there was such a flash of recognition from my soul that I went weak with joy.

Oh, Warren.

I used to wake up before dawn and do my chores and manage always to be at the gate when the sun rose and she came to do hers. She was the daughter of some working family down the street. They sweep the streets there with straw brooms. The unpaved streets. They sweep the dirt, compose it. They compose everything, they pick the fallen leaves one at a time.

How did you get to her?

I wish you wouldn’t phrase it that way, Lucinda. We knew each other on sight. We had to. My Japanese was less than rudimentary. Her English nonexistent. Only the upper classes studied English. It was a great social distinction to know English. A workman’s daughter couldn’t aspire to that.

Light me a cigarette, will you?

I have in my life just three times seen a face in dark light, at dusk or dawn or against a white pillow, in which there is a recognizably perfect perception of the world, some matched reflection of the world in her eye’s light as terrifying and beautiful in equal measure. Am I coherent?

A moral light? Is that what you mean?

She lives through her fear to her curiosity, there is a stillness of apprehension, like an animal’s stillness of perfect apprehension of its predator, and it is gallantry to break the heart.

I wish we had known each other when we were young.

Her father and several uncles made up a delegation to complain about my conduct to the monastery officials, who of course did not have to be told. I had broken every rule in the book. At the moment both sides gathered to come down on us we slipped away together and took the train to Tokyo. We found a room.

Is this when you became lovers?

I suppose so. I thought I could support us by teaching American customs and manners to Japanese businessmen. They wanted that. They were studying us intently. They listened to jazz and danced the Charleston. You’re not crying, are you?

It makes me sad. I know what happened.

I left the house one morning. I had an appointment to see someone at the U.S. embassy. It was a Saturday, the first day in September, 1923. As I walked down the street, I lost my balance but suddenly people everywhere were screaming. The streets were cracking open. I ran back, the city was falling down everywhere, I climbed over rubble, I saw her coming after me with her arms raised, the cobblestones heaved, the street broke open, it filled with water, I reached her and grabbed her hand just as the earth sank away and she fell in, she fell from my hands and where the earth had been there was a steaming lake. What is that up ahead, Lucinda? It looks very dark.

It’s nothing. A line squall.