Dreams of Speaking Read online

  ‘Instant karma’s gonna get you

  Gonna knock you right on the head

  You better get yourself together

  Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead

  What in the world you thinking of

  Laughing in the face of love

  What on earth you tryin’ to do

  It’s up to you, yeah you.’

  The man sitting opposite Alice opened his eyes and smiled. ‘“Instant Karma”,’ he said. ‘This song is called “Instant Karma”.’

  He was a Japanese man of about seventy-five. He had backward-swept grey hair and a look of sleepy composure.

  ‘I was once in love with Yoko Ono. Her boldness. Her art. Her international life.’ He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his fists. An enormous wristwatch glinted in the dim light of the train. ‘In the sixties, of course.’

  Alice liked his smile. And the unexpected intimacy of his confession.

  ‘In that song,’ he went on without prompting, ‘in the video of that song, Yoko Ono is brindforded.’

  Alice could not quite make out the last word. Brindforded? Ah, blindfolded.

  ‘Blindfolded,’ she found herself repeating, as if correcting his accented pronunciation. She was momentarily aware that he might consider her rude or pedantic.

  ‘Just so,’ he repeated. ‘Brindforded.’

  The words oscillated between them, rocking as the train rocked, catching their national inflections.

  The man smiled again. ‘Sakamoto,’ he added, with a half-bow of his body.

  Alice leaned forward and extended her hand. ‘Black, Alice Black.’

  ‘The colour?’

  ‘The colour.’ (Was it a colour or an absence?)

  They shook hands, meeting in the small memory room the song had opened. Then they listened together until the end:

  ‘Well we all shine on,

  Like the moon and the stars and the sun,

  Yeah we all shine on

  On and on and on on and on …’

  Mr Sakamoto introduced himself: an independent scholar, from Nagasaki, writing a biography, he said, of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. (The word sounded like ‘terror-phone’.)

  ‘The telephone’, Mr Sakamoto said, leaning forward, ‘is the most metaphysical of all technologies. It reveals and it effaces, it is fulsome and forsaken, it enfolds and estranges.’

  Alice listened with delight to this little speech. It was as if they shared a minority language. Or harboured a hidden secret. Or a freakish enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am writing, among other things, about the extraordinary existence of the telephone. I am writing a book – trying to write a book – about modern things: Xerox machines, neon lights, photography, astronauts.’

  This work sounded meretricious, almost childish, as she announced it. But Mr Sakamoto beamed approval.

  ‘So we must be friends!’ he declared. ‘We must be friends! I am so pleased to meet you, Black, Alice Black.’

  Alice liked the sound of her name with the l’s abraded.

  It was such an easy meeting. Friends are an intersection, a route back to the world. Alice could not have foreseen that this Japanese man, this man, she would discover, who was sixty-eight, not seventy-five, from the city of Nagasaki, would greet her with such openness and affinity that it would be impossible not to befriend him. He too seemed responsive to something in Alice’s manner – not just her project, but the earnestness of her isolation, the dedication to an intellectual cause, the pleasure in supposing the usual arcane, the familiar compelling. If there is a magnetic aspect to sensibility it is evident in friendships that arise from these merest conversations and shreds of sentences, talks that align particles of self in a sudden, energised correspondence.

  Alice remembered at some stage that she had seen the video clip of ‘Instant Karma’. Yoko Ono wore a kind of bandage across her eyes, thick and white, as if she were not simply blindfolded, but wounded, or even blind. There were words on cards and peace-symbol armbands, and Lennon, with a thin beard and a lazy tambourine. In front of the band, dancers were bobbing arhythmically, under strobe lights. They wore Carnaby Street gear and had fixed expressions. Alice had no idea what year this performance was from: it was something lodged in her girlhood, something as almost forgotten and as lost as a beached whale.

  Mr Sakamoto fell back to sleep. Alice watched him rest his face in his hand, arrange his pullover as a pillow against the cold surface of the window, and then re-enter his own seclusion. He looked calm, she thought. Wise. When they arrived at the station he awoke with a jolt and was instantly communicative.

  ‘We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world.’

  Mr Sakamoto gestured around him at the hubbub of the train station, with everyone rushing helter-skelter for the exits. He offered Alice a name card from his wallet and wrote on it the phone number of his hotel. Since she did not have a card, Alice scribbled her name and email address on a slip of paper.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, reaching to shake her hand once again.

  Mr Sakamoto turned into the crowd, walked a few paces and then looked back. He waved extravagantly, with a kind of Florentine flourish. Alice waved back in a huge reply. They were already mimicking each other, already blithe in their friendship.

  Dear Alice,

  Forgive me for taking so long to answer your letter; things here have been getting on top of me.

  It’s been a particularly hot summer – yesterday was 40, oppressive, and everyone was grumpy and short-tempered in the heat – and then there is all this talk of going to war with Iraq, which seems madness on almost any pretext. I fear – what do they call it? – the ‘collateral damage’ of women and children and the ghastly sense that superpowers will once again play out their posturing antipathies by bombing the shit out of people they can’t see. And that it will go on for years and years, with poor and powerless people invisibly suffering. Michael and I have joined an anti-war group, but it’s looking inevitable. The government here are slavish appeasers; they want the approval of Uncle Sam at any price.

  The other upsetting issue at the moment is the treatment of refugees. Bloody ‘border protection’, is what they’re calling it. The detention centres are nightmarish and there are still children in there, held behind razor wire. We are lobbying for the release of the children – since neither party, as you know, will close down the centres – but getting nowhere fast. I’d planned to go on a trip to the desert, to visit one of the centres, but have had to cancel for other reasons. So Michael and I send phone cards and toys, but we’re not sure if anything we send is actually given to the inmates. Australia distresses me, this barricade mentality, this fear of the ‘illegal’ refugees, this rightist neonationalism. Perhaps you’re sensible to be away, overseas, thinking of other things.

  I saw Stephen last week, for a cup of coffee. He is still in love with you, and in a bit of a mess, frankly, but seems to have made progress in getting to know his mother – who has cancer, by the way, as half the world seems to have. He said she has spoken to him of her childhood in an orphanage in England, how she was ‘shipped out’ to Australia with fantasy promises, how she met his father in a pub somewhere, playing the fiddle. Stephen seems pleased that she’s talking but says it’s because she’s dying. I told him not everyone who has cancer dies of it. He has picked up some part-time university teaching, and says he will stay at least six months, then consider his options. He’d love to hear from you, if you’re inclined to write.

  Michael and the children are fine. Michael has a job on a community housing project in the northern suburbs, which takes up all of his time. But he seems pleased to be working in the public sector again and is finally believing that architecture is a worthwhile profession. David is still not talking much (unlike Helen, who chatters incessantly), but seems cheerful enough and is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. Helen is actually taller than her brother, and strangers a
lways assume she’s the older child. She has a tendency to throw objects when she becomes frustrated, and at the moment David has a nasty cut on his temple from a hurtled block. I still love it when they’re asleep – this sounds terrible, I know – but they are so beautiful and at peace (and quiet!) and I have time to read or paint. Mum’s been over a bit lately, helping out. She and Dad ask me to remind you to write more often. Both are doing as well as can be expected after the operation. Dad moves more slowly now, but is otherwise recovered and back to his gardening.

  As to the whale, why do you assume, Alice, that you’re the only one ever to remember these things? Of course I remember it. We were in trouble for wandering off, but still felt elated at our discovery. I too remember how we stood in the skeleton shapes and felt the mystery of it, and the charm, and realised that we’d stumbled upon something marvellous. The spinal bone was left behind when we returned to the city. Dad tried to fit it in the car, but it was just too large, and too oddly shaped. So we left it at the front door of the shack, festooned with dried seaweed and decorated with pretty shells. It may still be there, for all I know. Or someone may have claimed it, or sold it, or taken it for a garden. We weren’t always fighting, were we? There were these occasions of joint experience and pleasure.

  How is your work going? I have none to speak of – apart from mothering – but am optimistic I will return one day to full-time painting. Michael doesn’t think so, but I’m determined to prove him wrong.

  Take care, big sister. Send me a cute Parisian story about your life. And thank you for the wooden toys. At the moment they’re on a shelf, a little like art objects, but the children will grow, I’m sure, to see their attraction.

  Yours,

  Norah

  Across the sky, superimposed, were the vapour trails of jet planes. Alice stood on windy Pont Marie, tilted her head, and looked up at the white lattice trails of international air travel. She was vaguely shocked that the territory of the sky could be so marked by transit, but also thrilled at the design, at the modern writ so ethereally. Below her, tourists passed beneath the bridge on a broad open boat. It appeared sturdy, like a workers’ vessel, having the look of faux antiquity. The river was jade-coloured, rippled. Alice saw someone on the deck pause and take her photograph, as if she were a Frenchwoman-on-a-bridge, a genuine spectacle. She waved, and the photographer looked up, embarrassed, and turned immediately away.

  Alice was walking to meet her new friend, Mr Sakamoto. They were to lunch at a small bistro on the Left Bank, and would talk, he said emphatically, about this buzzing world. Alice moved through the cobbled streets with an air of anticipation, as if he were forty years younger, and her secret assignation.

  Mr Sakamoto would raise his glass of red wine.

  ‘The difficulty with celebrating modernity,’ he declared, ‘is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,’ he added. ‘The kangaroo is truly unmodern.’

  Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke. ‘And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.’

  ‘Vapour trails,’ responded Alice, pretending to miss his point.

  5

  Hiroshi Sakamoto was born in Nagasaki, in 1934, into a wealthy family who lived on the south-eastern hillside of the city, overlooking the harbour. Below, they could see ships of many nations on the turquoise water and the day-to-day arriving and leaving of vessels of commerce and trade. Further out, there were small fishing boats dotted around the bay; these too swept in and out, regular and irregular as the weather permitted. The view extended to promontories, sky, to the horizon of the ocean. They could see rain approaching in blue veils and clouds mass and unfurl. It was expansive and mobile; it was a view that encouraged journeying. Up and down the steep slopes of the hillside moved figures, sedan chairs and heavy carts, so that one could believe one sat high upon a world of relentless labour.

  Hiroshi’s father, Osamu, had inherited a fortune, being the only heir to a centuries-old saki business. The raking and cooling of rice, the smell of fermentation, the rituals of purifying water and the appeasement of spirits, these were all encoded so thoroughly in Osamu as a child that no one would imagine that his interests would turn to the production of steel. Although he maintained the saki business, almost purely for sentimental reasons and the tremor of nostalgic pleasure whenever he smelled rice at its final stage and saw women bent with large fans above steaming trays, he was seduced by industrial manufacture and the intricacy of machines. In the late 1920s he visited America with a translator in tow, and saw there the production-line assembly of motorised vehicles, welders and machinists contriving the engines of aircraft, and women with nimble hands, each producing a little component of a Wurlitzer wireless. Although he found America crass, ugly and with no civic decorum, when he returned to Nagasaki Sakamoto-san told his associates: ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’ and set about establishing a chain of factories in the Nagasaki prefecture. By 1934, his premises produced both the tiny cogs of watches and the girders for a bridge, and metal items of assorted shapes and sizes in between, some for the Mitsubishi dockyards, some for the munitions factories.

  Hiroshi had two older sisters, Sachiko and Mihoko, who doted on their younger brother and were clever and witty. They attended an exclusive girls’ school in the centre of the city, at which they were taught English and French, as well as traditional academic studies and female accomplishments. Hiroshi remembers his sisters chattering trilingually, making jokes and exchanging confidences in a plait of languages. Sometimes, in the space of one or two sentences, Sachiko and Mihoko shifted linguistic registers, so that no one knew exactly what they were talking about, and Hiroshi was often frustrated to the point of tears when he could not follow their secretive, erratic conversations.

  When he was six his father employed two private tutors – a Japanese scholar, Masa Tanaka, almost eighty, who was a famous practitioner of the art of haiku, and a young man from Manchester, England, who was not particularly scholarly, but adored his own language with singular devotion. Harold O’Toole was twenty-six years old, had startling blond hair, and fell almost at once in love with Sachiko, who had turned seventeen the week he arrived. Hiroshi detected his foreign tutor’s divided attentions and strove to excel, anxious to impress the young man with his English language fluency and his penchant for difficult vocabulary. By the time he was eleven, in 1945, Hiroshi was reading classic English novels and adopting regional accents as a form of play – although still not quite commanding the pronunciation of ‘l’. Harold O’Toole – who had been protected from internment during the war by the wealth of the Sakamotos – was still love-struck by Sachiko, but by then she was interested in a young biology teacher, a Christian, who worked at the Chinzei middle school. Only when Hiroshi was an adult did he learn from his mother that Mihoko had been in love with Harold O’Toole, and that this mismatch of feeling, this mis-crossing of desires, had caused the family much worry and distress.

  Of the day in August 1945, when the world changed, changed utterly, Mr Sakamoto disclosed very little. Alice must not be offended, he said; he had never told his wife or two adult daughters the details of his experience. The outline was simply that he and his mother had been saved, but that the rest of the family had perished. Almost everyone he knew had perished. Sachiko and Mihoko had perished. His father. Mr O’Toole. The biology teacher in Chinzei middle school. Almost 74,000 people in the explosion alone. His Japanese tutor, who at the time of the explosion had been in the mountains meditating by a stream, survived, but wished he hadn’t and committed suicide two weeks after the blast. Poetry, said Mr Sakamoto, was no longer possible.

  The child Hiroshi and his mother moved to Tokyo, where she had relatives. When Tadeo, his mother’s brother, returned from the war, they all lived together in a small apartment near a bombed-out suburb. At length Uncle Tadeo dis
covered Osamu’s overseas bank accounts, and the existence of two remaining factories in Honshu, and the makeshift family, bleak with grief, moved to a larger dwelling in a better area.

  Hiroshi was a restless young man who could settle to nothing and was afraid of attachment. He entered an intellectual world of remote theorems and calculations, and at one time entertained the idea – somewhat vengefully – of becoming a theoretical physicist. But some ‘perversity’, he said, intuitively prevailed, so that in post-war Japan, when others turned to pragmatism and the business of reconstruction, he found himself reading haiku, and English novels and European poetry in translation. He felt like a being from another planet. In Tokyo, cacophonous with the manufacture of new buildings and the incessant clang of metal, he lost himself in the quiet domain of seventeen syllables, the make-believe lives of raven-haired heroines and country gentlemen, and the storm and stress of faraway poetic emotions. Often he dreamed of his sisters, and his father, and of people now gone. In his dreams his sisters always spoke in a language he could not understand and he would wake himself, weeping.

  After an uneventful few years at university, Hiroshi began travelling. His uncle indulged him, funding his nephew’s whims, while at the same time sending gently hectoring letters about the need to find a profession and accumulate wealth. On a pretext of scholarship, Hiroshi found himself settling for a time in Edinburgh, a city he admired for its unusual combination of stately complacency and rough-at-the-edges commitment to life. The Scots, declared Mr Sakamoto, are a people given to mischievous intelligence and the cultivation of irony. At a bookshop he met and fell in love with Clare MacDougall, whom he had first encountered sitting in lilac shadow in the classics section, on a small oak stool, reading a battered second-hand edition of Homer. She was attracted to his foreignness, his upright posture, the neat pert bows with which he greeted her, his low respectful voice; he, to what he perceived as her explicit sameness: she had black eyes and hair, a flat face and a small nose, and she read with a transported intensity he immediately recognised as his own. They courted in the usual way – walks up to the castle, drinks at the pub, the occasional swift kiss in a wynd or on the doorstep of her home – but perhaps both knew it would come to nothing. Clare’s two brothers called Hiroshi a ‘Jap’, and treated him with vicious and undisguised contempt. Her parents were appalled – and told her so – that she would ‘walk out with a yellow man’, for all the world to see. Not much irony there, Clare had commented. When Clare refused to stop seeing Hiroshi, her brothers beat her. She arrived at their dinner date with a broken cheekbone and a blue bruised face, and tearfully announced that it was all too difficult. In the candlelight of the café, she looked like a young woman ruined. Hiroshi had seen enough of wounded bodies to want not to be the cause of any more, so he made a quick decision and left Edinburgh the next day. They wrote letters to each other for almost three years. When Clare announced her engagement to a man working in the Bank of Scotland, the letters between them abruptly ceased.