One last time, Reiko says:
I never mutilated my tongue. Pleasure without pain is just a masquerade, but we must keep intact those parts that can give pleasure, because without it pain is only pain. You can cut off your fingers with big pruning shears, but you have to conserve at least one to penetrate the cunt up to the womb, you can amputate one foot with a hacksaw, but you have to keep the other to press it against the loved one’s cleft when your hands are otherwise engaged, you can lop off toes with a chisel, but you have to keep at least one stump to suck, you can rip off eyelids, make holes in lips, and slice off earlobes, but you always have to take care of your tongue, to treat well the only tongue you own, as it’s precious and doesn’t easily heal.
Without it, you wouldn’t be able to say that I’m lying, that two women would never do all that we’ve done, and that we are only paper ghosts, unable to suffer or bleed. Without it, I could turn my back on you as I am doing now, and go silent as I soon will, but I would not have been able to accomplish, on this next to last day, the one thing I’d refused myself up to that point.
On the night before the last day, in the darkness, over the muffled laughter of the renegades playing cards on the floor above, I told Misaka that I loved her.
In the end, the men say:
We’d screwed up our courage for a whole year, we’d saved up and armed ourselves with guns bought on the mainland, with rusted blades and clubs. We knew they wouldn’t prevail against the renegades, but we counted on our numbers and on our conviction that deep within themselves, the ronins and the gaijins must also have felt that this madness had to end. Even the wives no longer visited the Inoué property. Because we’d ordered them not to, of course, because they almost all had their own sculptures now, it was true, but also, and we knew it even if they refused to admit it, because they were afraid of Akuma and Reiko. They had seen things there about which they did not want to speak, they’d known women who had chosen to remain with the mistresses and who had never emerged from the property, they’d understood that all that was but horror, and they had returned to their duties and to reason. The children could bear witness to those horrors, those who had seen the graves dug below the property.
We crossed the village in a large pack, our lights troubling the darkness, battered the gate open with a sledgehammer and crowbars, and began to scale the slope leading to the house. At first we thought it was aflame. A pyre was burning in front of it, a gigantic bonfire loosing into the night air a stench of grease, wood, and solvent, and beyond which our eyes, dazzled, could not make out the structure of a house intact. We thought at first that the house itself was burning, and we saw ten black silhouettes loom up between us and the flames. We all felt a frigid chill run up our spines, we loaded our guns, unsheathed our blades, and closed our fingers around our staffs, tight enough to crack our joints. The renegades’ silhouettes shrank the more they drew away from the fire and came near to us, but their giant shadows danced with the flames and stretched out across the ground as far as the soles of our shoes.
Someone, bellowing, launched himself at the first of the renegades, his arms raised over his head to deal a heavy blow with his bludgeon. He’d hardly had time to begin his movement when the ronin took two steps forward and held the tip of his sabre to the man’s pulsing throat. He didn’t kill him. He made a sign for him to step aside, he ordered us all to step aside, then without a glance, plunged into the corridor that had been opened up, with the rest of the damned following behind.
The last one stopped and said:
“It’s over. You shouldn’t go up there.”
You had to be stupid to think we’d not go to see, to be certain that the threat was no more. Most of us rushed to the house, skirting the bonfire, and only a few turned back along with the renegades.
A strong wind rose up later that night, and blew embers and fiery brands into the house, through the windows. It was burned to its foundations, razed to the ground. No one ever missed it, but all of us who’d climbed on up, hours before the fire had been declared, regretted not having taken the renegade’s advice.
15
Akira Gengei said to himself, in Ainu:
The two women are now silent. The men here never speak of them, and on their orders, neither do their wives. And yet I feel, I sense that some of them still tend to their wounds, care for them and reopen them to keep Reiko’s art alive. Perhaps I’m the only one here who can still speak of all that, because I live in a language that no one any more understands.
The men who scaled the hill towards the house, despite the renegades’ warnings, found Misaka and Reiko carved up, dismembered, hacked into pieces that were scattered to all four corners of the house. The men must have been gratified, they must have told themselves that at last they had received their punishment, but they couldn’t really know if what they saw before their eyes was punishment or rapture. They couldn’t be certain. A fissure had worked its way into their minds, like a razor blade through the delicate flesh of their wives. They would have liked to believe that an ogre had staved in the doors of the property to bear off the women and drag them by their hair down to hell, but they had the vague feeling that whatever had come in search of Misaka and Reiko possessed the attributes of a woman and the attributes of a man, and that its fury had blown upon them like the wind through the window, making no more noise than the pad of a cat in an unmade bed. They knew that past a certain point, nothing had happened to Misaka and Reiko that they had not desired, and that whatever demon had come to ravish them, they had invoked it themselves, they had brought down its hands and claws upon themselves.
The house’s cold ashes were strewn over the peninsula, and the property is still abandoned. Travellers expected at Rausu never arrive, and the news of their disappearance reaches us by letter from Honshu, which is also an island, but that the people of Hokkaido still call “the mainland.”
As of the first snows, we find in places where no one ever sends flocks to graze, hoof prints, those of a buffalo or a goat walking on two legs. An old man told me one night that deeper still into the forest, there in the midst of brambles and thorns, where the bears themselves clear no paths, another series of prints joins up with those of the goat. They never run side by side for long, as if their owners knew each other well enough to exchange a greeting, but not enough to walk in convoy. Those prints are indistinct, like a child’s boot with at the tip a few red, almost brown drops like blood in the snow. The prints make three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood, three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood, three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood.
Paris in the Rain
BLOOD SISTERS III
He’d died deep in the woods and they’d taken him to the funeral parlour to try and deal with the damage. He’d worked for Abitibi Consolidated, which everyone around called the Console. None of the guys had seen what happened. He’d been split open from shoulder to hip by a machine that could trim trees tall as cathedrals. No one knew how he’d got in the way of the lopper. They were deep in the woods and the guys said that the day before there was a little snow. In June, mind you. Seems he’d made a stain on the ground as big as a puddle of water, thick as molasses and red as a harlot’s mouth.
She was there just by chance. A friend had found her work in his parents’ bistro in France. She’d be staying ten days in Paris before getting on a train for Brittany, and she’d come to say goodbye to her parents before taking off.