The pencil started scraping nimbly across the paper, but Tamba laughed, making it clear that he was imitating the manner of a typical lecturer only in fun.
‘But we shall not get to all that for a long, long time. For now, you must make yourself like a newborn child who is discovering the world and studying the abilities of his own body. You must learn to breathe, drink, eat, control the functioning of your inner organs, move your arms and legs, crawl, stand, walk, fall. We teach our children from the cradle. We stretch their joints and muscles. We rock the cradle roughly and rapidly, so that the little child quickly learns to shift its centre of gravity. We encourage what ordinary children are punished for: imitating the calls of animals and birds, throwing stones, climbing trees. You will never be like someone raised in a shinobi family. But do not let that frighten you. Flexible limbs and stamina are not the most important things.’
‘Then what is most important, sensei?’ asked Erast Petrovich, using the most respectful Japanese form of address.
‘You must know how to formulate a question correctly. That is half of the task. And the second half is being able to hear the answer.’
‘I d-don’t understand…’
‘A man consists of questions, and life and the world around him consist of answers to these questions. Determine the sequence of the questions that concern you, starting with the most important. Then attune yourself to receive the answers. They are everywhere, in every event, in every object.’
‘Really in every one?’
‘Yes. For every object is a particle of the Divine Body of the Buddha. Take this stone here…’ Tamba picked up a piece of basalt from the ground and showed it to his pupil. ‘Take it. Look at it very carefully, forgetting about everything except your question. See what an interesting surface the stone has; all these hollows and bumps, the pieces of dirt adhering to it, the flecks of other substances in it. Imagine that your entire life depends on the structure and appearance of this stone. Study this object for a very long time, until you feel that you know everything about it. And then ask it your question.’
‘Which one, for instance?’ asked Erast Petrovich, examining the piece of basalt curiously.
‘Any. If you should do something or not. If you are living your life correctly. If you should be or not be.’
‘To be or not to be?’ the titular counsellor repeated, not entirely sure whether the jonin had quoted Shakespeare or whether it was merely a coincidence. ‘But how can a stone answer?’
‘The answer will definitely be there, in its contours and patterns, in the forms that they make up. The man who is attuned to understanding will see it or hear it. It might not be a stone, but any uneven surface, or something that occurs purely by chance: a cloud of smoke, the pattern of tea leaves in the bottom of a cup, or even the remains of the coffee that you gaijins are so fond of drinking.’
‘Mmm, I see,’ the titular counsellor drawled. ‘I’ve heard about that in Russia. It’s called “reading the coffee grounds”.’
At night he and she were together. In Tamba’s house, where the upper rooms existed only to deceive and real life was concentrated in the basement, they were given a room with no windows.
Following lingering delights that were not like either ‘Fire and Thunder’ or ‘The Love of Two Moles’, as he looked at her motionless face and lowered eyelashes, he said:
‘I never know what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking about. Even now.’
She said nothing, and he thought there was not going to be any answer.
But then sparks glinted under those eyelashes and those scarlet lips stirred:
‘I can’t tell you what I’m thinking about. But if you want, I’ll show you what I’m feeling.’
‘Yes, I do want, very much!’
She lowered her eyelashes again.
‘Go upstairs, into the corridor. It’s dark there, but close your eyes as well, so you can’t even see the shadows. Touch the wall on the right. Walk forward until you find yourself in front of a door. Open it and take three big steps forward. Then open your eyes.’
That was all she said.
He got up and was about to put on his shirt.
‘No, you must not have any clothes on.’
He walked up the stairway attached to the wall. He didn’t open his eyes.
He walked slowly along the corridor and bumped into a door.
He opened it – and the cold of the night scalded his skin.
It’s the door with the precipice behind it, he realised.
Three big steps? How big? How long was the little bridge? About a sazhen, no longer.
He took one step, and then another, trying not to keep them short. He hesitated before the third. What if the third step took his foot into the void?
The precipice was here, right beside him, he could feel its fathomless breathing.
With an effort of will he took a step – exactly as long as the first ones. His toes felt a ribbed edge. Just one more inch and…
He opened his eyes – and he saw nothing.
No moon, no stars, no lights down below.
The world had melded into a single whole, in which there was no heaven and no earth, no top and no bottom, There was only a point around which creation was arranged.
The point was located in Fandorin’s chest and it was sending out a signal full of life and mystery: lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.
Sunlight parts all things,
Darkness unites everything.
The night world is one
SPILLED SAKE
Tamba said:
‘You must fall as a pine needle falls to the ground – smoothly and silently. But you topple like a felled tree. Mo ikkai.’ [xviii]
Erast Petrovich pictured a pine tree, its branches covered with needles, then one of them broke away and went swirling downwards, settling gently on the grass. He jumped up, flipped over in the air and thudded flat out into the ground.
‘Mo ikkai.’
The pine needles fluttered down one at a time, the imaginary branch was entirely bare now and he had to start on the next one, but after every fall he heard the same thing:
‘Mo ikkai.’
Erast Petrovich obediently pounded himself black and blue, but what he wanted most of all was to learn how to fight – if not like Tamba, then at least like the unforgettable Neko-chan. But the jonin was in no hurry to get to that stage; so far he had limited himself to the theory. He had said that first it was necessary to study each of the three principles of combat separately: nagare – fluidity, henkan – mutability, and the most complex of all, rinki-ohen – the ability to improvise according to the opponent’s manner.
In the titular counsellor’s opinion, the most useful part was the information about blows to vitally important points. In this area, it was quite possible to make do with the skills of English boxing and French savate while one was still struggling to grasp the unpronounceable and inexplicable principles of ninjutsu.
The pages of his cherished notebook were filled with sketches of parts of the human body with arrows of various thicknesses, according to the strength of the blow, and mysterious comments such as: ‘Soda (sxth. vert.) – temp. parls.; not hard! – or inst. Death’. Or: ‘Wanshun(tric.) – temp. parls arm; not hard! – or fracture’.
Surprisingly, the hardest thing proved to be the breathing exercises. Tamba bound his pupil’s waist tightly with a belt and Fandorin had to inhale two thousand times in a row, deeply enough to inflate the lower section of his abdomen. This apparently simple exercise made his muscles ache so badly that on the first evening Fandorin crawled back to his room hunched over and very much afraid that he couldn’t make love to Midori.