“Some people are an unsolvable mystery to other people. If he lives with that sort of person, he will gradually disappear. Have I answered your question? If you go to Ito’s bookstore late at night, you will hear him wrestling inside and the books falling from the shelves.”
“Who is he wrestling with?”
“Who? I think it’s a ghost. He has exceptional eyesight.”
The owner of the bookshop was named Ito. Joe had never noticed this before. So he was Japanese? His wife, this woman before him, was Japanese? They came here from the distant East to start a business, then they separated? Human hearts are frightful. There was something he wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t think of it. She seemed already to know what he wanted to ask, and moreover to be weary of answering it. She said someone was calling her, she must go at once, then she hurriedly left. “We won’t meet again.” This was the last thing she said.
Joe made up his mind to go to Ito’s bookshop in the depths of the night. What relation did this strange divorced couple have to those young Japanese women wearing kimonos in his story? The woman he’d just seen, wearing white. . it seemed that he had seen her somewhere before.
Joe looked up and down the pattern of a new tapestry Maria had woven. His head felt dizzy. There seemed to be no design at all, only changing layers of faint color. Perhaps even the changing of the colors was only in his imagination, and there was no pattern on the surface of the tapestry. His eyes began to hurt looking at it; even his temples hurt. He thought of turning aside his gaze but a magnetic force seemed to draw him into the tapestry. “Let me go, Maria,” he begged in his heart.
“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”
Maria appeared in the doorway. A few wasps wheeled around her head, looking dangerous. The wasps made Joe’s memory vivid and bright.
“You’ve come from seeing Kim, Maria?”
“As good as seeing him. I met the driver. Ah, that grassland! Did I weave it well? This time I began anew. It’s a new beginning. Listen, Joe. It’s so quiet. I mean the walls are quiet. After you leave, Daniel and I will miss you.”
And so Maria expected him to leave, too? Joe thought of the bookstore owner’s former wife, how years ago she and her husband had undertaken the journey here. The bookstore in the evening dusk and the riverbank during the bright day formed a contrast, so that Joe spontaneously felt the longing between the separated couple. But what kind of longing did Joe have for that woman? Maria was disappearing. Now she wove tapestries that gave him headaches, that left Joe’s line of thought suspended in midair. Joe circled the room, discovering the walls hung with quite a few similar tapestries, only with colors that were even more shadowy, in layers even more difficult to tell apart. When he fixed his eyes on a tapestry with deep gray tones, Maria spoke again, from behind him:
“Joe, what are you wasting your thoughts on?”
Joe uneasily turned to face her, saying to Maria that he grew more and more stupid. He heard the household’s two cats howling from the tops of the walls, and unexpectedly he glimpsed the pattern revealed in the tapestry. It was a hatchet. What hatred did Maria hold in the depths of her heart?
He heard Maria talking to someone, but there was no one in the room. She stood with her back to him, behind the loom, her voice low and hoarse. She was using a language that Joe didn’t understand.
Joe quietly left the workroom and went into the garden. There were a large number of wasps flying around it. Where had they come from? Was a wasps’ nest nearby? Daniel had also come out to the garden. A large group of wasps wound around him. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, but he didn’t mind the poisonous wasps. Joe thought of Daniel’s girlfriend, the Vietnamese girl with a body as light as a swallow’s, and felt that these two were truly a match made in heaven. Perhaps one day Daniel would go back with her to live in Vietnam. In that green country full of rainwater, Daniel would feel like he was returning home.
“Father, do you know who led the wasps here?” In the sun, the freckles on his nose were conspicuous.
“Who?”
“It was that driver. The moment he stood in the rose garden the wasps swarmed in, in a black mass. Such beautiful little things! The driver is admirable. Maybe he’s in love with Mother. Will you be jealous, Father?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I will be.” Joe spoke without confidence. “Do you think your mother hopes I will leave?”
“Mother loves you,” Daniel said earnestly. “Although that has nothing to do with your leaving.”
Joe saw the wasps sting Daniel’s head and face over and over. His face swelled rapidly, so that even his eyes were swollen into a single seam. Joe was afraid, but the wasps didn’t sting him. Only one kept at his ear, menacing, making its weng weng buzzing. Daniel sat calmly on the stone bench, as if he had not felt the wasps attack him, and was indifferent to the red swelling.
“Daniel, where should I go?”
His manner was helpless. He knew Daniel couldn’t answer questions like this, Daniel, who was bending down to investigate the roses, half his face swollen. He told Joe that the roses gave him evil thoughts.
Joe heard the loom start up again in the house. At the same instant, raindrops fell on his cheeks. How strange, when the sun was shining brightly!
“Daniel, did you notice it was raining?”
“I was just thinking about the problem of the soil quality, and I had a few thoughts about a tropical rainforest. What luck, Father, you seem to be able to feel my thoughts. Mother said there is a square inside of you, and a broad road shaded with trees extending all the way to the foot of snowy mountains. But why can’t I feel it there?”
Surrounded by such an atmosphere, Joe felt suffocated.
Daniel pulled up a rosebush and said something to its roots that Joe couldn’t hear. His hands were shaking. This boy, who as a child had shed tears at seeing a fish on a hook, had grown so violent. When Daniel was a year and a half old he fussed at night, and Joe held him in his arms, swinging in a circle outdoors, Daniel’s cries reverberating through the whole street. But once he learned to speak he became a silent, prissy child. Maria wasn’t willing to have Daniel grow up at her side and she sent him to a boarding school on her own initiative. For this, Joe had resented her. But now he felt grateful to her.
Joe needed to break something, to struggle. This boy, his face swollen, speaking to rosebush roots, and the headache-inducing tapestries in the workroom. . he couldn’t breathe. Also, there were the electricity-carrying cats. He must find a pure land to hide away in. Who could tell him where such a place was? Maybe the former wife of the bookshop owner could tell him?
A large clump of wasps circled Daniel. His face was swollen out of shape. He hadn’t realized it. He pulled up another rosebush and studied it in his hand. He seemed to have forgotten Joe still at his side. The sun burned the sweat from his youthful body, its odor filling the air. Joe heard an ominous implication in the loom’s shuttling sound. He had borne all he could.
He went inside and picked up his briefcase, telling Maria he was going to the office.
From her loom Maria fixed her eyes on him for several minutes, nodding her head. Joe sensed that her eyes were filled with expectation. Joe quickly walked into the yard before hearing Maria stick her head out and yell, “Joe, dear, walk to the corner and don’t look back.”
Joe, moving as if a generation had passed on, proceeded through the narrow streets. His own face reflected in the glass doors and windows was a stranger’s, a long face, a somber man, with a head of white curling hair. If the change in himself was so great, what had Maria, and Daniel, and other people, too, known him by? The street cleaner stood at the corner. Even this beautiful black woman seemed a little weary. She leaned toward Joe to greet him, with an imploring look. Joe stopped in his steps, and at the same time remembered Maria’s words.