Through the phone I heard the sound of something falling on the floor: something not very heavy-perhaps a single pearl-dropping onto a wooden floor. This was followed by a rubbing sound, as if a piece of tracing paper were being held in someones fingertips and given a vigorous yank. These movements seemed to be occurring someplace neither very close to nor far from the telephone, but they were apparently of no interest to Malta Kano.
I see, she said in a flat, expressionless voice. Something concrete. That's right. As concrete as possible. Wait for a phone call. Waiting for a phone call is all I've been doing.
You should be getting a call soon from a person whose name begins with O. Does this person know something about Kumiko? That I cant say. I'm just telling you this because you said you would take any concrete facts you could get. And here is another one: Before very long, a half-moon will last for several days.
A half-moon? I asked. You mean the moon in the sky?
Yes, Mr. Okada, the moon in the sky. In any case, the thing for you to do is wait. Waiting is everything. Goodbye, then. I'll be talking to you again soon. And she hung up.
I brought our address book from my desk and opened to the Os. There were exactly four listings, written in Kumiko's neat little hand. The first was my father, Tadao Okada. Then came an old college friend of mine named Onoda, a dentist named Otsuka, and the neighborhood Omura liquor store.
I could forget about the liquor store. It was ten minutes walk from the house, and aside from those rare instances when we would order a case of beer to be delivered, we had no special connection with them. The dentist was also irrelevant. I had gone to him for work on a molar two years earlier, but Kumiko had never been there. In fact, she had never been to any dentist since she married me. My friend Onoda I hadn't seen in years. He had gone to work for a bank after college, was transferred to the Sapporo branch in his second year, and had been living in Hokkaido ever since. Now he was just one of those people I exchanged New Years cards with. I couldn't remember whether he had ever met Kumiko.
That left my father, but it was unthinkable that Kumiko would have some special relationship with him. He had remarried after my mothers death, and I had not seen him or corresponded with him or spoken with him on the telephone in the years since. Kumiko had never even met the man.
Flipping through the address book, I was reminded how little the two of us had had to do with other people. Aside from a few useful connections with colleagues, we had had almost no relationships outside the house in the six years since our marriage, but instead had lived a withdrawn sort of life, just Kumiko and me.
I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn't just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but there was something annoying about it. I didn't know whether this was the fault of the violinist or of my own present state of mind, but I turned off the music and went on cooking in silence. I heated the olive oil, put garlic in the pan, and added minced onions. When these began to brown, I added the tomatoes that I had chopped and strained. It was good to be cutting things and frying things like this. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that I could feel in my hands. I liked the sounds and the smells.
When the water boiled, I put in the salt and a fistful of spaghetti. I set the timer for ten minutes and washed the things in the sink. Even with the finished spaghetti on the plate in front of me, though, I felt no desire to eat. I barely managed to finish off half and threw out the rest. The leftover sauce I put in a container and stored in the refrigerator. Oh, well, the appetite had not been there to begin with.
Long before, I seemed to recall, I had read some kind of story about a man who keeps eating while he waits for something to happen. After thinking long and hard about it, I concluded that it was from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The hero (I had forgotten his name) manages to escape from Italy to Switzerland by boat, and while he's waiting in this little Swiss town for his wife to give birth, he's constantly going to the cafe across the way for something to drink or eat. I could hardly remember anything about the plot. What had stuck in my mind was this one part near the end, in which the hero goes from meal to meal while wait- ing in a foreign country for his wife to have her baby. The reason I recalled it so clearly, it seemed, was that this part of the book had an intense reality to it. It seemed far more real to me, as literature, for the characters anxiety to cause this abnormal upsurge in appetite rather than to make him incapable of eating and drinking.
In contrast to A Farewell to Arms, though, I developed no appetite at all as I watched the hands of the clock in this quiet house, waiting for something to happen. And soon the thought crossed my mind that my failure to develop an appetite might be owing to the lack within me of this kind of literary reality. I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true.
The phone finally rang, just before two in the afternoon.
Is this the Okada residence? asked an unfamiliar male voice. It was a young mans voice, low and smooth.
Yes, it is, I answered, my own voice somewhat tense. Block two, number twenty-six? That's right. This is the Omura liquor store calling. Thank you for your continued patronage. I was just about to leave to make my collections, and I wanted to check to see if this was a good time for you. Collections?
Yes, sir. I have you down for two cases of beer and a case of juice. Oh. Fine. I'll be home for a while yet, I said, bringing our conversation to a close.
After hanging up, I wondered whether that conversation had contained any information regarding Kumiko. But viewed from all possible angles, it had been nothing but a short, practical call from a liquor store about collections. I had ordered beer and juice from them, and they had delivered it, that much was certain. Half an hour later, the fellow came to the door, and I paid for two cases of beer and a case of juice. The friendly young man smiled as he filled out the receipt. By the way, Mr. Okada, did you hear about the accident by the station this morning? About half past nine.
Accident? I asked with a shock. Who was in an accident? A little girl, he said. Got run over by a van backing up. Hurt bad, too, I hear. I got there just after it happened. Its awful to see something like that first thing in the morning. Little kids scare the heck out of me: you cant see them in your rear view mirror. You know the cleaners by the station? It happened right in front of his place. People park their bikes there, and all these cartons are piled up: you cant see a thing.
After he left, I felt I couldn't stay in the house a minute longer. All of a sudden, the place felt hot and stuffy, dark and cramped. I stepped into my shoes and got out of there as fast as I could. I didn't even lock the door. I left the windows open and the kitchen light on. I wandered around the neighborhood, sucking on a lemon drop. As I replayed the words of the young liquor store employee in my mind, it slowly dawned on me that I had left some clothes at the cleaners by the station. Kumiko's blouse and skirt. The ticket was in the house, but if I just went and asked for them, the man would probably let me have them.