Memoirs of a Geisha | Page 4

She's in terrible pain. Death will release h\
er."
After this, I couldn't hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I he\
ard a sound like a bird's wings
flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don't know. But if you've \
ever seen a bird trapped inside the
great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my \
mind was reacting. It had never
occurred to me that my mother wouldn't simply go on being sick. I won't \
say I'd never wondered what
might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I\
wondered what might happen if
our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life\
after such an event.
"I thought I would die first," my father was saying.
"You're an old man, Sakamoto-san. But your health is good. You might hav\
e four or five years. I'll leave
you some more of those pills for your wife. You can give them to her two\
at a time, if you need to."
They talked about the pills a bit longer, and then Dr. Miura left. My fa\
ther went on sitting for a long
while in silence, with his back to me. He wore no shirt but only his loo\
se-fitting skin; the more I looked
at him, the more he began to seem like just a curious collection of shap\
es and textures. His spine was a
path of knobs. His head, with its discolored splotches, might have been \
a bruised fruit. His arms were
sticks wrapped in old leather, dangling from two bumps. If my mother die\
d, how could I go on living in
the house with him? I didn't want to be away from him; but whether he wa\
s there or not, the house
would be just as empty when my mother had left it.
At last my father said my name in a whisper. I went and knelt beside him\
.
"Something very important," he said.
His face was so much heavier than usual, with his eyes rolling around al\
most as though he'd lost control
of them. I thought he was struggling to tell me my mother would die soon\
, but all he said was:
"Go down to the village. Bring back some incense for the altar."
Our tiny Buddhist altar rested on an old crate beside the entrance to th\
e kitchen; it was the only thing of
value in our tipsy house. In front of a rough carving of Amida, the Budd\
ha of the Western Paradise,
stood tiny black mortuary tablets bearing the Buddhist names of our dead\
ancestors.
"But, Father . . . wasn't there anything else?"
I hoped he would reply, but he only made a gesture with his hand that me\
ant for me to leave.
The path from our house followed the edge of the sea cliffs before turni\
ng inland toward the village.
Walking it on a day like this was difficult, but I remember feeling grat\
eful that the fierce wind drew my
mind from the things troubling me. The sea was violent, with waves like \
stones chipped into blades,

sharp enough to cut. It seemed to me the world itself was feeling just a\
s I felt. Was life nothing more
than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a mome\
nt before, and left behind
something barren and unrecognizable? I'd never had such a thought before\
. To escape it, I ran down the
path until the village came into view below me. Yoroido was a tiny town,\
just at the opening of an inlet.
Usually the water was spotted with fishermen, but today I could see just\
a few boats coming back-
looking to me, as they always did, like water bugs kicking along the sur\
face. The storm was coming in
earnest now; I could hear its roar. The fishermen on the inlet began to \
soften as they disappeared within
the curtain of rain, and then they were gone completely. I could see the\
storm climbing the slope toward
me. The first drops hit me like quail eggs, and in a matter of seconds I\
was as wet as if I'd fallen into the
sea.
Yoroido had only one road, leading right to the front door of the Japan \
Coastal Seafood Company; it was
lined with a number of houses whose front rooms were used for shops. I r\
an across the street toward the
Okada house, where dry goods were sold; but then something happened to m\
e-one of those trivial things
with huge consequences, like losing your step and falling in front of a \
train. The packed dirt road was
slippery in the rain, and my feet went out from under me. I fell forward\
onto one side of my face. I
suppose I must have knocked myself into a daze, because I remember only \
a kind of numbness