the word “kiwi,” as though they ached to meet mine.
My prince never hurried, pronouncing each word with great care. His voice came from deep in his chest, yet it was soft and almost meek, and trembled ever so slightly at the end of a phrase. It filled the room like music, like liquid, and I felt as though I could reach out and scoop it up in my hands.
His eyes never left the book, and he would continue to read until I stopped him. The slight rustling sound as he turned a page added to the charm of his performance. The downy hairs on his neck glowed gold under the light of the chandelier. His curls had grown out since we’d first met, half hiding his ears. The contour of his chest was visible under his sweater—a boy’s chest that would soon be a man’s.
I closed my eyes and let his voice wash over me, tracing his form in my mind in painstaking detail: his toes and calves, his hips, his arms, chin, lips, eyelids … And I felt his smooth tongue and long fingers run delicately over my body. The curls tickled my cheeks and I stifled a cry as his breath moved down along my side.
My hands were young again—no wrinkles, no trembling—and as he touched me I could feel the rest of me hurrying back to the past as well. I would be able to grip a brush again, to paint the picture I wanted. I would be able to wrap my fingers around his penis …
“What sort of man was your husband?” he asked, taking a photograph down from the mantel.
“I’ve forgotten,” I said.
“You can’t mean that.”
“It’s true. He’s been dead more than forty years now and I’ve forgotten. I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Forty years is a long time—you can’t possibly imagine.”
“He was handsome,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. You can’t tell anything from an old picture.”
“And you were very beautiful,” he said—to me, forty years ago.
“He was wealthy. He hired me to do paintings of some of the plants in his garden. There was a great difference in our ages. I was a poor art student, barely nineteen, a waif with paint on her fingers.” He had slipped the bookmark between the pages and handed the book to me. I held it to my chest. “The plants I painted were all quite poisonous: wild sweet peas, locoweed, monkshood. When I finished the paintings, we got married.”
He put on his duffle coat, tied his shoes, and bowed. “I’ve had a wonderful time.” He said the same words each time he left me, and I believe he meant them. He turned again at the gate to wave. I kept my hands on my cane, but I nodded to signal he should go, and he would hurry off into the darkness to catch the last train.
Just once he tried to break his promise. He telephoned to ask if it would be all right if he didn’t come on Saturday. I knew every nuance of his voice, and I could tell how nervous he was.
“Are you ill?” I asked.
“No, but I was wondering whether I could come Sunday instead.”
“Is something wrong? Did something happen?”
“No,” he said again.
“But tell me why you can’t come. I’ll worry if you don’t.”
“I’m sorry to ask, after all you’ve done for me.”
“That’s not the point,” I told him. “I want to know why you can’t come.”
He was silent for a moment. “It’s my girlfriend’s birthday,” he said at last. I remembered the date he had written down when I was telling his fortune, and the numbers and symbols on the cards.
“No,” I said. I hadn’t intended to say it, but the word slipped out.
“But her birthday is on Saturday.”
“So is mine,” I said. This was a lie, of course, and he knew it. “And who knows, I may not be alive to celebrate next year. I’ll expect you as usual.” Then I hung up.
My prince came on Saturday evening. “Happy birthday,” he said. He had brought a small bouquet of flowers, the same ones, I supposed, he would have given to his girlfriend—yellow, fragile, they seemed to shudder as I put them in the vase and set them on the mantel. I had no idea what they were called, but they reminded me of one of the flowers I had painted for my husband long ago.
“Shall I continue reading?” He opened the book without being asked.
My cane struck a small stone and I fell, skinning both my hands. Blood oozed from the wounds, and the pain was terrible. One of my sandals came off and rolled into the grass. A spotted dog appeared from somewhere and began sniffing at it.
“Scat!” I called, brandishing my cane, and it backed away with a snarl. I managed to pull myself up on a tree, but the bark was rough against my skin.
I had been climbing the hill behind the park as we often had but decided to turn back before I reached the top. Then I had lost my way and found myself in a part of the wood I did not know. One side of the path was a stand of fern in a bog; the other, dense undergrowth. The sun suddenly seemed low in the sky.
Not knowing which way to go, I chose a direction at random and set off. There were no maps of the area or arrows pointing the way. From time to time, a bird flew up from the bushes. The cuts on my hands were still painful, and my skirt was speckled with twigs and leaves and dead insects.
I had thought I was heading downhill, but the path started to rise again quite steeply. Still, I was reluctant to turn back.
“Lean on me.” I thought I heard his voice, but I did not look around. He had not appeared for our next appointment. Instead I received a letter along with all the money I had given him for his studies:
“…happy to inform you that I have obtained a scholarship from the Foundation for Musical Culture … and fully realizing your generous support could benefit someone with greater need … hereby return to you … with my most sincere thanks…” The tone was polite, but terribly cold.
I lost my cane as I was crawling up the hill. Bracing my foot on the roots of a tree, I took hold of a branch and barely managed to pull myself over the lip of a small ridge. The blood was clotting on my hands.
Then I found myself at the edge of an open field that sloped gently above me—a field covered with boxlike objects. I reached out to touch the nearest one: a refrigerator. Broken refrigerators—some upended, others half crushed, white ones, blue, yellow, big ones, tiny ones, some missing doors, some scrawled with graffiti—every refrigerator imaginable.
I wove my way through them, noting all the different ways in which they had been damaged, ruined beyond repair. The silence was oppressive.
My chest began to ache and cold sweat ran down my back. My foot caught on something and I stumbled again, managing to catch myself on a large, double-door stainless refrigerator, the kind from a restaurant kitchen. It was spattered here and there with bird droppings.
I opened the doors—and I found someone inside. Legs neatly folded, head buried between the knees, curled ingeniously to fit between the shelves and the egg box.
“Excuse me,” I said, but my voice seemed to disappear into the dark.
It was my body. In this gloomy, cramped box, I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes.
Crouching down at the door, I wept. For my dead self.
Also by Yoko Ogawa
