the brake. He turned off the engine, and we sat, delivered into the midst of a frozen silence. There was only the wind taking its survey of the land.
The caretaker rested both hands on the wheel. A half hour seemed to pass before he got out of the jeep and tapped the ground with the sole of his work shoe. I climbed out of the jeep after him and stood beside him, looking down at the road surface.
“No good,” said the caretaker. “It rained a lot harder than I thought.”
The road did not seem all that damp to me. On the contrary, it looked hard-packed and dry.
“The core is damp,” he explained. “It fools everyone. Things are different in these parts.”
“Different?”
Instead of answering, he took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit up. “How about taking a short walk with me?”
We walked two hundred yards to the next bend. I could feel the nasty chill. I zipped my windbreaker all the way up and turned my collar, but the cold insisted.
Right where the road began to curve, the caretaker stopped. Facing the cliff on the right, cigarette still at his lips, he grimaced. Water, a light clayey brown, was trickling out of the middle of the cliff, flowing down the rock, and slowly crossing the road. I swiped my finger across the rock face. It was more porous than it seemed, the surface crumbling at the slightest touch.
“This here’s one hell of a curve,” said the caretaker. “The surface is loose, but that’s not all. It’s, well, bad luck. Even the sheep are afraid of it.”
The caretaker coughed and tossed his cigarette to the ground. “I hate to do this to you, but I don’t want to chance it.”
I nodded.
“Think you can walk it the rest of the way?”
“Walking isn’t the question. The point is the vibration.”
The caretaker gave one more good hard stamp of his shoe. A split second later came a dull, depressing retort. “It’s okay for walking.”
We returned to the jeep.
“It’s about another three miles from here,” said the caretaker. “Even with the woman, you’ll get there in an hour and a half. One straight road, not much of a rise. Sorry I can’t take you the whole way.”
“That’s all right. Thanks for everything.”
“You thinking to stay up there?”
“I don’t know. I might be back down tomorrow. It might take a week. Depends on how things go.”
He put another cigarette to his lips, but this time before he could even light up he started coughing. “You better watch out, though. The way things look, it’ll probably be an early snow. And once the snow sets in, you’re not gettin’ out.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said.
“There’s a mailbox by the front door. The key’s wedged in the bottom. If nobody’s there, use that.”
We unloaded the jeep under the lead-gray skies. I took my windbreaker off and slipped on a heavy mountaineering parka. I was still cold.
With great difficulty, the caretaker managed to turn the jeep around, bumping into the cliff repeatedly. Each time he hit the cliff, it would crumble. Finally, he succeeded in turning completely around, honked his horn, and waved. I waved back. The jeep swung around the bend and was gone.
We were totally alone. As if we’d been dropped off at the edge of the world.
We set our backpacks on the ground and stood there saying nothing, trying to get our bearings. Below us a slender ribbon of silver river wound its way through the valley, both banks covered in dense green forest. Across the valley broke waves of low, autumn-tinged hills and beyond that a hazy view of the flatlands. Thin columns of smoke rose from the fields where rice straw was being burned after the harvest. A breathtaking panorama, but it made me feel no better. Everything seemed so remote, so … alien.
The sky was weighed down with a moist, uniform gray—clouds that seemed, as one, to blanket all light. Below, lumps of dense black cloud matter blew by, almost within touching distance. The clouds raced eastward from the direction of the Asian continent, cutting across the Japan Sea to Hokkaido on their way to the Sea of Okhotsk with remarkable speed. It all contributed to making us aware of the utter precariousness of where we stood. One passing gust and this whole crumbling curve plastered against the cliff could easily drag us to the bottom of the abyss.
“Let’s get moving,” I said, shouldering my monster backpack. Something awful, whether rain or sleet, was in the air, and I wanted to be near someplace with a roof. I sure didn’t want to get drenched out here in the cold.
We hoofed it away from that “dead man’s curve” on the double. The caretaker was right: the place was bad luck. There was a feeling of doom that first came over my body, then went on to strike a warning signal in my head. The sort of feeling you get when you’re crossing a river and all of a sudden you sink your feet into mud of a different temperature.
In just the three hundred yards we walked, the sound of our footsteps on the road surface went through any number of changes. Time and again, spring-fed rivulets snaked across our path.
Even after we cleared the curve, we did not slow down, trying to create as much distance from the spot as we could. Only after thirty minutes did we relax as the cliff eased back into a less precipitous slope and trees came into view.
Having made it this far, we had no problem with the rest of the way. The road flattened out, and the mountains lost their sharp ridges. Gradually, we were in the midst of a peaceful highland scene.
In another thirty minutes, the cone was completely behind us, and we came onto a plateau surrounded by mountains that looked like cutouts. It was as if the top half of a gigantic volcano had collapsed. A sea of birch trees in their autumn foliage stretched forever. Among the birches were brilliantly hued shrubs and undergrowth, here and there a toppled birch, brown and rotting.
“Seems like a nice enough place,” said my girlfriend.
After that curve, it looked like a nice place indeed.
The road led us straight up through this sea of birches. It was barely wide enough for a jeep and absolutely straight. Not one bend, no steep slopes. If you looked ahead, everything was sucked into one point. Even the black clouds passed directly over that point.
And it was quiet. The sound of the wind itself was swallowed by the grand expanse of forest. The air was split by the cry of a fat blackbird. Once the bird was out of sight, the silence flowed back in, a viscous fluid filling every opening. The leaves that had fallen on the road were saturated from the rain of two days before. The road seemed endless, like the birch forest around it. The low clouds, which had been terrifying only a short while before, now seemed surreal through the woods.
After another fifteen minutes, we came to a clear stream. There was a sturdy birch-trunk bridge with handrails, and nearby, a small clearing. We set down our packs, went down to the stream, and helped ourselves to a drink. It was the best-tasting water I’d ever had. Cold enough to redden my hands, and sweet, with a scant trace of earth.
The clouds kept on their appointed course, but unaccountably the weather was bearing up. She adjusted the laces of her mountain shoes, I sat back on the handrail and smoked a cigarette. Downstream, I could hear a waterfall. Not a very big waterfall from the sound of it. A playful breeze blew in from the left, sending a ripple through the piles of leaves and scattering them.
I finished my cigarette and ground it out with my shoe, only to find another butt right next to my foot. I picked it up. A flattened Seven Stars. Not wet, so it had been from after the rains. Which meant either yesterday or today.
I tried to recall what brand of cigarette the Rat smoked. But I couldn’t remember if he even smoked. I gave up and tossed the cigarette butt into the stream. The current whisked it off downstream in an instant.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I found a fresh cigarette butt, so somebody must have been sitting here having a smoke like me not too long ago.”
“Your friend?”
