Then I took up where I’d left off with the restaurant.
Now, if we could get J to come up here, I’m sure things would work out fine. Everything should revolve around him, with forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance at the center.
While waiting for the onions to cool, I sat down by the window and gazed back out at the pasture.
The Winds’ Own Private Thoroughfare
Three uneventful days passed. Not one thing happened. The Sheep Man didn’t show. I fixed meals, ate them, read my book, and when the sun went down, I drank whiskey and went to sleep.
The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.
Without exercise and without smoking, I had quickly gained six pounds. So I started to get up at six and jog a crescent halfway around the pasture. That took off a couple of pounds. It was tough not smoking, but with no store around for twenty miles, what was one to do? Each time I felt like smoking, I thought about her and her ears. Compared to everything I’d lost this far, losing smoking was trivial. And indeed it was.
With all this free time, I cooked up a storm. I made a roast beef. I defrosted a salmon and marinated it. I searched the pasture for edible vegetables and simmered my findings with bonito flakes and soy sauce. I made simple cabbage pickles. I prepared a number of snacks in case the Sheep Man showed up for a drink. The Sheep Man, however, never came.
Most of the afternoons I would pass looking out at the pasture. I soon began seeing things. A figure emerging from the birch woods and running straight in my direction. Usually it was the Sheep Man, but sometimes it was the Rat, sometimes my girlfriend. Other times it was the sheep with the star on its back.
In the end, though, nobody ever materialized. Only the winds blowing across the pasture. It was as if the pasture were the winds’ own private thoroughfare. The winds raced across the pasture, never looking back, on missions of utmost urgency.
On the seventh day after my arrival on the mountain, the first snow fell. The winds had been unusually calm from morning, the skies overcast with dense lead-gray clouds. After my morning run and shower, as I settled down to coffee and records, the snow started. A hard snow. It struck the windowpanes with a battery of dull thuds. The wind had picked up, driving the snow down at a thirty-degree angle. Rather like the slanting lines of some department-store wrapping-paper pattern. Soon the storm intensified and everything outside was awash in white. The entire mountain range and woods were obscured. This was no pitiful snow as sometimes falls in Tokyo. This was the real thing, an honest-to-goodness north-country snow. A snow to blanket everything and freeze deep into the heart of the earth.
The snow was blinding. I drew the curtain and curled up to read by the heater. The record ended, the needle lifted, and all was silence. The sort of silence that follows in the wake of the death of all living things. I set down my book and for no particular reason felt the urge to walk through the house. From the living room into the kitchen, checking the storeroom, bath and cellar, upstairs to open the doors of each room. There was no one, of course. Only silence which rolled like oil into every corner. Only silence which changed ever so slightly from room to room.
I was all alone. Probably more alone than I’d been in all my life.
I’d been dying for a smoke the past two days, but as there were no cigarettes, I’d been drinking whiskey straight. One winter like this and I’d end up an alcoholic. Not that there was enough liquor around to do the trick, though. Three bottles of whiskey, one bottle of brandy, twelve cases of canned beer, and no more. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to the Rat.
Was my partner, my former partner, that is, still hitting the bottle? Had he managed to put the company in order, turn it back into a small translation firm, as I suggested? Maybe he’d done exactly that. But could he really make a go of it without me, as he worried? Our time together was up. Six years together, and now back to square one.
The snow let up by early afternoon. Abruptly, just as it had begun. The thick clouds tore off in places as grand columns of sunlight thrust down to play in the pasture. It was magnificent.
The hard snow lay sprinkled on the ground like candy. Solidified into pellets as if to defy melting away. Yet by the time the clock struck three, the snow had all but melted. The ground was thoroughly wet, the twilight sun enfolding the pasture in a soft light. The birds sang as if set free.
After dinner, I borrowed two books from the Rat’s room,
I suddenly realized that this was the first time, in what now seemed like years, that I had seen a newspaper, and that I’d been left behind an entire week from the goings-on of the world. No radio or television, no newspapers, no magazines. A nuclear missile could have destroyed Tokyo, an epidemic could have swept the world, Martians could have occupied Australia, I wouldn’t have known. Of course, the Land Cruiser in the garage had a radio, but I discovered that I had no pressing desire to go listen after all. If something could take place without my knowing, it was just as well. I had no real need to know. I, in any case, had plenty on my mind already.
Something gnawed at me. Something that had passed before my eyes but which I’d been too dense to notice. All the same, on an unconscious level, it had registered. I deposited my coffee cup in the sink and returned to the living room. I took another look at the newspaper clipping. There it was on the reverse:
Attention: Rat
Get in touch. Urgent!
Dolphin Hotel, Room 406
I put the clipping back in the book and sank into the sofa.
So the Rat knew I was looking for him. Question: how had he found the item? By accident, when he’d come down off the mountain? Or maybe he’d been searching for something through several weeks’ worth of papers?
And why didn’t he contact me? Had I already checked out of the Dolphin Hotel by the time he came across it? Had his telephone line already gone dead?
No. The Rat could have gotten in touch if he wanted to, he just didn’t want to. Because I was at the Dolphin Hotel, he figured I’d find my way up here, so that if he wanted to see me, he had only to wait, or at least leave me a note.
What it boiled down to was this: for some reason the Rat didn’t want to face me. Even so, he wasn’t rejecting me. If he didn’t want me here, he could have shut me out any number of ways. It was his house, after all.
Grappling with these two propositions, I watched the second hand sweep slowly around the face of the clock. After one full circumgyration, my reasoning had made no progress. I couldn’t figure out what lay at the center of all this.
The Sheep Man knew something. That much was certain. Someone who had monitored my arrival on the scene was sure to know about the Rat’s living here for six months.
The more I thought about it, the more difficult I found it to escape the feeling that the Sheep Man’s actions reflected the Rat’s will. The Sheep Man had driven my girlfriend from the mountain and left me here alone. His showing up here was undoubtedly a harbinger of something. Something was progressing all around me. The area was being swept clean and purified. Something was about to happen.
I turned out the lights and went upstairs, climbed into bed, and looked out at the moon and pasture. Stars peeked through a tear in the clouds. I opened the window and smelled the night air. Among the rustling leaves I
