gave you my meishi with my postal address, and, remarkable to say, the letters came in the mail.”
“And no one else has your address? You never receive mail? Only from me?”
“Well, did you send them?”
“You say I did.”
“So, Savior, you are the Queen of the Jews?”
“It’s swell bantering with the scriptures, isn’t it? Of course I sent them to you. Now you tell me what do you think of them. Let’s have tea and you tell me what you are thinking. Better yet, let’s go to the reception room and I’ll play Chopin. Yes, Chopin softly, and you can whisper to me what you think the letters—are they really letters—or are they something else? Maybe not even Mogens’. I’ll play Opus 72. No.1 in E-minor; it, like the letters, came out after his death. And it’s softly done, a kind of contemplation of death. Yes, perfect for our discussion. For our chat. I like that word chat.”
She slipped out of her slippers never breaking her slow walking rhythm when they came into the large tatami room that served group functions. The mahogany upright piano had dug its double wheels into the matting. He kept his slippers on, even though she scowled at that insensitivity. The black bench was mounted on a wooden tray to keep the legs from driving into the tatami.
“You have to tell me quickly. It’s a short piece.” The slow repetitive rhythm in the left hand began softly as a mournful melody in the upper register limped out—an infinite legato line that seemed to calm itself into the rhythm, only to nudge upwards as if to escape the lower relentlessness.
“You have to think of them in terms of their audience. In terms of his situation.”
“Of course,” she said, watching her right hand climb further away from left. “Of course.”
“I’d like to know how you got them.”
“Oh, I bet you would like to know that. Maybe I went to Harbin after the war. I always wanted to go to China. But it’s not really China is it?”
“I don’t think anyone went to Harbin after the war. Russians everywhere.”
“Maybe I had a Russian lover,” she said, closing her eyes, nodding to the rhythm.
“Maybe you are a Russian lover,” he answered.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you didn’t go to Harbin.”
“Well, you are right there. And now I’ll have to play it again. You’re a slow thinker.”
“I think the clearest thing is to accept the extra page explanation. If you accept that, then they are for real, aren’t they? He had a chance to tell you what he really thought, what he imagined was actually happening, if he could understand it at all. But he had to know someone at the place was looking over what he wrote, don’t you think?”
“I think Chopin was wise to keep this music in his closet. It’s pretty dull stuff don’t you think?”
“I didn’t find it dull stuff. Did you?”
“I could not read it at first. It was horrible. Horrible.”
“I didn’t find it that horrible. It was pretty threadbare, if you want to know.”
“Threadbare?” The left hand stopped playing.
“Pretty open between stitches, so that you had to fill it in with your own threads—if you see what I mean. For example I say ‘eye’ and you think ‘pull it out with pliers.’”
“But you only said ‘eye’ didn’t you?”
“That’s all Mogens said.”
“I think they killed him in Harbin.”
“Presumably.”
“Our lord was killed deliberately—as part of God’s plan, isn’t that so?” she stopped playing.
“And Judas made it happen, blamelessly....is that it?”
“Yes, of course. And the church was never absorbed into the Japanese Christian Church, and after it was bombed, it was properly rebuilt and then properly moved to Rokko.”
“Properly?”
“Yes, properly, according to God’s plan.”
“And it was God’s plan to send Mogens to Harbin?”
“I don’t think so, but it was God’s plan to bring those letters to me and to you.”
“Yes but how?”
“Oh, but we cannot ask that question, can we? It shows lack of faith.”
“Faith has nothing to do with it, at least as I understand it. It’s simply a matter of logistics. How did you get the letters? They were written, presumably, to use your term, in Harbin. How did they get to you in Kansai?”
“We need to stop for some tea,” she said, getting up from the piano. And they went out of the reception room—effortlessly she slipped back into her slippers at the edge of the tatami. And they skittered slowly down the linoleum hallway to her room, pausing along the way only to gather up a tray with tea pot and cups. Owen wondered if magically little cakes would be waiting from them on the low table, but it was bare and he struggled to settle onto the zabuton placed there for him. He tried, unsuccessfully to cross his legs before his torso, then thrust them out under the table. With an easy envious grace she settled onto her calves on the other side of the glistening mock Formica of the table’s surface. She poured two tea cups, ever the geisha of his imaginings. And between sips of the tepid tea she explained that she was from snow country in Japan, along the base of the Noto peninsula where the snowfalls were so constant that drifts along the edges of the road were sometimes 12 feet high. Cars had to put red pennants on their aerials so that collisions could be avoided at intersections. Still it was never terribly cold—her village fought the snow in the center of town with running water—special hoses down the center of the street melted the snow as it fell with no risk of freezing so long as the water was running. She missed that kind of snow in California—gigantic unthreatening snow banks—most of the newer houses in her village put the living rooms on the second floor, the bedrooms underneath, so that at night you could look out at your neighbors before sleeping in the snow cased rooms below. She found piano playing in America very competitive. The Japanese emphasized imitativeness—the very soul of uncompetitiveness.
Everything should be aimed at triumphing in auditions, pushing through to individual unique but defensible interpretations. It was better to adopt a model and precisely duplicate the intonations, didn’t he think? Mogens understood, she said , that bending your will to another’s was the greatest freedom, the best discipline of liberty, and in that sense he was most profoundly Japanese—indeed, most Danes were. They easily fit in, didn’t he notice that? They deliberately bridled their inclinations to see what would happen if they duplicated the sentiments and actions around them. Only the rarest American could do that, didn’t he agree? The Danes were patient because they welcomed the information that someone had actually planned well before hand what should occur. Planned even down to reversed expectations.
