clarified.
They didn’t know what to think. An objection occurred to some.
‘There must be a reason that no one in the world has thought of going there to buy eggs.’
Baldabiou could bluff by reminding them that in the rest of the world there was no Baldabiou. But he preferred to say things as they were.
‘The Japanese are resigned to selling their silk. But the eggs, no. They hold on to them tightly. And if you try to carry them off that island, what you do is a crime.’
The silk producers of Lavilledieu were – some more, some less – gentlemen, and would never have thought of breaking the law in their own country. The theory of doing so on the other side of the world, however, seemed to them eminently sensible.
IT was 1861. Flaubert was finishing Salammbô, electric light was still a hypothesis and Abraham Lincoln, on the other side of the ocean, was fighting a war whose end he would not see. The silkworm breeders of Lavilledieu joined together in a consortium and collected the considerable sum necessary for the expedition. To them all it seemed logical to entrust it to Hervé Joncour. When Baldabiou asked him to accept, he answered with a question.
‘And where, exactly, might it be, this Japan?’
Straight that way. At the end of the world.
He left on October 6th. Alone.
At the gates of Lavilledieu he embraced his wife, Hélène, and said to her simply
‘You mustn’t be afraid of anything.’
She was a tall woman, she moved slowly, she had long black hair that she never gathered on to her head. She had a beautiful voice.
HERVÉ Joncour left with eighty thousand francs in gold and the names of three men, obtained for him by Baldabiou: a Chinese, a Dutchman and a Japanese. He crossed the border near Metz, travelled through Württemberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, and continued to Kiev. On horseback he traversed two thousand kilometres of the Russian steppe, crossed the Urals into Siberia, and travelled for forty days to reach Lake Baikal, which the people of the place called: the sea. He followed the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border, to the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabirk for eleven days, until a Dutch smugglers’ ship carried him to Cape Teraya, on the western coast of Japan. On foot, taking secondary roads, he went through the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama and Niigata, entered Fukushima, reached the city of Shirakawa, and rounded it on the east side; he waited two days for a man in black, who blindfolded him and led him to a village in the hills, where he spent one night, and the next morning he negotiated the purchase of the eggs with a man who didn’t speak, and whose face was covered by a silk veil. Black. At sunset he hid the eggs in his bags, turned his back on Japan, and prepared to set off on the journey home.
He had just passed the last houses in the village when a man came running up, and stopped him. He said something in an agitated and peremptory tone, and led him back with polite insistence.
Hervé Joncour didn’t speak Japanese, nor was he able to understand it, but he grasped that Hara Kei wanted to see him.
A rice-paper panel slid open, and Hervé Joncour entered. Hara Kei was sitting cross-legged, on the floor, in the farthest corner of the room. He had on a dark tunic, and wore no jewels. The only visible sign of his power was a woman lying beside him, unmoving, her head resting on his lap, eyes closed, arms hidden under a loose red robe that spread around her, like a flame, on the ash-coloured mat. Slowly he ran one hand through her hair: he seemed to be caressing the coat of a precious, sleeping animal.
Hervé Joncour crossed the room, waited for a sign from his host, and sat down opposite him. A servant arrived, imperceptibly, and placed before them two cups of tea. Then he vanished. Hara Kei began to speak, in his own language, in a sing-song voice that melted into a sort of irritating artificial falsetto. Hervé Joncour listened. He kept his eyes fixed on those of Hara Kei and only for an instant, almost without realising it, lowered them to the face of the woman.
It was the face of a girl.
He raised them again.
Hara Kei paused, picked up one of the cups of tea, brought it to his lips, let some moments pass and said
‘Try to tell me who you are.’
He said it in French, drawing out the vowels, in a hoarse voice but true.
TO the most invincible man in Japan, the master of all that the world might take away from that island, Hervé Joncour tried to explain who he was. He did it in his own language, speaking slowly, without knowing precisely if Hara Kei was able to understand. Instinctively he rejected prudence, reporting simply, without inventions and without omissions, everything that was true. He set forth small details and crucial events in the same tone, and with barely visible gestures, imitating the hypnotic pace, melancholy and neutral, of a catalogue of objects rescued from a fire. Hara Kei listened, and not a shadow of an expression discomposed the features of his face. He kept his eyes fixed on Hervé Joncour’s lips, as if they were the last lines of a farewell letter. The room was so silent and still that what happened unexpectedly seemed a huge event and yet was nothing.
Suddenly,
without moving at all,
that girl
opened her eyes.
Hervé Joncour did not pause but instinctively lowered his gaze to her, and what he saw, without pausing, was that those eyes did not have an Oriental shape, and that they were fixed, with a disconcerting intensity, on him: as if from the start, from under the eyelids, they had done nothing else. Hervé Joncour turned his gaze elsewhere, as naturally as he could, trying to continue his story with no perceptible difference in his voice. He stopped only when his eyes fell on the cup of tea, placed on the floor, in front of him. He took it in one hand, brought it to his lips, and drank slowly. He began to speak again as he set it down in front of him.
