The Narrow Road to the Deep North(114)

She so thoroughly believed in Dorrigo and Dorrigo’s life that she repeated his opinions as if they were her own, and she did it in a way that always frustrated him. Damned bloody bureaucrats, she would say, they’ll be the death of more than just patients. Or she would start going on in some detail about the medical ignorance of some stupid surgeons.

And as he listened, all he could see was the slight upturn of her nose, the way it made her face which once had seemed very beautiful rather comical, and he thought how she wasn’t really that beautiful at all, but rather odd-looking. And every time he heard her repeat something he had said a month or a week ago, he’d be astonished at both the banality of the opinion and her loyalty in repeating something that he could now see was trite and stupid. And yet had she dared suggest that what he was saying was banal and ridiculous, he would have been furious. He wanted her agreement and, having got it so unconditionally, he despised it.

With their children she would agree also, much to Dorrigo’s irritation.

It is the parent’s job to parent, he would say to her, and their job to live.

And having said that, he would try to hide his frustration, and would have to look away from her face so he would not focus on the tip of her nose.

But I agree with you, she would say. I couldn’t agree more. If a parent doesn’t parent, what are we here for?

Dorrigo, the children, her friends, and her wider family—they all existed for her as a way of divining the world. It was a far larger and more wondrous place with them than it was without them. If she hoped for the same love from Dorrigo, and if she was disappointed in her hope, she did not feel its absence as a reason not to love him. The problem was that she did. Her love was without reason and would never yield to reason. Though it longed for requital, her love in the end did not demand it.

But when he was away at night, she would lie awake, unable to sleep. And she would think of him and her and feel the most overwhelming sadness. She may have been a trusting woman but she was very far from a stupid one. She repeated his words and echoed his opinions not because she was without thoughts of her own, but because her nature was one that wished to live through others. Without love, what was the world? Just objects, things, light, darkness.

Damn bloody bureaucrats. Stupid surgeon. Oh, that poor, poor man, she would say. Over and over. And then, inexplicably, she would cry until she could cry no more.





5



FOR SOME MINUTES Tenji Nakamura said nothing. He was trying to remember the Japan he had believed in before he went to war; a beautiful, noble Japan that he recalled as strong and good in spirit, which he had served in the fullness and purity of his soul. But something in his memory of the POW painting portraits of him and his men that day in Siam troubled him, but why it did so, he had no idea, and the effort of memory or the effect of morphine meant he next forgot about whatever it was he had just been thinking. All he could think of was how, beyond his vision, frozen monsters loomed over the city, frozen monsters past which he had travelled to come to the Tomokawas’, frozen monsters beneath which he would travel going back to the airport. He realised Tomokawa was talking to him and he tried to concentrate, but the monsters seemed to be in the room now.

You know, Tomokawa was saying, but Tomokawa looked like the monster Gamera, at the beginning I was terrified they’d pick me up as a war criminal. And I used to think: What a joke! Because they only cared about what we did to the Allied prisoners.

Nakamura could hear Tomokawa’s voice but he was seeing a huge turtle spurting flames.

And when I think about all that we did with the chinks in Manchukuo, the turtle was saying with his breath of brimstone. And the fun we had with their women!

Nakamura was fully awake now and looked around uneasily, but Mrs Tomokawa, he realised, was out of hearing range in the kitchen.

Well, you’d remember it all, I’m sure, the giant turtle—who, Nakamura had to remind himself, was really Tomokawa—went on. And so I think those POWs had it easy, and they should be proud of what they achieved with that railway and us. But to hang us for that and not for what we did to the chinks! Really—it defies any reasoning. That’s what I think, anyway.

Mrs Tomokawa came back in to the room with food, and Tomokawa, who suddenly looked human again, changed the conversation. But all the time Nakamura was thinking about what Tomokawa had said and the common-sense wisdom of it all. For they had built a railway in fifteen months that the English had said could not be built in five times that period. He rubbed his neck, where the new bump had grown even that day, or so it seemed to Nakamura, for he believed he could feel the lump growing within him every hour of every day and every minute of every hour, eating him up. He tried, of course, not to feel it. He could with an effort not think about it and focus his mind instead on what concerned him more and more: the war, for that too was growing within him.