"December 6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

4

THE THEATER’S DRESSING ROOM was an entry to a new world for young Harry Niles. He and Gen ran errands for singers, dancers, musicians, comedians and magicians, fetching cigarettes, beer by the case, cough syrup for the codeine. Vitamin B was the rage. Soon Oharu would let no one but Harry give her injections. She twisted in her chair, offering her soft, smooth bottom.

Harry’s guide to this new Japan was the artist Kato. With his French beret, color-stained fingers and silver-headed walking stick, Kato cut a consumptive, sophisticated figure. Looking back, Harry realized that Kato must have been only in his twenties at the time, but he was the first person Harry met who had actually been to France and seemed to know about the world. Harry’s father, the pastor Roger Niles, knew about heaven and hell but not so much about the here and now. In turn, Kato took an interest in Harry the way a man might adopt a monkey. The idea that a gaijin could speak like a Japanese, eat like a Japanese and shoplift cigarettes like a born thief entertained Kato on a philosophical level, and the fact that Harry was a missionary’s son amused him enormously.

Harry lived for Saturdays between shows when he, Kato and Oharu walked around Asakusa like the royalty of a raffish kingdom. Asakusa stood for pleasure, for theaters, music halls, ballrooms, tearooms, licensed and unlicensed women. Everyone could afford something in Asakusa. And everyone, of course, admired Oharu in her pillbox hat, white gloves and long French dress that slithered over her like a snake. She had a dancer’s athletic body. Silk hugged her legs and slid across her body while she looked blandly out from under her painted brows.

Sometimes they would step outside Asakusa to a French patisserie in the Ginza to devour éclairs or visit the Tokyo Station Hotel, which was built into one of the station’s domes. The hotel had an elevator and a plush lobby with velvet chairs, but its greatest attraction was a wrought-iron balcony that ran around the inside of the dome below a crown of plaster eagles. Harry stood on one side of the balcony, Oharu on the other, and her merest whisper would bend around the dome to his ear as if she perched on his shoulder. Once they went to Hibiya Park for a concert of modan jazu, modern jazz. American Negroes played a brassy, speeded-up music before an audience both stupefied and curious. When the band left the stage, people reached with a total lack of self-consciousness to touch the skin of the musicians as if their color might rub off. There was a sense at the time of change and exhilaration. Japan had been on the winning side of the Great War. Fortunes were being made. The future was at hand, nowhere nearer than in Japan, the new great nation, and especially in Tokyo, the seat of the Son of Heaven. If anyone in this center of industry noticed Harry, they saw a pale, unusually round-eyed Japanese schoolboy with a typically shaved head, ratty sweater, knickers and clogs.

Kato noticed. “We have a real discovery, Oharu. He’s like an urchin out of Dickens, and he’s right here in the middle of Tokyo. He has a guardian who’s always drunk, so Harry gets the money orders and pays the bills. I’ve heard him on the telephone. Do you ever wonder how a boy his age buys sake? Harry calls the sake shop and, in the voice of a Japanese woman, says a boy, a gaijin, no less, will be by to pay and pick up the sake. That’s when Harry doesn’t out-and-out steal it. We may be rearing a monster, Oharu, you and I. I suspect so. I think our Harry has all the morals of a young wolf. The real question for me is, is he a monster with sensitivity. I can’t waste my time with someone who has no eye for color.”

On hot days, Kato, Harry and Oharu stayed in Asakusa and went to the movies. Asakusa boasted more theaters per square foot than anywhere else on earth. The three friends sat in the dark, eating dried fish with beer and watching Buster Keaton take pratfalls on the screen while, in the back of the theater, a fan blew cool air from a block of ice.

At all foreign films a Movie Man sat onstage to translate the dialogue titles and what the audience was seeing. “Now Buster is running after the train. Now the train has turned around, oh, now the train is after him. Puff, puff, puff! Puff, puff, puff! He calls out to Mary, ‘Save me! Save me!’ Mary calls, ‘Run, Buster, run!’”

“Have you noticed,” Kato would inquire loudly of all the nearby viewers, “that, according to the Movie Man, the heroine in American movies is always called Mary. Is this likely? Don’t they have any other names in America? Why is the villain always named Robert?”

“Kato is an expert on villainy,” Oharu said to Harry. “He says an artist has to try every vice.”

“In Paris we drank green absinthe and smoked hashish,” Kato said. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

Three rows ahead was the dancer Harry had seen his first day backstage at the music hall, the girl who changed with such naked cool from ballerina to majorette. Despite the dark he saw every detail, the wavy perm of her hair, a hat that was not much more than a feather, the shadow of her neck, her ear like a curled finger beckoning him, although she had never spoken to him other than to send him for cigarettes.

Kato followed Harry’s attention. “You like little Chizuko? Too bad, it looks like she already has an admirer.”

The admirer was an army officer. Harry immediately cast for explanations: father, uncle, family friend.

“Chizuko’s not for you,” Oharu whispered.

“Chizuko could be perfect for him,” Kato said. “A playmate his own age, inventive, full of energy.”

“Leave him alone,” Oharu said.

“I’m sure something can be arranged,” said Kato. Oharu pinched his arm.

Afterward they took in the theater of the streets. Kato taught Harry to appreciate the storyteller with his slide show and never-changing tales, the candy maker who turned and tugged rice dough into cats and mice, the publicity bands who banged through the alleys with saxophones, drums and spinning umbrellas to sell soap, seltzer, cigarettes. The twenties were a loud, bright time of modern girls-mogas-who worked at new telephone exchanges, sold French perfumes in department stores, punched tickets on buses. Fashion was war. On one corner, a corps of Salvation Army uniformed like majorettes would shake tambourines and sing “Rock of Ages” while, from the next corner, the Buddhist Salvation Army in saffron robes tried to drown them out with bells and chants. No one knew how the next social advance would take place. In a Ginza department-store fire, salesgirls burned to death rather than leap down to nets and embarrass themselves. Immediately a law passed requiring salesgirls to wear panties, and two thousand years of fashion changed. There was, as Kato pointed out, nothing more beautiful than a kimono. A woman in a hand-painted kimono and obi was wrapped in a work of art. Western fashion was drab by comparison, but as color leached out of modern clothes, it spread into billboards and movie posters, matchboxes and postcards, race cars and airplane banners. And, of course, each word, each character in every sign or delivery boy’s jacket was a picture. Every street was a flood of images.

Kato lived in the Ginza above a bookstore in rooms that he said were very French, very art nouveau. Harry didn’t know what France or nouveau was like, but he didn’t doubt it was exactly like this. Armchairs seemed wrapped in vines. Sconces were glass flowers on stems of brass. Even the teapot looked alive enough to hop from the brazier. French posters of ballet and cancan dancers had places of honor on the walls. Japanese prints of a young woman teasing a cat, and a geisha offering her shoulder to a tattoo needle, were strewn on a table.

Kato said, “Hokusai and Yoshitoshi, all the great Japanese artists, were inspirations for Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Modern art is Japanese art through French eyes.”

The lecture was wasted on Harry. He much preferred the simple lines and secret messages of the Japanese prints. How the girl innocently batting with the cat revealed the provocative nape of her neck cowled in red. How the geisha bit into a cloth to stifle pain the same way lovers stifled cries of ecstasy.

“Do you paint here, too?” Harry asked. He saw no easel, paints or canvas.

“Open your eyes.”

Harry noticed how Kato had positioned himself by the poster of a French cabaret, a line of cancan dancers with blue faces and red hair. In a corner, however, was the Japanese calligraphy of Kato’s name. The poster was an imitation.

“You did that?”

“Good, you aren’t totally blind. There’s hope for you yet, Harry. You help me deliver the prints on the table and we’ll meet Oharu and go to a Chinese restaurant. She loves Chinese food.”

Harry didn’t meet Kato’s customers. It was a warm day in May, and he was happy to go along and wait outside while the artist took prints, boxed and loosely wrapped in silk cloth, around town. The last delivery was to the museum in Ueno Park. Ueno Park was famous for its hills of cherry trees, although the flowers had passed and the branches, dark as patent leather, were going to green. What Harry liked about the park were its drunken rickshaw men, street magicians, beggars and “sparrows,” prostitutes who carried a ready rolled-up mat. Kato seemed to know each fire-eater, mendicant and whore.

This day, however, the usual transients had disappeared, the park was empty, sparrows flown. In a city of crowds, Ueno Park was mysteriously quiet until Harry saw red flags march over the hill, so many that the cherry trees seemed to toss in waves of red. These were followed by ranks of men wearing red bandanas tied around their heads and carrying signs that read RICE IS THE PEOPLE’S PROPERTY, a surprise to Harry, who had been taught at school that all the rice in Japan was the emperor’s. Some marchers were university students, but most were life-hardened workers holding their strong fists high. As they marched, their song spread across the landscape of the park: “Arise ye workers from your slumbers / Arise ye prisoners of want…”

” ‘The Internationale,’” Kato said. “It’s May Day. They’re Communists.”

It was thrilling, the unity of voices, the forward motion of history that swept up Kato and Harry. Flags seemed to set the park on fire as the phalanx swung down a wide flight of steps to the street, where a row of police waited. Like the bank of a river, the blue line of uniforms redirected the course of the march, containing it along a high stone wall. Demonstrators ran ahead to outflank the police, but they were checked by the arrival of flatbed trucks bearing men in black headbands, with shirtsleeves rolled back from tattooed arms. Newspapers always identified groups like this as patriotic citizens; their tattoos revealed them as yakuza, initiated members of the underworld, but criminals could be patriotic, too. All Harry knew was that it was like watching a painting of a battle come to life, in place of warring samurai the modern armies of the streets. Demonstrators raced, waving and snapping their flags. Men in black headbands jumped off the trucks, shouted, swung ax handles. As the two forces collided, individuals turned to indistinct forms grappling with each other. A red vanguard plunged through the black ranks, and Harry felt the flags surge, bearing away all opposition. Red paint splattered the trucks.

Kato clutched his package. His eyes lit up. “We’ll see some action now.”

As the battle became more equal, fighting became more vicious. What the thugs in black headbands lacked in group discipline, they made up for in back-alley experience. Anyone who fell was stomped before he rose, but Harry saw how oblivious to danger Kato was, and the sense of invulnerability was catching. Besides, Harry was proud to be part of any event that entertained Kato so much.

Just when Harry was sure the red flags would carry the day, horses with blue riders moved down the park steps. Mounted police carrying bamboo rods. It was wonderful, he thought, to hear the sound of hooves on stone, the muffled breathing of the horses like the Battle of Sekigahara, when Ieyasu, the founder of Tokugawa rule, crushed his enemies. It was a scene with everything except flights of arrows and the smoke of matchlocks. As marchers noticed the closing trap, confusion spread. They tried to organize a stand around their banners, but the impact of the horses was too much. Black headbands waded in with their shafts. Flags swayed. Toppled. One moment Harry stayed upright amid contending men, the next he was sucked under a truck like a swimmer out at sea. Between tires he saw Kato go down, walking stick and package wrested from his hands. Harry didn’t see Kato’s adversary, only the walking stick as it broke over Kato’s head. On his elbows, Harry crawled to the package and covered it with his body. He hadn’t kept track which prints had been delivered. The one he shielded could have been the girl with the cat, the strolling girl, the geisha with the tattoo artist. On the ground he recalled each one completely, the embossing of their golden kimonos, the shadowed pink around their eyes, their tremulous lips as if they were alive and asking for protection.

Once the issue was decided, the rout was swift. Demonstrators scattered, bearing the wounded they could carry. Those that didn’t escape were dragged onto trucks for further beating at a less public venue, or pushed into vans by police. In a matter of minutes the street was cleared, except for strewn shoes and banners and bloody shirts. Kato staggered and giggled as if drunk on survival. A dark stripe of blood ran from his beret.

Harry looked up. “I saved the picture.”

“The print?” Kato rocked on his heels. “Harry, there are hundreds of prints, every print is a copy. You risked your life for nothing, which proves you have true Yamato spirit.” With his own blood, using a finger as a brush, Kato put a mark on Harry’s forehead. “Because you have proved yourself a true son of Yamato, I declare you, I baptize you, Japanese.”

It was, as far as Harry was concerned, true glory.