挪威之恋 英文名著｜第8章（2）

IT FINALLY HIT ME some dozen or so years later. I had come to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red—my hand, the plate, the table, the world—as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything. In the midst of this overwhelming sunset, the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained—and would forever remain—unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing: forgotten for years to remember that such feelings had ever existed inside me. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something—anything—to save her.

But neither Nagasawa nor I could have managed that. As so many of those I knew had done, Hatsumi reached a certain stage in life and decided—almost on the spur of the moment—to end it. Two years after Nagasawa left for Germany, she married, and two years after that she slashed her wrists with a razor blade.

It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.

HATSUMI AND I WENT to a small bar and downed several drinks. Neither of us said much. Like a bored, old married couple, we sat opposite each other, drinking in silence and munching peanuts. When the place began to fill up, we went out for a walk. Hatsumi said she would pay the bill, but I insisted on paying because the drinks had been my idea.

There was a deep chill in the night air. Hatsumi wrapped herself in her pale gray cardigan and walked by my side in silence. I had no destination in mind as we ambled through the nighttime streets, my hands shoved deep into my pockets. This was just like walking with Naoko, it occurred to me.

“Do you know someplace we could shoot pool around here?” Hatsumi asked me without warning.

“Pool?! You shoot pool?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty good. How about you?”

“I play a little four-ball. Not that I’m very good at it.”

“O.K. then. Let’s go.”

We found a pool hall nearby and went in. It was a small place at the far end of an alley. The two of us—Hatsumi in her chic dress and I in my blue blazer and regimental tie—clashed with the scruffy pool hall, but this didn’t seem to concern Hatsumi at all as she chose and chalked her cue. She pulled a barrette from her bag and held her hair aside at one temple to keep it from interfering with her game.

We played two rounds of four-ball. Hatsumi was as good as she had claimed to be, while my own game was hampered by the thick bandage I still wore on my cut hand. She crushed me.

“You’re great,” I said in admiration.

“You mean appearances can be deceiving?” she asked as she sized up a shot, smiling.

“Where’d you learn to play like that?”

“My grandfather—my father’s father—was an old playboy. He had a table in his house. I used to shoot pool with my brother just for fun, and when I got a little bigger my grandfather taught me the right moves. He was a wonderful guy—stylish, handsome. He’s dead now, though. He always used to boast how he once met Deanna Durbin in New York.”

She got three in a row, then missed on the fourth try. I managed to squeeze in a ball, then missed an easy shot.

“It’s the bandage,” said Hatsumi to comfort me.

“No, it’s because I haven’t played in such a long time,” I said. “Two years and five months.”

“How can you be so sure of the time?”

“My friend died that night after our last game together,” I said.

“So you quit shooting pool?”

“No, not really,” I said after giving it some thought. “I just never had the opportunity to play after that. That’s all.”

“How did your friend die?”

“Traffic accident,” I said.

She made several more shots, aiming with deadly seriousness and adjusting the cue ball’s speed with precision. Watching her in action—her carefully set hair swept back out of her eyes, golden earrings sparkling, pumps set firmly on the floor, lovely, slender fingers pressing the felt as she took her shot—I felt as if her area of the scruffy pool parlor had been transformed into part of some elegant social event. I had never spent time with her alone before, and this was a marvelous experience for me, as if I had been drawn up to a higher plane of life. At the end of the third game—in which, of course, she crushed me again—my cut began to throb, and so we stopped playing.

“I’m sorry,” she said with what seemed like genuine concern, “I should never have suggested this.”

“That’s O.K.,” I said. “It’s not a bad cut. I enjoyed playing. Really.”

As we were leaving the pool parlor, the skinny woman owner said to Hatsumi, “You’ve got a nice stroke, sister.” Hatsumi gave her a sweet smile and thanked her as she paid the bill.

“Does it hurt?” she asked when we were outside.

“Not much,” I said.

“Do you think it opened?”

“No, it’s probably O.K.”

“I know! You should come to my place. I’ll change your bandage for you. I’ve got disinfectant and everything. C’mon, I’m right over there.”

I told her it wasn’t worth worrying about, that I’d be O.K., but she insisted we had to check to see if the cut had opened or not.

“Or is it that you don’t like being with me? You want to go back to your room as soon as possible, is that it?” she said with a playful smile.

“No way,” I said.

“All right, then. Don’t stand on ceremony. It’s a short walk.”

Hatsumi’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from Shibuya toward Ebisu. By no means a glamorous building, it was more than decent, with a nice little lobby and an elevator. Hatsumi sat me at the kitchen table and went to the bedroom to change. She came out wearing a Princeton hooded sweatshirt and cotton slacks—and no more gold earrings. Setting a first-aid box on the table, she undid my bandage, checked to see that the wound was still sealed, put a little disinfectant on the area, and tied a new bandage over the cut. She did all this like an expert. “How come you’re so good at so many things?” I asked.

“I used to do volunteer work at a hospital. Kind of like playing nurse. That’s how I learned.”

When she was through with the bandage, Hatsumi went and got two cans of beer from the refrigerator. She drank half of hers, and I drank mine plus the half she left. Then she showed me pictures of the freshman girls in her club. She was right: several of them were cute.

“Anytime you think you want a girlfriend, come to me,” she said. “I’ll fix you up right away.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, Toru, tell me the truth. You think I’m an old matchmaker, don’t you?”

“To some extent,” I said, telling her the truth, but with a smile. Hatsumi smiled, too. She looked good when she smiled.

“Tell me something else, Toru,” she said. “What do you think about Nagasawa and me?”

“What do you mean what do I think? About what?”

“About what I ought to do. From now on.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said, taking a slug of the well-chilled beer.

“That’s all right. Tell me exactly what you think.”

“Well, if I were you, I’d leave him. I’d find someone with a more normal way of looking at things and live happily ever after. There’s no way in hell you can be happy with that guy. The way he lives, it never crosses his mind to try to make himself happy or to make others happy. Staying with him can only wreck your nervous system. To me, it’s already a miracle that you’ve been with him three years. Of course, I’m very fond of him in my own way. He’s a fun guy, and he has lots of great qualities. He has strengths and abilities that I could never hope to match. But finally, his ideas about things and the way he lives his life are not normal. Sometimes, when I’m talking to him, I feel as if I’m going round and round in circles. The same process that takes him higher and higher keeps me going around in circles. It makes me feel so empty! Finally, our very systems are totally different. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Hatsumi said as she brought me another beer from the refrigerator.

“Plus, after he gets into the Foreign Ministry and does a year of training, he’ll be going overseas. What are you going to do all that time? Wait for him? He has no intention of marrying anyone.”

“I know that, too.”

“So I’ve got nothing else to say.”

“I see,” said Hatsumi.

I slowly filled my glass with beer.

“You know, when we were shooting pool before, something popped into my mind,” I said. “I was an only child, but the whole time I was growing up I never once felt deprived or wished I had brothers or sisters. I was satisfied being alone. But all of a sudden, shooting pool with you, I had this feeling like I wished I had had an elder sister like you—really chic and a knockout in a midnight blue dress and golden earrings and great with a pool cue.”

Hatsumi flashed me a happy smile. “That’s got to be the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in the past year,” she said. “Really.”

“All I want for you,” I said, blushing, “is for you to be happy. It’s crazy, though. You seem like someone who could be happy with just about anybody, so how did you end up with Nagasawa, of all people?”

“Things like that just happen. There’s probably not much you can do about them. It’s certainly true in my case. Of course, Nagasawa would say it’s my responsibility, not his.”

“I’m sure he would.”

“But anyway, Toru, I’m not the smartest girl in the world. If anything, I’m sort of on the stupid side, and old-fashioned. I couldn’t care less about ‘systems’ and ‘responsibility.’ All I want is to get married and have a man I love hold me in his arms every night and make kids. That’s plenty for me. It’s all I want out of life.”

“And what Nagasawa wants out of life has nothing to do with that.”

“People change, though, don’t you think?” Hatsumi asked.

“You mean, like, they go out into society and get their butts kicked and grow up kind of thing?”

“Sure. And if he’s away from me for a long time, his feelings for me could change, don’t you think?”

“Maybe so, if he were an ordinary guy,” I said. “But he’s different. He’s incredibly strong-willed—stronger than you or I can imagine. And he only makes himself stronger with every day that goes by. If something smashes into him, he just works to make himself stronger. He’d eat slugs before he’d back down to anyone. What do you expect to get from a guy like that?”

“But there’s nothing I can do but wait for him,” said Hatsumi with her chin in her hand.

“You love him that much?”

“I do,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation.

“Oh, brother,” I said with a sigh, drinking down the last of my beer. “It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody.”

“I’m a stupid, old-fashioned girl,” she said. “Have another beer?”

“No, thanks, I’ve gotta get going. Thanks for the bandage and beer.”

As I was standing in the entryway putting on my shoes, the telephone rang. Hatsumi looked at me, looked at the phone, and looked at me again. “Good night,” I said, stepping outside. As I shut the door, I caught a glimpse of Hatsumi picking up the receiver. It was the last time I ever saw her.

BY THE TIME I GOT BACK to the dorm, it was eleven-thirty. I went straight to Nagasawa’s room and knocked on his door. After the tenth knock it occurred to me that this was Saturday night. Nagasawa always got overnight permission on Saturday nights, supposedly to stay at his relatives’ house.

I went back to my room, took off my tie, put my jacket and pants on a hanger, changed into my pajamas, and brushed my teeth. Oh no, I thought, tomorrow is Sunday again. Sundays seemed to be rolling around every four days. Another two Sundays and I would be twenty years old. I stretched out in bed and stared at my calendar as dark feelings came over me.

I SAT AT MY DESK to write my Sunday morning letter to Naoko, drinking coffee from a big cup and listening to old Miles Davis records. A fine rain was falling outside, while my room had the chill of an aquarium. The smell of mothballs lingered in the thick sweater I had just taken out of a storage box. High up on the windowpane clung a huge, fat fly, unmoving. With no wind to stir it, the Rising Sun hung limp against the flagpole like the toga of a Roman senator. A skinny, timid-looking brown dog that had wandered into the quadrangle seemed to be sniffing every blossom in the flower bed. I couldn’t begin to imagine why any dog would have to go around sniffing flowers on a rainy day.

My letter was a long one, and whenever my cut right palm began to hurt from holding the pen, I would let my eyes wander out to the rainy quadrangle.

I began by telling Naoko how I had given my right hand a nasty cut while working in the record store, then went on to say that Nagasawa, Hatsumi, and I had had a sort of celebration the night before for Nagasawa’s having passed his Foreign Ministry exam. I described the restaurant and the food. The meal was a good one, I said, but the atmosphere changed to something uncomfortable partway through.

I wondered if I should write about Kizuki in connection with having shot pool with Hatsumi and decided to go ahead. It was something I ought to write about, I felt.

I still remember the last shot Kizuki took that day—the day he died. It was a difficult cushion shot that I never expected him to make. Luck seemed to be with him, though: the shot was absolutely perfect, and the white and red balls hardly made a sound as they brushed each other on the green felt for the last point of the game. It was such a beautiful shot, I can still bring back a vivid image of it to this day. For nearly two and a half years after that, I never touched a cue.

The night I played pool with Hatsumi, though, the thought of Kizuki never crossed my mind until the first game ended, and this came as a major shock to me. I had always assumed that I would be reminded of Kizuki whenever I played pool. But not until the first game was over and I bought a Pepsi from a vending machine and started drinking it did I even think of him. It was the Pepsi machine that did it: there had been one in the pool hall we used to play in, and we had often bet drinks on the outcome of our games.

I felt guilty that I hadn’t thought of Kizuki right away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. Back in my room, though, I came to think of it this way: two and a half years have gone by since it happened, and Kizuki is still seventeen years old. Not that this means my memory of him has faded. The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. What I want to say is this: I’m going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can’t explain it any better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say. In fact, you are probably the only one in the world who can understand.

I think of you now more than ever. It’s raining today. Rainy Sundays make it hard for me. When it rains, I can’t do laundry, which means I can’t do ironing. I can’t go walking, and I can’t lie down on the roof. About all I can do is put the record player on auto repeat and listen to Kind of Blue over and over while I watch the rain falling in the quadrangle. As I wrote to you earlier, I don’t wind my spring on Sundays. That’s why this letter is so damn long. I’m stopping now. I’m going to the dining hall for lunch.

Good-bye.