Читать книгу Arrows In The Fog - Günther Bach - Страница 9

4

There was enough time after his shower for more than just a quiet pot of green tea.

Bärger went down into his cellar, where the black case with his bow lay on a shelf under a stack of old professional journals. After a short search, he found the mailing tube with the arrows in a corner. He wiped off the dust with a damp cloth and placed both the bow case and the tube on the table in front of him.

He held the shallow tea bowl in both hands and stared at the black case, unable to decide whether to open it.

Why should I, thought Bärger, I have more important things to do. It’s been a long time since I quit, and I probably can’t even draw the bow any more. But the more he resisted, the more he became aware that he was fighting against something that clearly came from within the black case lying in front of him; from something that, in better times, had been almost a part of himself.

He set the tea dish down, opened the zipper with both hands, and pushed back the lid of the case. The reddish-brown wood of the bow had a dull shine as it lay in the crumbling foam padding, once green and now yellowed with age. It was complete with string and bow limbs, and there was even a beat-up finger tab in one of the recesses in the padding.

Bärger hesitated, then reached for the grip section, closed his left hand on the pistol grip, and raised it slowly to eye level. He aimed through the sight window at a point on the wall and tried to remember just how the colorful FITA target had looked. It still didn’t feel right, just to sit there with the bow riser in his hand, aiming over the shelf. Bärger stood up, installed the bow limbs, and tightened the screws. When he picked up the string, he realized that he had forgotten how to string the bow. He tried to remember, but it escaped him. His memory only began to work again when he saw the bow stringer in the case. He placed his left foot in the loop and bent the upper limb across his shoulder until he could string the bow.

Now what he held in his hand was a bow again. Slowly and carefully, he began to pull the string back. He let it down again, then drew it a little further, each time increasing the distance, until he finally dared to draw it all the way and hold it anchored at his chin for two or three seconds.

It’s not my head that remembers, thought Bärger. It is my body that recognizes the bow. He set the bow down on the table in front of him and sat down, looking wonderingly at his hands, as if he couldn’t believe what they had done. When he held the bow at full draw and felt the force flowing from his bow hand across his arms and shoulders to the hand holding the string, it had been like the closing of a circle, like the completion of a whole.

Tension, yes, a natural tension that would be released in the shot, giving an impulse to the arrow and sending it to the point that it should hit if he had done everything right.

There was no doubt that the bow was still in good shape. There was no doubt that he could still draw it. And there was no doubt at all that he wanted to draw it again. That was the important thing, thought Bärger.

He shook the tube with arrows, listening to their gentle clatter. It hadn’t gone away. It had waited for me. But I had almost forgotten it.

Bärger went into the kitchen, turned on the kettle and waited until the water began to boil. Then he turned off the heat and waited until the water in the kettle was still. Slowly he poured it into a small pot, the size and shape of an apple, until the water reached the rim. He glanced at his wristwatch and waited exactly eighty seconds, while he absentmindedly watched the simple reddish/brown pot, with its matt polish from long use. Then, just as slowly and carefully, he poured the tea through a bamboo sieve into the white, shallow bowl. Only then, the tea first took on color, a light, fragrant green fading into yellow at the edge of the bowl.

Bärger picked up the bowl with both hands and held it against the light from the window to look at its noble outline, and then closing his eyes, drank it all down in one swallow. It was time to pack up his books and the loose-leaf notebook. Bärger rinsed out his tea bowl and placed it carefully on a folded kitchen towel. Then he went back into the cellar, unstrung his bow, dismounted the limbs, and placed the pieces back in their case. Not for long, he resolved.

After a glance at his watch, he returned to his office and sat down at his desk to look over the chart with the Japanese syllabic script. He had pinned it to the wall in front of him at eye level so that he would always have it in view. It didn’t seem to work. Nothing did. It is really driving me crazy, thought Bärger. I can’t seem to impress them on my mind. The Japanese lady who taught the course had said that children in Japan begin to read hiragana when they’re five years old. He remembered that when he was a schoolboy, he and one of his schoolmates had learned the cuneiform alphabet in only one day. He still knew it. They had written notes to each other during class and let themselves be caught passing them back and forth, just for the fun of seeing the helpless expression on the face of their teacher, who had no idea what the mysterious symbols meant.

That was a long time ago, thought Bärger. Now he envied three high school girls who sat in front of the classroom and wrote the complicated symbols with ridiculous ease.

He had a good ear, which could detect even slight differences in speech so he could pronounce what he heard correctly, but he was almost ready to give up on the script. Again and again, he had tried to arrange the complicated system of symbols in some system, in some order he could remember, but without success. For him, hiragana was visual chaos. There must be something to the Japanese opinion, thought Bärger, that any European who learns perfect Japanese has to be crazy.

But it was time to go. He shoved the books, his vocabulary book, and his loose-leaf binder into his old, cowhide book bag, which got better looking each year as it aged. He closed the door behind him and made his way to the streetcar stop.

It was a very mixed bunch that came together every week to learn Japanese in the rooms at the old high school. At the beginning, they had all introduced themselves, giving their names, occupations, and reasons for learning the language.

One was a policeman, who wanted, or who had been assigned, to learn the language for professional reasons, and one was a fireman, who was interested in the samurai and especially in their swords. There was a married couple sitting next to Bärger who ran a martial arts school together. A retired man, who hadn’t really been able to explain why he was interested, had quit after the third lesson. As well as the three high school girls who sat in front, two students from another school also attended, explaining that they were preparing for a university language major. He was the only one who was preparing for a trip to Japan, and he was much envied by the others. It was very quickly clear to him that, in the short time he had for the course, he could not acquire enough real knowledge of the language to make himself understood in the country, even at a beginner’s level. The teacher had explained that there would be no problem using English in the cities, but that people in the country normally spoke only Japanese. Only one thing helped him to recover a bit from his disappointment. She explained that the Japanese were very pleased when a foreigner – a gaijin - not only mastered the usual manners, but was also able to express the most important courtesies in words.

After that, Bärger concentrated on correct pronunciation and the complicated rituals of introduction, greeting, and departure in combination with the appropriate bows for each occasion.

Today’s lesson concerned shopping in Japan but, like all the others, it began with a quiz. Its tempo and results reminded him unpleasantly of his schooldays from long ago. According to everything that he had heard and read, it was the same in Japan. Was he simply to old for this sort of class? But he had paid for the privilege of being treated as a schoolboy and presumably the method really was effective. Even so, he didn’t like it, and he cared even less for the superior attitude and mockery of the high school girls, who openly made fun of the awkward pronunciation of their older classmates.

What really gave him pause was his obvious inability to learn the twenty-three symbols of hiragana, the Japanese syllabic script. This bothered him particularly. He had always believed that he had a particularly good visual memory, but this task was simply too much for it. Bärger felt that he was even beginning to develop a dislike for the symbols. He found it absurd that a people who unconditionally recognized the value of a modern, technically oriented, and extremely rational working environment, would at the same time use three different scripts in parallel and mix them together.

When he asked about it, the teacher, Yoshiko-San, had answered that the origin of the hiragana symbols lay in a further development of the Chinese script symbols as a phonetic, syllabic script. That helped explain the shapes of the symbols, which had often seemed so bizarre to him, but it did nothing to make learning them any easier.

On the other hand, he found it remarkable that he had a much better grasp of the true Chinese script – the kanji. Although he had never really wanted to learn the thousands of graphic symbols that had originated as simplified pictures, it had been possible for him to learn a few of the basic forms quickly. However, that was long before his efforts with the Japanese language and was probably due to his intense interest in the spirit and technique of Chinese ink painting at that time. He took relaxed pleasure in adding the written symbols to his ink pictures, and he also considered it an agreeable calligraphic exercise. No, he liked the classic forms of kanji, but he wasn’t able to do anything with the simplified script derived, from it.

“Bärger-San.”

The teacher’s voice brought him back to the present. After a last glace at his exercise notebook, he stood up, went to the chalkboard, and without hesitation wrote the required sentence on the green surface. Even as he dusted off his hands and returned to his seat, he knew that by tomorrow he would have forgotten it all again.

The lesson continued at the rapid pace that Yoshiko-San thought proper. Bärger admitted to himself that he hadn’t quit only because he didn’t want to confess in front of the schoolgirls that this kind of instruction was beyond him.

The lesson ended precisely at the break. He made a note of the homework assignment in his loose-leaf binder, intending to deal with it the next morning.

“No more school work, Bärger-San!”

Yoshiko stood smiling in front of him and held out her hand. It was a minute before Bärger understood. Then he stood up, bowed, and grasped her hand.

“I wish you a pleasant trip to Japan,” said Yoshiko formally. “You will see the autumn leaves in the woods of Kyoto”. It sounded a little wistful. But then she said, smiling again, “Your bow was too deep for a simple teacher, Bärger-San. I wish you a safe return.” Then she quickly left the classroom.

On the way to the tram stop, Bärger thought about his approaching trip. He had studied the guidebook thoroughly, and had discovered that the proposed route hit every culturally significant spot in central and southern Japan. He was a little concerned whether he would have the time to see them properly.

He recalled a trip to Cyprus in November two years ago; the huge empty hotels along the beach, the dried vegetation, and the smell of the burning rubbish heaps at the edge of the city. In particular, he remembered the disaster of a side excursion to Cairo from Cyprus, a two-day tour by ship to Alexandria offered by a local shipping firm. The luxury liner sailed there and back at night, arriving in Alexandria in the morning. From there, they boarded the waiting buses for a non-stop, six-hour trip to Cairo along a four-lane highway through desolate country. Most of the way the route ran parallel to the Suez Canal, with only the superstructure or funnels of an occasional passing ship visible above the banks of the canal.

Cairo proved to be a large city with endless suburbs. They went right on through to Giza. It was a shock to him. He had seen a large number of pictures of the pyramids and the sphinx in various books and magazines. He had felt their majestic calm and impressive size and was captivated by the magic loneliness of these ancient monuments, but the reality proved to be quite different on their arrival in Giza. As soon as they had come to a halt in a cloud of yellow dust, a mob of clamoring Arabs surrounded the bus doors. Gesticulating wildly, they held out postcards, plastic camels, scarabs, and small plaster figurines in their hands. They ran after the people getting off, grabbed them by the sleeves, and tried to shove the souvenirs into their pockets in order to force a sale. A half dozen of them sat silently on arrogant-looking camels a few meters away and persistently edged their way in front of any tourist with a camera when he tried to take a picture of the pyramids. The base of Cheops’ Great Pyramid seemed to be surrounded by hundreds of these vendors on foot; some had climbed a third of the way up this gigantic ruin.

He swallowed, remembering his boundless disappointment at the time. At first he had stayed seated in the bus, unsure as to whether he should get out. But then when a turbaned salesman struck him energetically on the knee with a plastic camel, - he wanted “ten pound” for it - he was overpowered by the humor of the situation and laughed. He laughed until he had tears in his eyes.

That had been his unplanned trip to Egypt, which he recognized too late as an attempt by an idle shipping company to make money during the off-season. The real joke of the tour was that only twenty minutes was allotted to visit the pyramids and twenty for the Sphinx; then they were conducted into the souvenir shops, where considerably more time was devoted to ornaments and papyri.

At least I’ve been warned, thought Bärger. It can only be worse in Japan as far as the number of people are concerned. But then, he had also read that the Japanese were very different; polite, self-contained, gentle and, above all, full of respect for every aspect of their own cultural heritage. Perhaps it is the fault of that Cyprus trip, thought Bärger, that I can’t yet really look forward to this trip to Japan.

The lights of the tram came into sight beyond the crossroad at the end of the street. On time to the minute, thought Bärger, after glancing at his watch. He climbed into the last car, sat down next to the exit, and took his textbook out of his bag. The chart of hiragana symbols continued to irritate him. There had to be a trick to it, some hidden order that he hadn’t yet discovered.

When a group of noisy youngsters got on at the next stop, Bärger was so deeply involved in his problem that he didn’t even notice. He only looked up angrily when a black boot with white laces kicked the side of his foot. It was suddenly quiet in the tramcar and, without looking around, Bärger realized that he was alone with a grinning bunch which had surrounded him.

The young man with the black boots grinned at him, raised an open beer can and shook it so that foam spurted out.

“Chinaman,” he said, “Chinaman like to dlink beel!’ and then with a quick movement, he poured beer all over the book which still lay open on Bärger’s lap.

In the loud laughter that broke out, he heard the giggling of two girls. Then everything happened very fast. Furious, he tried to jump up to protect his book and he was hit. He was hit from behind, above his right ear and, because he was hit with a full beer bottle, the fun was quickly over for the bunch of young thugs. He sagged back onto the bench, and then slid to the floor of the car, where he lay motionless. As the tram then rolled shrieking around a curve, he rolled with his head beneath the bench and blood from the wound began to flow over his ear and down his neck.

Then they were at the next stop. There was no one on the street as the sobered bunch leaped off the tram and raced across the street, scattering in different directions.