The Boat of a Million Years

VIII. Lady in Waiting

Rain fell throughout the day. It was very light, soundless, and lost itself in the mists that smoked over the ground; but it closed off the world like sleep. From the verandah Okura looked across a garden whose stones and dwarf cypresses had gone dim. Water dripped off the shingles above her and filmed the whitewash of the enclosure wall. There sight ended. Though the broad south gate stood open, she barely glimpsed the avenue outside, a puddle, a leafless cherry tree. Fog had taken away the minor palace beyond. All Heian-kyo might never have been.

She shivered and .turned back toward her quarters. The two or three servants whom she passed by were bulky in wadded garments. Her overlapping kimonos kept some warmth of their own and the carefully matched winter colors preserved a forlorn elegance. Breath drifted ghostly. When she entered the mansion, twilight enfolded her. It was as if cold did also. Shutters and blinds could hold off wind, but dankness seeped through and braziers availed little.

Yet comfort of a sort awaited her. Masamichi had been kind enough to allot her a sleeping platform to herself in the west pavilion. Between the sliding screens that marked the room off, a pair of chests and a go table hunched on the floor. She had a fleeting fancy that they wished they could creep under the thick tatami that covered the platform. No one else was about, so its curtains were drawn back. By the flicker of a few tapers, futon and cushions lay as black lumps.

She opened the cupboard where her koto stood. It was among the heirlooms not yet removed; its name was Cuckoo Song. How right for such a day as this, she thought: the bird that is the inconstant lover, that can bear word between the living and the dead, that embodies the ineluctable passage of time. She had in mind a melody well-liked when she was a girl. Afterward she had sometimes played it for her men— those two among her lovers whom she truly cared for— But no, she remembered that the instrument was now tuned for a winter mode.

A maid came into the section, approached, bowed, and piped, “A messenger has arrived from the noble Lord Yasuhira, my lady.” Her manner took it for granted. The liaison between Chikuzen no Okura, lady in waiting in the household of Ex-Emperor Tsuchimikado, and Nakahari no Yasuhira, until lately a Minor Counselor to self-re-proclaimed Emperor Go-Toba, went back many years. Her own name for him was Mi-yuki, Deep Snow, because that had been his first excuse for staying the night with her.

“Bring him.” Okura’s pulse quivered.

The maid left. She returned as the courier showed himself on the verandah. With the light from outside at his back, Okura could not only see through the translucent blind that he was a boy, she made out that his brocade coat was dry, his white trousers hardly sullied. Besides wearing a straw cape, he must have gone on horseback. The least of smiles touched her lips. Deep Snow would preserve appearances until the end.

Her smile died. The end was upon them both.

With proper ritual, the messenger reached that which he carried under the blind to the maid and knelt, waiting for the reply. The maid brought the letter to Okura and went out. Okura released and unrolled it. Yasuhira had used a pale green paper, tied to a willow switch. His calligraphy was less fine than erstwhile; he had grown farsighted.

“With dismay I learn that you have lost your position at court. I hoped the Ex-Emperor’s consort would shelter you from the wrath that has fallen on your kinsman Chikuzen no Masamichi. What shall become of you, deprived of his protection when I too am made well-nigh helpless? This is a sorrow such as only Tu Fu could express. To my own poor attempt I add the wish that we may at least meet again soon.

His poetry was indeed not to be named with any line of the great Chinese master, Okura thought. Nevertheless a desire for his presence struck with astonishing suddenness. She wondered why. Whatever ardor they once felt had long since cooled to friendship; she could not recall just when they had last shared a mattress.

Well, seeing one another might strengthen them by the knowledge that each was not uniquely alone in misfortune. True, she had heard that the new military governor was confiscating thousands of estates from families who had supported the Imperial cause; but that was a mere number, as unreal as the inner life of a peasant or laborer or dog. True, this house would be taken over by a follower of the Hojo clan; but to her it had simply meant lodging given her out of a sense of duty toward common ancestors. Her dismissal was the sword-cut she actually felt. It lopped her from her world.

Still, she would shortly have left in any case. Surely Yasuhira’s isolation was worse. Let them exchange what solace they could.

One must cling to form, even in answering what she recognized as an appeal. Okura knelt silent, thinking, composing, deciding, before she called for a servant. “I will have a sprig of plum,” she instructed. That should complement her reply more subtly than cherry. From her writing materials she selected a sheet colored pearl-gray. By the tune she had the ink mixed, her words stood clear before her. They were only another poem.

He would understand, and come.

She prepared the package with the artistry it deserved and gave it to a maid to bring to the courier. He would fare swiftly across the city, but his master’s ox-drawn carriage, the only suitable conveyance for a nobleman, would take the better part of an hour. Okura had time to prepare herself.

Holding a taper close, she examined her face in a mirror. It had never been beautiful: too thin, cheekbones too strong, eyes too wide, mouth too large. However, it was properly powdered, the brows well plucked, the cosmetic brows painted just sufficiently far up the forehead, the teeth duly blackened. Her figure also left much to be desired, more bosom and less hip than should be there. It did carry its clothing well; the silks flowed gracefully when she walked with the correct gait. Her hair redeemed many faults, a jet cataract trailing on the floor.

Thereafter she ordered rice wine and cakes made ready. Her karma and Yasuhira’s could not be altogether bad, for she was alone with a few of the servants precisely now. Mas-amichi had taken his wife, two concubines, and children to settle in with a friend who offered them temporary shelter. Their private possessions were going along for storage. He had said Okura and hers could come too, but was noticeably relieved when she told him she had her own plans for the future. Well-bred, the family had never said anything unseemly about the men who called on her and sometimes spent the night. Nonetheless, the fact that somebody who mattered was bound to overhear things would have inhibited conversation on this day when, of all days, it must be either frank or useless.

With the clepsydra taken away and the sun obscured, it was impossible to tell time. Okura guessed that Yasuhira’s arrival occurred about midday, the Hour of the Horse. Because of the servants, she had one of them place her screen of state conveniently, and upon hearing his footsteps on the verandah she knelt behind it. Also for his sake, she thought wryly. Their world falling to pieces around them, the old proprieties mattered perhaps more than ever.

He and she spent a while in formalities and small talk. Thereupon she broke convention and pushed the screen aside. Once that would have implied lovemaking to come. Today a poetic reference or two among the banalities had made it clear that such was the intent of neither. They only wished to speak freely.

The maids Kodayu and Ukon might well be more taken aback by this than by any union of bodies so daylit blatant. They preserved blank deference and brought in the refreshment. Good girls, Okura thought as they went away. What would become of them? Slightly surprised, she found herself wishing the new master would keep the staff on and treat them gently. She feared he would not, being the kind of creature he was.

She and her visitor settled onto the floor. While Yasuhira courteously contemplated the floral pattern on his wine cup, she thought how he seemed to have aged overnight. He went gray years ago, but moon face, slit eyes, bud of a mouth, tiny tuft of beard bad remained as handsome as in his youth. Many a lady sighed and compared him to Genji, the Shining Prince of Murasaki’s two-hundred-year-old story. Today rain had streaked the powder and blurred the rouge, revealing darkened lower lids, blotchy sallowness, deepened lines, and his shoulders were slumped.

He had not lost the courtier grace with which, in due course, he sipped. “Ah,” he murmured, “that is most welcome, Asagao.”—Morning Glory, the name for her that he used in private. “Savor, aroma, and warmth. ‘Resplendent light—’ ”

She was compelled to cap the literary allusion by saying, “But not, I fear, ‘everlasting fortune,’” and whetted that a little by adding, “As for Morning Glory, at my age might not Pine Tree be better?”

He smiled. “So I have kept some of my touch in guiding conversation. Shall we get unpleasant topics out of the way at once? Then we can discourse of former times and their joys.”

“If we have the heart to.” If you do, she meant. I never had any choice but to make myself strong. ‘”I had hoped the Lord Tsuchimikado would retain you.”

“Under these circumstances, dismissal may be less than the worst thing that could happen to me,” she said. He failed to completely hide puzzlement. She explained: “Without a family holding rice land, I would be scarcely more than a beggar, lacking even a place of my own like this to retire to when off duty. The others would despise and soon abuse me.”

“Indeed?”

“Women are as cruel as men, Mi-yuki.”

He nibbled a cake. She realized that was cover for the collecting of his thoughts. At length he said, “I must confess, the knowledge of the situation made thin my expectations for you.”

“Why so?” She knew the answer perfectly well, but also knew that explaining to her would help him.

“It is true that Lord Tsuchimikado stayed at peace during the uprising,” he said, “but if he did not work against the Hojo chieftains, neither did he assist them. Now I daresay he feels a need to curry favor, the more so because they may then make one of his line the next Emperor when our present sovereign dies or abdicates. Ridding himself of every member of any family that was in revolt seems a trivial gesture. Just the same, it is a gesture, and Lord Tokifusa, whom they have set as military governor over Heian-kyo, will take due note of it.”

“I wonder what sin in a past life caused Lord Go-Toba to try to seize back the throne he had quitted,” Okura mused.

“Ah, it was no madness, it was a noble effort that should have succeeded. Remember, his brother, the then Emperor Juntoku, was with him in it, and so were not only families like ours and their followers, but soldiers of the Taira who would fain avenge what the Minamoto did to their fathers; and many a monk also took up arms.”

A bleakness’ passed through Okura. She knew how the monks of Mount Hiei repeatedly descended on this city and terrorized it, not only by threats but by beatings, killings, looting, burning. They came to enforce political decisions they wanted; but were they any better than the outright criminal gangs who effectively ruled over the entire western half of the capital?

“No, it must have been because of our own former sins that we failed,” Yasuhira continued. “How far have we fallen since the golden days! We might have won to an Emperor who truly ruled.”

“What do you mean?” asked Okura, sensing how he needed to express his bitterness.

It erupted: “Why, what has the Emperor been for generations but a doll in the hands of the mighty, enthroned as a child and made to step down and retire into a life of idleness when he reached manhood? And meanwhile the clans have made earth sodden with blood as they fought out who should name the Shogun.” He gulped for air and explicated in the same rush of words: “The Shogun is the military head in Kamakura who is the real master of the Empire. Or who was. Today—today the Hojo have won the clan wars; and their Shogun is himself a boy, another doll who says what their lords want him to say.”

He reined himself in and apologized: “I beg Asagao’s pardon. You must be shocked at my bluntness; and needlessly, for of course a woman cannot understand these things.”

Okura, who had kept her ears open and her mind awake amply long enough to know everything he had told her, replied, “True, they are not for her. What I do understand is that you grieve over what we have lost. Poor Mi-yuki, what shall become of you?”

Somewhat calmed, Yasuhira said, “I was in a better position to bargain for leniency than Masamichi or most others. Thus I have leave to occupy my mansion in Heian-kyo for a short time yet. After I must depart, it will be to a farm in the east, well beyond Ise, that I am allowed to keep. The tenants will support me and my remaining dependents.”

“But in poverty! And so far away, among rude countryfolk. It will be like passing over the edge of the world.”

He nodded. “Often will my tears fall. Yet—“ She could not readily follow his quotation, having had scant opportunity to practice spoken Chinese, but gathered that it was about maintaining a serene spirit in adversity. “I hear there is a view of the sacred mountain Fuji. And I can take some books and my flute with me.”

“Then you are not wholly destroyed. That is one bright dustmote in the dark air.”

“What of you? What has happened to this household?”

“Yesterday came the baron who will take possession here. The worst kind of provincial, face unpowdered and weathered like a peasant’s, hair and beard abristle, uncouth as a monkey and growling a dialect so barbarous that one could barely comprehend him. As for the soldiers in his train, oh, they could almost have been wildfolk of Hokkaido. Yes, knowledge of what I leave behind may temper my longing for Heian-kyo. He gave us a few days to make our preparations.”

Yasuhira hesitated before he said, “Mine will be no fitting existence for a well-born lady. However, if you have nothing eke, come with my party. For the rest of our days we can strive to console each other.”

“I thank you, dear old friend,” she answered mutedly, “but I do have my own road before me.”

He emptied his cup. She refilled it. “Indeed? Let me be glad on your account, not disappointed on mine. Who will take you in?”

“No one. I will seek the temple at Higashiyama—that one, for I have often been there with the Ex-Imperial consort and the chief priest knows me—I will go and take vows.”

She had not expected him to show dismay. He almost dropped his cup. Wine slopped forth to stain his outer robe. “What? Do you mean full vows? Become a nun?”

“I think so.”

“Cut off your hair, your beautiful hair, don coarse black raiment, live— How will you live?”

“The fiercest bandit dares not harm a nun; the poorest hovel will not deny her shelter and some rice for her bowl. I have in mind to go on perpetual pilgrimage, from shrine to shrine, that I may gain merit in whatever years of this life are left me.” Okura smiled. “During those years, perhaps I can call on you from time to time. Then we will remember together.”

He shook his head, bemused. Like most courtiers, he had never traveled far, seldom more than a day’s journey from Heian-kyo. And that had been by carriage—to services that for his kind were occasions more social than religious; to view blossoms in the springtime countryside or the maple leaves of autumn; to admire and make poems about moonlight on Lake Biwa ... “Afoot,” he mumbled. “Roads that wet weather turns into quagmires. Mountains, gorges, raging rivers. Hunger, rain, snow, wind, fiery sun. Ignorant commoners. Beasts. Demons, ghosts. No.” He set down his cup, straightened, firmed his voice. “You shall not. It would be hard for a young man. You, a woman, growing old, you will perish miserably. I won’t have it.”

Rather than remind him that he lacked authority over her, for his concern was touching, she asked gently, “Do I seem feeble?”

He fell silent. His eyes searched, as if to pierce the garments and look at the body that had sometimes lain beneath his. But no, she thought, that would never cross his mind. A decent man, he found nudity disgusting, and in fact they had always kept on at least one layer of clothing.

Finally he murmured, “It is true, it is eerie, the years have scarcely touched you, if at all. You could pass for a woman of twenty. But your age is—what? We have known each other for close to thirty years, and you must have been about twenty when you came to court, so that makes you only a little younger than me. And my strength has faded away.”

You speak aright, she thought. Bit by bit I have seen you holding a book farther from your eyes or blinking at words you do not quite hear; half your teeth are gone; more and more fevers come upon you, coughs, chills; do your bones hurt when you rise in the mornings? I know the signs well, and well I should, as often as I have watched them steal over those I loved.

The impulse had seized her days before, when the bad news broke and she began to think what it meant and what to do. She had curbed it, but it stayed restlessly alive. If she yielded, what harm? She could trust this man. She was unsure whether it would help or hinder him against his sorrow.

Let me be honest with him, she decided. At least it will give him something to think about besides his great loss, in the solitude that awaits him.

“I am not the age you believe, my dear,” she said quietly. “Do you wish the truth? Be warned, at first you may suppose I have gone mad.”

He studied her before replying with the same softness, “I doubt that. There is more within you than you have ever manifested. I was vaguely but surely conscious of it. Perhaps I dared never inquire.”

Then you are wiser than I believed, she thought. Her resolution crystallized. “Let us go outside,” she said. “What I have to tell is for no ears but yours.”

Not troubling about cloaks, they went forth together, onto the verandah, around this pavilion, and along a covered gallery to a kiosk overlooking the pool. Near its placidity rose a man-high stone in whose ruggedness was chiseled the emblem of the clan that had lost this home. Okura halted. “Here is a good spot for me to show you that no evil spirit uses my tongue to speak falsehoods,” she said.

Solemnly, she recited a passage she had chosen from the Lotus Sutra. Yasuhira’s manner was as grave when he told her, “Yes, that suffices me.” He was of the Amidist sect, which held that the Buddha himself watches over humankind.

They stood gazing out at things of chaste beauty. Mist from the rain filled the kiosk and covered hair, clothes, eyelashes with droplets. The cold and the silence were tike presences, whose awareness was remote from them.

“You suppose I am about fifty years old,” she said. “I am more than twice that.”

He caught a breath, looked sharply at her, looked away, and asked with closely held calm, “How can this be?”

“I know not,” she sighed. “I know only that I was born in the reign of Emperor Toba, through whom the Fujiwara clan still ruled the realm so strongly that it lay everywhere at peace. I grew up like any other girl of good birth, save that I was never ill, but once I had become fully a woman, all change in me ceased, and thus it has been ever since.”

“What karma is yours?” he whispered.

“I tell you, I know not. I have studied, prayed, meditated, practiced austerities, but no enlightenment has come. At last I decided my best course was to continue this long life as well as I was able.”

“That must be ... difficult.”

“It is.”

“Why have you not revealed yourself?” The voice trembled. “You must be holy, a saint, a Bodhisattva.”

“I know I am not. I am troubled and unsure and tormented by desire, fear, hope, every fleshly evil. Also, as my jigelessness first came slowly to notice, I have encountered jealousy, spite, and dread. Yet I could never hitherto bring myself to renounce the world and retreat to a life of sacred poverty. So whatever I am, Mi-yuki, I am not holy.”

He pondered. Beyond the garden wall swirled formlessness. Eventually he asked her, “What did you do? What have your years been like?”

“When I was fourteen, an older man—his name no longer matters—sought me out. He being influential, my parents encouraged him. I cared little for him, but knew not how to refuse. In the end he spent the three nights at my side and thereafter made me a secondary wife. He also got me a position at the court of Toba, who by then had abdicated. I bore him children, two of whom lived1. Toba died. Soon after, my husband did.

“By then the wars between the Taira and the Minamoto had broken out. I made an occasion to retire from the service of Toba’s widow and, taking my inheritance, withdrew to the family from which I sprang. It helped that a lady not at court lives so secluded. But how empty an existence!

“At last I confided in a lover I had gotten, a man of some wealth and power. He brought me to a rural estate of his, where I spent several years. Meanwhile he got my daughter married off elsewhere. He took me back to Heian-kyo under her name—such people as remembered marveled at how much she resembled her mother—and through his patronage I came again into service at a royal household. Gradually I outlived the scorn they have for provincials; but when they gradually observed how I kept my youth—

“Do you wish to hear it all?” she asked in an upsurge of weariness. “This has been my third such renewal. The tricks, the deceptions, the children I have borne and, one way or another, managed to have adopted elsewhere, lest it become too plain that they grow old while I do not. That has hurt most. I wonder how much more I could endure.”

“Therefore you are leaving everything behind,” he breathed.

“The time was already overpast. I hesitated because of the strife, the uncertainty about what would become of my kindred. Well, that has been settled for me. It feels almost like a liberation.”

“If you take nun’s vows, you cannot return here as you did before.”

“I have no wish to. I have had my fill of the petty intrigues and hollow amusements. Fewer are the midnight stars than the yawns I have smothered, the hours I have stared into vacancy and waited for something, anything to happen.” She touched his hand. “You gave me one reason to linger. But now you too must go. Besides, I wonder how much longer they can keep up the pretense in Heian-kyo.”

“You choose a harder way than I think you imagine.”

“No harder, / think, than most in times to come. It is a cruel age we are bound into. At least a wandering nun has people’s respect, and ... nobody questions her. Someday I may even win to understanding of why we suffer what we do.”

“Could I ever show courage like hers?” he asked the rain.

Once more she touched his hand. “I feared this tale might distress you.”

Still he looked before him, into the silvery blindness. “For your sake, perhaps. It has not changed you for me. While I live, you will remain my Morning Glory. And now you have helped me remember that I am safely mortal. Will you pray for me?”

“Always,” she promised.

They stood a while in silence, then went back inside. There they spoke of happy things and summoned up happy memories, pleasures and lovelinesses that had been theirs. He got a little tipsy. Nevertheless, when they said farewell it was with the dignity becoming a nobleman and a lady of the Imperial court.