Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz

Author:John Burnham Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Cycling, Americans - Japan - Fiction, Sports & Recreation, fiction, Literary, Americans, Asia, Japan, History
ISBN: 9780307787521
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

It was strange at first, sleeping in an open space with Kiyoko’s grandparents. Alec lay awake for a long time, the sounds of the old couple’s snoring and coughing making him feel as though he were listening to passengers on a night train; their noises had the steady sense of routine about them. Openmouthed, head cocked to one side, Alec strained and listened, and gradually, reluctantly, the old man and woman began to identify themselves to him until he knew for certain which noises belonged to whom. And once he could read the rhythms of their sleep, it was only a matter of time before he started to remember things he thought he had forgotten long ago. They came to him as they had from his first day in Japan, as images and scenes, each one belonging to something larger and unidentifiable. It was as if he had lost control somehow, as if his memory did as it pleased, mocking him by playing his childhood back to him in bits and pieces. He watched them as he would someone else’s home movies, and felt the foreignness of his own life. Like thick rope, it coiled around him and held him where he was.

A month had passed since Alec’s visit to the men’s club with his father. He had just begun eighth grade the week before. People were already starting to talk about high school. It was Saturday, the tenth anniversary, Alec’s father told him, of their renting the house in upstate New York. They made the three-hour drive so that they would be there to celebrate.

The house was Colonial style, painted white. It was old and at one time had been a schoolhouse. A cracked school bell still sat in one corner of the attic, its surface long since covered with dust and cobwebs. A back porch had been added on to the second story of the house. Maple trees bordered the property on two sides, sheltering it from neighbors. A rope swing hung from the tallest tree. A long field began at the edge of the house and sloped down to the steep bank of the river.

That same Saturday the head of the town’s historical association arrived to hang a wooden plaque on the front of the house. He was portly, all tweed and wide-wale corduroy, and he peered at the house and its occupants through round, gold-rimmed spectacles. He took his coffee with milk, he said, and sat down heavily in the Victorian chair by the Ben Franklin stove. He spoke of the history that had occurred on the site, of the famous people who had learned their childhood lessons within the walls of the old building. There were pages and pages of records, he said—dusty old books filled with important facts and schoolboy stories. Alec didn’t recognize any of the famous names the man mentioned and spent the rest of the day looking them up in his father’s 1952 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It was late that night when he awoke, perhaps two or three in the morning.

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