Melodie by Akira Mizubayashi

Author:Akira Mizubayashi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

20

WAITING

SHE WAITS. Mélodie is one who waits, who does nothing but wait. Her life will have been made up of waiting. But waiting for what? Waiting for the return of the one to whom she feels attached.

That morning, as usual, I had taken her for a walk and, after a long stroll through the laneways of Nakano, we made a stop at Philosophy Park before getting back to the house. Once the passers-by thinned out in the vacant land adjoining the park, I was in the habit of taking off her leash so that she could freely explore the area in her own way, from end to end and in every nook and cranny. So that’s what I did. I knew that if, say, a child was frightened by her presence I only needed to call loudly to her, and she would come straight back to me. But that day things took a different turn.

Mr D, the vet, came along with his female golden retriever, Momo—he would regularly get her to chase the frisbee. I greeted him and thanked him for looking after Mélodie two weeks before when she’d had a split dewclaw. The greetings over with, I turned round to the ex-patient. But I could no longer see her … She had disappeared … She had fled—that’s what I guessed straight away—as soon as she’d seen the man who had hurt her so dreadfully—he’d cut away half of her broken dewclaw together with the nerve that ran underneath it. I cried out her name. Now there were only Mr D and his dog on the vacant land. I took my leave of the vet and ran into the different parts of the park, shouting, screaming her name louder and louder: I looked around by the baseball stadium; I checked the area around the tennis courts; I also searched the cherry-tree garden; finally I continued the search as far as the pagoda and its surrounds. But in vain. Not the shadow of a dog. I was beginning to panic …

‘Mélodie! Mélodie! Where are you? Come back, please come back! Mélodie!’

So there I was, dashing around frantically, looking in all the out-of-the-way corners of the park where a lovable dog, all atremble, might be hiding. In my right hand I held the red leash, and in the left, the little walks bag containing the bottle of water and some advertising liftouts. I was hot. I was bathed in sweat; big drops of perspiration ran down my cheeks and down my back the whole length of my spine. I looked at my watch. It was past ten o’clock. That meant we should have been home more than an hour ago. I was exhausted. I sighed despondently.

It was then that a woman in her forties, who was holding a Shiba on the leash, spoke to me. Seeing me in the state of panic that showed I was a master looking for his dog, in this highly visible state of distress, no doubt she

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