The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Sailor Who Fell From Grace & the Sea (Vintage 1999)

Author:Sailor Who Fell From Grace & the Sea (Vintage, 1999)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

WINTER

CHAPTER ONE

AT nine o’clock in the morning on December 30, Ryuji emerged from the customs shed at Center Pier. Fusako was there to meet him.

Center Pier was a curious abstraction of a neighborhood. The streets were unpeopled and too clean; the plane trees lining them were withered. Down a siding which ran between archaic red-brick warehouses and a pseudo-Renaissance shipping office chugged an ancient steam engine huffing clouds of black smoke. Even the little railroad crossing seemed unauthentic, as though it belonged with a set of toy trains. The sea was responsible for the unreality of the place, for it was to her service alone that the streets, the buildings, even the dumb bricks in the wall were pledged. The sea had simplified and abstracted, and the pier in turn had lost its sense of reality and appeared to be dwelling within a dream.

Besides, it was raining. Rich cinnabar gushed out of the old brick walls and washed into puddles on the street. The masts spiring above the roofs were dripping wet.

Not wanting to attract attention, Fusako waited in the back seat of the car. Through the rain-streaked window she watched the crew emerge one by one from the weather-beaten wooden shed. Ryuji paused for a minute in the doorway to turn up the collar of his pea coat and pull his cap low over his eyes. Then he hunched into the rain, carrying an old zippered bag. Fusako sent her chauffeur running out to call him.

He came hurtling into the car like a piece of bulky, rain-soaked baggage. “I knew you’d come—I knew it,” he gasped, seizing the shoulders of Fusako’s mink coat.

His cheeks were streaked with rain—or were those tears?—and he was more sunburned than before. Fusako had paled: her white face was like a window opened in the dim interior of the car. They kissed, and they were crying. Ryuji slipped his hands under Fusako’s coat and clutched wildly at her body as though searching for life in a corpse he had saved from drowning, locked his arms around her supple waist and replenished his heart and mind with the details of her. It was only a six- or seven-minute ride to the house. Finally, as the car was crossing Yamashita Bridge, they were able to begin a normal conversation.

“Thanks for all the letters. I read every one a hundred times.”

“I did yours too. You can stay with us at least through New Year’s, can’t you?”

“Thanks. . . . How’s Noboru been?”

“He wanted to come and meet you at the pier but he caught a little cold and had to go to bed. Oh, it’s nothing serious—hardly any fever—”

The conversation was ordinary, remarks any landsmen might exchange, and it came easily. They had imagined during the months apart that their conversation would be difficult when they met again; restoring the bond between them to what it had been after three summer days had seemed impossible. Why should things proceed as smoothly as an arm slips into

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