The Teahouse Fire Read online

  As the streets began to look less foreign and more like New York, I kept glancing back at the proud torii gate. The higher crossbeam had ends that swept upward, like the prow of a Viking ship. I liked thinking of a spirit boat, sailing in the air through a red gate. “Is torii like tori, bird?” I asked.

  “Seen and not heard, Aurelia,” said Uncle Charles.

  “The Church of the Sacred Heart,” Brother Joaquin announced, stopping to nod toward three structures: a new brick church, a new brick house, and a blackened, roofless brick hall, half built or half in ruin. “Founded by our own Abbé Girard. To answer your question, young lady,” he said, “every time I’ve asked a Japanese something like that—torii, gate, and tori, bird; hana, nose, and hana, flower—I get a queer little laugh and a bow, and the man says, ‘Sorry, Father, different kanji. ’Their words are all in those wretched Chinese characters, and two words can sound alike but look completely different on the page.”

  I had seen kanji, the difficult Chinese characters, in my grammar, and had learned only a few. I nodded.

  “Well, here are your quarters for the night, right across from the main building. Japanese style, I’m afraid. The dormitory was almost ready last fall and then it went up in flames.” He nodded toward the wreck across the street. “Fires all the time here; they build their blasted houses out of shoji paper. We’re lucky more wasn’t lost.” He glanced back again at the ruined building, pained.

  “Paper?” asked Uncle Charles. Following his gaze, it seemed to me that only the roofless brick building had burned—an especially remarkable fact, given the surrounding buildings: under the heavy tile roofs, I saw dainty wood lattices framing sliding paper doors and walls. I had been too young to understand what was happening during the Draft Riots in New York, but I knew they had been more than Uncle Charles was prepared for. “Is it safe here?”

  “Oh, that bother with the British Embassy was a long time ago.”

  Brother Joaquin’s reassurance had the opposite effect on Uncle Charles. “What bother?”

  “Arson,” said the monk dismissively. “Before anyone could move in. Nobody hurt, don’t worry. Besides, that was four years ago, and times have changed. It was lightning, don’t worry.”

  Uncle Charles did not look mollified. “Couldn’t an evildoer have come under cover of storm?” he asked.

  “You don’t understand, Father. That was Edo, this is Yokohama. And we’ve hired our own watchman. You’ll hear him at night: they beat wooden sticks together”—he clapped twice—“to scare off trespassers, I suppose.”

  Uncle Charles looked wary as Brother Joaquin plowed ahead. “So, then. Have you ever been in a Japanese building before? Well,” he laughed dryly, “welcome; behold. You’ll need to take off your shoes whenever you step up into the house.” He opened a sliding lattice gate and showed us the dark inside of a wooden house. The stone floor just in from the lattice was simply a continuation of the cobbled street. After the little stone foyer, the whole house stood on stilts a foot or two up from the ground, carpeted in a strange pale flooring. “This is what the Japanese call a tatami floor: thick mats made of woven rice straw. Tatami mats are all the same size, about six feet by three. That’s how they measure their homes: I live in a six-mat room, and so forth. If you walk on tatami with your shoes, for them it’s like you used the well for a privy.”

  I grimaced, imagining, and Uncle Charles glowered at me.

  “So: you come inside and, if it’s raining, leave your umbrella and your muddy things here—arigato,” he said, counting out change to the porters who set down our trunk. “And then you sit on this wooden step, take off your shoes, and put them in this cupboard, see? Dirty outdoor shoes on the bottom shelf, clean indoor slippers on the top. They all wear wooden sandals so they’re not spending the day lacing and unlacing as we would.” Brother Joaquin, I realized, wore wooden sandals too. “In the lavatory—indoors, but it’s cleaned out daily—one must wear, mark me, different slippers, so that when you miss you’ll not be tracking your mess into the house. On our mission, we’ll each have a servant—a novice Brother, one of the natives—nonexistent, of course, under Japanese law. Anyhow, mine here raised all kinds of fuss when I wore the wrong shoes in the wrong place.” Uncle Charles opened the door the monk indicated and looked at the privy, appalled. “Yes, well, you’ll have to squat to answer the call of nature in Japan; it takes getting used to,” Brother Joaquin said. “Tonight we’ll have a boy take out your futon for you; it’s their idea of a mattress—cotton wadding spread on the floor. You’ll get to try their queer pillows too.” He pointed to an empty corner of the lattice-and-paper wall.

  “What is it, Brother?”

  “Oh, sorry, it’s a closet for your futon.” Magicianlike, he pulled the wall open—it was a sliding door—and revealed shelves laden with thick quilts. How strange the room looked, how empty: sliding paper walls surrounding straw tatami floors. Along one wall stood dark wooden cabinets I took to be dressers and cupboards, solemn with their sliding panels and metal fittings. Uncle Charles looked around as well, asking, “How is this place heated?”

  Brother Joaquin pointed to a blackened metal cauldron beside the cabinets. “Charcoal braziers,” he said. “Your boy will take them out tonight and get a fire set for you.”

  “I’m sure I could see to it myself,” said Uncle Charles.

  “Please don’t,” said Brother Joaquin. “They’re fussy, the braziers.” The church bell tolled five. “So. There’s a loft at the top of the ladder, which is sure to break if I show you,” said Brother Joaquin, rubbing his broad belly for emphasis. “And there’s a garden in back, very quaint,” he added. He and Uncle Charles blocked the garden door, so I looked around the back room: it had no furniture at all. One tatami mat against a side wall of the room was raised an inch or so higher than its neighbors; it was framed by raw wood posts and contained a statue of the Virgin. “What’s that?” I asked when Brother Joaquin moved away from the sunny patch of moss and gravel behind the house.

  “Aurelia, silence,” said Uncle Charles.

  “Our Lady, or her display alcove? The best room of every Japanese house, usually the one by the garden,” Brother Joaquin explained, “has a niche like this for showing off one or two treasures at a time, usually calligraphy or ceramics. The statue came from Nantes, thanks to Abbé Girard. What else can I show you? We’ll eat at the refectory, but there is a native kitchen, if you’re curious. It’s over here. Down a step, here we are, back on a stone floor again.” He lowered himself with practiced grace into a pair of sandals waiting by the ledge. “You can come in through the kitchen, if you like—there’s a side alley. Don’t ask me what all these things are for; I don’t know. Except here’s a basin—I filled it for you this morning. There’s a well down the alley; your boy will bring in more water for washing tonight. Unless you want to try one of the native bathhouses…” he laughed; Uncle Charles looked appalled. “It’s kind of charming, really, in a squalid way: they all change out of their daytime dress and wear blue cotton kimono bathrobes down the street, as if they all lived under the same roof. I thought it was some kind of heathen rite when I first came here. And then inside—according to their defenders—whole families bathe together like Adam and Eve in Eden.” Uncle Charles shook his head, overwhelmed. “So, the refectory at six, then? You’ll hear the bell.”

  Before dinner, I climbed the polished wooden ladder in my stocking feet and looked up in the empty loft: a three-mat room, I counted. When the bell called six, we wove our way through Brother Joaquin’s promised twilight procession: a streetful of clattering wooden sandals and blue cotton robes. Two pairs of women walking toward each other bowed and stopped to chat: I heard a hash of rapid syllables, the sound, -mashita, -mashita, that meant they were using verbs in the past tense, and then one of them glanced over at the sweet yawning baby on the other’s back. “Kawaii,” she sighed. I understood! The baby was cute! I also noticed that the women’s mouths were strangely like the dark O of the
baby’s: they had no teeth. No—one of them was standing under the mission lamp; I saw—their teeth were black.

  What’s more, I noticed, the women had no eyebrows. Those walking, it seemed, to the bathhouse had eyebrow lines painted on their foreheads; those walking from the bathhouse, moist and rosy, had none at all. I held my doll closer and hurried to catch up with Uncle Charles.

  He looked at me in the doorway and seemed uneasy. “A child…” he said darkly. And so I sat in my good dress in the kitchen, eating dinner on a tray. From time to time, I peered into the dining room to watch the dozen-odd Yokohama Brothers entertain their guests, bragging about their boiled beets and tough chicken. I thought, not of my mother, but of her steamed green beans, crisp and tender, potatoes and garlic cooked in wine and cream, her meringues served with strawberries in June. I missed them terribly. The Brothers sat talking, talking, sucking at their chicken bones. A silver-bearded Father made Uncle Charles stand with his head bowed as he pronounced upon “the old capital of Japan, benighted Miyako, hard of access, the city most steeped in pagan darkness, residence of the Emperor Komei, whom they worship as a descendant of their sun goddess. Our son Charles, gifted with tongues, we have chosen, with our son Joaquin, to breach the city of Miyako. May they bring light into darkness.” Uncle Charles flushed, bashful and radiant.

  “But first things first,” cautioned Brother Joaquin. “We aren’t supposed to be in the Emperor’s capital, not as Westerners, and certainly not as missionaries. But a group of Christians who have been practicing in secret since Saint Francis Xavier’s time has asked us to come. We’ll be guests of one of the feudal lords, who keeps a residence in Miyako. You’ll meet Father Damian when we get there; we’re to assist him. He’ll install us in houses where we can minister clandestinely, at least until the laws change.”

  “And on that day,” the Father boomed, “we will build a cathedral in Our Lord’s name and gather up a new flock. We shall not use violence but exhort by word, by baptism, and by example, until they put their own temples to the torch, the better to make straight the road for Christ.”

  I remember resting my head against the wall for a moment as I listened to the Brothers, and then Uncle Charles set me down on a pillowy quilt. He propped something under my neck: a wooden box topped with a cloth pad. I blinked awake. “Are we in the Japanese house?” I asked in French.

  “Yes, you’re upstairs,” he said in English. “Here’s your nightgown.”

  So the thing under my head was a Japanese pillow, how uncomfortable. Pushing it away, I blinked and saw soft candlelight on the tatami floor. “Tatami,” I said, pointing. “Futon. Shoji paper. Torii gates. Kanji words. So many new things.” I yawned. “How will Maman manage?”

  “Aurelia,” said Uncle Charles sharply.

  I swallowed hard, my face flaming. My mouth tasted of sour beets and rank chicken. “Nothing, never mind,” I said shortly. “Good night, sleep well.”

  “May the Lord watch over you,” he said, as always.

  I wouldn’t need the Lord if my mother were here, I thought in the dark, beginning to cry, and no one punished me with lightning. I was that alone.

  HIDDEN IN THE BELLY of a Japanese cargo ship, gnawing on the monks’ bread and salted meat, we sailed for a week down the coast and upriver to great Osaka. On the seventh night, concealed in lacquered, cagelike boxes, we took a flat poled craft to Fushimi, the port for the Emperor’s city. Come morning a group of Japanese men—servants of Father Damian’s Christians, it seemed—transferred us, boxes and all, to a third boat, the narrowest yet, which brought us into Miyako itself. I sat with my doll in my lap on those voyages, not speaking, mostly sleeping. My mother, my mother. I felt nothing. Not the distracted, evasive, playing-house nothing of the past two months, where my prayers were really stories I told myself, but a square-on nothing, a blank mirror inside. The animal of my body wept and I felt nothing.

  On the journey from Fushimi to Miyako, invisible in my lacquered cage, I peeped through the grillework at the world outside and at Uncle Charles’s chair, lashed beside us, empty, bobbing, half-encased in rough cloth. The red plush bulk of it rose up from the loose wrappings, framed in dark worked wood: scallops and protruding cherubs, and at the top a hoop of wood carved into a ribbon arch. Through that arch I saw the sky, the distant wild mountains, the nearby slopes terraced into pools; I saw green shoots, like eyelashes, peeping through the sheets of water. I saw trees among stones, bare, a few trembling with white blossoms. I saw people on the banks of the canal: straw hats, wooden sandals, and so many kimono. They wore indigo, mostly, but also brown and gray and black, gray-pink, gray-green, grayed gold. I saw blue in every shade and stripes in every pattern; women wore great wide sashes tied at the back in every kind of knot. Children darted in and out of the frame of arched wood, back and forth like butterflies, the way my mother had once promised I would.

  The sky framed by Uncle Charles’s chair was white, a fog, a murky absence of color. And I was an empty sky as well, a bare tree. Other people talked, other people laughed, other people ate—even here, so far from home, with knitting needles, out of black lacquer lunchboxes, they ate. I wasn’t hungry myself.

  By the end of the day, our flat-bottomed wood skiff, a scant few feet across, had threaded its way up a shallow channel so narrow two such boats could barely pass each other. “Is this the Kamo River that runs through the city?” asked Uncle Charles, surprised at its smallness.

  “We’re alongside it,” Brother Joaquin assured him. “The Kamo is rocky and quite shallow, except when it floods; you can’t run boats on it. This is the Takase Canal. Dug more than two hundred years ago,” he added.

  “The natives are cunning,” murmured Uncle Charles.

  THOUGH A LIFETIME has since passed, I remember catching a glimpse of the river beyond the canal once the men hoisted up our palanquins: a shimmering ribbon flecked with bridges and sandspits, long streamers of new-dyed cloth rinsing in its waters. On the near side, I saw the flat wooden city; on the far side, three mountains: one green and low close by, built up with little houses, one at middle distance, a wedge of its flank stripped of trees. Carved into that bare hillside, I saw one of the few Chinese characters I’d mastered: great, pronounced oh or dai. Far away and north of me stood the tallest mountain, solemn as a sentinel, leading a fleet of smaller blue mountains behind it; they filled the sky like strips of stacked torn paper. A gust of gulls skimmed the river and I felt, in spite of my grief, a sense of lightness as we pulled away.

  I remember Uncle Charles’s chair, borne by two porters, heading off a procession of small strong men carrying us and our trunks. We looked like a file of pallbearers, a parade led by a chair. I remember watching it bob solemnly through the narrow gray streets like a holy relic, framed at one point by a red torii gate. Once we arrived in the new house and scrambled up out of our lacquered cages, the two men heaved the chair barefoot up a narrow flight of stairs. It muscled through the tight stair-passage as if newly born, a wooden cherub bursting through a paper wall en route, and at last stood at rest, monstrous in the sere little three-mat room. We looked at it, embarrassed. “Well, with a rug…” said Uncle Charles.

  A pair of men appeared with a message and gifts of food, and Brother Joaquin talked with them, switching between Japanese and English to translate for Uncle Charles. “Stay here,” said my uncle, his voice buzzing with excitement. I had never seen him so happy to meet someone. “Change into your good dress, in case Father Damian asks to speak with you as well. Be ready, in case you’re sent for.”

  “Here, if you get hungry,” said Brother Joaquin, passing me a small packet tied in string. “It’s not bad; just don’t eat the leaves.”

  Uncle Charles and Brother Joaquin folded themselves back into their palanquins and I was left alone. The townhouse was very like the one in Yokohama: entry and kitchen at street level, a few barren tatami rooms a step up, an extra room on the second floor—this one reached by stairs instead of a ladder. Uncle Charles
had named them all: ministry, bedroom, parlor, service, and, upstairs, study. I was assigned a one-mat room under the stairs until I took over the novice brother’s duties, Uncle Charles told me, at which time I would graduate to service.

  Cold, I took Uncle Charles’s coat upstairs and huddled with my doll in the wide red mouth of his chair. I had never been permitted to sit on it at home, except in his lap at reading lessons when I was very young. Uncle Charles read in this chair, ate in this chair, napped in it, surely. It smelled richly of pipe smoke and faintly of soured sweat. “Claire,” I said in his voice, beckoning to my doll. “Un petit café.” I pulled his coat tight around my shoulders. “Tell your mother to put on some more coal,” I grumbled, close to tears. Clutching the coat to my sides, I felt coins in the pockets. I found three nickels, a rosary, and an envelope marked Telegraph Office, New York Harbor. I opened it, and read.

  HUNGER SUDDENLY TOOK hold of me. I felt hollow behind my eyes. I took up Brother Joaquin’s box and untied the string. The little package seemed simple enough on first glance, but in the dimming light I saw a leaf of white paper peeping out from under the subtly textured brown wrapper. The two sheets of paper concealed a wooden box tied in green thread, partially covered by another sheet of paper—this one painted with a crude and vibrant tree in bloom. I broke the thread and peeled off the little painting, removed a cunning lid and discovered six little packages pressed snug together, each wrapped in a leaf. I had once touched a snake at a street fair: it was cool and dry, satiny and faintly ridged, like these boxed leaf packets. I pried one out and unwrapped it: a perfect cube, pink fish on white rice flecked with herbs. I nibbled at it tentatively: faintly sweet, faintly tart, faintly salty. I ate all six. When Uncle Charles came up the stairs with an oil lamp, flushed, I felt not at all hollow; the thing I had to say was a clear hard bell inside me.