I watched Shi Chongming arrive at Todai University at eight o’clock the following morning. I’d been there since six thirty, waiting first on the street corner, then in the Bambi café when it opened. I ordered a large breakfast – miso soup, tuna flakes on rice, green tea. Before the waitress placed my order in the kitchen she whispered the price to me. I looked up at her, not understanding. Then I realized: she didn’t want me to think I’d get it for free again. I took the chit to the counter and paid it. Then, when she brought the food, I gave her three thousand yen notes. She stared at the money in silence, then blushed and tucked it into her pie-crust frill apron.
It was a hot day, but Shi Chongming wore a blue cotton Mao-style shirt, odd little black rubber plimsolls, the elasticated sort that English schoolchildren used to wear for PE, and his strange fisherman’s hat. He walked very slowly and carefully, his eyes on the pavement. He didn’t notice me loitering at the gate until I had stepped out of the shaded trees and was standing right in front of him. He saw my feet and came to a halt, his cane outstretched, his head down.
‘You said you were going to phone.’
Slowly, very slowly, Shi Chongming raised his face. His eyes were dim, like cloudy marbles. ‘You’re here again,’ he said. ‘You said you weren’t going to come here again.’
‘You were supposed to call me. Yesterday.’
He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘You look different,’ he said. ‘Why do you look different?’
‘You didn’t call me.’
He looked at me for an instant more, taking this in, then made a noise in his throat, and began to walk away. ‘You’re very rude,’ he muttered. ‘Very rude.’
‘But I’ve waited a week,’ I said, catching up and walking alongside. ‘I didn’t call you, I didn’t come here, I did what I was supposed to do, but you, you forgot.’
‘I didn’t promise to call you-’
‘Yes, you-’
‘ No. No.’ He stopped and held up his walking-stick, pointing at me. ‘I made no promises. I have a very good memory and I know I didn’t promise you anything.’
‘I can’t wait for ever.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Do you like wise old Chinese sayings? Would you like to hear a profound truth about a mulberry leaf? Would you? We say that patience turns a mulberry leaf into silk. Silk! Imagine that, from nothing but a dried-out old leaf. All it takes is patience.’
‘Well, that’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Worms turn it into silk.’
He closed his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I don’t see a very long life for this friendship, do you?’
‘Not if you don’t call me when you promise. You’ve got to keep your promises.’
‘I haven’t got to do anything.’
‘But…’ my voice was rising and one or two of the passing students gave us curious looks ‘… I’m at work in the evenings. How do I know you won’t call me in the evenings? There’s no answerphone. How do I know you won’t call me one evening and then never again? If I miss your call it’ll all go wrong and then…’
‘Leave me now,’ he said. ‘You have said enough. Now please let me alone.’ And he hobbled away across the campus, leaving me standing in the shadows under a gingko tree.
‘Professor Shi,’ I called, after his retreating back. ‘Please. I didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t mean it.’
But he kept walking, disappearing eventually beyond the dusty rotary hedge, into the shaded forest. At my feet the shadows of the gingko trees shifted. I turned and kicked the low fence at the edge of the path, then put my face in my hands and began to shiver.
I went home in a kind of trance, going straight to my room, not stopping to speak to the Russians, who were watching TV in the living room and who made a sarcastic ooooh ing noise to my retreating back. I slid the bedroom door closed with a bang and stood with my back to it, my eyes shut, listening to my heart beating.
When you know you’re right about something, the important thing is to keep going.
After a long time I opened my eyes and went to where I kept my paints stacked, against the wall in the alcove. I mixed some paint, set the brushes and the water in a jar near the wall and opened the window wide. It was already getting dark, a burnt-food smell was coming up from the streets, and Tokyo was lighting up for the night. The city stretched away into the distance like a small galaxy. I imagined it from outer space – buildings like mountains, streets glittering like Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s rivers of mercury.
How could this be? When the air raids ended, when the last American bomber retreated over the blue Pacific, there were over a hundred square miles of flattened streets in Tokyo. The city was unrecognizable. Cars couldn’t drive through it because no one knew where the streets ended and the buildings began. In the shanty-towns along the river, the tadon they burned, a foul-smelling, smoky combination of coal dust and tar, hung over the city like a cloud.
The silk walls of my room had been ripped down to waist height. Below that they were intact. I loaded the paintbrush with cobalt and began to paint. I painted broken rooftops and the spindly rafters of burned-away houses. I painted fires raging out of control and streets strewn in rubble. As I painted my mind drifted free. I was in such a daze that at seven o’clock the Russians had to come and knock on the door and ask me if I was thinking of going to work that evening.
‘Or you just gonna stay in there? Like a crab, hmm?’
I pulled back the door and looked out at them, brush in my hand, face smeared with paint.
‘My God! You coming like that?’
I blinked at them. I didn’t know it then, but I was lucky they had knocked on the door: if they hadn’t I might have missed one of the most important nights of my time in Tokyo.