Mariye didn’t speak that morning. She just sat there, the perfect model, in the simple straight-backed chair, and gazed at me as if at some distant landscape. Since my stool was taller than her chair, she was looking up at a slight angle. I made no special attempt to talk to her. There was nothing I had to say, nor did I feel any particular need. So I plied my brush across the canvas in silence.
I was painting Mariye’s portrait, yet I could sense elements of my dead sister Komi and my former wife Yuzu creeping into the work. This wasn’t intentional—they worked their way in quite naturally. Perhaps I was searching within Mariye for reminders of those two women, so important to me, whom I had lost. I couldn’t say if this was healthy or not. But that was the only way I could paint at the time. No, to say “at the time” is off the mark. When I thought about it, I had operated like this from the very beginning. Giving form to what eluded me in reality. Inscribing secret signals only I could decipher.
Whatever the case, I was able to push Mariye’s portrait forward with relative ease. Step by step, it moved steadily toward completion. Like a river, it followed the contours of the land, pooling in the hollows until it overflowed the final barrier to stream unobstructed to the sea. I could feel it circulate through my body, like blood.
“Can I come visit you later,” Mariye said in a small voice just before we finished our morning’s work. The lack of inflection made it sound like an assertion, but it was a clear question.
“You mean through your secret passageway?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mind at all, but around what time?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I don’t think you should come after dark,” I said. “You can never tell what’s in these mountains at night.”
All sorts of weird things could be lurking out there: the Commendatore, Long Face, the man with the white Subaru Forester, Tomohiko Amada’s living spirit. Even the incubus that was my sexual alter ego. Yes, depending on the circumstances, I might turn into one of those sinister creatures that prowled the night. The thought gave me a chill.
“I’ll try to come before dark,” Mariye said. “I want to talk to you about something. Just the two of us.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
We wrapped up for the day not long after the noon-hour chimes sounded.
Shoko was sitting on the sofa, once again focused on her reading. She appeared to have almost finished the thick paperback. Taking off her glasses, she noted her place with a bookmark and looked up at us.
“We made good progress today,” I told her. “One or two more sessions and we should be done. I’m sorry to be taking so much of your time.”
Shoko smiled. It was a beautiful smile. “Not at all,” she answered. “Mariye seems to enjoy sitting for you, and I so look forward to seeing the finished portrait. And this sofa is the perfect place to read. I’m never bored in the slightest. In fact, it’s a welcome change of pace for me to come here—I always feel better afterward.”
I wanted to ask her how their visit to Menshiki’s house had gone the previous Sunday. Had his fine mansion impressed her? What had she thought of him as a person? But asking questions like that would have been a breach of etiquette—I had to wait for her to raise the subject first.
Once again, Shoko had dressed for the occasion. It was most definitely not what a regular person would put on to visit a neighbor on a Sunday morning. A perfectly pressed camel hair skirt, a fancy white silk blouse with a big ribbon, and a dark blue-gray jacket with a gold pin adorning the collar. The pin had a jewel embedded in it, which I took to be a real diamond. The whole outfit seemed rather too fashionable to wear behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius. But who was I to say? Toyota’s director of marketing would likely have a very different opinion.
Mariye was dressed as usual. The same old varsity jacket, her hole-studded jeans, and a pair of white sneakers even dirtier than the ones she usually wore (the backs of these were stomped flat).
When they were heading out the door, Mariye looked back and gave me a wink, a secret sign that said “See you later.” I flashed a quick smile in response.
When Shoko and Mariye had gone, I went to the living room, lay down on the sofa, and slept. I had no appetite, so I skipped lunch. It was a brief nap, about thirty minutes, deep and dreamless. I was grateful for that. It was more than a little scary to think what I might do in my dreams, and even scarier to think what I might become.
My mood that Sunday afternoon was as unfocused as the weather. It was a quiet, slightly overcast day with no wind to speak of. I read a little, listened to a little music, cooked a little, but nothing helped me work out my feelings. It promised to be one of those afternoons where nothing gets resolved. Giving up, I ran a hot bath, got in, and soaked for a long time. I tried to remember the names of the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. I was able to come up with seven, including Kirillov. For some reason, since my high school days I’ve had a knack for memorizing lengthy Russian names. Maybe now was a good opportunity to go back and reread The Possessed. I was free, with time on my hands and nothing that had to be done. The perfect conditions for reading long Russian classics.
I thought about Yuzu some more. Her belly would probably be showing after seven months. I pictured how that would look. What would she be doing now? What would she be thinking? Was she happy? Of course, I had no way to know any of those things.
Perhaps it was as Masahiko had said. Perhaps, like a nineteenth-century Russian intellectual, I should do something out-and-out crazy just to prove I was a free man. But what? Something like…spend an hour shut up at the bottom of a pitch-black pit? That was what Menshiki had done. True, his actions might not fit the category “out-and-out crazy.” But they were definitely beyond the pale, to put it mildly.
It was after four when Mariye showed up. The doorbell rang, I opened the door, and there she was. She slipped through the half-open door like a wisp of cloud and looked around warily.
“No one’s here.”
“Nobody’s here, that’s true,” I said.
“Someone was here yesterday.”
That was a question. “Yes, a friend of mine stayed over,” I said.
“A man.”
“Yes, a man. A male friend. But how did you know?”
“There was an old car I’d never seen before parked in front of your house. It looked like a black box.”
That would be Masahiko’s ancient Volvo station wagon, what he called his “Swedish lunch box.” Convenient for hauling reindeer carcasses.
“So you came yesterday.”
Mariye nodded. It appeared that she was using her passageway to come and check on the house whenever she had time. She’d probably been doing this since long before my arrival. After all, it was her playground. Or “hunting ground” might be more accurate. I was just someone who had chanced to move in. In which case, could she have come face-to-face with Tomohiko Amada at some point? I had to ask her about that sometime.
I led her into the living room. We sat down together, she on the sofa, me in the armchair. I offered her something to drink, but she said no.
“The guy who stayed over is a friend from my college days,” I said.
“A good friend?”
“I think so,” I said. “In fact, he may be the only person I can call a true friend.”
Such a good friend that he could introduce his colleague to my wife and keep me in the dark when they started sleeping together—a situation that had led to my just concluded divorce—without casting a cloud over our relationship. To call us friends would hardly be stretching the truth.
“Do you have any good friends?” I asked her.
Mariye didn’t answer. In fact, she didn’t bat an eye, just acted as if she hadn’t heard what I’d said. I guessed it was something I shouldn’t have asked.
“Mr. Menshiki isn’t a good friend of yours,” she said. I knew it was a question, though her intonation was flat. Do you mean Mr. Menshiki isn’t a good friend of yours? was what she meant.
“As I’ve told you,” I said, “I haven’t known Mr. Menshiki long enough to call him a real friend. I started talking with him after I moved here, and that was only six months ago. It takes longer than that for people to become close. Still, he strikes me as a very interesting person.”
“Interesting.”
“How can I explain? His disposition strikes me as a little different than the average guy. Maybe more than a little, actually. He’s not an easy person to figure out.”
“Disposition.”
“Personality. The traits that make a person who they are.”
Mariye stared at me for a while. As if selecting the exact words she ought to use.
“He can see my home from his deck—it’s right across the valley.”
It took me a moment to respond to that. “Yes, you’re right. That’s the lay of the land. But he can see my house just as clearly. Not yours alone.”
“Still, I think that man is spying on us.”
“What do you mean, spying on you?”
“He’s got something like a pair of big binoculars on the terrace, though he hides them with a cover. They’re on a kind of tripod. He can see us really clearly if he uses those.”
So the girl found him out, I thought. Watchful, observant. Eyes that missed nothing of importance.
“So you think that Mr. Menshiki has been observing you through those binoculars?”
Mariye gave a terse nod.
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Still, that’s just a guess on your part, right? They don’t necessarily mean he’s peeking into your house. He could be observing the moon and stars.”
Mariye’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’ve had this feeling like I’m being watched,” she said. “For a while. But I didn’t know who was watching me, or from where. But now I know. It’s that person, for sure.”
I took another long, slow breath. Mariye’s supposition was on the money. Menshiki was watching her through his high-powered military binoculars on a nightly basis. Yet to my knowledge—and this was not to defend Menshiki—his motives for being a peeping Tom were far from nefarious. He just wanted to see the girl. This beautiful thirteen-year-old girl who might be his biological daughter. For that reason, and that reason alone, he had purchased the mansion on the other side of the valley. Wresting it from the family living there and booting them out. Yet I couldn’t reveal that to Mariye.
“Let’s say you’re right,” I said. “But then what’s his motive? Why is he so fixated on your home?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he has a crush on my aunt.”
“Has a crush on your aunt?”
She gave a brief shrug of her shoulders.
Mariye couldn’t imagine she was the target. She hadn’t yet reached the stage where she could see herself as an object of male desire. I found it strange, yet I didn’t dare call her version of events into question. If that was how she read the situation, better perhaps to let it ride.
“I think Mr. Menshiki is hiding something,” Mariye said.
“What, for example?”
“My aunt is seeing Mr. Menshiki,” she said, not answering my question. “They met twice this week.” Her tone suggested that she was passing on highly sensitive state secrets.
“On dates?”
“I think she went to his house.”
“Alone?”
“She left a little after noon and didn’t return until late.”
“But you can’t be sure she went to Mr. Menshiki’s, can you?”
“I can tell,” she said.
“How can you tell?”
“My aunt doesn’t leave the house that much,” she said. “Sure, she’ll volunteer at the library or go shopping, but then she doesn’t take a long shower, or paint her nails, or put on perfume and her fanciest underwear.”
“You really have sharp eyes, don’t you,” I said, impressed. “You see everything. But are you sure the man she’s meeting is Mr. Menshiki? Couldn’t it be someone else?”
Mariye narrowed her eyes at me. She gave a small shake of her head. As in, Do you think I’m that stupid? After all, under the circumstances it was unlikely to be anyone but Menshiki. And Mariye was anything but stupid.
“So your aunt spends quite a bit of time at Mr. Menshiki’s house, just the two of them together.”
Mariye nodded.
“And the two of them—how should I put this?—are engaged in what we might call a very intimate relationship.”
She nodded again. “Yes, a very intimate relationship,” she said, her cheeks turning a faint pink.
“But you’re in school all day. Not at home. So how can you know these things?”
“I can tell. I can tell that much from a woman’s face.”
But I couldn’t tell. Yuzu had carried on an extended affair while we were living together, and I was clueless. Looking back, I should have been able to figure out that much. How could a thirteen-year-old girl pick up on something I couldn’t that quickly?
“So things really moved fast between those two, didn’t they,” I said.
“My aunt’s no dummy—there’s nothing wrong with her head. But her heart has a weak spot. And Mr. Menshiki is stronger than normal people. A lot stronger—she’s no match for him.”
She’s probably right, I thought. Menshiki did have some special power. Once he made his move, it would be almost impossible for an average person to resist. Myself included. I doubted he would find it difficult to make a woman his, if that was his goal.
“So you’re worried about your aunt, right? That Mr. Menshiki is using her for some reason.”
Mariye swept her hair back with her hand, exposing her ear. It was small and white, and its shape was lovely. She nodded.
“But it’s not that easy to stop a relationship of this sort once it’s gotten started,” I said.
Not that easy at all, I said to myself. It would move forward, crushing everything in its path, like the Hindus’ great wheel of karma. There could be no turning back.
“That’s why I had to talk to you,” Mariye said. Then she looked me square in the eye.
When it began to get dark, I took my flashlight and walked Mariye almost as far as her passageway. She said she had to be home by dinner. They usually ate around seven.
She had come to ask me for advice. Yet I hadn’t been able to offer anything useful. All I could tell her was to wait and see how things developed. I knew Menshiki and Shoko might be having sex, but they were two unmarried and consenting adults. What was I supposed to do? Sure, I had some background information, but I couldn’t reveal it, not to Mariye, and not to her aunt. That meant that I couldn’t give useful advice to anyone. I was like a boxer trying to fight with his best arm tied behind his back.
Mariye and I walked side by side through the woods, hardly exchanging a word. We had gone partway along the path when she reached down and took my hand. Her hand was small, but its grip was unexpectedly firm. I was surprised at first, but then I had often walked this way with my sister, so it didn’t put me off. Instead, it felt normal, a kind of return to my youth.
Mariye’s hand was very smooth to the touch. Warm but not at all sweaty. She must have been thinking about something, for her hand squeezed mine and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed, depending, I guess, on what she was thinking. My sister had done the same thing back in the old days.
When we reached the shrine, she let go of my hand and, without a word, circled around to the back. I followed her.
The pampas grass still bore the tread marks of the backhoe. Within lay the silent pit. Its cover was made of sturdy boards, weighted down by a row of stones. I shone my flashlight on them to confirm that they hadn’t been moved. They hadn’t.
“Is it okay if I look in?” Mariye asked me.
“Just look.”
“Just look,” Mariye said.
I set some of the stones to the side and removed one of the boards. Mariye knelt and peered through the opening. I trained the flashlight on the floor of the pit. Of course, nobody was there. Only a metal ladder leaning against the wall. If one so chose, one could use it to climb down and then back up again. It would be next to impossible to get out without the ladder, although the pit was less than nine feet deep. The walls were just too smooth and slick to be scaled.
Holding her hair back with one hand, Mariye stared inside the pit for a long time. Intently, as if searching for something in the dark. I had no idea what was down there to capture her attention.
“Who built this?” she asked, looking up at last.
“I don’t know. At first I thought it might be a well, but now I’m not so sure. I mean, who would dig a well in such an out-of-the-way place? Anyway, it looks very old. And it’s very well put together. It must have taken a long time to build.”
Mariye looked at me steadily without saying anything.
“This area has been your playground for quite a while, hasn’t it?” I said.
She nodded.
“But you didn’t know this pit was behind the shrine until recently.”
She shook her head. No, she hadn’t known.
“You found it and opened it, didn’t you?” she asked.
“That’s right, I may have been the one who discovered it. I didn’t know it was a pit, but I figured something had to be under that pile of rocks. The person who arranged for the rocks to be moved and the pit to be opened, though, was Mr. Menshiki.” I wanted to let her in on this much, at least. It was better to be honest.
A bird cried in the trees. It was a sharp, piercing call, as if to warn its fellow creatures. I looked up but couldn’t catch sight of it. All I could see were the layered branches of the leafless trees. And beyond those the evening sky of approaching winter, flat, expressionless, and gray.
Mariye winced slightly. But she didn’t respond.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I felt as if the pit was demanding that someone open it. And that I had been bidden to perform that task.”
“Bidden?”
“Invited. Called upon to.”
She looked up at me. “It wanted you to open it?”
“Yes.”
“This pit asked you to open it?”
“It could have been anyone, perhaps. Maybe I just happened to be around.”
“But it was Mr. Menshiki who actually did it.”
“Yes. I brought him here. I couldn’t have uncovered it without him. The rocks were too heavy to move by hand, and I didn’t have the cash to bring in heavy equipment. It was a fortunate coincidence.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have done it,” she said after a moment’s thought. “I think I told you that before.”
“So you think I should have left it as it was?”
Mariye didn’t answer immediately. She stood up and brushed the dirt off the knees of her jeans. Not once but several times. She and I replaced the board, and the stones that held it down. Once again, I committed their location to memory.
“Yes, I think so,” she said at last, lightly rubbing her palms against each other.
“I think this place may have had some kind of religious background. There might be legends or stories connected to it.”
Mariye shook her head. She didn’t know of any. “Maybe my father knows something.”
The whole area had been owned by her father’s family since before the Meiji period. The adjoining mountain was also in their hands. He might have a good idea of what the pit and shrine meant.
“Could you ask him?”
Mariye winced slightly. “I’ll try,” she said in a small voice. She hesitated. “If I have a chance.”
“It would be a big help if we knew who built it when, and for what purpose.”
“Maybe they shut up something inside, and put heavy stones on top to make sure it didn’t get out,” she offered.
“So you think maybe they heaped on the stones to prevent whatever it was from escaping, and then built the little shrine to ward off its curse?”
“Maybe.”
“And then we went and pried it open anyway.”
Mariye gave a small shrug.
I accompanied her to where the woods ended. She’d go on from there by herself, she said. The darkness was no problem—she knew the way. She wanted no one to see the passage that led to her home. It was a shortcut that she alone should know. So I turned back, leaving her there. Only a glimmer of light remained in the sky. The cold blackness was descending.
The same bird made the same piercing call when I passed before the shrine. This time, though, I didn’t look up. I headed straight home, leaving the shrine behind. As I prepared dinner I sipped a glass of Chivas Regal and water. There was only enough left in the bottle for one more drink. The night was deathly silent. As if the clouds were absorbing every living sound.
You shouldn’t have opened the pit.
Perhaps Mariye was right. I should have steered clear of the pit. It seemed that everything I did these days was off the mark.
I imagined Menshiki making love to Shoko. The two of them naked, entwined on a big bed in a room somewhere in that sprawling white mansion. That event was taking place in another world, of course, one that bore no connection to me. Yet the thought of the two of them together left me bereft. As if I were standing in a station watching a long, empty train pass by.
Finally, I fell asleep and my Sunday ended. A deep dreamless sleep, undisturbed by anyone.