The Snow Kimono Read online

  Mark Henshaw has lived in France, Germany, Yugoslavia and the United States. He currently lives in Canberra. His first novel, Out of the Line of Fire (1988), won the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award and the NBC New Writers Award. It was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Out of the Line of Fire was one of the biggest selling Australian literary novels of the decade, and is being republished in the Text Classics series.

  In 1989 Mark was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, and in 1994 he won the ACT Literary Award. Under the pseudonym J. M. Calder, in collaboration with John Clanchy, he has written two crime novels, If God Sleeps (1996) and And Hope to Die (2007). His work has been widely translated. For many years he was a Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. He recently returned to writing fiction full-time.

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  Copyright © Mark Henshaw 2014

  The moral right of Mark Henshaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

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  First published in 2014 by The Text Publishing Company

  Cover and page design by W. H. Chong

  Typeset in Guardi by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Henshaw, Mark, 1951–

  Title: The snow kimono / by Mark Henshaw

  ISBN: 9781922182340 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925095326 (ebook)

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  To my wife, Lee.

  I could not have a better companion

  with whom to share this great adventure.

  I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me…

  ITALO CALVINO

  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

  On his return, after many years’ absence, Kenji-san went to see his blind friend.

  He told him of Abyssinia, that mysterious land, of his many adventures there.

  ‘So, Keiichi,’ he said, when he had finished. ‘What do you think of Abyssinia?’

  ‘It sounds like a magical place,’ his friend said, as if returning from a dream.

  ‘But I lied to you,’ Kenji-san said. ‘I was never there.’ ‘I know,’ his friend replied. ‘But I was.’

  OTOMO NO TSURAYUKI

  The Night of a Thousand Brocades

  Part I

  FUMIKO

  Chapter 1

  THERE are times in your life when something happens after which you’re never the same. It may be something direct or indirect, or something someone says to you. But whatever it is, there is no going back. And inevitably, when it happens, it happens suddenly, without warning.

  Paris: July 1989

  When Auguste Jovert stepped out of his apartment building on rue St Antoine to get his evening paper, it was dusk. The streetlamps were lit. Rain still fell in a thin mist. The roads shone. To anybody else it would have been obvious—accidents hovered like hawks in the air.

  As he made his way along the wet pavement, in his coat, his umbrella unfurled above his head, he was thinking about a letter he had received that day. It was from a young woman, someone he had never met before, who had made an extraordinary claim. She claimed she was his daughter.

  He had stood that morning in the cool, empty foyer of his apartment building reading and re-reading the letter. He did not at first see the small photograph caught in the corner of the envelope. When he did, he raised it to his face. One look into the young woman’s eyes and he knew that it was true.

  For thirty years, Jovert had worked as an Inspector of Police. Before that, he worked for the French Territorial Police in Algiers. Recently he had retired, and ever since then he had had the strangest feeling, the feeling that he was lost. While he worked, he barely had time to think. Things kept at bay. Now, however, fragments from his past had begun to replay themselves in his head. It was as if, now that he was approaching the end of his life, the overall pattern of his existence was about to be revealed to him. But the moment of revelation never came. Instead, he began to have doubts, to wake up at night. What’s more, he constantly had the impression that something was about to happen. Then something did happen. The letter arrived.

  It seemed to him later, recalling the accident, that at one moment he had been thinking about the letter, and the next he was lying flat on his back in the gutter looking up at the intricate expanse of the underside of a car. He could feel the heat from the engine on his face and hear the tiny tinking sounds of its cooling pipes. Odd drops of water fell about him and onto his forehead. One wheel of the car rested on the pavement above his head.

  In the distance, he could hear the urgent rise and fall of a siren. He turned his head tentatively to his right. There, suspended beneath the rim of the car, was a man’s face. He was wearing glasses. His upturned hat lay on the roadway beside him.

  The man was kneeling down, staring at him. Jovert saw now that he was bald, that his perfectly burnished head was studded with thousands of tiny, incandescent hemispheres of light. He looked from one tiny dazzling world to the next. He saw the man’s mouth moving. The tip of his tie rested on the wet roadway. A dark circle had begun to form about his knee. Jovert had wanted to tell him. Then a peculiar thing happened. All the lights went out.

  Two days later, Jovert left his apartment once again to get his evening paper. This time on crutches. Six weeks, the doctor had said. He had held the X-rays of Jovert’s knee up to the hospital window. Maybe more, he said.

  On his way home, Jovert sat down on the bench opposite St Paul’s to rest. He took the envelope he had received earlier that week out of his coat pocket, read the address.

  Inspector A. Jovert

  Le Commissariat de Police

  36 Quai des Orfèvres

  75001 PARIS, FRANCE

  He looked at the stamp, brought it up close to his face. Only now did he see that it had been franked some months before.

  He took the letter out and read it through once again. She did not know whether he was still alive, she said. She had only recently discovered that he was her father. She wanted him to know that she existed. She did not say why. I make no demands on you, she wrote. But then, at the end: Perhaps, if you wanted, you could write to me. And she gave him a name, an address—Mathilde Soukhane, 10 rue Duhamel, Algiers.

  He took the photograph out of the envelope. He recalled t
he day almost thirty years before when he had seen her mother for the first time. It had been in Sétif, in a narrow side street. He had been walking up the chipped stone stairs. She had emerged suddenly, like an apparition, from an unseen door in the wall, her dress so white, so dazzling in the light that it was like some momentary disturbance in the air itself.

  Even after all these years, the image of her face, her skin, dark against her blazing dress, still lingered. He remembered she had been carrying a bundle of papers in her arms. When he turned to look after her, she was gone.

  The girl in the photograph had the same face, the same eyes. She had the same dark skin.

  He sat for a long time thinking.

  Then, all at once, as though he had only just made up his mind, he took the photograph, and the letter, and crushed them into a tight ball in his hand. He rose, threw the wad of paper into the bin beside the bench, and walked off.

  It’s too late, he said to himself. It’s too late.

  That evening, however, things began to change. Afterwards, months later, the letter, the accident, came to seem to him precursors of an even greater shift in his life, one that had been lying in wait for him for years.

  When he arrived back at his apartment building, he punched his code into the panel by the door, listened for the click. His building was old. The door was heavy, its thick black paint cracked. He had to push with his shoulder to get it open. The hospital staff had been right. His crutches were too short.

  Inside, in the foyer, the lift was out of order once again. He stood looking at the note taped to its wire cage. It was the third time this month. He pushed in the light switch beside the stairwell. He would have three minutes to climb the five flights of stairs to his apartment before the light went out. Reluctantly he began to climb.

  By the time he heaved himself up over the last step to his landing, his right leg had begun to ache. Then, as he took his keys from his pocket, they slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

  Jesus, Mother of God, he said under his breath.

  A door closed beneath him. He heard footsteps receding down the hallway. He thought of calling out, but it was already too late. Whoever it was had begun descending the stairs. He leaned against the wall, looked up at the globe glowing dimly above his head. Its shade—dusty, discoloured, suspended on a length of twisted cord—was oscillating minutely. He pictured the tiny convected eddies whirling at its rim. He could see the movement of its shadow on the wall opposite. Any moment now, he knew, the light would go out. He waited, counting the seconds, until it did.

  He closed his eyes.

  Standing like this in the darkened hallway, he could hear the thinning evening traffic, the muffled subterranean rumble of the Metro, the sound of a distant siren. He thought of his own accident, took a deep breath. The air smelt musty now.

  Beneath his door a thin fissure of light hovered in the darkness. In it he could just see his fallen keys. He prodded them with the end of one of his crutches. Then he heard a rustle at the far end of the corridor and, suddenly, a voice.

  May I help you, Inspector?

  The sound startled him. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

  The light switch, he said. I’ve dropped my keys.

  Instantly the light came on. It flared up around him for a moment before dying down. He stood there blinking. He could just make out the shape of someone standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  Permit me, Inspector, the stranger said, coming forward. He stooped to pick up the keys. As he raised his head, light fell across his face and Jovert registered for the first time that his saviour was Oriental—from China, or Japan.

  He could see him clearly now—an impeccably dressed, sharp-featured little man in his fifties. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles poked out from the top of his coat pocket. In his hands, he held a hat. There was something about him that reminded Jovert of the Emperor Hirohito.

  Thank you, Jovert said.

  You’re welcome, Inspector. I have been waiting for you.

  Waiting? he said.

  Yes. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Omura. Tadashi Omura, former Professor of Law at the Imperial University of Japan. And you are Inspector Jovaire, are you not?

  With this he bowed slightly. It had been like an announcement.

  Now I am here, he said.

  Jovert half-expected Omura to go on, but instead, he stood there silently, with Jovert’s keys still in his hand.

  Jovert, he said. Auguste Jovert.

  He felt compelled to bow himself, but instantly he realised how impossible that would have been. Instead, he turned awkwardly on his crutches to face Omura, inclined his head.

  Your keys, Omura said.

  Yes, thank you.

  Omura, however, made no attempt to leave. As they stood there in the empty hallway, Jovert began to feel increasingly under some obligation to this odd little man who had helped him, and who was still standing, expectantly it now seemed, in front of him.

  He unlocked his door and pushed it open with his elbow. As he did so, Omura leaned forward. He stood, half-stooped for a moment, surveying the room. Then he straightened. Looked up at Jovert. Smiled.

  Yes, he said.

  The two men stood there on the threshold for a moment.

  Would you like to come in, Jovert said.

  Yes, yes, Omura replied. I have been waiting. Please.

  And with this, he stretched out his arm, inviting Jovert to precede him, as if, in fact, the apartment belonged to him.

  Later, when Jovert tried to recall what had taken place between this moment and the next, he could not. One instant, it seemed to him, he was standing in the open doorway to his apartment, leaning on his crutches, and the next he was sitting opposite his lounge-room window listening to Tadashi Omura’s strangely mesmerising voice.

  One afternoon, Omura was saying, I decided to take Fumiko to see her mother’s grave. Fumiko must have been about three at the time. It was the middle of winter and there was still snow in the streets. I remember the sky being a uniform, dull white, which meant it would snow again later in the afternoon.

  We must have spent some time getting ready. Going to the cemetery was no easy matter. Katsuo had wanted Sachiko buried in the old cemetery outside of Osaka. We had to take the bus, then the train. Not that this was a problem. We lived on the outskirts of Osaka, in any case. But afterwards we would have to walk the one or two kilometres through the woods. I myself loved this walk, even in winter. Often I would be the only person on the path. I loved the absolute stillness, the sound of my own footfall on the fresh snow, the feeling of my fogged breath on my face. Sometimes one would see a fox, or an owl perched on a tree limb. There was a stone bridge across the stream which led up to the temple gates, and I used to look forward to the odd hollow echo of my boots on it as I crossed. A short distance away, downstream, was a pond which froze over in winter. From the bridge you could see the children who came there sometimes to skate.

  I had never taken Fumiko to the cemetery before. My housekeeper, Mrs Muramoto, had called at the last minute to say that she was ill, that she could not come to take care of Fu
miko after all. I remember I suspected her of lying, and later I found out she had gone to visit relatives in Nara. I remember being angry. She knew I was depending on her, that I could not leave Fumiko alone in the apartment. I already had my coat and gloves on, and I could tell immediately by the tone of her voice that she was lying.

  Then I remember standing on the steps outside our apartment building, with Fumiko beside me, all dressed up in her coat and fur hat.

  It’s like yesterday, he said. I can still feel her child’s gloved hands in mine. Fumiko wanted to know where we were going. She was turning from side to side, waiting. I knew she was excited because she was humming to herself.

  Omura stopped for a moment. Took out a packet of cigarettes, shook one loose.

  But I am not explaining myself well, he said. And there is something I have forgotten to tell you. You see, Fumiko was not my daughter. In fact, I have never been married. First there were my studies, then establishing my legal practice. I never seemed to find the time. How I came to have Fumiko is rather complicated. I will get to that. At the time I am talking about, Fumiko had been with me for about a year. In general, Mrs Muramoto looked after her. Already, however, I had begun looking towards the future, when things, explanations, would be difficult. As a consequence, I had decided, at least for the time being, to bring Fumiko up believing that she was my own daughter. In other words, that I was her father.

  As you can imagine, Fumiko had been talking for some time, and yet, despite all of my and Mrs Muramoto’s encouragement, she had never once called me Father. I cannot tell you how important this had become for me. At the time, it seemed as if the whole future of our lives together depended on Fumiko uttering this one word. Without this, the world I had decided to build for her would never, could never, exist.