Facing the Bridge Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Shadow Man

  In Front of Trang Tien Bridge

  Saint George and the Translator

  Translator’s Afterword

  The Shadow Man

  1

  The world was turning upside down and the elders didn’t speak, their hips moving sluggishly. Amo watched them, burning with frustration. This was his first memory. In the bay they called “The Goddess’s Chamber” where the jungle ended and the sea began, there should have been only gentle waves moving drowsily in and out, but during the night what looked like a huge temple had appeared and in the morning Bad Spirits descended from it, one after another. With boxes wrapped in scarlet cloth clutched to their chests, the Bad Spirits rowed to shore in a stream of small boats. The elders stared blankly, not even touching their weapons. And when the Bad Spirits solemnly offered their gifts the elders snatched them away, their eager fingers fumbling with the cloth. Amo couldn’t imagine what made their lips take on such a honeyed look, mouths half open in ecstasy. They irritated him. Were they all drunk on the maya-maya fruit? Whenever they ate it their eyes rolled back in their heads and they drooled, no longer hearing what you said. Limp as lizards’ tails, kicked or screamed at, they wouldn’t get angry. Had they been gobbling that fruit again? Amo hid in the thorny bushes, standing perfectly still. His uncle disappeared into the jungle with the others but once their treasure was safely hidden, they all returned to the beach. Offering a second round of presents, the Bad Spirits pointed again and again toward the temple. Then they formed pairs and, grabbing his uncle and the others by the arms, one on each side, they shoved them into the small boats and rowed out to it. No one resisted. They didn’t even raise their voices. Amo wasn’t afraid of the floating temple or the Bad Spirits, but it horrified him to see the elders so passive. These men with nerves attuned to the slightest rustling in the grass, who could react as swiftly as a dart from a blowpipe, who could run like whirligig beetles darting across the water when danger was near, now meekly obeyed the Bad Spirits without fighting back. The Spirits wrapped their feet in leather bags, covered their legs, stomachs, chests and arms with cloth, and dyed their hair reddish-brown. Their eyes melted in the sunlight and looked almost white.

  Amo heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and saw one of the Bad Spirits standing there, and when their eyes met the Spirit knelt to the ground and held out both hands, which were filled with gleaming white powder. Since no elder had ever shown him such deference Amo was startled at first, but then a warm feeling came over him and he let the Spirit spill some of the pristine powder into his own palms. When he licked the powder, it tasted so sweet a pain darted through his chin. Was the Spirit young or old? It had the bright, round eyes of a kangaroo rat, and wrinkles on its forehead as deep as his grandfather’s. From its smell Amo knew it must be very, very old, but then why was there so much fat on its stomach? Didn’t only children’s bellies protrude like that? His memory of what happened next wasn’t clear. The tickling sensation of feathers on his chest and belly; the blood-colored drink that felt so cool going down before sending him into a dreamy haze; food that made his mouth water just to look at it. Arms around his shoulders; pats on the head; light, encouraging slaps on the back. He told himself over and over that this was all a dream. If he wasn’t dreaming he’d have to find his family at once and help them escape. But if he was dreaming, he could stay in this half-sleep until he woke up. Amo was taken to a ship’s cabin—table, sofa, patterned plants drawn on the walls. Next door was a bedroom where he slept at night, pressed against a big man like a baby animal huddled against its mother. Unlike the muscular bodies of his father and the other elders, this man’s belly consisted of a soft layer of fat, and was as white as a fish’s with coarse, golden hair growing out of it. The Spirits called him Heer, so Amo did likewise. Were his brothers and sisters sleeping in such a way, too, in different rooms on the ship? Whenever the possibility occurred to him he suddenly became frightened and stopped thinking. Among his fourteen siblings Amo had two older brothers he was especially close to, and now, remembering how they’d always been together, his skin longed for their touch. Overcome with yearning for them one night, he slipped out of the cabin. As he walked through the dim corridors that laced the ship like blood vessels, the stench of rotting animal flesh stung his nostrils through the harsh, salty sea air. Above the drone of the ship, he heard the murmurs and groans of curses. He recalled a warning not to go down to the sea alone at night. A dark shadow appeared out of nowhere; Amo was punched in the nose and fainted. The next morning when he woke up, Heer was bathing his forehead with a wet cloth. A terrible odor, unlike any Amo had smelled before, seemed to be rising from his own pores. Heer told him how dangerous it was to leave the cabin alone. “Because I’ve chosen you, as long as you’re here with me no harm can come to you; but the people out there are different and may treat you badly, so you must never go walking around by yourself.” Heer often sounded like a fortune-teller. Without actually studying the language, Amo was able to understand everything Heer said to him by the time he stepped off the boat.

  When they arrived in Amsterdam, the sailors cheered and cheered with tears in their eyes. To Amo, it seemed a desolate land. There was no sound, and the few trees standing here and there had no leaves. The sun was wrapped in smoke; the smell of smoked fish rose among the rows of stone houses. The people looked cold, wrapped in layer upon layer of clothes. They hardly decorated themselves at all, especially the men.

  Amo received the name Anton Wilhelm from the minister. Heer, he was told, would be his father from now on. In Heer’s house, both men and women slept under the same roof. In the village where Amo was born, from the age of five girls lived in the women’s house and boys in the men’s. Here he was returned to the care of females who dressed him up in various kinds of clothing, took him by the hand, and stood him in front of a mirror several times a day. In the mirror, their hands fluttered like butterflies. They touched him everywhere, reminding him of when he was still a baby, always being handled by women. Now that he was seven, their palms felt unpleasantly warm and sticky. But if Heer deemed this proper he would have to put up with them no matter how strange it felt. Heer was often away for meetings, business deals, planning sessions, and banquets. Except for an old servant, Amo rarely saw men. These females constantly stroked Amo, marveling at the ebony smoothness of his chest. They pinched his buttocks on the sly. The maid whose big, yellow teeth showed when she laughed would grab his penis when no one was looking and not let go. Amo stared at the boy in the mirror as if he were looking at a ghost. Why did he look so different? Everyone else had pale faces and skin with open pores and golden brown hair. Amo’s skin was black and shiny, with no hair anywhere except on his head.

  The women fed Amo meat and potatoes from silver platters. At night, they put him to bed and sang him lullabies. As he watched the child in the mirror grow prettier each day, Amo thought that no matter where they decided to take him he wouldn’t mind as long as he could be with this beautiful boy.

  Tamao found himself once again standing before a shop window examining the reflection of a young Japanese man. Since arriving in Wolfenbüttel, he’d never once been attracted by the goods on display behind the glass. Huddled in a gray-brown interior, they had nothing to say to him. Like all foreign students, Tamao didn’t have much money, so if there was nothing he wanted to buy all the better. Then why was he so obsessed with his reflection in the glass? His chest and hips seemed somehow deficient, and the delicate line from his shoulders to his fingertips looked positively effeminate. He never studied himself this way before, as if he were a stranger from some faraway place. Occasionally, he used to glance in a mirror to check out his new glasses or to see if
the cut on his chin had healed, but in such instances he was only examining a certain part of his face. Here in Wolfenbüttel he found himself searching for full-length mirrors that would give him the whole picture.

  “Here to see the sights?” The man who suddenly appeared beside him was shaped like a barrel, with a bushy beard that looked like a lion’s mane. Tamao hurriedly turned away from the window.

  “I am here to study philosophy.” Casting a sidelong glance, Tamao replied as if reading from a textbook. The fellow’s thin lips tightened in a scornful laugh. “One of Amo’s descendents.”

  Tamao had never heard of Amo, but afraid of being chided for his ignorance, he decided not to ask about him.

  “Did some philosophy myself a while back, but got fed up and quit,” the man said, searching Tamao’s face for an answer he was determined not to miss.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t philosophy that got sick of you?” Tamao shot back with just the right measure of sarcasm. He was feeling pleased with himself until the man’s lips stiffened into the shape of a dragonfly and began to twitch. Startled, Tamao blurted out, “Sorry, got to go now,” and started to walk away, but it was already too late.

  “What made you take up philosophy anyway?” the fellow roared, ready for a fight. While Tamao fumbled for an answer the man let out a piercing laugh and announced that his name was Manfred, not that anyone had asked. So this is how one makes acquaintances here, Tamao thought, feeling as if he were watching a poorly written television drama. Beads of sweat the size of rice grains appeared on Manfred's forehead. His lips formed the vowels like an actor practicing voice projection, but no sound emerged. He didn’t even seem aware that his mouth was moving. There’s something strange about this guy, thought Tamao.

  2

  Purely by accident, Amo learned that he was to be given away as a present. While walking back and forth in the great hall as he always did, stopping to gaze at the picture on a Chinese vase or peer into the darkness of the unused fireplace, he heard someone being shown into the parlor next door. After greeting Heer, the visitor quickly stated his business. Amo didn’t understand what they were talking about, nor did it interest him, but his ears pricked up at the mention of his name. Heer sounded reluctant, replying in monosyllables, while his guest spoke ever more enthusiastically about Amo. As he listened to this total stranger speak his name as if this were perfectly natural, Amo grew frightened. Hadn’t his uncle warned him never to tell a stranger his name? Once people know your name, they can change your whole life, his uncle told him. Then Amo overheard the word “present.” He thought of that boy in the mirror, so beautifully dressed. Wrapped in bright, shiny paper and tied with ribbons, like a gift. When the women were handling him, they squealed with delight. Could that boy be a present? When the visitor left, Heer called Amo into his study. “You’ll be leaving Amsterdam soon, and going to a place called Wolfenbüttel; when you arrive, you must think of the Duke of Braunschweig as your father and serve him well.” Upon learning there would be a dog in his new home, Amo was overjoyed and pranced around the room. An acquaintance of Heer’s kept two dogs in his house, and Amo wanted one so badly he didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t quite ten years old the day he moved to Wolfenbüttel.

  Traveling didn’t upset Amo in the least. Wherever he went, grownup men dressed in fine clothes were there to meet him. He had only to ask, and they would give him whatever he wanted. He readily accepted the notion of a “father” as an interchangeable guardian. When they heard Amo was leaving, all the women in Heer’s house, from maid to cook to gardener’s daughter, wept aloud. They annoyed Amo with their sticky tears and high-pitched, ear-splitting wails. Glad to get away, he scrambled into the carriage and let out a cheer. As they rolled along, he bounced his bottom up and down to the rhythm of the wheels. The scenery flew by, each image dissolving in an instant so that looking back he could only see gritty dust. Amo asked his traveling companion, a youth of about twenty, if he, too, was a gift for someone in Wolfenbüttel, but the young man said he was going to become a scholar. When he saw Amo’s eyes widen with curiosity, the youth explained that a scholar was someone who read and wrote books. The way he pronounced the word “book” sounded so delicious that Amo immediately began to yearn for one.

  The Duke of Braunschweig’s face was flat and pale. The folds in his overflowing clothes were far more expressive, reminding Amo of vines in the jungle. When Amo recited the greeting he had learned in the carriage, only the Duke’s eyes moved in response.

  Amo soon learned German. Any word he heard once was embedded in his memory like a design carved into a clay pot. He could listen to a sentence and repeat it aloud the following day, even if he didn’t understand what the words meant. When he uncomprehendingly recited an expression he fancied, his listeners would burst out laughing or their eyes would widen in surprise. Their reactions delighted him. The women here were different from the ones in Amsterdam. They weren’t so interested in touching his skin, and they never laughed in creaky voices like an old door that needed oiling. The maids assigned to the parts of the house where Amo lived—the bedroom, the great hall, and the dining room—were quietly efficient, their faces as grim as hunters armed with bows and arrows. There was only one middle-aged lady, a distant relative of the Duke’s, whose dry lips stretched into a wide smile whenever she saw him, and who spoke softly to him, placing a hand gently on his shoulder as if he were very fragile. Without what was called a husband, she was kept quietly inside the Duke’s mansion with no special role to play or tasks to perform. The old cook addressed her as Fräulein, so Amo thought he’d try calling her that, too. The woman breathed out gusts of silent laughter, and held him tightly to her breast. To everyone here he was Anton. But a name other people used was merely something given from the outside—it had nothing to do with your real self. Amo felt sure he once had a true name, although try as he might he couldn’t remember it. Fräulein showed him an illustrated volume of Bible stories from which she would read to him, occasionally making up stories of her own. Since coming here he looked not at mirrors but at books. Listening to Fräulein’s stories as he gazed at the pictures, Amo felt his body would surely be absorbed into that separate world. The people in the illustrations draped themselves with gold or red cloth, leaving only their hands and faces uncovered. Diamond-shaped eyes shone with a raw brilliance. The world in books sometimes reminded him of the jungle, too. Every page began with a huge illuminated letter, broad enough to be a patch of grassland surrounded by a fence. Each letter-enclosure contained a tangle of vines with birds and dogs and humans playing together. Some of the animals’ hind legs were ensnared by the vines, turning the animals into plants from the waist down. It seemed a hundred years to Amo since he walked through the jungle. There you must be alert to many signs. Animal tracks, for instance, or thorny and poisonous plants, snakes or scorpions, the various cries of birds, smells in the air. When reading you simply move on to the next word, but in the jungle you need to look everywhere, especially behind you. There is no need to worry about what you’ve already read. You stay focused on what is ahead, and keep your eyes moving forward. Learning letters didn’t take much effort for Amo. Before long he could easily find his way through any book without Fräulein’s help. As he read he felt he was chanting a magic spell that would keep the Bad Spirits away. Was it really Bad Spirits who had risen out of the ocean and taken his uncle and other family away? Where could they have gone? Could the world he had once known have completely disappeared? At times he wanted to ask Fräulein about that voyage across the sea, but whenever he tried, his throat hurt and he lost his voice. If those were Bad Spirits who had appeared in the bay, then perhaps everyone here, including Fräulein, was in league with them. As long as Amo pretended to forget what happened that day, everyone would be kind to him. But wasn’t this only because they mistakenly believed him to be one of them? If so, he would continue to let them dwell in their misunderstanding. Whenever a violent storm arose, his uncle and the other grownups
would calm the fury of the Bad Spirits by putting on masks to show that they were Bad Spirits, too; surely this was what Amo was doing now. As long as he pretended to be one of them, they would do him no harm. The moment he started screaming for his father, his uncle, his cousins, his brothers and sisters, the eyes in those kind faces would instantly turn red, the canine teeth would grow into fangs, and with hooked claws that had once been fingernails the Bad Spirits would grab Amo by his kinky hair and drown him in a swamp.

  One day Amo was sitting with Fräulein in the great hall looking at a map of the world when the Duke of Braunschweig entered. Fräulein handed Amo a book with a knowing look, and he proceeded to smoothly read out the Latin text for her as he always did. The Duke of Braunschweig’s gloomy countenance lit up as he let out an “Oh!” of surprise. Suddenly nervous, Amo stole a glance at the Duke’s face. His narrowed eyes were shining like a fish’s belly. Fräulein stood at his side, beaming with pride in her victory.

  Beginning the following week a series of men visited Amo in turn to teach him foreign languages, dead languages, history, medicine, astrology, and other subjects. Like an old tool that has outlived its usefulness, Fräulein was relegated to a back room. Amo was always cheerful on days when his tutors came; he started to grow very quickly. Fräulein eventually contracted a lung disease, and took to her bed in one of the outbuildings. Amo went to see her every day at first, but as the weeks passed his visits became less and less frequent until he finally forgot all about her.

  Tamao came to study here, where Lessing once lived, through the introduction of Professor Kanatsu. The town offered a one-year scholarship to students from his university who were studying the German playwright, and Professor Meyer, an old friend of Professor Kanatsu’s who had retired several years earlier, recommended Tamao. This elderly German professor, whom he had not met before, phoned to invite him to dinner. Tamao anxiously wondered about what he should wear, and what he should say. A suit seemed like the safest bet, though while examining himself in the mirror wearing a coat and tie, all he could see was a used car salesman. And what if he blurted out some foolish remark that made the Professor regret his recommendation? Keeping his mouth shut wasn’t an option, either. He had learned from a friend who had studied here that Germans considered silence a sign of stupidity. So if the Professor wanted to know what he thought of Germany, Tamao would say he found the tranquil atmosphere ideal for the scholarly life. If asked about the food, he would tell him how impressive he found the long tradition of bread making. What he really dreaded were inquiries into the exact nature of his research on Lessing. To tell the truth, he was studying Lessing because Professor Kanatsu had told him to. Not that he wasn’t interested, or didn’t have a fundamental grasp of Lessing’s work; he simply wasn’t prepared to give a scholarly explanation of what he intended to focus on or why. However, he couldn’t very well reveal that he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Tamao’s mind was in such turmoil he could hardly see the door in front of him, so when it opened, he missed the chance to thrust out his hand for the Professor to shake. A gentle smile on his face, his eyes surrounded by tiny wrinkles, the Professor looked rather like an old woman. As men age, something feminine seems to take up residence in their faces. The Professor’s wife, made up like a Barbie doll, seemed much younger. Surrounded by art deco furniture and Chinese porcelain from the Han period that might have been fake but looked impressive anyway, Tamao became terribly nervous. A glass of white wine was placed in his hand as he stood there talking with the Professor.