The Japanese Lover(75)
“The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They’re normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister.
“Do you think that, given the opportunity, you’d also behave like a monster, Samuel?”
“I don’t think it, Alma, I know it. I’ve been a soldier all my life. I’ve been to war. I’ve interrogated prisoners, a large number of them. But I assume you don’t want details.”
NATHANIEL
The sly illness that was to end Nathaniel Belasco’s life was prowling around him for years without anybody, himself included, realizing it. The first symptoms were easily confused with flu, which that winter was affecting nearly half the population of San Francisco, and disappeared again within a fortnight. They did not return for some years, this time leaving him with a sensation of enormous fatigue; some days he would walk about dragging his feet, his shoulders hunched as if he were lugging a sack of sand on his back. He went on working the same number of hours every day, but the time spent in his office brought little reward; documents piled up on his desk, seeming only to expand and multiply overnight. He became confused, lost the thread of the cases he was pursuing conscientiously, ones he could once have resolved with his eyes shut, and all of a sudden couldn’t remember what he had just read. He had suffered from insomnia all his life, and this now grew worse, with bouts of fever and sweating.
“We’re both suffering from menopausal hot flashes,” he told Alma, laughing aloud, but she didn’t find it so amusing.
He gave up sports, and the sailboat remained moored in the marina for gulls to nest in. He found it hard to swallow, began to lose weight, had no appetite. Alma prepared high-protein smoothies for him, which he drank with great difficulty, then took himself off to throw up as quietly as possible so as not to alarm her. When ulcers began to appear on his skin, the family doctor—a relic as ancient as some of the furniture bought by Isaac Belasco in 1914—successively treated his symptoms as those of anemia, intestinal infection, migraine, and depression, and finally referred him to an oncologist.
Terror-stricken, Alma realized how much she loved and needed Nathaniel, and threw herself into fighting the illness, destiny, the gods and the demons. She gave up everything else to focus on his care. She stopped painting, laid off the staff at the workshop, and only went there once a month to supervise the cleaning. Her vast studio, lit by the diffused light from the opaque windows, took on a cathedral calm. Work ceased from one day to the next, and the studio was left paused in time like a cinematographic trick, ready to resume a moment later, its long tables under wraps; rolled canvases standing upright like slender sentries, and others already painted hanging on their stretchers; sketches and color samples on the walls; pots and jars; paint rollers and brushes; and the faint whirr of the air conditioner endlessly spreading the acrid smell of paint and solvent. She stopped traveling, something that for years had brought her inspiration and freedom. Away from home, Alma shed her skin and was born anew, curious and ready for adventure, open to whatever the day might bring, without either plans or fears. This migratory new Alma was so real she was sometimes taken by surprise by her own reflection in hotel mirrors, as she somehow did not expect to find the same face she had in San Francisco. She also stopped seeing Ichimei.
They had met up by chance seven years after Isaac’s funeral, and fourteen before Nathaniel’s illness became fully apparent, at the annual show held by the Society of Orchid Growers, among thousands of other visitors. Ichimei saw her first and came over to greet her. He was on his own. They commented on the orchids—two specimens from his nursery were included in the show—and they went to eat at a nearby restaurant. They began talking of this and that, Alma of her recent travels, her new designs, and her son, Larry; Ichimei of his plants and his children, Mike, aged two, and Peter, an eight-month-old baby. No mention was made of either Nathaniel or Delphine.
The meal lasted over three hours without a pause. They had everything to tell each other, and they did so cautiously and uncertainly, without falling back into the past, as if skating on thin ice, constantly studying, noting the changes and trying to decipher each other’s intentions, aware of the mutual attraction that was still burning. They were both now thirty-seven; she looked older, as her features had become more accentuated, and she had grown thinner, more angular and sure of herself, but Ichimei had not changed: he had the same serene adolescent appearance as before, the same quiet voice and considerate manners, the same capacity to penetrate her every last cell with the intensity of his presence. In him, Alma could see the eight-year-old child in the Sea Cliff greenhouse, the ten-year-old who handed her a cat before vanishing, the tireless lover in the motel full of cockroaches, the man in mourning at her father-in-law’s funeral. All these images were intact, like lines superimposed on sheets of tracing paper. Ichimei was unchanging, eternal. Love and desire for him scorched her skin; she wanted to stretch her hands out across the table and touch him, draw closer, bury her nose in his neck and confirm it still smelled of earth and herbs, tell him that without him she lived like a sleepwalker, that nothing and nobody could fill the terrible gap of his absence, that she would give anything to be naked in his arms once more, that nothing mattered apart from him. Ichimei accompanied her to her car. They walked slowly, almost in circles, to delay the moment of separation. They took the elevator up to the third floor of the parking garage; she found her key and offered to drive him to his car, less than a block away. He accepted. They kissed in the intimate twilight inside the car, rediscovering one another.