Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,51
announced. “They never tell you what you really want to know.”
She took a Salem out of its box, put it in her mouth, and struck a match. Every day, she smoked one pack of Salems—no more, no less. She’d open a new pack in the morning and smoke it up by the end of the day. I didn’t smoke. My wife made me quit, five years earlier, when she was pregnant.
“What I really want to know,” Izumi began, the smoke from her cigarette silently curling up into the air, “is what happened to the cats afterward. Did the authorities kill them because they’d eaten human flesh? Or did they say, ‘You guys have had a tough time of it,’ give them a pat on the head, and send them on their way? What do you think?”
I gazed at the bees hovering over the table and thought about it. For a fleeting instant, the restless little bees licking up the jam and the three cats devouring the old woman’s flesh became one in my mind. A distant seagull’s shrill squawk overlapped the buzz of the bees, and for a second or two my consciousness strayed on the border between reality and the unreal. Where was I? What was I doing here? I couldn’t get a purchase on the situation. I took a deep breath, gazed up at the sky, and turned to Izumi.
“I have no idea.”
“Think about it. If you were that town’s mayor or chief of police, what would you do with those cats?”
“How about putting them in an institution to reform them?” I said. “Turn them into vegetarians.”
Izumi didn’t laugh. She took a drag on her cigarette and ever so slowly let out a stream of smoke. “That story reminds me of a lecture I heard just after I started at my Catholic junior high school. Did I tell you I went to a very strict Catholic school? Just after the entrance ceremony, one of the head nuns had us all assemble in an auditorium, and then she went up to the podium and gave a talk about Catholic doctrine. She told us a lot of things, but what I remember most—actually, the only thing I do remember—is this story she told us about being shipwrecked on a deserted island with a cat.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said.
“‘You’re in a shipwreck,’ she told us. ‘The only ones who make it to the lifeboat are you and a cat. You land on some nameless desert island, and there’s nothing there to eat. All you have is enough water and dry biscuits to sustain one person for about ten days.’ She said, ‘All right, everyone, I’d like all of you to imagine yourselves in this situation. Close your eyes and try to picture it. You’re alone on the desert island, just you and the cat. You have almost no food at all. Do you understand? You’re hungry, thirsty, and eventually you’ll die. What should you do? Should you share your meager store of food with the cat? No, you should not. That would be a mistake. You are all precious beings, chosen by God, and the cat is not. That’s why you should eat all the food yourself.’ The nun gave us this deadly serious look. I was a bit shocked. What could possibly be the point of telling a story like that to kids who’d just started at the school? I thought, Whoa, what kind of place have I got myself into?”
Izumi and I were living in an efficiency apartment on a small Greek island. It was the off-season, and the island wasn’t exactly much of a tourist spot, so the rent was cheap. Neither of us had heard of the island before we got there. It lay near the border of Turkey, and on clear days you could just make out the greenish Turkish mountains. On windy days, the locals joked, you could smell the shish kebab. All joking aside, the island was closer to the Turkish shore than to the next-closest Greek island, and there—looming right before our eyes—was Asia Minor.
In the town square there was a statue of a hero of Greek independence. He had led an insurrection on the Greek mainland and planned an uprising against the Turks, who controlled the island then. But the Turks captured him and put him to death. They set up a sharpened stake in the square beside the harbor, stripped the hapless hero naked, and lowered him onto it. The weight of