Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,55
the plane, I broke out in a sweat. My shirt stuck to my skin. An awful smell arose from me. All the while, Izumi held my hand tightly and gave me the occasional hug. She didn’t say a word, but she knew how I was feeling. These shakes went on for a good half hour. I wanted to die—to stick the barrel of a revolver in my ear and pull the trigger, so that both my mind and my flesh would be blown to dust.
After the shakes subsided, though, I suddenly felt lighter. I relaxed my tense shoulders and gave myself up to the flow of time. I fell into a deep sleep, and, when I opened my eyes, there below me lay the azure waters of the Aegean.
The biggest problem facing us on the island was an almost total lack of things to do. We didn’t work, we had no friends. The island had no movie theaters or tennis courts or books to read. We’d left Japan so abruptly that I had completely forgotten to bring any books. I read two novels I’d picked up at the airport, and a copy of Aeschylus’ tragedies Izumi had brought along. I read them all twice. To cater to tourists, the kiosk at the harbor stocked a few English paperbacks, but nothing caught my eye. Reading was my passion, and I’d always imagined that if I had free time I’d wallow in books, but, ironically, here I was—with all the time in the world and nothing to read.
Izumi started studying Greek. She’d brought along a Greek-language textbook, and made a chart of verb conjugations that she carried around, reciting the verbs aloud like a spell. She got to the point where she was able to talk to the shopkeepers in her broken Greek, and to waiters when we stopped by the café, so we managed to make a few acquaintances. Not to be outdone, I dusted off my French. I figured it would come in handy someday, but on this seedy little island I never ran across a soul who spoke French. In town, we were able to get by with English. Some of the old people knew Italian or German. French, though, was useless.
With nothing much to do, we walked everywhere. We tried fishing in the harbor but didn’t catch a thing. Lack of fish wasn’t the problem; it was that the water was too clear. Fish could see all the way from the hook up to the face of the person trying to catch them. You’d have to be a pretty dumb fish to get caught that way. I bought a sketchbook and a set of watercolors at a local shop and tramped around the island sketching the scenery and the people. Izumi would sit beside me, looking at my paintings, memorizing her Greek conjugations. Local people often came to watch me sketch. To kill time, I’d draw their portraits, which seemed to be a big hit. If I gave them the picture, they’d often treat us to a beer. Once, a fisherman gave us a whole octopus.
“You could make a living doing portraits,” Izumi said. “You’re good, and you could make a nice little business out of it. Play up the fact that you’re a Japanese artist. Can’t be many of them around here.”
I laughed, but her expression was serious. I pictured myself trekking around the Greek isles, picking up spare change drawing portraits, enjoying the occasional free beer. Not such a bad idea, I concluded.
“And I’ll be a tour coordinator for Japanese tourists,” Izumi continued. “There should be more of them as time goes by, and that will help make ends meet. Of course that means I’ll have to get serious about learning Greek.”
“Do you really think we can spend two and a half years doing nothing?” I asked.
“As long as we don’t get robbed or sick or something. Barring the unforeseen, we should be able to get by. Still, it’s always good to prepare for the unexpected.”
Until then I’d almost never been to a doctor, I told her.
Izumi stared straight at me, pursed her lips, and moved them to one side.
“Say I got pregnant,” she began. “What would you do? You protect yourself the best you can, but people make mistakes. If that happened, our money would run out pretty quick.”
“If it comes to that, we should probably go back to Japan,” I said.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said quietly. “We can never go back