‘First, I will infect Tokyo. Then, the whole of Japan. Finally, the world itself.
‘How you ask – never why, only how; always the first question and always the last – too late, always much too late – is the question why. Perhaps it is because, hidden in your hearts, you already know why. So you only, always ask how –
‘Well simply, I will poison the water supply. I will release fleas. I will release rats. And they will drop like flies – occupiers and collaborators alike – writhing in intestinal pain. There will not be enough ambulances, enough stretchers or beds. They will lie where they fall, one on top of the other, or side by side, their faces up and faces down, their hands raised, frozen and petrified, at their throats, dying in agony, fear and silence. And on your head will be these dead …’
The man is obviously mad and so I have nailed the wardrobe door shut.
Tokyo & Moscow. Februarius the thirtieth.
Each night I sleep, I dream of Russia, I dream of Moscow. In last night’s dream, in my second-hand leather jacket, I was pursuing a man when I saw that this man, this Japanese man who was running away from me, in his turn, was pursuing a third man who, not sensing our chase behind him, was simply walking at a brisk pace along the pavement. Then this third man heard the sound of our running boots and he turned to look behind him and I saw that the third man was my brother. Of course, when I awoke, I was still in Tokyo but my toes felt cold, my socks were damp and the bed muddy.
Maybe he is alive and it is I who am dead. My hands injected, frozen and black, and then hacked off like the handles on a clay pot before my own eyes. Maybe it is I who am screaming, ‘Avenge me! Avenge me! Avenge me!’
And so maybe it is I who am stood on the banks of the river among the silent legions of the murdered dead, the countless legions of the war dead, my threadbare overcoat rotting into the stagnant water and its tangled weeds, maybe it is I who am waiting for him to avenge me –
Stop! Stop! Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Spin! Spin!
Click! Click!
January of the same year, coming after February
I could no longer put off this day. I woke early again from a fitful sleep and I took the train out to Chiba. I got off the train at Funabashi Station. With the piece of paper in my hand – the piece of paper originally torn from this martyr-log, on which the man from the wardrobe had written an address below the name I had given him – I walked through the snow and the mud. Finally, I came to the house, his house, his big house by a shrine where he lives with his wife and his children. And I stood across the road from his house, in the sleet and the declining light, and I waited, with the pistol in my belt and the rain in my face, the encroaching night at my back. I watched the lights go on in his house. I heard children’s voices. I thought I could smell food cooking. And then the lights in the house went out and I thought I could see a figure at a window watching me, watching him. But frozen and soaked, incapable of either action or thought, I simply stood there.
The Date 25th
I dreamt of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s ‘Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap’ and, in the same dream, I heard the music of Bach. And when I awoke, clouds of snow hung low over the city, but it was ash that fell from the sky. And in that sky were written three words, three Russian words in our Cyrillic alphabet:
Avenge me…
And again I hated this city, this trap, and again I hated its people, these insects.
But I dressed quickly and I took the train back out to Chiba. I tried to keep my eyes on my boots, on the floor. But at every station, each time I glanced up, I saw that same sky out of the stained windows and I saw those same words, those three stained words, following me, watching me, suspended on strings, carried by swallows, flocks of swallows, in their beaks, three