South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,39

barren land. Crows were everywhere. As if signaling their comrades down the line of our approach, the crows let out short, sharp caws as we passed. They stood their ground, not trying to fly away. From close proximity I could see their sharp, weapon-like beaks and the vivid coloring of their claws.

“Do we still have time?” Shimamoto asked. “Can we walk a little farther?”

I looked at my watch. “We’re okay. We should be able to stay here another hour.”

“It’s so quiet,” she said, looking around slowly. Every time she opened her mouth, her hard white breath drifted into the air.

“Is this river what you were looking for?”

She smiled at me. “It’s like you could read my mind,” she replied. And reached out with her gloved hand to grasp mine, also in a glove.

“I’m glad,” I said. “If we came all this way and you said this wasn’t the place, then what’d we do?”

“Hey, have more confidence in yourself. You’d never make that kind of mistake,” she said. “But you know, walking like this, just the two of us, I remember the old days. When we used to walk home together from school.”

“Your leg isn’t like it was, though.”

She grinned at me. “You seem almost disappointed.”

“Maybe so.” I laughed.

“Really?”

“I’m just kidding. I’m very happy your leg’s better. Just a bout of nostalgia, I guess.”

“Hajime,” she said, “I hope you understand how very grateful I am to you for doing this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s like going on a picnic. Except we took a plane.”

Shimamoto walked on for a while, looking ahead. “But you had to lie to your wife.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“And that couldn’t have been easy. I’m sure you didn’t want to lie to her.”

I didn’t know how to respond. From the woods nearby, a crow let out another sharp caw.

“I’ve messed up your life. I know I have,” Shimamoto said in a small voice.

“Hey, let’s stop talking about it,” I said. “We’ve come all the way here, so let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

“Like what?”

“Dressed like that, you look just like a high school girl.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I wish I were.”

We walked slowly upstream. For a while we proceeded in silence, concentrating on our walking. She couldn’t walk very fast but was able to handle a slow but steady pace. She held my hand tight. The path was frozen solid, and our rubber soles hardly made a sound.

Just as she had implied, if only we could have walked this way when we were teenagers, or even in our twenties, how wonderful that would have been! A Sunday afternoon, just the two of us strolling along a river like this … I would have been ecstatic. But we were no longer high school kids. I had a wife and children, and a job. And I’d had to lie to my wife in order to be here. I had to drive back to the airport, take the flight that arrived in Tokyo at six-thirty, then hurry back to my home, where my wife would be waiting for me.

Finally Shimamoto stopped, rubbed her gloved hands together, and gazed all around. She looked upstream, then downstream. On the opposite shore there was a range of mountains, on the left-hand side a line of bare trees. We were utterly alone. The hot-springs hotel, where we’d had lunch, and the iron bridge, lay hidden in the shadow of the mountains. Every once in a while, as if remembering its duty, the sun showed its face through a break in the clouds. All we could hear were the screeches of the crows and the rush of water. Someday, somewhere, I will see this scene, I felt. The opposite of déjà vu—not the feeling that I’d already seen what was around me, but the premonition that I would some-day. This premonition reached out its long hand and grabbed my mind tight. I could feel myself in its grip. There at its fingertips was me. Me in the future, grown old. Of course, I couldn’t see what I looked like.

“This spot will be all right,” she said.

“To do what?” I asked.

She smiled her usual faint smile. “To do what I’m about to do,” she replied.

We went down to the riverbank. There was a small pool of water, covered by a thin sheet of ice. On the bottom of the pool several fallen leaves lay still, like the bodies of flat dead fish. I picked up a round stone and rolled it in my hand. Shimamoto