Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still...
Iris, blue each spring
― Shushiki
Japan.
June 1915
I was no artist.
It was simply rain, ceaseless, immutable rain. I could do nothing in my mind to train the image into anything beautiful, anything less banal or deleterious than the heavy, drumming, drowning bore of a Japanese summer.
My hair stuck to my face and neck in the way I hate, my curls deflated, symbolic of my whole drained personhood. Energy was a luxury in such an oppressive climate, and the thin pink muslin around my knees felt damp. It was so tiresome, the discomfort of jungle haze.
The great war in Europe raged still. I had heard men call it the 'war to end all others', but is that not how it always was? Nik and I would exchange a look, his bored. For centuries men had used the excuse of their prodigy to exercise the most demonic of massacres, but in the end they harvest a peace grown from the blood of war. And a bite into just one of those unholy berries? An unblessed gift to a child, for we of all people know what blood can do.
News was scarce here, in the still-water rainforests of East Asia, but my brother had taken me away from London. He said it may be many years yet before the French and the Germans tired of their indefatigable and pathetic rivalry. Many people would die, as they always did, and those that would be lucky enough to remain would be expected to stay. To rebuild. To remember. To grip the past with pride that would cripple the future. And to stay? That is one thing Nik and I could never do.
I was bored without my London friends. People I had met under the guise we created, a wealthy brother and his charge back from Rhodesia where our parents had settled with the rest of the European colonists. Japan was quiet. It was far too quiet for a mind that had spent a millennia turning over the dullness of rain.
I couldn't hear the pen over the deluge of water assaulting the roof. It was a hollow and aching sound, as if by smacking the bamboo, the rain merely expressed the absence of matter between the circular shoots and not the concussion against the bamboo itself. I believe it was a very Buddhist thought to have. The appropriateness of it may have amused me.
"What are you thinking, sister," Nik asked, leg crossed atop his knee on the other side of the bungalow. His sketchbook was curling at all four corners from the humidity, and his hands were muddy with the wet, uncooperative coal.
Some people might think it rude, the way I stare. Or the server girl did, I could tell, by the way she looked at me strangely when I did not answer him. She set down a precious glass pot, steaming tea, and left, no doubt wondering why we lounged in the screened room when it rained so mercilessly.
I could tell by the way he was looking at me that he had no interest in hearing my answer. He was drawing me. Asking only rhetorically, hoping to catch the solution to his inquiry only through the scratches of coal and blur of smudged hatch points where he would indicate rain, the positive space where my face would gaze from the foreground.
I would not give away the answer and ruin it for him.
"Don't you ever grow tired of drawing me," I asked, lounging lazily, elbow on the ridge of the window. I watched the river outside, the near and distant plots of shining green trees over blued mangroves. They looked like islands. There was a mountain in the distance like a solid sleeping creature. I saw a bird, black and brilliant with wings as grand as a kite at the World's Fair, dip into the trees like a fearsome dart.
"Never."
"You've drawn me for centuries," I said, countering, almost annoyed. "Aren't you bored yet?" the question had acid to it, the tone burned my tongue and flared with a heat antithetical to the solemn and balanced rain.
It was then that he glanced up for the second time.
"Could I grow bored of such everlasting beauty? Unchangeable."
I rolled my eyes at his base flattery. My brother with the forked tongue of a snake. But in his eyes I saw the pit of truth, ugly and hopeless as it might be. So I smiled dimly. Truth was worth such a thing.
"I love you, Niklaus."
"Rebekah," he said, "Your love is like the sun, and my cold heart the moon." I looked at him more intently, awaiting the soothing attitude of his voice, but not expecting their turn. "You burn endlessly, destructively. And I, naught more than a lightless rock destined to eternally encircle the earth."
I saw his pen stop but for a moment.
"And it is only this - pacing, cold and dark- I would remain, but for you. Lucky I am to glow icy white because of the sun's reflective gold."
When he finally moved to display the drawing my eyes scanned it for his sake only. I traced my thumb over his lip, guided his face to mine. I saw his stone eyes, and the soft surprise buried beneath centuries of rhythm.
The only thing worth living for.