Chapter Fifty Three – Mudbank in the River

As that day became evening she closed the website, got up from the laptop and went downstairs and out into the garden. She sat on the bench and listened to the water chuckle into the bowl of the fountain. He was right. Kanesaku's small fry struggling socialist rag had blossomed in the 24 months of mid '97 to mid '99. The circulation had skyrocketed nearly ten fold. From the scans on the webpage she could see that the production values had gone into orbit with the circulation and that meant more income, more competent management and stronger financial backing. Her series of articles published between August 1996 and May 1997 were strange to read. She'd not thought of them at all in almost seven years, but speed reading through them now the content came back to her. She considered that she had been sixteen, and in the latter half of the series, seventeen. It didn't seem possible. Surely someone ten years older had done this. She looked at the observations she'd made and the arguments put. They did, indeed, make sense. At the time they hadn't, and that was hard to get her head round. Perhaps it had all been instinct and intuition.

She could have stayed in Japan and gone on to write more, she shouldn't have turned her back and run away. She could and should have faced it. But instead she'd come to Italy out of love and her life had taken a different direction, like a river that flows against a mudbank and divides into two arms, she in her boat, had drifted down one arm and what had occurred on the other side of the mudbank was hidden from view. Then a few miles downstream the two arms of the river briefly joined again and she'd turned to look back up the other channel and caught a tantalizing glimpse of what her journey would have been like if she had put her oars in the water sooner and turned her boat more the other way. It was a strong vision, this one of rivers and progress, of options and decisions and she wondered what her life would be like now had she gone left around that mudbank instead of right. She imagined Seiji, here now in Cremona working away. He'd still have four years of his apprenticeship to serve. She would still be single, he and she might write or phone and encourage each other. Or maybe even they would have gradually drifted apart, in slow and gentle degrees, the letters passing less and less frequently, the phone remaining silent for more and more days between each call. And in Tokyo, or Kobe, or Kyoto, or wherever that unseen arm of the river might have flowed, would be she, working in some office perhaps and doing real work to change the system, to shake people up and help change the lives of the Japanese people around her for the better. That would have had value wouldn't it? That would have been a life worth living, hm? Yes, a life worth living.

But that image of the silent phone, of the last letter he would write, led to another image. An image of him maybe stopping at a café one evening to get something to eat and a girl casually stopping next to him and starting up some small inconsequential conversation. A conversation that might lead to other innocent friendly meetings, meetings at which he and she might share more of themselves until one day, the inevitable would happen and they would meet in a private place and share more than just conversation. Shizuku found those images unbearably sad, and she couldn't contemplate them.

No, she had done the right thing. In fairy tales when the heroine comes to a fork in the road, in the dark forest, she should always take the right hand path, the path that signifies the correct choice. The left hand path is always the one that in fairy tales leads to danger or signifies a wrong decision. It was a traditional symbolism, she had taken the right hand stream, and things had turned out right. Hadn't they?

She had drifted in her boat down the right hand channel and married Seiji and come here, to a life of struggles and worry and financial hardship, to a life that seemed to serve up to them one problem after another. The left hand channel seemed enticing now that she had been privileged to get a brief glimpse back along it but the thought of him here in Italy meeting someone else and one day no longer dialing her number ever again was ineffably painful to her.

Love. It all came down in the end, to love, didn't it? Grandpa had been right. A good strong link. She had come to Italy because of love. And in the years that followed they had, above all else, had love. Things had been bad at times, things had gone horribly adrift but through it all flowed love. It was love that had made him get on a plane and fly to Paris and walk the streets. The hopelessness of that search had been kept from him by simple love. She had stood on a bridge in the dull cold February light and looked at the brown water and contemplated her own death. Appropriate and deserved it had seemed but what had kept her from using those muscles and leaning forward and feeling gravity pull her? Love. Love for her parents. Love for him. At the time she had thought of these as attachments but they weren't only that, no. She had seen that bridge alive with people long dead, people whose whole instincts were governed by love, the need for it, the aching raw wound of losing it.

Kinu – even poor Kinu had been driven to do what she had done because of love.

And even Falco. Poor Falco, he had once been lost in his blinkered ideology and gone off to cheerfully do bad for a crazy man. But after a passage of time he had realised he was a cog in a vast machine that was doing evil. He changed his mind and did something, however small, and ultimately useless to try and make it right. And Shizuku's eyes opened wide with understanding when she saw love even in his motives. A love of his fellow men, of Germans and Germany that was being destroyed by evil and which he loved enough to risk his life to save.

And her? What of her? What of that stupid episode that caused Seiji to get on a plane in the middle of the night and walk the dawn streets in a hopeless search? Why had she done what she had done? She recalled the voice in her head, that last thing He had spoken, the last time she'd ever heard Him speak.

There is a reason. There is purpose in all things. This is why it happened.

At the time she had been deeply perturbed by that last sentence.

This is why it happened

Had she done what she had done in order that he, being love, would come? So that their whirling thrashing day of redeeming physical violence and sweating physical passion might be the start of some new phase in their lives? Had she done it for that? To test them? To temper the steel of them in those flames?

She looked at these things in a new light, in a way she'd not thought about them before. As a result of those three days she had gone to Pisa only once more, to resign from her job. And from that had come this new writing phase, and a new phase of he and her growing so much closer than they had done before. Because the past showed them how wrong things could go, that became a sign to them to never go there again. Yes, their relationship this spring had become more intense, and she wasn't thinking about a physical intensity (although there was that), their love had grown so much in every way – stronger, deeper, a palpable thing that bound them by strong thick wires of trust to each other in a way they had not understood two people could be.

And now this offer from Hayao Kanesaku. An offer she couldn't possibly have accepted if she was still working. But she wasn't. Now, not even three months since Paris, she was being offered an opportunity to write something political again, something she knew she would enjoy and although a fee hadn't been discussed she felt sure that here was an end to their financial worry. Another co-incidence. Like a cat leading her to a shop. Or a lunch bag left beside a clock. Links in a chain. They were all links. She knew that Hayao was a link. His call, today, had purpose. Her mood of unshakeable optimism was there, like a crowd shouting her on. It felt right.

Shizuku had no intention of turning her boat around and rowing upstream back along that other channel, but it certainly appealed to her to move her boat across a little and gain extra distance from the current flowing down it. The current flowing out of that other channel here mingled with the water in her own and the force became one for a while. She would be stupid not to make use of that additional momentum.

That evening over dinner she mentioned it to Seiji.

He gave a cheery wave of his hand, he was almost dismissively nonchalant about it.

"Yes, by all means go. Take six weeks if you like."
"Won't you worry?"
"No, not at all."
"Don't you mind?"
"Yes I'll miss you, you know that. But really it's not like before is it? Now, I know there's nothing to come between us. What happened before will never happen again, I know that. You'll return. So yes, by all means discuss it with him, find out what the details are."

-oOo-

The details were that she could take a couple of months to do research while still in Italy. Hayao had a couple of people who could check sources locally and feed information back to her. He could also give her the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of a few contacts he had in the education authorities, people who were unhappy. People wanting change. People high up enough to have clout but who didn't want to be seen to do the clouting themselves since that would make their own positions delicate. But they were willing to remain anonymous and talk to a journalist. As long as that journalist could be trusted and who had a track record of fighting the system constructively. And if the articles gained momentum, and support in the right places then the anonymous sources could be leaked at the convenient time. After her information gathering phase was done she'd visit Kyoto and do the interviews and if any heavy work was needed Hayao had a big lad who could go with her and put his boot in a few doors. After that she could return to Italy and send him the draft articles at the rate of one a fortnight. He had graphic layout people to pretty them all up. All expenses paid, and a rental car. She didn't drive? No worry, he'd get her a driver as well. The fee? 400,000 Yen. Well, Shizuku had thought. That was excellent, that would help a lot, that was nearly four months worth of Earth Shop rental. No, he'd clarified, with a chuckle, it was 400,000 per article. Shizuku had sat stunned, holding her phone.

"Hayao, that's two million Yen!"
"And if your writing is as good as your mathematics we're home and dry. Have we a deal?"
"Well, yes. Of course."
"Good. I'll send you the full proposal and a contract by e-mail. I'm looking forward to working with you Shizuku, this is gonna rock some people's boats, I just know it!"

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11 February 2007

For author notes about Chapter 53, please see my forum (click on my pen name)