Free Kazuo Ishiguro by When We Were Orphans (txt)

strip of water. No wonder then that my friend’s claim to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made an impression on me.
    I remember quizzing Akira repeatedly about these exploits.
    The truth concerning the Chinese districts, he told me, was far worse even than the rumours. There were no proper buildings, just shack upon shack built in great proximity to one another. It all looked, he claimed, much like the marketplace in Boone Road, except that whole families were to be found living in each ‘stall’. There were, moreover, dead bodies piled up everywhere, flies buzzing all over them, and no one there thought anything of it. On one occasion, Akira had been strolling down a crowded alley and had seen a man - some powerful warlord, he supposed - being transported on a sedan chair, accompanied by a giant carrying a sword. The warlord was pointing to whomever he pleased and the giant would then proceed to lop his or her head off. Naturally, people were trying to hide themselves the best they could. Akira, though, had simply stood there, staring defiantly back at the warlord. The latter had spent a moment considering whether to have Akira beheaded, but then obviously struck by my friend’s courage, had finally laughed and, reaching down, patted him on the head. Then the warlord’s party had continued on its way, leaving many more severed heads in its wake.
    I cannot remember ever attempting to challenge Akira on any of these claims. Once I mentioned casually to my mother something about my friend’s adventures beyond the Settlement, and I remember her smiling and saying something to cast doubt on the matter. I was furious at her, and thereafter I believe I carefully avoided revealing to her anything at all intimate concerning Akira.
    My mother, incidentally, was one person Akira regarded with a peculiar awe. If, say, despite his having got me in an arm-lock, I was still loath to concede a point to him, I could always resort to declaring that he would have my mother to answer to. Of course, this was not something I liked to do readily; it rather hurt my pride to have to invoke my mother’s authority at such an age. But on those occasions I was obliged to do so, I was always amazed by the transformation brought about - how the merciless fiend with the vice-like grip could turn in a second into a panic-stricken child. I was never sure why my mother should have such an effect on Akira; for although he was always exceedingly polite, he was on the whole unintimidated by adults. I could not, moreover, recall my mother ever having spoken to him in anything but a gentle and friendly way. I can remember pondering this question at the time, and various possibilities occurring to me.
    I did, for a while, consider the notion that Akira regarded my mother as he did because she was ‘beautiful’. That my mother was ‘beautiful’ was something I accepted, quite dispassionately, as fact throughout my growing up. It was always being said of her, and I believe I regarded this ‘beautiful’ as simply a label that attached itself to my mother, no more significant than tall’ or ‘small’ or ‘young’. At the same time, I was not unaware of the effect her ‘beauty’ had on others. Of course, at that age, I had no real sense of the deeper implications of feminine allure.
    But accompanying her from place to place as I did, I came to take for granted, for instance, the admiring glances of strangers as we strolled through the Public Gardens, or the preferential treatment from the waiters at the Italian Cafe in Nanking Road where we would go for cakes on Saturday mornings. Whenever I look now at my photographs of her -1 have seven in all, in the album that accompanied me here from Shanghai - she strikes me as a beauty in an older, Victorian tradition. Today, she might perhaps be regarded as ‘handsome’; certainly, she is not ‘pretty’. I cannot imagine her, for instance, ever having had the repertoire of