Free I Called Him Necktie by Milena Michiko Flašar Page A

such a shame, he babbled, a trumpet interrupted his words.
    No, not enough, I said once more. But my voice sounded harsh. Perhaps, I thought, I should spare us both the end. Nearby someone was talking about fish and whether fish ever slept. Perhaps, I thought again, I should leave it at that. An old saying came to mind: It is hard to wake someone who is not asleep. The whole time the drunk stood in the middle of the room. The waiter ran around him, as though he were part of the furniture. He really was standing stock still now, you could believe he’d fallen asleep upright. Only when someone knocked into him did he sway gently, to and fro, then immediately stood motionless again. It was minutes before he finally began to move. Instead of going to the toilet he returned to his place and ordered another brandy.
    I must finish it, I thought, that’s the least I can do.
    There’s more, I heard myself say.
71
    Someone found her, limbs twisted, on the playground. She had thrown herself from the fifth floor. Someone laid flowers there, where she had fallen. Wilting roses, carnations, chrysanthemums. On one of the accompanying notes it said: We mourn and are ashamed. Dear Yukiko. I put no words to paper. Any moment she would pop up behind the bushes and run back, her ponytail bobbing, backwards. Up to me. And further back. To walk between the graves. I ran off with a white sheet of paper in my hands. Perhaps, perhaps she would be waiting for me, there, by the temple. And we would sit in the shade of the bent pine and not let the wind pass between us.
    Red threads.
    Breathless, I stood still.
    The tree was bedecked with red threads, all over. Our friendship tree, on each branch hung five threads, for each year gone by, a thread. I gasped. How had she climbed so high? How had she reached the bushy crown? Our names in the bark had grown up with it, towards the sun. How had she known I would come here? Finally I saw and understood her. And yet not quite. Someone who creates such a work of art wants to preserve a secret to the very end. The meow of the temple cat. Was it still the same one? I picked her up and let her stretch her claws. Warm blood. I am still here. Dear Yukiko. I wrote it in the bend of my arm. I would like to tell you: I love you.
72
    What remained was a gap in our housing development.
    Her parents’ house was cleared out shortly afterwards. From the windows of my room I could watch how the men, masks over mouths and noses, brought out all sorts of rubbish, junk and trash. Broken bicycles, in piles. Dented pans. A dumpster full of newspapers and magazines. Radios. Sofas. Mattresses. Nibbled by mice. Three boxes of lamp shades. And nails. And screws. It emerged that the Miyajimas had lived off their neighbors’ garbage for a long time. A scandal, said Mother. She was standing close behind me. What they collected! Look, our alarm clock. As if it still belonged to us. As if it were ours forever. A passing remark. In her thoughts she had already moved on. I realized there was no point in reminding her that she had thrown the clock away more than a year ago because its ring was too shrill for her. Let someone else be woken by it! With these words she’d thrown it in the trash.
    A last truckload of plastic. I went out. Empty tin cans. A cracked mirror, in which my face was a grimace, an ugly contortion. I reached into one of the sacks that had been put outside the entrance and pulled out a fossil. An insect was frozen inside it. I stuck it in my pants pocket and felt its surface in there. It was cool and smooth, a pleasure to touch. From behind his mask one of the workers grumbled: That’s enough for today.
73
    The house was torn down. The materials had no value, they said, and it wasn’t worth repairing. On the way to school I saw them blocking off the street and on the way home I saw an excavator knocking down the last wall. The ground shook beneath my feet. Days later there was a level surface where I had once stood