Free I Called Him Necktie by Milena Michiko Flašar Page B

and rung the bell, anda few days later a new building went up. A family moved in: Father, mother and child. Good people, they said, perhaps a bit too stylish. How does that look? Our old Nissan next to their new one. There was hardly another word about the Miyajimas. According to what was known, and not much was known, not much anyone wanted to know, they moved into the lower part of town, burdened with debt, and no one would have been surprised to catch sight of them under a blue tarpaulin in one of the parks in S. Yes, one would have liked to be able to say that someone had seen them there. It would have been a reassuring horror story. To be able to say: They have hit rock bottom. And since the horror should not be allowed to fade, people said, without really knowing: No doubt about it. Even if they are not quite there. Some day they will hit rock bottom. Only when the Fujitas one block further over turned out to have a gambling addiction and marriage problems did the talk about the Miyajimas stop.
    And then?
    Nothing. I mean that’s how it was, and I had to get used to it. I had my seventeenth birthday. Then my eighteenth. The pressure grew. I resisted it. Clenched my teeth and thought: This is being grownup. To get over it, whatever it was, and even when you have not recovered, to regard it as over and done with. To forget. That too. To forget over and over again. If it were not for Kumamoto I would have managed it. But he had Yukiko’s eyes. The same look: I am dissolving.
    It is –
    I completed the sentence for him.
    – A decision.
    No. He shook his head. At least it is not one you have chosen to take. I see that now. In this café. He pointed to the right and left. We are unfree, all of us. Only, that does not absolve us of responsibility. Despite our lack of freedom we constantly make decisions and we have to take responsibility for them and their consequences. And so, with every decision we take we become less free.
    That thought, although it was hard, made it easy for us to move out of our chairs and on to the street. The rain had slackened and was more of a drizzle.
    See you tomorrow? I asked.
    Definitely.
74
    You don’t see any stars in the city. Its aura is too bright, it lights up the heavens, not the other way around, and instead of Lyra, the most you see is an airplane, gliding dangerously low, away over the houses.
    What had I sacrificed?
    I was now no longer merely an image, I was an image hiding another within. The image of a girl. Part of the tribe. I had asked the monk not to remove the threads. He agreed without knowing my story. Quite strange. That was all he said. Now and then I came by and sat under the tree. In time the threads lost their color and fell off the branches, all but two. Quite strange, the monk said, in exactly the same tone, when the last two fell off: Life.
    The bent pine is still there. I spent that night under its shelter, my collar turned up. I didn’t mind the pine needles trickling down on me. I found it comforting to be apart like that, my fingers numb, to sit outside those dark hours. My parents would be waiting for me, for the sound of my footsteps in the hall, perhaps worrying where I was, perhaps even lifting the receiver, dialing 110, suddenly feeling ashamed and replacing it. For how can you draw attention to a ghost? How can you explain that someone has disappeared, when that person is already gone? And yet that’s what I wanted, as soon as morning dawned, no more than just that: For them to search for me and find me. Grab me by the shoulders, slap me in the face and ask: How has it come to this, that we failed each other so? Take me in their arms and say: Let us begin again from the beginning.
75
    From the location of the sun I could tell it was a little after eight. The clouds had dispersed overnight towards the west. Only now I realized that I had forgotten my umbrella in the café. It was proof that yesterday had happened. If I hadn’t left it there I would have