Free Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach Page B

up to all day?”
    Hiroshi came closer, feeling awkward. “You wouldn’t be interested if I was to tell you all the technical stuff.”
    She made a face that was not quite a smile. “I just want you to take my mind off my aches and pains.”
    He stood there in thought, feeling the penknife still in his pants pocket, then sat down, took it out, and showed it to her. “Is it true this belonged to my father?”
    Mother raised her head with difficulty and looked at the knife. “So you’ve got it.”
    “You gave it to me.”
    “Ah yes. So I did.” She sank back down with a groan. “Yes, that belonged to your father.”
    “And how come you had it?”
    “When we flew to America, it was in the pocket of some pants he forgot to pack. Your grandpa and grandma kept all of his things, and I found it when I came back.” She smiled a bittersweet smile at the ceiling. “John was so upset about that. He thought he had left it in a taxi.”
    “Tell me about him,” Hiroshi said, putting the knife back in his pocket. It was a handy little tool, with its multiple screwdrivers, the tweezers, and so on. He could find a use for it.
    “Oh my. What is there to tell? You already know everything. And anyway, didn’t we say that you would tell me something?”
    “No,” said Hiroshi. “Just that I would take your mind off it.”
    His mother shrugged and moaned, turning her head from side to side a little. “This always happens. Every time I feel poorly, Dr. Uchiyama is on holiday.”
    “Did you love him?”
    She sighed and looked at Hiroshi. “Your father? Of course. Very much. I was young and foolish, and he was a handsome man…” She stopped for a moment and blinked rapidly. Her eyes were shining now.
    She began to tell the story. How one day he was standing there in her parents’ living room just as she came home. How she would watch him secretly from her window, see him coming and going but not dare talk to him, because she was afraid her English might not be good enough, or that perhaps she wouldn’t understand his Japanese. How, a little while later, he had turned up, of all places, at the travel agency where she worked, an agency that specialized in trips to Australia.
    She didn’t tell the story of how they first kissed.
    “He insisted that I come to America to meet his parents,” she continued after a long pause, a silence that somehow sounded like a sigh. “I didn’t want to, but he persuaded me in the end. He was the kind of man you couldn’t refuse for long. I couldn’t anyway. So off we went.”
    It was as though she were talking about a death sentence.
    “It was all very strange for me. America, the endless roads, the land stretching away in all directions. And then the Leak family house—no, not a house, a ranch. They were terribly rich, had a hundred rooms, servants, a swimming pool, dozens of cars, horses, a bowling alley. They even had their own movie theater down in the basement…I was quite overwhelmed at first.”
    Hiroshi tried to imagine it. The way she described it, even the French embassy would look small by comparison.
    “His family was very kind when we arrived—or, at least, so I thought. At the time I didn’t know any other Americans apart from your father; I didn’t know they always smile and act friendly. In reality, though, they were totally against our being together, and not only his parents but his brothers and sisters, too. John’s grandfather had fought in the war against Japan. When I happened to run into him on his own one day, he told me he hated the Japanese and that I mustn’t imagine for a moment that anyone in that house would ever agree to John marrying me. If John went ahead and married me anyway, the old man said, he would lose his inheritance, and since he’d never learned any way to make a living, we would starve.”
    “What a horrible thing to say,” said Hiroshi.
    “They were horrible. After running into the grandfather, I realized a lot of the kind things