/ Keepsakes /
Let’s go to the baths today, Miss Ikuko said, so we all got ready.
In our robes of white gauze, we took the children by their hands, formed a line, and walked the five minutes or so to the river, down the flagstone path. Some of the stones were missing where they had come loose. Up ahead, Miss Chiaki stopped every so often at these empty spots, crouching to scoop up the fragments scattered on the ground into her palm.
“It could be much worse,” Miss Ikuko said soothingly.
Miss Chiaki nodded. “You’re right. We’re fortunate here.”
Miss Chiaki gathered her robe around her and continued walking, a little faster now. We could hear the river and see the steam rising through the trees. This was a natural bathing spot.
We sank ourselves into the water and warmed our bodies. Our breasts and pale bellies were visible through our robes. One of us soaked her feet, while another submersed herself all the way up to her neck. We flushed faintly and soon started to perspire.
The children kept together, splashing in a shallow some distance from us. Their voices carried over the surface of the water as they played.
Farther down, an animal was swimming toward the other bank. Miss Chiaki gave a small cough. One of us said, Is it time we were going? Still in our robes, we rose out of the pool and made our way back, spilling drops of water. After our homeward procession had passed, the cobblestones shone wetly for some time, as in the wake of a giant snake.
I got married five years ago.
My husband is tall and generously built. I am tall for a woman, but when he hugs me, I feel as though I’ve been neatly rolled in heavy cloth, which is very pleasant.
My husband commutes to a factory at the edge of the city. Each region has a similar factory, but I have heard a rumor that even among those, this one is of an especially high standard.
Miss Ikuko laughs and says no. “They’re all the same. The technology is identical, after all.”
But even if the technology and the workings are the same, might not the quality of what is produced differ according to the skill of those working at the factory? I said so to my husband once, and he nodded, seeming pleased.
Several times a week, I think about how much I love my husband. When I notice these feelings I have for him, it makes me feel relieved, and also a little uneasy.
While my husband is at work, I raise children.
The children are full of energy. Miss Ikuko has been mentioning more often recently how it runs her out of breath to keep up. Before, she would be the first one to join in their games.
We take them to play in the big park in the middle of the city.
This park has a fountain and a trickling stream, a climbing frame, a sandbox, and a small carousel. The children are allowed on the carousel once they have entered kindergarten. So in spring, when they first start at kindergarten, they rush to climb astride the wooden horses and show off how they ride around and around. Soon, though, they tire of it, and go back to playing house and tag and kick-the-can.
The carousel attendant is an elderly man. He once told me that he resided somewhere in the north of the city.
By autumn, hardly any children ride the carousel. The attendant sits quietly next to the silent platform. Every once in a while, a child decides to jump onto a wooden horse, and then the attendant pulls a kind of large lever installed next to the platform. Slowly, the platform starts to turn. Tinny music plays. After exactly eight rotations, the platform stops. Underwhelmed, the child gets off the horse, and without a backward glance runs off toward the
sandbox.
Miss Chiaki has been married three times. Her first husband died two years after they got married, and the next was with her for seven years but then also fell ill and died. She registered her marriage with her current husband last year.
“Why bother making it official?” Miss Ikuko says to me behind Miss Chiaki’s back, but I think I understand.
Of course, registering the marriage doesn’t change anything. Either way, the two of you live together, and quietly grow older.
“Perhaps she wants to have something to mark the time they spend together,” I suggest.
Miss Ikuko laughs and looks askance. “I guess so.”
My husband and I have registered our partnership, although he wasn’t keen to at first.
“It looks like I might be around for a while,” he said.
“And me? You don’t think I’ll live very long?” I said.
He shrugged. “We don’t know, do we? No one can know that.”
This is my husband’s fourth marriage, and my second. His other wives and my previous husband are all dead. Unlike me, my husband has his wives’ keepsakes. He keeps each one in its own small box neatly lined with cotton.
Sometimes I try to remember all the children I’ve raised so far.
Pito, puta, mita, yota . . . Even counting up just the children whose names I can recall, there are fifteen of them. If I include the ones I’ve forgotten, the number must easily be over fifty.
The children grow quickly. It’s rare that a child takes as long as two or three years to become ready for kindergarten, and the fast ones can be ready at three months.
Once they enter kindergarten, my work is nearly done. If I were to meet any of those fifteen children now, whose names I remember but who all grew up and left, I don’t know that I’d recognize them straightaway.
Recently, I had a visit from someone who must have once been one of those children.
“Hello, Mother?” The child held out a sprig of flowers. They were small white flowers that grow on a hillock near the factory. “I picked these for you,” he said shyly.
I hesitated, trying to recall his name.
“It’s Taku.”
“Yes.” He had been . . . not in the first ten, but certainly one of the first twenty or so of the children. “How tall you are!” Out of instinct I reached out and took his hands, and the child gently squeezed back.
“I’m going to be getting married.”
“Well!”
“When was I your child?”
“You know I can’t tell you that. Just like you’re not supposed to come here.”
I looked around discreetly, but there was no one there to admonish us. I hadn’t seen Miss Ikuko today. I put my arms around his torso and held him tightly. This child I had raised—I could feel the firm warm muscle of him breathing.
“Congratulations,” I
whispered.
Taku smiled sweetly and lowered his head. Hugging me back, he said, “I’m so glad I came.”
Then he left, looking back over his shoulder, seeming sorry to be leaving.
Are things going well at the factory? I ask my husband.
He shrugs his shoulders in a way that can be taken as either uh-huh or nuh-uh.
They say the factory in this region was built around a hundred years ago. The other regions’ factories are around the same age. The very first one was built several hundred years ago, but that one no longer exists. Also, at that time, there was a unit that contained multiple regions, called a country, and that country was named Japan. And as well as Japan, there were countless other countries, each of which had a name. I learned all this from my husband, who enjoys reading old documents.
What was life like back then? I ask him.
He shakes his head. We don’t know. It’s not recorded anywhere. I expect that’s something we’re not supposed to know.
There are many things in this world that we aren’t supposed to know.
Miss Ikuko once took me aside and said, You’re a little inquisitive. That’s fine, of course. People ought to have a thirst for knowledge. Life is short, after all.
The factory makes food, and also children.
The origins of the children are randomized. Some are derived from cows; others from whales or rabbits.
“Why don’t they make human-derived children?”
“I think there must be a small number made,” my husband says. “But the human-derived stem cells are fragile.”
“Really?”
“For some reason, cells harvested from people who are human-derived are much more likely to mutate. We don’t have a lot of luck using them to produce children.”
“Really.”
None of us is allowed to know what our animal of origin is. Did the people back then also live in a world with so many things they couldn’t know? I wonder.
“Will you show me your keepsakes of your wives?” I ask.
Sure, my husband says, and brings out the boxes.
My husband told me that his first wife had been of mouse origin. The next one was of horse origin, and the third, of kangaroo.
Each box contains a bone, which is the keepsake. For some reason, the small bone called the analogous bone, which is located near the cervical spine, takes on the shape of the skull of the animal a person is derived from—only in miniature, of course. After someone dies, before the body is incinerated and pulverized at the factory, you can put in a request to be given the analogous bone. It’s only once someone’s dead that we can know what their heritage was.
My favorite is the analogous bone belonging to the horse-based wife. Its snout sweeps so prettily away from the eye sockets, and it looks as though it might start talking to me at any moment.
“Which wife did you like best?”
“The one I have now.”
If I die before my husband, I wonder, will he keep my analogous bone in a fourth box? I’d be happier if he didn’t, I think.
“I don’t want to end up like your other wives,” I say, to see how he’ll respond.
He smiles and says, “I agree. Let me think about it.”
But then, just like that, my husband was dead.
I put in my request at the factory counter and was given his analogous bone. I went to the library and looked it up in a reference book, which showed me that it closely resembled the skull of a dolphin.
The caption placed next to the photograph of swimming dolphins said: Dolphin: a generic name for the smaller varieties within Odontoceti, suborder Cetacea, order Cetartiodactyla, class Mammalia.
For quite some time, I felt like doing nothing at all.
“You mustn’t be down for too long, for the children’s sakes, too. I’m sure your dead husband would want the same,” Miss Ikuko said, trying to be encouraging.
But even the thought of the children didn’t appeal to me. “All they make is mess and trouble.”
“Don’t be silly!” Miss Ikuko raised her voice. “If we lose the children, that’s the end of the world. We have to make the children and raise them, because that’s how we maintain the biological diversity of the genetic information we need to preserve. That’s the only way the world keeps going.”
I have trouble understanding what she’s saying. Of course, they’re words I’ve had repeated to me daily, ever since I too was a child. But I don’t know what it all means.
“Where did people come from, Miss Chiaki?” I asked.
Would you like to go to the baths, just the two of us? I’d suggested. I was trying to avoid Miss Ikuko.
Miss Chiaki immediately said yes, and the two of us put on our light robes and walked to the river. Miss Chiaki didn’t say much. She didn’t mention my dead husband or the children, for which I was grateful.
Bubbles formed on the surface of the river. Vapor rose and drifted away. The two of us sat in the water without talking for a long time. Sweat ran down our foreheads and temples and the sides of our necks, but we stayed like that for a while.
It started to get dark. Miss Chiaki quietly got out of the water. Her breasts and her belly were flushed pink.
“Your husband who died the other day,” Miss Chiaki said simply. “You loved him.”
I nodded. I felt tears trickle down my face. From my eyes and my nose.
“May I show you something?” Miss Chiaki took a flat square tin from the small bag she had left on the bank. She opened the lid and showed me what was inside. ...
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