The Pine Islands Read online

  Dreams of what remained from the day. Tea nations, samurai. The swordfighter dresses himself in silken garments for a crucial battle and he pays the tea master a visit. He strides over the polished stepping stones towards the tea hut hidden behind a bamboo screen in the tiny garden, he has to stoop in order to get through the much too small door, almost crawling before the tea master. The tea master says few words, whisks the tea to a froth, passes it to the guest, and the guest has the chance, before his not improbable death, to look upon the flower arrangements, and the scroll painting with its precious calligraphy, he has the chance to lose himself in the room where the erratic shadows of the plants tumble in, where a breathtaking silence prevails.

  The next morning he girds himself and heads into battle. He wields mystical powers; not only does his sword move as if of its own volition, but he can also fly, while others are only able to jump at best. These abilities have earnt him the reputation of being an invincible sword master, but the opposing side outnumbers them, and his party are defeated. Filled with sorrow, he soars over the battlefield, sees all of the unnaturally twisted bodies that he cannot save, leaves them behind and rises higher, until he can see the sea shimmering in the distance. Japan from above, the countless islands, thickly forested mountains, a sumptuous green lapped at by this stirring, solemn blue, he flies over the gruesome beauty of this country one final time before taking his short sword and, as tradition demands, slitting open his stomach.

  Gilbert Silvester had seen the Japanese islands from above during the incoming flight, in the light of the setting sun, and in truth this sight had momentarily overwhelmed him. Now he awoke in a bare hotel room he didn’t recognise. Where did both of these knee-high cubes – that seemed to be of absolutely no use whatsoever – come from? Were they in case of a brief fainting spell in a fitness studio? Or maybe an ice cube advert, which, to his own surprise, he had somehow fallen into? Had he recently been shooting TV advertisements somewhere in the depths of his unconscious? He stepped towards the floor-length window, pulled across the ice-white curtain, and looked at the towering glass façade of Tokyo. How had he ended up in this city without the slightest effort? What did he want to do here? The mirrored glass of the building opposite sent flashes of light into his eyes, he had to blink intensely; reflective blue glass floor after floor, dismissive, cool. What should he do here? He was, he suddenly put it to himself, very far from everything that had ever been familiar to him. He had taken himself off into the unknown, into this most unfamiliar of environments, and the eerie feeling he was experiencing stemmed from the fact that this environment didn’t seem eerie in the slightest, simply functional, somewhat pretentious and somewhat sterile. He showered, put on a fresh shirt, and took the lift twenty-four floors down.

  It was early evening, the air was still warm, the first lights were coming on in the open-plan offices. Gilbert ambled along the busy streets and allowed himself to be compelled over huge crossings at intersections with the Japanese workforce clocking off for the day. He would have liked to have bought himself something to eat, but he felt too porous to make a decision, indeed, he felt veritably transparent, and this transparency had nothing to do with lightness, but was rather a manifestation of his weakness. His ability to take up space, to displace air in order to replace it with his body, seemed strangely impaired. Making his way around the city was difficult, and he sensed that it was the hectic commotion of the end of the working day that was propelling him forwards step by step, as if he was parasitically feeding on the energy radiating from the people around him, while he himself had no impetus, he didn’t know where to turn, and willingly allowed himself to be carried along.

  Mathilda hadn’t contacted him. He had checked his emails and messages one last time in front of the lift at the hotel. His withdrawal from the conference had been regretfully acknowledged. No word from Mathilda. He had to assume that this development, which had come as rather unexpected for him, was in all respects favourable to her, and she now had free rein to pursue her own plans. She was a very busy woman, and time and time again there had been days on which, overwhelmed by commitments, she was far too busy to have any time for him.

  She taught music and mathematics at a high school and trained new teachers. She served as an eminent authority on teaching methodologies, and as a communications wizard and all-round secret weapon; she was, especially when weighed up against his own remuneration, very well paid and highly sought after.

  But even in the case of some kind of unanticipated adversity it must be possible for her to find a free minute to make contact with him. He decided to hold his ground and wait. After everything that had happened it was clearly up to her to make the first move. Quite possibly she hadn’t dared approach him now that he knew about her indiscretion and she could be certain of his wrath. Well, the onus was on her to convince him to forgive her. Just the fact that she hadn’t got in contact at all was an outrageous affront. He was absolutely not going to run after her, he wasn’t going to grovel, he didn’t want the humiliation to go so far that he would give in, so to speak, and turn the other cheek. He did regret, however, that under these circumstances she didn’t know that he had taken it upon himself to make this journey, Gilbert Silvester, alone in Tokyo, further from home than he had ever been before. There was no one else he could have told. Mathilda would have delighted in the sight of the Japanese islands from such a high altitude just as much as he had.

  The crowds surged towards the underground stations and bus stops. He turned down a side street filled with small bars. It was essentially a ravine densely surrounded by high-rises, and yet oblique beams of evening sun were still managing to reach it. He sat down in a sushi bar at a counter with a view out the window and watched people rushing by. Businessmen, secretaries, schoolchildren, a few housewives. All in all, beardless people. Smooth black hair, smooth faces, smooth rehearsed smiles. A young man sauntered past, he had a full beard and white aikido trousers, his head of hair drawn up into a samurai topknot, but you could tell even from a distance that this beard’s wearer was European. There are many theories circulating on the subject of the Japanese beard. The dreariest was biological: some Asiatic peoples are missing a gene or whatever is responsible for beard growth, so that they can only grow patchy beards, if at all, which, in their sparseness, don’t function as a status symbol and are preferably shaved off. According to another theory, these beardless men in their prime have simply grown accustomed to fitting in, because companies demand a neat appearance from their employees, which under no circumstances includes beards. Hence, one would never catch a so-called ‘salaryman’ in Japan fully dedicated to his professional life with even a hint of a beard. The third theory has to do with the overall obsession with cleanliness that the Japanese have. A man on the street with a beard has evidently not conformed to the conventions of bathing that day and is basically unclean; a horror in the land of purism. The crucial question on beard styles and the image of God wasn’t related to these theories even remotely. While Gilbert Silvester had so far taken a rather Eurocentric approach to his investigation, a whole new field of research had now opened up to him by being here. This could, he told himself, even give his trip a sense of purpose. He had spent a long time with Michelangelo’s depiction of God in the Sistine Chapel. God, carried on a cloud of the finest putti, God, lying there reaching out his hand to Adam with such a casual gesture, and giving him, with the tiniest, electrified touch of his completely limp finger, the breath of life; God has a full beard. As Michelangelo famously loved men, the cultural impact of the Sistine Chapel on gay culture was not insignificant for Gilbert’s study. Going completely against the narcissism cliché that gay men encountered in the consciousness of the intolerant public, he proposed that the gay man didn’t identify with God in the slightest, but rather with the youthful, muscular, but nevertheless exceptionally passive Adam. According to Gilbert’s reasoning, this Adam, made in the form of the Greek statues of athletes devoid of any body hair, significant
ly contributed to the present-day fashion for full-body waxing. God, on the other hand, was the one breaking the Freudian touch taboo, the eroticising force, the wholly other, the great Other, and he hadn’t prevented the artist creating him, in the best Renaissance manner, in his own likeness, especially as far as his beard was concerned. Naturally it would be a fruitful undertaking to make a comparative study of this godly beard of the European tradition with a Japanese variety.

  The smooth-cheeked Japanese men streamed past the window, and Gilbert suddenly felt comforted. Had he not found a purpose? A reason to be here? He ate his sushi, even though he didn’t especially like raw fish, and seaweed even less. But he liked the sticky sushi rice, and he found it reassuring that sushi was a relatively self-explanatory dish. It being his first meal in Japan, he had no interest in taking part in any big experiments and spooning something or other out of an earthenware pot in which unidentified ingredients had been unified into a cloudy soup. He ate the bitesize pieces of rolled rice without the layer of fish, ate the rice wrapped in seaweed, then ordered some sake and ate a piece of salmon. It was only then that he noticed how hungry he was. He ate everything, leaving only the thumb-sized squid tentacle.

  He walked beneath multi-level motorways, admired the jarring electric advertisements and the meticulous cleanliness of the streets. He simultaneously paid close attention not to stray too far from his hotel. He was good at orientating himself and didn’t get lost easily, but the city gave him little confidence. The passers-by gave off an air of perfection, absolute self-restraint, an antiseptic quality. There were none of those grubby corners where underdone feelings could accumulate, places filled with carelessly tossed rubbish, where one tends to come across unkempt people, places with disconcerting auras that you want to steer clear of.

  Here, Gilbert was in the heart of the crowds, but no one came too close to him. At home people gesticulated in the street, took out their bad tempers on others, and even when they didn’t say anything, you could sense how the moods of strangers would overlay your own, how it would immediately contaminate a route through the city. Here, on the other hand, the people seemed like they were made of plastic. It made him a little uneasy. He kept going, tried to keep to the rhythm of the other footsteps, but made sure to pay attention to the way he had carved out. Finally, he recognised the train station he had arrived at. Neo-baroque, red brick, with a domed roof over its entrance. He didn’t really know what he was doing here twice on the same day. He longed to be back at the hotel, he longed to be gone. Was it homesickness, or wanderlust? He longed to be gone, just as far away as possible. He already found himself, however, relative to where his home was, at the other end of the world, and it would hardly bring relief to add a few extra kilometres to the distance he had already covered. He entered the station, a hall of confidentiality which whispered to him all the things he already knew here: the ticket machines, the barriers and the ticket inspectors, he had seen it all today already. He bought a ticket from the machine and took the escalator up to the platform.

  Meanwhile, it had become completely dark. The passengers stepped in and out of cones of light on the platform, the night an impenetrable wall behind them. Gilbert lingered on the platform and watched the trains come in. The Shinkansen pulled in elegantly. The aerodynamically formed locomotive tapered off to a beaky point, giving the train the appearance of a snakelike dragon. Silvery water dragon, iridescent and smooth. Then a train came in that had stunning barbels painted on it, yellow and red, like flames. Gilbert would have liked to have taken notes, but his leather satchel containing his writing things was back at the hotel. Flowing out from behind the next train’s headlight, where the outer shell of the bodywork thickened to the upper lip of the dragon, a magenta line ran across all of the carriages, whiskers in the airstream, ancient, endlessly long beard hair, nestled close to the body in flight.

  Exhilarated, Gilbert took a step closer to the train, and while the cleaning service stormed through the carriages, collecting rubbish and vacuuming the seats, he dared to give the magenta line a little pat. The passengers climbed on board, the train pulled away, and Gilbert looked after it for a long time. Then he looked for a deserted section of the platform, leant against a billboard and called Mathilda.

  – Gilbert here, he said formally.

  – Where are you?

  – I’m in Tokyo.

  – What did you say?

  – I said: Tokyo.

  – That is a very bad joke.

  Feeling sorry for herself. Extortion tactics.

  – No one’s trying to make a joke.

  – Why are you tormenting me? What have I done to you?

  She actually managed to say it and then wail. Her! She had managed in the space of a few words to go from the role of the culprit to that of the victim. He heard her gulping down the telephone, he thought he could hear tears hitting some surface or other, he hated, as he always had, the irrational female strategy of conducting a conversation while simultaneously not conducting one, or at least abruptly taking it in a completely different direction than the one that could reasonably be expected.

  – You haven’t tried to call me even once, he said coolly.

  – I spent the whole day calling you non-stop. I couldn’t get through to you.

  – I was on a plane, he said even more coolly.

  – But not for over ten hours.

  – Like I said, it was a long-haul flight, he said.

  He heard her hiss something that sounded a lot like ‘Why do you keep lying to me, you vile man’, but he hadn’t quite caught it, and didn’t want to conjure up accusations for something she hadn’t said for the sake of fairness. Before he could ask her to repeat the sentence, she had hung up.

  He called her back straight away, but she didn’t pick up.

  On the one hand it was a relief, because the conversation hadn’t gone favourably enough for his taste. On the other hand, he began to worry. She seemed confused. She couldn’t understand what was happening. She hadn’t at any point understood that he was in Tokyo. Where did she think he would be? Did she expect him to have made it to the moon? Where else would he be if not there, where he was? He resented not only having to justify his physical location, but also being forced to prove it. He was standing somewhere on the ground, she couldn’t have cared less where exactly. She hadn’t asked even once how he was.

  He dialled her number again, their shared telephone number, which was now no longer his, entered it wrong, started over, then gave up.

  He slowly walked along the platform, away from those waiting to catch a train, went right to the end of the platform where nobody else was. The markings people lined up behind before boarding ended here, and a fence began that shielded the passengers from the tracks. Gilbert stood in the shadow of a pillar, he found it comforting. He waited like that for a while, nestled closely to the pillar, he waited for the next train, for the next day, waited for the velvety night, which was held back at an unattainable distance by the lights of the train station.

  The commuters ebbed away. A young man with a gym bag over his shoulder walked along the platform towards him. He walked past Gilbert without noticing him, walked slowly, as if pulled by an invisible cord, until he reached the furthest end of the platform and put down his bag with excessive care in front of the fence. He plucked the bag into shape and tried to smooth out the creases, which he kept doing without success. Gilbert watched as the bag caved in and was smoothed down again anew. This corresponded exactly with his own situation: he gave endless effort, but this effort was not recognised.

  The young man fussed around the bag and then finally seemed to reach a fragile but satisfactory state for the moment. He took a step back to admire his work, and it was only then that Gilbert realised what it was about the man that had irked him. He had a small goatee beard: trendy, neat. Gilbert Silvester decided to speak to him.

  On the face of it, the matter of beards was quite straightforward. God had a full beard, Satan had a
goatee. The latter could, iconographically speaking, be seamlessly traced back to the ancient depictions of the goat-bearded, goat-hooved and goat-tailed Pan, and even today visual media, especially feature films, fall back on the beard when they need to flag up an undeniably morally reprehensible character. And the younger generation, once they hit puberty, naturally liked to flirt with the bad guy image. Give themselves a mark of toughness in opposition to the rebuke that they’re sissies. A younger generation with no prospects can’t help but style themselves in a way that suggests that they are a force to be reckoned with.

  The young man turned away from his bag and made a move to climb the fence. Before he could swing his leg over, Gilbert walked up to him. The man, startled, slid down from the fence, vaguely straightened up and bowed deeply and awkwardly many times. Gilbert formulated the politest possible sentence he could muster in English that started with the empty phrase that he didn’t want to bother him. No, he wasn’t bothering him at all, murmured the young man from below, while bringing his forehead nearer to the ground, he wasn’t bothering him in the slightest. What was bothering him (and at this point he apologised profusely), what had stopped him and made him lose his nerve, was this light that the stations had recently been fitted with, blue LED light, which had been attributed with a mood-lifting effect, a positive, friendly light, installed specially for people like him. He had believed, however, that it would be possible to resist it and carry out his resolution. He was sorry. He had failed.

  The young man spoke extremely bad English. Gilbert looked indignantly at the jiggling little beard bobbing up and down. Downward-pointing triangles, according to research, enter the human brain as a threat warning. This paltry lint wasn’t far enough along to make a clear-cut triangle. Gilbert thought it would be better to hold off on broaching the subject for now.