“The fiercest bandit dares not harm a nun; the poorest hovel will not deny her shelter and some rice for her bowl. I have in mind to go on perpetual pilgrimage, from shrine to shrine, that I may gain merit in whatever years of this life are left me.” Okura smiled. “During those years, perhaps I can call on you from time to time. Then we will remember together.”
He shook his head, bemused. Like most courtiers, he had never traveled far, seldom more than a day’s journey from Heian-kyo. And that had been by carriage—to services that for his kind were occasions more social than religious; to view blossoms in the springtime countryside or the maple leaves of autumn; to admire and make poems about moonlight on Lake Biwa … “Afoot,” he mumbled. “Roads that wet weather turns into quagmires. Mountains, gorges, raging rivers. Hunger, rain, snow, wind, fiery sun. Ignorant commoners. Beasts. Demons, ghosts. No.” He set down his cup, straightened, firmed his voice. “You shall not. It would be hard for a young man. You, a woman, growing old, you will perish miserably. I won’t have it.”
Rather than remind him that he lacked authority over her, for his concern was touching, she asked gently, “Do I seem feeble?”
He fell silent. His eyes searched, as if to pierce the garments and look at the body that had sometimes lain beneath his. But no, she thought, that would never cross his mind. A decent man, he found nudity disgusting, and in fact they had always kept on at least one layer of clothing.
Finally he murmured, “It is true, it is eerie, the years have scarcely touched you, if at all. You could pass for a woman of twenty. But your age is—what? We have known each other for close to thirty years, and you must have been about twenty when you came to court, so that makes you only a little younger than me. And my strength has faded away.”
You speak aright, she thought. Bit by bit I have seen you holding a book farther from your eyes or blinking at words you do not quite hear; half your teeth are gone; more and more fevers come upon you, coughs, chills; do your bones hurt when you rise in the mornings? I know the signs well, and well I should, as often as I have watched them steal over those I loved.
The impulse had seized her days before, when the bad news broke and she began to think what it meant and what to do. She had curbed it, but it stayed restlessly alive. If she yielded, what harm? She could trust this man. She was unsure whether it would help or hinder him against his sorrow.
Let me be honest with him, she decided. At least it will give him something to think about besides his great loss, in the solitude that awaits him.
“I am not the age you believe, my dear,” she said quietly. “Do you wish the truth? Be warned, at first you may suppose I have gone mad.”
He studied her before replying with the same softness, “I doubt that. There is more within you than you have ever manifested. I was vaguely but surely conscious of it. Perhaps I dared never inquire.”
Then you are wiser than I believed, she thought. Her resolution crystallized. “Let us go outside,” she said. “What I have to tell is for no ears but yours.”
Not troubling about cloaks, they went forth together, onto the verandah, around this pavilion, and along a covered gallery to a kiosk overlooking the pool. Near its placidity rose a man-high stone in whose ruggedness was chiseled the emblem of the clan that had lost this home. Okura halted. “Here is a good spot for me to show you that no evil spirit uses my tongue to speak falsehoods,” she said.
Solemnly, she recited a passage she had chosen from the Lotus Sutra. Yasuhira’s manner was as grave when he told her, “Yes, that suffices me.” He was of the Amidist sect, which held that the Buddha himself watches over humankind.
They stood gazing out at things of chaste beauty. Mist from the rain filled the kiosk and covered hair, clothes, eyelashes with droplets. The cold and the silence were tike presences, whose awareness was remote from them.