WABI-SABI
‘PLEASE DON’T REMIND me,’ Kaichi said. He was a good son, one not prone to anger, but surely she knew him by now? He sailed in days; their sole contact would henceforth be by letter.
‘Tell me.’
He sighed. There was a mountain of things to be done: books unpacked, still an ugly spill in the corner of the room; clothes rumpled, unsorted. In addition, he must get a new hat. Mr Dyer, at university, had advised where in Nagano one might be obtained which wouldn’t look out of place in Glasgow. He had no time for this!
She looked at him. Kaichi sighed again.
‘I’ll write regularly – what I’m doing, who my friends are. Those things.’
‘Yes.’
‘Alright, I’ll write a poem. Now and again.’
‘You will close each letter with one.’
‘Mother!’
‘Put your whole self into it. Wabi-sabi, Kaichi.’
‘I know – resonant loneliness, serene longing. Crows departing an evening bough. I’ll do my best.’
‘It is the mark of a truly civilised person. You’ll see.’
It took a lengthy passage, nine gruelling terms and appointment as a construction foreman on the Eighth Wonder of the World before he did.
*
Thank God for Archie. Yes, technical education had given him English, and Dyer a corresponding thirst for precision, but these men’s accents: low, fast and grumbling, like a dog growling in an alley, or a high wind wrenching open a door. It was maddening! Archie was from another place. Out of him, words flowed clear as a Tenryu stream. They worked well together.
Watanabe worried he would become dependent on his friend, but there was no time for worry. The bridge was six years into construction, two from the new decade. 1890. Every rivet increased the pressure.
There were tales from the men: strange calls in the hazy interval between afternoon and evening; phantom winds springing up from nowhere, entangling a man’s feet like snakes. Even faces appearing where none had been before: screaming faces, absent eyes, but horrified all the same.
‘Again, Archie? Every time this happens we slow down to nothing.’
‘Ach, lad – bunchae old wimmin, they are, wi their superstitions. Course the wind whistles up here. Couldnae not, eh?’
He smiled, clinking Kaichi’s mug. The brew was sweet, opaque as the Forth on a bleak autumn morning, but since he disembarked at Leith he’d grown used to it.
‘I suppose you are right. Why do they like to scare, so?’
‘They dinnae. But lookit th’alternative.’
From the board-hut, tucked under a tower at a hundred and twenty feet, the river ran swift as boiling pitch. He watched the black diamonds, turned his collar against the wind.
‘I see.’
With a grimace, Watanabe pulled the slider.
*
He’d managed through university – letters on academic progress; portraits of friends (Henderson, the redhead, McKenzie the snake); even a teashop waitress, with whom he delicately suggested he might be in love. It fizzled to nothing, but filled ten letters.
Yet still she harped on the poems.
He sat up, wracking his brains. Crows – well enough. Loneliness, a certain elegiac quality lending itself to haiku. Lonely miles of shoreline; a heron, even. It brooded over his letterhead for a number of weeks, stiff as a bird on a silk banner. Somehow she expected refinement when he spent his days teetering over the maw of the Forth, deafened by hammers, hands bruised with rivets, his mouth full of words he struggled to say.
Kaichi took his head in his hands.
The lamp-oil he’d frittered on this – this exercise! The wax. The shillings!
*
Somehow, tales about death were worse than folktales. Wailing spectres, detaching heads; such yokai he knew at his nursemaid’s knee. But men had died here, before he came. Some in natural ways – trips, burns, crushing injuries; it was the way with engineering.
But others …
From the wharf-side, he looked up at the branching splendour of the bridge. With caissons sunk, towers erected and the spans inching closer every day, he knew taking part was the triumph of his life. They had even photographed him between the two designers, demonstrating the cantilever principle with his slight, grinning weight. But down at the water’s level, those few hundred feet reached further than he wished to contemplate.
The day was over: Archie departed, the men dismissed. Watanabe lingered uneasily on the shore. It had its beauty, he supposed – a brute length, iron and certain in its containment; under a summer sky it might turn to a grid of light. But now it stood bitter with ice in the lingering stench of the braziers.
He left the slipway to find an older path.
If only his mother understood – such harsh calculations had their own elegance. He saw in the relentless rise of the spans – high and tight and buttressed as any cathedral – a new sort of civilisation, one forged from steel and speed. It thrilled him to be as much a part of it as any rivet or welded plate. He and the men had laid blood in its seams.
At a bend, he stopped.
He imagined another man – a workman, paid in shillings for long hours on the scaffold. A riveter, perhaps. He would wait for his mate to squeeze a red-hot rivet through the hole, twist it to its tightest position, then whale away, the whole of his strength driving the sledgehammer through a two-inch circle of steel till it mushroomed into place, locking the plates tight. A rest, another glow-worm squeezed through, and on he went. Watanabe recalled sparks cascading past the hut like a rainshower.
What had this to do with crows, evening skies – herons? Such delicate loneliness had no place here. Archie said thirty men had fallen to the water.
If another fell, then he would write.
His mother could show it to her circle of friends, the newspaper for its decorous weekly column. For now, the small, telling song of the hammer would ring across the water.
First published in To Say Nothing of the Dog: Flash Fiction (Cyberwit, 2023)
Next: Gooseberry Fool