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top is flat, and he’s balding. He’s short, with stubby arms and legs, and stocky. Does
that sound at all familiar?”
A misshapen head? “From the balcony I keep a close eye on the people walking
down the street, but I’ve never seen anyone that fits that description. He sounds like
the kind of person you couldn’t miss.”
“Exactly. He sounds like a colorful circus clown. If he’s the one
they
selected and
sent to check us out, I would say it’s an odd choice.”
Aomame agreed. Sakigake wouldn’t deliberately send a person who stood out like
that to reconnoiter. They couldn’t be that desperate for help. Which meant that the
man probably had nothing to do with the religion, and that Sakigake still didn’t know
about her relationship with the dowager. But then who was this man, and what was he
doing checking out the safe house? Maybe he was the same man who pretended to be
an NHK fee collector and kept on bothering her? She had no proof. She had just
mentally linked the fee collector’s eccentric manner and the
description of this other
weird man.
“If you see him, please get in touch. We may have to take steps.”
“Of course I will get in touch right away,” Aomame replied.
The dowager was silent again. This was rather unusual, for usually when they
talked on the phone she was quite no-nonsense, and hated to waste any time.
“Are you well?” Aomame asked casually.
“The same as always. I have no complaints,” the dowager said. But Aomame could
hear a faint hesitation in her voice—something else that was unusual.
Aomame waited for her to continue.
Finally, as if resigned to it, the dowager spoke. “It’s just
that recently I feel old
more often than I used to. Especially after you left.”
“I never left,” Aomame said brightly. “I’m still here.”
“I know. You’re there and we can still speak on the phone. It’s just that when we
were able to meet regularly and exercise together, some of your vitality rubbed off on
me.”
“You have a lot of your own vitality to begin with. All I did was help bring it out.
Even if I’m not there, you should be able to make it on your own.”
“To tell you the truth, I thought the same thing until a while ago,” the dowager
said, giving a laugh that was best characterized as dry. “I was confident that I was a
special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don’t just die when their
time comes.
They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes
when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price
for what they’ve received. I have only just learned that truth.”
You have to pay the price for what you’ve received
. Aomame frowned. It was the
same line that the NHK collector had spoken.
“On that night in September, when there was the huge thunderstorm, this thought
suddenly came to me,” the dowager said. “I was in my house, alone in the living
room,
anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning
lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eyes. That night I lost you, I also lost
something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence,
the very support for who I am as a person.”
“Was anger a part of this?” Aomame ventured.
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There was a silence, like after the tide had gone out. Finally the dowager spoke.
“You mean was my anger among the things I lost then? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Yes.”
The dowager slowly breathed in. “The answer to your question is—yes. That’s
what happened. In the midst of that tremendous lightning, the seething anger I had
had was suddenly gone—at least, it had retreated far away.
It was no longer the
blazing anger I used to have. It had transformed into something more like a faintly
colored sorrow. I thought such an intense anger would last forever.… But how do you
know this?”
“Because the same thing happened to me,” Aomame said, “that night when there
was all that thunder.”
“You’re talking about your own anger?”
“That’s right. I can’t feel the pure, intense anger I used to have anymore. It hasn’t
completely disappeared, but like you said, it has withdrawn to someplace far away.
For years this anger has occupied a large part of me. It’s been what has driven me.”
“Like a merciless coachman who never rests,” the dowager said. “But it has lost
power, and now you are pregnant. Instead of being angry.”
Aomame calmed her breathing. “Exactly.
Instead of anger, there’s a
little one
inside me. Something that has nothing to do with anger. And day by day it is growing
inside me.”
“I know I don’t need to say this,” the dowager said, “but you need to take every
precaution with it. That is another reason you need to move as soon as possible to a
more secure location.”
“I agree, but before that happens, there’s something I need to take care of.”
After she hung up, Aomame went out to the balcony, looked down through the plastic
slats at the afternoon road below, and gazed at the playground.
Twilight was fast
approaching.
Before 1Q84 is over
, she thought,
before they find me, I have to find
Tengo
.
No matter what it takes
.
