The Gift of Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

the daintiness of a stork stepping through a lily pond.
     
     
“I was tactless this morning,” she began. “I thought you would have been pleased to see his sword again, and to find out that it had not been lost.”
     
     
I stopped her. “There are so many things you don’t know. I cannot blame you.”
     
     
“What happened to your family, your brothers, your sister?” she asked, filling my cup again. I was only mildly surprised. Obviously she had thoroughly investigated the circumstances before approaching me. Perhaps Endo-san’s letter had told her of my family.
     
     
“All dead,” I told her, seeing their faces float before my eyes like wavering images on the surface of a pool.
     
     
Under the faint light of the moon the statues in the garden regained some of their original glory, giving off an unearthly luminescence. “There is a house, further up the road, which has been deserted for years,” I said. “Local legend has it that on a night when the moon is at its fullest the marble statues left in the gardens come alive, and for a few hours roam about the grounds. Tonight, I can almost believe that the story is true.”
     
     
“How sad,” she said. “If I were a statue, and came back to life, I would always be looking for what I had lost, for the last thing I had done as a living being. Imagine having to go through your entire existence alternating between stone and flesh, death and life, always attempting to find the memories of your previous lives. I would eventually forget what I was searching for. I would forget what I was trying to remember.”
     
     
“Or one could just enjoy the moment when one is alive.” As soon as I spoke I knew how hypocritical I sounded, how ironic those words were.
     
     
Sutherland sang on, flinging her heart out into the night. Verdi’s Caro nome had been my father’s favorite aria, I told Michiko.
     
     
“And now it is your favorite,” she said.
     
     
I nodded. Then I said, “Ask me again, what you wanted to know this morning.”
     
     
She sipped her sake, leaned back in the wicker chair and said, “Tell me about your life. Tell me about the life you and Endo-san led. The joys you experienced and the sorrow that you encountered. I would like to know everything.”
     
     
The moment I had been waiting for. Fifty years I had waited to tell my tale, as long as the time Endo-san’s letter took to reach Michiko. Still I hesitated—like a penitent sinner facing my confessor, unsure if I wanted another person to know my many shames, my failures, my unforgivable sins.
     
     
As though to fortify me she took the letter out and placed it on the table between us. Its pages were folded, yellowed like old skin, the faint tattoo of aged ink that had seeped onto the blank side visible to me. Just like me, I thought, looking at the letter. The life I had lived was folded, only a blank page exposed to the world, emptiness wrapped around the days of my life; faint traces of it could be discerned, but only if one looked closely, very closely.
     
     
And so, for the first and last time, I gently unfolded my life, exposing what was written, letting the ancient ink be read once again.
     
     
     
Chapter Three
On the day I was born, my father planted a casuarina tree. It was a tradition begun by his grandfather. The lanky sapling was planted in the garden facing the sea and it would grow into a beautiful tree, hard and tall, its cloak of leaves exuding a light fragrance that mingled soothingly with the scent of the sea. It would be the last tree that my father planted in his life.
     
     
I was the youngest child of one of the oldest families in Penang. My great-grandfather, Graham Hutton, had been a clerk in the East India Company before sailing out to the East Indies to make his fortune in 1780. He had sailed around the Spice Islands trading in pepper and spices, and came to befriend Captain Francis Light, who was searching for a suitable port. He found it on an