The Harunobu Face

*****

To fully feel that each moment perishes and will not return again can become a pain that is shot through with a peculiar ecstasy. It is like the pain-pleasure of a cruel but dear hand fastening vice-like upon my nipple, but it is stronger and more pervading. I can become dizzy from both, in any case...

*****

Those brief minutes when we lay breast to breast, and the fractions of those minutes when, my body moving slightly with a desire that was not solely carnal, my nipples rubbed against hers, a friction that felt as if it could ignite an all-consuming, world-ending, fire... I knew at the time that they would not come again. I can call them up in memory still; but I know that when this body dies that may no longer be possible. How much longer? I remember sometimes the strange feeling I had on a beautiful early afternoon of a late spring day, and wonder if I will be alive still when the magnolia trees bloom again.

*****

Another moment gone, and another. I think that she too was sad when she decided that we could have no more of those timeless moments and rose. She put on that green and white dress, for the last time. I know each item that she wore during those last four days, and can recall every one of them with ease. I lay there watching her while she knelt down and opened the case. She took out and with smooth proficiency fitted together an instrument. I recognized it, more or less at least: a Japanese shamisen. It was what she had told Jan (I listening through the wall) that she would need.

She sat down on a zabuton, the shamisen on her lap. The plectrum had also been in the case, and she strung and tuned the instrument. That gave me the first taste of its power. Then she paused, listening. I heard it too, the sounds of footsteps in the hall. Not just one person.

An expression that I could not interpret. She set down the shamisen carefully on the futon, and I understood that I was to rise. The door of the apartment had opened and there was the sound of at least three people, I thought, entering.

Yuki took my hand. She spoke very softly: "This may be hard. Try to have faith. Try to watch. You have to learn this too... "

She let go of my hand again and went to the living room. I knew that I was supposed to follow.

It seemed that Jan had just put down a thick rug, drawn from one of his bags, in front of the sofa. There were two other men in the living room with him. Both were nearly as big as he was; one was white and blond-haired, like Jan, the other black. They were younger than he; they were men such as I would try to stay away from if they came into a store when I was in it, or on the street.

"The Asian," Jan said. "You're not to touch the brunette." He put his arms around me; I was practically immobilized. He drew me with him against the wall.

The white man had grabbed Yuki's hands and was holding them behind her back. I expected, wanted, her to make some miraculous move, show herself a magician in martial arts, as she was in other things; to knock them both out, teach them not to lay hands on her... She seemed to resist, but there was no magic. Nothing to stop the black man from stepping up to her and laying his hands roughly on her breasts, through the dress. Then his right hand went swiftly first to his pocket, and then to her throat. I screamed; Jan's hand was over my mouth in a split second. Steel flashed, but there was not the spurt of blood that I (forgetting much of what I had learned) feared and expected. He had cut the middle of that green and white dress, from the top down, just a few centimeters, till above her breasts. The knife was back in his pocket, and he took the two sides in his hands, and with exultant deliberateness--ripped.

One of Jan's hands was still holding my two hands together behind my back. Now he let them go, but I was too focused on what I saw to think of trying--it would have been futile in any case--to use them to free myself. The hand over my mouth came away too, but before I could scream again Jan had thrust a piece of cloth into my mouth and slapped a broad strip of tape over my lips. One hand went back to cover my mouth as well; the other returned to holding my hands in an unbreakable grip.

The dress I had come to love (the dress which she had twice taken off to lie down with me...) lay ripped and ruined on the floor. Yuki's hands were held behind her, like mine, by one big hand; three other hands were molesting her brutishly; two handling her breasts roughly, a third obscenely pushing into her between her legs.

*****

I did not want to see it, but I remembered, somehow, Yuki's "Try to watch." And when I closed my eyes tightly so that the sight was not before them, Jan told me roughly (yet there was something kind too in his voice, oddly enough) that I had to open them.

I did. I saw it almost all, though sometimes my tears briefly blinded me.

*****

At some point they no longer secured Yuki's hands; she had ceased making any attempt to resist. They had completely free rein.

*****

I sometimes think of the possibility that I am what the world calls insane. If so, I may have descended into madness already on the seventh day. But it is also possible that it was only when I was forced to see this that I lost my mind. A mind already on the knife-edge perhaps, confronted with something so utterly perverse, unthinkable, as what was inflicted on the delicate beauty of Yuki's body, might naturally break and construct its own private "truth" in an attempt to make sense of the outrage, to let it be at least a sacrifice that is in the end worthwhile, not just the repellent desecration of what is beautiful and pure.

After all (I am astonished that I am able to think these thoughts at all, but I have done so, more than once), perhaps most of what I had experienced till then could be explained "rationally." The miracles (what I felt in the night of the fourteenth to the fifteenth day... ) all could be shrugged off as the reactions of an overexcited, hypereroticized, mind to "real," prosaic, events. The distortions of reality produced by sexual frustration... The visions of Yuki, of Sara, my fantasies--all can be adduced as proof of that hypererotic state, a symptom of my strengthening psychosis. But the wonders from this moment on the seventeenth day, the wonders that truly never cease... are they simply divorced from reality, a madwoman's delirium? Will I one day wake from the wish-fulfilling visions of psychosis, perhaps forced out of them by some new drug, some new treatment, and see only the sterile walls of a mental hospital, not able to find Her state again?

Sometimes I ask this of myself. But this trial never lasts long. I always pass it. I have never doubted Her, even when I have thought these thoughts, not for a moment. What I feel every instant proves (though those of the world would never understand it; those who can understand it are not any more fully of the world) that it is the other which is the psychosis, the fever-dream, from which I had begun on Friday evening to wake up, and which, not then but later on that night from Sunday to Monday, Monday morning, I finally left behind me.

*****

I believe that if I make a conscious effort I might be able to recall much of the detail of what happened. I do not want to, but sometimes I see a flash or several flashes of it. That beautiful face, almost expressionless, with a much bigger black one descending on it like a falcon on its prey; red visible as the man's big tongue forces its way into her mouth. Her thighs held open while a hand handles her without the slightest tenderness. And the worse obscenities yet. They positioned her (treating her like a rag-doll with no will of her own) with her bottom up, her thighs spread, head on the rug. And that big white man behind her (at that moment I hated him and wished him in hell) put his foot on the back of her head and hammered down into her as if he wanted to break the slender beauty of her body into two...

Another flash, from later. They had her on all fours, and while White fucked her from behind with frenzied lust, Black held her lovely hair and forced himself into her throat. Even then her face showed only slight signs of distress...

Flash--Yuki has been forced to impale herself on Black, and bent forward, her face resting on his chest. And White... is mounting her from the rear, holding her open with his hands to stuff himself lewdly into her bottom... Then both begin a grotesquely coordinated rutting into her two holes. They are too big for her... they are tearing her; it is an obscenity that such a thing could be possible at all. I can't endure seeing this and yet I have to... see and hear... If I had not been so securely gagged, and Jan's hand still pressed additionally over the lower part of my face, my screams of anguish might have been heard I think from the top of the building to the bottom.

*****

There are other flashes that I see, occasionally. Sometimes I utter a prayer. I will not try to describe them all here.

But one thing I must tell, as well as I can. Towards the end, when she should have been surely utterly broken by their abuse of her fragile beauty, I saw something that astonished (and did not astonish) me. They were both standing with her sandwiched between them and impaled on both cocks; and I realized that she had begun to whisper something to them, now to one, now the other. And something indefinable changed...

*****

The mood, when they were finished with her, was strange. Brutally though they had used her, almost breaking her apparently, she now seemed stronger than before, than ever. And they, who had so arrogantly taken her without regard at the beginning, they were now--ashamed? Cowed? The black man said some mumbled words which seemed half thanks and half apology after he had pulled on his clothes. And she, regal in spite of her nakedness, the bruises on her breasts and elsewhere, the traces of blood and semen between her thighs, smiled and touched his hand with a few low whispered words, and did the same to the white man. They left, and it was as if they were different men from the swaggerers who I had felt fear on seeing in her living room.

When they were gone, without looking me in the eyes Jan took my gag out and released me. I staggered to her. I wanted to give her comfort, but fell to my knees and could do nothing for a moment but hold her by her legs, sobbing. And it was she who comforted me, kneeling down to hold me in an embrace that now was motherly, her head on my bowed head. - "Over now, all over now... there, it was hard for you wasn't it... It's alright, everything is alright, you were brave dear... Louisa, Loes... "

Jan went behind the curtained-off area; I felt that he wanted to leave us alone, but there was also a sense of urgency from him, of work that had to be completed soon. Yuki led me to the bathroom, and for the second time that day we showered together. It must have mainly been because she knew that it was hard for me then to be separated from her, while I still had some vague idea that I could help her.

I cannot say that a miracle happened before my eyes; there was no moment in which I realized I was seeing what is not possible in the world. It was with wonder and a kind of triumph that I saw when I helped her dry herself that the bruises had disappeared entirely, that the tender flesh that should have been, and surely had been, swollen if not torn pitifully, was as freshly smooth and whole as if it had all been a dream.

The light was not yet all gone when we went together to her bedroom for the last time. I thought we might again lie together, facing each other, but she told me to rest a little, and I lay down obediently, next to the shamisen, and watched her as she put on a light yukata. But when she went into the living room my eyes indeed closed without my willing them to.

*****

It was a twanging sound of extraordinary power that woke me from a vivid dream. I sat up, and Yuki immediately put down the plectrum and the shamisen whose sound it had been and came to me. She knelt down and put her hands on my shoulders. "Tell me your dream, quick, while you remember it." I put a hand to my head. "I remember... being sick. In the grass. But after being sick I felt fine. I was by a wide river... there was a beautiful moon. But I felt anxious; you weren't there, and I didn't know how I could cross. Then the sun began to rise... I thought it was strange that the moon was still visible and bright while the sun was rising... That's all I remember, Yuki... I wanted you to be there, but I was alone." She seemed to relax, and I saw for the first time in her perfect face some sign of the physical strain--she had not slept for days, as I by then had begun to realize. She leaned forward to embrace me, her cheek against mine; I smelled again that subtle, elegant, fragrance, that noone but she has.

"Good, very good, Loes," she said. "There's not that much more needed now. We don't have much time" (this was said with a trace of sadness but without grief), "but it will be alright. You're almost ready, aren't you, darling?" The "darling" was like a knife of joy through my heart. As with many things Yuki said while I was with her, I understood and did not understand, said "yes", and trusted, believed, with all my heart, that it was the right answer. "The quickest and surest way will be with music. Listening; you are good at listening, aren't you?" And though there was nothing arch about how she said it I knew that she knew, somehow, as I had already suspected, about that place on my wall, about the glass, the microphone. "Already Friday you learned so quickly... Recordings won't be good enough now though. There, just sit here, and listen." She gave me a zabuton, and sat down once more on hers. The shamisen on her right thigh; plectrum raised in her right hand... and after a moment of stillness, descending to strike the strings and then immediately the drum-skin. With that sharp double sound, dry and yet immensely resonant, the fine hairs on my arms instantly thrilled, and the last traces of sleep-dullness were banished in a flash.

***** s

The light was just going, and after some minutes it was in near darkness that we sat and that she played. And, after a short time, sang. And, occasionally, paused to add something in English.

I had heard a shamisen before. But never "live." And never played as Yuki played in the afterglow of sunset, and then in the dark. The sound of tortoise-shell plectrum striking the gut strings and the drum-skin; of fingers sliding on and plucking strings... You may be able to get a faint idea from a recording, but even if you are lucky enough to find an old one, with a shamisen whose drum-skin is not plastic as they now are (as I later learned), it will not suffice. You will need great good fortune to hear once in your life something like what I heard only that one time in mine.

*****

I realize that each step was only possible thanks to the previous ones. And all followed, perhaps inevitably, after the step I made across her threshold on Friday. If I had not had that first transformation on that evening, I could not have received what Yuki gave me on Sunday when we lay face to face on her futon. And if I had not had that (and, I suppose--I reluctantly admit--if I had not seen what happened with Black and White, and the wonder of Yuki's healing almost before my eyes from that), I would not have been able to absorb the last things that I needed in preparation, almost the last things, from listening. Listening, with the power of all my senses once more concentrated in the sense of hearing, to... music? Oh, like so many words, that word has now lost its power, has been debased. But what I heard was truly music, of the Muses.

*****

Once, after more than an hour, the door opened, so that I could see Yuki in the light from the living room. Jan brought green tea, and we drank it. How strange, after what had happened just a few hours ago, that we should be drinking tea together, three of us, almost as if we were old friends, sitting in companionable silence in the little light that came through the open door... It was not exactly cozy, though; we had a sense of common purpose. And of urgency. We savored, did not gulp, our tea, but after only a few minutes Jan put his hand on Yuki's thigh for a second and rose, taking her empty cup and then mine. This time I felt no trace of jealousy or agitation at seeing him touch her, nor was I startled or disturbed when he squeezed my shoulder. The same hand that had held me ruthlessly immobile and silent while I saw... what now seemed like a nightmare that had faded and lost its terror. Now it had become, astonishingly, the hand of a friend and ally in a great enterprise. The greatest enterprise I would ever know.

In the second half of that teaching with the shamisen and with her voice, in almost complete darkness, Yuki took me to a place (which one can also call a state) further from the world than I had ever been while "waking." For you who are still wholly in the world, there is not much that I can say about that place. Imagine it, if you like, as a grassy field beside a broad river (so broad that the other side cannot be clearly discerned), moon high in the sky and bright, even as the sun rises. But unlike in my dream, in that place I sense Yuki's presence with me, in me, even if I never see her.

*****

It was a little before midnight when the last notes were played, and, after a brief pause, she put down the shamisen. She saw, or knew, perfectly where things were in the dark; she lit a candle with a match. By candle-light her face, the Harunobu face, was unworldly, her expression simultaneously serene and intense.

- "Do you trust me? Do you believe in me?" (She said that, though I thought at the time that she meant "Do you believe me?" or "Will you believe me?") I said that I did, and I meant it; and I would have said the same if I had not misunderstood her slightly. "Good. You must trust and believe in yourself too."

She told me to wait and went into the living room. The light from the door was different in quality now; it was not electric. She closed the door and I waited in the light of the single candle. I think it may have been for ten or fifteen minutes; the time was both long and short. When she returned she left the door open, and in the light from the oil lamps in the living room, combined with that of the candle, she dressed me and herself in red dresses, identical as far as I could tell (though only one of us looked a true empress). Again she told me to wait. It was shorter this time; in only a few minutes Jan came and carefully tied a thick blindfold over my eyes. He led me into the other room. I suppose that it was shortly after midnight.

*****

I knew and understood something of where I was being led, but I should remind you who read how little time I had had to prepare. The form of the ancient ritual that Yuki used was an abbreviated one, but there was still much to do. I simply followed the instructions that she gave me; doing what she said to do, speaking the words that she told me to speak, and doing my best to imagine what she told me to create in my mind.

Of course I should not give a full account here of the whole of it, though I have decided to write something, more than I strictly should. The flower was put into my hand, and I cast it, as they did of old; and Yuki told me with calm joy of my fate.

After that she removed the blindfold and showed me the palace. No curtain now, no veil to conceal the beauty of what Jan at her directions and with her help had recreated (it must have not been the first time, I am sure). The palace... and those who dwell in the palace. Some of them look terrifying, but I was not afraid, for all of them are part of her. The charnel grounds outside the palace, and their denizens, too did not frighten me; with the help of what I had been taught, I recognized the world I knew in them.