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.I didn’t know if it had fallen from the sky already dead or if I had killed it, but its little insect death touched me.I admired the lovely pattern on its wings, and then wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hid it away beneath the foundation of the house.I hadn’t thought about this moth since then; but the moment it came to mind I got on my knees and looked under the house until I found it.So many things in my life had changed, even the way I looked; but when I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it.It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns, like Mother wore when she went to her mah-jongg games at night.Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.If only one thing in my life had been the same as during that first week in Kyoto.As I thought of this my mind began to swirl like a hurricane.It struck me that we—that moth and I—were two opposite extremes.My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth’s velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling.I was so astonished I let out a cry.The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm.I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning.The stale air had washed away.The past was gone.My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it.But I suppose that for the past year I’d been dead in a way too.And my sister.yes, she was gone; but I wasn’t gone.I’m not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I’d turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future.And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I’d ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign.This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream.He was saying to me, “Watch for the thing that will show itself to you.Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”I had no time for another thought before Auntie called out to me:“Chiyo, come here!”* * *Well, I walked up that dirt corridor as though I were in a trance.It wouldn’t have surprised me if Auntie had said, “You want to know about your future? All right, listen closely.” But instead she just held out two hair ornaments on a square of white silk.“Take these,” she said to me.“Heaven knows what Hatsumomo was up to last night; she came back to the okiya wearing another girl’s ornaments.She must have drunk more than her usual amount of sake.Go find her at the school, ask whose they are, and return them.”When I took the ornaments, Auntie gave me a piece of paper with a number of other errands written on it as well and told me to come back to the okiya as soon as I had done them all.Wearing someone else’s hair ornaments home at night may not sound so peculiar, but really it’s about the same as coming home in someone else’s underwear.Geisha don’t wash their hair every day, you see, because of their fancy hairstyles.So a hair ornament is a very intimate article.Auntie didn’t even want to touch the things, which is why she was holding them on a square of silk.She wrapped them up to give them to me, so that they looked just like the bundled-up moth I’d been holding only a few minutes earlier.Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.I stood there staring at the silk bundle in Auntie’s hand until she said, “Take it, for heaven’s sake!” Later, on my way to the school, I unfolded it to have another look at the ornaments.One was a black lacquer comb shaped like the setting sun, with a design of flowers in gold around the outside; the other was a stick of blond wood with two pearls at the end holding in place a tiny amber sphere.I waited outside the school building until I heard the don of the bell signaling the end of classes.Soon girls in their blue and white robes came pouring out.Hatsumomo spotted me even before I spotted her, and came toward me with another geisha.You may wonder why she was at the school at all, since she was already an accomplished dancer and certainly knew everything she needed to know about being a geisha.But even the most renowned geisha continued to take advanced lessons in dance throughout their careers, some of them even into their fifties and sixties.“Why, look,” Hatsumomo said to her friend.“I think it must be a weed.Look how tall it is!” This was her way of ridiculing me for having grown a finger’s-width taller than her.“Auntie has sent me here, ma’am,” I said, “to find out whose hair ornaments you stole last night.”Hatsumomo’s smile faded.She snatched the little bundle from my hand and opened it.“Why, these aren’t mine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]