Korogi and Dumont leave the pub at closing time.
Korogi: “Twenty-five years since I first drank there and the sake is still not that good.”
“You have to train people up. The stuff still smells like a black Sharpie to me.”
“And I guess there’s no nostalgic dimension to it for you. I find it evokes all kinds of memories.”
“I dunno. I’ve done a lot of marking in my day.”
Korogi giggles.
“Oh, I’m drunk. That wasn’t that funny.”
“Where’s your house?”
“That way.”
They head off leaning on each other.
Korogi’s place is a typical 19th-century (you might say Meiji) wooden Maritime square house. There’s a front door that nobody uses, a parlour for when the minister visits, another parlour for everyone else, a dining room and kitchen with the door that everyone uses. Upstairs are several under-heated bedrooms with doorways you have to duck through. Korogi has put several of these rooms to modern uses. There’s a computer room. There’s a room for storing cardboard computer boxes. But the front parlour still has floral wallpaper, a picture of the young Queen courtesy The Halifax Herald and a record player that only plays 78s. One of the housebreakers is gesturing derisively to the other about the 78 collection when Korogi and Dumont start stamping their feet at the kitchen door. The second housebreaker makes a what do we do now gesture and the two of them go out a window.
“God, it’s cold in here."
“I’ll put the kettle on.”
Rosy fingered Dawn. And that ain’t half of what the Famous5 did to Da Xi Shuai last night. The six young bodies are flopped unconsious over a square of five (sheetless) striped mattresses, breathing the slow deep breath of the happy warrior in repose. Okay, snoring.
Across town Professor Dumont, who has to teach at half-past eight, after dancing around in the shower trying to get the temperature right, is having a hell of a time trying to work up a lather with this damned bar of green soap.
Korogi, who doesn’t have to be anywhere till ten, burrows under the pillows and has the following dream.
It’s onboard the Yasunari Maru, midway across the Pacific. Though the container ship is huge, the ocean is huger, and the ship is rolling in the twenty-foot swells. Korogi, nineteen-year-old steward’s mate, has the task of swabbing up after several seasick passengers. The dreamer knocks at a cabin door and enters. Seated inside is an elderly Japanese woman dressed in a gray tweed Victorian travelling skirt and jacket and smoking a pipe. Korogi takes a studio photograph out of a pocket and compares.
“Great-grandmother.”
The woman gives the teen a critical look up and down, takes the pipe from her mouth, and says, “No one told me there were any descendents on this trip.”
“I came to clean up.”
She makes an impatient gesture. “Foreign food doesn’t bother me.”
“Are you going to Vancouver too?”
“No, idiot, I’m sailing for Liaoyang. I have to meet a certain wandering monk and marry him, found a lineage named Korogi and, apparently, give life to a long line of deck swabs.”
“This is just a temporary job. I’m really going to study at a university in Canada.”
“I’ve never heard of that prefecture.”
“It’s new.”
“Young people. Everything has to be new.”
“Great-grandmother. You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in for. The Boxers are about to rise up. China is in for years and years of warfare.”
She laughs, displaying some heavily-nicotined teeth. Then she undoes the top buttons of her jacket and bares one shoulder. There’s the cricket tattoo.
“I’m a Boxer too.”
“But. Why should this monk renounce his vows to marry you?”
“For one thing, I’m too beautiful to pass up.” She now appears as a young woman and she is, frankly, stunning. “For another thing, he can’t refuse my dowery.” She puts her hand into her jacket pocket and produces the Spring Snow Jade.
“I have that in my bathroom right now.”
“Yes, I know. And your new white bedmate is trying to get clean with it. If the future is full of numbskulls like you two, I’ll die content knowing I won’t be around to see it.”
Professor Dumont enters the cabin, wearing a bath towel.
Dumont: “You’ve got the hardest water I’ve ever seen.”
Korogi, waking: “I’m Chinese.”
A little later, as Korogi is digging around in the sock drawer, Dumont shouts up the stairs, “There are snowy footprints all over your parlour carpet.”
Korogi (blinking): “Huh.”
Jacinthe shows up at Jake’s room.
“I’m going to the movies. You coming?”
“What’s showing?”
“Buster Keaton’s The Aviator followed by Shanghai Return Ticket with Marlene Dietrich, Wallace Beery and Anna Mae Wong.”
He waves his cell phone. “Seen ‘em.”
She makes a Dizzy Gillespie face of exasperation.
Jake: “But Dwayne asked Agnes.”
“Oh! Good!” On second thought: “Where’s he from anyway?”
“Restigouche. Why?”
“Just checking.”
At the theatre Agnes is wearing her grandmother’s mink coat.
Dwayne: “You look pretty hot in that.”
Agnes: “Why, thank you!”
Dwayne: “No, I mean overheated. Aren’t you sweating?”
Agnes: “No, I am not.”
They go in.
The first show is Keaton’s Aviator, a twenty-minute two-reeler from 1923. Keaton plays an unemployed drifter who, through a series of mistakes of identity, winds up in charge of a U.S. Postal Service biplane. He has never flown an airplane in his life, but gamely works it out as he goes along. He gets a lot of good, though clearly dangerous, physical comedy out of trying to get contact with the propeller. The two things to bear in mind with Buster Keaton are: 1) gravity is funny; and 2), he expresses emotions with his body instead of his face. Dwayne, who has never seen any of his films before, is completely taken aback, and laughs his head off.
Agnes: “Sh!”
Dwayne: “But . . .”
Agnes: “Shh.”
Dwayne: “It’s like . . .”
Agnes: “Sh!!!! You’re disturbing everyone!”
Dwayne: “But it’s a silent movie!”
Agnes; “Then be silent!”
By the second picture Dwayne has learned the rules of going out with Agnes and there’s less trouble. Shanghai Return Ticket, sequel to Shanghai Express, involves a trainload of Europeans moving through the China of the Warlords Era, plus Anna Mae Wong. Wallace Beery in a Fu Manchu moustache plays General Wu P’ei-Fu, leader of the Chihli faction. After about an hour Dwayne begins to squirm. Agnes quiets him the first few times by putting her hand on his arm, but ultimately she’s forced to grab him by the coat.
Dwayne: “Where’s Jackie Chan?”
Agnes: “He’s not in this picture!”
On screen:
General Wu: “So you claim to know nothing of the Spring Snow Jade?”
Shanghai Lili: “That’s not the kind of secret that gets me interested.”
The next day, about lunchtime, Jacinthe puts her key into her door. There’s a kerfuffle inside. She goes in and notices there are two people in Agnes’s bed, both hauling the blanket up to cover their heads but baring their lower parts in the process.
Jacinthe: “Oh! Oh!! Bare ass!! I don’t need to see that!!”
They catch hold of the blanket with their toes and pull it down, and peek out over the top. Agnes and Dwayne.
Jacinthe collects her books and goes.
“My work here is done.”
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