The Art of Kozu Page 9

  Close to dusk, Petrus’ transport arrived and the Chinaman, along with five others – three of whom looked French – were dragged down from the truck. Their legs hung limp, their knees banged against the tailgate, but Petrus for one seemed beyond caring. He and his compatriots were taken out into the expanse of grass in the middle of the racecourse, to what resembled a parade square, a shielded spot, what with the dim light, the distance from the perimeter, the lines of tents. Nobody outside the compound would able to see what was going on. Honma was careful that way. He liked to keep about him the mystique of power. He didn’t go in for public executions, the displaying of the head afterwards. He said it was foolish to incite the locals with such tactics.

  A tarpaulin was laid out flat on the grass in the square’s centre, a guard standing on each of its corners, his rifle slung or leaning against his body. Homemade cigarettes smoked on their lips, between their fingers. The soldiers’ uniforms were dirty, dark with sweat and rain and the job of moving the dead from ox-drawn carts into the tents, onto the cots prepared for them. From the square faces of these men, they looked to be of country stock and ill-educated. Seen from under the cover of the command tent, their combined weight preventing the wind from getting underneath the oiled canvas covering and rolling it over, I imagined them muttering obscenities about their orders, how the cots were a waste of precious resources, cussing about Kozu, but mindful of their words regarding Honma, as if the rain itself could pass on their words to the major’s ears. These details I remember distinctly Doctor, though in memory, everything seems brighter than it could possibly have been, what with that dark sky and the smell of wet soil. But then again, even lead can be polished to a gloss finish.

  When finally I followed Kozu and Honma out from under the cover, my thoughts were on Petrus and what I was finally understanding was certain to become of him -- the four guards would use the tarpaulin, of course, to scoop up Petrus’ corpse after the beheading. And yet, with this full knowledge of another’s gruesome end, would you begrudge me some selfishness Doctor? For as clear as things were for Petrus, I admit my greatest worries were over our own fearful predicament -- that some unknown power, some circumstance, would prevent Kozu from completing the major’s blasted painting of this awful scene and hence, our escape.

  The two men strode towards the execution ground, the major’s white gloves flashing with a measured rhythm. I could hear only snatches of their conversation, something about standard procedure, how if they were in China the condemned would usually dig a pit for their own remains, before standing over it. Kozu grunted his agreement.

  The guards, having disposed of their cigarettes, stood at attention. Honma and Kozu drew near, I close behind. When Petrus was dragged into the open from the other side of the square and delivered onto the tarpaulin, I swear to you Doctor, I could smell his body from where I stood. A tang, like rotten garlic.

  ‘Now, a headstrong type would swipe down with his sword, Yuichiro,’ Honma explained with a motion of his hands. ‘Doesn’t always work. You can miss. I’ve seen lungs pop out from shoulder cavities and all kinds of things.’

  Petrus’ eyes were glazed over, his cheek split, the blood sticky. He must have understood what the two officers were discussing, despite the fact he spoke no Japanese. A nod from the major and one of the guards stepped forward and pushed his rifle butt into the back of the Chinaman’s knees. Petrus slumped forward, while the guard who had brought him forth stopped his torso from keeling over.

  ‘See how the body sways, Yuichiro; you have to capture that rhythm somehow in my painting. That’s how one can miss – if you don’t concentrate, if you hesitate. That’s why you don’t swing your sword like a fool.’

  Honma turned to look at the artist.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to do this yourself? What do you say, Yuichiro? Then you could truly step inside the aura of your subject – the ecstasy that follows an execution. Don’t you believe it your duty to render such a feeling, to make it sensible? No one else has the power to do so, only you.’

  What could have been going through Kozu’s head at this point, I can see you are wondering now, as I did then. If Honma had handed you his sword, Doctor, and instructed you to do the act, would you have? What other choice would you have but to kill or to die? Are there any other choices during a time of war? I watched the fingers of Kozu’s hand tense.

  ‘This sword I put before you was crafted for such a purpose,’ the major said.

  In that moment, I thought I saw in Kozu’s eyes – not even a flicker, never did he blink -- that he was capable of murder. Not out of fear for his own life as I just put it to you now, but because he was the great Yuichiro Kozu, a man who would give and take everything for his art.

  But I was wrong.

  After a pause, Kozu said, ‘With respect Major, I must witness the shadow of rapture myself. The wound I can look on afterwards. It is your face I must watch and study.’

  Honma nodded and, satisfied, drew his sword. With a curt step, he placed the bevelled edge at the base of Petrus’ neck, the hand-guard touching the Chinaman’s skin. By the time I had lit one of Trau’s cigarettes and drawn the heat of the smoke into my lungs, Petrus’ eyes looked out across the grass, hard as marbles, as if searching for something beside Honma’s boot.

  One at a time, the five other men faced the same fate. The major’s gloves remained fantastically white throughout the whole affair.

  I should pause here, Doctor, I know, but my story is coming an end.

  A strange relief washed over me in the wake of Petrus’ execution. Kozu will surely work quickly now, I thought; Honma’s portrait is so much smaller in scale and lacking the ambition of his grand tableau for Ambassador Yoshizawa. The artist, I was sure, would finish soon, like Trau reeling off one of his green vistas. I could almost smell the sea salt, feel the deep sway of the ocean. Having made the voyage across the South China Sea in the hospital ship once, I was confident the American’s sentimentality would keep us safe. Return we would, and with a horde of paintings to keep the nation’s faith burning. Your painting, I was certain Doctor, would remain in Kozu’s stead, a gift to the Vietnamese people, a token that reminded any onlooker where the real threat was and how easily we had brushed them aside.

  I was close to euphoric. And, truth be known, I was amazed at how quickly I had adjusted to the rigours of war. How I had not embarrassed myself by vomiting. No one, I believed, had seen me look away at the last moment – their attention so much drawn to the Chinaman, to Honma’s ancient blade. And what a bathetic ending the Chinaman had met. He gave no last words, no valiant gesture of defiance. He simply knelt, swaying gently from side-to-side. I had somehow expected more at a man’s death.

  With the major now watching Kozu’s every move, every pencil stroke, the method behind his arrangement of his palette, I was left on the periphery. I wanted to go back to the villa, to get something to eat, perhaps to have a cigarette with Trau. The yoke from his and his sister’s neck had been lifted. Petrus’ death meant the villa would conceivably be his. Of course, I could foresee the military confiscating what rice stocks Petrus had stored away, and taking over the management of the distillery, but what concern were they of Trau’s? He could live out the rest of his days in luxury, his sister beside him and no longer under the heel of the Chinaman.

  How was I to return? Believe it or not, I struck out on foot. Without a guard for protection, though, my fear of ambush grew with every corner I took. Every native face appalled me. If I had carried a sword I would have drawn it. The Imperial troops I had seen on the streets after the coup were nowhere to be seen. Black clouds and rain once again stained the air over the Chinese City, like an ink wash, or burning wood.

  When I arrived at the front gate of the Yellow House, I looked upon its grandness with nothing but contempt. It was absurd to have such a building in such a country.

  At first I thought the place was empty. I called out for the maid with the pox-marked face, but received no
answer. But there was a trace of Trau on the air. I could smell solvent, and a deeper pall than turpentine at that. It was bole. As casually as Kozu on that first night in the house, I made my way along the corridor decorated with stencilled vines, to where I knew I would find the wrought iron staircase. Letting my mind wander now that I was safe from the natives outside, I imagined passing down a corridor in one of those root-buried palaces deep in the jungle.

  And if you are imagining, Doctor, that Kozu, with one painting on the go, might have finished another, you would be right -- how intuitive you are! When I reached Kozu’s studio, I lit the room’s candles and I found your painting compete, its soldier’s bayonet shining with a lustre beyond oils. In our absence, Trau had taken over from where the master artist had left off. After our summons to bear witness to his brother-in-law’s final breath, the young Viet had completed his own portrait, had lifted the painting away from the contingency of the world, not through an inspired choice of green paint, but through gold, rough overlapping shards, smelted and pummelled to a paper-thinness. The texture matched the surface of a worn bayonet well. Only, it was not really Trau’s portrait at all. What I saw before me that afternoon was a hero from a distant land. Nonetheless he had done a grand job, having stripped the paint back to the canvas, like a butcher scraping the fat and tissue from a thin bone; and he had not been left alone all that long. How Trau’s fingers must have moved with such dexterity; how they must have refused to shake, knowing full well as he did, that he was melding with a masterpiece.

  How long I waited on the balcony outside the studio for Trau to return I do not know. The canal was a hive of activity, as was the distillery. It was as if Petrus’ death never happened. The incessant call of the insects in the garden, in the nearby paddies, played on my nerves. I may have smoked one of Trau’s cigarettes, Doctor, or I may have smoked a couple.

  At some point I became aware of the sun and a presence behind me. I turned and found Trau wearing that damned old soldier’s uniform. His mouth open, but with no words coming out. He was as white

  as a ghost. He limped onto the balcony and shrank from the heat of the sun, stopping short after two

  or three shuffled paces. His clothes were soaked through with sweat. Behind him, to my horror, the young Viet left a slick of blood across the bedroom’s floorboards.

  ‘You’re not hurt?’ I asked, confused, unable to formulate a straight question. My mind drew a blank at the sight of the blood, the boy’s pale skin. Trau had been with us during the air raid. I remembered that. He had even made some dry quip about forgetting his matches, when we pulled ourselves from that makeshift grave by the dyke and looked upon the devastation along the canal. I had watched him and Kozu and his sister return to the house to check on Petrus, despite the fact that the place survived with little more damage than some loosened roof tiles.

  ‘Did the Kenpeitai take you? Did they hurt you?’

  He shook his head. At that moment, his strength gave out and he fell. I reached down and touched the bloodied rag wrapped around his left foot, unable to believe my own eyes. I prized apart and unwound the layers the material, to find a raw, oozing stump. His big toe was missing.

  It would take Trau two days to regain consciousness, waking as he did in the Japanese military hospital near the Docks de Saigon. Kozu was with him when he came to. Only then did we find out what had transpired. Trau, Kozu’s willing and able apprentice, had taken a chisel and hammer to his own body. To sever the big toe of his left foot at – you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor – what is called the medial joint.

  Such a mutilation, Kozu told me while we smoked on the deck of the hospital ship afterwards, was the mark of a thief in the village where he and his sister came from, out in the rice-growing lowlands east of Saigon. With no big toe, a thief could not hope to slink away into obscurity. His identity was forfeit. Everywhere he went afterwards his mark would follow, quite literally, in his footsteps, along every path, between every house, along all the byways that connected one village to another. There he would stand, long after he had walked away, his presence pressed into the red dust like a glyph in a printing press.

  ‘But that does not explain why he did it,’ I said.

  Kozu tossed his butt into the sea. ‘It was the gold leaf.’

  The master artist went on to explain to me, how, in order to finish Kozu’s portrait the young artist went on the hunt for gold. Without it, the bayonet would be incomplete. The painting’s soldier, indeed Trau himself, would not transfigure. So, the young Viet broke into Petrus’ bureau, and stole what he needed, believing all the while, Doctor, that his transgression was a crime of little consequence. What was one pair of cufflinks from Petrus’ bureau? The man had plenty to spare. Trau broke the gold disks into flakes with the same chisel that would later carve through his flesh and bone, before heating them up, making them soft enough to flatten. The roughness of the process, Doctor, the imperfect finish, the crude application to the canvas: look what they did for that blade. How striking it is.

  You are right Doctor. He completed the painting and then the Kenpeitai came for Petrus, while we were engaged at Honma’s green house. According to Trau, they arrested the Chinaman in the night, beating him across the thighs with batons when he could not understand what they said. Trau hid with Kieu upstairs, but they were not harassed. His sister never shed a tear. Her quietude horrified him. As such, the young Viet was under no illusion as to why they had come, why they took his brother-in-law away. Petrus, he knew, would disappear.

  Sat in his hospital bed, safe under Kozu’s protection, Trau confessed to the theft of the cufflinks. Fidelity demanded Trau punish himself. He had stolen from one of his own, from his family, from one of his countrymen. Kozu, of course, dismissed the young Viet’s words, the guilt they leaked.

  ‘Art is always worth the sacrifice,’ Kozu said.

  Doctor, such talk makes me nostalgic for something that should never inspire such a sentiment. Seeing your parcel there, the painting I know is wrapped up within it, I am filled with desire. I cannot give you what you want. But the thought of the Americans taking such a work away – it is unbearable. And surely enough, they will pay you a visit soon, Doctor. Of that I am sure. Botticelli looked to be a thorough man.

  It is not much, but I guess, I can make you a reduced offer. It cannot be much, but it is what little I have, perhaps just enough to cover the price of the painting’s gold leaf, that precious streak of light, which emblazons your soldier’s bayonet. Take the small sum as a token, Doctor, a sign of my good will. What else can I offer you, other than a slice or two of baked mountain yam and one last bowl of millet soup? May I suggest that you do take a little something to eat? Something warm. It is a bitter night out there, after all.