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CHAPTER 1

At some point, I got lost. The mountains were gloomy, the sun just about to set, and I'd suddenly emerged on to a path that was covered in a strange kind of undergrowth, hard like artificial grass, jutting out at sharp angles, yet somehow soft at the same time. There was the faint smell of animals. I thought I could feel their body heat — maybe there was an animal trail nearby. Stumbling across this path was surely a stroke of luck, and though my legs had become numb with fatigue, they could probably keep me going. If worse came to worst, I could light a fire and spend the night right here. The very next moment, however, the ground started to move beneath me, like a carpet of giant black caterpillars, and I lost my footing. I fell on to my bottom, and the ground started to undulate, poking into me. Shocked and frightened, I got up and set off running blindly through the trees, forgetting how tired I was. The next thing I knew I was at the top of a slightly elevated outcrop. Breathing heavily, I looked down at what had, until a few hours previously, been a kind of paradise. The soft jet-black path had swollen into a rocky fortress. I strained to see better, and discovered that the path was actually a countless number of bears, standing on their hind legs, huddled together in formation. They seemed to be moving as one, making their way into the mountains. What's going on? Had I been walking on the backs of those bears? Running on a carpet of their hair, thick with bitumen, here and there matted in hard clumps? I was covered in sweat, but I'd lost my towel while I was running, so I couldn't dry off. I stood there dumbfounded while the bears jostled their way into the distance. Just then, a breeze carrying a fishy tidal smell came wafting from the middle of the sea of black ursine bodies, where a solitary, slightly unbalanced triangular island now appeared. I was wheezing from the exertion, and this thick, warm, salty air was blocking my airways. My throat started to hurt. I wanted some water. I wanted something cool. I looked around, and my eyes fell upon a spring sputtering out of a crack in the rock face just beneath me. Unsteadily, I crouched down and scooped some up in my hands, lifting it to my lips. Immediately, there was a gloopy sweet taste in my mouth, followed by a chill that stung the back of my throat and sent sharp, stabbing pains to the molar that I'd been too lazy to take care of. I cried out. I forgot about my thirst, about the carpet of bears, and lay down on the ground. It was all I could do to endure the intense pain in my mouth.

Through the hole in the wooden shutters, a diamond of soft sunlight shone on to the unglazed tile floor. The air in the room was fresh and clean — in fact, it was almost cool — but my body was burning up. I was also thirsty, and my right molar ached, just like it had in the dream. I wasn't sure if this was because of how I was lying on the sofa bed — with my face squashed against the back of the sofa because the bed part wouldn't open out — or because of the dream itself, which had been eerily vivid. I looked at the clock on the table. It was already half past nine. I hadn't heard Yann leave. I got up slowly and went to the bathroom, found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet — who knows how long they'd been there — and tossed a couple of tablets into a cup of water. I watched as the bubbles rushed noisily to the surface. I drank the medicine down, and it stung my tongue. Praying for relief from the pain, I turned the shower on and got under a lukewarm spray.

From the small top-hinged window, I could see a fence of wooden posts pounded into the ground at random intervals. There was no barbed wire between them, just a single thick wire that drooped untidily, like a telephone line. Apparently the nearest neighbours, who owned the vast shrub-filled land, lived on the other side of some far-off hills. There really wasn't any sign of anyone else living around here at all.

The bathroom had been built by the previous owner, a DIY buff. The floor tiles were uneven, and so water easily overflowed the drain and wet the whole bathroom floor. Still waking up, I tried my best to control the flow. My towel got soaked, and it made me think of the black carpet of bears in my dream.

I'd driven to this remote farmhouse in Normandy, speeding along gently undulating country roads lined with low trees, passing bare fields of freshly harvested wheat and pastures of cows grazing under layers of cloud. It was pure happenstance that I was here. I'd been visiting Paris after many years. I had some work I needed to do, and as a result, I spent most of my days alone. I'd wanted to see friends I used to hang out with, but most had proper jobs now and I was hesitant to get in touch during the heavy period just before their summer holidays. Eventually, I managed to get most of my work done, and found myself with a bit of free time. That was when I thought of Yann, who was a perpetual freelancer, unbound by a company schedule. I hadn't heard anything from him for two years, so I tried ringing him at his parents' home. His father, whom I'd met on several occasions, answered the phone. His voice became animated when I introduced myself. He remembered me well. We chatted for a while, then I asked if he knew how I could reach Yann as he never replied to my letters. His father laughed, saying that Yann never wrote to his parents either. Then he told me that Yann had left Paris two years ago and had put down anchor in a small village in Normandy.

"I've never visited, so I don't know what kind of house it is," he said. "It sounds like it's really in the sticks, though."

He gave me Yann's number and advised me to call late as otherwise he probably wouldn't be there. I knew that Yann worked part-time a few months a year, and used the money he earned to travel and take photos, but I hadn't expected him to move out of his studio in the Paris suburbs — it'd been perfect for him. I waited until much later that night before ringing, only to get the answering machine on every try. I finally left him a message with my hotel phone number, and early the next morning Yann called, his voice sounding quite like his father's, just a little higher.

"I'm sorry," he began. "I got all your letters. They were forwarded to me. I should have replied, but there's been a lot going on." And then he told me he was going to Ireland the next morning and would be there for twenty days.

I only had two weeks before I needed to head home, so if we were going to meet, it had to be today.

"I'd like to go and meet you in Paris right now," Yann said, "but I need to sort out my travel plans and stuff. If it's OK with you, how about we meet somewhere outside Paris? Caen, maybe? It takes about two hours by train. I can drive there in about ninety minutes, if I put my foot down. We'll have something to eat, and this way we'll at least get to see each other."

If we missed this chance, we probably wouldn't meet again for several years. I didn't have any plans that afternoon, and a two-hour train ride to spend the day with a friend didn't seem like a bad idea. The only work I still had to do was a synopsis of a novel that might be translated, but I could do that anywhere. In fact, a change of scene could even boost my productivity. I didn't bother checking out of my hotel, and just packed a rucksack. I went to the station and bought a ticket, then I called Yann to let him know when I'd be arriving.

It was the weekend, and the train was crowded. I read for a while, but then a tall student joined me in my compartment. We exchanged a few words, and before long he was telling me about his hometown, Villedieules-Poêles — it turned out that he was on his way there. Ville means "town", dieu means "God", and poêle means "pan", so I asked him if this was a town where God had fried something in a pan. He chuckled, then explained that poêle can refer to copper products in general, and that the town had been at the heart of France's metalwork industry for centuries. Even though there were no copper mines in the area, it had become famous as the place where the bronze for the country's church bells was cast. As we were talking, a little boy who'd been poking his head into every compartment in the carriage took an interest in us, and without hesitation sat himself down. He was called Iywan, an old Norman name, and once the ice was broken, he started talking to us as if we were old friends. We ended up talking with him for a long time, answering every question he asked. We played a game where we were supposed to guess who he was thinking about. He'd give us hints that didn't make any sense and sit there laughing to himself, and then change the subject completely and start talking about school. He declared proudly that he had a computer and that he took three different sports classes a week. He also said he wasn't interested in regular girls — only filles de passion. He then blushed, and I made a mental note that this word was now in the vocabulary of primary school children in the countryside. When I told him I was from Japan, he looked shocked, and asked me, repeatedly, why my eyes weren't slanted upwards. I told him that there were all sorts of faces in the world — some with eyes that slanted upwards, others with eyes that drooped down.

"Your eyes look like this," I told him, pulling at the corner of my eyes to slant them downwards. He didn't respond to this. Instead he leaned against the armrest of the seat, swinging his legs, and announced, apropos of nothing, that when he grew up he was going to be a veterinarian or a computer scientist.

"Veterinarians and computer scientists are pretty different —" I began to say.

"Well, I'm going to be a veterinarian or a computer scientist," he said quickly. Maybe he thought he was being made fun of, as he soon stood up and walked out of our compartment.

"Kids in Normandy tend to like animals, so lots of them want to be veterinarians," the student said. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be a veterinarian or a fireman." He smiled gently, as though he were making excuses for the boy. "Everyone's got a dream," he added.

This reminded me of something I'd happened to see on TV at the hotel — a currant-picking contest — and I decided to tell the student about it. The contest was to see who could pick the most currants within a given time-limit. Contestants had to use tweezers, and they had to be careful not to crush the currants. It was a local event in this village, and an old woman was the winner. Apparently her mother had won the championship years before, so she was delighted she could write the names of two generations of her family in the history books. It had been her dream. Everybody indeed does have one, it seemed.

"I had a friend whose dream was to win the Camembert-throwing championship," the student said.

"A Camembert-throwing championship?"

"We lived in a dairy-farming area. We'd take an old Camembert and throw it like a discus, competing to see who could get it the furthest."

An image floated into my mind: a beautiful ancient Greek statue of a man, knees bent slightly, preparing to launch his discus.

"And did your friend achieve his dream?"

"He did."

"What was the winning distance?"

"57.38 metres."

I fell silent. The men's discus world record must have been something like that, and even though a Camembert didn't weigh as much as a two-kilo discus, 57 metres was still an incredible distance. And there was no way that he could have cheated. If he'd turned away from the judges in a crouch and nibbled the cheese to make it lighter, his deception would have been revealed as soon as the Camembert hit the ground. He'd thrown it that far, fair and square. I imagined the Camembert catching a breeze and sailing in a majestic arc across the sky, and I felt strangely moved. Then, still thinking about the cheese, I stood up, shook hands with my good-natured student friend and got off the train. I'd reached my destination. Just after three in the afternoon, Yann and I were reunited.

There was quite a crowd of passengers, but he managed to spot me, and raised his hand in greeting. The little bit of hair he'd once had was gone, and his scalp gleamed with an almost pure white light. In addition to shaving his head, he'd had the lobes of his distinctively pointy ears pierced and was sporting a pair of earrings that I could never have imagined him wearing before. The shape of his head seemed chiselled, with his deep eye sockets — though that may have been because the exit from the station was in the shade. It had been many years since we'd last seen each other, and so things were a little awkward at first, but after I'd got into the passenger seat of his pickup truck, it soon started to feel like old times and all the blank years in between just disappeared.

"It must be about five years since we had a proper chat," I said.

Yann took one hand off the steering wheel, and wagged his index finger. He made a theatrical clucking sound with his tongue. "I've been thinking about when we last spoke," he said. "It was before you went back to Japan. You called me from some hotel."

In which case, it must have been even longer since we'd seen each other.

"I'd just started that job at the quarry. Do you remember? I took all those photos of stones and brought them to show you."

"Yeah. You gave me a photo as a farewell gift actually. It was a close-up shot, but I didn't really understand it. It was of this big stone wall, with the stones joined together roughly. It wasn't a photographic print, though. It was photocopied, but the quality was really good."

"Yeah, in those days I used the photocopier's 'photo mode' to save money. And I think I took that photo in one of the old quarries from this area. There's a granite quarry and factory not so far from my house. The granite industry is on its last legs now, but it won't be allowed to die out completely — they wouldn't be able to repair the pavements in the big cities if it did. I still work there sometimes. I don't get paid, though. The workers let me take their photos instead."

His voice and his accent were exactly the same as I remembered, but the rays of sunlight that were popping out between the clouds and catching on his silver earrings were putting me on edge. We'd been driving around near the station, looking for somewhere inviting to eat. The area was full of cheap-looking restaurants designed to attract summer tourists, and their terraces were deserted now that the lunch hour was over. The main shopping street looked like it had been built from papier mâché. Nowhere looked like a very good place to eat.

"Whose bright idea was it to meet here ...?" I said, half-joking.

I was obviously feeling comfortable enough with Yann if I could say something like this. But it turned out that Yann himself had hardly visited the town either, so he knew about as much as I did.

"Still, if this is a station on a main rail line, why is it so bleak around here?" I now asked.

"Most of the buildings were bombed during the war. The town tried to restore them, but they could only manage this fake stuff. It could be a lot worse, you know," Yann replied very seriously. Then, after a pause, he said, "It's a shame you don't have more time. You could have come to my place. Actually, though, why don't you just come anyway and catch the last train back? Or if you don't have to go back to your hotel tonight, you could stay the night and leave with me first thing in the morning. You could even stay longer, if you like. It's a great place for writing. Quiet."

"Writing" wasn't quite an accurate word for what I did. I did piecework, translating a part of a book and then writing a synopsis of the plot so that an editor could decide whether to publish the full translation. Since arriving in Paris, I'd finished off two synopses of novels that I wasn't feeling very enthusiastic about. In any case, all I had in my rucksack, apart from the essentials, was a concise French-Japanese dictionary, another book I really didn't need to rush with, and a notebook. This was supposed to be only a day trip, so I hadn't even packed a change of clothes. But my interest had been piqued by the granite factory that Yann seemed to know well, and so I started to think that if I could check the place out, I wouldn't mind extending my stay a bit.

"Are we going past the quarry and the factory?"

"Sure. We probably can't go in, though, because it's the weekend. Anyway, shall we?"

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Bear and the Paving Stone"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Toshiyuki Horie.
Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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