24. LIYAN WAS NOT HERE

LIYAN WAS NOT HERE. The night before, the pair had had a violent row about the flute. Liyan wanted Elle to open the flute case, put the flute together and play a tune. Elle had squarely refused. It was completely out of the question to play the flute in this tiny bedroom of the first floor. Out of the question. Liyan thereupon was brooding, hidden in the army sleeping bag.

- "You are the one who advised me not long ago NOT to open up the flute case as long as we were in Auckland!"

- "Yes but I badly want to talk to her."

- "No way."

Yohitchi wanted to go to the beach.

- "The beach?... On foot, it won't be possible. Let's walk down to Quay Street and then we'll see."

Elle would have liked to visit the maritime museum on the quay, but thought promptly that it had no interest whatsoever for a blindman. Hand in hand they wandered, mingled in the Auckland crowd on a sunny day of May at the end of summer. Autumn hadn't reach Auckland yet. She thought that further north it would be even warmer.

At the bottom of the street in a shopping arcade she led Yohitchi in a music shop. To ask for Liyan's forgiveness she was going to buy a compact disc of flute and oboe music. She nosed about for wind instruments and managed to find one. It didn't seem terrible common. She wondered again if this inbredible love story between F'sharp and a oboe, told by Liyan, could be true.

Yohitchi was standing still behind his dark sun glasses, his white stick planted straight in front of him.

Elle went and asked if she could listen to the c.d., then came to stand by his side and listen to the music holding his hand.

Out of the music shop with a square box in a plastic bag marked Marbeck, they walked towards and along the quay, slowly, inhaling the tide's many scents, listening to the various shrieks of some arrogant city seagulls. They had to thread their way through the passengers of the Davenport ferry just arrived or between the outside tables of a restaurant. They ended up sitting on a bench in the sun, right on the edge of the sea where they could hear the lapping of the waves against the wall of the quay.

Yohitchi told her that in Japan he had recently been to a piano concert of Chopin music. The pianist, his friends had said, looked like he had ten fingers on each hand. Then he went on about his life in Tokyo since his accident.

- "How did your girlfriend react when it happened?" Elle asked.

- "I didn't have a girlfriend, I never had one," he answered with a smile.

Elle looked into his face, incredulous.

- "I was terribly shy before," he said calmly, "within a few month in the same year, I became blind and I knew a woman. I was very reserved, an introvert, when I could see. I drove a sports car... typed on a computer's keyboard... Now I am self assured. I live in a flat in Tokyo and I came to New Zealand to better my English."

He would stop and then resume his narration. Elle, leaning against him, was looking at the boats moving in the harbour. The idea of spending the night with him came across her mind. But terror overcame her when she thought of his gaping and burnt eyes that she would have to look straight at.

And when, approaching the hostel after their long walk, Yohitchi felt Elle's hand grip him, he said: "A penny for your thoughts?", she shook her head and replied: "No, nothing, nothing at all."