The Lamp

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The lamp was set up in the square in the year before Aiko was born, raised on a post of cedar by men who had come from elsewhere and who explained, as they were fitting the glass, that it was a gift and that it would burn without being fed. The elders assembled on the wet stones and watched it come on at dusk. It was nothing dramatic. A steady light where there had been dark, and a warm circle on the ground under it, and the moths that found it within the hour.

No one argued about who deserved it or who deserved to be free of it. A light in the square was a good thing, plainly. The children liked it. The old women said it was easier to come home from the well after sundown. Within a year no one could remember what the square had looked like without it.

Aiko was born in the house behind the stonecutter’s wall. She grew up with the lamp burning all her evenings, and she did not notice it, because it had always been there, and because by the time she was old enough to ask about it her mother had already sent her up the path to bring rice gruel to the old woman in the house at the end of the lane.

The old woman was not the teacher of the village. She was not the midwife, or the seer, or anyone in particular. She had been the wife of a man who had been dead for a long time. She had outlived her children. Her hands were spotted and thin. She did not say much, and what she said was sometimes not quite to the point, and the villagers who remembered her had begun to forget her in the ordinary way, and the villagers who had come up after her husband died had never quite known her in the first place. Aiko’s mother had brought her the rice gruel for years. When Aiko was six her mother sent her instead, because Aiko’s mother had a new baby and the stairs up the lane were steep.

The old woman’s name was Nao. Aiko called her obāsan because she did not know what else to call her. Nao sat on a woven mat near the door when the weather was good and near the hearth when it was not, and she took the bowl in both hands, and sometimes she said the bowl was warm and sometimes she said the child was good and sometimes she said nothing, and Aiko sat with her until the bowl was empty and then walked back down the lane.

This was the year Aiko was six. It was also the year the men came back and fitted a second post beside the first, and raised a second lamp, so that the square had two lights now and the warm circle on the ground under them joined into a larger circle that reached almost to the edges of the square. The villagers were pleased. The elders said the square was safer. The young men said it was easier to play go in the evenings. No one thought anything about it except that it was better now than it had been.

By the time Aiko was twelve the lamps were a matter of pride. The men from elsewhere came back twice a year to polish the glass and replace the fittings, because no one in the village knew how the lamps were made or what they burned, and the village paid a small sum for this service and was glad to pay it. An awning was built out from the teahouse wall to keep rain off the base of the nearer post. The evening meal in the village had shifted by half an hour, because now one could sit outside after supper under the lights and it was pleasant, and the fields could be worked a little longer at the other end of the day. The shrine at the edge of the village, which had once been lit at dusk by a girl from the nearest house, was not lit anymore. No one had decided not to light it. The girl had grown up and moved away and the next girl had not been asked, because the lamp in the square made the shrine’s small oil-flame look poor, and because the shrine was in any case a little out of the way, and because, and because.

Aiko continued to go up the lane to Nao.

She went in the morning now, with the day’s bowl, because her schoolwork and her other chores had arranged themselves around the ways the village had begun to organize itself around the lamps, and morning was the time she had. Nao was slower to take the bowl than she had been. Aiko began to help her eat, guiding the bowl to her mouth, wiping her chin. Nao did not thank her. Nao looked at her sometimes with a look that Aiko did not know how to read, and which Aiko came later to suspect had not been a look for her in particular but a look that happened to have her in its path.

When Aiko was fifteen the village raised a third lamp, this one on the steps of the hall where the elders met. The elders had not asked for it. The young men who installed it explained that the men who had brought the first two lamps were offering it to villages that had kept the first two lamps well, and that to refuse it would be to insult the gift, and that besides, the hall steps were dark, and it was difficult to find one’s sandals after a meeting. The elders agreed. The third lamp was lit.

In the same year the village converted the wing behind the hall into a house for its old people. It had been proposed for some time. The old had been living in their own houses with their families, or, in the case of those whose families had gone, with whichever neighbor had the room and the patience, and this had always worked and had always not-quite-worked, and the new arrangement was an improvement upon it in most of the ways that could be named. The wing had a stove that was kept going. It had a woman who came daily to wash and cook. It had a doctor from the next village who looked in once a month. The old people who moved there were better fed and better warmed than they had been, and those among their children who had been tending them were relieved of a labor they had not known how to ask to be relieved of, and which they discovered, once relieved, they were glad to have laid down. When the hall opened, the woman who came daily to wash and cook walked up each lane in turn to see who should be brought. She walked up Nao’s lane. Aiko was at the gate that morning with the bowl in her hands, because it was morning and she had come with the bowl every morning for nine years. The daily woman asked her, pleasantly, whether the old woman in the house had family. Aiko said her mother had sent her with breakfast since she was six. The daily woman asked whether the old woman needed looking after, because there was a place for her at the hall. Aiko said I bring her breakfast every morning. The daily woman, who was efficient and who had many houses to visit, made a small note in a book and went on up the lane to the next house. Nao stayed. Aiko did not know, then, and was not sure later, whether she had refused the hall or simply reported on her mornings. The two were not, in the moment, distinguishable to her. She had said the true thing that was in her hands. The daily woman had heard what she heard. That night there was a small festival in the square, and the villagers stood under the three lights and drank and sang, and the circle of dark around the village pulled back by another few paces, and no one mentioned that the stars above the square were harder to see than they had been, because the stars had never been a topic the village discussed, and the absence of a topic is not a thing anyone notices the absence of.

Aiko was at the festival. She drank a little. She sang. She walked home a little unsteady and her mother teased her and she went to bed. In the morning, before the singing in her head had quieted, she took the bowl up the lane, and Nao took it in both hands.

Her friends asked her, in the months that followed, why she still went. The hall was there. Nao could have been brought; the daily woman had offered. Aiko said that she went because she had gone the morning before, and the morning before that, and that Nao was expecting her. Her friends accepted this because it was the kind of answer one gave about a chore that had calcified into a habit, and they did not press. She did not say, because she did not have the words, that what had calcified was not a chore, and that what she had said to the daily woman at the gate had been the true thing that was in her hands and she was not sure even now what else she could have said, and that she did not think Nao should be brought to the hall, and that she did not think this because there was something wrong with the hall — the hall was a good thing, plainly, the old people there were warm and fed — but because the thing she was doing with Nao was not the same thing the hall did, and had no name that would have distinguished it, and she did not have the language to explain a distinction for which the village had no word.

In the summer of Aiko’s twenty-fourth year the shrine at the edge of the village was cleared. It had been half-fallen for some time, and a traveling monk had not visited in anyone’s memory, and the decision was made without ceremony, by the council which now met under the third lamp, that the small plot could better serve as a warehouse to support the larger granary the village kept. Aiko walked that way one morning on an errand and came around the bend and the shrine was not there. The stones had been taken. The cedar posts were stacked for firewood. Two men were putting up a frame. Aiko stood in the road for a while. Then she went on with her errand, because the errand had not changed, and she could not think what would have been accomplished by staying.

Something had happened, though. She registered it the way one registers a cold draft. There had been a place where a girl used to light a small flame at dusk. The place was gone. Not moved, not reduced, not fallen down — gone. She tried, walking on, to remember the name of the girl who had done the lighting, and could not, and tried to remember when she had last heard anyone in the village speak of the shrine, and could not. She had not been going to the shrine either. She had not kept that practice alive. Her lane was the only lane she walked, and she walked it, and that was all. She thought, without quite letting herself think it, that her own lane might one day be a piece of ground the village decided to put something else on, and that there would be two men putting up a frame, and that someone perhaps would stop in the road for a moment. Or no one would.

She grew. She married a quiet man named Isamu, who was a carpenter and who did not ask her why she went up the lane each morning, because he had noticed before they were married that she went, and had decided, without announcing the decision, that this was a thing about her he was not going to try to understand and was going to support. They had two children. Aiko continued to go to Nao. Her daughter went with her sometimes, when she was small, and sat on the woven mat and played with a wooden fish that had been one of Nao’s husband’s carvings, fifty years before, and Nao watched the child play and sometimes smiled and sometimes did not.

Nao died in the spring of Aiko’s thirty-first year.

She died in the afternoon. Aiko had come in the morning as usual, and when she had come in Nao had looked at her for a long time without any expression Aiko could place, and had then asked where Yumiko was. Yumiko had been Nao’s daughter. Yumiko had been dead for twenty-six years. Aiko had said that Yumiko was not here this morning, and Nao had accepted this and had taken the bowl in both hands, and had eaten a little, and had put the bowl down, and her hand had closed on Aiko’s wrist and had stayed there — whether deliberately, whether as the kind of clutch a body makes when something passes near it, Aiko could not tell, because Nao’s face had not changed — and had then let go. Aiko had gone home and done the morning’s work. In the afternoon she went back for the bowl, which she had left on the mat; she had done this sometimes, when she was busy, and walked up the lane a second time at the end of the day to retrieve it. She came in, and Nao was where she had been that morning, and the bowl was where she had left it. No one had been up the lane. There was no one to have been up the lane. She sat with the body until the sun moved off the far wall. Then she walked down to the square and told the council, and the council sent two men up with her in the evening to carry Nao to the place where she would be prepared.

There was no one to inherit the house. The village council, which met under the third lamp, discussed what to do with it. A young couple was given the house. They cleaned it. They threw out the woven mat, because it was old. They found the wooden fish in a drawer and did not recognize it and gave it to their child, who broke it within the month.

Aiko did not claim the fish. She did not know about it. She did not go back to the house. There was no longer a reason to go up the lane, and she did not invent one, and she did not replace the practice with a symbolic version of the practice, because the practice had never been symbolic. It had been feeding. Now there was no one to feed.

She thought, in the weeks after, that she had expected to feel something she was not feeling. She had expected grief, or hollowness, or the sense of a door closed. What she felt was something quieter and more troubling. She thought about the morning. About Nao asking for Yumiko. About the hand on her wrist, which she had carried home in her as if it were a sign and which, examined even the next day, might have been no more than an old body’s reflex. She had told herself, over the years without ever quite putting it into words, that Nao knew her, that Nao received the bowl as a gift and not as food, that something passed between them over the woven mat that was a kind of speaking without speech. She realized, in the weeks after, that she had no way to know any of this. Nao had not said so. Nao had not, on the last morning, known her. It was possible — it was fully possible — that the relationship Aiko believed she had had was a thing Aiko had built, privately and with no witness, around the daily fact of bringing rice to an old woman who ate it because it was put in front of her.

It was possible that the twenty-five years had formed her. It was also possible that she had formed a story about the twenty-five years, and that the story had formed her, and that the formation was a formation of her own making and not a gift received from anyone.

She had no way to settle this. The one person who could have settled it was in the ground, and had not been entirely sure who Aiko was on the last morning in any case. Aiko sat with the uncertainty for a long time. She did not, in the end, find a resolution to it. She found, instead, that her hands went on doing what they had learned to do whether or not the learning had been what she thought it was. She fed her children. She fed Isamu. She fed a sick neighbor who needed help for a month. The feeding had passed into her hands, and her hands did not care whether it had been given to them or whether they had found it on their own. The hands only knew how to feed. What she had wanted to believe — that Nao had given her something — was a belief whose truth she could not check. What she had was the hands. The hands were hers. This was perhaps less than she had thought she had, and it was perhaps all anyone ever had, and she did not know which.

In the square the lamps burned. A fourth was added. An awning was built over the whole square. The festival grew. Travelers came to see the village’s lights. A writer from the city wrote a small book in which he described the village as an example of a certain kind of progress. The villagers tend their lamps with great pride, he wrote, and the phrase was repeated at the teahouse with pleasure because it was felt to be accurate. The book was passed around and the elders were pleased.

Aiko read a page of the book and set it down.

When her daughter was sixteen her daughter came to her and said that she did not know what was wrong with her. She said that the festival had been that night, and that she had gone, and that everyone had been happy, and that she had been standing under the lights with her friends and had felt a thing she could not name and had come home. She said she did not want what her friends wanted. She said she did not know what she wanted instead. She said she was afraid there was something broken in her.

Aiko did not say what she might have said in another kind of story. She did not explain the lamps. She did not tell her daughter about Nao. She said, there is an old woman I used to bring rice to. She has been dead a long time. Would you like to come with me tomorrow and I will show you where her house was.

They went in the morning. The house had been lived in and then left and then lived in again and was now empty, because the young couple had moved to a house nearer the square, and the lane was quieter than it had been. Aiko stood with her daughter at the gate. She did not go in. She pointed out where Nao had sat in good weather and where she had sat in bad. She said I brought her a bowl every morning for a long time. Her daughter asked why. Aiko said because I had brought her one the morning before. Her daughter was quiet for a while and then asked if there was someone like that now. Aiko said I don’t know. Probably. There usually is.

Her daughter, over the months that followed, began to walk somewhere in the evenings. Aiko did not ask where. It was not Nao’s lane. It was something of her own, arrived at by her own feet, and Aiko did not ask about it and did not interfere, because she understood that what she had given her daughter was not the practice but the permission. Her daughter kept this, whatever it was, for some years. In her early twenties her daughter married a young man from the next village who worked as an accountant for the men who maintained the lamps, and her daughter moved to a house nearer the square, and the demands of that house and of her husband’s work and of the children who came were what her daughter’s days became. The walking fell away. It did not end; it thinned. Aiko watched it thin over the course of perhaps five years, by which point her daughter no longer walked in the evenings at all, and had perhaps forgotten that she had once walked. Aiko did not say anything to her daughter, because there was nothing to say that would not have sounded like reproach, and her daughter had not earned reproach. The form Aiko’s own practice had taken was no longer a form available to her daughter; the old people were in the hall now, and there was no old woman at the end of any lane for a daughter to bring a bowl to, and the lanes the daughter might have walked were lanes of her own invention, unsupported by any old shape that had once made such walking legible. She had given her daughter permission. She had not been able to give her a world.

Aiko’s grandchildren grew up under the lamps. They were good children. They did well in their schooling. They did not know who Nao had been, because no one had told them, and there was no way to tell them that would have made Nao anything other than a name. The conditions under which Nao had been a person one fed in the morning were conditions the children had never seen. Aiko did not tell them. It would have been a kind of violence, she came to think, to hand them a word whose meaning had been abolished. She loved them. She loved them without passing on what she had carried, because there was no longer a way to pass it on that would not have been received as an old woman’s eccentricity, and her love did not want to burden them with the shape of her eccentricity.

Aiko lived to be old. The lamps multiplied. The sky above the village was by her last years a kind of white haze at night, and the old lanes were weedy, and the village was prosperous and well-lit and had been written about in three more books. None of this troubled her, or troubled her less than she had expected it to, because her quarrel had never been with the lamps. She had not had a quarrel. She had had a lane, and a bowl, and an old woman who may or may not have known she was there, and the shape the walking had left in her, which she could not verify and would not now verify, because there was no one left who could have confirmed any of it, and she had found she could live without confirmation.

In the last year of her life a young man she did not know came to her door. He said he had heard from her daughter that she had once tended someone. He said he did not know why he was asking. He said there was something he could not name about his own life and he thought perhaps she might. Aiko made him tea. She did not tell him about Nao. She asked him if there was anyone in his village whom no one was tending, and the young man thought for a while and said yes, he thought there was, an old man who had taught his father something once and whom no one visited now. Aiko said you might take him a bowl of something tomorrow. If you do it again the day after, you will begin to find out what you came here to ask me.

The young man left. Aiko sat on the porch for a long time after he had gone. She did not know if he would go to the old man. She thought it was likely that he would try for a week or two and then would not, because the village he was going back to had its own hall by now, and the old man he had described was one of the last few who had not been brought to it, and the arrangement by which the old man remained in his own house was an arrangement everyone assumed was temporary, and nothing would be built around its temporariness, and the young man would find no one to share the going with and nothing in the shape of his days to support it. It was also possible that he would try and find he could not continue, and would blame himself. She hoped, if he blamed himself, that he would eventually stop. The blame would not be his.

She died in her bed in the autumn. Isamu was gone by then. Her daughter sat with her at the end and took her hand, which Aiko had not expected and had not asked for, and her daughter held it the way Nao had once held Aiko’s wrist — or the way Aiko had believed, for forty years, that Nao had held her wrist, which perhaps was the same thing and perhaps was not. When the moment came her daughter was still holding. She kept holding for a while after. The holding was not finished yet.

What Aiko had carried was buried with her. The village did not know that anything had been buried, because the village had not known that anything had been carried. Her daughter would forget, in the ordinary way, over years, what the holding had meant — or would remember it privately, without passing it on, which amounted in the end to the same thing in a world that no longer had the shape to receive it. A lane at the far end of the village, overgrown now, went on being a lane in the sense that it was still a strip of ground between two hedges, but it was not a lane in any sense that required a person at the end of it. The lamps in the square burned. They were very bright.