14/09/01

Ishmael Chambers was out walking aimlessly in the snow, admiring it and remembering. The trial of Kabuo Miyamoto had brought that world back for him.
Inside their cedar tree, for nearly four years, he and Hatsue had held one another with the dreamy contentedness of young lovers. With their coats spread against a cushion of moss they'd stayed as long as they could after dusk and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The tree produced a cedar perfume that permeated their skin and clothes. They would enter, breathe deeply, then lie down and touch each other - the heat of it and the cedar smell, the privacy and the rain outside, the slippery softness of their lips and tongues inspired in them the temporary illusion that the rest of the world had disappeared; there was nobody and nothing but the two of them.
[...]
Sometimes at night he would squeeze his eyes shut and imagine how it might be to marry her. It did not seem so farfetched to him that they might move to some other place in the world where this would be possible. He liked to think about being with Hatsue in some place like Switzerland or Italy or France. He gave his whole soul to love; he allowed himself to believe that his feelings for Hatsue had been somehow preordained. He had been meant to meet her on the beach as a child and then to pass his life with her. There was no other way it could be.
[...]
Later they lay side by side against the moss, looking up into the darkened cedar wood with their hands folded behind their heads. 'This can't go on,' whispered Hatsue. 'Don't you worry about that?'
'I know,' answered Ishmael. 'You're right.'
'What will we do? What's the answer.'
'I don't know,' said Ishmael. 'There isn't one, it looks like.'
'I heard a rumour,' Hatsue replied. 'There's a fisherman who claims to have seen a German submarine just off Amity Harbor. A periscope - he followed it for half a mile. Do you think that can be true?'
'No,' said Ishmael. 'It isn't true. People will believe anything - they're scared, I guess. It's just fear, is all. They're afraid.'
'I'm afraid too,' said Hatsue. 'Everybody's afraid right now.'
'I'm going to be drafted,' answered Ishmael. 'It's something I just have to face.'
They sat in their cedar three thinking about this, but the war still seemed far away. The war did not disturb them there, and they continued to view themselves as exceedingly fortunate in the particulars of their secret existence. Their absorption in one another, the heat of their bodies, their mingling smells and the movements of their limbs - these things shielded them from certain truths. Yet sometimes at night Ishmael Chambers would lie awake because there was a war on in the world. He would turn his thoughts toward Hatsue then and keep them there until at the verge of sleep the war swam back to spill forth horribly in his dreams.

[excerpt - Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson]