Breakfast? said Annie, standing in the doorway, rubbing her eyes.

  Yes, I said, seeing her there. Yes, I said. Thank you, I said. That would be wonderful.

  Yes.

  It was not just that Suzuki’s book had awakened something in me, deepened my understanding (or non-comprehension) of Zen. More than that, it filled me with a sense of possibility. It shone a light, showed me the kind of book (or books!) I could write myself. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and told Akio as much when I saw him the next day.

  I thought so, he said, and added that he had once heard Suzuki lecture, in Tokyo, said he was wise and kind, a true Zen man.

  Perhaps someday if we go to Japan you can meet him.

  I bowed, said I could think of nothing that would give me greater joy.

  Nothing.

  Alongside haiku, the zen writings I loved best were the koans, those unanswerable questions, madly illogical, designed to push the rational mind beyond breaking point, beyond limitation into something expansive and inclusive, an awakening to the here and now. One commentator described them as catechistic paradox, which made me smile.

  I asked Akio about the origin of the word. What did koan mean?

  He said it was from the Chinese, and literally meant public record or public document. He supposed that meant it was something official and binding, not to be challenged.

  Kind of like a legal case, with the master as judge?

  Perhaps.

  Joshu was asked, Does a dog have the Buddha nature? For various reasons, to answer Yes was wrong, and to answer No was just as wrong. It was like the old lawyer’s question, Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Answer Yes or No and it’s a hiding to nothing.

  Joshu’s answer was the single syllable Mu, meaning nothing. No-thing. The nothing that opens up when you realise the impossibility of answering Yes or No. Neither and both.

  Cutting off the Cheshire Cat’s head. The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from.

  When you’ve understood this scripture, said the Cheshire Cat, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

  Does a cat have the Buddha nature?

  Mu.

  Music. Mu-sic. Mu (Sic).

  I have always been grateful for the gift of music. We had an old upright piano at home (more or less in tune) and I had been given lessons at school where there was also an assortment of recorders, violins, a cello, even a trombone. I seemed able to get a tune out of whatever one I picked up. I recognised in myself an admirable combination of aptitude and enthusiasm (allied to dogged determination). I wanted more than anything to have instruments of my own.

  Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

  I have a letter Ma sent to me years ago.

  I so wanted to give you music, and buy you musical instruments, and we managed it somehow out of the housekeeping and your pocket money. Your dad was never mean, not really, but very careful, and rightly so.

  She added, There is much of Pa in you.

  I found that very affecting, and still do.

  I so wanted to give you music…

  Was it a memory of all that which motivated me in those early heady days in Korea? That love of music, and of musical instruments, was innate, or at least had been with me from my youngest days. But there was also my father’s practicality, even his frugality, the ability to make do and mend. So now that I could afford to buy instruments without having to penny-pinch as my mother had done, I found I preferred to buy instruments that were old and in need of repair.

  I had another excuse to buy them. Akio had told me he wanted the pupils at the school to have music lessons with the intention of forming an orchestra. Resources were limited and there were no funds for such luxuries. That was all the incentive I needed. I told him music, like poetry, was not a luxury but an absolute necessity.

  The markets were a great joy to me. I picked up old books and pottery and knick-knacks – a carved wooden Buddha, a little brass figure of Ganesh, translations of Confucius and Lao-Tsu, a hanging scroll inscribed with calligraphy which someone translated for me as Form is Emptiness. But I felt perhaps the greatest excitement when I found a musical instrument I could patch up and restore. The first one I bought was my precious silver flute, still in its hard black case lined with red velvet. The label read Boosey and Hawkes, London, which gave me a momentary sense of nostalgia. (It quickly passed). The head was intact, the mouthpiece undamaged, and I could blow a single note on it, pure and clear. (One note of Zen!) I laughed and the shopkeeper laughed too, quoted me a price. I showed him how much work it would take to make it functional. He shrugged his shoulders, noncommittal but willing. I haggled him down and we shook hands on it, laughed again. Over a few days, somehow I found the materials I would need and I set to work. I replaced missing screws, some of them irritatingly finicky. I made new finger pads, gluing them into place. I oiled the joints and the little hinges. Finally I rubbed the whole thing with silver polish, the tang of it like Brasso from my childhood, and I buffed it with a soft cloth till it shone. I pieced it together and once again played one single note, purer and clearer than before. Then I played from memory a passage from Syrinx by Debussy, not perfectly, but Annie applauded, delighted.

  After that the shopkeeper, Mr Gan, would beckon me in every time I was passing. He knew the kind of thing I was looking for and the kind of price I was willing to pay. I bought a cello and a clarinet, a second – wooden – flute and three recorders, a snare drum and two violins (one without strings – a zen fiddle!) I bought a mandolin and a balalaika, a little xylophone on a wooden base.

  Mr Gan found me amusing, thought at first I was some kind of madman, perhaps in a way that must be peculiarly western. He asked me – genuinely curious – if I had many friends who were musicians and if I was making an orchestra. I told him that might well be the end result, but initially I was buying them for boys at the school who couldn’t afford to buy instruments for themselves.

  After that he was even more helpful, kept a look-out, offered more and more instruments at knock-down prices. I bought a viola and a third violin, a trumpet and a piccolo, two more recorders, a guitar, an accordion and a trombone. I drew the line at a great beefy tuba missing its valves, in fact I thought perhaps I had bought enough (and Annie was inclined to agree). But one day Mr Gan said he had something special to show me. He indicated I should follow him through to his storeroom at the back where something sat in the middle of the floor, covered with a tattered sheet of cloth. He raised a finger in anticipation, his eyes twinkling, and with a certain amount of ceremony, a flourish worthy of a stage magician, he whipped off the cloth to reveal an old battered harmonium in a carved box-frame. I laughed out loud at the sight of it, the incongruity. How in God’s name it had ended up here was beyond me. A relic, perhaps, from some Christian enclave, a little mission-hall? I pulled up a low chair and sat in front of the keyboard. There were stops, ivory-handled, to change the tuning. The air through its reeds was driven by bellows, operated by foot pedals. I pressed down on them, tried playing a note or two and it wheezed and groaned into life, making me laugh again. It would take a great deal of work but I was sure I could make it sing.

  Mr Gan had it loaded onto a cart and delivered to my home, placed in the middle of the workshop. I saw him looking round at all the other instruments he had sold me, in various states of repair, dismantled and reassembled, and for a moment I saw it through his eyes, as if the harmonium might be the centrepiece in some infernal Heath-Robinson contraption, not a one man band but a one man orchestra.

  He looked beyond the room, out through the window to the little field at the back of the house, took in the menagerie out there, the dogs and geese, the goats, the horse, all happily co-existing. He looked back at me, perhaps returning to his earlier opinion that I was quite, quite mad (and in that he was not far wrong).

  Annie looked in on me later that afternoon, found me cross-legged on the floor, in the midst of the harmonium in pieces around me, and I thought she might well be in agreement with Mr Gan about my state of mind. She closed the door and left me to it.

  I realise I was often at my happiest absorbed in some piece of work like that, hand and eye coordinated, mind focused, myself at rest. There was something too in the physical posture – a kind of cellular memory. I felt like some sadhu in meditation telling his beads, or an old Jewish tailor seated in his workshop, engaged in a different kind of meditation, a meditation-in-action.

  Happy is the man who has found his work.

  Watching my father at his workbench in the shed, behind the house in Leytonstone, sawing, drilling, turning something on a lathe. He was never happier, making and repairing, salvaging and rebuilding, and nor was I, learning from him, being his apprentice. Make do and mend. An entire philosophy in itself.

  He always wore tweeds, as I have done all my adult life – sturdy and practical, rough to the touch but comfortable, and, or so I tell myself, timelessly stylish.

  There is much of Pa in you.

  The smells were a joy, cut wood and sawdust, turpentine and linseed oil, intoxicating as any incense, smells you feel in your teeth, that make you want to bite. I feel it now, and with it another sensation, another smell like burning, I remember it, the friction-burn of the wood in the lathe.

  All forms are burning.

  The telegram from Ma arrived unexpectedly, as telegrams always do.

  PA DIED PEACEFULLY IN SLEEP LAST NIGHT STOP FUNERAL NEXT FRIDAY STOP NOT POSSIBLE FOR YOU GET BACK BUT THAT’S ALL RIGHT STOP YOUR LOVING MA STOP END.

  The pared-down message, printed out on a slip of paper, was stark, unembellished apart from those two words, PEACEFULLY and LOVING. And I heard Ma’s voice in the THAT’S ALL RIGHT, reassurance and absolution.

  Pa holding my hand on the station platform at Leytonstone, waiting for the train to Southend. Pa working in his shed, at his lathe. The smell of him, tweed and tobacco and carbolic soap. Pa standing at the pulpit in the little church mission hall we attended, leading a hymn, reciting scripture. I am the resurrection and the life. Pa the quietly evangelical fundamentalist, born again, but never fanatical. Pa, who should not perish, but have everlasting life.

  Pa. Gone.

  I showed Annie the telegram and she held me, ruffled my hair. She had hardly known Pa but she said she thought he was a good man.

  All he needed by way of epitaph.

  It took time, perhaps weeks, but I fixed the harmonium, rendered it good as new (or rather better, as I was sure it had improved with age and with my loving ministration). I brought Annie into the workshop, sat her down on a kitchen chair, dusted off specially, and I gave a little recital for her and her alone, ran through a repertoire of old hymn tunes – Bread of Heaven, Bringing in the sheaves, Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning (in honour of Pa, perhaps). The noise rose and swelled and outside the dogs began to bark and howl, joining in or trying to drown me out, and Annie clapped and clapped, laughing till the tears ran down her cheeks.

  Annie, Annie, Annie.

  How young we were. How little we knew.

  I was happy to provide the musical instruments for the school. I had the joy of finding them in the first place (the joy known to all collectors, the hunt, the quest, the search for lost treasures). Then there was the added joy of repairing the instruments, restoring them to full functionality. (And the work itself, the labour of love, was restorative in terms of my own wellbeing). Finally there was the joy of seeing the boys being given the instruments for the first time, tentatively trying them out, delighted at plucking a string, blowing into a mouthpiece. In the beginning was the sound.

  In the teaching I had found my work. The Buddhists spoke of right livelihood, the Hindus of Karma Yoga, selfless action.

  I began giving lessons to a few of the boys, basic instruction how to play their instruments, the violin and viola, tenor and descant recorders. We would meet after school in one of the empty classrooms and practise for an hour. For the first few weeks I insisted they play nothing but scales and arpeggios. Over and over again, concentrating on technique and tone, again, the same runs, again, till it was second nature. Again.

  Sometimes one or other of the boys couldn’t stay behind, so I arranged for them to come to the house in the evening or at the weekend.

  Mr Gan had found me an old upright piano which I managed to tune and it sat, imposing, against the wall of our back room. I put the boys through their paces, the scales and arpeggios. Again.

  I would know the hour was over when I’d hear Annie, irritable, banging and clattering in the kitchen, letting me know she’d had enough of the screeching and scratching of strings, the morose wailing of recorders.

  In the name of God, she said one night. Can’t you at least give them a tune to play?

  The boys themselves asked the selfsame question (albeit without the tetchiness). They were irked by the tediousness of the repetition.

  When can we play tune?

  When you are ready, I said. But eventually I relented, gave them Three Blind Mice, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and they went to it with a will.

  I have never been good at time. I have never been good with time (as I have never been good with numbers). I have no mind (no-mind!) for dates, no clear memory of when this or that happened. In fact I have always been slipshod and lackadaisical about such things.

  Some time ago (some time ago!) I read Mr Beckett’s En attendant Godot and found this:

  One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?

  My answer would be Yes, it is more than enough, thank you very much.

  Time passed, inevitably, inexorably.

  Motoko had a child, a lovely daughter they named Katsura.

  By this time it might have been expected that Annie too might have become pregnant. We had long since stopped taking precautions, deciding what would be would be, and nature would take its course. But time continued to pass and she was not, as they say, with child.

  If this was our lot, to be childless, then so be it. I felt no desperate need to propagate my species, my race, my particular bloodline. The planet was over-populous as it was.

  But Annie, dear Annie, took it hard. She had always thought, always imagined, always assumed she would be a mother.

  We walked on a grey afternoon in the grounds of Myoshin-ji temple, wandered through the graveyard, stopped before row on row of small stone statues depicting the Bodhisattva Jizo in his guise as protector of children – the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted, the ones who simply died young.

  And the unborn? said Annie. The never-were? The never-to-be? What of them?

  In amongst the statues, placed in front of them, were offerings from grieving mothers, heartbreaking in their ordinariness, their banality – a doll, a toy animal, a paper parasol, a wrapped bean-cake, a small bottle of some dark fruity drink. Some of the statues had even been given little knitted baby-hats, touching and ludicrous and sad.

  I don’t know, I said, taking her small cold hand in mine. I truly do not know.

  There’s nothing brings home the passage of time quite so forcefully as seeing a child change and grow. So quick. So quick. We watched little Katsura blossom into herself, now a baby, now a toddler, now an infant bright and alert and wanting it all. The Fujii’s home was walking distance from where we lived, and they would often bring her round, at weekends, or in the evening after school. She would eat berries from our garden, or chestnuts we roasted – oh, the smell! – and she liked nothing better than playing with the animals. She’d feed the hens, chase the dogs, sit in front of me astride Martha our old grey mare and we’d trot round the field, content and at ease.

  I am quite sure Annie was as fond of Katsura as I was. But I noticed when the child was with us, after a while there would be a change in Annie’s mood. She was still all kindness, all smiles as she chatted to the girl, made her welcome. But her eyes clouded, her attention turned inward, and I knew with certainty that she still ached and yearned for a child of her own (a child of our own).

  Akio had told me they were appointing a new member of staff and I would like him very much. Akio brought the new man to meet me in the staff room on the morning of his arrival and his eagerness was almost overwhelming.

  Shinki Masanosuke, he said, bowing, grinning. He was short, compact, wore a neat grey suit.

  Shinki-san, I said, returning his bow. I am very happy to meet you.

  And I you, Buraisu-sensei.

  He made a very good attempt at pronouncing the th in my name.

  Fujii-sensei has told me so much about you, he said, and he shook my hand. I am dying to work with you.

  I hope it doesn’t come to that, I said.

  He looked momentarily puzzled, then realised. Ah! You are making a joke, yes? This is pun!

  He laughed, nodded vigorously, clearly delighted. By Japanese standards he was effusive in the extreme, and without further prompting he launched into his life story, telling it all-in-a-rush.

  He was born in Nagasaki in 1904. (Six years my junior, then, which would have been impossible for me to guess). The family had moved to Manchuria when he was three years old, then to Seoul when he was eleven. From high school he had gone to university and studied English literature. He had taught briefly in Kyushu then applied for the post at Keijo. And here he was, back in Seoul, and most glad he would be working with me. He thought we had much in common, many things to share. English literature was the love-of-his-life. Perhaps you and I, he said, shall be like Wordsworth and Coleridge.