After the Banquet Read Free Page A

indeed. Goering, who ruled the roost at the time, dressed in shabby workman’s clothes, with his arm around a teen-age girl, a real beauty, riding the underground, cool as you please. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, but the harder I looked, the surer I was that it was Goering himself. After all, I was in a position to know—I saw him at receptions almost every day. I was staggered, I confess, but he didn’t so much as bat an eye. The girl must have been a prostitute, but unfortunately that is one subject I’m ignorant of.”
    “You don’t look it,” Kazu said, by way of a compliment.
    “She was really an attractive girl, but there was something suspiciously coarse about her make-up, the lipstick especially. Goering, nonchalant as you please in his laborer’s get-up, was playing with the girl’s ear lobe and stroking her back. I looked at Matsuyama standing beside me. His eyes were popping out of his head. Goering and the girl got off two stations later. Matsuyama and I, still on the train, were flabbergasted. For the rest of the day I couldn’t get the sight of Goering on the underground out of my head. The following evening Goering gave a reception. Matsuyama and I went up close to him and examined him carefully. There was no doubt about it—he looked exactly the same as the man we had seen the previous day.
    “I was unable to restrain my curiosity any longer. I forgot my position as ambassador, and before I knew it I was saying to Goering, ‘Yesterday we took a ride on the underground. We wanted to observe how the ordinary people get about. I really think it was a worthwhile experience. I wonder if Your Excellency has ever done the same?’
    “At this Goering grinned, but his answer was profound, ‘We are always at one with the people and part of the people. I have never felt it necessary therefore to ride on the underground.’” Tamaki gave Goering’s reply in succinct German, at once adding a Japanese translation.
    There was nothing diplomatic about these former ambassadors despite their solemn appearance; they made not the least pretense of listening to what anyone else said. The former ambassador to Spain, hardly able to wait for Tamaki to finish his story, began to talk about his life as Minister to the Dominican Republic in the beautiful capital of Santo Domingo. The walk along the sea under a palm grove, the superb sunsets over the Caribbean, the dusky skins of the mulatto girls glowing in the sunset . . . The old man was quite carried away by his own painstaking description of these sights, but the eloquent Ambassador Tamaki, broke in again and turned the conversation to his story of meeting Marlene Dietrich when she was still young. For Tamaki stories about unknown beautiful women were of no interest; a world-renowned name, a glittering reputation, was a necessary embellishment to every story.
    Kazu felt uncomfortable with all the different foreign words thrown into the conversation, and it annoyed her especially that the punch lines of dirty jokes were invariably delivered in the original language. At the same time, men from the world of diplomacy rarely visited her restaurant, and she was intrigued by the special atmosphere surrounding them. There was no question but that they were all “elegant retired gentlemen,” and even if they were poor now, in the past their fingers had known the touch of real luxury. Sadly enough, the memory of those days had stained their fingers forever with a golden powder.
    Only Yuken Noguchi seemed different and stood out from the others. His manly face had a straightforward ruggedness it would never lose, and, unlike the others, his attire was utterly devoid of affectation or dandyism. Thick, strikingly long eyebrows jutted above his sharp, clear eyes. His features taken individually were impressive, but they warred with one another, and his lean build accentuated the disharmony. Noguchi did not forget to smile at the