Shibumi by Trevanian Page B

long. Her emotions had been frozen by fear, then melted by despair. Frozen, then melted. Her hold on reality was slipping.
    When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.
    “May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked from above.
    Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. “Hello. I am Hannah Stern.”
    “Well, come up, Hannah Stern.” With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. “We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese,
hana
means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea.”
    They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four
porte-fenêtres
flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. “I must put these in water,” she said. “Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?”
    “No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his.”
    “And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you.” She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Château d’Etchebar, all Hannah would ever see or hear of staff and servants would be doors that closed as she entered, or soft tiptoeing at the end of the hall, or the appearance of coffee or flowers on a bedside table. Meals were prepared in such a way that the mistress of the house could do the serving herself. It was an opportunity for her to show kindness and concern.
    “Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah,” the woman said. “And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?”
    With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.
    For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school… it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, “Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?”
    And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.
    That’s odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a café-owner in Tardets, the long walk up the