Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg does not speak of that night in Kumamoto easily, and when he does his voice drops to the register men use at funerals, because it was in his own bed, beneath his own roof, that he betrayed the family whose name he still carries like a blade he is no longer worthy to draw. He has catalogued the dishonor with the precision of a man counting wounds: the trust broken, the ancestors disappointed, the silence that followed him out the door and has not stopped following since. Now he sits at the edge of the Dojo's card table while the others howl over a busted hand and spilled shochu, and he studies their laughter the way a general studies enemy formations, certain there is a lesson in it he is too grave to receive. He tells himself he has come here seeking a quieter life, some monastic corner of the floor where he might rebuild discipline plank by plank, yet every morning he wakes late, reeking of weed smoke he swears he only inhaled out of respect for a ritual he did not understand, and every morning he adds the failure to his ledger with the same unsmiling gravity as the night that started it all. He bows to no one for this, least of all himself, and continues the search for silence in the loudest, most rugged room he has ever known.'