by Joy Kogawa
three
She's sitting at the kitchen table when I come in. She is so deaf that my calling doesn't rouse her and when she sees me she is startled.
"O," she says. The sound is short and dry as if she has no energy left. She begins to stand but falters, and her hands, outstretched to greet me, fall to the table. She says my name as a question.
"Naomi-san?"
I remove my muddy shoes and put on the slippers at the door before stepping in.
"Oba," I say loudly, and take her hands. My aunt is not one for hugs and kisses.
She peers into my face. "O," she says again.
I nod in reply.
Her head is tilted to the side as if it's all too heavy inside, and her lower jaw moves from side to side.
I open my mouth to ask, "Did he suffer very much?" but loud talking feels obscene.
"Everyone someday dies," she says eventually. Her voice is barely audible. She turns aside, pivoting in shuffles, and goes to the stove, picking up the large aluminum kettle with both hands. It's been made heavy over the years by the mineral deposits from the hard water. She twists the knob and the gas flame flares blue and red.
I hang my jacket on a coat peg, then sit on a stool beside the table. Uncle's spot.
The house is in its usual clutter. Nothing at all has changed. The applewood table is covered with a piece of discoloured plastic over the blue-and-white tablecloth. Along one edge are Uncle's African violets, profusely purple, glass salt and pepper shakers, a soy sauce bottle, a cracked radio, an old-fashioned toaster, a small bottle full of toothpicks.
She pours the tea. Tiny twigs and bits of rice puffs circle in the cups.
"Thank you," I say loudly, lifting the cup in both hands and nodding my head in thanks.
Her eyes are unclear and sticky with a gumlike mucus. She told me years ago her tear ducts were clogged. In all this time I've never seen her cry.
She takes a fold of toilet paper from her sleeve and rubs her lips, which are flaked with dry skin. Her mouth is plagued with a gummy saliva and she drinks the tea to loosen her tongue sticking to the roof of her false plate.
We sit in silence sipping and turning the cups around on the tips of our fingers.
Behind her on the counter is a black loaf of Uncle's stone bread, hefty as a rock. It's too big to be a bun but much smaller than regular "store-boughten" bread. The fact that it's uncovered means that it was made either yesterday or today. Was making this bread Uncle's last act?
I can remember the first time he attempted baking. It must have been around 1946 or 1947, when I was about ten years old, shortly after we came to southern Alberta. The fat woman in the Granton general store was giving everyone handwritten recipes for bread with every purchase of flour that day. I begged Obasan to let me try. In the end, it was Uncle who made it.
"Burreddo," Uncle said as he pulled it from the oven. "Try. Good."
"How can you eat that stone?" I asked, poking it. "It'll break your teeth. Shall I get the axe?"
"Stone burreddo. Oishi," Uncle said. "Taste beri good." He carved a piece off and held it out to me.
"Here," my brother Stephen said. Stephen, three years older than me, was always ordering me around. He plopped a spoonful of hand-yellowed margarine onto the slab. He called margarine "Alberta," since Uncle pronounced Alberta "aru bata," which in our Japanese English means "the butter that there is." "Try some Alberta on it."
"No ten kyou," I said irritably.
Uncle had baked the bread too long. I refused to eat it, but Uncle kept making it that way over the years, "improving" the recipe with leftover oatmeal and barley. Sometimes he even added carrots and potatoes. But no matter what he put in it, it always ended up like a lump of granite on the counter.
When Obasan eats it, she breaks her slice into tiny pieces and soaks them in the homemade "weed tea”. The "weedy tea", as Stephen and I named it, was better on cold rice with salted pickles, especially late at night.
Once I took the stone bread in my fists and tried to break it in half but I couldn't. "If you can't even break it, it's not bread," I said. "It's all stone."
"That's not how," Stephen said. He speared the loaf with the sharp knife point and handed me a clump. "Matches your complexion."
"What! Bristleface!"
Stephen was an early beginner when it came to hair on his face. He was the first boy in his class to shave.
With Uncle gone now there will be no more black bread and black bread jokes.
Obasan is rolling a bit of dried-up jam off the plastic tablecloth as she sips her tea. When she speaks, her voice is barely a whisper. Uncle, she says, woke up this morning and called her but she couldn't hear what he had to say.
"There was no knowing," she says. She did not understand what was happening. The nurses at the hospital also did not understand. They stuck tubes into his wrists like grafting on a tree but Death won against the medical artistry. She wanted to stay beside him there, but, again, "There was no knowing." The nurses sent her home. The last she saw of him, his head was rolling backward and he was looking at the ceiling through the whites of his eyes.
What, I wonder, was Uncle thinking those last few hours? Had the world turned upside down? Perhaps everything was reversing rapidly and he was tunneling backward top to bottom, his feet in an upstairs attic of humus and memory, his hands groping down through the cracks and walls to the damp cellar, to the water, down to the underground sea. Or back to his fishing boats in B.C. and the skiffs moored along the shore. In the end did he manage to swim full circle back to that other shore and his mother's arms, her round moon face glowing down at her firstborn?
"Nen nen korori—lullaby, lullaby...." Uncle was a child of the waves. Was he rocked to sleep again by the lap-lap of the sea?
Obasan taps her wrist with her thumb. "Here," she says, "medicine was put in, but—oso katta—it was too late."
She leans her head back to look up at me and her cheeks sink into the cavity of her mouth, making her face resemble a skull. The pulse is a steady ripple in her wrinkled neck. Such an old woman she is. She opens her mouth to say more, but there is no further sound from her dry lips.
The language of her grief is silence. She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances. Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful.
What will she do now? I wonder.
What choices does she have?
My brother will be of little help. Stephen, unable to bear the density of her inner retreat and the rebuke he felt in her silences, fled to the ends of the earth. From London, he went to New York, to Montreal. Stephen has always been a ball of mercury, unpredictable in his moods and sudden rages. Departure, for him, is as necessary as breath.
Obasan keeps his infrequent letters in her jewel box.
"Oba, are you all right?" I ask as she struggles to stand up. I put my hands over hers, feeling the silky wax texture.
"Now old," she says. "Too old."
She totters as she moves to the door and squats beside the boot tray, picking up my shoes weighted by the heavy clay. Granton gumbo adheres like tar.
"It is late now," I say to her. "Should you not rest?"
She is deaf to my concern and begins to gouge out the black sticky mud wedged against the heel. Beside her on the shoe shelf are Uncle's boots and overshoes scraped clean and ready for the next rain. She takes a sheet of newspaper from the pile that is kept beside the entrance and the mud drops down in clumps. In a tin can are a blunt knife and a screwdriver. Everything else is in its place. She is altogether at home here.
Could she, I wonder, come to live with me? I cannot imagine her more comfortable in any other house.
"This house," Obasan says as if she has read my mind. "This body. Everything old."
The house is indeed old, as she is also old. Every homemade piece of furniture, each pot holder and paper doily is a link in her lifeline. She has preserved on shelves, in cupboards, under beds—a box of marbles, half-filled colo
uring books, a red, white, and blue rubber ball. The items are endless. Every short stub pencil, every cornflakes box stuffed with paper bags and old letters is of her ordering. They rest in the corners like parts of her body, hair cells, skin tissues, tiny specks of memory. This house is now her blood and bones.
Squatting here with the putty knife in her hand, she is every old woman in every hamlet in the world. You see her on a street corner in a village in southern France, in a black dress and black stockings. Or bent over stone steps in a Mexican mountain village. Everywhere the old woman stands as the true and rightful owner of the earth. She is the bearer of keys to unknown doorways and to a network of astonishing tunnels. She is the possessor of life's infinite personal details.
"Now old," Obasan repeats. "Everything old."
She pushes Uncle's overshoes to the side and places my shoes neatly beside them.
"Let us rest now, Obasan," I say once more. "You must be tired. Mo nemasho."
four
From my many years with Obasan, I know that no urging on my part will persuade her of anything. She will do what she will do. She will rest when she is ready to rest.
I have come to the living room to wait for her.
"Too old,” I hear her saying to herself again.
I can imagine that my grandmother said much the same thing those dark days in 1942, as she rocked in her stall at the Vancouver Hastings Park prison. Grandma Nakane, Uncle's mother, was too old then to understand political expediency, race riots, the yellow peril. She was told that a war was on. She understood little else.
One of the few pictures we have of Grandma Nakane is in the silver-framed family photograph hanging above the piano, taken when my brother Stephen, the first grandchild on either side, was born,
The Nakanes and Katos are posed together, the four new grandparents seated in front like an advance guard, with their offspring arranged behind them. What a brigade! Square-faced Dr. Kato, my mother's father, sits upright in his chair with his short legs not quite touching the floor. The toes of his black boots angle down like a ballet dancer's. A black cape hangs from his shoulders and his left hand clutches a cane and a pair of gloves. Beside him, stiff and thin in her velvet suit, is Grandma Kato, her nostrils wide in her startled bony face. And there's gentle round-faced Grandma Nakane, her hair rolled back like a wreath, her plump hands held tightly in her soft lap. The last of the quartet is Grandpa Nakane with his droopy mustache, his high-collared shirt, and his hand, like Napoleon's, in his vest. They all look straight ahead, carved and rigid, with their expressionless Japanese faces and their bodies pasted over with Rule Britannia. There's not a ripple out of place.
Grandpa Nakane, "number one boatbuilder” Uncle used to say, was a son of the sea that tossed and coddled the Nakanes for centuries. The first of my grandparents to come to Canada, he arrived in 1893, wearing a Western suit, a round black hat, and platformed geta on his feet. When he left his familiar island, he became a stranger, sailing toward an island of strangers. But the sea was his constant companion. He understood its angers, its whisperings, its generosity. The native Songhies of Esquimalt and many Japanese fishermen came to his boatbuilding shop on Saltspring Island, to barter and to buy. Grandfather prospered. His cousin's widowed wife and her son, Isamu, joined him.
Isamu, my uncle, born in Japan in 1889, was my father's older half-brother. Uncle Isamu—or Uncle Sam, as we called him—and his wife, Ayako, my Obasan, married in their thirties and settled on Lulu Island, near Annacis Island, where Uncle worked as a boat-builder.
"How did you and Uncle meet?" I asked Obasan once. "Was it arranged?"
Her answers are always oblique and the full story never emerges in a direct line. She was, I have learned, the only daughter of a widowed schoolteacher and was brought up in private schools. When she came to Canada, she worked as a music teacher and became close friends with Grandma Nakane, who was an accomplished koto player and singer. She married Uncle, she told me with a chuckle, to please Grandma Nakane.
Their first child, a boy, was born dead. He looked, Obasan told me, like Grandpa Nakane. Exactly the same outline of the face.
"Fushigi," Uncle said, "a marvel." Not being Grandpa Nakane's son, he traced the resemblance back through his father's line and concluded finally that the pointed chin and wide jaw of his stillborn child came from his father's and Grandpa Nakane's grandmother. The baby had long paper-thin fingernails and white skin and was perfectly formed. Sometime during birth, the umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck and he was strangled. Three years later the next child also died during birth, but this time there was no explanation. Obasan refused to see or talk about the second child and doesn't know if it was a boy or girl. After that, there were no more. Aunt Emily gave them a springer spaniel pup in the fall.
In the back row, Uncle and Obasan stand behind Grandma and Grandpa Nakane. There is an exquisite tenderness in Obasan's slanted eyes, her smile more sad than demure. She would be forty-two years of age when this picture was taken in 1933.
In the center of the picture, in the place of honor, is the new grandchild held for display in my father's arms. Stephen's face is a freshly baked bun and his tiny mouth is puckered. His marshmallow fists pop out from the long sleeves of a white lacy christening gown. Father, in a black suit with his hair slicked back like Mandrake the Magician's, holds Stephen up like a rabbit in a hat. Father's eyebrows are in a high arch, as if he is surprised and pleased at the trick he has managed. "Lo, my son."
To the left are Aunt Emily and Mother, the two Kato sisters, their heads leaning slightly towards each other. I have examined this picture often, looking for resemblances. The sisters are as dissimilar as a baby elephant and a gazelle. Aunt Emily, a pudgy teenager, definitely takes after Grandpa Kato—the round open face and the stocky build. She isn't wearing glasses here, though I've never seen her without them. The carved ridges of her short waved hair stop abruptly at her cheeks. She is squinting so that the whites show under the iris, giving her an expression of concentration and determination. Not a beauty but, one might say, solid and intelligent-looking. Beside her, Mother is a fragile presence. Her face is oval as an egg and delicate. She wears a collarless straight-up-and-down dress and a long string of pearls. Her eyes, Obasan told me, were sketched in by the photographer because she was always blinking when pictures were being taken.
Every once in a while, Obasan catches me looking at this photograph and she says, "Such a time there was once."
Grandma and Grandpa Kato look fairly severe in the picture. They all look rather humorless, but satisfied with the attention of the camera and its message for the day that all is well. That for ever and ever all is well.
But it isn't, of course. Even my eleven-year-olds know that you can't "capture life's precious moments", as they say in the camera ads.
From a few things Obasan has told me, I wonder if the Katos were ever really a happy family. When Mother was a young child, Grandma Kato left Grandpa Kato, who was a medical student at the time, and returned to Japan. I don't know how many times Grandma went to Japan, but each time she took Mother and left Aunt Emily and Grandpa Kato behind.
"No, the families were not fragmented," Aunt Emily said once when I asked her. She insisted the Nakanes and Katos were intimate to the point of stickiness, like mochi. (Sometimes, instead of buying mochi ready-made in white balls, we cook the special dense mochi rice, then pound it with a small wooden bat over and over till it is stickier than glue. Obasan eats it without her false teeth, ever since the time the mochi clamped her teeth together so tight she had to soak them in hot water for hours.)
The marriage between Father and Mother was the first non-arranged marriage in the community, Aunt Emily said. Grandpa Kato opposed it at first, until his frail daughter became ill. But then when Stephen was prematurely born, it was Grandpa Kato who spent the most time ogling his tiny red face looking for evidence of himself. A male child at last.
My parents, like two needles, knit the families caref
ully into one blanket. Every event was a warm-water wash, drawing us all closer till the fiber of our lives became an impenetrable mesh. Every tiny problem was discussed endlessly. We were the original "togetherness" people. There were all the picnics at Kitsilano, and the concerts at Stanley Park. And the Christmas concert in the church at Third Avenue when tiny Stephen sang a solo. And I was born. And after that?
After that—there was the worrying letter from Grandma Kato's mother in Japan—and there were all the things that happened around that time. All the things....
If we were knit into a blanket once, it's become badly moth-eaten with time. We are now no more than a few tangled skeins—the remains of what might once have been a fisherman's net. The memories that are left seem barely real. Gray shapes in the water. Fish swimming through the gaps in the net. Passing shadows.
Some families grow on and on through the centuries, hardy and visible and procreative. Others disappear from the earth without a whimper.
"The rain falls, the sun shines," Uncle used to say.
Aunt Emily, after graduating at the top of her class in Normal School, was unable to get a teaching position and stayed home to help Grandpa Kato with his medical practice. Father, at the time this picture was taken, was a university student. Later he helped Uncle, designing and building boats.
One snapshot I remember showed Uncle and Father as young men standing full front beside each other, their toes pointing outward like Charlie Chaplin's. In the background were pine trees and the side view of Uncle's beautiful house. One of Uncle's hands rested on the hull of an exquisitely detailed craft. It wasn't a fishing vessel or an ordinary yacht, but a sleek boat designed by Father, made over many years and many winter evenings. A work of art.
"What a beauty," the RCMP officer said in 1941 when he saw it. He shouted as he sliced back through the wake, "What a beauty! What a beauty!"