by Joy Kogawa
That was the last Uncle saw of the boat. And shortly thereafter, Uncle too was taken away, wearing shirt, jacket, and dungarees. He had no provisions, nor did he have any idea where the gunboats were herding him and the other Japanese fishermen in the impounded fishing fleet.
The memories were drowned in a whirlpool of protective silence. Everywhere I could hear the adults whispering, "Kodomo no tame. For the sake of the children…." Calmness was maintained.
Once, years later on the Barker farm, Uncle was wearily wiping his forehead with the palm of his hand and I heard him saying quietly, "Itsuka, mata itsuka. Someday, someday again." He was waiting for that "some day" when he could go back to the boats. But he never did.
And now? Tonight?
Nen nen, rest, my dead uncle. The sea is severed from your veins. You have been cut loose.
five
It is past midnight when I waken to see Obasan enter the bedroom with a flashlight in her hand.
"What is it?" I ask, switching on the bedside lamp and frowning against the sudden light.
"It was in the attic, surely," she says. An open stairway to the attic is built along the inside wall of my bedroom and she grasps the railing.
"What was in the attic?" I ask, rubbing my eyes and sitting up.
I put my slippers on and follow her as she climbs the narrow stairs one step at a time.
"At this hour, Obasan?"
The best position is behind her, holding the railing with my left hand, my right arm poised to catch her if she stumbles.
"Slow can go," I say.
At the top of the stairs, I push open the square ceiling door carefully. A pencil line of dust drops through the crack. The light from the bedroom is just enough to show the outlines of a number of cardboard boxes, a small trunk, piles of magazines and newspapers. I arc the flashlight along the floor where there are some glass kerosene lamps covered in thick dust. In the nearest corner by the eaves is a dead sparrow on its back, its feet straight back like a high diver's.
"What are you looking for?" I ask, breaking off the web dangling from the steep-angled rough ceiling.
"Somewhere here," she says.
She squats in front of a pile of cardboard boxes. Her hands, pulling, pushing, tugging, are small weak fists. They remind me—these hands that toil but do not embrace—of the wings of a wounded bird, battering the ground in an attempt at balance.
"Lost," she says occasionally. The word for "lost" also means "dead."
She turns to face me in the darkness.
"Eyes can no longer see."
My shoulder brushes against a canvas bag hanging from a nail in a beam. The lumps protruding here and there are the tools Grandfather Nakane brought when he came to this country—chisels, a hammer, a mallet, a thin pointed saw, the handle extending from the blade like that of a kitchen knife. I can feel the outline of the plane with a wooden handle which he worked by pulling it toward him. There is a fundamental difference in Japanese workmanship—to pull with control rather than push with force.
Obasan is searching through bundles of old letters and papers. She picks up a yellow wallet-size ID card. I shine the flashlight on it and there is Uncle's face, young and unsmiling, in the bottom right-hand corner. Isamu Nakane #00556. Beside the picture is a signature which looks like "McGibbons"—Inspector, RCMP.
She lifts the thick glasses from around her neck and her magnified eyes are as blurry as the sea. She stares at the picture a long time. Finally, she puts the ID card in her apron pocket. This is not what she is looking for. She squats beside a pile of magazines—Life, New Liberty, Mechanix Illustrated— mostly from the fifties. As she pushes a box aside, she stretches the corner of a spider's web, exquisitely symmetrical, balanced between the box and the magazines. A round black blot, large as a cat's eye, suddenly sprouts legs and ambles across the web, shaking it. It pauses and another spider of a different variety comes scuttling up. It is lighter in colour, its legs more muscular, striped and tapered. Its antennae are short knobs that protrude like eyes from its head. Sidling aggressively, it reaches its long pincer legs out toward the first. The tips touch. In a burst of speed, the first spider leaps down the roadway of webs and disappears into the floorboards.
Its flight is so sudden I recoil, jerking my arm up, sending the beam of light over the ceiling and a whole cloudy scene of carnage. Ugh! What a sight! A graveyard and feasting ground combined. Shredded rag shapes thick with dust hang like evil laundry on a line. A desperate washday. Spiders, I would say, are indelicate.
"Give you the creeps," the children say.
I wish Obasan would find what she's looking for.
The dust, light-winged as soot, is swarming thickly across the flashlight beam. I sneeze and the specks pummel across the light. Everything, I suppose, turns to dust eventually. A man's memories end up in some attic or in a Salvation Army bin. His name becomes a fleeting statistic and his face is lost in fading photographs, the clothing quaint, the anecdotes gone.
All our ordinary stories are changed in time, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the past. Potent and pervasive as a prairie dust storm, memories and dreams seep and mingle through cracks, settling on furniture and into upholstery. Our attics and living rooms encroach on each other, deep into their invisible places.
Obasan shuffles to the trunk and stoops to lift the lid. The thick dust slides off like chocolate icing sugar—antique pollen. Black fly corpses fall to the floor. She pushes aside the piles of old clothes—a 1920s nightgown, a peach-coloured woolen bathing suit. A whiff of mothballs wafts up. The odor of preservation.
"Shall I help you?" I ask, not knowing what she seeks. "Everyone someday dies," she answers.
I scan the contents of the trunk, zig-zagging the flashlight beam over the old clothes. The thin flowery patchwork quilt Mother made for my bed when I was four years old is so frayed and moth-eaten it's only a rag. I remember standing by the sewing machine, watching as her hands, quick as birds, matched and arranged the small triangles of coloured cloth. I would like to drop the lid of the trunk, go downstairs and back to bed. But we're trapped, Obasan and I, by our memories of the dead—all our dead—those who refuse to bury themselves. Like threads of old spider webs, still sticky and hovering, the past waits for us to submit, or depart. When I least expect it, a memory comes skittering out of the dark, spinning and netting the air, ready to snap me up and ensnare me in old and complex puzzles. Just a glimpse of a worn-out patchwork quilt and the old question comes thudding out of the night again like a giant moth. Why did my mother not return? After all these years, I find myself wondering, but with the dullness of expecting no response.
"Please tell me about Mother," I would say as a child to Obasan. I was consumed by the question. Devoured alive. But Obasan gave me no answers. I did not have, I have never had, the key to the vault of her thoughts. Even now, I have no idea what urgency prompts her to explore this attic at midnight.
"Is it enough, Obasan? Shall we go downstairs?"
She turns to face me. Her glasses, thick as marbles, dangle from the chain around her neck.
"Lost," she says.
The light from the flashlight grazes her forehead as I sweep it in a final arc around the attic. Her hair is so fine that her scalp shows through, the texture of skin, hair, and net almost translucent.
"What is lost?"
She seems to have forgotten her reason for coming up here. I notice these days, from time to time, how the present disappears in her mind. The past hungers for her. Feasts on her. And when its feasting is complete? She will dance and dangle in the dark, like small insect bones, a fearful calligraphy—a dry reminder that once there was life flitting about in the weather.
She laughs a short dry sound like clearing her throat. "Everything is forgetfulness," she says.
It's a long journey to her bedroom, and near the end she stumbles. "Thank you, thank you," she says as I hold her small body upright. She crawls into her bed fully dressed. She lies
in exhaustion, half awake, half asleep—almost, it seems to me, half alive.
After all these many earth years, where is she now? My arms are suffused with an urge to hold, but a hug would startle her. I can only sit quietly beside her and wait for small signs of her return.
six
Early in the still gray morning I can hear Obasan emptying her chamber pot in the toilet. I wait until she returns to her bed before I drift off again. Haze. Cloud. Again the descent. I was dreaming just now, was I not? I drift back down into white windless dream. The distance approaches and the roots of trees are prayers descending. Fingers tunneling. Wordlessness.
The mist in the dream swarms like the foam of dry ice on the weatherless mountainside. Together, from out of another dream or from nowhere, the man and woman arrive. Their arrival is as indistinct as the fog. There is no language. Everything is accepted. It is not yet known that I am the woman.
They also are here, the other man and woman. They have been here before us, forever in the forest. At what point we notice them is not clear. It is too strong to say we become aware of them. They move on a heavily treed slope that rises sharply to our right. The woman's back is bent. Slow and heavy as sleep, her arms sway and swing, front to back, back to front. For a flickering moment, she appears as she once was, naked, youthful, voluptuous.
But the mirage fades. Her face is now harsh again and angular as quartz—square, a coarse golden brown. Her body, a matching squareness, is dense as earth. With a sickle she is harvesting the forest's debris, gathering the branches into piles.
The man is taller, thinner and precise—a British martinet. It is evident that he is in command. With his pruner's shears, he is cutting the trees.
They may be trying to make a clearing or gather brush or search for food. Basic survival activities. We do not know what the effort is.
We do not greet them but the man looks at us. We are to help in the work at hand. His glance is a raised baton. Like an orchestra of fog we join them and toil together in the timelessness. We move without question or references in an interminable unknowing without rules, without direction. No incident alerts us to an awareness of time. But at some subtle hour, the white mist is known to be gray, and the endlessness of labour has entered our limbs.
Weariness.
The mist is, is not, is a mist—a smoky curtain continuously rising.
It happens here, in the heart of the forest. One instant. One fraction of an instant, and a realization is airborne. There is the startle effect of a flock of birds in sudden flight.
"Look!" The shouting inside me communicates to everyone.
There is in the forest a huge gentle beast—a lion or a dog or a lion dog. It belongs to the man. Its obedience is phenomenal.
My electrifying discovery occurs just as the animal yawns. Its yawn is frozen a bare sliver of a second longer than a natural yawn should be and in that moment I see that the inside of the mouth is plastic. The animal is a robot!
In the moment of the too long yawn, when the mechanism that hinges the jaws has proven faulty, a house of cards silently collapses. Instantly in our telepathic world, the knowing spreads and the great boulder enclosing change splits apart.
The square woman farther down the slope moves up toward me from under the curly-branched trees. One of her arms is now connected to her shoulder by four hooks locked to make a hinge. It dangles there as she approaches. She begins to speak but the words are so old they cannot be understood. There is a calmness in her face as she recites an ancient mythical contract made between herself and the man so long ago the language has been forgotten.
The dream changes now and Uncle stands in the depth of the forest. He bows a deep ceremonial bow. In his mouth is a red red rose with an endless stem. He turns around slowly in a flower dance—a ritual of the dead. Behind him, someone—I do not know who—is straining to speak, but rapidly, softly, a cloud overtakes everything. Is it the British officer with his pruning shears disappearing to the left? He is wearing an army uniform.
The waking is white and perfectly still, without sensation and without haste. Some mornings it isn't clear at all where the edge of the forest or the dust storm is. Daybreak blends in all directions.
What time is it and how am I back in my low-ceilinged bedroom with the ladder stairs along the wall? And a late-season mosquito here as well. Yesterday the phone call came. Yesterday seems an age ago.
Obasan is shuffling in the kitchen. The rattle of the fridge shudders to a halt, making way for other sounds—the kettle boiling, the high rhythmical whine of a truck in the distance. The dream recedes like a tiny asterisk star at dawn, a footnote disappearing in the morning sky.
Obasan is folding toilet-paper squares and filling a Kleenex box with them as I enter the kitchen.
"Good morning," I say loudly. "Were you able to sleep?" She lifts her head to look up at me. "Good morning," I repeat.
On the stool is a thick parcel tied in twine. She makes a short apologetic "eh" sound as I pick up the parcel.
"That was thought to be in the attic," she says, "but...." She points to a mandarin orange box under the table and makes her embarrassed sound again. "Everything is forgetfulness. The time of forgetting is now come."
A package from Aunt Emily, I note.
seven
The parcel is as heavy as a loaf of Uncle's stone bread. Someone, I see, has already opened it and the Scotch tape wings stretch out unstickily from the two end flaps.
"When did this arrive?" I ask Obasan.
"What is it?"
"When did this arrive?" I have to shout everything two or three times.
"Sa," Obasan says wearily, "around when ..."
The answer doesn't so much matter.
There are several packages here—an old scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, a brown manila envelope, one gray cardboard folder, a three-ring-binder-size hardcover book full of Aunt Emily's handwriting. I untie the loose twine from around the middle of the envelope and a note falls loose and drops to the floor.
Aunt Emily's writing is as wispy and hard to decipher as the marks of a speed skater on ice.
"Write the vision and make it plain. Habakkuk 2:2."
Dear Aunt Em is crusading still. In seven canonical words, she exhorts, cajoles, commands someone—herself? me?—to carry on the fight, to be a credit to the family, to strive onward to the goal. She's the one with the vision. She believes in the Nisei, seeing them as networks and streamers of light dotting the country. For my part, I can only see a dark field with Aunt Emily beaming her flashlight to where the rest of us crouch and hide, our eyes downcast as we seek the safety of invisibility.
Write the vision and make it plain? For her, the vision is the truth as she lives it. When she is called like Habakkuk to the witness stand, her testimony is to the light that shines in the lives of the Nisei, in their desperation to prove themselves Canadian, in their tough and gentle spirit. The truth for me is more murky, shadowy and gray. But on my lap, her papers are wind and fuel nudging my early-morning thoughts to flame.
The hardcover book, I see, is a journal. The private words of Y. Emily Kato. Dear Diary, Christmas 1941. Last May, during a fly-by-night stopover between conferences, Aunt Emily told me she'd be sending me “the works”. I expected the conference papers, perhaps documents—not a diary.
She was on her way home to Toronto from a conference in California called "The Asian Experience in North America", and from the moment we met, I was caught in the rush-hour traffic jam of her nonstop conference talk.
How different my two aunts are. One lives in sound, the other in stone. Obasan's language remains deeply underground but Aunt Emily, BA, MA, is a word warrior. She's a crusader, a little old gray-haired Mighty Mouse, a Bachelor of Advanced Activists and General Practitioner of Just Causes.
Since her first visit to Granton in 1954, there have been, let me see, seven, or is it eight, more. There was the summer of 1958 and a week in 1960, another week or so the following year, t
hen a Christmas visit. There have been a few others. So counting that last fast visit, there have been nine trips in all. And in between visits, there's the army, the navy, the air force of letters—all the Aunt Emily correspondence jamming up our small metal box in the Granton P.O.
The May morning of her last visit, the sky by 10 A.M. was already yawning open like a great oven door. It was a premature furnace day. In southern Alberta, spring weather is unpredictable—a blizzard one moment and midsummer the next. The only thing that is constant is the wind.
She led the small string of passengers filing out of the Time Air plane at the Lethbridge airport. Her traveling bag dangled from her shoulders. Clutching her briefcase and her small-brimmed hat, she lowered her head like a bull against the wind. She's about the same height as I am, five feet one or so, but much chunkier and with "daikon ashi" as we used to say—legs as shapely as Japanese radishes. A small tank of a woman with a Winston Churchill stoop. Apart from a deeper puffiness under her eyes and more gray hair, she seemed unchanged from her visit the year before. With her mind and her hair leaping wildly in the gusts, she was Stephen Leacock's horseman riding off in all directions at once.
I hurried behind her as she marched ahead to the car.
''What a conference! You should have been with me, Nomi," she said. "There was so much to learn. I had no idea how much I still hurt. Just read some of these papers." She flung open her briefcase and took out a bundle of conference notes and papers as I searched for the car keys.
"Ever read this?" she asked, punctuating the air with a pamphlet entitled "Racial Discrimination by Orders-in-Council.”
I held the pages down on the steering wheel and scanned the sheets as the edges flittered in the gusts. There it was in black and white—our short harsh history. Beside each date were the ugly facts of the treatment given to Japanese Canadians. "Seizure and government sale of fishing boats. Suspension of fishing licenses. Relocation camps. Liquidation of property. Letter to General MacArthur. Bill 15. Deportation. Revocation of nationality."