Obasan

by Joy Kogawa

  In my childhood dreams, the mountain yawns apart as the chasm spreads. My mother is on one side of the rift. I am on the other. We cannot reach each other. My legs are being sawn in half.

  twelve

  It is around this time that Mother disappears. I hardly dare to think, let alone ask, why she has to leave. Questions are meaningless. What matters to my five-year-old mind is not the reason that she is required to leave, but the stillness of waiting for her to return. After a while, the stillness is so much with me that it takes the form of a shadow which grows and surrounds me like air. Time solidifies, ossifies the waiting into molecules of stone, dark microscopic planets that swirl through the universe of my body waiting for light and the morning.

  SEPTEMBER 1941.

  The harbour is crowded with people. It is altogether bewildering. Aunt Emily is here and Aya Obasan, Grandpa Kato, Uncle, Father and his friend Uncle Dan, Grandma and Grandpa Nakane. The whole family. Stephen is wearing his short gray pants and gray suit top and gray knee socks and I am wearing the blue woolen knit dress that mother made and likes best. It has delicate five-petalled white flowers with red-dot centers stitched in wool and spaced all around the border of the skirt. I have short white socks and shiny black shoes with a single strap.

  Father is holding my hand and asking foolishly if I can see my mother. There is nothing to be seen but legs and legs. All I know is that Mother and Grandma are at the other end of a long paper streamer I clutch in my fist. Father picks me up in his arms and points but I can see nothing except thousands of colourful paper streamers stretched between the people below and the railing of the ship. Stephen is gathering spools of streamers that lie here and there unused on the ground.

  "She'll be back soon," my father says.

  I do not doubt this.

  Uncle Dan winks at me and smiles. Uncle Dan is almost always smiling or laughing, his mouth wide open and his head thrown back like the junkman's horse, showing his large straight teeth.

  "Obaa-chan [the old grandmother] only needs to see their faces," Aya Obasan says, "then they will come back.” She tells me that though Mother was born in Canada she was raised in Japan by her grandmother. Obaa-chan is very ill," Aya Obasan says. My great-grandmother has need of my mother. Does my mother have need of me? In what marketplace of the universe are the bargains made that have traded my need for my great-grandmother's?

  The boat pulls away and I cannot see my mother's face, though Father keeps pointing and waves.

  When we get home, Stephen gives me three of the spools he's retrieved, and I put them in the top left-hand drawer of my mother's sewing-machine cabinet for a surprise homecoming present for her. I put my fluffy Easter chicks in there as well, their feet three wire prongs. Last Easter I found them in a wicker basket sitting on top of candy and chocolate eggs.

  There is a scene I imagine in which I am my mother come home and am sitting at the treadle machine. My hand is poised at the round wooden knob carved into the ornate drawer, my fingers feeling around the smooth curves. With my eyes averted, I am my mother pulling the drawer open to look for the black darning knob, or a spool of thread, or scissors. To my mother's surprise, she finds the colourful paper streamer rolls and her fingers touch the soft fluff of the Easter chicks. She lifts them up one at a time. "Ah," I say in my mother's voice. Two small Easter chicks. Who would not cry out?

  Everything we have ever done we do again and again in my mind. We take the streetcar to Kitsilano beach and buy potato chips in cardboard baskets. We go with Aunt Emily and Grandpa Kato in his shiny black car, across the Lions' Gate Bridge and along the Dollarton Highway to visit Uncle Dan, who is staying in the small house that Grandma and Grandpa Kato own. Or to New Westminster and the island where Aya Obasan and Uncle Isamu live in their beautiful house full of plants by the sea. I play with the dog they call "Puppy" though he is not a puppy at all, romping around the pond full of goldfish with the waterfall and the rock garden surrounding it. We go to the zoo at Stanley Park and sit on the grass by the dome of the outdoor theater, listening to the symphony concerts in the dusk. I rehearse the past faithfully in preparation for her return.

  Aya Obasan is in the house every day now. She is gentle and quiet like Mother. She sleeps in my room on an extra bed that has been brought upstairs from the basement. The first morning she is here, I am surprised to see her long black hair, a thick braid thinning out to a few tassels that reach to her buttocks. Normally her hair is coiled around and around in a braided bun at the back of her head.

  Stephen and I watch her as she sticks countless hairpins in to keep the bun in place above the nape of her neck.

  "Long legs, crooked thighs, no head, and no eyes," Stephen chants.

  Obasan takes a while to understand the hairpin riddle.

  She has an ivory brush with soft useless bristles and a comb with teeth as thick as chopsticks. I hold the matching hand mirror with its curved edges as she powders her face. A fold of her long velvet dressing gown rests on my arms, soft and fluid and heavy as dry water. Many of Aya Obasan's things are soft against my cheek. Her fur coat, the fluffy quilt on her bed, and especially Obasan herself. She is plump, unlike Grandma Kato, whose knees are like bed knobs.

  But even with Obasan's warmth and constant presence, there is an ominous sense of cold and absence—a darkness that has crept into the house as stealthily as Mrs. Sugimoto's dead animal fur piece she sometimes leaves on the living room sofa.

  One night I waken frightened. There is no light anywhere—in the hallway, in the streets, in the neighbours' houses. This night I remember we are not to turn on any lights. We are doing what Stephen calls a "blackout”. I feel my way along the walls into the living room, where there are voices.

  Old Man Gower is here. He has never come into our house before and it is strange that he should be sitting in the darkness with Father.

  "Yes, yes," he is saying, his large soft hands rubbing together. The light from his pipe glares and fades. I don't know what he is agreeing to as he sits in the armchair. Even in the darkness, I can tell that Father's eyes are not at ease.

  "I'll keep them for you, Mark. Sure thing." Old Man Gower's voice is unlike the low gurgling sound I am used to when he talks to me alone. "The piano. Books. Garden tools. What else?"

  Although I am in the room, he acts as if I am not here. He seems more powerful than Father, larger and more at home even though this is our house. He sounds as if he is trying to comfort my father, but there is a falseness in the tone. The voice is too sure—too strong.

  Father is as if he is not here. If my mother were back, she would move aside all the darkness with her hands and we would be safe and at home in our home.

  I am relieved when Old Man Gower leaves but when I turn to my father, the safety has not returned to him. I clamber onto his lap and put my arms around his neck.

  "Naomi-chan," he whispers, "could you not sleep?"

  I understand later what it is about. The darkness is everywhere, in the day as well as the night. It threatens us as it always has, in the streetcars, in the stores, on the streets, in all public places. It covers the entire city and causes all the lights to be turned out. It drones overhead in the sounds of airplanes. It rushes unbidden from the mouths of strangers and in the taunts of children. It happens to Stephen even more terrifyingly than it does to me.

  One day he comes home from school, his glasses broken, black tear stains on his face. Obasan is hanging up clothes on the line from the back porch. When she sees him, she does not cry out but continues hanging up the laundry, removing the pegs from her mouth one at a time.

  "What happened?" I whisper as Stephen comes up the stairs.

  He doesn't answer me. Is he ashamed, as I was in Old Man Gower's bathroom? Should I go away?

  "What happened?" It is Obasan asking this time and her voice is soft.

  He still does not reply and Obasan takes him by the hand into the kitchen and wipes his face. I stand hesitantly in the doorway, watching.

&nb
sp; "I told you," Stephen says at last.

  I am encouraged that he is speaking to me. "Oh," I say, wishing to show that I understand, but I do not.

  "You know, Nomi."

  Stephen is in grade three at David Lloyd George School. There are "air-raid drills" at school, he tells me, which means that when a loud alarm sounds, all the children line up and file out of the classrooms as quickly as possible. They lie flat on the ground, crouch by hedges or in ditches, to hide from the bombs which may drop on us all—not just on the school, but anywhere at any time out of enemy aircraft overhead. We may be killed or maimed, blinded for life or burnt. We may lose an arm, or a finger even. To be safe, we must hide and be still so they will not see us.

  The girl with the long ringlets who sits in front of Stephen said to him, "All the Jap kids at school are going to be sent away and they're bad and you're a Jap.” And so, Stephen tells me, am I.

  “Are we?" I ask Father.

  "No," Father says. "We're Canadian."

  It is a riddle, Stephen tells me. We are both the enemy and not the enemy.

  thirteen

  Riddles are hard to understand. Only Stephen knows what they mean. Neither Aya Obasan nor Grandma and Grandpa Nakane understand the jokes in Stephen's riddle book. But Grandpa Nakane pats Stephen on the head and laughs when Stephen does.

  When Grandpa Nakane walks, he bends forward from his waist and his right arm dangles loose from his shoulder close to his knees like some of the monkeys at Stanley Park. The monkeys are swift and hop and swing acrobatically from wall to ceiling and around in great arcs. But Grandpa Nakane is no leaping dancer and lopes along at his own pace.

  During the Christmas concert, I look up and see Grandpa Nakane coming down the aisle of the church to sit in front, his hoary white eyebrows lifted high so he can see better.

  Under his left arm he is carrying a present wrapped in rustly white tissue paper. He is watching intently as Stephen and I stand around the manger singing carols with the other white-robed cherubs, our hands folded like church steeples and our eyes gazing down at the little Lord flashlight Jesus asleep in the hay. Nakayama-sensei, the round-faced minister, is standing beside the organ smiling widely and nodding in time to the music. When I peek up at the audience, I can see short Grandpa Kato sitting in the aisle near the back, his round belly like a ball with his gold watch chain draped in front. I know Aunt Emily and Uncle Dan are somewhere in the crowded church watching and I am filled with a need to hide but there is nowhere to go. If the wooden manger in front were bigger I could dive into the hay and be buried from view.

  All the lights except for the flashlight in the hay go out and the room is suddenly so still and dark that it seems almost to have disappeared. In a moment a candle appears high up in the air in the middle of the aisle at the back and I can hear Father's high clear notes on his wooden flute, playing the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. After this, Father's voice, rich and tender, sings the beginning of the hymn and candle after candle comes through the archway from the hall, around to the back and, in a steady advancing stream of light and song, up to the front, engulfing us.

  All of Christmas is like this, a mixture of white lights and coloured twinkling lights in the dark, surprises, songs, and streams and streams of people, up and down the escalators, in the crowded stores and on the green and red decorated sidewalks.

  Even on New Year's, Stephen and I are so showered with gifts that our rooms bulge with new toys. I have a wonderful set of entirely red things: an apple-fat shiny red purse that clicks open and shut like Aunt Emily's with a shiny red change purse inside, a red bead necklace, bracelet, comb, brush, and a gold-and-red kitten brooch with green jewel eyes. Stephen has a Meccano set and a wine-coloured encyclopedia—The Book of Knowledge—which Aunt Emily exclaims over and reads aloud with excitement.

  "Look, Nomi," she says, pointing to the picture of a little girl carrying a candle and walking in the dark to get a secret message to her father in a dungeon. It's a story in a part of the encyclopedia called "The Book of Golden Deeds”, which is filled with tales of martyrs and brave children and people going through torment and terror. Could I, I wonder, ever do the things that they do? Could I hide in a wagon of hay and not cry out if I were stabbed by a bayonet?

  Mother, it seems to me, could. So could Grandma Kato or Obasan. But not, I think, Aunt Emily, though perhaps that is not so. She is too often impatient and flustered, her fingers jerking her round wire-rimmed glasses up her short nose. And Stephen? Who among us would last the longest in a torture chamber without betraying the rest? Sometimes, in the dark, I send my finger digging deep into my arm or chest, imagining the bayonet's bloody stab.

  At night I lie awake thinking of dangerous people wielding hooks and prongs, but during the day there is another danger, another darkness, soft and mysterious. I know it as whispers and frowns and too much gentleness. Then, one spring evening, the two shadows of day and night come together in a white heavy mist of fear.

  I am in the basement playroom making folding paper cranes, each one tinier than the one before. I can hear Father coughing lightly in his study, over and over. He coughs almost all the time and he sits in his study writing at night. When I talk to him he smiles but he stares away as if I am not there. He is never cross. He is alone these days. Where has everyone gone? There used to be friends visiting us and staying for meals. They brought me little toys or toffee. Uncle Dan was almost always here in the evenings, his horsey face flung back in laughter and his shoulders pumping up and down. Where is he now? No one ever visits us in the evenings anymore.

  But tonight Aunt Emily is here. I hear a groan and a thump as someone pounds—what? The wall? The desk?

  I tiptoe out of the playroom and past the furnace to the door of the study. The room now has a cot in it since Father sleeps down here. Aunt Emily is pacing back and forth, her arms folded tightly and her black skirt swishing. No one sees me standing by the door and I take my smallest paper crane and crawl under the bed. From there, lying on my belly, I can see one of Father's legs crossed at the knees, moving back and forth like a pendulum. His black boot with the hooks lined up along either side of the tongue kicks the leg of his rolltop desk—tick, tick, tick, like a clock.

  Then suddenly the crash again of a fist against the wall and I hear their voices speaking as I have never heard before—tight, low, dark. I half thought I would shout "boo" and jump up at them, but now I am afraid to move. I wish I had not thought to hide.

  "What next, Mark?" Aunt Emily is whispering in a hoarse voice.

  Father's fit of coughing begins again. When he speaks, his voice is thin as the wind. "It can't be helped. It can't be helped."

  "But we can get them out. I'm sure we can," Aunt Emily says. I have never heard such urgency. “Your father won't last in the Sick Bay. And he'll be left behind after the rest of us are gone. He’ll be alone. The orders are to leave everyone in the Sick Bay behind. It's a death sentence for the old ones."

  Grandpa Nakane at Sick Bay? Where, I wonder, is that? And why is it a cause of distress? Is Sick Bay near English Bay or Horseshoe Bay? When we go to Stanley Park we sometimes drive by English Bay. Past English Bay are the other beaches, Second and Third Beach, where I once went to buy potato chips and got lost. Grandpa Nakane came ambling out of all the crowd that day and took my hand in his one strong hand without saying a word and I fed him my potato chips one by one as if he were one of the animals at the zoo. If Grandpa Nakane is at the beach now, could he be lost the way I was? Should we not go to find him?

  “They must have rounded up everyone on Saltspring Island and shipped the whole lot of them to the Pool," Aunt Emily says. "Where will it end?"

  I have seen my Nakane grandparents only once since Christmas. Obasan told me Grandma and Grandpa went to visit friends and their old boat shop on Saltspring Island as they do every year. They have still not come back to their house in New Westminster. When Mother was with us we used to visit Grandma and Grandpa Nakane often and go to see Ay
a Obasan and Uncle Isamu who lived not far from them. I haven't seen Uncle for a long time either.

  Aunt Emily treads back and forth across the wine-coloured carpet, her black pointed shoes with the single strap coming straight toward me, then abruptly away. The round black fastener wobbles with every step.

  "Your mother won't survive it either, Mark. We really have to get them out. We'll go together to the Security Commission tomorrow. I've met the woman there."

  "You think she can help? In all this mess would there be time to listen to one story?"

  "They'll have to. Oh, if Grandma and Grandpa had only stayed at home this year. We’ll have to explain that your parents don't live in Saltspring. No one else from Vancouver or New Westminster has been shoved into that place."

  "Is it so bad there?" Father speaks so softly I can barely hear.

  Aunt Emily sits down on the bed and the wire slats suddenly form a rounded bulge above my head. I push back farther under the bed and my leg brushes against a red, white, and blue ball that Uncle Dan gave me. It's covered in a layer of fine dust.

  "It's a nightmare,” Aunt Emily whispers.

  The black coils at the ends of the slats squeal as Aunt Emily shifts restlessly. “All those little kids. And the old women like Grandma—totally bewildered. Fumi and Eiko can't take any more. They're so thin." Aunt Emily's voice is shaking.

  Fumi and Eiko are Aunt Emily's closest friends. I have seen them often at Aunt Emily's place laughing and talking and teasing each other.

  Father's fist thuds against his knees for a long time. Then, in a halting voice I've never heard him use before, he says, "I have to leave it all in your hands, Emily. My time is up."