Legacy- an Anthology

by Regina Calcaterra et al.

  I nodded, grateful for those words, grateful I wouldn’t have to explain the whole painful story from the beginning.

  “I recognize you, my dear. And I suppose I’m not really surprised… I always knew you would return. Come, let’s go inside and have a tea, shall we?”

  For the first time, I entered the cottage. During the three weeks we spent in the cellar, I’d always wondered what the house was like. What the people who lived there were like.

  “Help yourself to a pastry while I get the tea on,” Madame said.

  I looked around the house, and memories flooded my mind. It felt so bizarre since I’d never been in those rooms before. Yet the sounds and smells were familiar. Again, my heart raced as I remembered the panic I’d felt all those years ago. Trying to remain calm so as not to scare the twins, yet being terrified myself.

  “I imagine you have some questions for me,” Madame said, setting a teacup on the table.

  “I do,” I replied, cradling the warm cup in my hands. “I’ve managed to piece a lot together over the years. I… thank you. Thank you for helping us. For saving us. It was a huge risk for you.”

  “Oh, it was nothing.” She smiled and let out a tiny laugh. “Actually, no, it was not nothing. It was the most frightening thing we’d ever done. But you don’t have to thank me. It’s what you do. You help people, you know?”

  “Did you ever hear what happened to my parents?”

  She paused and looked down at her teacup. She ran a finger along the edge of the saucer, then stopped. She looked up and said simply, “No.”

  That “no” weighed a thousand kilos. I suspected she knew much more than she let on. I also suspected it was something I was not ready to hear. Not yet. Maybe I would gain the courage to ask her one day, or maybe I would find my answers elsewhere. Today, I had a different goal.

  “I don’t have anything from my parents, anything physical. Not a single memento. Our suitcases… Do you by chance still have them?”

  The country house was charming but tidy. Would she have tossed out the suitcases, figuring she had no need for them? Or would she have saved them, wanting a memento herself of the surreal time she had helped three German children escape certain death?

  “I don’t know why, but yes, I have saved them. Help yourself to more tea. I’ll be right back.”

  I glanced around the kitchen as I waited. But the shelves lined with jars of flour, sugar and various baking pans weren’t enough to distract me. What would I find in the suitcases? What was I even hoping to find?

  Madame returned with the luggage. Three small trunks. “I’m sorry, I should have offered to help,” I said, heat rising to my cheeks.

  “Non, non, you’re a guest. Which one is yours?” I pointed to the largest of the three. “We’ll start with that one.” She carried it over and set it at my feet.

  I hesitated, then thrust it open. A musty scent filled the kitchen as I sifted through my long-forgotten belongings. Books, of course, along with my favorite dress, some other clothes. All my things but nothing from Mother.

  “Thank you,” I managed to say. But I wanted to cry. I’d come here to revisit my past and hopefully find a souvenir. This suitcase would have to be enough. The memory that Mother had lovingly packed these items for me, knowing she was sending me off to a better life, and knowing she was not likely to see me again. Any of us.

  As I pushed the trunk off to the side, a piece of paper slipped out and fluttered to the stone floor. How had I missed that?

  “What’s that, my dear?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, reaching for the note. I unfolded it, recognizing Mother’s slanted writing immediately. Tears welled up in my eyes, and a smile slowly stretched across my face.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Mother’s recipe for apfelstrudel. She knew it was my favorite. She had been about to teach me how to make it before…” I choked on my words and couldn’t get the rest out.

  Madame rose from her chair, walked around behind me and placed her arms on my shoulders. “It seems you have found what you were looking for. Stay here for a few days. Maybe we can discover this recipe together.”

  I looked out the kitchen window to the orchard and thought back to all the tartes Tatin this kind woman had made for me and how I’d never appreciated them. And how, ever since, I couldn’t eat apple tart because it brought back too many painful memories. And I looked at the scrap of paper with my mother’s handwriting, the only thing left of her in this world.

  “Yes, that sounds lovely,” I said. My heart ached for my mother, yet I felt something else as well. Hope. Hope that baking this silly dessert would help me remember my mother, my former life. That maybe, just maybe, it would finally taste sweet again.

  N agasaki

  David Whitehouse

  In the 1920s, when Choko was small, she adored the life-sized tigers her father painted on the sliding paper doors that separated the tatami rooms at home. He was a coal miner, and the family lived on the Takashima mining island off the west coast of Nagasaki peninsula in southern Japan.

  When Choko was a teenager, she started to take part in the island’s annual summer festival. She was one of the girls who each July donned bright blue kimonos and struggled through the humid evening in their wooden sandals with the rest of the procession.

  The air would be smoky and damp, loaded with the smell of grilled fish. The men would carry a huge painted plaster dragon, mounted on a wooden pallet, on their shoulders. If it rained, the kimonos with their red sashes would get wetter and more revealing, and the girls would dance more keenly to the cacophony of beating drums and clanging bells.

  One year, as she danced, a tiny needle of light in her mind told her there would be trouble. The same sliver of light had soundlessly intimated the year before that her brother would come home from school camp in the mainland mountains with a broken arm.

  When the procession finished, she told her father she wanted him to take her home. He wouldn’t listen and kept drinking beer in the village square with the rest of the men. Their songs got louder and cruder. Then she saw him with the shiny red eye of the dragon in his hands, trying to thrust it under his coat. He was a poor man, and the eye could be sold for at least a month’s wages.

  Then he was down in the mud, and she could see the crowd of men kicking, kicking him again and again until the eye slipped from his hands and into the mud. She pushed against the mob to reach him, but she couldn’t get through. No one heard her as she screamed at them to stop. Choko’s father died from his injuries within a few days.

  Ten years later, in 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded China and occupied the city of Shanghai. Choko was still living in Takashima with her now elderly mother. Her brother had married and moved to another village. The tigers on the doors, which had been as large as life, were now shrunken and faded, and marked by dirty fingerprints.

  The soldiers came to the house and seized her. They wanted to use her to stop Japanese troops raping their way indiscriminately across the eastern Chinese seaboard, which would have inflamed local resistance to the occupation. They wanted her to control China. With her body she was to hold the Chinese at bay for her masters.

  They shipped her there and gave her a tatty gray kimono. She lived in a tiny hut that had insects crawling on the floor. As she was raped every day, 10 times a day or even more, sometimes by two at once, she began to concentrate on the tiny needle of light that still existed in her mind.

  As Choko concentrated on it, the eye of the needle became a little wider and seemed to become a tunnel that was inviting her to enter. Each day with the brutes inside her she would crawl a little further along the tunnel. One day the tunnel expanded, and she was able to stand up. There seemed to be something solid under her. She pressed down with the soles of her feet and was able to rock back and forth. She looked down, and she could see the brutes down there, and she suddenly felt that they were fucking a corpse.

  She could also see outside the hut,
the slack-jawed, unshaven soldiers smoking and waiting their turn. The tunnel opened out endlessly before her. She stepped forward into the light and was gone.

  ~~~~

  On the plane to Japan, the children were served first, but they fell asleep. Their trays of food sat untouched in front of them. I started on my holiday reading material by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Would you like to be spun round in a fairground teacup? Mishima answered his own question with a definite No. Having written the final page of the four-book Sea of Fertility saga, Mishima in 1970 attempted to lead a military coup d’état which he hoped would restore traditional Japanese values. As he seems to have suspected, the soldiers who he incited to insurrection just laughed at him. He then committed ritual suicide at age 45.

  I struggled with the first of the four books for a while but kept losing the threads of the reincarnation-based plot. Who was supposed to have been reborn as whom? The children were still asleep, and the economy-class food service for adults was miles away. Hungry passengers stared in disapproval as I demolished a child burger.

  We changed planes in Seoul as it’s the easiest way to get to Fukuoka on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. One day to recover from the flight and then it was out into the post-modern consumerist wonderland. We started early in the morning. The drive from the wooden-framed house near Fukuoka city took about three hours. The group comprised my wife, our kids and my wife’s extended family. There were nephews, nieces, cousins. They were all Japanese, and I was the only foreigner.

  As we drove, I patiently lectured our callow audience about the historical influence of Catholic missionaries in southern Japan. After a while, the children began to doze. We stopped at a service station for breakfast. After we had eaten, I stood outside and stared at some kanji, complex Chinese pictographs that number in the thousands. These were imported into Japan in ancient times, and in a kind of linguistic skin transplant, grafted on to the existing spoken language. It’s like writing English using Arab letters or whatever. I call it state-engineered dyslexia. The Koreans and the Vietnamese were sensible enough to drop them and come up with something easier, but the Japanese have persisted. Each kanji has its own meaning, as well as a variety of possible pronunciations; Japanese sounds for basic nouns, Chinese ones for more abstract compounds.

  I stared at a group of three of these letters that seemed suddenly to swim together to give a rare glimpse of clarity.

  “Life…science…application!” I turned to my wife in triumph. I was sure she would be pleased with my progress. “So that must be the drug store, right? But how do you pronounce it?”

  “It means female hygiene,” she said, slapping me on the arm. “Don’t stand there with your mouth open. Hurry up, will you, everyone’s waiting!”

  We headed on toward Nagasaki. We were soon there and found ourselves jammed in among the almost vertical slopes. The houses seemed to cling like limpets to the sides of a rock face. This is not a good place to ride a bike. Or buy a piano. Or get old.

  To be fair, the locals’ English didn’t seem to be much better than my Japanese. For example: Meat Is the King of Material. What the hell was that supposed to mean? The sign was outside a butcher’s shop and was presumably intended to attract customers from the local American military base.

  Our next stop was the reconstructed Dutch trading settlement at Dejima. For the two centuries that ended in the 1850s, this was the country’s only point of contact with the outside world. As we strolled around, I decided that the Protestant Dutch merchants had been much more sensible than the Catholics in Japan. Not only did they avoid being thrown into boiling water—always a risk for an overzealous missionary—but they were housed in spacious tatami-floored homes during their annual trading visits. These had now been restored and opened to the public.

  The Japanese prized the silk and spices that the Dutch brought, and so hand-picked women from the city were made available to entertain them. In fact, these women were the only locals allowed into contact with the Dutch: You really needed a good reason to be let into the settlement. The term “Dutch wife” is still used nowadays in Japanese. These days it means “blow up doll.”

  I sat on the tatami and imagined myself as a Dutch merchant chilling out in a high-security comfort zone. As I daydreamed, one of our children charged across a carefully restored dining room. An alarm went off, and a security guard came running. I wrestled the kid back under control. The sweat glowed on the guard’s neck as he wagged a white-gloved finger at me.

  From Dejima, our ragged, floppy-hatted army toiled uphill through the afternoon humidity. We were bound for the Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, built in remembrance of a mixed group of Japanese and foreigners who were crucified for preaching Catholicism. It struck me as we climbed that the hill was a worse-than-average place to get crucified.

  I have always been agnostic, at least since the long-ago night when a German student of philosophy pounded on a beer-soaked table in a furious response to my confident declaration of atheism. He told me I was unlogisch; the existence of God could not be proved or disproved either way. I decided that I couldn’t argue with him. But how was I to label myself? Thomas Huxley, finding himself similarly confused a century earlier, had coined the term “agnostic” so that he might have “a tail like all the other foxes.” That, I decided, would have to do.

  In the toilets outside the church, a small boy in our group relieved himself squarely on my light tan trousers. I sighed and led him back to the group.

  Inside the church, it was a surprise to find that the floor was flat and not sloping uphill toward the altar. That must have been some feat of construction. I sat in one of the pews and thought about the butcher’s shop sign. Meat, the material king. The reason the sign here seemed so weird, I reckoned, was because in the west we like things to be capable of moving—like a person—before we start calling them the king of this, the king of that. Or start worshipping them as gods, for that matter. We like to see something that we can imagine as a proof of human control if we try hard enough. At home we have McDonald’s or Burger King, but the king is not the meat itself. It’s a human figure. It’s either some Colonel Sanders-type guy lurking in the background, or the staff, collectively, or the customers, who are the kings.

  The Japanese Shintoists, on the other hand, don’t care about whether something can move or looks like a person. They don’t need the illusion of human control. Nature is a law unto itself. They worship stones, the wind, the sun, mountains, waterfalls. It’s the agnostic creed par excellence. There’s hardly anything in the way of fixed belief, but an endless array of natural spirits to cut out and keep.

  “Are we going to the hotel now?” I asked my wife. I wanted and deserved fresh trousers, dinner, beer. My leg was warm and damp, and it wasn’t even my own kid who had done it.

  “No,” she said. “We’re going to the atomic bomb museum.”

  I sighed. I had been there before. I remembered how the American pilots, blinded by the cloudy weather, had been just about to return to base. At the last moment, a brief chink of blue in the clouds; then mangled clocks stuck forever at 11:02 a.m.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “He pissed on me.” I showed her the stain on my trousers. I pointed at the culprit.

  “It’ll be good for the children,” she said. “We agreed, remember? You can change your trousers later. Come on.” We collected our strength and ran down the hill in the gathering shadows of late afternoon.

  Letters of the Night :

  Adeline and Augustin

  Didier Quémener

  The following is presented as a work of fiction. Only the authors of this nighttime correspondence may determine its veracity. Adeline and Augustin share a love story. A story of youth. The creation of an immutable bond between these two characters before the rules of society and adulthood could make their mark. Their reunion, at the castle of Madame de M. during the winter of 1875, is the perfect moment to reignite their passion. The letters of Adeline and Au
gustin are offered to you exactly as they were found, without a single modification.

  Letter I

  To Adeline

  Dear Adeline,

  Please forgive me for my audacity, sending this letter to you at such a late hour, but I have found it impossible to sleep. Your presence at the castle this evening far outshone the ostentatiousness of the ball and the company of the other guests.

  I found myself riveted to the spot the moment my gaze met yours. Without a doubt, when admiring the young woman you have become, I rediscovered the child I knew from my visits to your family home. However, time seemed to mock me when in your eyes I saw the reflection of those summer games we would play in the park behind your parents’ residence, and at the same moment, the charm and elegance that accompany you today. The years that have passed, without your path crossing mine, have graced you with such beauty. If Madame de M. had not introduced us, certainly several more years would have flown by before our lives could touch once again. What a pleasure to have seen you, to have enjoyed your company! If fatigue has not overcome you, a response would culminate this joyful reunion…

  Letter II

  To Augustin

  Dear Augustin,

  All is forgiven, for I, too, was not sleeping. As I look back at my memories of you, feisty young man that you were, I suppose I could not expect any less. On the contrary, silence from you certainly would have surprised me. The pleasure to meet again was mine as well, Augustin. You have matured quite a bit after the years abroad, haven’t you? You seem to be a man of the world, intelligent, and with a confidence that draws everyone to your side, hoping to share in conversation. Bravo! And I could not help but notice the particular effect you had upon the ladies…

  Letter III

  To Adeline

  Adeline,

  I thank you for your words. You are right—my voyages brought me a great deal, intellectually as well as emotionally. And of course the time that passes inexorably leaves its mark, as does the ink on these letters I address to you. Did you know that I have preciously guarded the letters you sent to me during the winters you spent in Italy with your parents? When a sense of melancholy knocks at the doors of my heart, I reread them, one after the other… Do you still have mine?