by Kyoko Mori
Masa crouched down to examine the three-colored violas planted by the side of the house. The rain did not seem to have helped them much. Their leaves were still turning brown, most of their buds drying out rather than blossoming. The few flowers that had opened were stunted looking. Gently lifting the thick foliage, Masa found a fine web among the lower stems and knew what was causing the violas to wither. The web, fine as dust, was a sign of spider mites that had infested her other plants in previous years. The mites lived on the juices they sucked from stems and buds. Smaller than flecks of dust, their bodies were reddish orange, almost ruby, almost beautiful.
Masa looked up from the violas and saw Takeo walking out of the front door, on his way to the hen coop to collect the eggs. As he waved at her, she got up and continued to examine the flowers. When the ground dried a little, she would dust the violas. Perhaps she would be able to catch them in time.
* * *
When Takeo woke up a few minutes before six that same morning, Masa had already risen. Her thin body seemed to leave no warmth or wrinkles on the futon bedding. Takeo lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
He could still hear children’s voices from his dreams. He had dreamed of hundreds of schoolchildren running in a field of pampas grass. Some of them, he knew, were children he had never seen. Others had been his students during his forty years as a schoolteacher. Then scattered among them were his children and grandchildren. How can I pick out my own children among all these? he had wondered helplessly in the dream. That was just before he woke up. His ear still echoed with their voices—hundreds of children all speaking in twos and threes, their voices making noises like the wind in the long grass.
Lately, waking or sleeping, Takeo heard distant noises that sometimes sounded like the wind, other times like children’s voices. The noises were never loud. They didn’t prevent him from hearing other things. But several times during the day he noticed the constant echo.
He wondered if this was an indication that he was losing his hearing. Even though the echo in his ear was not a serious problem now, it might come to interfere with his hearing later on. He thought of the old man and the old woman across the road, only ten or twelve years older than himself. They had been deaf for seven or eight years now. He saw them sometimes on his walks, their hands fluttering like excited birds. Once, about two years ago, he was planting his only rice paddy, which lay across the road next to the couple’s house. The old man and the old woman were in their yard, arguing, it seemed, about how to stake out their plots. Takeo was startled by their voices. Low, blunted moans spilled from their mouths while their hands did the real talking. He realized for the first time that both of them being deaf, the man and the woman no longer used their spoken words. The sounds that came out of their mouths now had no shape or meaning. They had forgotten how to speak.
It seemed especially horrible that the woman across the road, who had been so talkative, had become deaf and mute. Both the man and the woman had grown up in the village in the days before the land reform, when Takeo’s family owned all the land east of the river. Even now, when Takeo met them in the street, the man and the woman bowed deeply to him as though he were their landlord. If he bowed back, they bowed even deeper. Until the year she became deaf, the woman had brought over to Takeo and Masa the best of her crops—the largest, ripest watermelon, beautiful tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, bunch after bunch of flowers. She would stay and talk with Masa, telling her the problems of her family, asking for advice, as though Masa were still the landowner’s wife, the most influential woman in the village. Takeo had tried to discourage the woman from bringing the gifts. But she only said, “Our family always brought the best to yours. Your mother gave my mother such helpful advice.” When Takeo was troubled by her gifts, Masa only smiled. “But everybody in the village feels the injustice even though they benefited from it,” she said. “They think that the land shouldn’t have been taken away from us quite so abruptly. They felt bad when they saw you working at the school all day and farming in the evenings to make ends meet. It makes them feel better to show you the same respect as before.” “But you know the land reform had to happen,” he said to Masa—just as he had taught his students. “Our country couldn’t have gone on after the War with only a few people owning the land. It wasn’t a very productive system. People are more motivated when the land they work belongs to them. Besides, I enjoyed being a schoolteacher. I wouldn’t have liked sitting in my big house and nodding to my tenant farmers as they brought in their rent. I wouldn’t have wanted to see them live on millet or oats while I ate white rice every day.”
Takeo rose and put on his brown haori jacket over the long shirt and underwear he had slept in. Then he went to the Buddhist altar in the family room. Masa had already brought the daily offering of rice and tea in the small white cups she used for the altar. After her work in the garden, she would come in with a fresh bunch of zinnias or chrysanthemums for the altar.
He lit an incense stick and closed his eyes. His head bowed, he tried to forget the constant chatter of his mind and be at peace as he faced the altar. The distant echo of children’s voices faded gradually. For a brief moment, his mind was almost blank, peaceful. Then he was thinking again of his children and grandchildren, the woman across the road, his family losing the land, the rainstorm during the night, Shizuko, Yuki, Masa … It was impossible to concentrate on being at peace. He had thought once that it would be easier as he grew older.
How wrong I was, he thought as he opened his eyes.
The bright blues, purples and green of the fabric on the altar flooded his thoughts. Yuki had dyed the cloth during her visit and left it on the altar as an offering to the spirits. Its design, showing a cluster of irises, was made up of various shades of blue—some of them closer to green, others closer to purple.
Shizuko’s colors, Takeo had thought as soon as Yuki had finished the cloth.
When he looked at the irises now, he knew again that Yuki was going to be all right. It was something he could not quite explain, even to Masa, who worried so much. As soon as Yuki showed him the cloth dyed in the colors her mother had loved, Takeo knew that Yuki would find her way. She was beginning to look beyond the sadness and pain her mother’s memory must still bring her.
Takeo stood up slowly, leaving the incense to burn down by itself. He went through the house toward the front door. His legs had been better since the warm weather. He was practicing walking without his cane again, though he could not walk fast. Exercise was good. He would go and collect the eggs from the hen coop. The woven basket for the eggs hung on the nail near the door. The sun shone through it and cast a latticework shadow on the wall.
Outside, Masa was among the violas planted against the house. He waved to her and walked toward the hen coop. The ground smelled of rain. He could see already that it would be a hot day. By noon, the rain of the night before would be rising in vapors from the hot ground and the cicadas would be droning in the trees, their voices like currents of heat.
The hens were quiet this morning. None tried to escape or peck at his fingers while he gathered the eggs, still warm, out of the straw. His son, Saburo, had come to butcher the rooster one afternoon during Yuki’s visit. The rooster had been getting too mean. Yuki asked her uncle, dead serious, if he couldn’t just let the rooster wander off. No, Masa had to explain. It would only stay in the garden pecking at all her flowers. Yuki stayed in the house while her uncle butchered the rooster in the yard. She didn’t come out for a long time. Somehow, it made Takeo smile to think about it.
For all Masa’s worries, Yuki had not changed all that much. When she was about eight years old and she and her mother were visiting for the summer, Saburo went fishing one afternoon and returned with two buckets full of bass. Masa cooked the fish for supper. Yuki, having seen her uncle scale the fish, would not eat them. She made herself a lettuce sandwich instead—lettuce and peanut butter together on toasted bread, which Saburo said was more disgusting than
any kind of dead fish. “At least the lettuce wasn’t scaled while it was jumping around,” Yuki retorted. During her recent visit, she said that she had become a vegetarian. “A friend of mine went to help some farmers butcher pigs because he thought that since he ate pork, he ought to be able to kill the pigs himself,” she said. “That made a lot of sense. I stopped eating any kind of meat or fish because I could never kill anything.” That was just like Yuki, to think like that. She still ate lettuce and peanut butter sandwiches. One night, Takeo saw her making them as a late-night snack. She even offered to make one for him. When he declined, saying that he still didn’t feel up to such a strange combination of food, she replied, “Grandpa, it’s good for you,” as though he were a child now and she a mother. It had made him laugh.
Takeo collected the last egg and went out of the hen coop. Since the rooster had been gone, Masa said that she heard one of the hens crowing almost like a rooster. She must be mistaken, Takeo decided. He had heard nothing of the kind.
As he walked toward the house, he could see his wife cutting some zinnias from the patch closer to the road. The zinnias had done well this year. Some of them were unusual colors—salmon, lavender, peach.
He stepped inside the house and waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. The echo of the children’s voices returned, a little louder than when he had gotten up. From the hallway, he could see the wooden slide in the sun porch. He had built it when Shizuko was born.
That was forty-six years ago, he thought. Shizuko would have been forty-six years old if she had lived. He felt a sudden sadness. There was nothing he would have liked more, he thought, than to hear Shizuko complain about white strands in her hair, about her laugh lines deepening. But she had not lived long enough to be concerned about such things. They would never be laughing together about getting old.
He walked to the kitchen and was about to put down the basket of eggs on the table when the pain came. It was almost as though something, a small hand, was scratching the walls of his chest. He stood motionless, looking at the basket of eggs in his hand. Then the pain became sharper. It started somewhere between his chest and stomach and spread both upward and downward.
Behind him, the door opened. Masa was coming into the house. He wanted to turn around and look at her coming down the hallway, pink and purple zinnias in her hand. But his chest hurt too much. He had to stand still and concentrate on the pain. Masa, he wanted to say, don’t worry. Don’t grieve. But he could not utter a sound.
Slowly, he leaned forward and managed to put down the basket of eggs on the table. Then he stood looking at them, eight eggs nestled in the woven basket. When the rooster had been there, Takeo had candled the eggs. Most of them had lit up completely in front of the flame, light flooding out the thin shell. Each egg was a perfect sphere of light in the arc of his hand.
Masa was saying something behind him. He could not hear clearly. The echo in his ears became louder. For the first time, it seemed to block out his hearing.
Masa tossed the bunch of zinnias on the table. The flowers scattered over the basket of eggs.
Zinnias for the altar, Takeo thought. Thank you, Masa. He tried to smile. The flowers are for me. They are beautiful.
* * *
Yuki was about to leave for work when the telephone rang. She had already put on her waitress uniform. Her friend Isamu was going to give her a ride on his motorcycle to the restaurant where she worked. She asked him to wait in her room while she answered the phone in the hallway. None of the other boarders were home.
The first thing she heard when she picked up the phone was her grandmother’s voice saying, “Your grandfather’s had a heart attack.”
Yuki was speechless. Her grandmother hadn’t waited for Yuki to identify herself or even to say “Hello.” She wondered, for a moment, what she might have done if any of the other boarders had picked up the phone. Then she realized the full meaning of what her grandmother was saying.
“Is he all right?” Yuki asked.
“No.” Her grandmother said nothing more.
“What do you mean, no?” Yuki shouted. She was stunned by the loudness of her own voice.
“How soon can you come for the funeral?”
Yuki heard the scratchy sound of the static and realized that she was gripping the telephone cord, twisting it hard.
“You can come, can’t you?”
“I’ll be there on the first train tomorrow morning.” Yuki had a feeling of listening to someone else’s voice. “I have to go to work right now. Then I don’t have to work till the day after tomorrow—maybe not then, either. I’ll try to switch off with one of the other girls.”
“Why can’t you come tonight?”
“I was on my way to work. It’s too late to call in.”
“Is that so important at a time like this?”
Yuki stopped for a moment. What’s the hurry now? a voice said inside her. What good would anything do? “I’ll come the first thing in the morning. I’m sorry, Grandma. I can’t afford to call in at the last minute and get fired. But I’ll be there soon. Wait for me, okay?”
As she hung up, she thought of the telephone call six years ago, when she called her grandmother after her mother’s death. She had to repeat herself because her grandmother wouldn’t hear it. Finally, her grandmother said, “Is this one of your tricks?” so that Yuki had to repeat, “No. I’m telling the truth. Mama’s dead.” She hung up. Her grandmother called back and said, “Your grandfather and I are leaving right away. We’ll be there before midnight. I’ll call your aunt Aya and make sure she gets there soon too. Just wait for us.” Her grandparents’ train was delayed. Yuki fell asleep before they arrived. She woke up the next morning and found her grandmother in the kitchen waiting to make her breakfast.
Isamu was standing in the hallway, looking at her.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “What was that all about?”
“My grandfather just died,” Yuki said. “I have to leave in the morning.”
“Your grandfather?”
“My grandfather I went to see in June.”
“I’m sorry. Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” Yuki walked toward her room, where she had left her purse and her waitress shoes. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “I should have seen him more often.”
Isamu put his hand on her shoulder as if to stop her. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to work.”
Yuki continued to walk, so he had to let go. “I can’t skip work on short notice,” she said. She went into her room, picked up her purse and shoes, and turned to Isamu. “We should go.”
His motorcycle was parked in front of the boardinghouse. She sat behind him and put her arms lightly around his waist.
“You have to really hold on, remember?” he said. “Last time, you were so busy looking around, you almost let go.”
“Okay.”
When the motorcycle started, the wind whistled in her ears. Isamu sped up, and the whistle turned into a louder noise, like the noise of a waterfall.
I should have seen him more often, she kept repeating to herself. She remembered her recent visit, how she had argued with her grandmother and gone to the garden, pretending to be so interested in weeding the flower patches. Why didn’t I spend more time with him then and before? she thought; I should have visited him no matter what my father said. Her mind was stuck on that regret. She couldn’t think of anything else. She couldn’t even cry.
“Yuki!” Isamu was shouting above the noise of the wind. “I told you to hold on! You’re about to let go and fall off.”
“I’m sorry.” She leaned forward and tightened her arms around him. “I know I shouldn’t let go.”
Isamu pulled his motorcycle to the curb in front of the restaurant and turned off the engine. Yuki got off.
“Can I pick you up after work?” he asked.
“You don’t have to do that. I can get a ride from someone here.”
“Let me take you to the sta
tion tomorrow morning, then.”
“All right. Thanks.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” he said. He got off the motorcycle and stood in front of her. “Call me after work,” he said. “You know you can call me anytime if you want to talk.”
“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”
He reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll be thinking of you,” he said. “Hang in there.”
She smiled at him and went into the dark foyer of the restaurant.
* * *
At seven o’clock, the restaurant was at its busiest. Yuki had several tables of couples and families, and a large group of businessmen who all wanted mixed drinks and separate checks. She was going to get the third round of drinks for the businessmen when the busboy tapped her arm. “Those people over there,” he said, pointing to one of the families. “They want their check.”
“Well, they’ll have to wait,” she said, and continued toward the bar. She didn’t have the checks figured out. She would have to do it leaning on the bar while the bartender mixed the drinks.
At the bar, she ordered the drinks and then pulled the bunch of checks out of her apron pocket. She began to leaf through them for the family’s check. It was hard to read her own handwriting in the dim light from the bar. She always wrote too small, the lines bunched together too tight. Her grandfather had tried to teach her to write more neatly when she was a child. He would write down some numbers and letters on the dotted lines of her notebook and she would try to make her own as much like his as possible. As she looked at her cramped-up handwriting, she thought again, Why didn’t I go on seeing him after Mama’s death, when he would have wanted to see me all the more?
“Hey.” The busboy was behind her again. “Those people. They’re really anxious for their check. They asked me to get it for them.”