For a second Aya thought she might faint, but she didn’t. She stared straight on, without flinching. She held her breath, but did not avert her eyes. With her last tug on the material, Fumi had exposed the baby’s face. The rest of its body remained tightly swaddled.
They stared at their discovery, too shocked to move.
Fumi spoke first. “Do you think it’s…?”
Holding her hand over her nose, Aya bent closer and gingerly pulled more of the material away from the baby’s head and shoulders. Fumi crouched down beside her.
The baby was tiny with very dark skin, a deep rich hue of brown like the color of the earth after a long rainfall. It had a surprisingly thick head of hair, damp springy little curls that covered its miniature skull. Its thin lips were primly pursed in a wiggly line, and its eyes were closed, as if it were sleeping. They could see two lines of thick curly lashes rimming the bottom of its large round eyelids. What if it opened its eyes, Aya thought. What would they do?
“Is it dead?” Fumi whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Why does it look like that? It doesn’t look Japanese.”
Aya didn’t say anything at first. Finally she said, “I think we should put it back, don’t you? Maybe its mother will come back soon.”
Aya put her finger on the baby’s tiny cheek. Its skin was slippery and a little cold. She wrapped the cloth over its face and put the bundle back in the bucket where they had found it. When she finished, she realized she was shaking uncontrollably. Next to her, Fumi was shaking, too.
Without exchanging a word, they both began running.
28
After working all Saturday night in Love Letter Alley, Kondo usually didn’t get home until early morning. He would crawl onto his thin futon in his underwear and, exhausted from the long night, surrender immediately to the dark pull of sleep. But no matter how tired he was he never allowed himself to sleep in too late. Sunday afternoons were the only time he had to himself, and he used it to browse the used-book stores, a practice he had begun as a student long before the war. It was one of the few pleasures he permitted himself. During wartime, the English-language books he loved so much had been taken off the shelves, and he had missed them greatly. He’d had to content himself with perusing the Japanese classics—this was not a bad thing, for there were many works he hadn’t read—and even some German books, though he knew hardly a word of German. Having little or no money to buy books had never been a problem, for browsing was free. But Kondo wanted more. He wanted to own his books, to have his own personal library. As much as he could, after buying the food that he needed, he set aside the rest of his extra money for this purpose.
The book district was slowly beginning to recover. At first there were only a fraction of the original number of stores, and even they were mainly empty, their stock having been destroyed during the bombings. A few stores had miraculously been spared; their walls remained intact, their books unscathed if a little dusty. But other stores had been obliterated. Kondo knew that the father of one of his students had lost everything. He remembered the store—Tanaka Books—and even recalled having had conversations with the owner, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. Now if he came across Tanaka hawking cheap pulp magazines on a street corner, he tried to avert his gaze. It was the best way to preserve what remained of the poor man’s dignity. He wondered if Tanaka would do the same for him if he spotted Kondo at work in Love Letter Alley.
Today he thought he might go to Kobayashi Shoten. The store specialized in art books and lately had begun carrying works on European art that were hard to find elsewhere. Kondo liked the impressionists. How he enjoyed looking at the works of Renoir—the facial expressions the man created were exquisite. Toulouse-Lautrec was another favorite. Those sad drunken faces brought him an odd solace. Why was that? Was it simply knowing that there were other people in the world like that? Even if you were white and European, he thought, you might be lonely, too.
He had just turned the corner onto the street where Kobayashi Shoten was located, when he almost collided with Fumi and Aya. Or rather, they almost collided with him, for they were the ones who were running recklessly down the narrow sidewalk, unmindful of the book displays outside the stores and of the other people who were strolling in the district.
“Miss Tanaka! Miss Shimamura!” He automatically assumed his teacher’s voice.
The girls had been running hard. Their hair was messy, their brows shone with sweat, their faces were tear-streaked and blotchy. Their shoulders heaved up and down.
“What’s the matter?” he said. Now he was really concerned. They were his pupils, and it was obvious that something was wrong. For a second it crossed his mind that they had stolen something and were running away from a shopkeeper. If so, he would have to give them a lecture on ethical behavior. He straightened his posture and made himself a little taller. “You can tell me,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Terrible, Sensei. It was awful.” Fumi spoke haltingly between loud gulps of air.
“What?”
“We have to show him,” Fumi said to Aya. She turned to him. “Kondo Sensei, please come with us.”
The girls hurried back in the direction they’d come from, and Kondo had to quicken his pace in order to keep up with them. They threaded their way down the crowded main street and past all the used-book stores until they reached a passageway between two stores that led to a sunless back lane. It was near the site of the former Tanaka Books.
Fumi and Aya walked halfway down and stopped.
“Over there,” Fumi said, pointing to a wall where overgrown weeds sprouted thickly.
“Where?”
“In the weeds. There’s a bucket. There’s something inside.”
He went over. Sure enough there was a bucket and inside there was a bundle of cloth. It was probably someone’s clothing. He turned around to look at the girls who hung back several steps, and wondered if they were playing a prank on him, but their faces were if anything more strained and anxious than before.
“Please, Sensei, it’s not our fault. We found it by accident.”
As soon as he picked up the bundle of clothing, he realized there was something inside, something that smelled a bit off. The cloth—a lightweight yukata—was clean, so it couldn’t have been exposed to the elements for very long. He lifted the top folds of the material and saw the baby’s face. He’d never seen one like this before though he had heard there were lots of them now.
“Sensei, it’s not alive, is it?” It was Fumi’s voice at his side. He shook his head. There were no signs that the baby was breathing. He wondered if it had even taken its first breath.
“No,” he said quietly. “No, it’s not.”
Maybe someone else would have examined the baby right then and there. Perhaps he should have unwound the cloth completely and taken a good look. Later, when he watched what the police did at the station, he realized that there might have been something tucked inside—an amulet or a note with a name—and he could have been the first to discover it. But he didn’t want to touch the baby. Not because of its color or the fact that it was dead. No, he didn’t want to sully the baby by putting his dirty life-soiled fingers on its beautiful body. The baby struck him as so pure, a tiny Buddha come to earth. He felt he didn’t have the right to touch it.
At the neighborhood police station, they treated the matter with such callous indifference, Kondo regretted letting the girls come with him. They had walked together to the station, and the whole time Kondo had cradled the baby gently in the crook of his arms. It didn’t matter that it was dead. The girls flanked him on either side, leaning toward him in an uncharacteristically intimate way, as if he were their father. Maybe they had wanted to protect the baby, too. The officer on duty took the baby like he was handling a clump of unwashed clothes and set it down on the dirty counter. Kondo shuddered. He hated to think what else had touched that counter recently—some punk gangster leaning his greasy shirt against it as he o
ffered a bribe, or a woman of the night sprawled drunkenly across it. The policeman quickly unwound the cloth, and laid the naked infant on its back. He turned his attention to the material.
Kondo saw that it was a boy. The baby’s tiny fists were clenched tightly to its chest like a boxer ready to fight.
The policeman shook out the yukata, snapping it in the air several times.
“Got to check for ID or a note, just in case,” he said. He made a show of looking on the floor. “See, nothing at all. That’s the way it always is.”
He rolled the yukata into a ball and put it back on the counter beside the tiny body. Then he opened a drawer, got a small label, and in black ink wrote “Unknown,” followed by the date and time. He tied the label to the baby’s foot with a piece of thin wire.
Kondo wished he could pull some of the material over the baby’s body. Instead he said, “I suppose there is no way to trace the mother?”
“You can see there’s no note. No identification.”
“Yes, I can see that. But do you think there might be other clues? Perhaps the yukata might be a lead.”
“Not possible. This kind of cheap cotton kimono. Besides, it’s dead, isn’t it. Even when they’re alive, we can’t do anything. There’re too many of them.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose so.” Kondo was conscious of the girls standing next to him and hoped they didn’t really understand.
“Are you kidding? You wouldn’t believe!” The policeman laughed crudely. He was a thin man with leathery skin and deep wrinkles around his mouth. “A lot of them look like that, too.”
He picked up the baby and took it into the back room. When he returned to the counter, he looked surprised that they were still there.
“Hey, you don’t want that yukata, do you?” he asked, pointing at the material on the counter.
“It’s not mine,” Kondo said.
The policeman fingered the yukata as if assessing the thickness of the cotton. “It looks pretty new. Well, I guess we better keep it here at the station.”
Kondo knew that the policeman was going to take it home and give it to his wife or daughter. There were some bloodstains but those could be washed out. The material was still good. It could certainly be reused. A policeman’s salary was as bad as a teacher’s.
“What are they going to do with the baby?” Fumi asked as soon as they left the station.
“Don’t worry.” He tried to sound reassuring. “The police will take care of it properly.”
“Will they give it a funeral?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
All three of them were silent for a moment. Then, just when he thought Fumi was finished with her questions, she spoke again. “Sensei, why did the baby look like that? Why didn’t it look Japanese?”
He wasn’t prepared for her directness. Fumi often struck him as naïve and worldly at the same time.
“Actually, he was half Japanese and half—”
“Amerikajin.” Aya completed his sentence. “American soldier.”
When he swiveled his head in her direction, he was surprised by the heat of her gaze.
Now it was Aya’s turn to question him. “Who is going to tell the baby’s mother where he is?” she asked. “How is she going to know where to find him?”
Kondo wasn’t prepared for this question, either, but an answer came to him immediately. “Aya, a mother always knows where her baby is. Don’t worry, she is praying for him in her heart.”
Thank goodness for the sweet-potato peddler. His cart was passing at just the right moment, his singsong chant—“Yaki-imo! Yaki-imo!”—growing louder as he moved in their direction. The potatoes were roasted whole over a small charcoal fire that he stoked in a metal tin.
“Are you girls hungry? I hear the sweet-potato cart, don’t you?”
Kondo watched the girls struggle to peel off the crisp outer skin and devour the sweet orange flesh of the potato without burning their lips or fingertips. They were smiling, and he hoped that, with this distraction, the baby would be forgotten.
29
Aya wondered if the baby gave Fumi the same kind of nightmares as he did her. For a long time after they found him, he came to her every night, always naked but each time somehow bigger and more muscular. He lay on his back, his chubby arms and legs churning energetically in the air, his powerful fists clenched over his chest. His head was gigantic, and although he sometimes opened his mouth wide as if waiting to be fed, his eyes remained tightly shut, just as when they had discovered him. The dream refused to release her, and she feared the moment when he would open his eyes. The terror was so real that in the morning her nightgown would be drenched in sweat. She knew that when he opened his eyes, the first person he would see would be her. And she knew he would ask, “Mother, why did you leave me behind?”
It was the question she always asked. It was the question that had no answer.
Aya had seen a dead baby before. In the internment camp, there was a young mother whose baby died at birth. For a full week, the woman refused to give it up, screaming hysterically if anyone tried to take it from her. As soon as she could get out of bed, she went from person to person, even among the children, asking if they wanted to take a look. Aya had caught a glimpse of a tiny skull with a tuft of black hair; it was poking out of a bloodstained towel. “Don’t look!” Aya’s mother had pulled her away, tried to cover her eyes. But it was too late. She’d already seen it.
Aya was too young at the time to fully understand what was happening, but the hushed voices of the other women lingered in her mind long after the event had passed. The woman’s husband had been sent even farther away than Aya’s father—to a place somewhere in the wilderness of northern Ontario. A POW camp, someone whispered.
“It was worry that killed her baby.” The old grandmothers talked among themselves in the bathhouse. “Kawaiso. So pitiful. Worry is a poison. It went straight into her womb.”
Aya didn’t know what a womb was, but she pictured a soft pink sac that sagged heavier and heavier as it slowly filled with the black fluid of worry. Fearing the young mother might do something to herself, the other women set up a watch and took turns following her around. Aya’s mother seemed particularly affected by the woman’s grief.
Aya’s friend Midori said that dead babies went to Sai no Kawara—the Children’s Limbo. The banks of the River Sai were rocky, and there was nothing to play with except the stones on the shore. The children built little piles of stones here and there, little piles of memory so no one would forget them. No sooner had they built a pile but it would be knocked down and they had to start all over again. Was it cold there? Aya wondered. Were they lonely?
When winter came to their camp, the temperature plunged and it began to snow. White pellets fell ceaselessly from the huge gray sky. Aya had seen snow only three times before in Vancouver, soft fat flakes that fluttered to the sidewalk like feathery petals and dissolved as soon as they touched the ground. She remembered trying to catch them on her tongue. But in the mountains the snow was different. The flakes were small and hard and persistent. The snow fell for days without stop until the lake was covered and all the pine trees on the mountainsides wore heavy capes of white. The ground, the shore, the peaks, the sky: The whole world looked like it would remain white forever.
Each day was colder than the one before until it became too cold to snow. Too cold to breathe. Too cold for blood to flow. Inside their tarpaper shacks, they put on every piece of clothing they’d brought with them, even their Sunday dresses, layering one on top of the other like clowns.
“The government knew all about this,” Mrs. Takahara said to Aya’s mother. Aya and her mother shared a cramped, freezing shack with another family, Mrs. Takahara and her three children. “They studied the long-range weather forecast and picked this as the coldest place they could send us. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Bobby and Tom are going to walk across Slocan Lake.” Midori threaded her arm thro
ugh Aya’s as they walked in the snow. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret, of course.”
“But they can’t,” Aya said. “It’s not allowed.”
Their ghost-town camp had no barbed-wire fence, but the mountains and lake formed natural barriers. Aya imagined an invisible line in the middle of the lake dividing the Japanese Canadians from the rest of the world.
“Bobby said the lake is frozen solid. They’ve been testing it, walking out a little bit farther each time. Bobby said I could watch. He said I could bring a friend.” Midori clapped her mittens together, perhaps in praise of her brave cousin Bobby or perhaps simply because she was cold. “It might be tomorrow. If not, then the day after. I’ll come and get you. You’re my best friend.”
Aya thought about Bobby and Tom’s daring plan and felt sick with fear. All the children had been warned about the lake. It had been formed by a glacier, and was narrow across but at its center so deep it was said to be bottomless. During the summer some children had liked to swim and play water games, but they were warned to stay close to the shore. Never swim across. Never go out too far. The lake had moods that shifted suddenly. It was swiftly roused to anger, and with a swoop of mountain winds or a rush of underwater currents, the placid glass-like surface could turn violent and mean in an instant. When winter came, the warnings were sharper. Never walk on the ice. This lake has no bottom. If you fall in, your body will never be found.
During the silver rush half a century ago, an old white prospector had drowned in the lake and his body was never recovered. The story was that he lurked in the depths, ready to grab your leg and pull you down so he could have company. Some said they heard him cackling with glee in the middle of the night. “All you Japs are in ghost towns. It’s lively here again. New Denver, Sandon, Kaslo, Slocan—whichever one you’re in, it don’t matter. ’Cause you can be a real ghost now and stay with me!”
“Girls are so stupid. That’s a bunch of baloney,” Bobby used to say. He and Tom had swum in the lake all summer.
The Translation of Love Page 17