Setsu dropped over the side into the water.
Michiko tossed her a woven hemp basket, then threw in the descending weight, keeping it well within Setsu’s reach. The ten-pound weight was made of cast iron, shaped like an inverted mushroom, had an eye on its stem for a line to be tied to it.
Setsu lowered her goggles into position. Placed her feet on the flanges of the weight and began her breathing. Took a rapid series of deep-as-possible breaths that she blew out with such force they were whistles. Her nod signaled Michiko to play out the lifeline and, at a rate exactly fast enough, the weight line. Time of descent would cost breath.
Setsu rode the weight all the way down, felt, as usual, the temperature of the water become increasingly cooler. At bottom she estimated the depth was seven fathoms, slightly more than forty feet. Reflection had prevented her from seeing this far down, but now visibility was good, the bottom struck with adequate sunlight. She glanced up at the black underside of the boat, thought it ominous. Gave the weight line a signaling tug and swam from it.
It was second nature for her to be in an underwater realm such as this. She wasn’t at all intimidated, swam about easily, using little effort, relying mainly on the propelling motions of her legs and feet. Quite a few amas had taken to wearing flippers and some had even resorted to using scuba gear. She’d tried both, and, although such assistance gave her more speed and allowed her to cover more area, it was wrong, reduced her freedom, spoiled it for her. She preferred not to be fettered, to rely purely on the specialness of her own given ama strengths and abilities.
She quickly surveyed the sea floor all around. Saw that this channel was divided into three sections: an abundance of mustardcolored sunward-reaching ropes of weed on the left and the same on the right. Between, a cleared swath thirty to forty feet wide ran down the channel. The bottom of that swath consisted of no pebbles that she could see and very little sand. It was mainly pale, bared granite, resembled an unpaved road of humps and dips, the sort formed only by much use.
She guessed the reason.
Swam from the edge of the swath toward the middle of it and there allowed herself completely to relax. At once, the current claimed her and began carrying her, supporting her. Face up as she was, deep away from the world and so comfortable, for an instant some part of her suggested she go along with it for as long as it would take her to be breathing water.
The current was deceitful, hidden from the surface. Its force had swept and created the swath. Its flow was too violent for there to be any oysters, she thought. With several strong kicks and a maneuvering twist she defeated the current and paused at the lesser agitated edge of it close to the seaweed.
She’d been under only about a minute, still had breath. But not enough for what she had in mind. She sighted upward for the hull of the boat, found it, swam diagonally up to it. Surfaced, for more deep, whistling breaths while Michiko again threw her the weight, and the boy threw her a smile with some relief in it and she took that with her as she rode the weight again the forty or so feet to the bottom.
The place to look, she thought, was along the sides among the kelp. She swam into the kelp, felt the familiar, friendly brush of its slick foliage. Saw the sinuous dancing of its shoots. There hadn’t been a sign of a fish before but now here they were. Some brilliant yellow show-offs, a school of blue-brown others, more modest.
The bottom here was right, composed of sand, with bits of shell and fragments of coral in it. Her practiced eyes scanned the bottom and caught upon the proper sort of protrusion. An oyster with only the rounded, scalloped edges of its paired upper and lower shells exposed, the rest of it buried in the soft sand. The oyster was open about an inch, trying to feed and at the same time remain mostly hidden from predators such as starfish, octopi, skates and snails. Careful not to have the oyster snap shut on her fingers (how early she’d learned the pain of such a pinch), Setsu dug close around it with both hands and removed it from its refuge. It was, indeed, a pearl oyster, the sort pearlers call a silver lip, and scientists call Pinctada margaritifera. It was about eight inches in diameter with a rough brown exterior comprised of numerous radial ridges that showed a hint of white and a few pale yellow spots. A prize that might contain a prize. Setsu deposited it into her woven hemp basket.
She knew, according to the gregarious nature of oysters, where there was one there’d most surely be others. Perhaps she’d come upon a plentiful family also pretending to be asleep in their bed. She swam around among the gray coral and sponges and masses of weeds, found four more silver lips before surfacing again.
The moment Bertin saw those five oysters come up in Setsu’s basket he just did manage to hold back shouting for joy. He took them to the stern and transferred them to a large tub, one of two he had placed there to receive the abundant catch he anticipated. At once he set about to open one of the oysters. Using an old Burmese knife designed especially for that purpose that had been among Miller’s things, the sort of knife Burmans call a dah-she. Its long, somewhat curved blade was honed extremely sharp and attached, as though grafted, to a whalebone handle carved crudely with the saying Buddha is generous.
Bertin placed the oyster with its hinging part up on a wooden block. He forced the blade of the knife through the elastic ligament with which it held itself and its tough adductor muscle, causing it abruptly to surrender its determination to remain shut. The oyster sprang open.
Bertin immediately saw the pearl.
Plucked it out.
It was only about five millimeters in size, Bertin estimated, no larger than a baby pea. But a nice creamy pink and perfectly round. He held it up between his fingers to give its luster the benefit of the afternoon sun. Had it been double its size it would have been worth easily ten thousand dollars, perhaps twenty, wholesale. He was encouraged. Felt all around the squishy insides of that first oyster on the chance that it might contain another pearl. It didn’t. He tossed it overboard and eagerly opened one of the others.
It had a twice larger pearl in it.
But badly misshapen, an asymmetrical lump. It was the sort that for the sake of selling was made to sound more desirable by calling it baroque. This one was even lamentable in that category, had many welts and pits and inconsistent luster. Why, Bertin thought, would an oyster with the wherewithal to produce a pearl of beauty create one as unsightly as this. Oh well, it would be worth something. He kept the baroque, placing it along with the first small perfect pearl in the nearby black lacquer bowl that he intended to fill.
Meanwhile, Setsu was diving, thoroughly searching the most likely sandy areas of the bottom. Over that afternoon she made thirty dives, stopping only once for a quarter-hour rest. She felt early on that this wouldn’t be a really good place, however she gave it every possible opportunity to prove her wrong. Altogether she came up with only thirty-seven oysters. On her final dive she swam closer to the underwater wall of the nearest little island and found three awabi (abalone). These single-shelled creatures had clamped themselves steadfast to a rock. She pried them loose with the iron bar and put them in the basket. They were quite large, would do nicely for supper.
Surfacing with the awabi she handed the basket up to the boy.
Bertin rushed down the side deck and yanked the basket roughly from the boy. Probed for pearls in the exposed flesh of each of the awabi. None. By then Setsu had climbed aboard, and, as Bertin was about to discard the awabi into the sea, her hands took firm hold of the basket while her huge dark eyes took hard hold of Bertin’s eyes. After a long moment he relinquished the basket and returned to the stern.
The black lacquered bowl contained the reason for Bertin’s irritation. Only six pearls, including the baroque, and the baby pea-size one was the best of the meager lot. The other four were of better size but marred with pocks and pimplelike protrusions. Certainly a far cry from the fortune he’d anticipated. At this rate he wouldn’t make enough to offset the cost of fuel. He busied away that thought by pulling in the drogue, starting the
engine and moving the boat up and out of the channel to the protective leeward side of an island. Got close up as possible, dropped anchor.
He sat in a folding chair on the aft deck, drinking red wine from a tin cup, gnawing at a hunk of hard strong cheese and longing for some proper bread. The wine wasn’t a good burgundy so the tinny taste from the cup didn’t matter all that much. And the cheese, he wasn’t even supposed to be eating cheese. A doctor had told him cheese would cause his kidneys to make stones. Hell, his stones were probably as good as those, he thought, glancing at the contents of the black lacquered bowl. Perversely, a lighter mood suddenly poured into him and he almost laughed aloud at where he was and what he was hoping for.
On the foredeck Setsu was being tended to by Michiko and the boy. Michiko had poured two pails of fresh water over Setsu to rinse the saltwater residue from her. Then, before the air could dry her, Setsu lay on the deck while apricot oil was massaged into her skin, the molecules of the oil taking the moisture of the water with it as it penetrated. Special, longer attention was paid her legs and feet, for they had done most of the diving work. Michiko tended to the left and, simultaneously, the boy to the right. The boy had become good at this and enjoyed doing it and there was just as much care and love in his hands as there were in those of Michiko, who let him continue on Setsu’s ankles and insteps and toes while she prepared the raw supper. She washed the awabi more thoroughly before slicing them because Bertin’s fingers had been into them.
By the time supper was over the long twilight was waning. Setsu sat with her back against the cabin trunk, Michiko, beside her, had eyeglasses on and was writing postcards that she’d picked up in an everything store in Ban Pakbara. The boy was restless, getting up and down, wandering the foredeck but minding Setsu by keeping to it. He had her patience, she thought, and that caused her to catch upon an instance when she’d been about his age and showing her patience, as for perhaps the hundredth time she listened to her grandmother Hideko Yoshida recite family history and pridefully tell of her great-grandmother Amira’s exploits as an ama.
For twenty generations or more, as far back as could be remembered of anyone being told by anyone, the women of the Yoshida family had been amas. An honorable profession, romantic in the way it demanded female courage. How mystical and practical the gathering up of the offerings of the great mother sea!
Originally the family had lived on the island of Tsushima out in the Korean Straits. In the early 1800s all the Yoshidas, including even most distant cousins, migrated to the village of Wajima in Noto prefecture. There were many amas living in Wajima, an entire society of amas, so the Yoshidas felt comfortably in place and before long had earned a respected standing.
It was customary for most of the amas of Wajima to spend the diving season (from late spring to early fall) working the more generous waters out around the island of Hegurajima, thirty miles from the mainland. In the eyes of the Yoshida amas of that time no place could have been more beautiful, and eventually they’d grown so attached to it that throughout each off-season their spirits longed for Hegurajima. They heeded the longing, gave in to it, moved one and all out to that island and settled on its northernmost tip close by the lighthouse. From then on Hegurajima was where they thought of as truly home.
And it was where, shortly before the turn of the century, the West discovered these Japanese women who dove. It was thought and expressed then how contrary they were to Victorian convention. So actively brave and, scantily clad in revealing wet white (if at all), they plunged into the sea time and time again in search of pearls. Incredible how deep they went and how long they remained under. They were able to better stand the coldness of the water because of something special about their female bodies, it was said. By all means worthy of curiosity, an attraction one would never regret going that far out of one’s way to see: the amas of Hegurajima.
That was during the time of great-grandmother Amira, whom Setsu had always been told about so much. Very early on it got so Setsu would enjoy reciting aloud to herself practically word for word those stories about the great ama, the great-grandmother, Amira Yoshida.
For example, the account of how Amira had taken part in the 1905 pearl fishing season of Ceylon. Never had there been another to equal it. Forty thousand persons from almost every direction assembled on what had only a week before been a desolate stretch of beach on the Gulf of Manaar. All sorts. Picture them. Delicate-featured Singhalese, muscular Moormen, thick-limbed Kandyans, Weddahs, Chinese, Jews, Dutchmen, half-castes and outcasts. There were boat repairers, mechanics, provision dealers, cooks, clerks, coolies, servants, priests and pawnbrokers. Even jugglers, acrobats, fakirs, gamblers, beggars and, of course, many women on hand to sell themselves. Such a babble of languages! What a confusion of activity! Everyone intent on what might be gained from the pearls that ironically were mere irritations to the oysters that contained them.
Five thousand divers! Imagine such a number, five thousand. Most were Ceylonese Moorman and Lubais from Kilakari, also many Tamils from Tuticorin, Malayans, Arabs, Burmans. Not many Japanese and only a few amas, however those few were by far the best divers and the most industrious. On days when the seas were considered by others to be too rough to dive safely, the amas, Amira among them, defied the undertows and worked the bottom as usual.
The boat from which Amira dove was an oversize dhow that had come there from Bahrain. It was painted bright orange except for its figurehead, a crudely carved interpretation of a serpent, that for some reason was painted blue. The boat had one large square sail of hand-woven cloth and riggings made of twisted date fiber. The captain or master or sammatti, as he was called, was a bearded and dishonest Persian, who had an uncanny talent for picking out which of the oysters brought aboard by the divers contained the choicest pearls. Defying anyone to object, either the divers, line tenders, the boiler or the pilot, he would open those certain oysters, remove their pearls and store them in his jaws. No matter that it was prohibited, that every oyster was supposed to be contributed unopened to an aggregate that would at the end of each day be divided among all. Great-grandmother Amira would glare at this Persian, silently but explicitly, to convey her mind. Despite numerous opportunities not once did she ever secret a pearl anywhere upon or within her body.
The usual depth she was required to dive was ten fathoms (about sixty feet), which was no strain on her, as she had been down twice as deep. During each dive she gathered as few as fifteen or as many as fifty oysters.
By midafternoon when the boat headed for shore it was often bringing in twenty thousand.
Those were divided daily, unopened, with the divers of each boat receiving a one-third share, of which a third went to their rope tenders. The question then for Amira was whether she should open her oysters and have her compensation be the value of whatever pearls, if any, they might contain. Or to sell her unopened oysters on the spot to one of the many pearl merchants. Amira seldom gave it a second thought and when she did she only had to picture herself sitting forlornly amidst a pile of empty shells.
She sold to a shrewd Indian, a Chettie from Madura, who dressed quite fashionably in semi-European attire, carried a walking stick and wore patent leather boots, which, as the days passed, were being abraded and dulled by the beach sand. To ensure that she continued to sell her unopened oysters to him, he always forlornly reported that those he’d bought from her the day before had been entirely without pearls—or had contained only a few nearly worthless seeds. Amira knew, of course, that he was exaggerating, to put it politely, and she would have preferred it if he’d admitted that they were accommodating each other.
By decree of the Ceylonese government, the season of 1905 ran from February twentieth to April twenty-first. Sixty days were scheduled but only forty-seven were worked because of holy days and storms. The total number of oysters taken was 81,580,716. (It was estimated that 20,000,000 more were illicitly opened.) The catch yielded pearls that brought at local worth 5,021,453 rupees ($2,000,00
0). In 1905 money it was an enormous amount.
Right after that Ceylon season Amira returned home to Hegurajima. The sum she brought with her was not a fortune but far more than any Yoshida ama had ever earned. With it she paid to have a small but sufficient house built for her sister and to have rooms added to three other of the Yoshida houses situated closely together there on the point near Hegurajima light.
Although great-grandmother Amira died many years before Setsu was born, from this manner of hearing history and elaborating with imagination, Setsu felt she knew Amira well. In fact, one of those rooms that Amira had added on eventually became Setsu’s bedroom, so Setsu thought of Amira as a benefactor as well as an ama that she should live up to.
There was never any doubt that Setsu would be an ama. She believed, as did others, that she’d had the secrets of the profession passed on to her while still in the womb. Hadn’t her mother continued to dive for months after Setsu had begun kicking and rolling within her? Hadn’t Setsu been born early, in a hiba, one of those meager stone houses along the Japanese coast meant to be where an ama might take temporary refuge?
Even before Setsu was old enough for deep water she would go out in the boat and help while Harimi, her mother, dove. The boat was a wide, high, fat-bellied rowboat, and Setsu enjoyed the dry thumping sounds it made whenever she or her father moved about in it or something struck its sides. Father would often have her tend the line that was attached to mother’s waist, and she’d feel the tugs and tensions of it as mother, like a large fish, moved along the bottom ten or so fathoms below. (It occurred to Setsu years later how umbilicallike it was, but with the dependency reversed.)
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