The Pearl Diver

by Jeff Talarigo

  Mr. and Mrs. Matsu were married a few weeks back, and that first late night he came into the room, it took her awhile to figure out what was happening. She had noticed the blankets heaving up and down; she had thought of running over to one of the adjoining wings to get some help, not certain what was happening. She knew a little about these things, how the divers used to joke and tease about their husbands and all, but she was only a listener, never a participant, never understanding much of it.

  Now, on those nights when he comes into the room, she waits until the blankets settle and then, after awhile, she can fall asleep.

  Three months after their marriage, Mrs. Matsu confronts her while she is on night watch.

  “I know that you work in Clinic B and what they do there. I am pregnant and I need your help.” She leans in close, whispers.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. I need you to say nothing.”

  “They’ll never allow you to have the baby. Besides, I have no say in the matter.”

  “If they don’t know, then they can’t take it.”

  Mrs. Matsu stares her straight in the eye, the light from the kerosene lantern bouncing her huge shadow on the wall behind her.

  “I would never say anything to them. I hate what they are doing, but I have no choice. That is where they have assigned me.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I know that you have no choice.”

  “That’s okay. Just because you are late-term doesn’t mean they will allow you to keep the child, Mrs. Matsu.”

  “But if I can deliver full-term, then maybe I can keep it.”

  “There have been babies aborted in the sixth, even seventh month.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance. I need your help in concealing it.”

  “You should be okay for another month or two, but after five months, it will be almost impossible.”

  She remembers some of the pregnant women back home on Shodo Island wearing wide obi belts that pressed tightly against their bellies and how they didn’t seem pregnant if you weren’t paying attention, looking for it. They make one for Mrs. Matsu, and during the fifth and even into the sixth month, the pregnancy is concealed. It helps that Mrs. Matsu was never one to go out all that often; she works in her room, sewing the cotton-padded lining into the quilted uniforms they wear in winter.

  Before leaving the room each morning, she checks on Mrs. Matsu, who, although weak, has a glow about her, a glow she never recalls seeing, not only here but even back over on Shodo Island. It is Mrs. Matsu who pushes her through the days at the clinic, particularly on those days when there is a patient on the table and she is given a sack to throw into the garbage bins. On the worst days, she thinks ahead to going back to her room at night, when only a kerosene lantern will be lighted, and how the six women will gather around their secret, touching the taut belly. “Like the skin of a taiko drum,” one of them says, and they laugh, laying their faces against it, the miracle of feeling the kick of the baby, the sounds inside.

  Then, late in the eighth month, it is Mrs. Matsu who is on the table in Clinic B. The tray of medical instruments, cold and heavy no matter the season, awaiting the doctor to come in. When he enters the room, his eyes meet Miss Fuji’s, which are the only things visible to each other behind the masks. His eyes tell her that he knows who she is and her connection to the woman on the table. It isn’t until this moment—his look as he walks by her, never stopping or slowing his steps, looking directly at her and then over his shoulder as he passes—that she feels fear for herself and Mrs. Matsu. Any hope that she had harbored for this to turn out right is crushed.

  Throughout the procedure, her eyes aren’t anywhere near the table, anywhere near Mrs. Matsu, not even at her feet, the swollen feet of a pregnant woman. She tries digging up a song, but this time she can’t find a single one. She can’t even remember the names of the songs; not a note comes to mind. The only thing she remembers hearing, however, is a slight popping sound, like when one of the divers would remove a fin. She thinks that she hears Mrs. Matsu say the lone word “No,” but this she isn’t certain of, will never know.

  More out of habit than awareness, she holds out the bag, turns her head away, waiting for the weight in the bag to tell her it is in there and it is time for her to turn around, open the door, walk down the hallway, out the back door, open the lid of one of the garbage bins, and drop it in there. But there is no weight, only the bag held out until it is ripped from her hands, tossed to the floor all in one sweeping motion by the right hand of the doctor, his left hand holding out the baby as someone would a drowned puppy.

  “Take it. Be sure to tell as many patients as you know. This will never happen again.”

  The baby is in her arms, the deflated, collapsed skull; the doctor walks out of the room, leaving her and a nurse, and Mrs. Matsu, who is still on the table. The nurse bends down and picks up the bag, takes the baby from her arms, and for a slight moment she feels herself not wanting to let go of it, but then it is gone from her arms and into the bag. Then the bag is in her hands, the weight in it telling her it is in there, and it is time for her to turn around, open the door, go down the hallway, out the back door, open the lid of one of the garbage bins, and drop it in there.

  ARTIFACT Number 0623

  A cherry tree bonsai

  She walks across the damp brown blossoms. The cherry blossoms were cheated of their week of beauty, as the heavy rains beat them to the ground only two days after blooming. This is her first time back to the western shore of the island since the uprising.

  Many times she has thought of the boy and girl. That is what got her through those days in the isolation room. It was the children whom she thought of throughout the winter, and she thinks of them now.

  Cherry blossoms are matted to the driftwood, to the bottom of her sandals. She sees nothing across the way, allowing the maybes to gather. Maybe they have started school, maybe it is too cold for them to play, maybe they have lost interest in playing on the shore, or, after receiving the last set of soap figures and not seeing her return, maybe they gave up on her.

  She waits, staying back from the cold water. The tide is up, but it doesn’t matter; there is nothing across the way that she wants to get closer to. As she is about to go back, she hears a voice, then a couple of them. She hesitates, thinking it is her imagination or that maybe someone on Nagashima is talking. For a moment, she can’t make herself turn back toward the channel. First, a glance over her shoulder, and this leads the rest of her body to follow when she sees them. She is nervous; shards of shyness overcome her. It is only when they wave that she returns theirs. She stands on a piece of driftwood, but this isn’t high enough, so she climbs onto a rock. This is better, but not much; the children can be lost, if only for a second, on the choppy channel.

  She waves and they wave. It is she who stops first and she who turns her back on them. A strange emptiness settles inside and stalks her all the way to the room, sits in her all evening, gets under the blanket of the futon with her. And she knows that she shouldn’t have made and taken those soap carvings over to the children, not the first time or the second. She berates herself for not being satisfied with only waving to them, for having to go and make the figures, her desperation for the boy and girl to take something of her back home with them.

  A few days later, she is back and it isn’t long before the boy and girl show up. Although the tide is out, she doesn’t go to meet it, even up to her ankles. They wave, but for her, the game has lost some of its verve, the jolt of energy it once gave her.

  They have waved only a couple of times, back and forth, when she sees someone running toward the children. An adult. A woman. The boy is the first to turn back to the woman, who is now shouting something. When she reaches the children, she grabs them both by the arms. The boy glances back across the water. The woman smacks him across the head, pushes him ahead of her. The woman turns, points back at her, screaming. Words she will never know.
Words that she craves and that horrify her.

  Before they are out of sight, something strangles her, shoves her away from the shore. She trips, falls, crawls up the edge of the embankment through the weeds and shattered shells and rocks. Runs, stumbles past the clinic, where she is scheduled to work that evening. And although she doesn’t realize it at the moment, she will soon be devastated by the reality that the island of Nagashima, for her, has become even smaller today.

  ARTIFACT Number 0624

  A scrub brush

  Across the channel, in a house in Mushiage, a mother has her son and daughter in the bathroom, scrubbing them with soap, hot water, and brushes. She scrubs as much to clean them as to release some of her rage. The children have finally told her everything.

  “Satomi, you are supposed to be watching your brother. Didn’t I tell you that you could burn your eyes by looking over there? What you have done is so much worse than looking!”

  She goes on with the story that her uncle had told her when she was her children’s age. A story she never believed all that much, but it gives her some sort of justification for the fear that is choking her. She sends the children off to their room, goes about cleaning the house and the children’s and her own clothes with the same vengeance.

  She doesn’t tell her husband, or anyone in town, what has happened, worries that she and her children, too, will be shunned. She wants to take the children to the doctor’s, but she thinks that maybe they will be taken from her.

  For many months, she goes about checking her daughter and son after they bathe, telling them that she is searching for dirt left behind from their day of play, while she checks for spots, for a droop of the mouth, a shortened finger. She knows only what little she has seen, has heard, has imagined.

  And she goes on living in silence and terror, for she has no one with whom to share it.

  ARTIFACT Number 0638

  A teacup

  The long walk home after a day in Clinic B. When she arrives at her building, she keeps going until she comes to Miss Min’s room. She leaves her shoes at the door and enters. Miss Min is preparing the futon when she sees her standing there.

  “What are you doing here, Miss Fuji?”

  “I don’t know. I’m coming from the clinic.”

  “Do you want some tea or something to eat?”

  “Tea, thank you.”

  While Miss Min makes the tea, two of her roommates leave the room; three others are asleep on the floor.

  “Here. Sit down on my futon.”

  Miss Fuji does, and she stares at the cracks in the wall. Today, she can’t create anything in the patterns, just stares.

  “It was a long day at the clinic. One of the patients died on the table. She bled to death.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m forbidden to tell any names. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand.”

  Miss Fuji sips her tea, still staring at the wall; the other roommates still haven’t returned.

  “Why don’t you lie down a little?”

  Miss Min takes the teacup from her and sets it on the floor in the corner. Miss Min covers her with a blanket, her hands stopping and remaining on Miss Fuji’s shoulders. The hands are cold on her shoulders, the fingers bent like claws, but Miss Fuji doesn’t mind, doesn’t resist, for they feel good resting there.

  “It was Miss Hashimoto.”

  “It’s okay. Just rest.”

  Miss Min’s hands begin moving on Miss Fuji’s shoulders, clumsy, sometimes pressing too hard or not hard enough, having trouble, due to the lack of feeling in her hands. But Miss Fuji says nothing, for this first massage she has ever received at Nagashima feels good, helping to give her a break from the memories of the day.

  ARTIFACT Number 0668

  A bottle of liquid Promin

  It has been days since she has left the room. Her roommates ask her if she is all right, bring her a small bottle of Promin and a needle. They step over her when they place their futons out at night, step over her when they put them away in the morning. She has always been the one to lay out and clear the futons each night and day, and there is some confusion at first, but the other patients manage helping one another fold and stack them. There is talk that she has suffered a relapse, built up a resistance—like some of the patients have—to the Promin. The disease reappearing out of its cave.

  It is only after the second Saturday, when she hasn’t met Mr. Shirayama at Key of the Hand Island, that he becomes concerned and goes to check on her. Her thinness shocks him. He is horrified to find a bottle of Promin, not yet used, under her pillow.

  She recognizes Mr. Shirayama but says nothing. Her stubbornness has hardly been weakened, as she refuses to be taken to the clinic. She can’t go there, and he sees this in her face, so he and her roommates tend to her. It takes a couple of weeks to bring her back, liquids and boiled rice, working up to fish and vegetables. After many days of refusing the drug, she has started receiving it again.

  She barely talks. Mr. Shirayama knows how all of them at some time have teetered on this edge. For the next month, several of the healthier patients substitute for Miss Fuji up at Clinic B. Mr. Shirayama goes there and tells them that she has injured her ankle and can’t stand. A feeble excuse, but even more feeble is the response: none. So long as someone can work for her.

  By the end of July, the first swarm of cicadas have arrived. It is Miss Fuji’s first time over to Key of the Hand Island since her breakdown. Usually, they meet at the top; this day, they cross the stone path together. Today, she wants to go around to the other side of the island, not up to the top. There is little activity out on the water; the fishing boats are back at their docks until the next morning. The thrumming of cicadas can be heard here, everywhere, she imagines. She has never found their noise to be soothing; rather, it irritates her. She speaks, more out of need to distract the maddening sound of the insects than out of a wish to reveal what she has discovered.

  “I don’t think we will ever get out of here. It has taken me all this time to realize this. I think we are here forever.”

  “Would it be any better over there, on the main island or back home?”

  “I’m not saying that things would be any easier. I know that I don’t ever want to return to Shodo Island. But sometimes I think I could survive away from here. Go somewhere where no one knows who I am. I think I could make it. I would like to find out if I can.”

  “I know you could survive, Miss Fuji. You are fine.”

  He looks at her, and she does look fine, he thinks, but since she started working in Clinic B, nearly four years ago now, she has aged; her eyes have a heaviness to them, still beautiful, he thinks, but a tired beautiful. The way she walks, not as deliberate as she once did.

  “There are times when I want to let this thing totally devastate me; then maybe I would feel justified being here,” she says.

  For the first time, she has spoken this thought. Neither of them talks. Mr. Shirayama wants to tell her that he knows how she feels, but he doesn’t. He knows that he couldn’t survive out there.

  “Have you heard from Mr. Nogami?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you think we will?”

  “I don’t know. That is one thing I can’t bring myself to think about.”

  “So, what did we get from the uprising?”

  “Small steps, Miss Fuji. They have given us mats to cover the dirt floor; they have given back our money.”

  “But they are still trying to break us, trying to tame any power that we take from them.”

  The heat devours her; the Inland Sea is breathless. Mr. Shirayama turns his back to the water and points to the top of the island.

  “We need to start sharing this island with the others.”

  “This island?”

  “Here. Key of the Hand Island. It brings me, and I think you, too, Miss Fuji, so much solitude, allows us a brief escape from over there. We need to share this place.”

  �
��It is not all that big. And what will the administration say of it?”

  “The more I think of it, the closer I am to believing what Mr. Nogami said was correct. How we have to use their power and turn it on them, use it to our advantage.”

  ARTIFACT Number 1830

  Tide schedule for Nagashima, Okayama,

  Japan: 34.70° N, 134.30° E

  She begins paying more attention to who is on the table. Although it still pains her to look at their faces, she forces herself to do so while they are anywhere in that room. She remembers distinguishing marks on their bodies, a name that perhaps escapes from one of the nurses’ mouths, sneaks a glimpse at the patient’s chart. When she places the fetus in the garbage, she pays attention to which of the bins she puts it in, the blue one or the brown one. She locks away all of the information, repeats it to herself as she walks back to her room, writes it down in a little notepad she keeps under the floor mat. The same as she does with the tide tables.

  When she sneaks out at night, she is more anxious than when she first began swimming across the channel. A much bigger risk. But after what happened to Mrs. Matsu and her nearly full-term baby boy, she doesn’t care; she will never forgive them for that, never forgive them for making her a partner in it. This is what pushes her, late at night, to go behind the clinic to the garbage bins. When she first started doing this several months back, she got some oil from Mr. Shirayama’s tool chest and lubricated the lids of the metal garbage bins so they wouldn’t creak. Now she only has to remember the color of the bin that she threw the fetus in.

  On this night, she goes to the blue one, lifts the lid, pulls out the bag that she placed in the far right front corner so it wouldn’t be totally immersed in the day’s other garbage. She cradles the bag under her left arm while closing the lid, then hurries off to the northeast end of the island. Once she is away from the clinic, she takes a breath. She didn’t realize in those early days of doing this that she was holding her breath much of the time when retrieving the bag. Now she is keenly aware of it, and she keeps the breath within her for a little bit farther each night that she does this. Maybe, on this night, only a step farther, three steps. I could make it the whole way across the channel on one breath, she thinks to herself, which brings a smile to her face.