Requiem

by Frances Itani

  Lena’s voice in my head again. Speaking French, as she was sometimes wont to do—having grown up in Montreal. C’est comique. C’est vraiment comique.

  The chunks pick up speed, swirl and bob in the direction of the rapids. With split-second timing, the gulls lift to safety precisely as each piece of ice beneath their feet reaches white water and flips upside down. From there, they fly upstream and ride down again.

  It’s the bird midway at the fair. They don’t seem to tire of these daredevil rides that tease danger. Faster and faster they travel under layers of descending cloud. And then, a last flat sheet of ice shifts and turns with a mild roar, dips to the whitecaps like a salute and is gone. Out of sight, beyond hearing. The river, still swollen, is dark but free.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. I do know that this is breakup, what I have just seen.

  At the car, I remove my wet jacket and open the trunk for Basil, who takes his time about climbing in. He’d run miles if I let him, even in the rain. Especially in the rain. I start the engine and turn up the heat, full blast. Glance out the side window. The gulls are circling aimlessly above the river, as if suddenly bereft.

  Basil pokes his head over the back of the seat and rests the weight of his damp and hairy chin on my shoulder. A thick fug of warmth permeates the inside of the car and mixes with the odour of wet dog. I look out the window again at the gulls and imagine beginnings: the way I’ll shape angular chunks of ice, the overwhelming greyness, a flash of wing to hover over speeding darkness while the river discharges its winter debris. I think of the Fraser again, my childhood river, and a rush of images floods up so suddenly, I’m caught off balance. It happens, Kay’s maddening professional voice once said over the phone. It’s always there, the camp, close beneath the surface. For all of us.

  It is when I feel the cold touch of Basil’s nose against my neck that I curse the fates, lower my head and weep.

  CHAPTER 4

  I’m on the road, seriously on the road, enjoying my hands on the wheel, the liberating sense of moving forward. “Travel does that,” Lena used to say. “It clips the fetters of routine.”

  Every time we started out on a trip, the moment we pulled away from the curb in front of the house, she stretched her arms wide and kicked off her shoes. Until it was her turn in the driver’s seat—we switched every three or four hours. Our conversation changed, too; it became more contemplative, the two of us staring straight ahead. As I am now, with thoughts and memories tumbling unbidden, scrambling over one another to grab my attention. Inevitable, since I’m heading for the camp on the other side of the country. I look in the rear-view and swear that Basil is nodding. But he makes a smacking sound, ducks his head and settles behind me again. It’s going to be a long journey back.

  FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, my first journey began. It was early 1942, and despite my young age then, I can clearly recall some events from that time. Other events have been pieced together from a jumble of images, fragments of conversations overheard, body memories, sensations. Given the intervening years, it’s impossible to separate one way of remembering from another.

  My brother and sister, Henry and Kay, who have lived in Alberta for decades, know more stories from the early years, simply because they were older at the time. Truth to tell, when the three of us are together, which is not often, we rarely discuss the war years or the 21,000 people of Japanese ancestry forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and moved inland. A considerable feat on the part of the government and the RCMP, considering how many of us there were to round up. The numbers were greater in the U.S.—114,000 Japanese Americans having been interned at the same time. These were highly organized manoeuvres on the part of both countries, quick reactions to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

  During my infrequent visits to Edmonton over the years, and while trying to pretend that we are still family, no one has ever really wanted to poke at the layers of shadow that have fallen behind us since that time. Except Lena. In the early years of our marriage, when she accompanied me to Alberta, she was forthright about aiming questions.

  “They changed your names? That’s an outrage! How could such a thing be allowed? What are your real names, then? Do you have two names—one English, one Japanese?”

  Yes, and yes.

  I remember how indignant she was on our behalf, how I’d become used to this. Henry and Kay responded politely, if not fully. Yes, their names had once been Hiroshi and Keiko. No, they hadn’t bothered to change them back. Yes, it did create confusion each time they applied for a passport. The same agencies that had taken their names away now demanded that the originals be pulled out of storage. “It’s laughable,” Henry told Lena, but there was an edge to his laughter. When he suddenly referred to the part of the coast from which we’d been removed as “the Jap-free zone,” his outburst took all of us by surprise.

  Henry and Kay did not offer information that wasn’t asked for. They did not, for instance, tell Lena that my first name was changed to Benjamin by an Anglican missionary who taught some of our classes in school during the camp years—on the pretext that Japanese names were too difficult to spell and remember. And just how difficult was the name Bin? Or that my name was changed back to Bin when we left the camp. And changed again to Ben, by the next teacher, in the postwar school I attended. That when we moved east, I reclaimed my real name for the final time. I was the one who told Lena all of that. “Henry and Kay probably kept their English names because keeping them made their lives easier,” I told her. “I never asked them why.”

  But perhaps I, too, am guilty of not offering information. I did not tell my brother and sister that it was Lena who requested, persisted, and finally demanded to see long-forbidden documents kept secret for more than half a century. That when the embargo on information about the internment was quietly lifted a decade ago, it was Lena who stood at the desk of the National Archives with written request in hand. As a Caucasian, she was required to present my signature as proof that she was a member of my family—hence, permitted access to the files. I had to accompany her during that first visit, but I never went back.

  Locating the files wasn’t easy, but Lena was not a person to give up. After weeks of following blind alleys to their frustrating ends, after tracking references and cross-references, after sitting in darkened rooms feeding slivers of microfiche into machines, after reading pages on blurry screens—whole paragraphs having been censored and blacked out—she paid for and obtained copies of everything she could turn up. When she was not permitted to see originals, she demanded copies. Of transcripts of tapes she was not permitted to view in their entirety; of auction papers concerning the fate of homes that had once belonged to my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Details of fishing boats, insurance policies, beds, tables, chairs, carpets, trunks stuffed with dishes and linens, crates packed with fishing nets and tools.

  Lena read excerpts to me from some of the letters, which were couched in politely firm but always condescending language, written during and immediately after the war by representatives whose job it was to explain to 21,000 people why there was nothing left.

  —It was reported that the house was ransacked. The crates you say you listed were never found at the site.

  —The present owner of the house states that she does not recognize the Japanese interest in this property. Therefore …

  Yes, Lena found explanations. About the disappearance and disposal of household goods that we were forced to leave behind in our family home during the early winter months of 1942. The eventual sum, which represented total value before expenses, was assessed at $24.75. After being charged an “auctioneer’s fee” of $2.48 and a “moving fee” of $3.42, our father was paid $18.85 in 1946, after the end of the war.

  Eighteen dollars and eighty-five cents. A figure not easy to forget. A cheque was sent to Father, in that amount.

  For an entire house. A house full of goods.

  Wh
o knows, after all this time, what really went on behind the scenes and what happened to the parts of our lives that we had to leave behind?

  Strangely enough, Lena knew. Or partly knew. Lena the historian, born in December 1946, the year of the dog, one year after the end of the war, and unaware of these events until shortly before we married. She was the one who tracked my personal history.

  I did not take part in the unearthing of Lena’s discoveries. Having lived through the internment once, I had no desire to read through files and live through it again. Especially after hearing her rant after each day’s research.

  Leave the past alone, I wanted to tell her.

  “How can you not want to know your own history?” she asked, genuinely perplexed. “We have a son. He’ll want to read these papers someday. It’s his history, too. There are relatives he hasn’t met west of the Rockies, cousins he doesn’t know. But most of all, the history is yours—to claim, or reclaim. Whatever!”

  Did she forget that she had also told me how she’d wept over the documents while sitting at a long table inside the high-ceilinged room of the archives? A comment that made me even more determined not to know. I had no desire to weep. No desire for more anger. I had, I thought, distanced myself from the past in whatever ways I could.

  Despite my determination, I admit that I listened when Lena read out details of the auction and the way the ownership of our family home on Vancouver Island was transferred to strangers who later denied that our father and Uncle Kenji had built it, board by board.

  But I could not make myself open the manila folder she ultimately carried home at the completion of her single-minded search. I could not make a move to lift it. I could not riffle the pages to see if they contained a single paragraph of meaningful information.

  Lena, having finished what she set out to do, eventually stopped mentioning the folder and stowed it in my rolltop desk, where it has remained ever since. Until I crammed it into my pack this morning. Now it’s in the car, travelling beside me.

  Perhaps I did not want Lena’s version of my history because I knew it would differ from the one I had brought to a standstill in my own memory. If I were to call it up, my version would be active. People would be on the move, changing direction, criss-crossing in my head. For decades after leaving the camps, everyone I knew was involved in the same struggle. Relocating. Trying to fit in. Moving. Moving again. Trying to find work. Dropping out of sight—sometimes for years. Maintaining an awareness of others, but silently. Sending word back, but never telling the entire truth.

  Also, in my version, while some stories are unfinished, others have reached their end. Okuma-san’s, for instance. His story reached its end in 1967. It was the year I left Montreal for England, on a scholarship to continue my studies in art. I was in my late twenties. I was eager; I wanted change; I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to stand before the great masters in the grand museums of Europe. I wanted to meet other art students. I wanted to explore the streets of London.

  But first, I went to say goodbye to Okuma-san. He had retired two years earlier and was living in a small house near the river in the west end of Ottawa. I was with him the week before he died. If he knew that those days would be his last, he did not impart the foreknowledge to me.

  I hear Basil stirring, and take this to mean I should stop the car and let him out for a break, a leg stretch for both of us.

  The landscape is tense and still in the frozen light. We are backtracking into winter because the highway runs north before it angles west. Birch trees have stretched their bandaged limbs, begging for alms. When I pull over to the edge of the road and turn off the engine, Basil sends a sympathetic noise in my direction, a noise that sounds like a humpback whale, searching for a soulmate under water.

  CHAPTER 5

  1941–42

  Although no one could have predicted exactly how or when the removal would take place, I learned later that there had been forebodings for weeks. Terrifying rumours, letters intercepted, newspapers stifled, community centres boarded up, schools closed, radios, cameras, binoculars taken away. Because we were isolated in our island community—the supply boat arrived only every ten days at the wharf near the village store—it wasn’t easy to obtain information. Even so, the rumours were unstoppable. It was as if they’d been lifted by waves up and down the waters of the coast, as far north as Alaska, as far south as California and back again. There was fear of invasion by the Japanese navy or air force. There was fear that Japanese Canadian families were relaying information by secret code to the enemy. A blackout along the coast had been declared as a response to this fear and as a precaution against air raids. Every lantern, every light had to be hidden behind dark curtains in our homes after dusk.

  The men of our fishing community were concerned. They gathered in small groups outside the houses and in front of the recently boarded-up canning factory. We will be rounded up, the rumours said. We will be taken away. Hadn’t the men already been forced to turn in their boats under naval escort? A quick demand by authorities within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Father was unhappy about the way this had been done because navy men who had no experience working the fishing boats had boarded and managed to damage many of those they’d brought in. Father was more fortunate than most. His boat, being larger, was used to tow four others, and he was permitted to remain at the helm. The boat was unharmed, but the navy men insisted that the crossing to the mainland take place at night. Both fishermen and navy men thrashed in wild wind and waves for hours in the dark, forced to approach land in the midst of terrifying swells.

  After their boats were confiscated, the eight fishermen from our tiny bay were told to make their own way home from the mouth of the Fraser. They journeyed back to the west coast of Vancouver Island by ferry, by train and by mail boat. They were forced to pay their own fares. Some, more optimistic than others—Father was not one of the hopefuls—believed that their boats would be safe under naval protection.

  The day the men were due home after turning in the boats, Mother watched the door for signs of Father. It was shortly before Christmas 1941. A small tree stood in a corner of our living room. Hiroshi and Keiko and I were creating decorations from paper, pipe cleaners, food colouring, and flotsam and jetsam that had washed up on our rocky beach. I could hear water lapping at the stilts beneath the floor. The tide was in. A sharp rap at the window startled us, and a man’s voice shouted in to tell us that light was spilling between our curtains and could be seen from outside. Mother rushed to the window to close the curtains tightly, and she pegged them with a clothespin to keep them completely shut. Her fear was contained, but it was there and I sensed that, and I was afraid, too. At that moment, Father came in and stood at the end of the kitchen. Mother looked towards the door as if seeing him for the first time. Neither moved towards the other. Father was frowning, his face lined with fatigue.

  “If you could have seen the boats at the Annieville Dyke,” he said. “So many boats.” He leaned against the table as if the strength had been sucked out of him, his voice a mixture of anger and disbelief. He was speaking Japanese. The two languages flip in my mind at the recollection. Until my understanding of Japanese kicks in, I always believe I’ve forgotten the language, though it was essentially my first—no English school having been provided in the inland camp to which we were removed, at least not at the beginning. Until the internees themselves built a school, and volunteers from the camp became our teachers.

  “Ghost boats,” Father continued. “The navy men didn’t care if one boat rubbed another, or if windows were smashed, or if the boats bashed one another in the storm.”

  Of course, the boats were not returned. They were quickly auctioned off after the government allowed, in their orders, the insertion of the clause, without the owners’ consent. A prudent look to the future, ensuring that no one would be coming back, that there would be nothing to come back to.

  We also learned, some time later
, that several Japanese fishermen sank their boats instead of giving them up. And Father found out about the death of one of his friends—a man whose boat had been boarded while he was on his way to New Westminster to turn it in. The man’s throat had been slit and he was found on his drifting vessel, blood spattered on the floor, walls and ceiling of the cabin. He lived for a short time after being brought to hospital in Vancouver, but he wasn’t able to say who had done it, who had cut the hole in his throat. He died, but the truth of his murder was never uncovered, the murderer never found.

  Only weeks after the boats were turned in, we were rounded up by the RCMP. It was the year of the horse, the early winter of 1942. The mail boat, the Princess Maquinna, sailed into the bay to collect us. In the early morning, uniformed men made their way from house to house, banging at doors, giving warning. We were given two hours to pack. We were told to take with us only what we could carry.

  And now, I have recollections of running behind Mother, my short legs tiring as I dragged and bumped a cloth bundle over uneven ground, all the while struggling to keep the pleat of her navy blue coat in my line of vision. Everyone was responsible for carrying something when we left, even the youngest. My bundle contained the heavy rice pot and shamoji, the wooden rice paddle, with several kitchen towels padded around both pot and lid.

  My feet, arms, legs, nerves and tendons still remember the jarring and clanging of the pot, which must have separated from its lid while being dragged. How I hated that rice pot. My skin remembers the cruel curve of the lid as it clipped the side of first one leg and then the other, no matter how often I switched the bundle back and forth, no matter how I adjusted my gait or broke into a half run, always keeping the pleat of Mother’s coat before me, so threatened was I by the possibility that both she and the pleat would disappear into the unforgiving mist.