Requiem

by Frances Itani

  No paper given up by the archives has ever documented that.

  I never lost my animosity towards the rice pot, though it fed me through several more years of childhood. Later, Okuma-san had a smaller and different sort of pot, one I liked better because it evoked no memories of banging into the sides of my legs.

  My ears have memory, too. They remember the harsh sound of Father’s orders barked from the doorway of our house while we were packing. Father’s mouth opened and closed and his shouts filled the kitchen, whereupon all other sound and movement ceased. No, not all sound, because I remember now that our neighbour Missisu—the childish word we used for Mrs., omitting her surname, which I never learned—was playing piano next door. The piece was Beethoven’s Minuet in G. Notes that had been marching through the air in a deliberate and playful way began to slow, and then snagged on a distortion of mist that blurred the space between our side-by-side houses. I was well acquainted with the music, though I did not then know its name, nor did I know it was a minuet. But something happened while I was listening, something that had never happened before. I began to see milky-white colours in the air around me. A blur of waves undulated close to my body, and I was afraid I would lose my balance. I stood still while my ears listened to the notes, and in some primitive way, I understood that I was seeing sound. Sound that rippled and flowed visibly, next to my skin. And though I batted my hands in front of my face, several moments passed before the milkiness in the air went away.

  Once more, I was conscious of rhythm, of music. I could also hear the emphatic tick of the grandfather clock that loomed in a dark corner of our living room. The room was shadowed by a thickness of trees on the hill that rose up behind our house and overlooked the bay, which curved in from the sea and was surrounded by mountains on three sides. The music went on, mixing and blending with the ticking of the clock. Some years later, after learning from Okuma-san what the music was called, I joined the two sounds and named it, privately, affectionately, Grandfather Minuet.

  But on that particular morning, each time the kitchen door opened and shut, Missisu’s notes from next door alternated between swelling in the midst of Father’s shouts and then shrinking and pulling back. Notes that were loud and visible suddenly dimmed, as if their true intention was to accompany the listener to the depths of some unnamed darkness that, long ago, Beethoven had foreseen.

  I had already heard the piece countless times while playing outside or while creating pictures as I sat on the boardwalk that linked the eight houses along the edge of the bay. Even then, though I hadn’t yet started school, I was trying to draw, as any child does, using whatever was at hand: pencil on cardboard salvaged from the inside of cereal boxes or scraps of rough mill paper that sometimes came in on the supply boat. But never had I heard the music played the way it was that day. Missisu gave piano lessons to both Japanese and Caucasian children in our tiny fishing village, and inevitably, at some stage of learning, each student was asked to struggle through the minuet. On this memorable morning, it was Missisu herself who was playing.

  But her fingers lifted off the keys before the piece was finished. That is what I remember. I was startled by the abrupt cessation of sound, and I was compelled to bring the melody to its end, silently, in my head. I was still standing in my parents’ kitchen when I realized that tears were running down my cheeks, tears I did not let my brother and sister see; nor did I understand why I was weeping.

  Now, in my mind’s eye, I see a tableau vivant: Mother, Hiroshi, Keiko, frozen by Father’s shouts. Mother looks up and in Father’s direction. He is a full head taller than she. Two curls, one on either side of her forehead, seem to be stuck to her temples. And then—I am the onlooker inside this memory—Father, who has been coming in and out of the kitchen, turns and stomps down the outdoor steps. The dark rim of the bay is momentarily visible beyond his shoulders. Noises silenced by his anger start up again as if no interruption has taken place. Mother’s slippered feet cross the room. Dishes rattle. Rice bowls, cutlery, pots, pans have been sorted on the kitchen table. What to bring? What to leave behind? The willow basket is bursting with clothes and bedding. Food for the journey is sealed in waxed paper: boiled eggs; rice balls wrapped in dark seaweed called nori; Mother’s cucumber pickles, tsukemono. Along with chopsticks, ohashi, enough for everyone. All tucked in around the top of Mother’s basket.

  I hear sudden shrill voices—my brother and sister. Are they quarrelling? Is Hiroshi following Father’s lead and trying to boss Keiko? Have we eaten breakfast? It is early morning, I’m certain of that. And why do I recall the stove? Bits of iron and pipe have been taken apart and are strewn around the once gleaming, now soot-covered floor. Father re-enters the kitchen, but he is no longer shouting.

  “If they send us to the inland mountains,” he says, addressing Mother, “we’ll have to supply our own heat.”

  Not caring that cones of ash sift down or that there are puddles on the floor. Puddles, indoors! The unthinkable has happened. Father has been pouring buckets of water over the hot stove, and as it cools, he dismantles it piece by piece, dragging each section outside to be crated on the beach, all the while ignoring black streaks that smear one end of the kitchen to the other. No one pays attention to the heaps of mud and soot inside the house, and I begin to feel a giddy kind of danger because we have always been strictly required to remove our shoes at the outside door. The floor that Mother wipes every day with a damp mop is no longer spotless, and it becomes clear to me that what is happening at this moment in our kitchen is of greater magnitude than any stray specks of dirt we children might once have dragged in.

  There is another tableau stamped in my memory, this from the evening before we boarded the mail boat that took us away. Evacuation Eve, Hiroshi came to call it. The memory is of the pyre and the dolls. Of slashes of colour emblazoned as indelibly as the bruises the lid of the rice pot formed on my fat little legs as I followed, at a run, behind my mother the next morning.

  Firewood has been stacked into a neat pyramid on the rocky shore. Everyone is present, all eight families from the bay—but only Japanese. The hakujin families live in a separate part of the village.

  It is the men who make the decision. They instruct the women to gather the dolls and bring them to the pyramid of wood on the strip of beach, which, at low tide, is awash with curiously speckled stones, tangles of seaweed, gaping oyster shells. I see now that the dolls, in some bizarre way, might be more precious than the houses we are about to leave behind. The fate of the dolls is the only fate that can be controlled in that brief and desperate time. Of course, the adults already know what the children learn only the next morning—that our homes will be looted the moment we are taken away.

  Brightly coloured reds and golds, greens and silvers, jackets of silk, kimonos with permanent folds of upholstered fabric. These are the dolls that have graced the shelves of the tokonoma, the special corner of the living room, or that were displayed in glass cases on top of cabinets or buffets. Ceremonial dolls, dolls with real hair, black hair like Mother’s, with bangs clipped evenly over the forehead. Cream-coloured faces with crescent-shaped laughing eyes and sharp, thin noses. A delicate arc of eyebrow on a face, hand-painted, as if by a calligrapher. Links to our unseen ancestors, works of art, every one—I sense and know this, even as a child. Later, I attempt to create them on paper, from memory, or I try to invent likenesses of my own.

  The warrior dolls are samurai, with separate horse and leather armour. There are dolls for Boys’ Day, Girls’ Day, dolls to celebrate and honour the birth of each child. Purchased from stores in Steveston, on the mainland, or sent by great-grandparents never met. Dolls that were once lovingly packed in straw and shipped in wooden crates.

  It is a symbolic fire, though the story passed down is that our parents were certain there would be no room for dolls in the bundles they would carry out of the house. It would be an outrage to think that dolls would be necessary for survival, especially during the bitter cold of
that first winter in the Fraser Valley, when we ended up living in tents.

  Did Mother agree with the men’s decision when she carried our dolls down the steps and out to the pyre on the rocky beach? She did not. Because she defied Father and hid two of the smallest at the bottom of her willow basket. She continued to hide the dolls all the years of the war and all the years that came after, and I found out about them only after her death in 1987, less than a year before the public apology was made to us by the prime minister in the House of Commons. Mother did not live to hear those historic and crucial words. And though Lena and I were not at her funeral, when Mother’s will was read, it was a surprise to everyone that the pair of dolls had been left to Lena. My sister, Kay, was instructed to send them to our home, which she did. Mother had known that it would be my wife who would unearth the family history. Even though she had met Lena only half a dozen times—and never in B.C.—Mother wanted our stories to be told.

  On the narrow shore outside our home that evening, the dolls are heaped onto the pyre. Each of the men carries a small vessel of sake, rice wine, and sprinkles it over the pyramid of beauty, the pyramid of art. The children are ordered not to cry, one more emotion that must be buried, to simmer endlessly under the skin. My father, self-appointed leader of the now boatless fishermen—wasn’t he known as “high-catcher” at sea?—strikes the first match. And everyone—men, women, children, Mother staring straight ahead, Missisu’s eyes downcast, face expressionless—looks on in silence while cream-coloured cheeks, elbows and fingers, upholstered pantaloons, kimonos green and gold, delicate tassels beneath dimpled bisque chins, all, all are devoured by unstoppable, ferocious, orange licking flames. Could I create such a scene on paper now? In my mind I see every angle of elbow and foot, every miniature samurai blade.

  In the morning, after we are herded onto the Princess Maquinna—which brings us to Port Alberni, where a train waits to take us to Nanaimo, on the east coast of the island, and from there to Vancouver by ferry—we stand with our hands gripping the railings, and watch while looters from the village move swiftly, running from house to house as the boat tugs out of the bay. The looters cannot get inside our houses quickly enough. They cannot wait until the boat is out of sight.

  Almost everything left behind is dragged from our home. The grandfather clock, tables, chairs, linens, pillows, cutlery, china, sets of dishes, photograph albums, wedding gifts and heirlooms my parents had been given at the time of their marriage. Even the toy boats Hiroshi and Keiko and I had banged together from boards and nails, boats to which we’d attached string, and dragged through shallow water from the safety of shore—even those are scooped up.

  I retain two final images from the house of my birth. In the first, a woman’s fair hair flies about her face in the wind as she exits our home triumphantly, bearing in her arms the prize of my mother’s portable Singer sewing machine. The woman’s eyes can barely be seen above the machine’s ebony wheel. A spool of red thread is stuck to the bobbin like a traitorous flag. Another woman, older than the first, follows behind. She is carrying the curved wooden cover that slips overtop of the Singer. In their haste, they have not stopped to fit the two parts together.

  In the second image, four men push and pull at an upright piano. They are trying to squeeze it through the doorway of Missisu’s house, tilting it forward over the steps and onto the boardwalk. There is much shouting and shoving and swearing until, finally, they get that troublesome load down and onto a large, flat cart they have brought with them for the sole purpose of the piano’s removal.

  As the mail boat chugs away from the bay, the looters do not look out towards the families crowded on board. They do not even bother to glance our way.

  CHAPTER 6

  1997

  The sensory memories, expressions fixed to the faces of my parents, a trill of notes drifting through a slammed kitchen door, a litany of conversations, that is what I have patched together. Along with random historical facts—some of which are in the manila folder, travelling on the seat beside me.

  Apart from Okuma-san, Lena was the only person I ever told about the looting. How we were removed from our village. How, by nightfall of the same day, we were sleeping in cattle stalls and animal pens at Hastings Park in Vancouver. How our belongings were stolen while we watched from the mail boat as it pulled away from the wharf on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

  She was silent, then angry, then silent again. “You know,” she said, “it’s like Zorba. That’s what it sounds like, anyway, the ugly scene where the women run upstairs to grab the belongings of Lila Kedrova—well, Lila in the role of Madame Hortense. The looting happened after she died in her upstairs room. Everything was grabbed and fought over and torn apart while her body lay on the mattress.”

  I had not read the book. Nor had I seen the film, which came out in the mid-sixties, a few years before I’d met Lena in Montreal.

  We watched the film with Miss Carrie, as it turned out. Lena wanted me to see it, and noticed in the newspaper that it was going to be shown on TV on a Saturday night. This was in the mid-seventies, not long after we’d moved from an apartment in Montreal to our house in Ottawa. Lena had finished her doctoral studies and had a job teaching history at the university, the reason for the move. I was trying to prepare for a solo show and was supplementing my income with freelance magazine work, doing illustrations and design. Miss Carrie had begun to stuff notes into the bottom of our mailbox at the front door; it didn’t matter that our houses were twenty shuffling steps apart. She was delighted to have us as neighbours, and she liked to write notes. She did not use stamps. Stamps were for real mail—condolences sent to descendants of a shrinking group of aging friends she referred to as “the antiquarians.” As she had no living relatives, Lena and I were adopted, the fact of this being undeclared. And if Miss Carrie had adopted us, we, in turn, had adopted her. The Saturday we invited her to watch the film, Lena hauled a note out of our mailbox and read aloud:

  It’s one of my tired days, and everything is an effort. Improved, however, over yesterday, when I had an aching back and took my own advice. I offer it to you now because someday it might be of use. Whenever possible, LIE ON THE FLOOR. Five minutes on the floor is worth a great deal. Because I am so stiffly rounded, it takes part of the five minutes to make my head lie down. But once my body accustoms itself to the position, my head lies back more easily.

  P.S. The only mat I care to lie on is the small pink one.

  “I’m going next door to get her,” Lena said. “Even if she is having one of her tired days. She can share a pizza with us. She’ll probably consider it a treat.”

  She found Miss Carrie in her front hall, tilted over her rickety willow walker while surveying a heap of goods in the hellhole, the floor space at the bottom of the curved staircase in her two-storey stone house. Because Miss Carrie had to grip the banister, hand over hand, to get down, she was not able to carry anything. So she stood on the floor above and dropped what was needed: towels for the wash, an ancient jacket shortened in the left sleeve because one arm was shrinking, a muskrat stole with hard eyes and snout that had once belonged to Mommy and was tossed below in the event that she might be invited out. Whatever was dropped landed in the hellhole with a satisfying thump. A stern portrait of Daddy in uniform looked on from the wall above the staircase; Miss Carrie had told Lena that she lowered her eyes at night when she passed it while climbing the stairs to get to the blue room, where she slept.

  Lena picked up the walker with one hand and held Miss Carrie’s arm with the other, supporting her until she got her up onto our veranda. Miss Carrie’s bones were brittle even then. She had already suffered a broken hip and had had surgery after a fall. The items in the hellhole stayed where they were for the time being.

  “I’m not giving up, I’m giving out,” Miss Carrie announced as she and Lena came through our front door. “In fact, I’ve come to believe that my time really might be running out. A good thing, too.” She lowered
her chin, scrunched her forehead and peered up. “I’ve always thought a sudden death would make a happy corpse,” she said and she laughed abruptly, a conspiratorial sort of laugh.

  But that evening, she was anything but a corpse, and the three of us sat in the living room and watched Zorba. Lena ushered her to an armchair and propped cushions to support her hip and back. We served pizza and, later, popcorn, and Miss Carrie settled in with satisfaction.

  At the end of the film, there was a long silence before our friend launched into a story of her own childhood. Perhaps she was thinking of the looting scene in the film. Her Daddy, the General, had fought in the Great War. He’d sailed to England in September 1914 along with the Originals, and was in theatre at the Western Front by December of the same year. He also moved his wife and daughter to the south coast of England, and there they stayed—in the tradition of camp followers—for the duration of the war. Miss Carrie had been a young schoolgirl at the time.

  “We were on the coast, facing France,” she said, and Lena and I settled back to listen. Of the many eras Miss Carrie had lived through, she had countless stories to tell, but never in any particular order. She criss-crossed time, described periods of innovation, buffoonery, tragedy and relief. Her stories were told with the expectation that the two of us would keep up, that we would enter the scene illuminated at the moment of its telling. We had already learned to leap from the beginning of the century and to land on our feet at its opposite end or somewhere in between, all in the same conversation.

  “Daddy had to return to France that day,” she continued, “because his leave was over. Mommy kept me home from school. I loved school and hated to miss a day, but I had to be present for the farewells, which were slightly formal, in the manner of the times.