Requiem

by Frances Itani

  After Okuma-san returned from his walk, he said, “Would you like me to read the story to you?”

  I nodded, though I was careful not to let him think I wanted to live with him, just because he owned a book that had pictures of a monkey and a dog dressed as humans.

  We sat at the table and I learned, for the first time, the adventures of Momotaro, the boy who floated down the river inside a giant peach and washed ashore, only to be discovered by an old man and an old woman. I especially liked the part about the treasure Momotaro won. This included a hat and coat that made him invisible and a hammer that could turn objects to gold by striking them. If I had such objects, I thought, I would arrange my life so that things would turn out differently. I would start by wearing the hat and coat to make myself invisible. I would slip into the home of my real family and I would stay there. I would remain invisible so that everyone would think I had disappeared and would feel badly. Especially First Father, who had given me away.

  That night, when I lay in my bed—a narrow cot that Okuma-san had built across the room from his own—I pulled the covers up around my ears and thought about my first family. I missed them all but I didn’t know if they missed me. Then I thought about the story of the river, which was also the story of the old man and the old woman who found the boy inside the peach. That boy was happy to be found. I wondered what the other stories in the book were about and tried to remember the details of the pictures. I decided that I would draw a story of my own. The next day would be a Saturday, and I made up my mind to ask Okuma-san for permission to hold the long pen with the fitted nib, and to dip the nib into the squat round bottle of indigo ink. I would look for a bit of cardboard or a piece of board as soon as breakfast was over. I was going to draw the great river below the camp. I was going to draw the island in its middle, the one I had been taken to on First Father’s back. But I would change the story. I was going to give it an ending of my own choosing.

  In the morning, before I had a chance to ask about pen and ink, Okuma-san went to the corner of the small room that was both kitchen and living space, and lifted a plank that had been propped at a slant against the wall. I’d noticed this when I had first arrived in his house, but had not asked what it was. Okuma-san was not a big man like First Father, and his shoulders were slightly stooped. When he lifted the plank I could see that it was almost as long as he was tall.

  “An old tree has given up this gift for me while I must live in this place,” said Okuma-san, as he turned the wood so the flat side faced up. “This is my keyboard and it is made of ponderosa pine, a tree that can live to an old age, four or even five hundred years. Imagine what the earth was like when the tree that gave this wood was no bigger than a tiny seedling. It is the kind of tree that likes to stand tall, and sends out a long, long root.”

  He gestured in invitation, and I reached out to feel the wood and rubbed my fingers across the surface. The keyboard had been smoothed and sanded, right to its edges.

  “At first, the wood was sticky, maybe more so than Douglas fir, but when I saw it, I understood how it would show its beauty. It was dry when I chose it. That helped. That and the sanding. I began to work on it soon after I arrived here.”

  The clear and even grains of the plank, face up, were visible even through the black-and-white keys that had been painted on its surface. On the underside, bits of bark were still attached, as if to remind that this had once been a tree. The bark was as it had grown in the forest, grooved in thick, hard plates. The underside, in its natural state, was as beautiful as the sanded surface.

  “Do you see where I have drawn the keys?” he said. “I have made this my instrument. When I lived in Vancouver, I had a piano that was beautiful in both appearance and sound. I played it every day until it had to be sold. But here, if I want to play and have no piano, I must practise some other way. I can do this, as long as the music is inside my head and my heart. Do you see the keys?”

  I nodded, but I had never heard anyone say they had music inside their heart.

  “There are fifty-two white and thirty-six black keys along the length of the pine. That adds up to eighty-eight—a full keyboard. Have you ever heard anyone play the piano?”

  “Missisu,” I said. “I listened from our step. Sometimes I looked at the piano in her house.”

  When I saw the question on Okuma-san’s face, I explained. “Missisu lived beside us in our fishing village. That was before the Mounties told us we had to leave. Hakujin men who lived in the village took her piano away on a cart with wheels when we were on the mail boat. Missisu was sent to a different camp before our family left Hastings Park.”

  Okuma-san nodded. “I see. And what was it that Missisu played on her piano before it was taken away on the cart?”

  “I don’t know the names of anything. She taught other children and I listened from the step. Sometimes I could hear her from inside our kitchen.”

  “I, too, taught children at one time,” he said. “Grown-ups, too. But there were no students after Pearl Harbor was bombed.”

  I did not tell Okuma-san about the morning we left our home by the sea, when the whiteness of sound from the piano drifted in front of my face and had to be batted away. I did not tell him about the tears that had rolled down my cheeks while I’d listened to Missisu play. I did not tell him about the hated rice pot banging into my legs while I followed Mother’s navy blue coat, or about the fates that First Father had read aloud so many times. He did not have to know everything.

  Okuma-san sat on a rough kitchen chair and placed his homemade keyboard in front of him across two small trestles he had fashioned from tree stumps. The trestles were solid, and narrow enough to stow beside the plank when it was propped in the corner. He inched the keyboard back and forth until it balanced to his satisfaction. Then he adjusted his position, tucking his knees beneath the wood, raising and lowering his heels, planting his feet several inches apart. When both feet were firmly on the floor, he shrugged his shoulders exaggeratedly, closed his lips and nodded. His arms hung at his sides in relaxed fashion. Then both hands came up over the centre of the board, acting as if they were not truly connected to his arms.

  “Watch closely,” he said. “Watch my hands. Maybe your neighbour Missisu played this.”

  He looked towards the pine plank, then tilted his head back and closed his eyes. He had been sitting straight in his chair but his upper body dipped forward suddenly, as if he were entering a place that could not be seen. His fingers began to move against the wood and seemed to be following a familiar path. What I heard was rhythmic and insistent, a rapping against pine. Although both hands were in motion, the fingers of the right were moving more quickly. Okuma-san’s left hand paused briefly and then struck the plank emphatically several times. I strained to hear any sort of melody, but there was nothing to discern, apart from fingers rapping on wood. The sound filled the room of the shack.

  Both hands came down at the same time and stopped abruptly. He rubbed at his left hand and shut his eyes. I wondered if he was in pain, but then he spoke again.

  “It is a minuet. Minuet in G. Not a long piece, but a good one for piano students to practise once they have already begun to study.”

  Okuma-san’s hands were once more suspended an inch or two above the plank, his fingers relaxed and extended. At any moment, they might drop back to the painted keys and begin their race up and down again.

  “The man who gave this minuet to the world was called Beethoven. Can you say that?”

  “Bait-o-ven,” I ventured.

  “Good. He created this minuet 150 years ago. He was a great artist but he did not have an easy life. There were many problems that had to be faced. But he did not give up just because he had problems. He continued to create so others would always be able to listen to his music, even though he could not hear it himself. Because, you see, he was deaf from the time he was a very young man. The deafness made his life sad and empty sometimes, and he felt cut off from the people around
him.”

  I tried to imagine this, but it was difficult to picture a man called Bait-o-ven making music he could not hear. I wondered if Okuma-san was mistaken, or if this was another made-up story like the one about the boy inside the peach.

  Okuma-san’s hands dropped to the keyboard and he began to play again. This time, however, he hummed in accompaniment to his own finger-tapping. To my astonishment, I recognized the melody that he was humming. I knew the entire piece in my head. It was the same one Missisu had played the morning we had been taken away on the mail boat. Having recognized the melody, I also remembered the noise of the grandfather clock and the way it had ticked emphatically in the background, merging with the drifting notes.

  “Grandfather Minuet,” I said softly, more to myself than to Okuma-san. I was able to follow now, tap by tap, as his fingers moved against the wood.

  “I see that you do know this one,” said Okuma-san. “Then I guessed correctly.”

  He lifted the plank so he could get his knees out from under it, set it on the trestles again and walked over to the bookshelf. He chose a large, thin book that had a faded brown cover and loose pages, and he opened it carefully on the tabletop. He turned each page with two hands so that the paper, which was fragile and thin, would not tear. He pointed to a page that held row after row of markings and notes.

  “This is what the minuet looks like on paper,” he said. “The one I have just played. I have owned this for a long time. But it is only a small part of the creations that came from the heart of the great man.”

  He placed the sheet music back on the shelf. He sat me down at the end of the table and brought down the pen and the nib, the squat bottle of indigo ink and a small square of blotter. I did not have to ask him for any of these. He set his three sharpened pencils beside me, along with an eraser.

  “You are very good at drawing. I have learned this about you. I have heard it from many people in the camp, and from your teacher, too. Perhaps it is something you can do while I am practising at my keyboard.”

  I looked around for something to draw on.

  “Ah,” he said, “I have forgotten the most important thing.” He reached up to the shelf and opened a different book. Four sheets of paper had been inserted inside the back cover. He put one of these in front of me. The paper was thick and cream-coloured.

  “Take your time,” he said. “And I will take mine. You may draw what you wish.”

  He went back to the shelf and chose another book of sheet music. He opened this and propped it against a wooden support he had nailed together to hold the pages upright. The support rested on a low cupboard. There was a small wind-up alarm clock on the cupboard. It was white and had a nickel finish and an oversized bell on top. Beside the clock was a photo of a woman in a small frame. She was wearing a traditional kimono, and she was smiling. This was Okuma-san’s wife, who had died; he had already told me that. She had been a singer and she had loved music, and sometimes he had played the piano for her when she had performed.

  Okuma-san sat between the trestles now, and faced the propped-up pages. He adjusted the plank all over again until he was happy with its position. He raised and lowered his shoulders, shrugging a few times, preparing. He settled back and began to move his hands and fingers rapidly up and down the painted keys. I did not know what he was playing.

  I looked at the blank paper on the table, the first I had ever been given only for the purpose of drawing. The paper was beautiful—too beautiful to use all at once in a single drawing. I folded it, and folded it again. I slid the blotter nervously towards the ink bottle, dipped the nib and tapped it against the rim as I had seen Miss Mori do in the classroom. I crouched over the paper. In the lower right-hand corner, I began to make small dots and lines that I hoped would resemble the river. My drawing might be part of a story; it might not. I only had a feeling that I wanted to put on the paper. If the feeling turned into a story, I did not know what the ending was going to be.

  CHAPTER 20

  No longer did I hide my drawings under a corner of the mattress. No longer did I receive knuckle raps to my head because I was a daydreamer. Even so, when I drew, I crooked my elbow, ready to cover the page with my arm in case anyone came to the shack and tried to see.

  The paper I was given was sometimes a blank page that Okuma-san removed from the back of one of his books. He used the thin, sharp blade of a knife and did this painstakingly, so as not to further damage the book. If there was a blank page at the front, he removed that as well, to provide me with extra paper. Sometimes he folded the paper and, with the same knife, slit it in two. There were days when I returned home from school in the afternoon to find a new sheet of paper lying on top of my bedcovers. On one rare occasion, Okuma-san procured a long strip of paper from Ying’s truck. On the Monday, he had passed Ying a coin folded inside a strip of cloth and quietly asked him to bring what he could. On delivery day, Wednesday, the long rolled sheet was passed to Okuma-san after the women had finished gathering around the truck, after they had paid for and collected sugar and flour and thread, after they had laughed about extra-long chimpo sausage. When I held the oversized sheet of paper, I folded and refolded and divided it so that I could do many small drawings instead of one large one.

  Sometimes, on a Saturday or Sunday, Okuma-san took me for a long walk up the side of the mountain or down the trail to the river. He pointed out plants and bushes and birds along the way. If neither of us knew the name of a species, we brought a leaf or a twig back with us to the shack, and tried to identify it from books, later.

  Now that the harvest was over, money was distributed from the proceeds of the sale of produce, especially tomatoes. Families were ordering winter clothing from catalogues, which were passed around and shared. Okuma-san traced an outline of my foot on a piece of cardboard, and we had a long and serious discussion about ordering new shoes from Eaton’s and how many sizes larger than my foot the shoes should be. We decided on a pair a full size longer, but of a type that would lace past my ankles, so they wouldn’t fall off my feet. He also ordered a pair of thick socks for me, and he laughed about not being able to knit. I knew that Mother would knit socks for me; she always did, just before the snow came.

  She and the other women in camp were busy now, pickling, preserving, knitting socks and mittens and scarves, lining winter clothes, everything done by hand. The men were making improvements to the root cellars near the shacks, and they dug more cellars out of the side of the hill and reinforced those with planks. Everyone, in some way or other, was occupied with finding wood, chopping wood, clearing deadwood, stacking wet wood, storing dry wood. Huge logs were dragged from the surrounding forest and sawed with a crosscut saw. Having enough wood for winter was important to every family, and the woodpiles grew higher and higher.

  I helped to keep Okuma-san’s woodbox filled to the top, day and night. Unlike the real stove First Father had crated and brought with us on the train the winter we arrived, Okuma-san’s stove was like the others in camp, a converted oil drum that rested horizontally on low cradle legs made from iron. A large kettle was filled to the top so that warm water was always available.

  Every day, when I came in from school, a snack was waiting for me on the table: crackers, sometimes a bowl of canned peaches. Fish was salted and dried, sometimes canned. We ate it with rice and with vegetables from the garden. On rare days, a special treat from Mother was waiting on the kitchen table: sushi, or part of a cake she’d baked earlier in the day and delivered while I was at school. There was always enough for both me and Okuma-san. If First Father knew about this, no one said. I did not see First Father often. When I did, it seemed to me that he turned away, as if he didn’t want to speak to me. He did speak, sometimes, if I happened to be with Hiroshi or Keiko, outside.

  “Are you behaving well?” he said to me one day. “Are you learning new things?”

  I nodded. By now, I knew what was expected of me at Okuma-san’s. What was expected was that I would learn. Le
arning, reading, drawing and music were honoured in his home. I had a sudden urge to blurt out the name Bait-o-ven to First Father, but he had moved on.

  In the late fall, our first camp wedding took place. Miss Mori, my teacher of the past two years, married a man whom everyone knew as Tak. Tak was in his twenties, and had been living with his parents in our camp for the past six months. He had been sent to a work camp in 1942, to build roads near the Alberta border, but after a year he was permitted to join his parents because his father had become ill. Few young single men were ever allowed to remain in the inland camps; they were either sent to Ontario prisoner-of-war camps, to work camps to build roads under supervision, or—if they could find jobs—they were permitted to move east to work. Even the young male teachers in the other internment camps in the interior were eventually sent east, after being told by the Security Commission that they could no longer keep their teaching jobs.

  Tak remained in our camp until his father was well again, and by then, he and Miss Mori had decided to marry. They planned to move to Ontario after their wedding. They had been promised work in Hamilton, and had received permission to travel by train across the country. Tak’s parents would leave with them, and that would mean the first empty shack in our community.

  I was sorry to lose Miss Mori partway through the school year. She had always given me extra challenges. It wasn’t difficult for me to learn work from the third grade because I could hear the lessons around me from the next row of desks. I was doing both grade two and grade three work at the same time. Miss Mori also taught songs to the four grades on our side of the room. There was no instrument to accompany our voices, but that didn’t stop her from teaching us to sing. There was one special song we planned to sing at her wedding, but that was to be a surprise.