Requiem

by Frances Itani

  Everyone in camp, including Okuma-san, had been making special foods and there was a festive air, despite the bitter cold. Mother came to visit, and helped with sushi making. Okuma-san put a chicken in the pot—our contribution to the larger celebration that would take place in the community room of the schoolhouse, where lanterns were hung from the ceiling and long tables and benches set out for the feast on New Year’s Day.

  My gift from Mother was a shirt, one of Hiroshi’s that had been cut down and resewn. She also gave me a new pair of thick knitted socks and a navy blue bow tie. If the tie had been cut down from one that had belonged to First Father, I was never to know.

  Okuma-san had something for me when I woke on the first day of 1945. It was a surprise, hidden on a shelf behind his books, and I wondered how I had not known it was there waiting for me. After I dressed on this special day, and put on my bow tie, and wet my hair and parted it with a comb, Okuma-san presented me with a small brown box, about four inches long and two inches high. He took it down from the shelf and held it out in both palms. He placed it in front of me, on the table.

  “Lift the cover,” he said. He was smiling.

  A half-moon indent on either side of the box permitted me to lift the lid with one hand while holding the bottom section in the other. Tucked inside was cream-coloured paper, tightly rolled and shaped like a cylinder. So neatly did this roll fit the space, the box had to be turned upside down to free it. A thin black ribbon attached to the outer edge had been wrapped around the roll several times to keep it from unravelling.

  “This is a scroll, a scroll painting,” said Okuma-san, not without pleasure. He helped me unfurl the crisp, curled paper, and showed me how to use my right hand as an anchor. With my left, I rolled the scroll down the length of the table.

  “I think you will want to see what this artist drew a long time ago. Eight hundred years ago. Can you imagine so much time going by? It is a famous piece of art in Japan. And here we are, sitting at a table in this camp in British Columbia, looking at the work.”

  I said to myself, “Eight hundred years.” But so much time was a vagueness that was not easily pictured.

  Okuma-san went on. “The artist was probably a priest. He might have lived in a monastery. This is not the original, but a copy. I treasure it because it was a gift from my father when he first took me with him to Japan when I was a boy. It was given to me before he boarded the ship to return to Canada. As I have told you, my parents were lost at sea during their voyage back to get me the following year.” He added this so softly, I wondered what else he was remembering from that time. But he continued.

  “The artist drew the scroll with brush and ink. What we have here is the colour of charcoal. The paper is darker than it was at one time, because I opened it so many times when I was a child.”

  I was anxious to keep unfurling. My right hand was secure as an anchor, but as the scroll opened, it became longer than my left arm could reach. I saw, too, that at the centre, a wooden dowel was attached to the inner edge. The wood for the dowel, said Okuma-san, had come from a cherry tree. He helped me to steady the unravelling scroll so it would not spring closed suddenly or fall to the floor. Once it was open all the way, he held the dowel and rewound the scroll so that we could start at the beginning again. This time, I scrolled left, slowly, by myself, and paid more attention to what the artist had drawn and to what the story was about. The opening images were of grasses and shadowy lines suggestive of hills and tree trunks. Animals were playing in water, perhaps a lake. The water then narrowed and might even have been a rolling river that flowed in the background.

  The animals that splashed and played were rabbits and monkeys and frogs. Two monkeys were scratching each other’s back. The rabbits—hares, Okuma-san called them—were diving and swimming around the edges of the scroll. There were hills on either side of the wavy lines that depicted the river. The hills were drawn in simple strokes, soft and grey.

  I stared. How was it possible to show a tree blowing in the wind this way, with only a few dark lines and a bit of shading? I watched the animals frolic down the length of the table while Okuma-san helped reroll the parts I had already seen. In this way, the two of us controlled the speed at which the pictures were displayed and, at the same time, kept the scroll from slipping off the edge of the table. A monkey raced in and out of the scene, among the frogs and hares, holding a switch in his hand while he ran. The river faded; a road began. A fox at the edge stood like a human and held his full, bushy tail between his legs. A large frog was shouting at the fox, and another hare suddenly appeared. I continued to unfurl, and saw a large lily pad tied to a frame made from branches. The lily pad was being used as a target for bow-and-arrow practice. Hares and frogs were in separate groups, aiming their arrows and testing their bows as if for a competition.

  Leafless trees showed the passage of time and distance; these were deliberately spaced and rugged and blowing helter-skelter. After that, the hares began to dominate the activity. There were long-whiskered hares with short-tufted tails; hares with fans, or with cages they carried suspended from long poles; hares with fishing rods made from branches; hares talking, laughing, running, leading a deer with a long rein, inspecting a tied and captured boar. Badgers and monkeys squatted comically, wearing loose robes. A dead frog was sprawled on its back. There was a chase, a dance, tiny mice peering around the edges of the scene. I felt that I could make up my own story. I could create many stories from the pictures. Trees and shrubs began to leaf and flower as the scroll went on, but a single line of hill was always constant in the background. And then, all the animals in the foreground began to roll on the ground with laughter. Or so it seemed. A sober monkey sat smoking; a frog in the lotus position sat on a tabletop. An owl perched on the branch of a gnarled tree; a series of dots and marks showed the owl’s feathers. An outdoor feast was set up to the left of the tree. Picnic foods were spread out on a table and the spread continued along the ground.

  I loved the simple lines of the scroll, the frenzy of activity, animals posing as humans, reading, smoking, eating, singing. The last of the figures, a solemn and important-looking frog, was carrying a rolled scroll that looked very much like my own.

  Okuma-san was pleased that I liked my gift, I could tell. And I had something for him. Something I had drawn in secret at school and hidden in my desk. It was my own childish picture of the bear. Not the dead, upside-down hanging bear, the one that sometimes opened its jaws and gnawed its way into my nightmares, but a living bear. One that had raised its large head only a moment before to sniff out some danger that could not be seen with its small, dark eyes.

  After the holiday, when school started again, rumour, confusion and fear were once more being stirred up. The war would soon be over. Japan was going to be defeated. The camps would close. The camps would not close. We would be allowed to return to our homes. We would not be allowed to return. Other people, hakujin people, lived in our houses now. Fishermen’s lives had changed forever. Japanese Canadian fishermen no longer had licences to fish. No one had boats; no one owned a car. If we did move, where would the men find work? Where would we move anyway, if the war did end?

  And then, not many weeks later, something that was not a rumour had to be talked about. RCMP officers arrived from the town and asked to meet with the heads of families. Word was quickly sent around from shack to shack, and the men gathered in the community room. They were told that every family would have to sign a paper offering two choices: the first was “repatriation,” which meant authorized expulsion and exile to Japan, a country only a handful of people in the camp had ever seen; the alternative was to agree to “relocate” east of the Rocky Mountains.

  Of course, everyone was upset by this turn of events. Four men who lived in the camp came to our shack after the meeting, because they wanted to talk things over with Okuma-san. I opened the door for them and they sat around our table. One of the men looked over at me, but Okuma-san said, “My son knows what is
going on. He may hear whatever we have to say. Our decisions will affect him, too.”

  What were the men to do? They were angry. No one understood this new demand. It was clear that we weren’t wanted in the province, but why would anyone be sent to Japan? That was not our country. We were citizens here. We had agreed to move into the camps and get off the coast because we were given no choice after Pearl Harbor. What more was wanted of us?

  Okuma-san listened quietly as the men said what they were thinking.

  “We have to have more information,” he said. “I will do what I can to find out more from the RCMP, the next time they come to the camp.”

  After the men left, Okuma-san took out his own worries on the keyboard plank. Every evening now, after our supper meal, we went through the ritual of clearing the table and washing the rice pot and storing the dishes. Okuma-san placed paper and pencils—sometimes pen, nib and ink—before me at one end of the table. When my homework was done, I could draw or read until bedtime. I was expected to say if I needed help with homework. Otherwise, he pulled out the keyboard, settled it on the trestles and once again began to practise the piece he returned to most often, the Hammerklavier, the one with which he was never satisfied. This was a “sonata,” he had told me.

  What the sonata meant to me was the rapping of fingers for an extraordinarily long time. When it was in progress, Okuma-san was in a dream state and I was kept far outside of this. I knew he was unaware of me watching. At times, a look of melancholy—perhaps even pain—came over his face, and at first I was worried. But then his face would be calm again, as if he could hear, at that moment, what no one else could. I was always glad that we had eaten before he began, even though I stayed at the kitchen table, not daring to speak during the better part of an hour. I looked at the clock, and the hands were not moving. I fidgeted a little in my chair, but it was clear to me that even this distraction was not acceptable. If I were to ask a question, it would not be answered. Okuma-san was not present, not really. So I drew, or watched, while his fingers raced up and down the ponderosa pine. If a book had been placed on the table, I pulled it towards me and turned the pages as silently as I could.

  There was a pause, another pause, and then a gentle flowing movement over the painted keyboard. This movement, the one that made his hands almost float, sometimes made me think of the great river below the camp. At other times, one of his hands seemed to reply to the other. For a while, his fingers trilled against the plank so rapidly I could not keep track of any particular rhythm. At other times, the sense of peace was so overwhelming, it filled the room.

  The left hand rumbled up the keyboard from the lower end. Okuma-san’s foot made an involuntary forward movement. His hands came to rest. There was stillness.

  Again, he was not satisfied.

  “I hear the music,” he said softly. “But my hands do not move the way they should. That means I do not perform the way I want to. It is my left hand that gives me trouble, a foolish fall many years ago. It happened suddenly, but a bone fractured and then rehealed. It meant that I would never again play the way I had played before the fall. But even before that, the piece was always difficult to play.”

  He went on. “Think of the many times you have tried to draw wild horses, or even the big river. It is like that with music, too. If you draw the river, you want to transfer what you know you have inside yourself to a single sheet of paper. You want to work with the white space of the page; you want to create light and flow, mist and current. You especially want to capture spirit. But as you have already learned, these things are difficult, which does not mean that you stop trying. There is good reason to try again, to move forward, to make the attempt to accomplish what you have not been able to do before. There is always good reason to keep trying.”

  I did not know what to say. I thought of the river and my feeble attempts to draw it. I thought of the island, where I had been taken on First Father’s back. That time was far away. The picnic with my previous family was part of a world I had dreamed. Like our fishing village on the coast. That, too, belonged in a world entirely different from the one in which I woke up in a freezing shack every morning.

  Okuma-san turned back to the keyboard. Most of the time when he tried to play this sonata, he looked at notes on the pages of sheet music. Sometimes, he tried to play parts from memory. He told me that even though the sonata was called the Hammerklavier, that was not what Beethoven had intended. The great composer, he said, had wanted the German word Hammerklavier to be used for his piano sonatas, instead of the Italian pianoforte. But the word became attached to this particular sonata, No. 29, and it was thereafter referred to as the Hammerklavier.

  “One hundred and six,” he said. “That is the opus number. Do you know what opus means?”

  I shook my head, knowing the answer was coming.

  “Numbers are assigned to the works of a composer,” said Okuma-san. “This sonata was given the opus number of 106. Beethoven wrote it during a period of poor health. He was in so much pain all the time, a substance made of tree bark was put on his arms. But then he couldn’t move his arms. Herbs were put on his belly. He took cold baths. There was humming and buzzing in his ears. And he had little money to support himself. Of course,” he added, “by then, he was deaf and he had become reclusive, but his genius could not be held back.”

  Okuma-san’s left hand occasionally became swollen because of connecting with wood that had no give to it, on painted keys that did not depress in response to the pressure of his fingers. At those times, he asked me to soak a towel in a basin of warm water and to bring it to him, especially after the Hammerklavier. Sometimes I watched the clock. And when I recognized the rhythmic raps on the keyboard and knew the ending was near, I poured water and brought the towel before I was asked. I watched while Okuma-san wrapped it around his hand to let the moisture soothe his skin and help the swelling go down. Streaks of red appeared along the length of both thumbs and on the inside of his wrists. His palms, which became mottled, remained like that for hours, but he did not seem to notice.

  Throughout the long winter, the stove was lit all the time and the air inside the shack was dry. So dry, the edge of one of Okuma-san’s thumbs split open. He went to a shelf and took down a tin can with a lid. Inside was his sewing kit: a thimble, a package of needles and two spools of thread—one black, one white. He sat on a chair by the table, and with coarse black thread and a needle, he sewed his own thumb, forcing the needle through his toughened skin. Once the needle had punctured the edge of the open wound, and before he could bring himself to push it through the opposing edge, his partly sewn hand pulsed in the air, palm up. A low moan, “Uh uh uh,” came from his lips and I scrunched my eyes, believing, sometimes, that I was feeling the needle, too. He closed his eyes and pushed the needle through again, repeating the process until enough stitches criss-crossed the wound and closed it.

  All of this became an ordinary part of my life during the winter months: to sit and draw; to read or dream while listening to the rapping of music that my second father heard inside his head, and that came out on the smoothed plank of pine through his moving fingers and his swollen, stitched hands.

  CHAPTER 23

  1945–46

  The weather was warmer, the season changing. With the approach of spring, there was much to talk about. The paper every family had to sign had become real and threatening. The paper represented what was known as the “dispersal policy.” All conversations, no matter what else was being discussed, ended with talk about the demands made and how to act in response.

  Okuma-san asked if I wanted to go to the river one Sunday, and the two of us set out after lunch. On our way past the communal gardens, we greeted several men who were burning heaps of tumbleweed that had blown in and around the rows during the winter months. Flames leapt high as they crackled, and there was a sweet scent around us while the brittle weed scattered sparks into the air.

  We hiked down the steep trail, with Okuma-san
in the lead. He had placed a special order for me with Ying several weeks before, and Ying, in turn, had sent to Vancouver for a thin sketch pad of real art paper and a small box that held four sticks of charcoal. The entire pad was to be used for no other purpose than drawing, and it was the first sketch pad I had ever owned.

  When we reached the bottom of the trail, I saw Okuma-san look intently towards the place where a small boy had drowned three weeks earlier. This was near the spot where First Father had once fished for sturgeon. The boy had fallen in and was swept away, his body never found. There had been a service in the community room of the school, and everyone in camp attended, crowding the room, the hall, the doorway, even the outside steps. I tried not to imagine the boy thrashing in panic in the water, but I could not keep the image from my mind. As if we were having a conversation of thoughts, Okuma-san now said, “Rivers sustain and nourish, yes, but they can also take life away.” I did not reply. I did not know what sustain meant but I knew what it meant to say that a river could take someone’s life. I had seen death in the camp: my baby cousin, Taro; several old people who had been cremated; and even the dead bear that had hung upside down behind Okuma-san’s shack. Now there was another death: the boy who had fallen into the river and would never be returning to his parents’ shack. This was one more ghost to worry about, a child ghost, footless, joining the others.

  I settled myself on a flat rock and smelled the air around me and thought about this same rock shelf where Mother had sat and stretched her legs in the sun. I opened my new drawing pad to the first page and began to shade until lines resembling a riverbank appeared on the paper. Okuma-san stayed close by, reading a book while I drew. I tried first of all with a thick pencil and then I added charcoal, rubbing it sideways across the paper. I was thinking of the scroll I’d been given at the new year, and about the river that ran through it from end to end. Even though the river could not always be seen in the scroll, there was somehow a suggestion that it was there. Sure enough, a bump or a wavy line would reappear as the scroll was unrolled, and there it was again.