It took me a few minutes to find her, to find out which curtain she was behind, and another few minutes before I was permitted behind the curtain with her. The doctors on duty were blunt. From the Emergency Room, I phoned Greg and told him to come home at once.
A bleak smile from her hospital bed. A grim one from me, in response. Bleak information delivered and received. She moved her left hand, gestured towards her body beneath the covers. There was an IV hooked up to her arm.
“Look at me. I’m pulled down in a heap. Like one of your fractured and broken smalls.”
But I wasn’t protecting her now. I hadn’t kept her safe.
She had difficulty speaking. “I have so much to give up,” she said. Tears running now, unchecked. “You and Greg.”
“He’s on his way,” I said. “He’s coming. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“He’ll carry on doing what he’s already begun,” she said. “He loves his life.”
I leaned my forehead into the sheets, felt the ridge at the edge of the mattress. Closed my eyes. I wanted to banish the encompassing gloom.
“Don’t give up hope, Lena. Please don’t,” I said.
I felt her drifting.
She brought herself back. But her look was so distant, any bit of hope I’d had now drained away.
Her condition changed quickly. There was no time to think of what more to say or not say. A word once uttered is beyond the reach of four galloping horses, Okuma-san had always told me. But I had no words to utter that could save her.
In the morning, I went home to feed Basil, to change clothes, to speak with Miss Carrie and to pick up Greg at the airport. Lena was now in Intensive Care. Miss Carrie immediately took a taxi to the hospital and said she would stay on the unit until Greg and I arrived. At home, Basil had taken up position at the top of the stairs, his head over the top step. He was keeping watch over the front door below, and he was upset. He hadn’t kept his pack together. His disintegrating pack. I knew how that felt.
While I was collecting the few items I needed to take back to the hospital, Basil began to drag his mattress again. It seemed that no matter which direction I looked, he was crossing a room or passing through a doorway, the mattress in his teeth.
Before I left for the airport, I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment and looked at a framed photo of Lena on the dresser. I stared, but what I was seeing was fragmentation. Because of the lighting at the time the photo had been taken, only half of her face was visible, the left. It was obvious that she was ready to explode in laughter. How could I tell, from her left eye, from the shadow of her lip, from the vertical line of her nose to her darkened chin?
I could. I just could. I removed the photo from the frame and stored it. The Lena I had left at the hospital had no laughter, no smile. And I wanted her refocused; I wanted to make her whole.
When Greg and I returned from hospital that night, after Lena had become unconscious and had not reawakened, after she had died of a massive stroke, we saw the lights on at Miss Carrie’s and we went there first, to tell her. The three of us stood inside Miss Carrie’s front entrance, next to the hellhole, and held one another, and wept for what we could scarcely believe, wept for what each of us had so suddenly lost.
Greg and I let ourselves into our own home. When we turned on the lights, we saw that Basil had methodically ripped every bit of his mattress to shreds. Pieces of white wadding were scattered in every room over the entire main floor.
CHAPTER 29
1997
Keep river as your focus, Lena always told me.
And there it is. The deep canyon, the great Fraser River on my left, teeming with its own life, cutting its way through mountain, rock, soil, eroding as it flows.
I’ve decided to take a long route from Kamloops, and I approach from the south. The highway has been narrow and winding, hugging the side of the mountain for miles. Warnings of rock slides have been posted along the way, and I grip the wheel and glance up, wondering if I’d be able to shoot ahead, even if I had warning. It’s easy to imagine tons of loose boulders up there, hanging by threads.
I have been listening to what Okuma-san described as the last masterpiece written by Beethoven, the last string quartet, op. 135, the one Beethoven finished the year before he died. I chose its fourth movement to be performed at Okuma-san’s funeral, and now, it is perfect for this day, the notes floating to the highest peaks. I left this valley fifty-one years ago on a bus with Okuma-san, and now, I listen to the music he loved. There is a delicacy to this quartet, a reminder of contrasts, of opposites, the more so while I’m surrounded by the majesty of the mountains. Everything comes together. Perhaps everything Beethoven knew. Maybe he had some grand vision of humanity. Muss es sein? he asked. Must it be? And he answered his own question. Es muss sein. It must be.
IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1967, I was about to move to London, England, on a scholarship. I had finished a degree in fine arts several years earlier and had been living in a small apartment in downtown Montreal. I was painting, and sharing the apartment with an artist named Peter. We had become friends, and we both had part-time jobs. I worked at an antiquarian bookstore west of Atwater during the day, and attended classes at the Museum of Fine Arts in the evenings. Peter worked for a private gallery on Sherbrooke Street and attended the same classes. Each of us had submitted a painting to the jury for the museum’s spring exhibition, and we were ecstatic to learn that our work had been selected. It was the final exhibition of that type, and it was my first painting to be accepted for a large exhibit. It was also the year of Expo 67, when the world came to Montreal. Every chance I had, I took the Metro to the Expo site and visited the gallery, the outdoor works by Giacometti and Henry Moore, the photography exhibit, the many splendid pavilions. Everything seemed possible that year.
In August, I travelled by train to Ottawa to spend a week with Okuma-san before departing for London. He had made a life for himself in Ottawa. It was a quiet place, and it suited him. Although he had retired from teaching two years earlier, he had remained active in the music world. He had bought a piano and he played for himself, but not publicly. The pain in his left hand had worsened over the years and he suffered from arthritis. But he listened to music constantly and he had become known as a Beethoven expert. He gave talks and lectures and wrote program notes and published a number of important papers. I had met most of his friends. They attended concerts together and performed, and some were members of the church Okuma-san attended in the west end of the city.
He had also accomplished what he had set out to do: he had ensured that I completed my formal education; he had sent me to university; he had helped me to begin the exhilarating study of art. He had provided me with a home, and he had supported me in every way.
The week I spent with Okuma-san was the last week of his life, though I did not know this at the time. He had a friend, Mari, and the three of us ate most of our meals together. Mari was a widow, and she and Okuma-san spent much of their time in each other’s company. During that week, he and I walked the pathways along the Ottawa River, talking, discussing music and art. He was curious to hear about my latest enthusiasms. He also wanted me to visit Paris, Florence, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, the great cities of Europe. He spoke about the birthplace of Beethoven in Bonn, the life mask, the ear trumpets, the grandfather clock, the four-stringed piano, all of which I would later see for myself. I had saved as much money as I could towards travel expenses, and Peter had found a McGill student named Lena to take over my room in Montreal during the year I would be away. I did not meet Lena before I left the country, but Peter told me she was a history major, a Montrealer who wanted to move out of her parents’ home so that she would be closer to the campus.
Two days after I said goodbye to Okuma-san in Ottawa, I was in Montreal, packing my belongings in a trunk that was to be left behind with Peter. The phone rang and it was Mari. Okuma-san had died suddenly, from a heart attack. I was on a train, returning to Ottawa, within
hours of the call.
At the funeral, I sat beside Mari, who had arranged for the musicians—all friends of Okuma-san—to play the last movement of the String Quartet in F major. It was performed expertly, the grace and power of Beethoven flowing into every sorrowful space inside the church. From the oak pew, I thought about the grace and power that had also been Okuma-san’s. He had met adversity with stoicism and with hope. He had set the example of never giving in to anger, even though he knew I had anger of my own inside me. He had provided strength in my background, and I had relied upon him for stability, for support and for love.
As I sat there, I could not help but think of the shack in the camp, with its brittle needles of frost inside the ceiling and walls, the worn plank keyboard of ponderosa pine, the bruised hands, the attempts at the sonata, the cream-coloured paper he had slit from his best books so that I would be able to draw, the lone egg in the refrigerator, the first time I heard a recording of the Emperor Concerto and how we listened to it twice in the same evening in the fading light of the chicken coop. I wondered, too, if the plank keyboard even existed. We had left it in the chicken coop the day we departed British Columbia, and it might be there still. I doubted that any other tenant lived in that place after we left in 1951.
I thought of all the parts of our lives that Okuma-san and I had shared as father and son, for twenty-one years. And I was grateful.
Muss es sein? Es muss sein.
After the funeral, Mari gave me an envelope that had been found with Okuma-san’s papers and his will. Whatever he owned had been left to me. I opened the envelope later, when I was alone, after the mourners had departed, after the sushi and sandwiches had been served, after I had returned to the house in the early evening. My Dear Son, I read,
I have been troubled by a heart ailment for some time, and there is nothing more to do that has not already been done.
I am ready, but you have your entire life before you. You will be a fine artist, I am sure of this. Remember, always, that I have been grateful to have you as my honorary and beloved son.
The music has ended; the road widens. I am able to loosen my grip on the steering wheel as the car descends into the valley. I park at the side of what, surprisingly, is now a paved road. Why should this come as a surprise? It’s been more than half a century since I lived here.
Basil clambers out and we stand together and face the camp. Or what would have been the camp. But could sixty-one shacks have fit into this narrow space? I walk forward into the field where the huge tents were set up the fourth day after our arrival by train. At first, this is confusing, and I wonder if I can be in the right place.
Any structure we left behind has been razed to the ground. The field is run through with weeds and shrubs grown wild. There are bushes with red berries I don’t remember, and sagebrush and tumbleweed at the edges of the field. The slopes hold only a thin layer of trees. The ground is lumpy, but when I look more closely I see outlines of scooped-out places, now covered with tufted grass. And there’s the town, on the other side of the river. This has to be the camp. But the winds of fifty years have swept through and it has become a barren place.
I stand still and try to gather memory. Recognition comes slowly. My eyes follow contours and outlines on the surface of the field. I open a mental map and unfold it, square by careful square.
This is it, I tell myself, and I pace forward. I’m at the edge of a rounded hollow filled with clumps of earth, and I see a couple of pieces of old tin. I look to the left. A plank led to the bathhouse here. Ba and Ji’s shack there. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya’s behind. At the foot of the hill, the site where the outhouses used to be. Outhouses with their snow chinks in winter, and always cold as fear. The trees have been cut down in the place where the ghosts were said to gather. There isn’t so much as a board anywhere, but I can trace the community; it’s all here.
And now that my eyes have adjusted, I see tarpaper fragments, a shallow indent hardly more than six feet square. I pick up a stick that fits to my palm, and use it to dig. And suddenly I’m unearthing a half century’s drifting silt. The end of the stick hits something that clinks, and I keep digging. Pieces of china now, and some heavier Japanese porcelain. A blue-and-white rice bowl that matches the one I saw in First Father’s kitchen last night. This one is whole except for a large triangular chip missing from the rim. Miraculously, I find the chip as well, and I stow both pieces to take back with me.
Bin, protector of fractured and broken goods.
This is the place. The buried place. With no trace of path worn smooth between three rows of shacks; no trace of bathhouse, outhouse, schoolhouse. No trace of Jack-pine pole, of water tank, of woodshed where a headless bear once hung upside down. No sign that a community endured, that Auntie Aya gave birth, that Baby Taro died and we searched the ashes for his teardrop shape. No sign of the funeral pyre, or of graves in the woods. No sign that elders died, that children played and shouted, that Ba waited for letters from Manzanar, or that Ying drove his truck to camp every week and laughing women gave orders for chimpo sausage. No sign that Mother wept, that First Father raged, that Hiroshi and Keiko and I and all of the others, young and old, had to set aside our dreams and our hopes.
I look up now, to the flat Bench where we picked berries on summer evenings. The camp was hemmed tightly between road and Bench here, the mountain rising up behind. But I’m astonished to see, beyond that, a second mountain behind the first. Another mountain was there all this time and I didn’t know, because I was too small to see. All those years and the mountain behind the mountain could not be seen.
I tug my shoulder pack from the car, lock the door, cross the road and search for the trail that leads to the river below. Basil, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, has no difficulty following the steep path. He is remarkably stable with his low centre of gravity and his large feet and claws.
There is the gravel bar. There are the jagged rocks, the muddy green water. I don’t need to look, not really. The river, the mind’s companion—fast and hard and unrelenting—is where it has always been.
There is no mist hovering, no rope of cloud stretched along its length. The small island, in the middle of the channel, has eroded along the edge but otherwise is much the same. I sit on the flat rock on the riverbank and open my pack. I should have brought Lena here a long time ago. I should have shared this place with her. I’ll bring Greg. We’ll manage a trip before long. And when he’s with me, we’ll keep going, all the way to the Pacific, to the coastal village on Vancouver Island where I was born, even though the house is gone. Or maybe we’ll start at the sea and work our way back. For now, this has to be enough.
From my pack, I pull out the manila folder that has Lena’s signature written across the cover. I begin to leaf through papers, copies of documents she was never able to persuade me to read. The ones from the archives. The ones with whole paragraphs censored and blacked out.
But Lena has highlighted lines of her own in faded blue, and these I can read.
—The file reveals that no crosscut saw was inventoried.
—The file reveals that no sewing machine was located.
—The file reveals no mention of a grandfather clock.
—When the area was visited by officials sent to appraise the property, no property could be identified at the location described.
—As you did not reply to our letter, it was understood that you agreed to the $8 value of the skiff, which was sold.
—The fishing vessel previously owned by you was sold through the Japanese Fishing Vessels Disposal Committee, the vessel having been requisitioned by Naval Service.
—Supervision costs of $41.50 have been charged to you. An additional $68.90 has also been withheld to cover possible repairs, and has been deducted from the sale price.
And the ultimate, repetitive replies to persistent requests after the war, also highlighted by Lena: The items found on the property were declared to be of no value.
I cram t
he papers back into the folder. Basil is joyously splashing, running from water to riverbank, from riverbank to water. I step down to the edge and raise my arms and I hear Lena’s voice.
You’re drowning your history, Bin. Think about it. This is your own history.
And I reply, “But maybe this is the way I can, finally, for all time, get rid of the ghosts.”
I pause for a moment, and then I let the folder fly. Papers scatter on the waves and bob and swirl as they rush downriver. The same direction as the body of the small boy who drowned and disappeared during the last year of the war.
Back up the bank now, I sprawl out on the rock shelf where Mother once sat in the sun. I take out the wooden box given to me by my own beloved son. I take out a charcoal pencil and the pad that has the thickest paper and I begin to draw. It is like naming, I think. And Lena’s voice says, Yes, but which name? You, for instance, have had so many.
I look around at the mountains and at the turbulent river rushing past on its long journey to the coast. I inhale the air, cool and clear. I think of the people I love and have loved, living and dead, and I think of the camp that once existed here but is nothing but shadows now, and I decide: REQUIEM. That will be the name of my exhibition. I’ll phone Nathan and Otto later this afternoon, and I’ll let them know so that they can get things moving at their end.
I focus on my drawing now. And listen to the soft, scratchy, satisfying sound of charcoal against paper. I look up, and then down again. This is what I have always known. This is what river is.
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