One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  “No, it’s not stupid,” I say.

  “I was making a foolish assumption,” she insists. “What he did with the bird—it was such a tender gesture. Because of that, I thought Masao was wise, gentle, kind. I suppose in a way he was. He never was cruel on purpose, but when his mother was mean to me, he complained to me instead of to her. ‘Why can’t you do what she says and make peace?’ he would ask me. Later, when things got really bad, Masao started taking long research trips, avoiding his mother and me so he wouldn’t have to get in the middle. He left me alone with his parents.” She grimaces. “Still,” she says in a brighter voice, “I did learn about birds from him. I don’t mind not having become an ornithologist. I do know about birds; I work with them.”

  Watching her drive, I remember the way she examined the dead bulbul—the one I had named after my grandmother. “I hope you won’t find this outrageous,” she had told me as she put the bird inside a plastic bag. “I’m going to donate this bird to the ornithology museum in Kyoto. They are always looking for specimens. This way, somebody will learn something from him.” Sealing the bag and putting it in the freezer, she turned to me and smiled in a worried way. “You’re not upset, are you?” I shook my head even though I wasn’t sure. I should have shown more enthusiasm. She believes that no catastrophe is too terrible to learn from.

  * * *

  The trip to my grandparents’ house used to take my mother and me a good part of the day. We would change trains in Kyoto, getting on a local with only two cars, and travel along a single track to the last stop. Then we had to ride a bus that went up the winding mountain paths for two hours, stopping every twenty minutes or so. But this time in Dr. Mizutani’s truck, the small cities and villages fly by. We stop once to check the map, drink our coffee, and eat some bread and cheese. When we start up again, driving past the shelved plots of tea, grape arbors, lettuce, spinach, and wheat fields, we don’t have very far to go.

  It is only three hours after we left Ashiya, and we are already in my grandfather’s village. The road takes us past the little bus depot, the general store, the town hall where a doctor visits twice a week in case someone is ill, an old bathhouse that has been closed but never torn down because no one has the money to hire a crew. The long hill that goes up to the house is unpaved. From the mountains around us rises a chorus of harsh, rhythmic whirs, as though many angry women were whispering together.

  “What is that sound?” Dr. Mizutani asks me.

  “Looms,” I tell her, “from the weaving cottages nearby. Most people around here are weavers, yuzen-dye, or indigo-dye craftspeople. They’re all in the kimono business. My grandfather is the only embroidery man left. All the others went out of business a long time ago.”

  “It’s beautiful here,” she says, pointing to the forests of cedars and pines.

  We pass only a few old houses hidden behind trees. I imagine my mother and Mrs. Kato driving up this hill in January. The road must have been covered with ice and snow.

  “Here,” I tell Dr. Mizutani. “We have to pull over and park on the side.” I point to the bamboo grove on our right. “The house is on the other side. See the footpath? This is as close as we can come in a car.”

  She is staring, looking completely surprised. “Everyone has to walk?” she asks.

  “My grandfather didn’t want a road to cut across the grove—or across the field behind his house, which has pampas grass. That was a long time ago, before the war. Now the village has no money to cut a road even if he wanted one, but he doesn’t regret it. If people want to visit him, he always says, they won’t mind the walk.”

  “What about the people who deliver things for his business?”

  “He never gets such a large order that he can’t carry it himself.”

  We fall silent. I slouch forward, feeling nervous all of a sudden. What if my mother doesn’t want to see me? My grandfather is an old man. Perhaps surprising him isn’t such a good idea. I should have written first. I had wanted to come and see my mother in person, to tell her that I would be spending the summers with her, because it seemed too important to write in a letter. But now I’m not so sure. What if she’s not home—or worse still, if she isn’t happy to see me?

  It’s too late to change my mind; I put my hand on the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I say.

  “No need to hurry,” Dr. Mizutani replies, reaching into her glove compartment and pulling out her binoculars. “I’m going to walk around for a couple of hours and look for birds. I’ll come up the path and find you when I’m done.”

  “You won’t get lost?”

  “No,” she laughs. “I know how to find my way in the woods.”

  “Okay.” I open the door and lean out. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  “You are more than welcome.”

  I step down onto the dirt road, cross over to the other side, and enter the path. Just before it curves out of sight, I look back at the truck. The doctor is still sitting inside, watching me as intently as she had watched the waxwing and the crow when we let them go. I smile even though she probably can’t see my face. Then I turn my back and walk on.

  * * *

  The path is like a narrow green tunnel, fifty yards of trodden grass and roots. Under the trees, there are violets and white anemones. My footsteps flush out small sparrows, which disappear into the yellow-green hair of the bamboo. Toward the end the path veers to the right, and suddenly I am in the clearing looking at the one-story frame house, sprawled flat and sagging in the corners. All the wood looks weather-beaten and gray.

  My grandmother’s peonies by the front door are just about to bloom. The bushes hold up large buds like loose pink fists. Along the side of the house, her irises have shot out their long flower spikes—the lower buds are almost open, so I can tell which flowers are going to be purple and which are going to be yellow. Because my mother and I always visited in late summer, I have never before seen these flowers in bud or bloom, except in the pictures Grandmother sent us every spring.

  The yard is deserted, and no noise comes from the house, but that is not unusual. My grandparents’ home was always quiet during the day; they didn’t own a TV, a radio, or a stereo. In the embroidery workshop inside their house, they worked holding their needles on the low worktable, listening to silence. At night, however, the darkness was full of sounds—the wind rattling the dry branches and the windows, whispering through the leaves and creeping through the eaves’ troughs, mingling with the owls’ hoots or the rain. My grandparents were amused that I, who lived in the city all year round, complained about not being able to sleep in the countryside because—I insisted—it was too noisy.

  Crossing the yard, I go into the house through the sliding front door. It’s cold inside. My footsteps make no sounds in the foyer and the kitchen, both of which have dirt floors. Taking off my shoes, I climb up the low steps to the main part of the house. The first room to my left, my grandfather’s, is empty and the door is open. It’s a little after nine, the time for his midmorning walk. He must be strolling through the woods just as he has done twice a day for as long as I can remember. He might run into Dr. Mizutani. What would he make of her—a thin young woman in jeans and a denim jacket, a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck? Would he be puzzled to see the long peacock feathers dangling from her ears?

  With every step I take, the floor creaks under my feet. The floorboards were deliberately laid to creak at the slightest touch, my grandfather told me. All the old houses in the country have the same kind of floors, meant to discourage intruders. Uguisu yuka, bush warbler floors they are called, because the noise reminded someone of the harsh calls the birds use to warn one another of threats.

  An intruder—that is what I feel like, coming unannounced. I could be a thief, or worse still, a ninja sent as a spy or an assassin. If we had lived in a different time, my mother’s and my father’s families could have been at war, and I, an only daughter, would have been considered a member of my father
’s family. But we don’t live in those times, I tell myself. I am no intruder. This is my house, too. The floor keeps creaking. I imagine a flock of warblers chattering with their harsh, scolding notes. It doesn’t seem right for me to be here. At best I feel like a ghost come back to life to walk through a familiar but strange place. Maybe no one will be able to see me, I think. Or else this is a dream, and I’m not really here. I stand on my toes and touch the horizontal wooden beam above my grandfather’s door, just to make sure that my hands cannot go through things, as in movies about ghosts. My fingertips come back with a light coating of dust. Grandmother Shimizu would have a fit and say that my mother and grandfather live in filth. As soon as that thought occurs to me, I know I am not a ghost, this is not a dream, I am really here: Housekeeping isn’t something a person would think about while dreaming or dead.

  The next room down the hallway is my mother’s, the room she had as a young girl, where she and I stayed on our visits. From the open door, I can see a pile of her wool sweaters on the floor by the dresser. Maybe she has been trying to put away the winter clothes. I stop and peek into the room. She has pictures of me in frames on her desk, on her dresser, on the windowsill; the three are placed so that no matter where she is in this room, she can see at least one of them.

  Standing in her doorway, I take a deep breath to keep from bursting into tears. In every letter she wrote to me, my mother mentioned how much she missed me. But I skipped over those words as though they were meaningless, no more than a standard greeting like “How are you?” or “Take care of your health.” The three pictures—my sixth-grade graduation picture, a snapshot from last year in her garden, and a baby picture—make me realize how much she misses me, how she must treasure all the years we have spent together. I stand still for a while, trying to compose myself.

  As I begin to walk toward the next room—the family room—I can smell the incense my grandfather offers at the Buddhist altar to pay respects to his ancestors, his son, Susumu, and my grandmother. There is half an inch of incense left; smoke is rising from crumbling ashes. Somebody must be in the house, in the last room past the family room, which is the embroidery workshop. My grandfather would never burn incense in an empty house—he is afraid of fire. He and Grandmother lived and worked in Osaka for a few years during the war, when they had to close down the embroidery business. There, firebombs fell from the sky almost every night. They spent hours crouched in the dark, their windows covered. Because of that time, my grandparents could never even see fireworks in the summer without getting sweaty-palmed and dizzy. They worried about incense and candles starting their house on fire. I quicken my steps; my mother must be here.

  The sliding fusuma door of the workshop is partially open. I stand in the doorway looking into the narrow, tatami-covered room with windows on one side. The five small worktables are arranged next to the windows, one behind another like seats on a train, all of them facing away from me. Behind each table there is a flat pillow to sit on. My mother is seated at the first table, the farthest one from the door, with her back to me. Sitting bolt upright in her navy blue cotton sweater and gray slacks, she is holding her work a few inches from her eyes, examining her stitches. She must have been too absorbed in her work to have heard the creaking of the floor. She has no idea that I am standing in the doorway. Lowering the cloth a little, she guides her needle through the weave with her left hand—she is left-handed like me. Carefully tugging at the thread, she straightens and secures the stitch.

  I take a step into the room. “Mother,” I call to her, my voice trembling with everything I want to say to her.

  She turns her whole body toward the door. The moment our eyes meet, she takes in a sudden, short breath; then her face freezes, more in surprise than anything.

  “Megumi,” she calls my name in a choked-up voice.

  My mother has gotten thinner since the day she left me. Her sharp cheekbones stick out, making her face look angular like mine. “Mother,” I ask, “are you all right? You look terrible.”

  She stares at me without speaking. After what seems like a long time, she manages to say, “I’m all right.” Slowly, she puts down her needle and embroidery on the table; then she covers her face with her hands.

  The next moment, I am running to her and kneeling down on the tatami floor to throw my arms around her shoulders. She clings to me and starts crying.

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “I’m so sorry to surprise you. Please don’t cry.”

  I hold her tight, rubbing her back with my hand to soothe her. As I make the wordless, cooing sound she used to make to comfort me, I keep thinking of how I wanted to make her cry, in January. How could I have been so mean? I actually wanted to hurt her, to see her suffer. The memory makes me want to cry, myself, but I hold back my own tears and keep patting her shoulders, her hair. I would give anything, now, to see her stop crying, to make her smile.

  “It’s okay,” I repeat, even though she can scarcely listen. “You don’t have to cry. I’m coming to stay with you for the summer. We’ll be together every summer.”

  Over my mother’s back I can see the work she has put down on the table. It is a mandala for a Buddhist altar cloth. My grandfather once showed me the tiny, knotted stitches that must be used for them—made in silk thread, each stitch smaller than a grain of sand yet luminous as a pearl. On the edge of the cloth, the stitches trace circles within circles like the patterns the monks rake into their sand gardens each morning. In the center, there is a rose that is slowly opening in a perfect bloom. The rose, the circles, all the stitches are the same smoky pink as the silk cloth they are made on. The flower seems to be appearing out of nothing but air; it is spreading wave after wave of beauty back into the same air. The monks, my grandfather told me, believe that a whole world could be contained in a perfect ceramic cup or even in each stitch of an altar cloth. I remember what Mother wrote in her letter, how she and Grandfather pray to the same God although they have different names for him. Looking at the rose my mother has embroidered, I understand what she must have meant, and I am sorry, more than ever, to have assumed the worst about her: When I read that letter, I dismissed her thoughts as strange and crazy—another thing that I could never tell anyone about my family. I take a deep breath and struggle to stay calm.

  Holding my mother, rocking back and forth with her tears, I notice my own hands rubbing her shoulders. My broad palms and long fingers look just like hers. Our thin wrists have sharp knobs of bone sticking out from the side. All four hands and wrists are the same. My mother’s eyes are scrunched up behind her tears. When she is done crying, when she opens her eyes, she will look right into my eyes, which are hers, passed on to me.

  Repeating words of comfort, I wait for her to calm down, so she can understand what I have come to tell her: I am her daughter; no one is going to keep us apart for seven years. There is so much for us to talk about, sitting together in this house where she grew up. Though I will see her every summer now, there is scarcely enough time to tell her everything I want to say. I try to be patient. I crane my neck and press my cheek against her shoulder, just as she is doing, holding on to me. The mandala is like the two of us. I cannot tell which is the flower, which is the air.

  Chapter 11

  THE MIGRATION OF WORDS

  The morning after my visit with my mother and grandfather, I wake up before five, worried about the yellow irises I brought back from their house. Getting out of bed in the near dark, I walk over to the desk, where I have left the flowers in a small pail of water. They look the same as yesterday, no worse. The yellow buds are looser and larger at the bottom, some of them beginning to open.

  I take the flowers out of the water and wrap them in layers of newspaper. Then, changing my clothes in the dark, I leave the house before my grandmother gets up.

  Outside, the streetlights are on, but the sky is already a pale gray. On my way down the hill, I meet only a few businessmen in their suits, carrying their briefcases. Birds are t
wittering in the maples along the river, but I cannot see them among the dark branches and leaves.

  I get to the Katos’ house at five-thirty and climb the steps to the rectory. The door is open, as always—Pastor Kato believes that one day someone may come looking for help or shelter in the middle of the night.

  Inside, everything looks the same. The stoneware cups and plates are drying on the rack by the kitchen sink, the placemats and napkins carefully folded on the table. I can find my way around in the light coming through the windows.

  Making as little noise as possible, I open the cabinet where Mrs. Kato keeps her good china, crystal glasses, and vases. All three vases are on the second shelf: a crystal bud vase, a stoneware vase that matches her plates and cups, and the large salt-glazed vase Mrs. Uchida made. I reach up and take Mrs. Uchida’s vase in both my hands. It is heavy and round, the size of a small watermelon; its pockmarked surface and bright rust color remind me of oranges. Mrs. Uchida made the vase for Mrs. Kato’s thirty-eighth birthday, back when Kiyoshi and I were in third grade.

  At the sink, I fill the vase with tepid water, hoping it won’t be too cold or too warm. Taking an aspirin from my jeans pocket, I crush it with the back of a spoon to dissolve in the water—a trick my mother showed me to make the flowers last, though it has not always worked for me. I bring the vase to the table, put the irises in it, and re-read the letter I brought for Mrs. Kato.

  Dear Mrs. Kato:

  These flowers are from my mother’s garden. She sends her love. I went to see her yesterday and am going to stay with her for the summer. We hope you will come to visit us there.

  I am sorry about church and about not having come to your house in all this time. I miss you very much and promise to visit soon.

  love, Megumi