Once Removed

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by Mako Yoshikawa


  In books, Hana has seen Egyptian hieroglyphs, and she thinks that she might not have given up on English, at least the written version of it, if it, too, were a language made up of stick figures and line drawings of animals and trees. A whole nation that thinks in terms of images rather than words? Bliss indeed. Japanese, she supposes, works along those same lines: so the character for tree is a cross with two branches dangling like a skirt from the center of its trunk—a willow tree, she's always assumed, with its tendrils giving it an airy grace. So the ideograph for rice paddy is a box cut into fours, geometric and tidy as those she glimpsed from the window of the plane, through a haze of motion sickness, when she first left Japan; so the character for river is three vertical lines, ever so slightly bowed, which immediately evokes for her the sailboats made of bamboo leaves that she and her sister used to sail down the stream by their house, and the hushed murmuring sound that the water made.

  Then there are characters that encapsulate a concept through an image: thus trouble is written as a tree locked away in a box. Back in the distant past when ideographs were first created, perhaps people took it as a religious tenet that a tree's rightful place was outdoors, under the sun and the moon and exposed to the air and the wind and the rain. Perhaps the idea of shutting one up seemed a stark violation of the natural order and, as such, a good example, maybe even a prime example, of trouble.

  Growing up in Japan, Hana became used to picturing as she read, not only the characters or the descriptions contained in a passage but also the concepts ingrained in the visual cues of the language itself. She loved reading then, and loved writing too, loved the act of picking up an ink brush and watching the black strokes appear on the smooth white of the paper: a series of images, but one that magically made sense as well, one that transformed itself with little or no effort into a sentence, a thought, a story, an entire world. Not too surprising, really, that she'd derived an almost sensual pleasure from the act, something akin to the fierce explosion of joy she sometimes felt when dabbing her brush in paint, that moment of applying color, a splash or dot or an arcing, soaring line of it, to the pure white of the canvas.

  But Japanese is no longer the language she deals with every day. Her chosen lot in life (and one she doesn't regret, despite everything; hasn't life in this fine, easygoing country, where women could be artists and girls, tomboys, been better for herself as well as for her daughters?) is, instead, the slippery cadences of English, with its odd inflections and its enormous vocabulary, and the letters that bear little relation to the images or sounds they represent. There are a few exceptions, which Hana cherishes: the way in which the letter O is written is clearly a tribute to the shape that the mouth makes when saying it; the letter I, tall and proud and solitary, the one and only form possible for the first-person singular pronoun. Could the words water and waves start with any letter other than W, with its sharp undulations, and doesn't it make sense that the word yay begins and ends with the letter that it does, its shape so resembling a figure with two hands lifted up in a glad shout of praise?

  It's ridiculous—the height of stupidity, on the order, yes, of a tree shut up in a box—that not everyone speaks the same language. This is a thought that Hana has had more than once before, but perhaps because the thought of talking to Claudia is making her breathe hard (and also, she has to admit, because worrying about Rei might be addling her brain, sending it off in directions that she can no longer control or predict), she feels particularly outraged, and particularly overwhelmed, at the problems caused by there being such a mixture of different tongues in the world. She remembers how excited she'd been when she found that there was a story in the Bible to back her up on this point.

  “That's not quite it,” Henry had said, smiling with affection, pleased to see that church hadn't made her sleepy for once. Slipping his arm around her, he explained how the Tower of Babel was a story about the perils of reaching too high; he told her that it was a cautionary tale against pride and ambition.

  “Oh,” she had said, nodding. “Okay, now I see.”

  But she had thought it over later and come to the conclusion that she'd been right after all. Wasn't the imposition of different languages on mankind a punishment as well as a way to foil them in their attempts to reach high, and didn't that mean that the whole point of the story was the chaos that originates from not being able to communicate?

  To put it another way, if everyone spoke the same language, then surely the human race would be able to build a tower high enough to reach God.

  “I HAVE HERE the number for a C. King in Boston—”

  “No,” says Hana, interrupting politely. “Claudia Klein. K-L-E-I-N.”

  When she was Hana Klein, she'd been pleased to find how seldom she had to repeat her name, or to spell it. Her accent must be very bad today: nerves, no doubt.

  HANA CAN FUNCTION in this world, ordering fresh tuna from the man at the fish store and having a chat about the latest drought with the best of them, and she's glad about that, of course. But in a way, her very facility undoes her. Her conversational ease makes her seem more proficient than she actually is, so that even those closest to her—which is to say, her daughters—believe that when she sits quietly during a discussion about anything more complicated than the weather, it's because she isn't interested in the topic, or would rather listen than participate.

  When in actual fact she's struggling to find the entryway into the towers of words looming around her, when the thought of constructing her own sound structure out of the oddly shaped building blocks of the English language utterly defies her.

  If only she were a braver sort. If given enough time and an audience that didn't rattle her, she could form a sentence, or three. She could tell her children stories, for example, stumbling through them though she did, sprinkling in words and whole phrases of Japanese, when they were young. But never when they were older, sharp and sharply critical teenagers who may have tried to be polite but were clearly embarrassed when she spoke in Japanese, heaven forbid. When they asked for stories then and she refused, they assumed she had just gotten tired of telling them the same old tales, never knowing how much she missed having someone with whom to share them.

  With Henry, too, the give and take of a sustained conversation about any topic of substance had been beyond her grasp. The times he did take in all that she said, she always seemed to understand little of what he said in response, and the reverse held true as well. It was a mercy, really, as well as a boon that their physical relationship had been what it was. Lying with him had come as close as her brush and paints ever did in terms of stilling her desire for a greater fluency of speech.

  But perhaps she'd misunderstood the relationship between her silence and their hunger for each other's bodies. Maybe it hadn't just been a stroke of good fortune that they'd had such a deep physical intimacy, one that not only went beyond words but also took the place of a substantive ongoing conversation (such as she'd once shared with Seiji, such as Henry must have once had with his first wife). Would Henry have been as passionate if she had talked more; wasn't it partly because of his need to communicate with her in some fashion that he had made love to her every night with such an intensity of focus? Nightly his fingertips had roamed over her, touching her everywhere, again and again, as if he had been born blind, her body the one and only book he could ever hope—he could ever want—to read and learn.

  Apart from her body, she had given him so little.

  Henry was a patient man, and he had been deeply in love with her (as deeply, yes, as she had been in love with him), but even patient men have their limits. She couldn't blame him when he reached his, nor could she admit to any surprise.

  No, the only wonder was that he had stayed with her as long as he had.

  IN THE YEARS SINCE HER SEPARATION from Henry, very little has changed. While she desperately hopes that she'll be able to get through to his daughter, to talk to her for the first time in, could it be, almost eighteen years, sh
e'd do anything to substitute her paintings for words now. Hana finds phone conversations, perhaps not surprisingly, the hardest context in which to communicate, since she has no visual cues of any kind to rely on; even after more than three decades in America, she still dreads picking up the telephone. She likes to think of the telephone as the idiot box, although she knows (no idiot she) that that's a term invented for another contraption. When she wraps her hands around a receiver, that small, innocent-looking box with pushbuttons and numbers on it becomes a sinister device through which only idiocy is sent forth.

  Claudia never liked or trusted her, the woman who'd stolen her father from her mother; throughout her marriage to Henry, Hana couldn't help but know that. Given that Claudia must believe that Hana went on to betray Henry, she has to be thinking far worse of her now.

  So how can she persuade Claudia, over the idiot box, to help her find her daughter, when broken English is all that she has?

  But then again, it's not as if she really has a choice. She has to find Rei, to ask her forgiveness and to find out if she's safe and well.

  And if she is, and if, what's more, Rei could find it in herself to forgive her mother—the letter Y would have nothing on Hana, so high would she raise her arms in praise.

  COMING BACK ON THE LINE, the operator apologizes for the long wait. She has the number, she announces; she's sure that this one has to be right.

  Hana writes it down, thanks her, and hangs up the phone. Claudia's in Boston, just as she'd thought. Where was Henry now, and would his number be as easy to locate as that of his daughter?

  WHEN HANA THINKS ABOUT the end of her second marriage, which is as seldom as she can manage it, she's grateful for her mushroom paintings. Dislike them though she always has, even she has to concede they did serve one purpose, and that exceedingly well: for a long time, before she was able to place blame where blame was squarely due, they, or at least the nightmares that led to their creation, were a convenient scapegoat for the end of her marriage. The dreams were always the same—a step-by-step reliving of those long-ago days in Hiroshima. When she woke up, her mouth dry, her heart thudding, and beneath her the sheet damp with sweat, the images would be so vivid that, try as she might, she couldn't blot them out of her mind.

  Which is why she sometimes wondered if the nightmares were actually preferable to what followed them: the hours spent lying awake, gazing up at the ceiling in the dark. Usually she got up to pace or to brush her hair; sometimes she made the trek up to her studio to paint yet another mushroom—an image that, God knows, she was tired of by that point.

  She'd tried, but of course she couldn't keep either her nightmares or her insomnia secret from Henry.

  Talk to me, he'd urge in bed, with his touch as much as his voice. Let me in. What happened on that day in August; what did you see, and how close did you get?

  The first time he asked her that, she had wanted to run away. It was a cool, unusually still night in April (“How strange,” he muttered, more to himself than to her, as he pushed open the window closest to their bed. “How odd—how often is it that there's absolutely nothing to listen to outside?”), and she had been feeling relaxed and a little sleepy from her bath. But when he lay down beside her and asked her, first, if she'd done any more mushroom paintings that day (“Two,” she had replied, so bored by her own obsession that she was beyond any shame), and then, more pressingly, about her memories of Hiroshima, she felt an immediate desire for flight. It was a bodily response, instinctive and irrational, and familiar to her from when she was a small child in Japan and she'd known, deep inside, a full second before it happened, that an earthquake was on its way.

  It was a credit to the masterfulness of Henry's hands, as well as to the strength of the bond that lay between them, that she had managed to stay put. She tensed instead, lying so rigid that he temporarily stopped the soothing and at once almost astonishingly arousing movement of his fingers, propping himself up on an elbow to peer into her face and make sure that, he told her later, she hadn't had a seizure of some kind.

  Then, having reassured himself of her seizure-free state, he recommenced touching her. Henry's hands were oversize, his palms and fingertips, strikingly rough. Soon after they met, she'd asked him why they were so calloused, and he'd laughed and said, Don't you know, I work with rocks? She had suspected he was joking, since as far as she could tell, his work involved less actual rocks than soil, microscopes, graphs, and books, but she never could be sure, as the mystery of the toughness of his palms went otherwise unexplained.

  Wherever the calluses on his fingertips came from, she was thankful for them. His hands on her were a miracle: a combination, she thought, of the roughness of his skin with how gentle he was, and how deft; how did he know so precisely where to touch her, with the exact right pressure, and the perfectly calibrated stroke?

  If this was how he touched rocks, she wondered that they didn't split open at the feel of his fingertips, obediently revealing the secrets of the ages for him to study and see.

  Which speculation led her to the unfortunate conclusion that she was harder to crack than a rock. Because while her legs obediently—helplessly, even—parted under his touch, her lips didn't; while the feel of his hands kept her from fleeing when he asked her questions about that day, even the calluses on his fingertips were not enough to make her open up her secrets to him.

  ALMOST A FULL YEAR AFTER that night, Henry would stop reaching for her in bed; defeated, he would, at last, give up on trying to pry her secrets out with the rough tips of his fingers.

  Two months after that, he would find the document that made him as chary of speech as she always had been around him. “I don't think I know you anymore,” he'd say, standing in the doorway to her studio as she sat on a stool in front of her latest mushroom. “If I ever did.” The document was in his hand; a brush, still glistening with paint, in hers. She'd want to protest (You know me, she'd want to say, running over to reassure him with her hands and lips as well as her speech, no one better), but before she could start moving, before she could gather her thoughts and the words needed to express them, he'd go on. “I'll be better later,” he'd add, looking away. “I'll get over this too. But surely you, of all people”—she'd humbly accept that dig, as well as the bite in his voice as he said it, as the least of what she deserved—“will understand if I don't feel like speaking now?”

  What had happened to her; how could she have lost herself so in her work? Her hair was unwashed, her studio littered with used teacups and the remains of makeshift meals that she had had more than a week ago. She had not left the house for what seemed like days; she couldn't remember the last time she had gone on an outing with Henry, not even to the grocery store or the bank. Sure, he was a scientist and a devoted amateur gardener, spending much of his time at work hunched over his papers and at home alone out back, overturning earth with his hands. But he was, in the end, a social being, as she herself was not. What he loved most about his work was being a teacher, the give and take, the push and pull, of intellectual discussion.

  She'd know then that she could never make him happy; she'd realize that it was only a matter of time before he, too, would come to acknowledge that fact.

  Then, finally, about a year and a half after the night that he first asked her about Hiroshima, when she and Rei had moved out of the house to a small apartment on the other side of town, Hana would once again find that sleep was eluding her at night. The nightmares wouldn't be troubling her then; she would, at last, be painting images other than mushrooms. It'd be, instead, the thought of Henry that was keeping her awake through the nights and dogging her through the days. Who was stroking his hair back from his face at the end of a long day; who was rubbing his bad back, tucking him in, and making and bringing him the ginger tea that he liked?

  So one night in early October, her hair washed, her hands clean of paint, and a thermos of hot, fragrant tea on the seat beside her, she would pull out of the lot attached to her apartment
complex and begin driving through town, back to the neighborhood where she had lived with Henry for eight years. She would not get very far on that night, her courage giving out as the streets grew increasingly familiar, but when she embarked on the same journey a week later, she would have steeled herself so well for the trip that she'd be pulling up on the curb outside the house in what seemed like no time at all.

  The lawn would be a little overgrown, the leaves of the maple tree they'd planted together a deep red, the house still in dire need of a paint job but dearer than ever. Only the kitchen light would be on, and Hana would strain to catch a glimpse of Henry through the curtains. Was he sitting down over a proper meal; had he lost weight that he could ill afford to lose? Had his hair, like hers, grown grayer in the six weeks that they'd been apart? But nothing would be visible from where she sat.

  She'd be sitting at the wheel, giving herself a few minutes to still her breathing, collect her thoughts, and review the apologies that she'd carefully prepared and rehearsed, when, as if in answer to her prayers, her husband would step into view. Hana would see his shadow first; it would grow longer and more distinct as he came closer to the window. Then his arm would reach out, pulling back the curtains and pushing up the windows, first one and then the other; it wasn't a warm night, but he'd always loved the fresh air.

  It's when he stepped back that she'd see he had company: a woman leaning against the counter.

  Hana would suffer no more than a moment of panic—could he have met someone already, and if so, who, and how?—before she'd recognize Rosie, Claudia's mother. Of course, of course, she must be there to pick up her daughter or drop her off. And she probably was.

 

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