Poached Egg on Toast

  Decades later, the habit was hard to shake. Tosh dropped his English name, the one bestowed upon him in the camps. He printed Toshio, the name which had been declared unpronounceable by the missionaries, and returned the application. The passport arrived two days before he and Judith flew to Japan.

  And what of pilgrimage by association? Judith felt both lightly connected and not connected at all. It was the way she thought of the five islands, shakily attached to the Earth’s core. She was insider and outsider, mostly out. Away from Tokyo, sometimes three or four days at a time, the only Caucasian face she saw was her own, staring back from hotel mirrors. Tosh, on the other hand, and for the first time in his life, was slipping into physical harmony with his outer world. Some shadow of himself left her side again and again, as he mingled with clerks, travellers, pedestrians. Her husband, the stranger. Judith watched the unmistakable human exchange, from which she was excluded, take place in streets, in lineups and crowds, in subway cars. Tosh was expanding, while she was shrinking—despite the newly forming child inside her.

  She was also aware of a hint of meaning, a cause. But what cause? It was like being on the edge of a society that was immersed in anonymity. Manners were held in place by invisible controls as fragile as the breadth of a hair. Controls that could momentarily give rise to panic. The absence of chaos was what made Judith aware of a subterranean rumbling, a deep muttering beneath the surface.

  Before Honshu, before joining the tour that would this afternoon arrive in Hiroshima, Judith and Tosh had travelled on their own up the Inland Sea, staying at various places on the Island of Kyushu. They’d stopped over in a village of cultivated hills and raw coastline. Climbed to the top of a hill, where they’d been greeted by a Shinto priest on the open veranda of his outer shrine. A weathered torii gate, brilliant in lacquered vermilion, reared itself in brush strokes against the sky.

  The smiling priest was directing visitors to put coins into a mechanical dispenser. He intercepted and distributed the folded papers as they fell out of the slot. Judith deposited a coin while Tosh went off to see the gardens. The priest assumed that she did not speak Japanese, and began to read aloud, translating into English.

  The smile fell from his face as if he had slipped behind a mask. He stared at Judith and, once again, she became aware of a subterranean rumble of panic. The priest shrugged.

  “I do not understand. This is unlucky fortune. There will be a difficult labour.”

  The priest could not be blamed, after all. How could he know about the floating cells curled inside the womb? Judith accepted the folded paper. The priest turned his attention to the young man who was next in line, awaiting translation.

  She found Tosh beside a stream in a remote part of the garden. A cupped bamboo pipe clicked as it filled and tipped, filled and tipped. Did Tosh leave her side this often when they were at home, or was it only in Japan that she was noticing?

  “That’s only the first part of the ritual,” Tosh said, when she blurted out the priest’s translation.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to tie the paper to a branch. To close the circle, to complete the fortune. A branch of a sakaki tree.” He was concerned and amused at the same time.

  “So?”

  “Interrupt the rite.”

  “Don’t tie the fortune.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Cross-fertilization, confusion.” Judith had a sudden image of purging herself of the unlucky Shinto paper at a Buddhist temple. She would tie it to a Buddhist tree.

  On the way down the path she walked grimly past the sakaki tree, where paper hopes and knotted dreams fluttered in the hot breeze.

  During the next few days, she had carried her own folded paper as if it were a living object at the bottom of her purse. A threat of gloom, a curse, a piece of paper two inches long weighing her down.

  Tosh teased her at the hotel. “Don’t be so serious. The person next in line might just as easily have been given it. It might have been a man. It probably means something like labour diligently, something as mundane as that.”

  “A man didn’t get it. I did. I’m the one who’s pregnant.”

  “Why don’t you take it down to the desk and ask for a second translation? Maybe the priest used an indefinite article by mistake.” Tosh spoke Japanese, but could not read the written language.

  “No,” Judith said. “No and no. I’m the one who looked into the priest’s face. I’m the one who has to thwart fate.”

  Now, they were part of a group. And, since six o’clock in the morning, they’d been led by a fraudulently cheery Teruko, to three of the four temples she wanted them to see before the bus continued on to Hiroshima. At the fourth, while the others milled about the low temple platform, removing shoes, sliding their feet into paper slippers, Judith left the bus and hurried around to the rear of the building. The path was lined with rugged stone lanterns, which hugged the ground as if they’d blundered up through the earth. Cicadas shrilled against the bark of trees, but could not be seen. She pulled the twisted paper from her bag and looked around to ensure that she was unobserved. She tied the fortune to the twig of a thorn bush, and fled. Her body was light. Free. Teruko’s face closed when she saw Judith join the group, late. Judith smiled sweetly.

  Teruko was talking about masks. She had herded the group back onto the bus and now held a microphone in her hand. She was excessively thin, and wore a navy blue suit that seemed to be a company uniform. Her glistening black hair was pinned at the back of her head, but it wobbled as she gave what was a formal explanation. Perhaps she’d memorized the words, Judith thought.

  “There are many kinds of masks. They have fixed faces; these are guardians of the temple. Dogs, devils, animals, even a manbeast. Evil in concrete form is able to repel evil itself. But masks,” she added, “are also used for gentler purpose. A mask can still the spirit inside. The blank face reveals only what it chooses to reveal.” She was not looking at Judith. Deliberately, Judith thought. “When the mask is used in art,” she went on, “it is placed between the eye of the beholder and the spirit of the object.”

  The mask might represent multiple faces, Judith thought, but if it’s left to the beholder to supply meaning, then meaning will never stop shifting. Why were the Japanese so preoccupied with masks in the first place? Why the preoccupation, through centuries of art, when the living face was so accomplished at drawing every expression into one? Had she not lived with Tosh for many years? For one disconcerting moment, she believed that her own face revealed everything.

  Teruko’s expression shifted to a place between forced politeness and disdain. Teruko had two and a half days left to lead her tourists from one landmark to another—gaijin, foreigners, every one.

  When she stepped off the air-conditioned bus into Hiroshima heat, Judith recoiled as if flames had waved her back. The driver had parked at the edge of the Peace Park, beside three other motorcoaches. The group formed a huddle on the cement, trying to stay in the shade beside the bus. Teruko raised her hand and commanded silence. She announced that tourists from all over the world visited the site every year, that the stone chest beneath the sheltering curve of the cenotaph held the names of the victims, now close to two hundred thousand. She told them abruptly that they should be back at this spot by five o’clock. Departure would not be delayed for latecomers. Pamphlets in many languages were available. The bus driver handed Teruko a Coke, and the two, without a backward glance, walked off towards a staff building outside the entrance to the park.

  At first, no one in the group made a move. There seemed to be a collective reluctance to go forward, to see what had to be seen. The foreigners were on their own. Judith opened a bright red umbrella she had borrowed from a cache at the front of the bus. Earlier in the day, Teruko laughed outright when Judith used one of these in the sun. Indeed, when Judith now opened it to protect herself from the heat, three young Japanese women standing near the fountain burst into giggles. Judith tried
not to explain their behaviour to herself; she knew she’d get it wrong. Laughter could be met with humour. Stares could be endured. Paranoia could be pushed down, out of reach.

  But the old feeling was revived. The feeling that always depended upon where she and Tosh happened to be. At home, she’d forgotten. Or perhaps it hadn’t mattered in the last place they’d lived. One afternoon in Toronto, she read from the window of the subway, Death to mixed races, but she told herself it didn’t apply to them. How could anything so murderous make sense? There and here, when she and Tosh were together, they thought about it only if the rules, imposed from without, forced their participation. Did you notice that time? Yes, I wondered if you did, too.

  From the guidebook, she now read the awkward, translated English. The fountain is a monument dedicated to those who so craved the water. The mother and child statue in desperation fleeing from the ravage.

  The fountain had been erected in front of the museum, a long, glass building. The group had quickly dispersed. Perhaps the others were wandering the grounds or the streets, looking for air-conditioned tea-houses. Teruko had made it clear that the bus door would not be open again until five. Judith and Tosh began to climb the museum stairs.

  The first room, though air-conditioned, contained rank, dead air. Two Japanese couples were moving off behind a partition. In the next room, displays were presented in realistic detail: twisted spoons, sections of bridges, chunks of concrete, mutilated buttons, fragments of clothing, flattened pots and pans, melted steel, indistinguishable char. Random objects that happened to be at or near the hypocentre that sixth day in August when citizens of wartime Hiroshima were going about the ordinary business of trying to stay alive.

  Tosh walked on ahead, while Judith slowed to read every word. Most glass cases contained explanatory cards printed in English. As she zigzagged from one exhibit to another, a part of her was aware of people hurrying past, of a swelling of tension through the long series of rooms. Her feet were swollen; she could not have rushed if she’d wanted to. She looked through a window to the hills beyond, and thought of the slow shuffle into and out of the city. Before she’d left Canada, she had read about the death marchers fanning out in confusion, dragging sheets of skin, and dropping like charred bits of meat along the way.

  She turned back to the display before her, a selection of photographs pinned to a black-and-white background depicting devastation. The faces in the photographs registered not horror, but bewilderment, numbness. These were the faces of the insensate. Victims of the human race peering out from inside skinless bodies into a camera eye. Whatever part of them was still living, was trapped inside bodies that decayed as they stood—bodies that gave off the blue flame and smelled of broiling sardines. Judith read from the scorched hollows of those faces what the Japanese themselves had written: The chance of survival is the thickness of one sheet of paper.

  She was roused by a shout. Beside, behind. A Japanese man was shaking his fist in her face, frighteningly close. A short, muscular man, he wore a narrow band of cloth wrapped around his head and knotted at the temple. He’d been drinking—she could smell whisky—and he shouted in rapid Japanese. She backed away, but he circled and hemmed her to the glass. She looked for Tosh, but Tosh was nowhere to be seen.

  She wanted to shout back, “I understand. It’s horrible for me, too. But it’s complicated. The world was at war … I had nothing to do with … it isn’t my fault.” Knowing that this would be ridiculous. She was trapped, pressed to the glass by a man whose anger was so immediate, he was aware only of its existence. He pounded the glass that protected the photographs, and the glass shook, and again he brought his fist close to her face. She braced herself, just as a guard rushed into the room and grabbed the man’s arm, giving her a moment to flee.

  She caught sight of Tosh relaxing against a windowsill near the exit. In his face, she saw their lives together. Love, normality; this was the man she knew. But other lives flashed before her. The man she’d left back there, consumed with hate; Teruko, waiting outside at the bus, no doubt in disapproval; the men and women in the photographs, caught during their last moments of survival—whether they were prepared to die or not. She looked towards Tosh again, and understood that, although he was here beside her, he could not help. As long as she remained in Hiroshima, as long as she was in Japan, she would be held accountable. For the shape of her eyes, and the colour of her skin.

  What We Are Capable Of

  When Sarah phones, Em has just torn every letter into fours, then eighths, sixteenths and, finally, fragments so tiny it would take years to put the m’s back together, or to match the dots with the i’s. No one will ever see these letters, though she can call any one of them into view at any time. Each word is stored in the memory part of her brain. She saw a map once, of the brain, its sections delineated like rivers: knee, hip, abdomen, thorax; and neck, face, lips, tongue. One rippled area was marked: emotions. Another—more than one, now that she thinks of it—was labelled memory. This is where Michael is stored: emotions; multiple caches called memory.

  Perhaps, instead of tearing, she should have spent days and weeks dismantling the letters, character by character, with her sharp-as-a-knife sewing scissors. She could have created a spectacular alphabet of possibilities. She could have thrown the lot into her deep Scandinavian bowl, the one that sits on a low table beside her desk. She could have picked out fragments and put them together again like particles of an Icelandic saga that rearrange themselves with each telling. Recently, she’d opened a book about Isak Dinesen and read that all sorrows could be borne if they were put into a story, or if a story were told about them. She wondered if for Dinesen this had been true. Or if, after the telling, Dinesen had ended up with both story and sorrows. The weaving of words: to bear in mind, to bear tidings, to bear down, to be born.

  “Mom,” says Sarah, “are you there?”

  Em hears the fullness in her daughter’s voice, the portent, and thinks, No, Sarah, I’m not. Not now. But another part of her, a slumbering part, has been roused. She has been the parent of her child for twenty-two years—the last six without Owen—and though Sarah can surprise her, Em sometimes knows as much about the direction of Sarah’s choices as she does about her own.

  She imagines Sarah’s face at this moment and matches expression to voice. Tentative. But there is something more; she senses and then sees the word wound. Open to attack. She cannot keep her mind from inventing this way—it is her peculiar relationship with words. If she knows uncountable truths about Sarah, then Sarah understands and puts up with this about her.

  “I want to come home,” says Sarah. “For the summer. I’ll get a job waitressing until I go back to school. There’s a flight to the island in the morning. I’m already packed.”

  “Fine. Wonderful. It’s your home, too.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  “Garry walked away,” she says. She’s crying softly. “I ignored the signs. He was seeing someone else for weeks while he was still living with me. You can say I told you so, go ahead.”

  “Not on your life,” says Em. “Get yourself on a plane. Your room is ready.”

  After she hangs up, Em stands at the window and looks down over the narrow field that rolls to the edge of the sea. The blue of the sky is so startling it shocks her to be part of its brilliance, its glare. She thinks about the way she and Michael turned away from each other the last time they were together and she wills her mind: Don’t think about him. Don’t.

  How did it begin?

  A way of speaking. They fell into it slowly. At first, neither she nor Michael allowed that it was happening. Had already happened. She remembers the word risk. They were excited by the riskiness of the language they began to use with each other. Perhaps she was supposed to know enough about herself that she could see what was coming and muster some counterforce to ward off the next thing. But she has never been good at predicting what will happen a
fter the first mark is made. Not until every one of the signs has been followed to the end.

  In the early morning, Em leaves the house in the dark and drives the length of the island to the tiny airport, where she waits outside the fence. Night is turning to day. From here, she cannot see the ocean but she is surrounded by a circle of sea-sky. She is always aware, always renewed by it. Each of the island roads is drawn towards an expanse of milky blue as if, inevitably, the height of the next curve will lead off into the sky. She would not know how to live anywhere else, so much is she a part of this place. Even after Owen drowned she did not for a moment consider leaving. And though Sarah has left, in the way young people can and do, Em knows that her daughter is part of this place, and deeply connected, too.

  Throughout Sarah’s childhood, Em and Owen took turns telling stories—always stories, it seemed, that rose up from the sea. A gale, electricity out, the house rocking as if it might lift from its foundations and soar out over the Gulf—that was when Sarah begged to hear the tales: the phantom train that wailed through the night fog; ships that went down; women who raised their skirts and dragged themselves out of the Atlantic; men and women who survived the winters and the winds, who became builders of ships and settlers of land, who created what has become Sarah’s ancestral past.

  The plane taxis in and Em watches her only child shift her backpack and descend the steps to tarmac below. Sarah spots her mother and raises a hand in a wave. She has to go through the terminal first, and Em heads for the door to meet her.

  Sarah is wearing her brave face and moves to her mother’s arms. As Em draws her in and they lock together, she feels her daughter’s body let go. Now she knows what Sarah is holding: real loss, real sadness. In a fleeting moment, she wonders if Sarah detects her mother’s own comfortless shell.