Requiem

  While we were all enjoying the entertainment, I had not once thought about missing my family. In fact, in the crowd of people and without thinking, I had inched my chair closer to Mother, as if I were part of my first family again.

  Everyone was in high spirits at the end of the play, putting on coats and mittens and scarves, waving and calling out farewells, heading for the door. First Father remained behind in the community room because he had been one of the actors. As we were leaving, he was sprawled on the platform stage with the other players, half in and half out of costume. They had already begun to celebrate, some of them having stored homemade potato sake for this special night. For weeks, it had been brewing and fermenting with lemons and sugar, hidden away in heavy crocks in earth cellars dug into the side of the hill.

  When we were outside in the cold again, I automatically followed Mother and Hiroshi and Keiko. They were ahead, halfway down the row, before they heard the crunch of footsteps on the snow behind them. They stopped, and Mother half-turned. When she saw me still making my way towards her, she shook her head, almost imperceptibly. When I caught up, she put her hands on my shoulders and turned me to face the direction from which we’d come. I looked back towards Okuma-san’s shack, which we had passed at the end of the row. My second father was standing by his door, staring at us, looking as if he had lost his way. His head was wrapped in a scarf, his face expressionless. I felt a small push between my shoulders and heard Mother’s voice say softly, “You are sure to sleep well tonight, Bin. It has been such a happy night for all of us.”

  She continued on her way and I was left, caught between the two shacks.

  I stood without moving. The mountains leaned in on all sides. The other families had quickly disappeared inside their homes, and I was alone on the path. I had to force myself to drag my feet towards Okuma-san. The excitement that had pulled me along behind my first family now deserted me, and I was stranded like an island in the midst of cross-currents that overlapped in the same stream.

  The wind was blowing hard as Okuma-san and I stomped the snow from our boots and went inside. I began to prepare for bed, and climbed under the covers without saying good night. I was feeling badly, but I didn’t know what to say. As I lay there, I could hear the rattling of loose boards up and down the rows of shacks. The wind always howled more at night, and Okuma-san once suggested that I listen to it as a kind of music. Wind music that played against the roof, the tarpaper, the ill-fitting floorboards with frost on the nailheads, the doors, even the trees. For him, he said, the wind swayed and rocked the trees as if they were outdoor instruments being finely tuned.

  From behind the curtain that divided bedroom from kitchen, I heard his footsteps, followed by a dragging sound and a creak, which I knew to mean that he had lowered himself to his chair and was balancing the keyboard. As if I were beside him, I could see in my mind how he would be relaxing his shoulders, adjusting his knees, wiggling his feet and planting them flat to the floor. His upper body would dip forward, the way it always did when he began.

  If he was about to play what he said was called the Hammerklavier, I knew his head would be bowed. I tensed then and waited for the sound of his hands to come down hard against the plank. The fierceness of the beginning always startled me, no matter how prepared I tried to be. Then I heard his hands moving in a different way as they made a hollow tapping up and down the length of the silent keyboard. Not silent, because playing against wood was far from silent, even from where I lay in my bed. Okuma-san’s fingers were entering what I had come to think of as a frenzied race towards a place so far away it could not be reached, not even by him. This rapid movement of fingers and hands went on for some time and then there was a pause, and after that his hands slowed and paused and slowed again.

  I was becoming sleepy, and the sound of the wind began to blend with the insistent rapping of fingers. I thought of Hiroshi and Keiko getting ready for bed in their shack farther along the row. I imagined them wearing the same kind of pyjamas I had on—the ones Mother had made for the three of us from flannel sheets. I knew that Keiko had her own bed now, because she had told me so at school.

  “My cot is at the end of the kitchen,” she had said. And then she’d laughed and added, “At night, I’m the warmest one in the family because I sleep closest to the stove. Hiroshi still sleeps in the bedroom. Where we all used to sleep before …”

  She’d stopped abruptly, as if she had blurted out too much.

  I pictured all of this while I was buried under the blankets I had pulled up over my ears. I pictured First Father getting home after the celebration, maybe staggering a little as he checked the stove, his last ritual before sleep. I knew that he, like Okuma-san, would have to get up in the night to add more wood.

  Not so easy to conjure at this moment was Mother, who had turned me away, even though I had pushed my chair close to hers during the play. I knew that she was still my mother, and that there was no mother in the house of my second father. I listened to the wind both inside and out while I was thinking of her. And as I was dropping off to sleep, I wondered if, at exactly the same moment, she was also thinking of me.

  CHAPTER 21

  1997

  Sweeping along Saskatchewan prairie, I am surrounded by the sounds of the Missa Solemnis, the great and glorious Mass. From the heart! May it go to the heart. Beethoven’s message, written in his own hand above the Kyrie. As I do every time I listen, I wait for the burst of passion that marks its beginnings.

  In the camp, Okuma-san said, “When we are out of this place”—he had been trying to tell me about the Mass—”you and I might someday hear this wonderful music together. When you are older, we might even be fortunate enough to attend a live performance. The beginning of the Missa Solemnis has a way of entering the spirit all at once and then holding it captive until the last note.”

  It would not be until the late fifties that I would hear a Toscanini record of the Mass, when Okuma-san and I listened to what seemed to be sounds funnelled from many places into one place, the choir swelling into the room where we sat. And now it’s as if I am compelled to hear this, and every one of Beethoven’s works, through Okuma-san’s ears and in the context of his stories. It is a big work, Beethoven wrote. Simply that. Nothing about the nearly four years of its creation, the dedication, the countless delays. By the time it was finished, Beethoven was in his fifties. I’ve sometimes wondered what he felt at its completion. Numbed, perhaps. When I listen, I think of how he had to witness its performance in Vienna. He was unable to hear a note of it. Three years later, in 1827, just when the music was finally being published, he was dead.

  As the Missa Solemnis soars inside the car, I open a back window slightly and let the music escape outside. I had been thinking of a drawing Greg worked on one Sunday morning when he was a child. Lena and I were still in bed and he was patiently waiting for his breakfast. He drew a man lying on the ground, an ambulance door open beside him. A light on top of the ambulance, with rays to denote flashing, had been filled in with red crayon. The caption read: IT IS BEST TO KEEP A PRSON WARM WEN HE HAS A HART ATTAK.

  I listen again and look out at the prairie landscape. I have driven north as far as I want to go on this cool and sunny day. I stop the car, turn, and begin to travel south and west again, mainly west, where I’ll rejoin the main highway that leads to Alberta. For some time now, I have been passed by snow geese that are holding up the limitless sky, line after wavering line, as they migrate north. Now there are more and more, and they begin to land in farmers’ fields on both sides of the highway, the vees overlapping until they’ve become an assemblage of sinuous shapes.

  While this is going on around me, Basil begins to pace. He starts dashing from one side of the car to the other, sniffing the air repeatedly. He keeps trying to force his nose into the gap where I’ve lowered the back window. If I stop again, there’s no telling what he will do. Run to the fields, ears flapping, bellowing for sure. I’d never get him back.


  A new sound begins to break the silence of earth and sky. It is a chattering of thousands that can be heard from more than a mile away. The earth where the geese land becomes a moving mass of white. Then an entire field seems to rise suddenly into the air. The geese have been startled, perhaps by a fox. And though many separate flocks are on the ground, they surge upwards as if they are one, and swerve in a wide U-turn to regroup. It’s as if a lasso has rounded them up in the sky. There is a jostling of position while they assume the same direction, and then they land again. Their continuous noisy chatter can be heard inside the car, even over the Gloria of the Mass.

  I wish Greg, with his love of the natural world, were able to witness this astonishing sight. But he is on the East Coast, witnessing his own astonishments. And here, above Basil and me, the migration goes on all day, thousands upon thousands of white geese, black wingtips flashing.

  I slow, take my time and listen to the sustaining power of the final movement—described as the prayer for inner and outer peace.

  DURING THE LAST EVENING of that first trip we made to Prince Edward Island in the early eighties, the three of us took a walk along the beach for a mile or so. “To say goodbye to the sea,” Greg told Lena as we stepped out of the mobile home and made our way over dunes and down the side of the cliff. “But only for now. Because I’m going to remember this place, and hold it inside of me until we come back next year. We are coming back, aren’t we?”

  To which Lena replied, “I see it all now—and for the rest of time. I’m living with a man who is obsessed with rivers, a boy who loves the sea. We’ll be planning every holiday from now on around rivers. Or oceans. Or rivers that empty into oceans.”

  The sky was dull when we set out, the vaguest of suns showing itself in a haze at the approach of sunset. Strips of horizontal cloud were stretched across the western sky like iron bars. The bottom half of the sun disappeared all at once, leaving the upper half stranded in an inverted silly smile. It was the only notable shape in that vast grey space. Cormorants flew low over the waves, their migration having begun. Greg was thrilled that he had recently learned to identify them. While tagging after Albert on the farm, he’d been taught to differentiate between cormorants and geese.

  “They both fly in vee formations,” Albert had told him, pointing out past the shore. “From here, they look pretty much the same size, do you see? But the wild geese never coast. Their wings never stop flapping. A cormorant will pause now and then, and coast. That’s how you tell them apart.”

  There was still a bit of light during our walk, and Lena said she was turning back because she wanted to start in on the packing. The sky was changing again, and clouds had begun to spin out from the setting sun. Greg and I continued for a while, sandpipers scurrying ahead comically, miniature busybodies with white rings around their necks. We were intent on reaching a promontory where the red cliffs jutted sharply into the sea. Mostly, we were silent, listening to the ebbing waves and paying attention to what had washed up on the sand since our last walk. Just before we reached the point, we came across a tidal pool that was shrinking rapidly but, at the same time, creating numerous shallow puddles some twenty or thirty feet back from shore. In the puddles, hundreds upon hundreds of small herring were trapped. The tide was going out quickly. The once wide rivulet through which the herring had swum in from the sea had left its outlines, but it was now clogged with sand and the exit was blocked. It was obvious that the herring were doomed, because the pools that contained them were too far back from shore. There was no hope of reopening the rivulet; it had closed long before we’d arrived. And now that the water was being absorbed, hundreds, maybe thousands, of small fish were abandoned on the surface of the sand.

  Greg began to scoop them up, his bare hands turning to liquid silver as he ran to the edge of the sea to dump them in. Back and forth he raced, saving as many as his small hands could hold. When he saw how little progress he was making, he tried to scoop the flopping bodies into his sunhat, running to the sea and returning to the shrinking puddles. I helped him for a while, sickened by the hopelessness of the drama we’d become a part of. We could not keep up. There were too many tiny fish. Too big a school, too many stranded.

  In exhaustion, and finally acknowledging what I already knew, Greg plunked himself down on the sand. His knees were bent up, his head down. His skin was almost nut brown from the sun and he looked like a sea creature himself.

  I heard a curse. “Goddamn,” he said. That tiny, lean boy. He was struck down in defeat. It was a defeat for me, too, because I could not see any way to help him. He’d have been insulted if I had said, “It’s an accident of nature and we have stumbled upon it and we are witness to it and there is nothing more we can do.”

  I thought of Okuma-san, who had always been there in the background when I was a young boy. Somewhere near. Instructing, caring. Hovering, the way Uncle Aki hovered over Auntie Aya. What would Okuma-san have done in this situation? He would have allowed Greg the dignity of silence.

  It was dark when we turned and made our way back, the living-room light in the trailer acting as a beacon on the cliff to guide us forward. Greg’s narrow heels dug into hard, damp sand, leaving a trail of dogged footprints.

  At bedtime, my son, who had been born old, looked up from his pillow and said, “I’m not so sure I want to live in an unjust world.”

  To which I had no reply.

  The death of the herring did not deter Greg. His love affair with the sea having begun, he became all the more determined to learn about the creatures that live within. Lena and I supplied books and recordings. He began to take tapes to school, sharing songs of the humpback whales. At home he sat in the reading chair, wearing oversized earphones while leafing through his new books and singing heartily along with the whales. In an exercise book he brought home from school, he printed: I have a reckrd with sownds of a humpback whale. I’m going to be a marine bologist. I love sea mammals. They are frendly that’s why.

  When the teacher asked the class to make two lists, one of things they could do and one of things they couldn’t, Greg printed in his book:

  THINGS I CAN DO: think, sing, giggle, subtract, swim, love the sea

  THINGS I CAN’T DO: fly, juggle, drive, hate the sea

  At dinner one evening, he crossed his hands over his chest and declared that in place of his heart were whales and dolphins. That was where he was holding his love.

  CHAPTER 22

  1945

  By the beginning of 1945, the windows at Okuma-san’s had frosted over and we would not see through them again until spring. Thick needles of frost had built up inside the walls; Okuma-san held a chair and steadied it while I stood on the seat and broke off the larger brittle needles near the ceiling. Like every other tarpaper shack in camp, ours was not airtight, though Okuma-san had done what he could to seal the cracks. At night, the boards snapped and groaned and the place breathed with a hoary rasp. I’d become used to the winter noises here, in the way I had been familiar with distinctive sounds in my earlier homes: the tide seeping up under the house of my birth on Vancouver Island; the winds gusting through the boards and knotholes in the home of my first family.

  There had been recent changes in our camp. Four families had packed up their meagre belongings and departed the first week of December. They left their homemade furniture behind and travelled together, all of them heading for Ontario. Their shacks were now being used for storage of wood and for food that could be kept frozen.

  The United Church had helped these families to find work—two of the older girls would be domestics; their parents were to be caretakers and short-order cooks. One man was to have a job working for a laundry, another for an optical company.

  Ba and Ji had received a new letter from California. Sachi wrote that half the population, almost five thousand prisoners, had now left Manzanar. Unlike Canada, the United States had decided to permit Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast. Despite this, many were moving east bec
ause their homes in the coastal regions were no longer available to them, and their jobs were gone. Sachi’s husband, Tom, had applied for a job in Nebraska, using his engineering background, and that was where they were heading. Although Sachi was expecting the baby in April, she was going to try to get temporary work as a steno, to help with the income after they settled.

  Since Christmas, two babies had been born in our camp. Ba had helped with the deliveries, and both babies were girls. The parents had to keep the wood in the oil-drum stoves piled high and burning constantly to make certain that the new babies would be warm enough.

  Also, a man had died of pneumonia—one of the elders. I hated to use the outdoor toilets at any time, but when someone died I became worried about the footless ghosts that were said to gather in the woods behind the building, even though I still hadn’t seen one.

  As for the war, it wasn’t any easier than before to get news about what was happening either in Europe or in the Pacific. There was still no radio in camp. We did learn, from letters, that many Japanese Canadian men had been recruited to work with the British and Australian armies. And that the Canadian army needed men to teach the Japanese language to soldiers who would be working in Pacific operations.

  For a few days, our worries were set aside because New Year’s Day was the biggest celebration of all. It was the custom for families to visit back and forth for two or three days over this period. On New Year’s Eve, I ran back to the house of my first family because I was allowed to bathe in the bathhouse with Hiroshi and Keiko on this special night. We scrubbed extra hard, remembering the warning of the adults: anyone who forgot to bathe before midnight would turn into an owl.