Requiem

  And then there was Lena’s family, unlike mine in every way. Her family had come from one place, Montreal or close by. Too close, she sometimes complained, only a two-hour drive away. Whereas my family was scattered forever: uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, sister, nieces, nephews, anywhere and everywhere in the country, unseen and no longer really known. Except through Kay. She was the one who had the information; she was the one who tried to round everyone up, if only in her head. She was the one who informed me that Uncle Kenji’s son, a cousin younger than I, had finally moved back to Vancouver Island’s west coast and now fished for a living. That Uncle Kenji, who still lived near First Father in Kamloops, drove to the coast every spring—a full day’s journey by truck—to visit his family and to go out on the boat with his son.

  Auntie Aya now lived in a long-term residence for psychiatric patients in Vancouver, and Mother’s brother, our Uncle Aki, lived in an apartment nearby so that he could visit her every day. Sometimes, she came out on a pass for two or three weeks, but she always had to go back to receive the care she needed. I wondered if, for Auntie Aya, Baby Taro’s bones had ever fallen silent, or if they still rattled in the baking powder tin. There had been something fragile about Auntie Aya from the beginning, but after Baby Taro’s death, whatever broke inside her was never put right again.

  My brother, Henry, had moved from job to job for many years until the mid-eighties, when he’d found something he was good at. He bought a small truck stop, expanded the diner and turned it into an excellent business. He couldn’t wait to retire and had told me over the phone that he’d earned his retirement. I wasn’t sure how he would spend his extra time. Travelling a bit, perhaps. Or driving back and forth between Alberta and B.C. Most of my relatives kept their heads down, stayed below the radar, as far as I could figure. Whole lives spent with their heads down.

  As for Mother, we’d had visits with her at Kay’s home several times, because Kay had arranged for her to be there whenever we’d visited Edmonton. But now, Mother was gone. I did not attend her funeral. Kay sent the ritual photo, Japanese funereal style, of family members standing around Mother’s coffin. First Father, taller than the others, stared grimly into the camera eye. I couldn’t bear to look at that photo. It disappeared, and is probably mixed in with other family photos and papers.

  But even though I had seen Mother from time to time, for me she had always remained as she was during the last evening we spent in the camp in 1946. The image I carried around had scarcely altered with time, both before and after Mother’s death. It was always Mother with black hair and bangs, a curl on each side of her forehead, wearing her yellow cotton dress and taking me by the hand to walk back and forth on the path at the edge of the cliff that looked down over the Fraser River. I could still call up the sensation of her hand pressing down on my shoulder when we paused so that she could shake out the grit from her homemade sandals.

  The truth was, I had never really said goodbye, not even when we were all still living in the camp. She was the one I had missed the most, ever since the day of the picnic, when I was given away. The memories of her were the ones buried deepest, but that had happened while she was alive, not after her death, when I was an adult. I had hunkered down, buried the connection—perhaps to protect it—and I rarely brought it to the surface.

  But I had done what artists do. I had painted. There was one canvas I had never put in a show or offered for sale. I used acrylics and mixed my own colours to create deep indigos and browns. It was an abstract that contained a heaviness of feeling but with a single fine edge running along one side, an edge of the palest yellow. And a mass of white that took up a third of the canvas, and that I could hardly define. Lena loved the painting when she saw it, but I did not tell her how it had come about. I could scarcely articulate the genesis to myself.

  And First Father, well, apart from the photograph that Kay sent after Mother’s funeral, I had not actually seen him since the day in 1946 when he left in the back of Ying’s truck. Lena and Greg had never met him and I did not consider him to be Greg’s grandfather. He was never at Kay’s in Alberta because he refused to leave British Columbia, the province that had once tried so hard to remove him. Perhaps he still held the suspicion that if he were to leave, even this long after the war, he would not be allowed back in. As for me, I was the only one in the family who had not re-entered B.C.

  Maybe First Father was the most stable one of us all. He was the one who had staked out his territory. But the years went on and distances stretched farther and farther. After the Redress Agreement was signed in the fall of 1988, after the public apology was made by the prime minister, First Father received his cheque, as we all did. Mine was banked and invested for Greg’s education. First Father’s payment, Kay had let us know, was put towards buying the bungalow he and Mother had rented for years, on the outskirts of Kamloops. But Mother was no longer alive to enjoy the fact of ownership. Nor did she live long enough to hear the Apology.

  I had been going over all of these things in my mind and had turned away from Lena after our conversation about moods. I was lying on my side with my back to her. I knew she was not asleep; I could tell by her breathing. But I had nothing to offer.

  “Listen to me,” she said into the dark, and she brought me back. “You and I started a new chapter. Our own chapter. One that has nothing to do with war. A chapter that began with love and opened enough space to let in hope.”

  I turned to face her. “You know I haven’t forgotten those years, Lena. But I don’t waste time feeling sorry for myself.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said. “But there are those moments that rear up every once in a while.”

  I did not say what I was thinking: that those moments were about the threat of chaos, the threat of loss.

  “Everything happened a long time ago,” I told her. “I know I’m blessed to have what I have now, to have the family we have. I’m blessed to be able to practise my art. And tell me, what was that about you playing piano—when we were at Miss Carrie’s tonight? You’ve never said a word about that before. What about the silence around that?”

  “You’re just trying diversionary tactics,” she said. “As usual. Anyway, it wasn’t really a silence. There wasn’t anything to say. Piano was something I studied as a child, that’s all. How could that measure up to your stories of Okuma-san and the keyboard of ponderosa pine?”

  “Well, I never learned to play,” I said. “In fact, for me, Beethoven was first learned in silence. Not exactly silence. Silence shaped by rhythm. Hands, fingers, tapping, rapping. Long before I knew what the actual music sounded like. Except for Minuet in G. Grandfather Minuet.”

  I had already told Lena about the music from Missisu’s piano entering our kitchen the morning we were uprooted from the coast.

  “Would you be able to identify music if I tapped it out?”

  “Maybe. As long as it’s Beethoven. Who knows?”

  “Turn on your side again,” she said. “There. I don’t know every note, but I can do part of this by ear. It will be awkward, but stretch your imagination. Don’t move, now.”

  I waited. Tried to push the memories away.

  Fingertips on my naked back. A moment of stillness while she thought, and then rapid pulsing, very rapid. And steady, from the left. Movement, sudden and light, from the right. Both hands, even and quick. More rapid movement, melody on the right, quickly up and down the scale, a pause, steady pulsing again.

  She stopped.

  “Again,” I said, and she repeated the pattern in exactly the same way.

  “Waldstein Sonata,” I said. “No. 21, first movement. The entire sonata lasts close to twenty-five minutes.”

  “Incredible. I can hardly believe it.”

  The camp, the shack, the cold. Sitting at the table with a piece of cream-coloured paper in front of me, paper that had been slit from one of Okuma-san’s best books. Indigo ink, a fine nib, a corner of blotter. The clock on the cupboard. His head nodding
forward just before his hands came crashing down on ponderosa pine. The mottling of the skin afterwards. The dryness. The splitting of his thumb and the way he sewed it back together with black thread. Me, with my eyes scrunched, looking, but trying, at the same time, not to see.

  “Okay, here’s another. From the beginning.”

  One chord on bare skin. Both hands. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four …

  I knew it at once, but she continued.

  “Piano Concerto No. 4, first movement,” I said. Hearing every note in my mind, as she was.

  “A symphony, then.”

  “Maybe I can guess which one before you start.”

  “Do you realize that we could go on the road?” Lena said. “Side-show—I could be your manager. We could make our fortune this way. I could quit teaching.”

  “Play.”

  “Light touch, playful, steady beat, non-stop, bit of melody, steady, steady, rock-rock, rock-rock, tah-tah, tah-tah, tah-tah.”

  “Easy. Maelzel had invented the metronome and I think Beethoven was having a bit of fun. Symphony No. 8, second movement. Tah-tah, tah-tah. He fought with Maelzel, one of the feuds that lasted. Maelzel, the inventor, even made several mechanical hearing aids, but Beethoven said they didn’t work. Any collaboration between the two was not a happy event. Beethoven considered the man ill-bred, someone who was trying to infringe on his rights.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Okuma-san. The stories he told. All those nights in the chicken coop after we left the camp. He bought an old turntable our last year in British Columbia. And records, one at a time, as he could afford them—usually secondhand. All the while, he was salting money away so that we could move east, where he could teach and send me to art school. It was one of those nights in the chicken coop when I heard a recording of Beethoven for the first time. The light was fading around us. I felt the music enter my soul, I swear. We listened under that low ceiling, in a building that should have been condemned …”

  “Please don’t talk about the chicken coop,” Lena said. “I can’t bear it, not tonight. Here. I’m going to play the last one. Ready? This will be difficult. Focus. Identify.”

  Her hands, resting on my skin, all fingertips. Slowly, slowly, floating, one side to the other. Pressure, even pressure on my back. Pause. Into the skin, all fingers again, forward and back. Pause. So many pauses. My body reaching to meet the silhouette of melody, the music shaped by rhythm. And then, the fingers of her right hand, only the right, slowly picked out, slowly. Disjointed taps. What? What? I feel as if she’s swaying now. And I.

  The rage, Okuma-san said. We cannot allow the rage. If we allow it, it will also consume.

  As it consumed First Father. As it broke Auntie Aya after the burning of Baby Taro. As it left its marks, forever, on me.

  “You have to concentrate,” she said. “I’ll start again, from the beginning.”

  Slow floating fingers across my skin, the pauses.

  The beauty of the music in my head. The powerful surge of realization. The unmatchable creation that would always be there for every race, for every generation, for all time.

  “Adagio. Second movement. Emperor,” I said, so softly I didn’t know if she had heard. It had been the first Beethoven recording I had ever listened to.

  I turned to face her again. We fell asleep, clinging to each other. The music was in my body. I was clinging to life itself.

  CHAPTER 27

  1997

  You’re driving straight through?”

  “That’ll work out best, I think.”

  Kay has picked up the phone as if she had her hand out, waiting for it to ring. She’s not happy about this new plan of mine. I don’t tell her I’m already on the other side of Edmonton.

  “I’ll be stopping at your place on the way back,” I tell her.

  “Hugh went out to get extra groceries,” she says, as if this will change my mind. “And I told Henry I’d call him when I knew which day you were arriving. He’s planning to join us for dinner. I’m making teriyaki chicken. Henry has a serious friend, I don’t know if he told you. I haven’t met her yet. Someone he met after he sold his restaurant. Or maybe he met her while he still owned it. Anyway, they were friends before. She’s Japanese. He’s on the pension now, you know. The first of the three of us. Next year, it will be my turn. Aren’t you glad you’re the baby of the family?” She laughs. “Henry has taken up weightlifting, too,” she adds. “At his age.”

  “Impressive,” I say. “But look, I’m sorry for the delay. All it means is that I’ll be arriving four or five days later, something like that.”

  “I had no idea how far you’d be driving each day. I didn’t even know if you had my work number. Though the academic year is winding down and I’m not at the office so much. You could get one of those cell phones,” she says drily. “Then we could get in touch with you when we need to.”

  It’s always about need with Kay. Her needs, Hugh’s needs, my needs. And of course, First Father’s.

  “What is it that you’re looking for?” she says, changing tactics. “Searching, searching, you travel around the world, but for what? You don’t light long enough to find whatever it is.”

  Ah, I wasn’t expecting this. But that’s her job. Identify the problem.

  “Your room is ready. And what about Basil? I thought you wanted to drop him off with us while you went on to the camp.”

  I look through the wall of the phone booth and see Basil watching for my next move. Big, sloppy, happy Basil. He’s drooling against the car window as I speak. And he does love the company of other dogs, even Diva; he’s more sociable than I am and can fit into any existing hierarchy. Though a few years ago, when he was younger and we were visiting Kay, Diva, after two days, had had her fill of the interloper. She dragged Basil’s bed out to the yard and dumped it on the grass.

  The real truth is, I’m not ready to face sister, brother-in-law, brother or his new friend. My own silence has been exactly right throughout this trip, and I need to protect it a bit longer. Well, there it is, what I need.

  “What about Kamloops?” she says suddenly. “You have to pass through there to get to the camp, or very close by. I’ve already warned Father that you’ll be driving to B.C. after you leave Edmonton. He’ll be sitting in his chair, staring at the door as always, but this time he thinks it’s you who will be walking in.”

  A man who won’t leave the province. Another who won’t enter. Until now. I imagine a painting, panels, a diptych maybe, some sort of split canvas. If I were in it, I’d paint myself out.

  “I don’t know why you did that, Kay. I haven’t decided about that.”

  A long sigh.

  “You never knew,” she says. “Well, how could you? No one ever told you. After we left the camp, while we were on the move from one town to the next, some nights after Henry and I were in bed, Father mourned because he had given you away. It was terrible. He keened, a high-pitched wail. My God, it was terrible.”

  Did I hear correctly? Did she say keened? First Father, keening.

  “There was no keeping him quiet,” she said. “It was disturbing to all of us, but to Mother especially. Her grief was quiet and contained. But just as terrible all the same. There were other people around, too. In the mill towns. Other Japanese families, just a few. We lived in such close quarters; everyone knew everyone else’s business. No one was happy about the noise.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Kay?”

  “How do you think Henry and I felt? You were his favourite. You always were. He had hopes for you. The biggest hopes. He loved you so much. Can’t you see that? He always loved you best.” She sounds like a child as it spills out of her. “Why do you think he gave you to Okuma-san? My God, Bin, figure it out. You’re not a stupid man. He wanted more for you. What he couldn’t give. A future. Any future at all. But he missed you. He even said, several times, that he was going to go after you and bring you back.
Long after you and Okuma-san left British Columbia.”

  I swallow hard at this. I’m the target of the ambush: words coming at me from all sides.

  “But he didn’t come after me, did he. If he’d wanted me, he wouldn’t have given me away in the first place. Anyway, by then he’d have lost face—if he’d tried to take me back. Okuma-san did legally adopt me, you know. He was my father.”

  I haven’t intended anger, but there it is.

  “I know all that,” she says sadly, and I suddenly understand that what she’s telling me is probably true. Every bit of it.

  Why didn’t he let Mother visit me when I was a child? I don’t ask. Okuma-san and I were living far away from them, in the south of the province. Even before we moved to Ontario, there wouldn’t have been enough money. A trip would have been unthinkable.

  All the emotions withheld. First Father, having made his decision, would have had to banish any thought of changing his mind and trying to get me back.

  All the feelings concealed.

  All the stories never told. Fifty-one years of stories. Fifty-one years since Ying’s truck drove my first family across the bridge and dropped them at the bus station on the other side of the river. I have no idea, I realize, how they lived their lives. I know only how Okuma-san and I lived ours. I received Mother’s letters, and Kay’s, but did the letters reveal anything? They never wrote about the details: how much my sister and brother had grown in a year; if they had to wear tight shoes; what they endured at their schools; if their hand-me-downs were ridiculed; if Henry was often in fights, as I was; if they had enough to eat; if they ever knelt inside a church to pray. Did they have trouble finding their first jobs? How did Kay get herself to university? She must have worked so hard. And what was Mother’s life like during those years, before Kay and Henry left home? Hard-working, of course. I found out later that she had worked as a domestic in the home of one of the mill owners. Trying to contribute earnings to feed and dress her children. But no one was in a position to give Mother what she did not have. A different kind of life. A family undivided.