Radiance (22 page)

In the car Keiko put her head to one side and closed her eyes until they had left the city behind. Only then did she open them again.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lawrence.”

She turned to face the buttercups in the field outside the window, pure and bright in the afternoon sun, as though painted by children. And all the while, Walter held on to the leather steering wheel with both hands and drove as though chased, his hat low on his brow. They sped along the Northern State Parkway towards Riverside Meadows, Linden Street, their house, their neighbours, the bedroom where Daisy would help Keiko take off her jacket, unbutton her dress—all those tiny pearly buttons—and slip it from her frame.

Then Keiko would unwrap the soft pink nightgown Daisy had bought for her, and Daisy would help her put it on.

C
HILDREN RAN OUTSIDE THE WINDOW,
through the wild grass, the timothy, in a place that looked like the Russian steppes. The train rumbled and shook. All at once Daisy was
afraid, knowing she had been afraid before, but still hoping that if she alerted the authorities, she could make things right. “We’ve got to stop now,” she shouted, but her voice came out low, a whimper that made her need to pee. A mother kept reading quite tenderly to her pale son, and there were soldiers bent over a table, playing cards. She looked out the window: all the colour had leached from the grass blades and the air had filled with silver dots. When she thrust open the window her scarf billowed into the poisoned air and her skin prickled and grew hot, as though hundreds of pins had been inserted beneath the surface.

She must have heard the door close in her sleep, the faintest click, and yet it woke her. She looked down the hallway. Keiko’s bedroom door was open. Daisy went towards it, feeling that she had walked down this hallway many times, and each time she had found the covers rumpled, the bed empty. Her head jangled with déjà vu.

Keiko’s blue blanket was folded back neatly. She was gone.

Daisy heard Walter hacking behind her. He appeared at the bedroom door, pulling up his pyjama bottoms. The string was broken.

“She’s gone out,” Daisy said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She can’t have gone far—” Daisy ran for her shoes, but Walter stopped her.

“I’ll go. You stay here.”

“I’m worried.”

“That’s why I should go. I’ll be quicker.” He slipped on his boots and sweater and was gone, out the back door.

Later he told her that as soon as he reached the back alley he saw her ahead of him, wearing her pale pink nightgown, moving with surprising swiftness. He did not call out. She crossed Old
Middle Road and passed quickly through the playground, taking the path leading to Willard’s Creek, moving sure-footedly. She zigzagged down the trail, stepping with such purpose Walter began to think that she was off to meet someone. (Tom, Daisy thought. Tom, her red-haired Romeo.) But that wasn’t it, because when she came to the stone bridge, she stopped, leaning over, looking at the water.

Walter watched her. Being out in the night, surrounded by unlit, rustling fields, didn’t seem to frighten her. She leant against the bridge, hands on the parapet, looking with patience at the trickle of water.

When Walter said her name she turned. Her eyes were blank, dark. Her lips looked strikingly dark too, surrounded by the bandages, as though she had been sucking on licorice. Somewhere off in Stoney Creek a dog howled.

“She told me to wait here.” Keiko’s voice was clear, a tone or two heavier than he had heard it before. She turned back to the water.

Walter took a step, another step, until he was near enough to touch her. She was shaking her head, a tiny automatic quiver, as though refusing to believe something.

“You’ll need this.” He took off his sweater and draped it around her shoulders.

She looked at him and smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

“Who told you to wait here?” he asked. “Did Daisy say something?”

A troubled look passed over her face, his question forcing ripples. He was afraid that she would wake up and find herself alone with him, on a bridge, in the darkness. “I think it’s time to head home.” He said this firmly but lightly.

Keiko looked towards the pathway, trying to remember something.

He put his arm around her and led her from the bridge.

Daisy saw them from the kitchen window as they crossed the back lawn: Walter’s arm was slung protectively over Keiko’s shoulder, his sweater sleeves hanging far past her hands. She threw the back door open, but Walter motioned for silence. Keiko came up the back steps easily, a bounce in her step they had never seen before, but her eyes were opaque and dull. As soon as she had stepped inside, Walter reached behind and bolted the door, then Daisy led her by the arm to the bedroom. She sat her on the bed, then knelt and took off her muddy slippers.

“Lie down,” Daisy said, and Keiko did as she was told. Daisy adjusted the pillow beneath her head, then tucked the edges of the coverlet between the mattress and box spring, sealing her in place.

“Stay in bed now.”

“I will,” the girl said in a bright, clear voice.

Walter sat at the kitchen table, breathing heavily from his walk.

“Eyes open, but senses shut,” he said.

“Frightened.”

He nodded. He felt for his rolling papers, but of course they weren’t in his pyjama pocket. “She said someone told her to go there. To the bridge. Did you say that?”

“Of course not.”

“She’s remembering.”

“It’s the pressure.”

“I think you’d better sit up with her tonight.”

Daisy nodded.

“I’m going to stay up for a while,” he said. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Thanks. I mean, for finding her so fast.”

He shrugged and turned back to finding his tobacco. “You’re all right, Daisy Lawrence,” was all he said.
When Daisy entered Keiko’s room, she was sitting up in bed, fumbling at the window latch. “I’m letting them in,” she said.

Daisy sprang for the window, yanking it shut. The girl turned blank eyes on her. “No use letting them in tonight,” Daisy said briskly. “Not when everyone needs their sleep.” The no-nonsense voice did the trick. Keiko stopped fumbling for the catch.

Daisy gave her some water and she drank deeply, holding the glass with two hands. She handed it back and lay down. Daisy sat in the chair and watched her. Eventually a shiver ran through her body. Her eyes were closed now; she had slipped back into sleep. Or a deeper sleep. Daisy switched off the bedside lamp, but she didn’t leave. She sat in the chair by the light of the moon, which was waning slightly, though its face was still intact.

After another few minutes Keiko shivered again, but rather than falling into a deeper sleep, she seemed to be emerging, like a swimmer from the bottom of a pool, up and up, into the room again. She kicked the blankets away, rolled to her side. Gently, Daisy placed the covers back over her. But her small feet were untucked. Daisy knelt and began to tuck Keiko’s feet beneath the blanket. She touched the girl’s heel and then, for some reason she could not explain, she cradled it in her palm. It fitted exactly. Oh, this reminded Daisy of the dream, all those children, the livid stalks of grass, and she felt her scalp grow hot from the effort of not crying. It wasn’t just losing the babies, or being with Keiko—this girl with her small feet that she had never touched until now—it was the other children too: Emmy-Mae, in her glass coffin, and Joan’s brother, falling from the monkey bars, and the others too, too many to think of, at Babi Yar and in the ghettos and raising their hands to stop
the blinding flash. Daisy didn’t know why she hadn’t seen them before, but the room was thick with them now; they pressed in on her, imploring her to notice, to feel them there, as she bent to that soft foot and held her breath to stop herself from making any noise.

A twitch ran through Keiko’s body. Her legs were covered in goosebumps. Then she sat bolt upright, eyes wide open, and stared at Daisy, who knelt at the end of the bed holding her foot. Keiko drew her knees to her chest.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was full of accusation.

“You were—” Daisy stopped. It was too awful a thing to say:
You walked a quarter-mile, unconscious; you stared into the water, asking for someone; you returned. Look, here are your muddy slippers to prove it.
Daisy couldn’t say any of it. Nor could she say why she had been crying.

“I just came to check on you. Look, I brought you water.” She pointed to the glass. “Perhaps you’d like some now?”

Keiko put her knees down, but kept clutching the blanket. “I’m fine,” she said.

“I’m going now. You sleep tight.” Daisy took the glass from the bedside table and left. But when the girl was fast asleep again, Daisy returned to sit by her bed.

T
H ERE IS ONE MORE THING TO DESCRIBE
from that night.

At
4
:
00
a.m., Keiko sat up in bed, startled out of sleep, startling Daisy as well.

“It grew back,” she whispered, touching her ear. “It grew back.”

Daisy took her hands and gently laid them at her sides. “It was a nightmare.”

“I can feel it.” Keiko covered her face.

“Shh,” Daisy whispered. “Don’t be afraid.” And then some instinct made her add: “I won’t let them hurt you.”

Later, when Daisy remembered that night, she could smell the scent of honeysuckle at the window and see the moon on the floorboards. But in her memories Keiko wasn’t bandaged: her face was broken down the middle, just like the moon. One half was pure and white, the other half mottled and porous. The unbroken side was as smooth as porcelain, terrifying in its brightness, but in every memory it was the pocked side that drew Daisy in.

    INTERPRETER

T
HE METHODS OF TORTURE AMAZE:
the ad hoc embellishments, the precise and careful attention to detail, the creative variations on a single theme. Who knew that causing pain could take so many forms? But human beings are nothing if not inventive.

Men sick with dysentery are forced to crouch beside the open hatches of the ship that bears them to Shamshuipo; semiconscious, dizzy with fever, one by one they pitch into the sea. Men stand in the scorching compound, arms outstretched, holding buckets filled to the very brim. For two days and two nights they struggle to keep the buckets upright. When one man drops his bucket, all the men are beaten senseless. Then there’s the water torture: a man is forced to drink water until his stomach bulges, then he’s ordered to lie on the floor. The guard places a board on his stomach and jumps onto it, pressing the water into the man’s heart and kidneys and lungs.

These are things Ed Warburgh has seen.

These are things he knows intimately.

More intimately than the number of teeth that have cut through his daughter Patti’s gums, more intimately than the feel of his wife’s pregnant belly in her flannel nightgown, printed with yellow flowers.

He digs his hole in the backyard, levels the ground by stomping back and forth and thinks about what he knows.

One morning Ed sees two prison guards arrest a Chinese woman. She is gathering seaweed on the beach below the compound. They wave their guns at her, ordering her to leave her straw basket where it lies, then escort her across the white compound, sand fine as talcum, where the prisoners stand for roll call—
tenko
—morning, noon and night. She hurries between the two guards at a jog, as though by rapid compliance she will show that she means no harm at all, that she will do whatever they say. Standing in the shade of the prison barracks, Ed cannot see the woman’s features clearly. The sharp sun casts a shadow down her face, making her eyes appear like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

With formal politeness now, they gesture for her to stand on the wall at the north end of the compound. Below is a forty-foot drop, then the sea. She does not understand. One of them bounds onto the wall, demonstrating, standing with his back to the compound, signalling for her to join him. She clambers up—a tiny figure on the white wall—while the guard climbs down. Ed wonders what she is thinking, looking at the fishing boat near the horizon. He knows what will happen next, but he doesn’t stop watching. He takes in the black figures of the guards against the scorching sand, the sea in the distance, a seagull above them, stationary, flying against the wind. This is how he will remember it later. The guards talk for some time. Something is decided between them, because the taller one goes and leans against the compound wall, in the shade, while the shorter one raises his pistol. He
does this without sound, or at least Ed can hear nothing, a hundred yards away. Then he shoots. There is no cry from the woman. She sags at the knees. The impact of the second shot pitches her forward, out of view.

Ed follows the wall of the compound, staying in the shade, until he reaches the north wall, which on the prisoners’ side is covered in high barbed wire. Leaning forward he sees the woman’s body face down in the sea.

Ed’s neighbours in Riverside Meadows know about the tingling in his feet, shooting pains that he relieves by soaking them in seltzer. They know he has nightmares. But none of them know that he can sit on the back porch steps, or dig his hole in the yard, or walk home up Linden Street, any time of the day or night, and see a woman’s body floating in the waves, shirt blackening as it takes in water.