Requiem (25 page)

But the freighter never arrived in Japan. It went down in a storm in the Pacific, and Okuma-san became an orphan before his tenth birthday. The missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Dowson, tried to get information, and when it was finally confirmed that his parents were dead, they decided to adopt him. It was not difficult to obtain permission, because they were British and he was Canadian, and because he had been born in the Empire. They taught him about England and travelled with him to that country in the same year. After that, his education took place in the great capital of London.

I interrupted again. “I know where London is,” I said. “King George lives there. Keiko showed me on the map at school. We have a picture of the King and Queen on the wall in our class and we sing ‘God Save the King’ every morning.”

“Well, London is the place I lived,” said Okuma-san. “And I sang the same anthem when I was a boy, and I walked past Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen live, many times. When I was young, two other kings lived there: King Edward and a different King George.”

But life had turned out differently for Okuma-san, because in London, he was still an outsider. He did not look like anyone in the streets or at school. He learned to be quiet and to stay out of trouble. Whenever he could, he stayed indoors and read books in the library so the boys would not taunt him in the schoolyard.

I had never been to such a place, and Okuma-san told me about the library at his London school and the public library not far from the house where he had lived with the Dowsons. He had walked through rooms lined with shelves from ceiling to floor, every shelf stacked with books. More books than he had ever seen.

From the time Okuma-san was first adopted in Japan, and later, after moving to England, Mrs. Dowson recognized his love of music and taught him to play piano in her home. When he was in his early teens, he was sent to an advanced teacher. After the end of the Great War, his adoptive father died. Mrs. Dowson was left with little income, but she sold her house and moved the two of them to a smaller place. Knowing it was Okuma-san’s dream to continue to play piano, she provided him with enough money to travel to Vienna, where he spent the next three years studying music. He took extra classes in the German language at night. When his money ran out, he wrote to Mrs. Dowson to tell her he would have to come back to England. But the letter was returned to him by Mrs. Dowson’s brother, who told him she had recently died. That was when Okuma-san decided to return to North America. Now that he was a young man, he wanted to see if he could make a life for himself in the country of his birth.

I listened to these stories because I had never considered the fact that Okuma-san had once been a boy. Now I was forced to learn that he had lost not one set of parents but two. I did not like the way parents kept dying in his stories, nor did I like to think of him as an orphan, which was what I considered myself—even though my first family lived just along the row of shacks, a short walk from our doorstep. But one thing was different. When Okuma-san was adopted, he had been allowed to keep his Okuma surname, whereas I had not been allowed to keep the surname Oda. Nor did I want to, not anymore. If First Father did not want me, I reasoned, then I did not want his name.

Although I listened carefully to the things that had happened to Okuma-san, I was also waiting to hear a different kind of story. I thought about how he had arrived late at the camp, almost two years after everyone else. I did not ask about his wife, the singer, because he seldom talked about her. I had heard Mother say that the lines in his face were there because of grief over his wife’s death. But too many people died in his stories, and I did not want to hear more about death.

Then I thought of something else.

“Tell me about the bear,” I said suddenly. “How did you catch the bear when you first moved here to the camp?” This had been on my mind for some time, but I had never asked. I wanted to go to school and tell Hiroshi and Keiko that I had finally found out.

“Ah,” said Okuma-san. “It was fortunate for me that the bear cooperated.”

But that was all he would say.

Two wooden blocks clapped together. The clean knock of sound arrested all other noise in the room. An unseen hand wound the camp gramophone and set the music spinning. Unrecognized fathers took their places on the raised wooden platform, and I knew that First Father was among them. At school, Hiroshi had told me that Mother had been sewing a costume during the past several weeks, helping to prepare for the
shibai
, the winter play.

The storyteller stepped forward slowly, an air of magnificence about him. He made us wait, taking time to settle himself on a stool at the edge of the lantern-lit stage. A black curtain slid away from a painted backdrop and fell into darkness. No longer did I see a rough platform on wooden props. No longer did I see fisherman, farmer, mill hand, carpenter, cannery worker, storekeeper, factory hand. Instead, I saw imposing figures, the whirl of dark robes, makeup and mask, watercolours, banners of calligraphy fluttering before my eyes.

The story unfolded; a brand-new script had been created. All the roles, including women’s, were acted by the men. They had been practising for weeks, ever since the end of harvest. In the schoolhouse, after hours, props had been constructed and painted, and these had been pushed against the walls of the community room and covered over so we could not see what was on the backdrops before it was time for the performance. Even Okuma-san had put on his heavy coat and disappeared on weekends, working in secret alongside other men who were painting and nailing boards and planning the entertainment for this December night.

How we laughed, how we laughed, how our hands flew to our mouths. Between scenes, while backdrops were being changed, two men came out and sat at the front of the stage. Each man wore baggy trousers,
hakama
, and
tabi
, split-toe socks. They faced each other and held a running conversation and told jokes that made us laugh some more. One man held out a ripe banana, began to peel it slowly and carefully, and then tapped the side of his hand. A neat slice fell off. He tapped his hand again and another slice fell, the same size as the first. Everyone in the audience was roaring with laughter, but while I was laughing, tears rolled down my cheeks. The second man began to catch the slices, until finally, the banana skin was empty. How could this happen? I wiped my eyes. I couldn’t understand. It was only when I was older that I was shown the trick of piercing the skin of an unpeeled banana in layers, beforehand, with a long needle, making a steady stitch all the way around—an invisible stitch that would not be seen by the audience.

Auntie Aya and Uncle Aki were seated in the row in front of me, and Auntie Aya was wearing a new navy dress with a sparkly belt that Mother had made for her from material Uncle Aki had ordered from Eaton’s. It was the first time I had seen my aunt all dressed up. In the winter months there was no place to go anyway, except to visit from one shack to another. Apart from her calligraphy classes, she rarely left her shack. When she did go out, Uncle Aki was right beside her, hovering near, as always.

When the second act of the play was over, everyone clapped and clapped and protested and called for more, but the curtain was pulled and closed. The actors had run out of script. The jokes had been spent. The evening had come to an end.

When we’d entered the crowded community room at the beginning of the evening, Okuma-san had ensured that I would be seated next to Mother and my brother and sister. Ba and Ji were farther along in the same row. Ba had patted her thick pocket, where the end of a new envelope could be seen sticking out—another letter from the place called Manzanar. She was extra happy this night, because Sachi and Tom had written that they were expecting their first baby in April. This would be the first grandchild for Ba and Ji.

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.

S
weeping 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.