Requiem (6 page)

After their boats were confiscated, the eight fishermen from our tiny bay were told to make their own way home from the mouth of the Fraser. They journeyed back to the west coast of Vancouver Island by ferry, by train and by mail boat. They were forced to pay their own fares. Some, more optimistic than others—Father was not one of the hopefuls—believed that their boats would be safe under naval protection.

The day the men were due home after turning in the boats, Mother watched the door for signs of Father. It was shortly before Christmas 1941. A small tree stood in a corner of our living room. Hiroshi and Keiko and I were creating decorations from paper, pipe cleaners, food colouring, and flotsam and jetsam that had washed up on our rocky beach. I could hear water lapping at the stilts beneath the floor. The tide was in. A sharp rap at the window startled us, and a man’s voice shouted in to tell us that light was spilling between our curtains and could be seen from outside. Mother rushed to the window to close the curtains tightly, and she pegged them with a clothespin to keep them completely shut. Her fear was contained, but it was there and I sensed that, and I was afraid, too. At that moment, Father came in and stood at the end of the kitchen. Mother looked towards the door as if seeing him for the first time. Neither moved towards the other. Father was frowning, his face lined with fatigue.

“If you could have seen the boats at the Annieville Dyke,” he said. “So many boats.” He leaned against the table as if the strength had been sucked out of him, his voice a mixture of anger and disbelief. He was speaking Japanese. The two languages flip in my mind at the recollection. Until my understanding of Japanese kicks in, I always believe I’ve forgotten the language, though it was essentially my first—no English school having been provided in the inland camp to which we were removed, at least not at the beginning. Until the internees themselves built a school, and volunteers from the camp became our teachers.

“Ghost boats,” Father continued. “The navy men didn’t care if one boat rubbed another, or if windows were smashed, or if the boats bashed one another in the storm.”

Of course, the boats were not returned. They were quickly auctioned off after the government allowed, in their orders, the insertion of the clause,
without the owners’ consent
. A prudent look to the future, ensuring that no one would be coming back, that there would be nothing to come back to.

We also learned, some time later, that several Japanese fishermen sank their boats instead of giving them up. And Father found out about the death of one of his friends—a man whose boat had been boarded while he was on his way to New Westminster to turn it in. The man’s throat had been slit and he was found on his drifting vessel, blood spattered on the floor, walls and ceiling of the cabin. He lived for a short time after being brought to hospital in Vancouver, but he wasn’t able to say who had done it, who had cut the hole in his throat. He died, but the truth of his murder was never uncovered, the murderer never found.

Only weeks after the boats were turned in, we were rounded up by the RCMP. It was the year of the horse, the early winter of 1942. The mail boat, the
Princess Maquinna
, sailed into the bay to collect us. In the early morning, uniformed men made their way from house to house, banging at doors, giving warning. We were given two hours to pack. We were told to take with us only what we could carry.

And now, I have recollections of running behind Mother, my short legs tiring as I dragged and bumped a cloth bundle over uneven ground, all the while struggling to keep the pleat of her navy blue coat in my line of vision. Everyone was responsible for carrying something when we left, even the youngest. My bundle contained the heavy rice pot and
shamoji
, the wooden rice paddle, with several kitchen towels padded around both pot and lid.

My feet, arms, legs, nerves and tendons still remember the jarring and clanging of the pot, which must have separated from its lid while being dragged. How I hated that rice pot. My skin remembers the cruel curve of the lid as it clipped the side of first one leg and then the other, no matter how often I switched the bundle back and forth, no matter how I adjusted my gait or broke into a half run, always keeping the pleat of Mother’s coat before me, so threatened was I by the possibility that both she and the pleat would disappear into the unforgiving mist.

No paper given up by the archives has ever documented that.

I never lost my animosity towards the rice pot, though it fed me through several more years of childhood. Later, Okuma-san had a smaller and different sort of pot, one I liked better because it evoked no memories of banging into the sides of my legs.

My ears have memory, too. They remember the harsh sound of Father’s orders barked from the doorway of our house while we were packing. Father’s mouth opened and closed and his shouts filled the kitchen, whereupon all other sound and movement ceased. No, not all sound, because I remember now that our neighbour Missisu—the childish word we used for Mrs., omitting her surname, which I never learned—was playing piano next door. The piece was Beethoven’s Minuet in G. Notes that had been marching through the air in a deliberate and playful way began to slow, and then snagged on a distortion of mist that blurred the space between our side-by-side houses. I was well acquainted with the music, though I did not then know its name, nor did I know it was a minuet. But something happened while I was listening, something that had never happened before. I began to see milky-white colours in the air around me. A blur of waves undulated close to my body, and I was afraid I would lose my balance. I stood still while my ears listened to the notes, and in some primitive way, I understood that I was seeing sound. Sound that rippled and flowed visibly, next to my skin. And though I batted my hands in front of my face, several moments passed before the milkiness in the air went away.

Once more, I was conscious of rhythm, of music. I could also hear the emphatic tick of the grandfather clock that loomed in a dark corner of our living room. The room was shadowed by a thickness of trees on the hill that rose up behind our house and overlooked the bay, which curved in from the sea and was surrounded by mountains on three sides. The music went on, mixing and blending with the ticking of the clock. Some years later, after learning from Okuma-san what the music was called, I joined the two sounds and named it, privately, affectionately, Grandfather Minuet.

But on that particular morning, each time the kitchen door opened and shut, Missisu’s notes from next door alternated between swelling in the midst of Father’s shouts and then shrinking and pulling back. Notes that were loud and visible suddenly dimmed, as if their true intention was to accompany the listener to the depths of some unnamed darkness that, long ago, Beethoven had foreseen.

I had already heard the piece countless times while playing outside or while creating pictures as I sat on the boardwalk that linked the eight houses along the edge of the bay. Even then, though I hadn’t yet started school, I was trying to draw, as any child does, using whatever was at hand: pencil on cardboard salvaged from the inside of cereal boxes or scraps of rough mill paper that sometimes came in on the supply boat. But never had I heard the music played the way it was that day. Missisu gave piano lessons to both Japanese and Caucasian children in our tiny fishing village, and inevitably, at some stage of learning, each student was asked to struggle through the minuet. On this memorable morning, it was Missisu herself who was playing.

But her fingers lifted off the keys before the piece was finished. That is what I remember. I was startled by the abrupt cessation of sound, and I was compelled to bring the melody to its end, silently, in my head. I was still standing in my parents’ kitchen when I realized that tears were running down my cheeks, tears I did not let my brother and sister see; nor did I understand why I was weeping.

Now, in my mind’s eye, I see a
tableau vivant:
Mother, Hiroshi, Keiko, frozen by Father’s shouts. Mother looks up and in Father’s direction. He is a full head taller than she. Two curls, one on either side of her forehead, seem to be stuck to her temples. And then—I am the onlooker inside this memory—Father, who has been coming in and out of the kitchen, turns and stomps down the outdoor steps. The dark rim of the bay is momentarily visible beyond his shoulders. Noises silenced by his anger start up again as if no interruption has taken place. Mother’s slippered feet cross the room. Dishes rattle. Rice bowls, cutlery, pots, pans have been sorted on the kitchen table. What to bring? What to leave behind? The willow basket is bursting with clothes and bedding. Food for the journey is sealed in waxed paper: boiled eggs; rice balls wrapped in dark seaweed called
nori
; Mother’s cucumber pickles,
tsukemono
. Along with chopsticks,
ohashi
, enough for everyone. All tucked in around the top of Mother’s basket.

I hear sudden shrill voices—my brother and sister. Are they quarrelling? Is Hiroshi following Father’s lead and trying to boss Keiko? Have we eaten breakfast? It is early morning, I’m certain of that. And why do I recall the stove? Bits of iron and pipe have been taken apart and are strewn around the once gleaming, now soot-covered floor. Father re-enters the kitchen, but he is no longer shouting.

“If they send us to the inland mountains,” he says, addressing Mother, “we’ll have to supply our own heat.”

Not caring that cones of ash sift down or that there are puddles on the floor. Puddles, indoors! The unthinkable has happened. Father has been pouring buckets of water over the hot stove, and as it cools, he dismantles it piece by piece, dragging each section outside to be crated on the beach, all the while ignoring black streaks that smear one end of the kitchen to the other. No one pays attention to the heaps of mud and soot inside the house, and I begin to feel a giddy kind of danger because we have always been strictly required to remove our shoes at the outside door. The floor that Mother wipes every day with a damp mop is no longer spotless, and it becomes clear to me that what is happening at this moment in our kitchen is of greater magnitude than any stray specks of dirt we children might once have dragged in.

There is another
tableau
stamped in my memory, this from the evening before we boarded the mail boat that took us away.
Evacuation Eve
, Hiroshi came to call it. The memory is of the pyre and the dolls. Of slashes of colour emblazoned as indelibly as the bruises the lid of the rice pot formed on my fat little legs as I followed, at a run, behind my mother the next morning.

Firewood has been stacked into a neat pyramid on the rocky shore. Everyone is present, all eight families from the bay—but only Japanese. The
hakujin
families live in a separate part of the village.

It is the men who make the decision. They instruct the women to gather the dolls and bring them to the pyramid of wood on the strip of beach, which, at low tide, is awash with curiously speckled stones, tangles of seaweed, gaping oyster shells. I see now that the dolls, in some bizarre way, might be more precious than the houses we are about to leave behind. The fate of the dolls is the only fate that can be controlled in that brief and desperate time. Of course, the adults already know what the children learn only the next morning—that our homes will be looted the moment we are taken away.

Brightly coloured reds and golds, greens and silvers, jackets of silk, kimonos with permanent folds of upholstered fabric. These are the dolls that have graced the shelves of the
tokonoma
, the special corner of the living room, or that were displayed in glass cases on top of cabinets or buffets. Ceremonial dolls, dolls with real hair, black hair like Mother’s, with bangs clipped evenly over the forehead. Cream-coloured faces with crescent-shaped laughing eyes and sharp, thin noses. A delicate arc of eyebrow on a face, hand-painted, as if by a calligrapher. Links to our unseen ancestors, works of art, every one—I sense and know this, even as a child. Later, I attempt to create them on paper, from memory, or I try to invent likenesses of my own.

The warrior dolls are
samurai
, with separate horse and leather armour. There are dolls for Boys’ Day, Girls’ Day, dolls to celebrate and honour the birth of each child. Purchased from stores in Steveston, on the mainland, or sent by great-grandparents never met. Dolls that were once lovingly packed in straw and shipped in wooden crates.

It is a symbolic fire, though the story passed down is that our parents were certain there would be no room for dolls in the bundles they would carry out of the house. It would be an outrage to think that dolls would be necessary for survival, especially during the bitter cold of that first winter in the Fraser Valley, when we ended up living in tents.

Did Mother agree with the men’s decision when she carried our dolls down the steps and out to the pyre on the rocky beach? She did not. Because she defied Father and hid two of the smallest at the bottom of her willow basket. She continued to hide the dolls all the years of the war and all the years that came after, and I found out about them only after her death in 1987, less than a year before the public apology was made to us by the prime minister in the House of Commons. Mother did not live to hear those historic and crucial words. And though Lena and I were not at her funeral, when Mother’s will was read, it was a surprise to everyone that the pair of dolls had been left to Lena. My sister, Kay, was instructed to send them to our home, which she did. Mother had known that it would be my wife who would unearth the family history. Even though she had met Lena only half a dozen times—and never in B.C.—Mother wanted our stories to be told.

On the narrow shore outside our home that evening, the dolls are heaped onto the pyre. Each of the men carries a small vessel of
sake
, rice wine, and sprinkles it over the pyramid of beauty, the pyramid of art. The children are ordered not to cry, one more emotion that must be buried, to simmer endlessly under the skin. My father, self-appointed leader of the now boatless fishermen—wasn’t he known as “high-catcher” at sea?—strikes the first match. And everyone—men, women, children, Mother staring straight ahead, Missisu’s eyes downcast, face expressionless—looks on in silence while cream-coloured cheeks, elbows and fingers, upholstered pantaloons, kimonos green and gold, delicate tassels beneath dimpled bisque chins, all, all are devoured by unstoppable, ferocious, orange licking flames. Could I create such a scene on paper now? In my mind I see every angle of elbow and foot, every miniature
samurai
blade.