Requiem (7 page)

In the morning, after we are herded onto the
Princess Maquinna—
which brings us to Port Alberni, where a train waits to take us to Nanaimo, on the east coast of the island, and from there to Vancouver by ferry—we stand with our hands gripping the railings, and watch while looters from the village move swiftly, running from house to house as the boat tugs out of the bay. The looters cannot get inside our houses quickly enough. They cannot wait until the boat is out of sight.

Almost everything left behind is dragged from our home. The grandfather clock, tables, chairs, linens, pillows, cutlery, china, sets of dishes, photograph albums, wedding gifts and heirlooms my parents had been given at the time of their marriage. Even the toy boats Hiroshi and Keiko and I had banged together from boards and nails, boats to which we’d attached string, and dragged through shallow water from the safety of shore—even those are scooped up.

I retain two final images from the house of my birth. In the first, a woman’s fair hair flies about her face in the wind as she exits our home triumphantly, bearing in her arms the prize of my mother’s portable Singer sewing machine. The woman’s eyes can barely be seen above the machine’s ebony wheel. A spool of red thread is stuck to the bobbin like a traitorous flag. Another woman, older than the first, follows behind. She is carrying the curved wooden cover that slips overtop of the Singer. In their haste, they have not stopped to fit the two parts together.

In the second image, four men push and pull at an upright piano. They are trying to squeeze it through the doorway of Missisu’s house, tilting it forward over the steps and onto the boardwalk. There is much shouting and shoving and swearing until, finally, they get that troublesome load down and onto a large, flat cart they have brought with them for the sole purpose of the piano’s removal.

As the mail boat chugs away from the bay, the looters do not look out towards the families crowded on board. They do not even bother to glance our way.

T
he sensory memories, expressions fixed to the faces of my parents, a trill of notes drifting through a slammed kitchen door, a litany of conversations, that is what I have patched together. Along with random historical facts—some of which are in the manila folder, travelling on the seat beside me.

Apart from Okuma-san, Lena was the only person I ever told about the looting. How we were removed from our village. How, by nightfall of the same day, we were sleeping in cattle stalls and animal pens at Hastings Park in Vancouver. How our belongings were stolen while we watched from the mail boat as it pulled away from the wharf on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

She was silent, then angry, then silent again. “You know,” she said, “it’s like
Zorba
. That’s what it sounds like, anyway, the ugly scene where the women run upstairs to grab the belongings of Lila Kedrova—well, Lila in the role of Madame Hortense. The looting happened after she died in her upstairs room. Everything was grabbed and fought over and torn apart while her body lay on the mattress.”

I had not read the book. Nor had I seen the film, which came out in the mid-sixties, a few years before I’d met Lena in Montreal.

We watched the film with Miss Carrie, as it turned out. Lena wanted me to see it, and noticed in the newspaper that it was going to be shown on TV on a Saturday night. This was in the mid-seventies, not long after we’d moved from an apartment in Montreal to our house in Ottawa. Lena had finished her doctoral studies and had a job teaching history at the university, the reason for the move. I was trying to prepare for a solo show and was supplementing my income with freelance magazine work, doing illustrations and design. Miss Carrie had begun to stuff notes into the bottom of our mailbox at the front door; it didn’t matter that our houses were twenty shuffling steps apart. She was delighted to have us as neighbours, and she liked to write notes. She did not use stamps. Stamps were for real mail—condolences sent to descendants of a shrinking group of aging friends she referred to as “the antiquarians.” As she had no living relatives, Lena and I were adopted, the fact of this being undeclared. And if Miss Carrie had adopted us, we, in turn, had adopted her. The Saturday we invited her to watch the film, Lena hauled a note out of our mailbox and read aloud:

It’s one of my tired days, and everything is an effort. Improved, however, over yesterday, when I had an aching back and took my own advice. I offer it to you now because someday it might be of use. Whenever possible, LIE ON THE FLOOR. Five minutes on the floor is worth a great deal. Because I am so stiffly rounded, it takes part of the five minutes to make my head lie down. But once my body accustoms itself to the position, my head lies back more easily
.

P.S. The only mat I care to lie on is the small pink one
.

“I’m going next door to get her,” Lena said. “Even if she is having one of her tired days. She can share a pizza with us. She’ll probably consider it a treat.”

She found Miss Carrie in her front hall, tilted over her rickety willow walker while surveying a heap of goods in the
hellhole
, the floor space at the bottom of the curved staircase in her two-storey stone house. Because Miss Carrie had to grip the banister, hand over hand, to get down, she was not able to carry anything. So she stood on the floor above and dropped what was needed: towels for the wash, an ancient jacket shortened in the left sleeve because one arm was shrinking, a muskrat stole with hard eyes and snout that had once belonged to Mommy and was tossed below in the event that she might be invited out. Whatever was dropped landed in the hellhole with a satisfying thump. A stern portrait of Daddy in uniform looked on from the wall above the staircase; Miss Carrie had told Lena that she lowered her eyes at night when she passed it while climbing the stairs to get to the blue room, where she slept.

Lena picked up the walker with one hand and held Miss Carrie’s arm with the other, supporting her until she got her up onto our veranda. Miss Carrie’s bones were brittle even then. She had already suffered a broken hip and had had surgery after a fall. The items in the hellhole stayed where they were for the time being.

“I’m not giving up, I’m giving out,” Miss Carrie announced as she and Lena came through our front door. “In fact, I’ve come to believe that my time really might be running out. A good thing, too.” She lowered her chin, scrunched her forehead and peered up. “I’ve always thought a sudden death would make a happy corpse,” she said and she laughed abruptly, a conspiratorial sort of laugh.

But that evening, she was anything but a corpse, and the three of us sat in the living room and watched
Zorba
. Lena ushered her to an armchair and propped cushions to support her hip and back. We served pizza and, later, popcorn, and Miss Carrie settled in with satisfaction.

At the end of the film, there was a long silence before our friend launched into a story of her own childhood. Perhaps she was thinking of the looting scene in the film. Her Daddy, the General, had fought in the Great War. He’d sailed to England in September 1914 along with the
Originals
, and was in theatre at the Western Front by December of the same year. He also moved his wife and daughter to the south coast of England, and there they stayed—in the tradition of camp followers—for the duration of the war. Miss Carrie had been a young schoolgirl at the time.

“We were on the coast, facing France,” she said, and Lena and I settled back to listen. Of the many eras Miss Carrie had lived through, she had countless stories to tell, but never in any particular order. She criss-crossed time, described periods of innovation, buffoonery, tragedy and relief. Her stories were told with the expectation that the two of us would keep up, that we would enter the scene illuminated at the moment of its telling. We had already learned to leap from the beginning of the century and to land on our feet at its opposite end or somewhere in between, all in the same conversation.

“Daddy had to return to France that day,” she continued, “because his leave was over. Mommy kept me home from school. I loved school and hated to miss a day, but I had to be present for the farewells, which were slightly formal, in the manner of the times.

“I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of a Zeppelin immediately overhead. This was followed by a large bang. A bomb had been dropped at the end of our street, directly over the baker’s house. Poof! The baker was gone! Clouds of flour rose to the sky. People raced to the scene to attempt rescue, but the baker could not be saved. Instead, they rummaged in the ruins for salvage. The rummaging continued the next day, and the day after that. The looters kept what they found.”

The three of us considered. Each, perhaps, visualizing a different scene. I wondered if Lena was thinking of Madame Hortense in
Zorba
. Or if she was thinking, as I was, of my mother’s sewing machine, or even of Missisu’s piano, which had been hoisted with much effort on the part of the looting men.

Later, after I’d escorted Miss Carrie and her rickety walker home, Lena remarked, “Don’t you sense Daddy in her house somewhere? It’s as if he’s still lurking. His wines are stored in the basement; his humidor adorns the walnut buffet, cigars inside. His stale tobacco is tucked into the leather pouch. And the hellhole—well, maybe that’s the way she exerts defiance, now that both parents are dead. She can finally do what she wants to do. It’s obvious that she managed the household after Mommy died. Probably the reason she never married—that and the fact that the young men of her generation were killed off. Has she shown you her early photos? She was petite, blonde, beautiful. There’s mischief and humour in every photo. The same humour she hasn’t lost, thank heavens. And—wait for this—she loves Benny Goodman! She told me that during the thirties, she danced to his band at Billy Rose’s in New York. Her Benny records are stacked in a box in her basement. Along with the jazz greats. Can you believe it? Unfortunately, her record player doesn’t work.”

But I still hadn’t caught up. I was thinking of the looting scene in the film. I was thinking of my parents, of my sister and brother. Where did the anger go? Did it find its own swallowed place to reside and brood within us, along with the shock and helplessness we felt at the time? Why weren’t the parents—and the children, too—why weren’t we all shouting and yelling from the railings of the
Princess Maquinna?

We did not protest. We stood, soundless, as if we were also invisible, while the boat took us away.

I suppose it is somewhat strange that ever since that winter morning, it is the image of Missisu’s piano I most easily call to mind. I have always imagined that heavy piece of furniture being pushed and pulled through time. Shoved around restlessly, continuously, within some faceless person’s house. Or perhaps at a final standstill after all, collecting dust in a living room in which I will never be welcome.

T
he day after we watched
Zorba
together, Miss Carrie placed a bottle of wine between our front doors. It must have taken considerable effort to transport it from her house to ours. Perhaps she let it roll around the seat of her walker. Or perhaps she shuffled to our place with the aid of her cane. A note was tied to the neck of the bottle.

There has been a rise in the price of single malt. The man who came to cut overhanging branches from the sorry old oak in my backyard frequents the liquor store and has so informed me. The wine is from Daddy’s wine cellar and is meant to thank you for the film. I know it’s not Scotch, which Bin prefers, but he might enjoy an ancient red. Do come and have sherry with me some evening next week, perhaps Sunday. I serve it the old way, with a fistful of croutons. I toast the croutons myself, in the oven
.

A bottle of Laphroaig is with me now, so far unopened. I shove in a Beethoven tape, the Fifth Symphony, exactly right for a landscape where rock is a force, the dominant force. No escaping the fact of this since first approaching the northern part of the province. I’ve been travelling for hours over marsh and crag, over road blasted through solid walls of rock, in a landscape where only stunted growth survives. This is how I would depict the old, old earth in its pared-back state. Patches and furrows of salmon pink, feldspar in granite. Roots and pods, struggling to survive.

Basil raises his head at the click of the tape and Beethoven’s four-note motif. What does Basil hear—apart from my thoughts? What does any dog hear?
Wah-wah-wah-wah
. He sniffs the air and settles again. I hear him gnawing at his Kong. He’s content while we’re moving and lets me know that he’s immune to the music. Not that there’s anything wrong with his hearing. At home, he hears the mail before it hits the slot and then tries to scare off the postman. Or he bounds to the kitchen from any room of the house at the sound of a yogurt top being torn off, hoping to lick its foil underside.

The music continues, three plus one, same pitch for three, the fourth pitch down a third:
Da Da Da Dum
. The theme repeats itself in insistent ways.
Fate knocking at the door
. Where did that come from? From the great man himself, who created an entire symphony around four notes. He unified themes; that was his genius. The power in the music builds and builds, never releasing the listener. Beethoven had energy and beauty inside him, and determination. Enough that he could pluck the first note from his mind and plant it to a staff, the lines of which he had drawn in one of his copious notebooks. If he’d contained the symphony unexpressed, within him, it could have destroyed him. And life wasn’t easy before he wrote the Fifth. To which I could listen for days—and have. With Okuma-san when I was a boy, years after the war, when he purchased a second-hand record player. On a lumpy mattress in a long-ago student apartment on rue Bishop in Montreal. In a concert hall in Berlin. In a bedsit in London, teetering on a lopsided stool that had a splintered leg.

Beethoven once wrote to his friend Wegeler that it would be so lovely to live a thousand lives. But if given a second life, or a third, would his ears be able to hear? He was closed to the outer sound of his own music, but his inner life, his adversity, must have pushed his genius.
Listen
, Okuma-san told me.
Listen to the tapping on wood. Listen to it rhythmically. It is the music of Beethoven. His greatest works were written after he was totally deaf
.