Twenty-Six (8 page)

They’d been through this several times before, but the violence had never been so extreme. And this time it had happened in public. Yuka and her boyfriend had been having coffee in a Kohikan near Ginza Station when he’d flown into a blind rage, pounding and kicking her repeatedly. More than once the owner of the shop had been in the midst of phoning the police, when she’d begged him herself not to. She’d blacked out several times and did not know how she’d got to the hospital. Meta asked about the other people in the coffee shop. What had they done? Hadn’t they tried to intervene? But Yuka had no recollection of anyone else in the shop.

Meta listened to the story with tears in her eyes. She nodded and held out a hand to touch Yuka’s. But when Yuka had finished,
Meta felt a terrible contradiction in herself. What her friend was going through was sad and enraging. But what was her role in it? What could Meta do? She didn’t have enough Japanese to make a report to the police. The only person who could help her do such a thing was Yuka, who would not. Meta felt such a course of action would be useless anyway, since the man who was beating her was a foreigner, and the Japanese police, like the rest of the society, were unsure about how to treat foreigners. The likelihood was slim that a single report of violence would result in his arrest.

“Yuka,” Meta began. She stopped. She’d said it all before.
This man has no right to hit you. It’s not anger, it wasn’t a fight, he’s sick. The only thing that’s going to stop the violence, realistically, is an end to the relationship
. “I’ve said it all before,” she said. The image of Yuka with her blouse off flashed in Meta’s mind. Her bandaged, bruised body like a broken twig. Something new occurred to her.

“He’s going to kill you,” she said. “Take a look at yourself in the mirror. He’s going to kill you. He almost did this time.”

“No,” Yuka said, her high voice becoming shrill. “I kill him!”

Meta shook her head. “That’s stupid,” she said. She pointed a finger at Yuka for effect. “He …” she paused. “… is going to kill …” another pause. “… you.”

They sat at the kitchen table most of the evening. Meta made green tea and they drank it. Yuka called the noodle shop on the corner and the son of the owners came on his scooter with noodles and broth in two big china bowls that they rinsed and left outside the door when they were finished. The conversation went in circles a number of times: Yuka talking about the violence she’d endured, talking about the most recent attack as though she were surprised it had happened. Meta did not want to
seem unsympathetic, but she was tired of talking with Yuka about the same problem they’d been discussing for over a year.

According to what Yuka had already told her, the first hint that the British boyfriend was violent had come when they’d been playing a board game. Yuka had been winning, and after protesting jokingly several times, he’d taken a lit cigarette from an ashtray and stubbed it out on the back of her hand. Meta had noticed the burn, and at first Yuka had claimed she’d burnt her hand in the kitchen. But when Meta learned the truth, she decided she did not want to meet the boyfriend. She did not even want to know his name. She told Yuka immediately what she thought: This was not normal behaviour. Unless he’d burnt her by accident, he had a serious problem. And since then, the outbursts and attacks had followed a predictable escalation: pushes and pinches turned to punches and kicks. Bruises became commonplace. Hidden injuries caused Yuka to wince in pain when standing up or sitting down.

Meta feared that she was growing hard-hearted about Yuka’s situation: she’d begun to worry primarily about its effects not on Yuka, but on herself. She’d done everything she could think of for her friend and neighbour: she’d recommended sending the boyfriend to counselling. (He admitted he had a problem and was going to a British-educated analyst, but this did nothing to slow the frequency or to stem the severity of the attacks.) She’d recommended Yuka seek counselling herself, secretly hoping it might give her the strength to end the relationship. (The counsellor had actually told her she must be doing something to provoke the man’s behaviour.) Meta had even gone as far as to tell Yuka she did not want to see her again until she ended her relationship with the
abuser altogether. This resulted in a two-week lie in which Meta believed Yuka had broken off the relationship. Then one day Yuka had come into Meta’s apartment trying to disguise a limp.

By now, Meta and Yuka’s relationship revolved primarily around Yuka’s violent affair, and they’d gone through the same cycle several times: advice, decisions, lies, broken promises, broken blood vessels.

Meta was beginning to think she’d done what she could to help her friend and that she should start thinking about herself. Though her own family was peaceful and loving, she’d seen violence and mistreatment as she was growing up. She’d pursued an education for herself to make sure she could lift herself out of the hemmed-in world of poverty, ignorance, and violence she’d been forced to look at up-close. Now, despite her best efforts, here she was: mired in the same muck she’d moved away from in Canada. She wasn’t sleeping well at night. She’d have nightmares when she did sleep. She was distracted in the daytime, wondering how many of the strangers she saw were enduring a home life that was making them less than fully human. This was the last way she’d expected to be living when she’d come to Tokyo.

She had promised herself before now that the next time Yuka came to the door with a bruise or a swelling, she was going to close the door in her face. But she’d been unable to go through with it. She’d resigned herself to resolving nothing with Yuka, but she felt a responsibility to listen with even a pretended sympathy. She was the only support Yuka had.

It was past ten when Yuka left Meta’s apartment. They stood inside the door and embraced carefully, so as not to cause Yuka
further pain. Yuka smelled of hospital disinfectant and the tobacco of the last cigarette she’d smoked, hours before. The next day was a workday, but Meta felt she’d sleep better if she went up on the roof one more time. She might be able to unwind a little. She put on her heavy jacket and boots and watched out the peephole in the door as Yuka went back to her own place. When she thought Yuka could not hear, she left her apartment and rode the elevator to the top floor again, for one more look from the roof before she went to bed. The sky was still clouded, and in the darkness the reflected light of Tokyo turned the clouds a sickly yellow-brown. Shinjuku was in full bloom. A few tops of the highest neon signs were visible to her, and a red-and-blue haze enveloped the entire western sector of the horizon. The city roared and blinked in the darkness, creating its own kind of daylight. She lay on her back on the sand-and-asphalt roof, looking up at the hazy yellow clouds. The chill from the cold roof seeped up into her through her clothes. An imperceptible breeze moved the sky to the east, and now and again, when the clouds thinned and the sky got dark in a particular spot, she caught a hint of the stars that lay beyond.

She jolted awake and pressed the light button on her watch. It was almost one thirty a.m. She stood unsteadily, pounded her feet into the roof to warm up, and walked the two flights to the elevator. As she waited for the elevator to arrive, she had the sensation she often got while waiting for an elevator in Tokyo, the sensation of the building moving slightly in a lateral direction, and for a moment she wondered if this would be another earthquake. And as always when an earthquake would begin, she wondered if this would be the Big Earthquake, the one
everyone knew was coming, the one that would flatten the city again, as had happened in 1923. When the elevator doors opened, she understood that what she’d felt was the motion set up in the building by the moving elevator. She got in and rode it to her floor.

The radio alarm came on at six and she quickly hit the snooze bar to give herself a few more minutes. It took several seconds for her to realize what she’d heard, and by the time she’d switched the radio back on, the
AP
network news was over. She lay in bed pondering. Could she have heard the words
Albion Mines
? It was rare to hear the name
Canada
on the American Armed Forces Radio broadcasts, and for a few moments she thought she must have been mistaken.

But when she switched on the television in the living room/kitchen, the 6:00 a.m. newscast showed a picture of the giant twin silos of Eastyard Coal’s pit at the south end of Albion Mines. Her heart began to pound. She’d seen them in photos and news clippings her parents had sent. The mouth of the pit had been damaged in some way. White panels from the enclosure that led into the ground lay scattered like shed teeth. The scene switched to show the Albion Mines Volunteer Fire Department’s two trucks parked below the blue-and-grey coal silos. She could not recognize the faces of the firemen moving purposefully about the trucks; their heads were covered with oxygen masks. The voice of the Japanese reporter was serious and matter-of-fact, but Meta understood less than 10 per cent of what he was saying. She could hear times being talked about. Five twenty-nine a.m. was one. She checked her watch, although she knew what time it
was. She struggled in her confusion and disorientation to calculate the time difference between Tokyo and Nova Scotia. What was the date the newscaster gave in Japanese? Was it yesterday’s? She listened hard for anything she could understand. A word came through clearly. One she understood:
bakuhatsu
: explosion. And
niju-roku nin
: twenty-six people.

A
rvel put the last piece of toast into his mouth and drank warm, milky tea to soften the toast. “I gotta get up to that grave, anyway,” he said. He walked into the porch and put on his parka and heavy boots. He stopped at the door and turned to face his father, who stood backlit and grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen.

“You ever point a gun at me, old man, it better be loaded and you’d better pull the trigger. That’s just some advice.” Arvel turned his back on his father and walked to the end of the driveway. Even the rich black of the sky was different, was better. You could look up there and you’d know something about life. On a clear night you had the delicate patterns of stars. In overcast you got the town’s reflection of itself. The black overhead in the pit was meaningless, and it went on forever through the rock. His brother, Ziv, said lighting the pit with a cap lamp was like trying to get through a hurricane with a candle.

Ziv hadn’t lasted in the pit. One shift and he was out. His brother thought of himself as a coward for not staying, but sometimes it took as much courage not to do things as it did to do them, and that’s what Arvel admired about Ziv: he did only what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to university, so he went. He wanted to quit university, so he did. He wanted to work in the pit, then he wanted to stop working in the pit. If everyone hired at the Eastyard mine had quit after a single shift, things could have been different underground.

Unlike his brother, Arvel didn’t feel he knew how to get out of anything. His life now existed beyond his ability to control it. The problems he and Jackie were having seemed unsolvable; his job was murdering his spirit. If he had any guts, he’d get out of all of it. He’d move to Halifax, which is where Jackie wanted to go. He’d get a job out west, working in a hard-rock mine that wasn’t seething with methane. He’d get an electrician’s job, something he was actually trained for. He’d start all over out there, where nobody knew anything about him.

All he had in his life that he took any enjoyment from was this short walk outside in the fresh air, and this ended in his arrival at the pit. There was nothing in any way scenic or beautiful about the walk, but it was a stroll outside under the sky and in the air. Since he’d been working in the pit, where the feeling of being enclosed was extreme, any time outside had become precious to him.

But recently the walk to the pit had become haunted. Every step reminded him of a dream he’d had. It was a dream about walking to a pit, and since he’d had the dream, his walk to the Eastyard site had been charged with flashes of dream pictures.

His alarm goes off just before six. He wakes up, pulls on a pair of work pants and a shirt, picks up a lunch can, and walks out into the streets of the Red Row. The backyards are dotted with outhouses and coal sheds. A plume of black smoke rises from every chimney. The unpaved streets are full of men dressed like him, each carrying a lunch pail under his arm. The year is 1928, thirty-four years before Arvel will be born
.

At the bottom of Hudson Street, Arvel meets his grandfather, his mother’s father. He is the same age as Arvel, and even though he died at seventy, when Arvel was only ten, Arvel recognizes him immediately by the thick glasses that blur his eyes huge, and by the big forehead, a trait Arvel has inherited, that rises above his glasses
.

“Good morning, Didu,” Arvel says
.

“Good morning, boy,” says the grandfather. His accent is so heavy that Arvel can hardly understand. He has lived in Canada for less than ten years, Arvel realizes, and he came without a word of English
.