by Meira Chand
Under the heading Notes, Arthur began to write. ‘New Year’s Day, 1868, was the appointed day for the opening of Kobe, or Hiogo as it was then called, to foreign trade ...’ A mosquito whined again about his ear. He swished it off and saw it settle on the folded square of the newspaper on the desk. Its delicate insolence disturbed the grey meeting of two politicians in a mottled photograph. Arthur took aim with a thick envelope and the insect became a bloody mark. But the quick movement caught a small blue vase on a corner of the desk. It crashed to the floor and broke; he stared down at the fragments in dismay. The vase had stood on his desk for twenty years. Sometimes he stuck a flower in it. Sometimes. He picked up the bits and looked at them in the palm of his hand, at the smooth film of blue glaze on the shattered earthenware. He turned them over in his hand, and remembered the woman, Kyo, again.
5
She had no need to read the letter; she knew the words by heart. They echoed and gnawed in Akiko’s head. And sometimes they sang, scarlet and flowered. Even the neat, flexed columns of Japanese characters, arriving from their indeterminate source, were not strange. Because of the familiarity of the emotion they aroused. She had suspected nothing when she picked up the letter, although she had dreamed of it often. And afterwards she told nobody. Not even Eva.
The sun was already hot on her face, although it was early. But today in a sultry way; unnatural. She had not slept well, the letter cutting her adrift from rest, so that she had seen the dawn, and a strange sickly cast to the sky that filled her with unease. Akiko, the letter started. Akiko, you will not know me and yet sometimes I like to hope you think of me. And afterwards she had answered, I do. Often. And she had said the word aloud: Mother. It had a strange thick feel in her mouth, stiff as unused rubber. She had not tried again. That was two days ago. Since then she carried the letter inside her, a whole fantastic landscape before which she trembled, poised, afraid that at darkness or a touch it would soundlessly disappear. But at such times she stared again at the letter, taking it from a small lacquer box. Unfolding it carefully, her hands trembled and anticipated an identity to be restored. On the page, the ink of the biro still secreted an oily glaze. Like leggy insects, the delicate fragments of each character lay hatched in neat columns. They joined to make sentences, palpable and whole that quickened in her throat.
Akiko, sometimes I like to hope you think of me.
Mother. Mother.
She handled the letter wonderingly, like precious glass, and could not speak in case it broke. But inside she waited, intuitively, knowing this was the beginning. She did not answer; she knew there was no need.
In the yard of the orphanage she sat beneath the wisteria, legs stretched out to the sun. The leaves were beginning to yellow, the frenzied mass of branches trapped heat and the crackle of insects. She looked up into its complicated darkness, warmth beat down upon her. She thought again of Daniel, and somehow they seemed tied up together, man and letter, setting the world upon its end.
From the dining room door two children ran out. In the yard they began to bounce a purple ball. On the chest of their T-shirts gaudy pictures jumped and jerked. Akiko pulled herself up, calling them behind her for breakfast. They were all trooping in now, filling the room like a tide. She counted heads as they darted and pushed. Mariko ... Yumiko ... Takeo ... Jun ... Some little ones passed her in a file, a clump of four joined hands to waists, hopping and chanting. The sun speared windows and fell in a path of lozenges on the linoleum floor. The children hopped from one bright pool to the next, singing.
At one time Hanako’s
Tears poured down
Poured down,
Too many tears
Too many tears,
With a kimono sleeve
Let us wipe the tears ...
She remembered the old song and watched breath vibrating in the small bodies as the thick polished helmets of the girls’ hair flapped up and down. Emiko’s plaits rapped her shoulders, fringes were disturbed and parted. Watching, Akiko saw herself again, walking to the same tables, long before.
She straightened chairs behind small backs, tied Emiko’s bib, parted the battling chopsticks of Takeo, Nobuo and Jun. They settled and the pink stain of ginger pickles soon became part of Nobuo’s shirt. Behind, the older children ate in a more subdued manner. Mariko and Yumiko sat together in an uneasy truce, after an argumentative week. Beside them Hiroshi’s fingers stuck out like fat grubs from the plaster of his broken arm. Soon they only simmered beneath the clatter of chopsticks and bowls, and the lusty suck of soup. These sounds, this room, had been with her always. Although she had lived with Eva, during the day there were no differences made. So that now the room settled comfortably around her. At the tables were the bent heads of children, the small bowls of rice, the magenta of pickles, the smooth nests of eggs. The same breakfast hour she had known throughout her life; she felt safe and grateful for it. She bent and broke a raw egg into Hiroshi’s bowl.
‘Jiro is still outside.’ He pointed with his chopsticks to the yard. ‘He’s talking to the flowers again.’ Hiroshi guffawed and sprayed soup upon the table.
Akiko saw then Jiro was missing, his seat empty at the table. They called him Jiro, although on his records there was a Korean name. But it was better, said Eva, that he took the protective hide of a Japanese name, for his mother was Japanese, even if his father was Korean; he would not show up like a naked thing on a printed register. In that way he might for a while postpone the hate he must receive in Japan for the double sin of being of mixed blood and also Korean.
Akiko found him in the garden. He was under the camellia tree that in spite of the heat had burst its first flower, an awkward early bloom. He was a strange and introverted child. In the thick of other children’s conversations, he rarely spoke; he looked out at the world in a guarded way, as if protecting something too delicate to expose. And he drew, absorbed constructions that he said were magic flowers or complicated underworlds. As she walked towards him he picked the solitary bloom and held it to his face. He was the oldest child in the orphanage.
‘Don’t you want your breakfast?’ she asked.
‘They say you must never bring these into the house. Camellia don’t drop petal by petal, they fall like severed heads. Is that true? Is it unlucky?’ He turned thoughtful eyes upon her, waiting.
‘Not much you are told like that is true. You must decide these things for yourself. It is only what you decide that is important.’ She told him because she remembered long before, standing beneath the same camellia, before the dusty body of a dead bird: a neatly folded brown and beige soul, except for the maggots that crawled in its eyes. And that treachery had somehow seemed the shape of life.
He paused to consider. ‘Then I shall take it inside.’
Akiko nodded, she knew him. Inwardly he was like her, divided, dissolved, yet of one hard shape. He must search the arrangements of other people for the clues that were himself. She walked back behind him into the room.
With his arm in a plaster cast, Hiroshi held his chopsticks awk-wardly, beating a raw egg in his bowl. It slipped and spilt an oily yellow mess over his legs. Akiko reached for a bowl and cloth and sponged his fat brown knees. Fat square knees like the boy Daniel in the photograph Eva kept of him upon her dressing table. An old photograph, taken when Daniel was four. Now he must be thirty. This morning Eva had told her to take Daniel to the festival at the local shrine. The thought of being alone with him knocked inside her head.
Until now there had been just that photo of Daniel. A photo she had stared at secretly in childhood, trying to resurrect. And she had always thought, some part of Eva flows within him that does not flow in me. In his face she detected the similar outline of an ear, the eye laid firm and forthright in a way that was familiar. He is hers, she thought, not me. She looked at him curiously, looking beyond Eva for that link within him that was her father. A link as wide as a continent, and as narrow as the word, America. That was all she knew of her father; the word, Am
erican. Yet, through her childhood she had tried to find him, painfully, rashly, in mottled newsprint photographs, improbable music and atlas names. She searched in darkness among those American families she met through Eva, but found no comforting revelation. Only a dry discarded dust, and loneliness in her veins.
She had asked Eva many times when small, lying in bed, staring up from the pillow into her face. ‘Who are they? Where are they? My parents?’ She looked up into the woman’s face; a broad, firm, loving face. But she saw only the look that came into the eyes, the shadow that closed the face.
‘Do not think backwards. I am here instead to love you. Your mother left you with me, to love, she wanted it that way. And where she is now, I do not know. Your father was American. Of him I know nothing more than that. She never told me.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Pretty.’
‘How pretty?’
‘Very.’
The child saw then the lips were shut, and held a finished look that would release no more. If Eva knew, it was concealed, in some dark compartment, unpronounceable, however much the child’s heart ticked beneath the serge of school uniform. Akiko had ceased to ask the useless questions. She managed to hold them in silent, so that they lay close to her bones.
Sometimes, as a child, she had been invited to play at the homes of Eva’s foreign friends. She had gone eagerly at first. In the houses of missionaries and consuls she played with blue-eyed children who played with blue-eyed dolls. And her head began to spin, on the very edge of it all. Here she could reach out and touch her father’s world, but however hard she tried she could hold none of it in her hand. The sharp features and flaccid skins, the coca-colas and peanut butter, and soft slurred vowels of women with floury baking hands, the men with bony eyes, pink iced birthday cakes, petit point cushions, the bulge of toes in a pair of old shoes, a cat asleep beneath bed covers. As a world it rose up and rejected her.
‘Here, in your own country, you may be considered beautiful, but not in America,’ a violet-eyed child once told her, plaiting flaxen braids before a mirror.
‘My father is American.’
‘You don’t say?’ retorted the child. ‘Where is he then? Where is he?’
The hungriness in Akiko retreated, rolling back upon itself. She went less and less.
‘But it’s good for you. Why must you be so difficult? Well, do as you wish,’ sighed Eva, having always a maze of other children to consume her.
Sometimes Eva sent her along the road to Mrs Okuno’s, to play with the daughters there.
‘Your nose, your nose,’ they screamed. ‘It looks like a Bugaku mask.’
And Mrs Okuno’s senile mother would sit on winter days beside a heavy wooden brazier, grilling sticky mochi rice cakes upon a wire mesh. She brushed them with soya until they gleamed caramel and the sauce dripped and spat on the coals beneath.
‘Little konketsu, mixed-blood one, come here.’ She laid a bony, long-clawed hand upon the child, a hand already dead. Her eyes were like ferrets’, buried deep down. ‘You should not have been born. There is no place for you here. Your mother should have killed herself with shame. But not her. I knew her. She would lay with them in the open if they paid her enough. She left you in a box on that English-woman’s doorstep. Yes, your own mother didn’t want you, you shameful thing.’ She cackled, her face ripped open by grey mottled teeth. She held a hot, skewered rice cake up to Akiko’s face. Once, she pressed it to the child’s lips; there had been a blister for a week.
It was almost the same in the Japanese school they went to from the orphanage. Then, there had been others like herself in the orphanage, a forgotten population, after the war and the occupation. ‘Konketsu’, mixed blood, they called after the orphanage crocodile in the street. Voices stopped suddenly when Akiko appeared; the desk beside her had been vacant half a year.
Akiko had preferred the orphanage, where there were others like herself. It offered some bleak unity; the unity of a group of wanderers on the spine of a hill at sunset. But she grew there in peace, undisturbed. She sensed the silence within each child, whittled and thin as bone. It drew them together in a soundless way, beneath the clatter of lunchtime bowls, or the splash of the communal bath. Each battled alone, discarded by the world.
Before the breakfasting children now, Akiko remembered the letter again. The thought swelled in her. I’m not like them, I’m different now. For it seemed like that. It seemed the letter made her different.
Mother. She whispered it soundlessly again.
6
In the Coopers’ house at the bottom of the hill, old Maud Bingham lay in bed and called for her daughter, Geraldine.
‘Geraldine. Geraldine. Oh why do you not come?’ The breakfast tray was heavy on her knees and behind her the pillows had slipped and bunched awkwardly, leaving her neck unsupported. There was egg yolk on her nightdress. Things had never been the same since they moved to this house.
‘Horace,’ she said, for she thought she saw her husband standing there beside the bed, the sun reflected on the chain of his pocket watch. ‘Horace. Tell Geraldine to take this tray away.’
But there was only silence to answer Maud Bingham and the rustle of a curtain in the sliver of a breeze. She opened her eyes then. Horace was not there. It was only the gleam of a metal photo frame. Nothing more. She must remember to remember Horace was dead. But it was increasingly difficult to secure these minor details in her mind. For the moment she shut her eyes he was there again, strutting impatiently up and down.
‘Maud. Maud,’ he called. She was sure she heard him say it.
There were times like this every day now, when the thin rim between dreams and realities dissolved and the two mixed. And she did not mind but waited for it, for the memories reassured, like the touch of hands, like the faded smiles of photographs and the yellow faces of old letters. She shut her eyes and let the past reclaim her.
And there were Mama and Papa again. Mama in a blue bustled autumn dress with the engraved silver clasps of two storks beneath a cherry tree. Maud was in pink with rosebuds on her boater. A jinriksha waited for them at the door. They were to go to the fireworks at Ryogoku Bridge. They had gone to a tea house, called The House of a Thousand Mats, and were offered seats in the gardens there where a fine view of the river and fireworks was obtained. The river was alive with the lanterns of lighted gondolas carrying geisha and their patrons. The clipped notes of the samisen filled the air. The fireworks were the best she had ever seen.
She had been only six when she came to Japan with her parents, when her father was invited to fill a post at Tokyo University. She never left. Horace came out at twenty-two with the London and Lancashire Insurance Company. They had met at a croquet match at a Mrs de Boinville’s.
‘Geraldine. Geraldine,’ she cried in vain.
The window was open, a huge steel-framed hole. She could see the bay, still and flat beneath fleshy clouds, near enough to touch, it seemed. It frightened her, this crag hanging over the sea that Nate Cooper, her son-in-law, insisted upon. She preferred the old house, high on the hill, but she of course was voiceless, an old woman in need of a home. Her son-in-law had many times doubled Horace’s business; it was not for her to complain. But she longed for the familiarity of the old home she had come to with Horace. He had died there, Geraldine grew up there. But Nate did not care. She should have heeded her instincts and all she had heard about the brashness of Americans. But Geraldine had been getting on, there were few opportunities for a girl of her age in Japan, few eligible foreign men. No, Nate did not care. He brought in the wreckers and replaced the house with obnoxious flats. And moved them down here, into this concrete fortress, hugging the bay. She did not recall how long they had been here, one year or ten. The days slipped in and out of her mind until they were as one. But you could not knock a nail into the wall, she remembered that clearly. To hang up her mother’s old prints of the Lake District and Horace’s collection of early Meiji woodblock prints,
that were all so dear to her, a man with an electric drill was called in. She had lain in bed and watched him with tears in her eyes. The drill screamed in her ears, the concrete dust could be tasted on the tongue. It had all worn her out.
