Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  Around the torso, the bandages covered the bruises. But her left shoulder and upper arm were a dark violet-red, and on the strip of flesh between the bottom of the bandages and the top of her skirt there were signs of bruises to come, only now beginning to form beneath the skin.

  Meta felt her insides wrench. She jerked Yuka’s blouse from her and threw it back in her face. “Put that back on!” she shouted. “Put it on, now!” Yuka struggled painfully to get the blouse back on. Her arms were stiff and it hurt her to put them above her head. Meta held the hem of the blouse for her, and together they tucked it back into the skirt. Meta put a hand on Yuka’s right shoulder, where she knew there was no bruise. “Sit down, Yuka,” she said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  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 ear
thquake. 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.

  Arvel 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.

  “It’s a beautiful morning,” Arvel says. From the street, he looks in through the window of his grandfather’s kitchen and sees his grandmother, six months pregnant with his mother. In less than twenty-five years this woman will be dead from tuberculosis, but this morning she appears as vigorous as any woman her age. She is washing apples under the water pump at the sink, working the handle up and down.

  “All begin beautiful, boy,” Arvel’s grandfather says.

  As they walk together to the pit, their leather boots crunch the gravel of the unpaved streets. In the clear air of morning, they can hear the wheels and gears of the elevator working in the shaft.

  When they pass through the gates and into the mine yard, Arvel’s heart jumps. He has only seen this place in pictures. By the time he is born, the coal boom will have passed and most of the operations will be shut down. But these buildings before him, this smokestack, the wheels that turn on the big lift: these have been written on his mind by something stronger than memory.

  “You’re frightened, boy,” his grandfather says. “I won’t tell you not to be.”

  In the change house they don what they’ll need for work. The boots, the coveralls, the gloves. They check out their equipment from the tool room. The hard hats, the lamps, the shovels, the axes. They gather with the rest of the day-shift men at the mouth of the shaft, smoke final cigarettes. The sun splits down on them in rays between the beams and cables and pipes that run in all directions above their heads.

  The wheels on the giant elevator turn. A dozen men before them walk onto the platform and drop from sight. Arvel and his grandfather move ahead, and twelve more descend. Cables quiver. A platform swings into view. “I wish this could be different,” the grandfather says. Two men remain. They step forward and disappear from the surface of the earth.

  His grandfather Staciw had been a survivor of the mines. He’d worked his whole life in the pit and lived to see his retirement. The work had killed him nonetheless: he’d suffered chronic debilitating health problems in the time he’d survived after retirement, each year spending at least a month in the hospital, and suffering almost monthly from what Arvel’s mother called “turns,” violent convulsions that led to unconsciousness.

  His grandfather had probably counted himself lucky nonetheless. He’d been born into debt to a peasant family in southern Ukraine and had come to Canada before the Bolshevik Revolution to get a job and buy his family out of economic servitude. So however miserable his life in Canada, however dangerous the work, however meagre the pay, he’d always known he was better-off
than he would have been if he’d stayed in Ukraine. After the revolution, he’d lost contact with his family, only getting letters through again during and just after the Khrushchev era. One of Arvel’s earliest memories was of a photo his grandfather had received of his village in the Ukraine. It had come in a paper-wrapped package that most of the extended family had gathered in Didu Staciw’s kitchen to see opened. It had been one of the first warm days in late spring. The windows and doors were open, letting in the earth smells from the damp garden at the front of the house. Didu was sitting at the kitchen table with a crowd of people standing expectantly around him. He cut the twine from the bundle and folded back the heavy paper wrapping. Inside were some pieces of cloth that Arvel was too young to understand the significance of. The women in the kitchen raised a fuss over these. In a yellow envelope inside the package was a photo of Didu’s village. Several stern-looking, bony-faced men and women stood, stuffed into ill-fitting clothing, in front of a small group of farm buildings.

  Arvel’s father began laughing. “Look at what they’re living in,” he exclaimed. “Thatched roofs! Holy shit! Welcome to the twentieth century!” Didu pulled the photo from Arvel’s father’s hand, shouted something at Arvel’s father, and stormed into the living room. He sat in the swivel chair and spun his back to the kitchen. Arvel, three, maybe four years old, followed his grandfather into the living room and approached the swivel-based armchair from behind. When he got to the front of the chair, he looked up at his grandfather. The old man was holding the photo close to his face, a few centimetres from his glasses. Behind the thick lenses, his grandfather’s eyes were blinking rapidly, tears were pouring freely down the sides of his nose.

  The air was dry and cold now and smelled of the frozen earth that had been ploughed up with the snow. Banks of old snow were pushed up on either side of the sidewalk as he made his way up Foord Street. Near the corner of Bridge Avenue, naked trees thrust their frost-whitened branches against the sky. A few ragged wreaths, weather-beaten, face-down, and half-covered with ice and snow, remained on the steps that led up to the war monument, leftovers from Remembrance Day. It could have been last winter that the wind had blown massive drifts over the ridge at the edge of the Anglican graveyard, up behind the monument. He and Ziv and Bundy Burgess and other kids from this end of the Red Row had taken running leaps into the snow, diving headlong into the powder, going so deep that a semi-darkness set in amid the translucent white of the drift. It could have been last winter, but it wasn’t. It was more than ten years ago, that day he remembered so well. No, it was more than fifteen years ago. Why did he remember this so clearly, when yesterday and the day before had already gone shapeless in his imagination?