Requiem

by Frances Itani

  REQUIEM

  FRANCES ITANI

  For Tate

  For Campbell

  For Frances Michiko

  With much love

  And for all of those whose memories

  have been weighted with silence

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE FATES

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  THE FATHERS

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  TOMORROW’S WIND

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  REQUIEM

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Also by Frances Itani

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE FATES

  Speak of a man and his shadow will turn up.

  Black outside. A solid blur of black. A wall of mountain behind. A man moving about out there would instinctively raise his hands to push his way through the dark.

  Inside, lumps and shadows cast by the kerosene lamp. Twigs of frost to be snapped off in the morning, suspended from the seams where wall and ceiling meet. The drone of First Father’s voice from his chair in a corner of the shack.

  I had heard the fates many times before, but he insisted that I pay attention when he picked up the palm-sized book with the red cover. He read back to front, top to bottom, starting with my older brother.

  “Hiroshi. You are number-one son, born in the year of the monkey. You are a strong boy and you will grow up to be a strong man. Because of your fate, you will be skilled at whatever you choose to do.”

  He paused, and I waited for Hiroshi’s intake of breath.

  “But sometimes you will not finish what you set out to do, and this will make you angry with yourself. Remember that you should never marry a woman born in the year of the tiger.”

  Hiroshi frowned, looked down at his already muscular arms and was momentarily quiet.

  “Bin,” said Father, because I was always second. “You are youngest, number-two son, born in the year of the tiger. A tiger may be stubborn, but can chase away ghosts and protect. If careful, a tiger is capable of amassing a fortune.”

  My brother and sister perked up, knowing what was coming next.

  “But because your time of birth was at the cusp of the year of the rabbit”—he added this as if he’d sired a child who could not be helped—”you are destined to be melancholy, and you will weep over nonsensical things.”

  Hiroshi and Keiko leaned back on the bench and hooted with laughter, as they always did. Father cleared his throat and ignored the interruption.

  I remained silent and glanced over at Mother, who was making sushi from egg and rice. The outer wrappings, rinsed cabbage leaves, had been stored since fall, salted, folded and packed in a jar. If a leaf tore, it was expertly repaired with a patch from another leaf. When the rice was tucked in—not a grain wasted—she rolled the bamboo mat, the sudare, and sliced the sushi in bite-sized circles. She caught my glance and gave a quick nod that also meant, Pay attention to your father.

  Keiko’s fate was last to be told, though she was middle child. But she was a girl.

  “Keiko, you were born in the year of the rooster. You will be ambitious and work hard, but you must learn to trust. Even though you will want to tell people exactly what you think, you cannot be right all the time. Still, you will do well and you will earn respect.”

  Keiko preened, with a frown. Her cheekbones flushed like matching purple bruises.

  Did this moment take place during the first winter of our internment, 1942? No, it had to be later, when I was older—the third year, perhaps. We were in the camp five winters in all. We were sitting as close to the

  wood stove as we could position ourselves, bundled in layers of sweaters that had tumbled from Mother’s needles. Because new wool was scarce, she had unravelled sturdy fishermen’s sweaters so that she could reknit the coarse wool into smaller items. Pattern was of no concern, nor was colour. It was warmth that mattered. We were living in the mountains, after all, partway up the Fraser, the great river that defined our lives in the camp. We were inland, more than 150 miles from the river’s mouth and from the southern channels of the delta, where it spilled out into the Pacific, just north of the boundary with the United States.

  Even farther from us was the west coast of Vancouver Island and the house Father had built with the help of his brother, our uncle Kenji. It was a fisherman’s house, propped on massively thick stilts. Stilts that Father had sealed, by himself, to prevent rotting, and that defended our family when tidal waters swept up the bay and drifted in soundlessly over a thin strip of barnacled beach between house and shore. But all the while, hidden undercurrents had been making their own incursions with the tides, in and around and under the house. The house from which we had been forcibly removed, and that none of us, as it turned out, would ever see again.

  CHAPTER 1

  1997

  The call from my sister, Kay, comes in the evening. Second call in a week.

  “He isn’t dying, Bin. I want to make that clear. He sits in his chair, facing the door, as if he expects someone to walk through. He asks for you every time I visit. I’ve driven to B.C. twice in the past six weeks—it’s a long drive from here. But he won’t budge from his place.”

  “First Father?” I can’t resist, though I’m not proud of saying it like that.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

  “That’s what he is.”

  “You still have anger.” She says this softly, but impatience is there, underneath.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not about the same things. Anyway, I try not to hold on to it.”

  I want to snap at her when she talks like this. I want to say, Get angry yourself, why don’t you. You deserve to.

  “He’s old, Bin. Well, getting old. In his eighties, after all. I’d bring him here to Alberta if he’d agree to leave that tiny house of his.”

  “But he won’t,” I say. “And since Mother died, he insists on living alone—or so you keep telling me.”

  “You’ve never seen his house, because you refuse to visit Kamloops. In summer it’s stifling, take my word for it. Another month or so, and it’ll be scorching there.”

  “Why doesn’t he go to the coast before the weather changes?”

  “He won’t. Not even with his own brother, though Uncle Kenji has offered to drive him, countless times. Father just sits there staring at the door, or out the window at dry mountains.” She pauses and adds, “He needs to see you.”

  I choose to ignore this and remain silent for a moment. He made his choices, I’m thinking. More than half a century ago. His needs are not my concern.

  I feel Kay bracing herself, ready to argue or persuade.

  “As a matter of fact,” I tell her suddenly, “I’ve decided to travel—west—to British Columbia. As far as the Fraser, to the cam
p. Well, there is no camp, but whatever is there now.”

  This announcement surprises me as much as it does her. There’s a longer pause and I wonder, foolishly, if she has hung up.

  “I won’t be in your part of the country for several days, of course.” I’m making this up, now, as I speak. “I’ll be leaving in the morning, but I probably won’t reach Edmonton for a week—more or less. I have things to do along the way.”

  Basil has been listening and pads by in the hall, his nails clattering against hardwood. He tilts his shaggy head at an angle, enough to ensure that his expression of reproach has been noticed. Nose to floor, long ears dragging the dust, he disappears into the kitchen. I’m certain he does this—the ear-dragging part—on purpose.

  “What things?” Kay, as usual, has recovered quickly.

  “Work things.” I’ve never liked explaining myself, not even to my wife, Lena. “I’ll phone when I get close.”

  “You’re driving. All this way. By yourself.”

  I hear a long sigh and have a sudden image of Kay standing at a picture window in her Alberta home, looking out at a disc of sun hovering over flat, golden plain. No, there will be nothing golden this time of year in Edmonton. Last summer, when she moved from one neighbourhood to another, she wrote to say that her new house is close to the ravine and the University of Alberta—where she has worked as a counsellor for many years. For all I know, she might be staring into the depths of a crevasse, or at rows of houses, or at spring snow melting in a parking lot. After the enforced years in the camp, Kay has always hated the mountains. She feels squeezed between them every time she drives to B.C., says the mountains press in on her lungs until she’s short of breath. Maybe now that her children are grown and on their own, she’s finally found a place where she can breathe deeply, no dips or peaks to interrupt her view. A place where she can retire in a year or two, in peace. Her husband, Hugh, has already retired, and Kay has told me that he loves having his time to himself now. He has all sorts of projects going, though she’s never said what kind of projects these are.

  Basil reappears, having circled kitchen, laundry, dining room. His face looks up in innocence, but something is drooping from his jaw. He drags it across the floor and, without stopping, plops it at my feet and carries on. I watch his low-slung body disappear, sixty pounds of Basset Griffon, the Grand version. He’s predominantly white, with a mix of grey, black and apricot markings, the apricot showing through from a thick undercoat. He circles again, this time reversing direction. He’s been sticking his nose in the dirty laundry again, probably feeling ignored. Loping his way through an existential dog nightmare, perhaps.

  “I’ll be alone,” I say into the phone. And now it’s Kay’s turn to be silent.

  Who else would be with me? Lena has been dead more than five months. Greg returned to his studies on the East Coast and is back to living his own life. He left a week after the funeral, in mid-November. He was home again at Christmas, and we managed to get through muted festivities at Lena’s sister’s place in Montreal. Greg flew to Ottawa first, and we travelled together by train to Montreal. Neither of us wanted to drive because the roads were hazardous, covered in snow and ice.

  Once in Montreal, we did our best to keep well-meaning relatives at bay—or were surrounded. One and the same, perhaps. There were always people around, people in every room. Was that by accident, or was Lena’s family orchestrating our grief as well as their own? When I think of those few days, I remember chairs crowded around the kitchen table, lineups for bathrooms in the morning, music turned up a little louder than necessary. I particularly remember the Sanctus of Berlioz’s Requiem, only the Sanctus, a solo tenor voice. It was a blend of pain and beauty, and I felt that the tenor, after singing, could only go offstage and weep. As for the answering women’s choir, they were intent on bringing solace from afar. The women sang as if something clear and important had to be said. Perhaps that is when something I was holding back fell away. Perhaps that is when I began to allow myself to grieve.

  As soon as Kay and I hang up, I phone Greg to tell him about the trip—before I change my mind. It’s an hour later on the East Coast but he’s up, studying. He, too, is surprised at my sudden announcement.

  “Hey,” he says, “you’re really going back? Through the mountains? All the way?”

  “Through the Rockies,” I tell him. “As far inland as the camp, but not all the way to the Pacific. Do you want to come? It’s been a while since we crossed the country by car.”

  “I’d love to, Dad, but I have term papers to finish. After exams, I have to prepare my research project.”

  Greg has a spot in a summer fellowship program in Massachusetts—exactly where he wants to be. He deserves to be excited about this.

  “I don’t have all the dates figured out yet,” he says. “But maybe we can get together in Cape Cod while I’m there. Or even earlier. I’ll let you know as soon as everything is confirmed.”

  During the conversation, while he tells me what he’ll be doing at Woods Hole, the Oceanographic Institution, I find myself calling up a memory of a time when he discovered a dolphin skull on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay. Almost eleven years ago. The Fundy tide was low; we’d been beachcombing. The skull had washed up on brown and slippery rocks, the elongated bones of its distinctive rostrum bleached by the sun. Greg easily recognized it for what it was, a perfect discovery for a ten-year-old. The skull stank for months, but we dried it in the sun in the backyard an entire summer, until it was odourless enough to be in his room. It’s still there, on a shelf with his other marine treasures.

  We say goodbye, I hang up the phone and lean forward to see what Basil has dropped at my feet. It’s a message, a dismembered sleeve, a rag, a duster tugged up and out of the hamper. Part of a sweatshirt Lena used to wear around the house.

  I recognize this as a measure of Basil’s distress. He’s a pack animal. And a member of his pack—our pack—is missing.

  CHAPTER 2

  Five-thirty in the morning and I’ve been dreaming of Lena. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a cream-coloured robe that I don’t recall, her bare legs crossed at the knee. It was the way she always sat: on kitchen chairs, on the chesterfield, in the seats of airplanes. But there she was, in the dream, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. My first thought was: Lena is okay. She can move, she can speak. She was teasing, telling me I’d slept the sleep of the high-strung and uneasy. Before that, she curled into my body deliberately, her skin as soft as it was when she was in her twenties, when I first met her.

  Then I woke, or thought I woke, to see her sitting beside me. She raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for me to say something. But when I reached for her, she was gone. Did I call out? Perhaps that was part of the dream—believing I had.

  I glance at the clock, 5:18, shove back the covers and force myself, will myself, to get up, even though it’s still dark. I go to the window, naked, and pull back one of the curtains. Search for the line of river on the northern edge of the city and feel the disappointment as I realize, in the fog between sleep and awareness, that this is not the river of my childhood after all. So real is my childhood river, I can call up at any moment its steep banks, the steady rush of fast and muddy water, the ribbon of blue-green coming in from the side.

  I push down the fluttering, the extra beats inside my chest, try to smother the sense of panic. And as I stare out, I recall an earlier dream. Or perhaps fragments of the same dream, a prequel of sorts.

  I had been moving from one place to another, as one’s dream-self does, changing scenes in a way that makes no sense to the conscious mind. I was walking in drizzling rain, searching for the Fraser River below the camp. As I descended the steep path, I caught glimpses of a horizontal rope of cloud stretched low above the turbulent water. I was wet and miserable and fatigued, and lay on the ground in that damp, leaden air, hoping to rest. When I woke, it was to find myself at the river’s edge. Again, Lena was there, her body curled i
nto mine.

  Let it go, I tell myself. Let her go. I release the curtain and make my way downstairs in bare feet. Open the door for Basil, who streaks past in a grizzled mass of coiled energy and, just as coiled, returns. For a dog who is ten years old, he has surprising vigour. I pour pellets into his dish and turn away while he gallops through his food. The pellets resemble swollen cigarette butts stripped of their papers, an image I can do without so early in the morning.

  A thin light has begun to filter down over the street. Next door, in the backyard of my elderly neighbour, Miss Carrie, a chaotic tangle of gooseberry bushes has emerged from under cover of melting snow. The snowbanks have shrunk to grass level now, but it’s a stretch to believe that bulbs are pushing up under that layer of slush. Years ago, Lena planted crocuses in our own backyard and, every spring, delicate purples and yellows defy the weight of winter and reappear like tendrils of hope.

  Basil nudges my leg, my cue to pour water into his bowl. I wonder when to tell him we’re going on a trip. If I say the word, or even spell it aloud, as Lena and Greg and I used to do—though he quickly caught on—he’ll begin to run in tight, frantic circles until it’s time for me to say: Get in the car, Basil. From the way I’m being watched, I suspect he already knows. He’s tensed and ready, waiting for the words.

  Despite his canine intuition, I make an effort to behave as if this is a morning like any other. I leave him in the kitchen and go back upstairs to dress, shave, pack a duffle bag. Shirts, socks, underwear, rough clothes for hiking that I can throw into a machine at a laundromat along the way—but only when necessary.

  I add a couple of extra razors to my shaving kit and go to my studio, same side of the house as the bedroom. The blinds are never closed here. Clouds are tilted on their edges out there, a fleet of sails tucked to one another, news gusting from afar. With daylight lowering into the cold glint of city, I can see the Ottawa River more clearly now, a winding strip of darkness that defines the borders of two provinces. The Peace Tower erupts to the left. Old and dun, it lauds the sky without assumption, while the seats of power, the offices of Parliament, reside on either side. Not a scene I relish when I think of how the power was used in 1942. I focus, instead, on the smudges of pewter that are trees and bushes along the edge of the river as it disappears into an outline of hills behind.