Requiem

by Frances Itani

  “A revealing story,” Lena said. “In more ways than one. A story of longing, definitely.”

  “But the young man was observant, you have to give him that.”

  “Indeed. The scene was painted quite clearly.”

  Observant but lonely, I was thinking, but I didn’t say that aloud. The young man was always—more or less—alone.

  “And this present moment,” said Lena, “the one in which the young man finds himself in the midst of deep forest, is also a moment of intimacy. Too bad we don’t have curtains on the car windows. What if someone drives up?”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s so late, no one is going to drive in at this time of night. Anyway, it’s pitch black and we’ll be awake before dawn. How soundly do you think we’ll be able to sleep like this?”

  We were asleep almost before I finished the sentence.

  When we woke, it was hours past dawn and sun was shining through the car windows on one side. Lena raised her head and looked out and ducked back down again.

  “My God,” she said. “We’re surrounded. There are half a dozen cars and camper trailers. Did you hear anyone drive in? There must have been others on the highway who couldn’t find a place to sleep. I didn’t hear a thing all night.”

  But we could hear people now. The sound of many voices as families prepared breakfast at picnic tables around the edges of the parking lot. There was no way we could get dressed without being seen.

  I volunteered to be the one to unzip the side of the sleeping bag, to try to gather up the clothes at our feet. I stayed low, pitched the clothes to Lena and climbed back under, and we began to dress while lying on our backs inside the sleeping bag. Not easy, I remember. And we were laughing again. The whole scene was comic because our car was parked in the middle of the lot and people were coming and going, back and forth to trailers and cars. “Who cares?” I said to Lena, through snorts of laughter. “Who bloody cares?” But every time someone walked past, we froze and pretended to be asleep.

  There must have been five or six vehicles, and neither of us had heard so much as a wheel turn in the night.

  When we were dressed, which took more than a few awkward manoeuvres, we looked at each other and nodded. Ready. We climbed out on opposite sides of the rear of the car and got back in at the front. People at the picnic tables looked over and waved. The two of us drove off.

  I know the exact place we parked. Same site, same lot. I call for Basil and get him into the car, but only after offering a treat as persuasion. We are back on the highway in minutes, and I drive for more than an hour until we’re at the outskirts of a small town. By the time I see a sign for a Pancake House, it’s mid-morning, late, and I’m not certain I’ll be served. The need for coffee is greater than the need for food, and I can probably get at least that much, so I pull in. I give Basil a drink of water and leave him in the car with the window partly down, in a parking spot that can be seen from inside the restaurant.

  The place is more bar than restaurant—a sports bar or maybe a hybrid, bar and restaurant combined. There are no customers in the room. A TV on a high shelf in one corner is on but soundless. Two men are wrestling in outlandish costumes, golden cocks strutting across the screen.

  A tall woman with a weary-looking face is wiping glasses and she points to a table close to where she’s working. Efficiency itself, she’s fast, moving from one table to another, setting places, giving surfaces a swipe of her damp cloth, creating order from salt and pepper shakers, containers of ketchup and syrup. If I were to sketch her, I’d call the drawing Taut motion. She wears a black pinstriped blouse and black slacks. The blouse shines like satin. Her face is thin, her long legs thin, her hip bones prominent, no extra flesh. Everything about her brings to mind the words gaunt and defeated. It’s easy to see that her life, thus far, has not been easy.

  But she is all kindness, as it turns out. And she gives the impression of intuiting some need, not in her but in me—a need that is blatant and personal. She brings coffee before I ask, offers the news that two moose, a cow and a calf, have been strutting through town since early morning, and that the police are in a tizzy. They’ve called for the local conservation officer. She hands me a menu, goes to the bar, swishes her cloth over the counter and returns to take my order. When I ask for an egg sunnyside, she says she can do egg. When I ask for toast, she can do toast. The kitchen never closes. She’ll throw in back bacon as there is extra today. I can have waffles, too, if I want them. Her body leans forward and pulls back. She leaves comfort behind and disappears behind the bar and through the kitchen door. And yet, she looks so troubled herself.

  When she brings my breakfast, it’s a plate heaped high with food. In the centre, a double yolk in a single egg. The two yolks are unbroken, even with the cooking.

  “Our lucky day, yours and mine,” she says. She tilts her chin, points to the double yolk and tries to explain. “It’s good luck. You know—double yolk.” And then she looks at me more closely and says, “Hey, hey. It’s only an egg. You okay?” She gives me a firm pat on the shoulder before she turns and goes back to cleaning up.

  I stare at my plate through blurred vision and curse the fates again. And I think of Otto at the funeral, reaching over to pat at my sleeve.

  CHAPTER 11

  1942

  There was no time to sit around and mope after our first night in the tents. Distances were marked, sticks were pounded to the earth. A month earlier, while in detention in Vancouver, Father had arranged to cash in his only insurance policy—worth one hundred and twenty-five dollars. He was also to receive, some time in the future, a small share of money from the Fishermen’s Cooperative, which he had helped to set up and which had collapsed in late 1941, even though it had been incorporated only two weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Like everyone in our Fraser River camp, we would have to pay for our own internment—until the money ran out and Father found a way of earning more.

  The shacks that were to become our homes were erected on a strip of land that was strewn with old sagebrush and spotted with snow, and that lay between the base of the mountain and the edge of a dirt road that led back towards the bridge—the same bridge over which we’d been driven the day before, and which we were now forbidden to cross. The strip of land was the only available space where we could build. Everything else was slope and mountain and cliff that hung over the Fraser River. In the other direction, the dirt road continued past us and around a curve that led to a deep canyon. If we were to travel in that direction, we were told we would face mountain ranges even higher than the ones we now stood beside. Not that we were permitted to travel; roadblocks were set up in both directions on either side of the camp and guarded by the RCMP, twenty-four hours a day.

  I was shivering from cold, and looked across the wide river to the town on the opposite bank. In the daylight, I could see the railway station where our train had been idle for three nights. Smoke was rising from chimneys on the main street of a community that had heat. I saw houses spotted here and there in the hills that spread out from the town. Even in the hills, smoke was visible over the rooftops. It was clear that every bit of warmth on the planet had gathered on the other side of the river.

  A meeting was organized, men and women were assembled, skills called out. There were millhands, loggers, mechanics, bookkeepers, stenographers and typists, farmers, fishermen, factory workers, restaurant workers, store clerks, cooks and accountants. When it was discovered that two men were master carpenters, it was agreed that they would supervise construction. Tools would be shared. At the beginning, someone from the Security Commission helped with the ordering of supplies. But after that, we were on our own. There was also a woodcarver among us, and he was put to work alongside the carpenters, but his main job was to help make furniture: tables, benches, shelves, stools and wooden frames for beds. Some wood had already arrived, but several more weeks passed before large quantities of rough green lumber were delivered from a mill in a nearby va
lley. The men in camp, along with teenage boys—Hiroshi and I were not big enough to be part of this group—sorted materials and sawed rough boards that would enable them to erect the shacks that would become our homes: three tidy rows, twenty shacks per row, each twelve feet wide, utilizing every inch of available flat space.

  And shacks they were. For the most part identical. Uninsulated, with open knotholes in the wood. Each had two rooms: a main room that served as kitchen, a second room for sleeping, with a makeshift curtain dividing the two. For a very large family, a small extra bedroom was added on at the back.

  But most of us were still living in tents, using kerosene lanterns to ward off the dark. The stove outside our own tent burned wood from early morning to late evening and was used not only for heat, but for boiling water and cooking food. We continued to drag dead branches and twigs and anything else that was combustible out of the woods and down the slopes. Some of the men in camp set to work cutting trees, dragging and sawing logs. Women, too, gathered wood and, during the day, stayed near open fires or inside the tents, where they bundled themselves in coats and blankets. My parents had shared the cost of a small galvanized tub with Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya, and we were able to stand or crouch in the tub and have a bath inside the tent before going to bed.

  Keiko’s hands became frostbitten and swollen from the cold, but there was no doctor in camp to examine her, and the puffiness lasted until summer. As for me, I was freezing all the time, both in and out of the tent. Mother gave me an extra sweater to wear, along with a strip of wool, a haramaki, to wrap around my torso so that my kidneys would be covered. And, finally, a long scarf to coil about my neck.

  As soon as one shack was finished, a family moved in. The men from families whose shacks were complete then helped the next family to build. Each place had little more than walls, roof and a rough plank floor that snagged the soles of our feet and planted slivers under our skin. There were no doors, no inside plumbing, no electricity. Even without doors, we moved into the shacks because they offered more permanency than the tents. Four long communal outhouses were built at the back of the camp, the outhouse doorways facing the side of the hill.

  After our shack was built, Father divided the bedroom by hanging a sheet. Hiroshi and Keiko and I shared the bed on the right, our parents the one on the left, a few inches separating the two. Bed frames were nailed together from raw lumber. Thin mattresses or futons were laid overtop. We had to climb into bed from the end.

  Father decided that we would have two small windows at the front, the same as every other shack, but a window in the back as well, in the bedroom. He sawed and banged at the wood and made an opening in the wall, but his measurements were askew and the space for the window ended up being crooked. He made no apologies. No glass had arrived at the camp, so we had to wait. He said he would patch around the edges later. Mother hung cloths over the gaping spaces, and stuffed cracks and knotholes with strips of old newspapers that had been used to wrap the dishes we had brought with us.

  At the beginning, there was no fresh water. Drinking water in covered barrels was brought in by truck from outside the camp. Like everything else, the water had to be paid for, though many people had diarrhea after drinking it. When the truck arrived, men and women brought buckets, pots, any containers they could find, and these were filled from the back of the truck. Three old people died of dysentery and typhoid within the first month of our arrival. For a while, during those early weeks, melted snow was used for cooking and drinking. When the snow on the hills disappeared, water from the muddy Fraser was dragged up the steep embankment in buckets, and strained and boiled. Water was the preoccupation of every family, and remained so during all the years we lived in the camp. Eventually, river water was pumped up from the Fraser and filtered and stored in huge wooden tanks that were levelled on boulders, but it would be a long time before the tanks were in place. Mostly, people lugged their own water and stored it in barrels that stood outside their doors. As for heat, empty oil drums were fashioned into makeshift stoves, and these were placed inside the shacks while construction continued.

  The next step was to tack tarpaper to the outside of the shacks. Father dug at the winter crust of hardened earth around our new home and tried to loosen sandy dirt that could be shovelled and banked against the outer walls. He did as much as he could to prevent the winds from gusting under the shack and between cracks in the wooden floor.

  In the midst of this continuous activity, Hiroshi and Keiko and I watched trucks as they drove in and out of camp. We talked about what lay beyond the mountains, and we tried to imagine the sorts of places from which the trucks had come. Hiroshi was all for talking to the drivers, asking questions, trying to help unload supplies that were too heavy for him. He managed to do some small errands, made himself useful and even earned a five-cent tip every once in a while, from one of the drivers. Sometimes, he was given a local paper by a driver, or a pack of gum. When he was given a paper, he brought it to Father, who read it by lantern light after everyone else had gone to bed.

  As for Keiko, she was missing school more and more. Classes had come to a complete halt, except for the few lessons given informally while we had been at Hastings Park. Keiko also missed her friends from our old fishing village. She had made a few new friends, however, and when she wasn’t required to help Mother, she could be seen with the other girls, playing school, going over old lessons they had already completed. Keiko wanted books and workbooks. She wanted a teacher. She wanted school to start up again quickly. But so far, there was no school.

  In the evenings, after working on the shacks, the men met and made a plan to set aside a large field area across the dirt road, on the river side, so that by late spring the snagged tumbleweed could be burned off and communal gardens could be started, as well as an allotment strip for each family. Beyond the wide portion designated for growing vegetables, a steep cliff hung over the river below. Rules were made. Young children were not permitted past the garden plots because of the danger of falling from this great height into the river. Older children were assigned to watch over the young.

  There was much discussion about how the vital garden space would be irrigated, because it had become apparent that we were stuck in a place that had arid, sandy soil. A number of experienced farmers who were interned in the camp were certain that tomatoes would grow well here. The men had been warned by the man who was leasing the land where we now lived—and who came by from time to time—that the growing season was not a long one, but the summers were extremely hot. Again, plans were made, this time to repair a damaged flume that was already on the site. Never short of ideas, the men were eventually able to divert water through a system of long wooden pipes with homemade filters. Cold, clear water rushed down from small mountain currents and from dammed streams into holding tanks and out the pipes again. This water was used for garden plots, and any extra for laundry and bathing. Every once in a while, someone hauled out a fat rainbow trout, caught in the pipes, caught between filters. A shout would be heard, and someone would pull out a trout and take it home for his dinner.

  In the midst of all the planning and building, there was visiting back and forth, tent to tent, tent to shack. If the sun was strong, neighbours gathered outside. I sat on a low three-legged stool Father had nailed together, and tried to stay out of his way because he always seemed to be in a temper. Sometimes I created pictures in the dirt with a stick; sometimes I drew with a finger against my knee and traced images. All the while, I was paying attention to what people had to say because everyone had a different story to tell. The community—for that’s what we were becoming—was trying to piece together details of what had happened. To ourselves and to every other person of Japanese ancestry who lived on the West Coast. A mail system was now in place. Letters addressed to the camp, already heavily censored, arrived by train in town and were driven across the bridge and dropped off in a mailbag. Camp mail was sorted on our side of the river. Letters came in from the stall
s at Hastings Park in Vancouver, where friends had been left behind, from separated family members in other camps in the interior of the province, and from as far south as California. Letters also arrived from Angler, a prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario. Surprising as it seemed, and despite the number of internment camps that had sprung up in the United States and Canada, some people believed that we were in the camp under a temporary arrangement. They were certain we’d be sent back to the homes we’d been forced to leave. Others said that the worst was yet to come.

  “This is the story of the two-dresser set,” said Ba, and we settled around the stove to listen—as many of us as could squeeze in.

  Most sat on the floor. The woodcarver whittled away at a stick of wood, and dropped the shavings into a carpenter’s apron spread over his lap.

  Ba and Ji were our neighbours now. They were an elderly couple whose shack had been completed before ours, just a few feet away. Elders and people with babies moved into their places first, followed by families with young children. Uncle Aki and Auntie Aya’s place was also finished, and they lived directly behind us, in the second row. Auntie Aya was seldom seen outside, and Uncle Aki told us she was resting in bed because she was always tired. She was vulnerable to cold and infection, Mother said, and she did not have the energy to be outside in the mountain air for hours at a time.

  Everyone was welcome in Ba and Ji’s shack. Ba and Ji had owned a store in Vancouver before being detained, and they were used to having people drop by. And people wanted to hear their stories. The old couple knew more than almost everyone else about recent events in the outside world. Unlike most of us after Pearl Harbor, they had not been forced into the cattle stalls of Hastings Park. Because they were already living in the city, they had not been on the early list for removal. Not like those of us from the fishing villages along the coast. Ba and Ji were registered and fingerprinted in Vancouver and were forced to obey curfew and carry IDs, but they had been allowed to stay in their home a bit longer. Eventually, they were sent to the camp along with everyone else.