by Kurt Caswell
“Answer me, answer me!” Genji says to Fujitsubo: “I cannot live without you. And yet, what use to die? For I know that in every life to come I am doomed to suffer the torment of this same heinous passion.”
“What shall we cook?” I asked, pushing the moment away.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do it.” And she did.
And that was all. That moment faded away from us like it hadn’t ever been. I didn’t know how it was for her, but I felt foolish and weak, ugly and cowardly. I wondered why what some people did so recklessly tormented me. Was I shallow and selfish? Was I broken? Was I mad?
She wanted to visit one of my classes, the “littler ones,” she said. “I want to meet some of the little children.”
So it was that I brought her along to the portable that day to talk to my sixth-grade class, to tell them about the world she lived in, about Hokkaido, and Japan, about how far she had traveled to be here, about her impressions of this place called Borrego. I wondered if her visit wouldn’t open the door a bit wider, if my students wouldn’t begin to wonder about other places and other cultures, if they wouldn’t come to wonder about anything at all.
The class was utterly silent as I showed Sakura into the room. She was dressed in a grey wool skirt and a black blouse with a lacy collar, her hair pulled back and up and held in place by a silver hairpin from Tiffany. She wore black tights and black shoes, shiny, with low, squared-off heels. She looked lovely and happy and a little formal, as a guest might look, but also approachable and open, and she was smiling. I wondered why in the previous few days I couldn’t tell her that I loved her.
My class sat upright and still, like they were about to meet the Queen, and Sakura went to the front of the room with me and I introduced her. “Maybe you can say ‘hello’ in Japanese,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “Konichiwa,” she said.
No one moved. No one said a word. I had never seen them like this before.
“Konichiwa means ‘hello,’ in Japanese,” Sakura said. “Maybe you can say it. ‘Ko-ni-chi-wa,’” she said again, her voice trailing up on the end of it.
“Ko-ni-chi-wa,” the class said together.
“That’s good,” she said. “One more time. ‘Konichiwa!’”
“Koni-chiwa,” the class said again.
“Now your turn,” she said. “In your language.”
“Oh, I know,” said Joseph Jones. “Yá’át’ééh!” he said.
“Yá’át’ééh,” Sakura said. And everyone cheered.
“Koni-chiwa,” Shane said. “Koni-chiwa, yeah.”
“Oh,” Sakura said. “Good. Konichiwa. O genki desuka?”
The class went silent again.
“That means, ‘Hello, are you doing fine? Are you doing okay?’ ” Sakura told them.
“Oh, I get it,” said Kyle Bigfoot. “Genki desk-o,” and he patted the table with his hand.
Sakura laughed then, and the whole class laughed too, and then went stone silent again, as if to study Sakura laughing.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Shane. “Can you tell us about China? What do they eat over there anyways?”
“Shane,” I said. “I keep telling you. Not China. Japan.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But can you tell us about it anyways?”
“Don’t you have Chinese restaurants here?” Sakura said.
“I don’t know,” Shane said. “We only eat Indian food.”
“Japan is one of a different country,” Sakura said. “It’s so small island near China. Well, not so small, but China is very big.”
“And do they use soap way over there?” asked Kyle. “Do they wash with soap?”
“Yeah, hey, do they have alligators over there?” asked Charlie Hunter.
“No, stupit,” said Valeria. “That’s way down in Texas.”
“They could have alligators,” said Charlie. “You don’t know.”
“No,” Sakura said. “No alligators. But soap, for sure.”
“See,” said Valeria. “Told you.”
“Told you,” Charlie said to Valeria. Then he said, “Hey, you ever eat fry bread? It’s real good.”
“No. Never tried it. Maybe before I go back,” Sakura said.
“Yeah, you have to,” said Shane. “ ’Cause it’s real good. I eat it every day too.”
“Can you eat lunch with us?” asked Leanne Yazzie. “Just us girls, I mean. Not those boys. Can she, Mr. Caswell?”
“Yeah, can you?” asked Valeria.
Sakura looked at me.
“That’s up to her,” I said. “Don’t ask me. But we should include the boys too, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” said Michael. “Include the boys.”
“No way,” said Valeria. “Boys just mess everything up.”
“No, we don’t,” said Shane.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Sakura is going to show you something.”
“Yes,” she said. “I brought some papers.” She took out a package of origami papers, small squares about six by six inches, of various patterns and colors.
“Wow,” said Leanne. “So beautiful.”
“They are,” said Sakura.
“So beautiful like you,” said Shane.
All the girls laughed, and Shane blushed like he hadn’t meant to say it.
“So beautiful like you,” Valeria said, laughing again.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Shane said. “I didn’t mean nothing, for reals,” he said. “For really reals, Mr. Caswell, oh, wait, I gotta go to the bathroom,” and hurried away.
“So we’re making crane,” said Sakura. “It’s simple one. And for good luck.”
“What’s that?” Michael said.
“Of course it’s a bird, anyway,” Leanne said.
“Yeah, it’s a bird,” Valeria said.
“Oh, you mean like an eagle,” Kyle said.
“No, well, a little, but a crane is more longer, and tall,” Sakura said. “In Japan a crane is for long life and good luck.”
“Like a horny toad,” Shane said, returning from the bathroom. He seemed to have recovered himself, and was happy and confident.
“What’s that?” Sakura asked.
“It’s a horny toad,” Valeria said. “It’s a horny toad for good luck.”
“I’ll make you one,” Shane said, and he drew one out on the back of an origami paper. “Like this, see.”
“Oh, I see,” Sakura said. “Those live here?”
“Of course they do,” Valeria said, looking a little disgusted.
“How do you make a crane, anyways?” Michael said.
“OK, right. Let’s try. First you choose a paper you like,” Sakura said, and we started in.
Step after step, Sakura taught them how to make an origami crane. They were focused and attentive, asking a few questions here and there about Japan, about her life there, about food and cars and Wal-Mart, and about China. Somehow, they couldn’t get China off their minds.
“I should have brought a map,” I said.
“You can show it next time,” Sakura said.
“Yes, I will show them next time.”
I was surprised how the feeling in the classroom shifted, how Sakura seemed to soften the class, bring it together. For that day at least, we did away with taking sides—me versus you, us versus them—and we were all one people working toward a common goal. I had to ask, then, was the aggression I usually felt in the classroom really coming from them? I always thought it was. I always blamed them for it. Perhaps it wasn’t them at all. Perhaps it was me. Or at least, I was so much a part of it that its presence, how it continued from this day forward, was at least partly in my hands. If I could learn from Sakura today, perhaps I’d have a much better spring semester. I didn’t know what I was learning, what I needed to learn, but I realized then that these kids were not defined by their bad behavior and that I needed to find a way to access this other side of them, to keep us all moving together in the same direction. I fe
lt hopeful, even eager to come to class the next time.
I took Sakura to see the abandoned hogan at the end of a day when snow came out of the north in short bursts and flurried around us like moths in pursuit of the moon. We drove my truck the little way beyond the Trading Post to the V in the road, bumping along over the frozen ground. I parked aslant in the ditch. I asked Sakura if she really wanted to see this place, explaining that the Navajos believe a place like this is bad luck, that for us to go here was to disturb the dead. She said yes, she wanted to see it, and if the dead man’s spirit was here, maybe she would be able to see that too.
Sakura came from a devoted Shinto family. Her mother prayed to Shinto gods and paid close attention to her dreams. Sakura once told me that her mother could see ghosts and spirits, especially those that stayed close to people. Sakura said she could sometimes see ghosts and spirits too. When I was still in Hokkaido, Sakura’s mother had a dream about me. She dreamed that I would betray her daughter one day by choosing another woman, a woman who would appear before me wearing a red dress. The story angered me. I passed it off as superstition.
A few weeks before I left Hokkaido, I traveled to China with a small group of friends. We traveled in Shanghai, then to Guilin, and finally to Beijing. I was making my way from the Earthly Tranquility Palace to the Imperial Garden in the Forbidden City when I met Sheryl. I had caught her eye several times that morning among the crowds. Finally I approached her and asked for her name. Her Chinese name was Shi Rong. She was an architectural student at China People’s University working on a thesis comparing ancient and contemporary architecture as a way of understanding political shifts in China. “Everywhere you look,” she said, “you see the new on top of the old.” She was not wearing a red dress, but the Forbidden City, the sanctuary of all the emperors of China, from Yong Le in 1420 to the last emperor, Puyi, who was crowned the Son of Heaven at age two in 1908, was now draped in the deep red of communism, and I had passed through the front gate beneath a great red banner with the image of Mao Tse Tung.
It was spring in Beijing, and everything was green where we stood. The flowers were brilliant and innumerable, tiny white and purple displays against the hardened brown of the stones of so many years. The structures around us were very old, the roofs low and red and soft to our eyes. For that moment, at least, I was in love with Sheryl. She was seductive, the way old memories are, and I wanted to consume her. I met her later that night in the lobby of the Hotel Xin Da Du. She came dressed all in black. She was thin and tall and graceful. Her hair was long and black, and it hung straight down her back reflecting light as she moved. She took my hand and led me out through the city into a series of dark, empty streets that were closed to traffic on either end for construction. At one point I stopped.
“You know,” I said. “I have no idea where I am. You have the advantage, if you want it.”
She turned toward me then, fixing me in her eyes, only I couldn’t see them, just the presence of them, in the dark. She didn’t understand.
“I mean, I’m a foreigner here,” I said. “If you wanted to take advantage of that, take my money or my credit cards or something . . . I’m a little vulnerable right now.”
She held my hand tighter. “That’s not the advantage I want,” she said, and led me on.
We turned into a little bar owned by people she knew. There was no one else inside. We sat down next to each other in a booth in the back corner. She ordered drinks for us, I don’t know what, and she pulled her long hair forward over her right shoulder. She put her mouth on mine and I moved into her then. We did not stop when the drinks came. She pulled away, a little breathless, and said, “It’s so much how I want you,” and then we made love in the booth in the darkened corner with most of our clothes on.
When I returned to Hokkaido, I told Sakura about Sheryl. I told her that as her mother had warned, I had betrayed her, and I could not be the lifelong partner she was looking for. She cried then, but she said she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter to her, and that we should forget about it and go on. “This is our one chance,” she said. “Maybe we won’t know each other ever again.”
Of course it did matter to her, I knew. And it mattered to me that faced with this moment in which I might have accepted a life with a beautiful and intelligent woman, I denied it, denied Sakura and a future with her. Was I mad? What was I doing? How could I be so cruel? Yet what she said to me—“it didn’t matter”—made me feel uncomfortably powerful. I accepted it, and we spent the night together inside our folded lies.
If only you allow me,
I will willingly wipe
Salt tears from your eyes
With these fresh leaves
—Bashō
At the abandoned hogan, I wandered with Sakura for an hour or more through the field of derelict things. It was quiet and cold, and our footsteps broke the brittle branches of desert shrubs. I showed her to the hogan, and we circled the outside until we arrived at the door. She stood in front of it, beautiful and frightened.
“You can push it open,” I said. “It opens a little way to see inside.”
“What will I see inside?” she asked.
“Just have a look.”
She turned away from me then, pressed the door open with both her hands. It went in to the length of the chain, and Sakura bent to peer inside. The wind swirled in behind us, kicked up some dust and then cleared it.
“It’s okay,” Sakura said, looking back at me. “He’s not in here. There’s nothing left here but his memories.”
A few days later, Sakura returned to Hokkaido. We were at a kind of stalemate, or an impasse, or, more honestly, we avoided, here at the end, talking about a future. I drove her to Albuquerque, where she boarded a plane for home. She cried in my arms there in the empty, hollow-sounding space that makes airport partings almost unbearable. I wanted to feel it with her, the deep grief and joy that wracked her so, but nothing lived inside me then but emptiness. Was something wrong with me? Had my heart died since last we parted? I held her close as her tears splashed against my shirt. Then she straightened and stood tall to bear it, kissed me, and turned to make her way through the gate where only travelers could go.
NINE
THE EASTERN NAVAJO AGENCY SPELLING BEE
In February, Bob King asked me to work with students who wanted to compete in the local spelling bee at Mariano Lake. I agreed, and Lauren agreed to go with me to the Eastern Agency Bee if any of our Borrego kids qualified. And qualify they did—two girls and two boys. For the boys’ team it was Miles Wiseman, the white boy (who had an obvious advantage in that he was one of the few students at Borrego who spoke better English than Navajo), and his best friend, Tom Charlie, both of them in the fifth grade; and for the girls’ team, Vanessa Angel, in the eighth grade, and Valeria Benally, in the seventh. A few more kids came along as support. They had practiced hard all spring but were easily eliminated at Mariano Lake. They were Renee Benally, my star eighth-grade English student, whose defeat surprised me; Linda Yazzie, a very bright sixth grader who also surprisingly did not qualify; then Carmen Yazzie, Linda’s sister; and Marcella Brown.
Marcella, the sixth-grade girl whose mother I had met at Bashas’ in Crownpoint, once told me that she had been stopped by the Navajo police while driving the family car, a thirty-year old Chrysler almost as big inside as a hogan. She was en route to Bashas’ to steal food, she said. Of course she didn’t want to do it, because, for one thing, it was too hard to drive. She could hardly see over the dashboard. And besides that, her mother worked at Bashas’. They knew her in there and trusted her. She didn’t want to steal, she said, but she had to, she explained, because her parents had been away for four days, she didn’t have any money, and her little brothers and sisters and cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters said they were starving to death. So she was going to have to steal. It wasn’t her driving that gave her away to the police, she said. She had done it before, so she knew how to use the signal on the car, and s
he knew that she shouldn’t go too slow or too fast so as not to draw attention to herself, and she knew she had to be real careful and go straight down the road like an arrow, not swerve back and forth and be all crazy. She knew all that. But what attracted the police that day was that here went this big car down Highway 371 and there didn’t seem to be anybody at the wheel.
It wasn’t uncommon on this part of the reservation to hear stories like Marcella’s. Lots of children got left at home, way out beyond the borders of the world, especially around the first of the month, when government checks came in and people again had money for traveling and shopping and liquor. It wasn’t that the parents were cruel or crazed by addiction (although in some cases they were) but that, like everyone else, they were just trying to survive. Everyone had to do their part, even the young children. They learned to be resourceful, these Navajo children left at home, so that for someone as young as eleven or twelve, being stranded in a little hogan with nothing to eat in the cupboards, a huge stack of firewood, and a few brothers and sister to care for became little more than routine.
