Frances Itani - Requiem

I did. I understood what she was telling me, and it was because of the sea.

Greg and I returned to the cottage that day, after our inland river walk, and we stood on the cliff looking out over a long stretch of surf that was now somewhat diminished because the winds had lowered. The waves were still white-tipped but safe for leaping, and exciting for a small boy. There were four people in the water below, two of them children. We watched as they waited for the exact moment a wave peaked to dive headfirst into the foam. From where we stood, we could hear their voices drifting up as if from an old recording, bumpy and muffled, only the odd-pitched cry getting through.

Greg raced to get his bathing suit, and we changed and hurried down to the beach and into the cold water. Tiny smooth stones were being tossed pell-mell at the edge of shore. We swam, and jumped waves to get ourselves out deeper, and rode larger waves back to shore, and fought against them to wade out, and rode them in again. I couldn’t keep from laughing aloud while Greg shrieked his delight. When I finally persuaded him to come in, his slim body was hard and blue with cold. I rolled a big towel around him and sat him down so that I could massage his legs.

That evening after our picnic supper, we sat below the dunes around the fire and we were rewarded with a moving-picture show of the aurora borealis against a dark wall of sky: vivid, miraculous, an infinity away. Great vertical sheets of light. The breeze had dropped completely; the sea was calm, its bulge ominous as ever. Foam slid in over sand that had been pounded flat. The red blink-blink of a buoy flashed and bobbed far out. We listened to the slow wash of waves and watched in awe as the sky’s colours rushed past on their way to somewhere else. Shades of deep green to lighter shades and back again swept over the huge stage of the night. There were greens I have never seen before and have never seen since.

Greg told Lena, “All that moving colour in the sky makes me feel like shouting, Mom. It makes me feel like running underneath.” And then he shrank into himself. “It makes me feel like a tiny speck.” He started to drop off to sleep and, barefoot, I carried him over hard-packed sand and up steps that had been dug out of the dunes but managed to change shape in every weather. I tried to be careful of my footing, but it wasn’t a smooth climb and Greg woke before I could brush the sand off his legs and feet and get him into bed.

“You know, Dad, when I grow up,” he said, looking straight up at me, “I’m going to be all Japanese like you, instead of just half.” He snuggled deep into the covers, and then he added, “This has been the happiest day of my life.” In an instant, he was asleep.

When I told Lena, she said, “It’s because you went in with him. You could be bothered. You went into the sea, which he loves, and you jumped those fabulous white waves alongside him, and he’ll never forget.”

But I was thinking of the mirror, of the reflection that had stared back at me, the one I could not escape as a child or a young man. The hope that by the time I grew up, somehow, in some miraculous way, the mirror would turn me into someone else.

“Follow,” said Father.

It was mid-morning when we left the shack for our end-of-summer picnic, our big outing before school started up again in the fall. We walked single file, Hiroshi behind Father, then Keiko, then me. Mother was last in line, keeping an eye on us from behind. We waved, called out to Ba and Ji, and fell silent after we crossed the dirt road. We walked past the communal tomato gardens, past rows and rows of eggplant and radish, carrot and cucumber, melon and squash. We skirted the edge of the cliff and made our way through foliage and undergrowth, and found the zigzagged trail that descended the embankment. Down and down we went, always in shadow of the mountain, the sounds of our progress echoing back as we stumbled over gravel and root. The day’s heat pressed against the earth; the air was still. Sun poked through slits in the treetops and planted blotchy patterns of shadow and light over the trail. The lower parts of the path were hot and dry and sandy, and shifted each time a foot touched down. At the bottom, there was river, only river. That, and a small island in the midst of rushing water.

The moment we reached the chosen spot, Mother began to clear a space for our picnic. Father set down the bundles he had carried and he stood, hands on hips. We fell silent while he examined the river with a fisherman’s eyes.

“I thought the banks would be more exposed,” he said. “This water is dangerous and high. Higher than it should be so late in summer.”

He looked out again and I had a moment’s worry that he might lead us back up the trail without the picnic happening at all. But he did not look tense or angry, and it was clear that he, too, enjoyed being here, close to the great river.

“My arms are aching badly, really badly,” Hiroshi complained, filling the silence. He knew the complaint would get him nowhere, but he made it anyway. He had carried the gallon water jug all the way from the shack. Father glanced over at Hiroshi, but he did not reprimand. Carrying water was Hiroshi’s job, whether he wanted it or not.

Keiko’s job in this season was to help Mother with the canning and preserving, but she also worked in the gardens, picking tomatoes. There were no more classes held by Keiko on the slope above camp, but she continued to find and share materials for drawing and copying, and she helped me with reading and printing lessons. She and her friends had also persuaded an eighty-four-year-old woman in camp to teach Japanese dancing. At night, when the chores were done, the girls went to the community room to learn from the woman, who had once been a dancing teacher in Vancouver.

My own chores were not difficult these days. I, too, picked tomatoes. I also carried armloads of wood into the shack for the stove, and I stacked wood outside after Father had finished chopping. Most of the time, Father was after me to stop daydreaming. Sometimes he rapped my head with his knuckles because I wasn’t paying attention. “When you aren’t so scrawny, when you grow taller and bigger, you won’t be spending hours over your scribblings,” he said. “You’ll be taking your share of family responsibility, like everyone else.”

But he kept me busy, all the same. There were summer days when I worked for hours stacking wood into tidy rows behind our shack. If even one log or piece of kindling stuck out crookedly, he came out and knocked the woodpile apart and made me start over again.

Despite Father, I did find time to draw. Mother helped by putting away bits of cardboard for me, and these were hidden under the edge of the mattress. Sometimes, during the summer months, I was able to get away from the whole family and climb the trail to the Bench. I sat up there by myself on a tree stump on the side of the mountain, and I looked down over sagebrush and rolling tumbleweed, the outhouses, the rows of shacks, the gardens on the far side of the dirt road, the water tanks with wooden bungs in the sides and the river in the deepest part of the ravine.

From high up, it was easy to tell which shack belonged to my family because of the neatness of the woodpile and because of the crooked window at the back. Sometimes I would see Hiroshi come around the side of the house with our bows and arrows, and he would look in all directions, searching for me. If I didn’t feel like playing in the woods, I ducked back into the shadows before he had a chance to look up. And there were others to watch, too. Our community was in perpetual motion: people walking or standing in different attitudes and postures; sixty-one shacks to observe and draw, some with oddly proportioned additions—lean-tos, wooden bathhouses, overhangs to keep woodpiles dry, pits dug for earth cellars, tiny rooms or shelves added to the side or back of a shack when there was extra space and spare lumber. There were many chicken coops now, too, including ours. Chicken manure was never wasted, and was used as fertilizer on the gardens. Because of the smell, the coops were kept at a slight distance from our homes.