Frances Itani - Requiem

From behind the curtain that divided bedroom from kitchen, I heard his footsteps, followed by a dragging sound and a creak, which I knew to mean that he had lowered himself to his chair and was balancing the keyboard. As if I were beside him, I could see in my mind how he would be relaxing his shoulders, adjusting his knees, wiggling his feet and planting them flat to the floor. His upper body would dip forward, the way it always did when he began.

If he was about to play what he said was called the Hammerklavier, I knew his head would be bowed. I tensed then and waited for the sound of his hands to come down hard against the plank. The fierceness of the beginning always startled me, no matter how prepared I tried to be. Then I heard his hands moving in a different way as they made a hollow tapping up and down the length of the silent keyboard. Not silent, because playing against wood was far from silent, even from where I lay in my bed. Okuma-san’s fingers were entering what I had come to think of as a frenzied race towards a place so far away it could not be reached, not even by him. This rapid movement of fingers and hands went on for some time and then there was a pause, and after that his hands slowed and paused and slowed again.

I was becoming sleepy, and the sound of the wind began to blend with the insistent rapping of fingers. I thought of Hiroshi and Keiko getting ready for bed in their shack farther along the row. I imagined them wearing the same kind of pyjamas I had on—the ones Mother had made for the three of us from flannel sheets. I knew that Keiko had her own bed now, because she had told me so at school.

“My cot is at the end of the kitchen,” she had said. And then she’d laughed and added, “At night, I’m the warmest one in the family because I sleep closest to the stove. Hiroshi still sleeps in the bedroom. Where we all used to sleep before …”

She’d stopped abruptly, as if she had blurted out too much.

I pictured all of this while I was buried under the blankets I had pulled up over my ears. I pictured First Father getting home after the celebration, maybe staggering a little as he checked the stove, his last ritual before sleep. I knew that he, like Okuma-san, would have to get up in the night to add more wood.

Not so easy to conjure at this moment was Mother, who had turned me away, even though I had pushed my chair close to hers during the play. I knew that she was still my mother, and that there was no mother in the house of my second father. I listened to the wind both inside and out while I was thinking of her. And as I was dropping off to sleep, I wondered if, at exactly the same moment, she was also thinking of me.

Sweeping along Saskatchewan prairie, I am surrounded by the sounds of the Missa Solemnis , the great and glorious Mass. From the heart! May it go to the heart . Beethoven’s message, written in his own hand above the Kyrie. As I do every time I listen, I wait for the burst of passion that marks its beginnings.

In the camp, Okuma-san said, “When we are out of this place”—he had been trying to tell me about the Mass—”you and I might someday hear this wonderful music together. When you are older, we might even be fortunate enough to attend a live performance. The beginning of the Missa Solemnis has a way of entering the spirit all at once and then holding it captive until the last note.”

It would not be until the late fifties that I would hear a Toscanini record of the Mass, when Okuma-san and I listened to what seemed to be sounds funnelled from many places into one place, the choir swelling into the room where we sat. And now it’s as if I am compelled to hear this, and every one of Beethoven’s works, through Okuma-san’s ears and in the context of his stories. It is a big work , Beethoven wrote. Simply that. Nothing about the nearly four years of its creation, the dedication, the countless delays. By the time it was finished, Beethoven was in his fifties. I’ve sometimes wondered what he felt at its completion. Numbed, perhaps. When I listen, I think of how he had to witness its performance in Vienna. He was unable to hear a note of it. Three years later, in 1827, just when the music was finally being published, he was dead.

As the Missa Solemnis soars inside the car, I open a back window slightly and let the music escape outside. I had been thinking of a drawing Greg worked on one Sunday morning when he was a child. Lena and I were still in bed and he was patiently waiting for his breakfast. He drew a man lying on the ground, an ambulance door open beside him. A light on top of the ambulance, with rays to denote flashing, had been filled in with red crayon. The caption read: IT IS BEST TO KEEP A PRSON WARM WEN HE HAS A HART ATTAK.

I listen again and look out at the prairie landscape. I have driven north as far as I want to go on this cool and sunny day. I stop the car, turn, and begin to travel south and west again, mainly west, where I’ll rejoin the main highway that leads to Alberta. For some time now, I have been passed by snow geese that are holding up the limitless sky, line after wavering line, as they migrate north. Now there are more and more, and they begin to land in farmers’ fields on both sides of the highway, the vees overlapping until they’ve become an assemblage of sinuous shapes.

While this is going on around me, Basil begins to pace. He starts dashing from one side of the car to the other, sniffing the air repeatedly. He keeps trying to force his nose into the gap where I’ve lowered the back window. If I stop again, there’s no telling what he will do. Run to the fields, ears flapping, bellowing for sure. I’d never get him back.

A new sound begins to break the silence of earth and sky. It is a chattering of thousands that can be heard from more than a mile away. The earth where the geese land becomes a moving mass of white. Then an entire field seems to rise suddenly into the air. The geese have been startled, perhaps by a fox. And though many separate flocks are on the ground, they surge upwards as if they are one, and swerve in a wide U-turn to regroup. It’s as if a lasso has rounded them up in the sky. There is a jostling of position while they assume the same direction, and then they land again. Their continuous noisy chatter can be heard inside the car, even over the Gloria of the Mass.

I wish Greg, with his love of the natural world, were able to witness this astonishing sight. But he is on the East Coast, witnessing his own astonishments. And here, above Basil and me, the migration goes on all day, thousands upon thousands of white geese, black wingtips flashing.

I slow, take my time and listen to the sustaining power of the final movement—described as the prayer for inner and outer peace.

DURING THE LAST EVENING of that first trip we made to Prince Edward Island in the early eighties, the three of us took a walk along the beach for a mile or so. “To say goodbye to the sea,” Greg told Lena as we stepped out of the mobile home and made our way over dunes and down the side of the cliff. “But only for now. Because I’m going to remember this place, and hold it inside of me until we come back next year. We are coming back, aren’t we?”

To which Lena replied, “I see it all now—and for the rest of time. I’m living with a man who is obsessed with rivers, a boy who loves the sea. We’ll be planning every holiday from now on around rivers. Or oceans. Or rivers that empty into oceans.”

The sky was dull when we set out, the vaguest of suns showing itself in a haze at the approach of sunset. Strips of horizontal cloud were stretched across the western sky like iron bars. The bottom half of the sun disappeared all at once, leaving the upper half stranded in an inverted silly smile. It was the only notable shape in that vast grey space. Cormorants flew low over the waves, their migration having begun. Greg was thrilled that he had recently learned to identify them. While tagging after Albert on the farm, he’d been taught to differentiate between cormorants and geese.