Frances Itani - Requiem

Maybe First Father was the most stable one of us all. He was the one who had staked out his territory. But the years went on and distances stretched farther and farther. After the Redress Agreement was signed in the fall of 1988, after the public apology was made by the prime minister, First Father received his cheque, as we all did. Mine was banked and invested for Greg’s education. First Father’s payment, Kay had let us know, was put towards buying the bungalow he and Mother had rented for years, on the outskirts of Kamloops. But Mother was no longer alive to enjoy the fact of ownership. Nor did she live long enough to hear the Apology.

I had been going over all of these things in my mind and had turned away from Lena after our conversation about moods. I was lying on my side with my back to her. I knew she was not asleep; I could tell by her breathing. But I had nothing to offer.

“Listen to me,” she said into the dark, and she brought me back. “You and I started a new chapter. Our own chapter. One that has nothing to do with war. A chapter that began with love and opened enough space to let in hope.”

I turned to face her. “You know I haven’t forgotten those years, Lena. But I don’t waste time feeling sorry for myself.”

“I know you don’t,” she said. “But there are those moments that rear up every once in a while.”

I did not say what I was thinking: that those moments were about the threat of chaos, the threat of loss.

“Everything happened a long time ago,” I told her. “I know I’m blessed to have what I have now, to have the family we have. I’m blessed to be able to practise my art. And tell me, what was that about you playing piano—when we were at Miss Carrie’s tonight? You’ve never said a word about that before. What about the silence around that?”

“You’re just trying diversionary tactics,” she said. “As usual. Anyway, it wasn’t really a silence. There wasn’t anything to say. Piano was something I studied as a child, that’s all. How could that measure up to your stories of Okuma-san and the keyboard of ponderosa pine?”

“Well, I never learned to play,” I said. “In fact, for me, Beethoven was first learned in silence. Not exactly silence. Silence shaped by rhythm. Hands, fingers, tapping, rapping. Long before I knew what the actual music sounded like. Except for Minuet in G. Grandfather Minuet.”

I had already told Lena about the music from Missisu’s piano entering our kitchen the morning we were uprooted from the coast.

“Would you be able to identify music if I tapped it out?”

“Maybe. As long as it’s Beethoven. Who knows?”

“Turn on your side again,” she said. “There. I don’t know every note, but I can do part of this by ear. It will be awkward, but stretch your imagination. Don’t move, now.”

I waited. Tried to push the memories away.

Fingertips on my naked back. A moment of stillness while she thought, and then rapid pulsing, very rapid. And steady, from the left. Movement, sudden and light, from the right. Both hands, even and quick. More rapid movement, melody on the right, quickly up and down the scale, a pause, steady pulsing again.

She stopped.

“Again,” I said, and she repeated the pattern in exactly the same way.

“Waldstein Sonata,” I said. “No. 21, first movement. The entire sonata lasts close to twenty-five minutes.”

“Incredible. I can hardly believe it.”

The camp, the shack, the cold. Sitting at the table with a piece of cream-coloured paper in front of me, paper that had been slit from one of Okuma-san’s best books. Indigo ink, a fine nib, a corner of blotter. The clock on the cupboard. His head nodding forward just before his hands came crashing down on ponderosa pine. The mottling of the skin afterwards. The dryness. The splitting of his thumb and the way he sewed it back together with black thread. Me, with my eyes scrunched, looking, but trying, at the same time, not to see .

“Okay, here’s another. From the beginning.”

One chord on bare skin. Both hands. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four …

I knew it at once, but she continued.

“Piano Concerto No. 4, first movement,” I said. Hearing every note in my mind, as she was.

“A symphony, then.”

“Maybe I can guess which one before you start.”

“Do you realize that we could go on the road?” Lena said. “Side-show—I could be your manager. We could make our fortune this way. I could quit teaching.”

“Play.”

“Light touch, playful, steady beat, non-stop, bit of melody, steady, steady, rock-rock, rock-rock, tah-tah, tah-tah, tah-tah.”

“Easy. Maelzel had invented the metronome and I think Beethoven was having a bit of fun. Symphony No. 8, second movement. Tah-tah, tah-tah. He fought with Maelzel, one of the feuds that lasted. Maelzel, the inventor, even made several mechanical hearing aids, but Beethoven said they didn’t work. Any collaboration between the two was not a happy event. Beethoven considered the man ill-bred, someone who was trying to infringe on his rights.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Okuma-san. The stories he told. All those nights in the chicken coop after we left the camp. He bought an old turntable our last year in British Columbia. And records, one at a time, as he could afford them—usually secondhand. All the while, he was salting money away so that we could move east, where he could teach and send me to art school. It was one of those nights in the chicken coop when I heard a recording of Beethoven for the first time. The light was fading around us. I felt the music enter my soul, I swear. We listened under that low ceiling, in a building that should have been condemned …”

“Please don’t talk about the chicken coop,” Lena said. “I can’t bear it, not tonight. Here. I’m going to play the last one. Ready? This will be difficult. Focus. Identify.”

Her hands, resting on my skin, all fingertips. Slowly, slowly, floating, one side to the other. Pressure, even pressure on my back. Pause. Into the skin, all fingers again, forward and back. Pause. So many pauses. My body reaching to meet the silhouette of melody, the music shaped by rhythm. And then, the fingers of her right hand, only the right, slowly picked out, slowly. Disjointed taps. What? What? I feel as if she’s swaying now. And I.

The rage , Okuma-san said. We cannot allow the rage. If we allow it, it will also consume .

As it consumed First Father. As it broke Auntie Aya after the burning of Baby Taro. As it left its marks, forever, on me.

“You have to concentrate,” she said. “I’ll start again, from the beginning.”

Slow floating fingers across my skin, the pauses.

The beauty of the music in my head. The powerful surge of realization. The unmatchable creation that would always be there for every race, for every generation, for all time.

“Adagio. Second movement. Emperor,” I said, so softly I didn’t know if she had heard. It had been the first Beethoven recording I had ever listened to.

I turned to face her again. We fell asleep, clinging to each other. The music was in my body. I was clinging to life itself.

“You’re driving straight through?”

“That’ll work out best, I think.”

Kay has picked up the phone as if she had her hand out, waiting for it to ring. She’s not happy about this new plan of mine. I don’t tell her I’m already on the other side of Edmonton.

“I’ll be stopping at your place on the way back,” I tell her.

“Hugh went out to get extra groceries,” she says, as if this will change my mind. “And I told Henry I’d call him when I knew which day you were arriving. He’s planning to join us for dinner. I’m making teriyaki chicken. Henry has a serious friend, I don’t know if he told you. I haven’t met her yet. Someone he met after he sold his restaurant. Or maybe he met her while he still owned it. Anyway, they were friends before. She’s Japanese. He’s on the pension now, you know. The first of the three of us. Next year, it will be my turn. Aren’t you glad you’re the baby of the family?” She laughs. “Henry has taken up weightlifting, too,” she adds. “At his age.”