Frances Itani - Requiem

The front door is firmly closed and locked, the spare key given to Miss Carrie, who, with her diminutive frame, now emerges from her own house next door and stands at the top of her veranda step. She offers a regal wave in farewell. She has thrown some sort of greatcoat over her back, and its weight tips her forward more than usual. She has one hand on her walker and tilts her eyes upwards as if to acknowledge a neck too fragile to support her head and its thickness of white hair. She has declared, in the past, that she is the same age as the stone house she lives in, though she’s never divulged how many years that is. Ninety-something, no further details. The house was inherited from her late father, a General of the Great War, whom she looked after in his old age. Although he’s been dead for decades, his presence fills the house and she still refers to him as “Daddy.” “Mommy” died ten years before “Daddy.” All of this happened before we moved into the neighbourhood. Miss Carrie doesn’t seem to have much ready income apart from her pension, but she is surrounded by ancient furniture and memorabilia. During the seventies, when we bought our house, she adopted us as family and later became an honorary, close-at-hand grandma to Greg when he was born. Now she’s the only “grandmother” he has. When I phoned last night to tell her I was heading west on a sudden trip, she offered to bring in the mail and keep an eye on things, as she usually does.

“I’m nearly blind,” she’s been saying for two decades. “Blind as an underground mole.” But there isn’t much Miss Carrie doesn’t see. And she insists that she’s capable of checking my house, casting out junk mail, watering indoor plants. She’ll do that with love and care, in the same way she goes outside with a small wooden bucket on summer evenings to water a scraggly maple, which, against odds, has pushed up through cement on city property in front of her house. “Poor tree,” she mutters while she pours water to its roots. “Someone has to help you stay alive.”

I wave to her now and start to back out of the driveway, feeling that I’m the one who has the eyesight of an underground mole. And it’s impossible not to hear Lena beside me, steering me along.

“What do you want?” I ask the air inside the car. I even turn my head to the right. Somehow, Basil knows I’m not addressing him. It wouldn’t be the first time the hound reads the human mind.

What do you? the silence replies.

Once on the street, my foot drops heavily to the pedal, though it’s not my intention to depart in a roar. Too late. Miss Carrie has seen my lips move before I pull away. She’s caught me talking to myself. Not that she doesn’t do the same. She speaks her thoughts aloud, laughs as she does, makes no apologies.

She’ll think I’m talking to Basil. Still, I’m distracted. By the belief, momentary as it was, that Lena really was there. First at the door, and then beside me. As vivid and real as she was in my early-morning dream.

Music blasts from the car radio and I’m on my way. What I hear is a burst of chaos. The middle of something I can’t immediately identify.

A violent clash of sounds. Notes brought together against their will. Dissonance. And then, I recognize Eroica , first movement. The chaotic climax is reached, followed by pulsing, shrugging, withering steps. I know the symphony in its entirety thanks to Okuma-san, who, for so many years, tried to teach me about grand themes.

I turn the corner at the end of the street, relieved that Miss Carrie’s house and my own can no longer be seen in the rear-view. Leave it behind. Leave it all behind . Lena’s voice in my head. I’ve read that soon after a loved one dies, the person’s voice will no longer be remembered. But this hasn’t happened to me, not at all. Not even after five months have passed.

As Eroica continues, I think of Beethoven, who must have known a great deal about chaos and suffering and grand themes. He died in his fifty-seventh year, younger than I am now. What did he know of the human condition to be able to write the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? What did he believe—believe in—when he chose the poetry of Schiller, whose work he so much admired? He declared Schiller to be an “immortal” and worth the trouble of setting his words to music. Oh, you millions! … above the canopy of stars … a loving Father surely must dwell .

It’s all so bloody complicated. The persistent attempts to put something meaningful on canvas—or into music, or on the page.

“Sex and death,” Otto said during one of our early meetings to discuss the river project. “ Eros, Thanatos . Think of it, Bin. Every book I publish is ultimately about sex and death.”

But he hasn’t said that since Lena’s funeral. And he’s never mentioned the word love .

I stop at a light, do my best to shove everything sideways out of mind: my sister’s phone call, First Father asking to see me, the last of the river drawings—due and overdue.

At my most recent meeting with Otto and Nathan, Otto said, “Could we settle on the middle of June at the latest, Bin? For a final deadline? For the sake of the catalogue? It’ll be stretching things with the show in November, but we can do it—if we all agree. Of course, the last bits and pieces have to be tidied up.”

Otto, Nathan, myself nodding silently. The solid handshakes that followed. The perpetual need to tidy up.

Again, I try to clear my head, to focus on the drive ahead, to imagine a destination. But the thought of destination, the word, the sound of it, makes me wonder what my real destination is: The camp? First Father? Final drawings for the show?

Why am I leaving?

You’re trying to force things to matter .

I want to work.

Which means? A hope that your life will change?

I have the distinct sensation that despite the wheels of the car rotating as they should, I’m suspended in a kind of punishing no man’s land. I narrow a slit in my mind, try to block everything but the continuing music of Eroica . Grand themes. I’ve lived enough for a lifetime and I’m not an old man yet. But because I’m making an effort not to, I think of Lena again. It’s the Beethoven. One of my favourite pieces is his Leonore Overture III , which reminds me of Lena and not only because of the name. It’s the opening. The extended note. The descending scale that levels in a thickening of darkness. And then, a flute entering from far away, leading up into the light as if announcing its arrival through a long tunnel. Joy rising from an underground spring, that’s the way I hear it. Far and near, far and near. Whatever it was that Beethoven intended, he understood about life setting up patterns. Even so, Leonore transcends pattern, so woven is it with rivers and peaks. Always something hidden and receding. Always the flute, beckoning and bringing a glimmer of light. After that, turmoil, frenzied and exuberant. The breaking of pattern. And then, the notes ascend again. That would be Lena, all of those things. I am the receding part.

I think of Okuma-san, who shared his knowledge of Beethoven with me. It was his singular passion. Okuma-san, whom I once believed to be old. But anyone over thirty would have appeared old to a child. How could I have known, when I first met him, that he was only in his mid-forties? Numbers meant nothing. Hiroshi and Keiko and I referred to him as the old man who arrived in camp without a family. The man who’d been hiding out in Vancouver, looking after a sick wife. When she died, he came out of hiding and was promptly arrested a block from Powell Street in Japtown, as it was then called. Now, more kindly, more politely known—historically, for the tourists at least—as Japantown. Childless, Okuma-san arrived at our place of internment above the banks of the Fraser two years after everyone else. I could not have understood this at the time, but he must have appeared older than he was because of sadness and grief.