Three Views of Crystal Water
Katherine Govier
A literary saga, spanning two generations and two cultures, Canadian and Japanese, reminiscent of the work of Isabel Allende.Suddenly finding herself motherless at the age of six, Vera is left in the care of her grandfather, who spends long periods away at sea, leaving her alone back in Vancouver. When she reaches her teens, Vera is taken by her grandfather's mistress to a small island in Japan.After years of loneliness, she finds an island where she can feel comfortable. The women of the island take her in and she learns to dive for pearls. Immersed in her surroundings, she meets a mysterious stranger, a man who is trained as a ceremonial sword polisher, who brings her into touch with the outside world. Every day, they listen to the mounting rhetoric on the radio and must live with the knowledge of the havoc that the Japanese are wreaking in China.Then the worst happens. Vera is forced to return to Canada by a father whom she has long thought is dead. World War Two breaks out. The idyll is over.But Vera never forgets her island life, the sword polisher, or her true identity. Determined to regain the passion and joy that she once knew, she must return to Japan, to the one place that she truly belonged.
Katherine Govier
Three Views of Crystal Water
For my mother
Transparent things, through which the past shines.
Vladimir Nabokov
Prologue
It is a warm day late in the season; the sky is clear and the sea is calm. We will dive in the deep. We meet early at the shore with our baskets; when we come back they will be full of abalone, if we are lucky. And we will be lucky, I feel it.
We women carry the lunch, and the men and boys bring little braziers to light in the centre of the boats. Although the day will be hot, the deep water will be so cold we will have to warm ourselves every hour.
We set out, boats behind the boats, towed by the two fishermen who have motors; four and then four more fishing boats sally forth in two obedient lines. We travel nearly a mile before the motors slow. As one we turn our heads to look back where we have come from. Our island lies behind, a saddle-shaped disk, low in the centre and higher at each end. On sharp, clear days in late summer it appears to have jumped off the surface of the sea: there is a little space under it, as if it were floating on an invisible cushion. But today the air is slightly misty and the summer island, as we call it, seems half sunk in the distance.
We have arrived at the deep fishing grounds, a semi-circular cluster of islands called the Watchers. Our lines of boats pass between two rough cones that erupt from the glass-topped sea. She is at her most docile – turquoise, almost flat, but moving in the long soft swells that are memories of a storm far away and days ago. Yes, the sea has memory: you can read it if you learn the signs.
Tamio unties us from the boats in front and behind. Because I have no brother, no father, no husband here, my boatman is Keiko’s nephew. He has only a shy smile for me and no words. He stands, holding the oar that fits into the little cut in the stern. When he has poled us to the diving spot I remove my yakata and stand, wearing only the thong the ama call the ‘black cat’.
The other women are not concerned to show their bodies. It is a matter of no importance to them; nearly naked is the way they have always dived and is the best way to dive. But I am unused to it, as I am unused to much that is custom in this place. Tamio looks down with covert curiosity: does he think a white woman’s nipples would be different? He holds the waist belt with its charges of lead to make me sink. But I don’t want it yet. I tuck my tegane into the thong where it crosses the small of my back. The knife makes me a little braver. I loop another rope around my waist, this one sixty feet long and heavy. Keiko’s nephew checks the knot. This will be my lifeline.
I keep my sights on the neighbouring boats. Hanako is in the nearest one; she is sixteen and an apprentice diver too, but we both know she will be very good one day. Hanako’s mother Maiko is just beyond: she is one of the best divers in the village. And Hanako’s grandmother too will dive today. She is fifty-five and has been diving for nearly forty years, since she was Hanako’s age. Grandmother loves to dive. She could have retired but she did not want to. She says she would have nothing to do all day and that she would miss the rest of us.
I keep my eyes on Hanako. When Maiko and Grandmother jump off the sides of the boats, she jumps. When she jumps, I jump.
I see Hanako’s feet leave the boat. I see the side rock down with the pressure of her jump, and then bounce up as her weight leaves it. I see her arms go up, in that gesture of submission one makes before entering water.
I see the hair lift off the back of her neck and fly into the air. I see her head enter the splash her feet made and the water close over it. I open my mouth, fill my lungs, and follow.
Oh, the shock of entry. Every time, it is as if I’ve never done this thing before; never left the safe air and gone feet first into this cold, wallowing, two-faced, foreign element. I call it alien, although in the sweet state it is what nourishes me and even fills my body: aren’t we ninety per cent water? But I fear this part of me. It is a world unto itself. I also adore it. Water is seductive, silky to the skin, welcome in its chill when the sun is burning. Endlessly lovely: sometimes a scroll, its lines of foam columns of script telling an ancient tale; sometimes a healer. It soothes, offering weightlessness and dream in exchange for consciousness.
But try to enter it! Its surface is a pane of glass I shatter at my peril. It stings. Its weight exaggerates any insult. It bulges and caves into great troughs. It tosses me like an angry parent. It sucks me down.
Bodies of water, we call them. Fresh, salt, dead, alive, still, fast-moving, tidal, land-locked. I know little about those other bodies which span the world, but I can tell you that the sea I plumb is a trickster. Lashing at the black lava rocks, tasting of the mysterious living things, shot with sunbeams or sunk in massive gloom, it is bitter to the nostrils and stinging to the lips. I’ve seen rock cliffs under water that trail air bubbles out of some crevice as if they were breathing.
But today the water is perfect. It is pale, silvery turquoise. Whoever named the aquamarine must have been looking at this water on just such a day. It gives me no shock. It fits over me gently. My feet, like arrowheads, make their bite and my body sails down their stream of froth. Easily, I stop my downward motion and with one strong scoop of my arms send myself back up to the surface. When I break it I shake the hair out of my eyes and little drops of sea water fly in bright radiance around my head. My friends, the other girls and women, bob on the surface, laughing to each other. They purse their lips then and make the mournful whistle they call the ama-bui. Then, silently, simply, they give a nod to their tomahi and bend, break the water with their faces and neatly tuck down.
I will do the same. First I fill my lungs with air. They expand in my chest, and for once there’s no tightness, no tension. I tuck my head under, jackknife at the hips and strike out with my legs while using my hands and arms to dig a downward path. It seems easy to drift head down toward the forest below. I pass startled small fish and see the shadows of larger ones flit beyond the corners of my eyes. Ahead of me, below are the tips of the tallest seaweeds and coral. The weed is a magnificent lime colour, and the coral wears new white and pink blooms. Today it’s all open, showing its heart to the penetrating sun, the magical ringmaster down here. Down further, twenty, twenty-five, thirty feet, I enter the green forest. The light-filled strands drift alongside my body but they don’t alarm me. I’m used to their touch. I can see, ahead of me, white sand and black rocks. The rocks lace the sand’s edges and promise a deeper place. I turn, and begin to swim along the sand floor. I can see crabs, and pink and purple suction cups on a tapered arm as an octopus suddenly retreats from my path.
Now the water darkens, over this valley in the sea floor. In a little crater I’ll find what I am looking for. My lungs are half empty. But I know how much air I have and can ration it. Rushing will not help. But neither can I waste time. I swerve, pushing the water away from my path first one way and then the other, hanging upside down, my hair below me like tassels, I thrust my hand into the crack, and feel for the rough edges of the shell. Holding on with one hand so that the drifts of water down here, like winds above the surface, don’t carry me away, I reach to the small of my back and bring out my knife.
It’s really as much of a crowbar as a knife, this tool that centuries of diving has developed. It fits into the cracks between the rocks and, because it has a bend in it, even slides under the edge of the rough shell. I slice sideways with as much strength as I can muster, although I have no earth to brace myself. It cuts the muscle that holds this shellfish to the rock.
This is the trick. I place my free hand on the knife. Kicking with my feet I slash, hard. This is my special cut. Guide with the right, power with the left, I repeat to myself. The abalone detaches. Holding it in my left hand I replace the tegane behind my belt with my right. Then I kick again, trying to plant my feet on sand. But a surge of motion, like a sleeper’s unconscious roll, takes me sideways and I lose my grip on the shell.
My lungs warn me; there’s not much time left. The surge relents and I tumble back to where I started, and in the little release of pressure that comes from the water’s movement, I get my feet down and both hands in the crevice. The abalone comes away, leaving a small storm of protest on the sand floor. Creatures hiding in its lee roll away and the sand itself flies up in protest.
Cradling the razor-edged shell against my chest, I try not to cut myself. I tug on the rope which disappears above me into the column of blue. I feel like a monk at the base of a bell tower, pulling with all his might to make the bells swing. But their clappers are stopped.
I wait for the return tug from above. I hang on to my rope and my shell and try to rise. I cannot see him there in the little leaf-shaped boat shadow that floats over my head, but I hope the boatman is pulling hand over hand, as fast as he can, so that the rope comes in and falls at his feet in expert circles. I can see, shooting up from the clouded depths, my friends rising too, like slim angels called to heaven.
Part 1
VIEW 1
1
Mei
Attacking from in front
So this is how it began.
Vera, bereaved, a slip of a girl, stood in a slanting rainfall on the quay. The year was 1934 and she was thirteen. It was a romantic moment in what she hoped would be a romantic life. This little girl, who was me, but has now become, with the perspective of twenty-five years, a stranger called Vera, was waiting for her grandfather. She had loved him for her whole life, a love renewed on his infrequent stops from the sea to dry land, and now she would be his. He was an elusive man, James Lowinger, the pearl merchant, a wild, imposing man whose portrait, a painting of a white-whiskered Poseidon braced against the mast in a tearing wind, dominated the parlour Vera shared with her mother, Belle. But he was coming home.
The Empress of Japan slid into its berth, high-bowed and with attendant pomp. With a great rumble and sigh the engines stopped, and the porters began to run up the long ramps pulling their wheeled carts. The passengers leaning over the rails waved to loved ones below and then began to walk unsteadily down the hypotenuse to terra firma.
No waves for Vera.
On she stood in the cold, under her umbrella. She looked and looked, clutching her skirt with her free hand, waiting for the White-Moustached God to make his appearance. At length he did so at the top of the ramp. There he was, just like his portrait, ruddy and bewhiskered. He waved. She looked over her shoulder. To whom was he waving? She looked back. He was waving to her. She was amazed he recognised her. Then he turned his head to speak to the tiny person who stood beside him.
A woman. In a kimono.
Vera was not entirely surprised. Her mother had made reference to James Lowinger’s travelling companions, biting her lip. Her grandfather and the small Japanese woman came down the hypotenuse. Vera didn’t give him a chance to speak first. She stepped forward.
‘Grandfather,’ she said.
‘It is really you, my dear?’
‘Yes it is. It’s Vera.’
He appeared astonished, and delighted. ‘Vera. My darling.’ He opened his arms.
‘Grandfather,’ she said warningly, ‘I have to tell you.’
He opened his arms more widely.
He wasn’t listening. She had to stop him. ‘Grandfather, Mother died.’
He started, but did not lose his composure. The wind-roughened cheeks twitched; neck sinews stood out over his starched collar; hands clutched, probably involuntarily, at his trouser legs in a gesture eerily like her own; the ruddy colour drained from his face.
‘She did what?’ He said this in a thin voice of incredulity.
Vera could see that he wasn’t comprehending. He had trouble with the verb, the ‘action word’, they called it at school. It was throwing him off.
‘She died. She’s dead,’ Vera amended.
The hand went to pull his moustache. ‘I see,’ he said.
He saw, but what did he see? Did he see Vera, child of his child, bereft and soaked to the skin and all but transparent with grief?
Or did he visualise, in that instant when he knew she was gone, his beloved daughter Belle? Did Belle’s shortened life from the moment of her birth inscribe itself in his mind? How he held her in his arms, in Yokohama, when his wife handed the baby over without a word? How he tried, but not hard enough, to keep her with him in Japan? Did he think of the first time he lost the girl to his wife? Or the second to marriage? Or the third to Vancouver, Canada, a beautiful city with a view to the Orient?
Or did his mind trip, as his foot tripped – over the grief struck grandchild, and his dead daughter – and stumble on the wife who’d given them to him? Did he think of Sophia, whom he had replaced with this young, Japanese woman?
Vera did not know. James Lowinger recovered his balance and put his foot down on dry land.
He was not at ease there. His life was water. One bit of land or another was much the same; it was not-sea. The news had caught him at the moment of landing, of crossing over from water to earth. All of his life, crossings had marked him – going from island to boat, from boat to mainland. Ramps and bridges were the same. He tripped, he lost his footing. All went into flux, his language, his understanding, his memory.
The Japanese woman caught his arm.
He turned to her. She stood there not getting a word of it. He was unsteady; her arm was holding him up. He hardly knew this little girl, though he recognised her, could not miss her, with that white hair. She was strangely personable, for a child, and too much like his wife for comfort.
‘This is my granddaughter, Vera,’ he said. ‘Vera,’ he said, ‘this is Miss Tanaka. Keiko.’
Miss Tanaka, Keiko, was younger than Belle. Younger than Belle had been, rather, because now it is clear that Belle was never to grow old. Vera was as much a surprise to Keiko as Keiko was to Vera. A surprise and yet not a surprise: James Lowinger was a man who had secrets. He gave nothing away, until he had to. The day before, carelessly, as land came into view, he had told her: ‘Oh Keiko, by the way. A long time ago I was married in Yokohama. My wife was English. She left me and took our child to England. Belle married a bounder; he’s left her I imagine. She has a child, my granddaughter. I wired them, that we were coming.’
But he hadn’t wired we. Only I.
As her grandfather and Keiko stepped off the gangplank, Vera was conscious of herself as a girl needing to be rescued. She had been brave for long enough. She hoped to let down for a bit. When their feet touched terra firma and she had delivered her news she offered up both arms in her grandfather’s general direction, for an embrace. She made the same undiscriminating gesture to the unknown Japanese woman. Then, turning toward home, she worked her hand into her grandfather’s, the one that was not carrying the valise, and allowed a few tears to fall.
They found a taxi that would carry their trunks and she gave the address of the little house on Ivy Street that had been Belle’s, that still was Belle’s. When they arrived, the three of them climbed slowly out of the cab and the driver helped unload the baggage, very little, really; the rest would come later. They made their way up the narrow pavement. And all the while Vera was taking the measure of this man, who was pretty well her only chance for being looked after in the world.
The main event was his moustache, which was waxed and hence pointed at its extreme ends. Or should we say moustaches? A plural will give more a sense of the presence of this accessory. They started under his nose and stood out thickly over his upper lip. When the lip ended (although you couldn’t see the corner of his lips, but you knew there was one) the moustaches swooped down, then up and curled back upon themselves, spiralling into smaller curls. This stiff upcurl happened well beyond his cheeks and reminded Vera of the things on the ends of the curtain rods that her mother called finials.
The finials were not white, not like his beard, and not like his hair, but rather an orangey brown. Moving inward, from the tip, the moustache hairs were a dried auburn and tobacco colour, then a dark brown turning to slate grey, and finally at the root, white. He’d been young when he grew the curls, she supposed. One day, she supposed, his moustache hair turned white. One particularly tempestuous day on the high seas.
The swag of the moustaches also left to the imagination the shape of her grandfather’s upper lip. It might be a villainous thin, hard lip, or it might be, and she suspected it was, a soft, full, sweet-shaped upper lip. Vera would never know. The face was blustery, and had high red cheekbones. His eyes were a beautiful blue, but one of them had a white cast over it. His chin was long and came to a thoughtful point; there was impishness to the lines around his mouth, which showed they’d been made from smiling. He wasn’t as big as Vera had expected: the chest inside his double-breasted navy jacket must have shrunk since the jacket was purchased, and his long sea legs, that Vera imagined would have bestraddled the deck of the bucking frigates the way a cowboy bestrode a horse, did not seem steady. His knuckles stood up, his fingers were as long as a pianist’s, and they waved, sensing things. But his voice, now that he had regained it after the shock of her announcement, was powerful and commanding. Keiko circled in its gusts trying to go respectfully behind him while he tried to herd her in front as if he needed assurance that she was truly there.
Vera produced her key and opened the door, and her grandfather and Keiko were impressed with her competence. They gave each other a look: see how she manages!
And then they entered the door of the house, and disappeared.
And silence descended. For days.
The neighbours who had helped Vera bury her mother poked their heads out of their doors and conferred over the rhododendrons. The trio had been seen. What could it mean? Was the curious little kimono-clad woman a housekeeper? They watched the house. But for some reason, maybe because the Lowinger-Drews kept strange hours, or maybe because each of the three exited singly and deliberately tried to pass unnoticed, the other inhabitants of Ivy Street rarely caught a glimpse of the girl, her grandfather, or the mistress. Because that was what had been determined: the little woman was more than a servant. At night when the lights were on in the house and the curtains unpulled, the pair had been seen, nuzzling. Kissing over the kitchen sink. It was shocking for such an old man. And such a young woman; hardly more than a child herself, much more like a companion for Vera.
‘Well that’s nice isn’t it?’ said a kinder soul. ‘She needs a playmate.’
‘Of course, you can never tell with Orientals, they don’t seem to age.’
They liked Lowinger and they called him Captain. He walked down the street, and his eye was caught by every dog or squirrel that crossed his path. He chuckled and was entirely lost in the creature, until it was out of sight.
‘He’s very charming.’
‘And there is money.’ He was thought to have accumulated a fortune as a pearl merchant, on top of the one he inherited from his father from the same business. But some doubted the veracity of this. Inquisitive housewives smiled on James Lowinger and opened their mouths to speak, but words failed and they faded behind their front doors. Were they scandalised by this Japanese woman in her kimonos? Or just shy, as shy as Keiko herself? There was little censure spoken in the corner grocery store; James Lowinger excited no real disapproval for his flagrantly irregular life. Perhaps a little envy, was all. If he hadn’t come home with an oriental woman, who took tiny steps because the folds of her kimono draw together at the knee, they’d have been disappointed.
What they didn’t know was that Keiko, despite her demure and inarticulate manner, her lowered eyes, was no timid Japanese mistress. She was an ama, a diving woman.
For a while life changed little on Ivy Street. Vera still walked to school in the mornings, but the housewives did not call out to her, or if they did it was with a kind of pity. It was not only Keiko who was strange but she, Vera, who became strange by her association with the Japanese woman. And the bravery she affected when her mother died stuck to her. She wanted to lay it down but she could not. She still had her friends in the schoolyard. Sometimes after school they all went to buy a soda pop. She was held in a certain awe because of the tragedy of her mother’s death, and its odd denouement. She didn’t talk about it, but one day the minister stepped out of the manse and said: ‘Is Captain Lowinger in town then for a few months? Will he be stopping here, with you?’
Vera said she didn’t know.
In front of her grandfather’s mistress, Vera was polite and excessively well behaved. This nuance was lost on Keiko, as Japanese children are usually well behaved, but Vera meant it as a hostile gesture. It was to show Keiko that she was a guest and not part of their household at all.
There was another change: instead of going home after school, Vera went to her grandfather’s place of business. It was on Homer Street, down by the water. She took the streetcar to Granville, and over the bridge to the Gastown, on the waterfront. Gastown was the oldest part of town, the port, where the old light standards had once been gas lamps. The lights were left on all day, but they were far apart, and small; often the fog and rain made the street very dark. You could smell the kelp and the oil that mingled at the dirty edge of the water.
That November Vera walked through late afternoon gloom in delight. When her mother was alive she was never allowed to come down here alone. There were fish and chip shops and bars. And there were sailors from all over the world, in their white clothes, sometimes their blue clothes, with weathered faces and strange tongues. At any time of day they might spill noisily through the doors of a bar; they might be asleep standing up at a bus stop. They lived on another timetable, they’d crossed the date line, the equator, the Tropics. They’d be looking for sex, her mother had told her. Vera knew not to catch their eyes, never to look at them directly. As she walked quickly down the street they might look at her, but she was too young and too thin to be of interest.
Out of range of roving sailors, Vera slowed to look into the dark entrances of hotels. The sexy women limping in high heels, were in there often. Farther along the street were women who looked tired, handing out tracts about God and Jesus Christ. There were shops selling seashells, plastic flowers and postcards of the Lion’s Gate bridge. There was a hat shop that belonged to her grandfather’s friend. A furrier with buffalo coats, a hardware shop, a shop selling steel-toed work boots and checked shirts. There were jewellers, traders, importers, exporters. And then there was Lowinger and McBean.
Vera had never seen Mr McBean; his only appearance was in the firm’s name. He might be fictitious, a title only, like the ‘Captain’ in James Lowinger. Her grandfather was no sailor, but a trader in gems, pearls in particular. He and his father before him travelled all over the world, hiring luggers and diving men to search for pearls. But the pearls were gone now. The company had bales of fabric and crates of dishes packed in wooden cases, goods, as they were called.
There were a few steps up from the street. There was a door with a top half of frosted glass. She opened this door and right in front of her, so she couldn’t slip past unseen, was a little office with shipping schedules pasted all over the walls, presided over by Miss Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was at all times erect and mannerly, as if her respectability were at issue. Why she was not Mrs Hinchcliffe, Vera did not know. She was certainly old enough to be married, and there was an inviting vigour in her form that was more like the sexy women than the missionaries. Still, she imagined that no man was polite enough to meet Hinchcliffe’s high standards.
‘Hang up your coat! Wipe your shoes! Put that wet umbrella in the hall!’ were her usual first words, followed by, ‘So, we are to be favoured with your presence again today are we?’
‘Hello, Miss Hinchcliffe.’
There were maps on one wall and a black telephone and metal filing cabinets. ‘Captain’ Lowinger’s office was beyond, in a room with a window of pleated glass through which Miss Hinchcliffe could keep an eye on his shadowy form. When Vera opened the door she would see him seated, smiling, behind a perfectly clear desk. There were no piles of paper and no calendars with dates circled, no complex timetables. His wooden desk had a green leather top and he had a lamp with an emerald shade. To one side was a set of brass scales that was used to weigh pearls, and the corn tongs to pick up the gems. There was nothing else except, in the corner on the floor, a typewriter. She could only assume that in this office, unhampered by physical records, Captain Lowinger conjured magical fundamentals that were then subject to mental administration.
The action was all on the walls, which were decorated with woodcut prints on rough yellowed paper. The pictures were of tall women with fleshy faces and chopsticks in their hair. There was a Japanese name for them: ukiyo-e. But Captain James called them his Beauties. His Beauties stood around like a picket fence, to keep out the world. Each one existed on a blank background as if she were completely alone in the world. She might have been a model on a ramp. Each one had a slouch, an over-the-shoulder glance, and dainty hands and feet which appeared as afterthoughts from under great swirls of decorated fabric. Each sumptuous kimono was patterned with mountains and rocky streams, shells and flowers and leaves. Each Beauty’s body cut a figure like one of those giant letters on the first page of an old book, a decorated L or S or F. They were a veritable alphabet of women.
But they were unreadable. They had their backs to the room, and their eyes cast down, thoughts lost in the folds of their wraps. Everything about them was secretive, held in, padded, even their faces, which appeared to have no bones. They were white and soft and disturbed only by the thinnest fine painted lines to suggest eyebrows, nose, cheeks. Only the lips, red and rounded, were defined. But they were closed.
Her grandfather was not always alone amongst his Beauties. When Vera arrived, he might be talking to an urgent man in a blue serge cap who he called Skipper. Or he might be listening to a visitor who took pulls on a pungent-smelling pipe, sending clouds of smoke into the room, behind which the Beauties faded perceptibly. This visitor might be telling a tale, complete with grand gestures and occasional whispers, and sidelong glances through the door to where Miss Hinchcliffe would type with renewed energy. On these occasions Vera would go back to the warehouse and walk up and down the rows of bales of fabric, feeling them with her fingers. Or she’d peer into the fragile crates filled with dry grass and wonder if there were pearls inside. She might look at the life-sized kimono doll and take all her clothing apart. There were little spikes that went into her hair, and tight wrappings around her middle. Her feet had one split instead of toes, dividing the white cotton foot in two, so that it was like a dainty hoof. They’d been specially designed to fit into the thongs of the platform slippers she stood in.
If his visitor were a persistent one, Vera repaired to the big cutting table meant for fabric with its low-hanging light in a metal shade. She was allowed to open certain wooden boxes and take out the prints one by one and look at them.
She stared and stared at the ukiyo-e. The people were so very, very strange. Most of them looked like women, but only a few of them were, according to Vera’s grandfather. Everyone wore a robe, often with a skirt too. The ones with swords were men. The ones with make-up and hair piled in knots and smirky smiles, who looked very much like women, were also men: they were actors who played women’s parts. It was hard to find the real women. But Vera grew skilled at it. They were softer, and smaller, and less obvious about it.
They were usually shown among other women, fixing hair or serving tea. It was peaceful as they went about their lives inside squared timbered rooms. Sometimes they travelled with their companions, poled along in a banana-shaped boat by a man in a loincloth. If the weather was good and the current was with them, the boatman leaned on his pole, lazily. They glided through such scenery! Mountains and hillsides were cut by a slanted path, where trees attended in stylish attitudes, with clumps of branch here and there like soft clouds.
But there were days when rain came down aslant like a torrent of nails. There was snow too. The women were never dressed for it. For one thing they had bare feet, with a thong between their first and second toes, and square sandals like little benches, to prop the foot up high off the ground. The snow fell heavily, loading their pretty, papery umbrellas with inches of white. It covered the slated tile roofs and stayed in a thick layer on the branches and even stopped, mid-fall, in the air, a white dot carved in the print and coloured in. The snowfall was a kind of burial, but the figures were bright and graceful, as if for them to withstand this final curtain was effortless.
The snow in the pictures was so sad, cold and exquisite. The difficulties were borne lightly, gaily, as if everyone knew it would melt tomorrow. As if everyone knew that the tea house was around the next bend. The cherry blossoms would soon be out. The people would be flying their kites, which they did all together, an entire street of people. Or standing on a shore with a picnic basket looking expectantly to a nearby island.
There was snow sometimes in Vancouver, but it rarely stayed more than overnight. Vera’s mother had had the same delighted attitude to snow, an attitude that was also a denial. She could just as easily have said, ‘Let’s go for a walk with our bare-toed shoes and our thin umbrellas and the little white split-toed socks!’ That would have been on her gay days. Other days she was a sleepwalker.
And the pasty faces, the swollen cheeks, the lost features of these women were her mother’s.
But this was a thought Vera did not like to have, and she pushed it away.
The devils – or men – in the ukiyo-e world simpered and hunched their shoulders and curled their toes. Their eyes were black marbles in wild open Os. They had huge dog faces with curled-back snarling lips and mad, crossed eyes, and eyebrows that make an angry V in the middle of their foreheads. Their hair was tied up in knots on the top of their head, and they often had a rope over one shoulder. One had a blue bow at his waist, the tassels dancing at his knees. His five fat fingers spread out in astonishment as he looked down and off to the right: something was there. He too had bare feet and carried two curved swords.
Once, her grandfather came out of his office and stood beside her. He smiled as she looked from one print to the other.
‘Why do you have so many?’ Vera asked.
‘They used to be easy to find. No one put any value on them,’ he said. ‘I sent them home over the years. I don’t know if your mother ever looked at them. And now – I look. There’s always something new to see.’
‘Do people buy them?’
‘Oh they’re not for sale, not for sale, Vera,’ he said. And he laid his finger alongside his nose making a joke of the secret. ‘If anyone knew they were worth money, my creditors would have them in a flash. We’ll just keep them here, where only you and I can look.’
This day, when she got past Hinchcliffe, her grandfather was tapping on his typewriter. He asked her to wait in the hallway. She knew that when he let her in, the typewriter would be back on the floor and any evidence of paper would have vanished. Once in a while he spoke of a book. Vera hoped he would write it. She wanted to know all about his adventures. Sometimes at night in the house on Ivy Street he told stories. But, he said, any book would put him in a conflict between truth and loyalty. ‘That be very interesting,’ said Keiko, who was learning English.
Vera went to the measuring table and stared for a long time at a print where a child with a net was out in the darkness with a woman, her mother or a nanny. There appeared to be an official nature to the relationship, but then this was true of nearly all the pictures and nearly all the relationships. The little girl reached with her net trying to catch the little lights that were in the air, like stars come down to dance over the tips of the grasses.
‘Fireflies,’ said James Lowinger. He placed his hand on her shoulder. It was heavy but it was gentle. ‘They’re catching fireflies. The Japanese love fireflies. Do you see how the artist has tried to make them shine? It is a very fine print.’
She saw that there was a round hole in the darkness and then little sparks of yellow that radiated from this white spot. She leaned back against her chair and the back of her head rested somewhere in the middle of his chest.
‘Did you ever see them catching fireflies?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. He laughed. She loved the way he laughed. It was uncomplicated, amused. ‘Even I’m not that old. This was a long time ago. Before I ever went to Japan.’
Her grandfather shifted the paper, and found another. His fingers touched the dry, stiff yellowed paper with care.
‘Look,’ he said.
Water was everywhere, everywhere in this land of extremes, of cloud-like blossoms floating in the dry arms of trees, of shores littered with shells and crabs, of people standing on a shore looking out to an island, carrying what she took to be picnic baskets. She grimaced over the working men, their loincloths high over knotted thighs, who poled the boats upstream in a gale.
Tiny, almost comic figures engaged in Herculean tasks amongst giant waves, in deep gorges among mountains with white and black gashes down their pyramidal sides. Small, determined, they fought on.
‘Is Japan still like that?’ Vera asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ he chuckled. ‘Not the last time I checked.’
But he didn’t sound very convinced.
The world of these pictures, which Vera took to be the world of her grandfather’s business, and of his romance, was far away in the distance, but at an unspecified place in time. Perhaps it still existed. It was like the world of fairy tales. It was like a performance. Vera wondered who had made the pictures, which were like records of all that went on. She thought the picture world was his secret world, the one he might be writing about.
Someone was always watching this world. The artists who made these pictures peered through timbers, branches, and windows to frame a view; they hid behind fence poles and horses’ back ends. They stood in corners so that they could encompass a whole line of warehouse roofs descending a hill, or let the bent branch of a tree swirl over and under the scene to frame it. And the people knew they were being watched. They were like actors in a play. They knew they were exquisite. They made processions and fought battles. They toyed with the idea of removing their costumes, but they never actually did. There were a few pictures where the women let the kimono slip off one shoulder or even off both. They raised their hems in certain cases to do unspeakable things. She liked them even more for that. Those prints she looked at furtively, blushing.
Of course she knew her grandfather had been a pearl merchant. But as closely as she scanned the pictures, Vera could see nothing to do with pearls. Water pictures she examined carefully for clues. But then – in a special bottom drawer – she found the seashore prints. The diving girls in their fire circle by the beach. Bare-breasted, with fabric looped over their hips, long-haired and long-bodied. Like sloops, an easy curve from chin to hip.
Then one day, Vera stumbled across the octopus. Good grief, what an idea, what they might do with those tentacles. She was horrified, put down the pictures and leaped out of the room with her face blazing.
More often than not, when Vera arrived after school, her grandfather was waiting for her. He stood up in his courtly way and they went out, telling Miss Hinchcliffe they’d only be a few minutes. He took his umbrella from the stand and opened the wooden door with the frosted top half, paused on the top step to see if it was raining (it was), took Vera’s arm and descended to the street. On the pavement, they turned right. The flatiron building filled the end of a block where two streets angled together, which was why it was called a flatiron: it was triangular. At the bottom of it, just below street level, was a triangular coffee shop. There were windows on either side, one looking on to Homer Street and the other on to Water Street: the café was only ten feet wide at its widest. At the narrow end it came to a point in two windows. At the wide end was a curtain.
As soon as they stepped in from the rain, Roberta appeared from behind the curtain.
‘Captain Lowinger,’ she said, gravely, as if he’d come to church, ‘and Miss Vera.’
‘Hello, love,’ Captain Lowinger said. ‘We’ll have coffee and a Danish, sliced flat and toasted and then buttered.’
They sat. Their faces looked out on to the pavement just at the level of people’s feet. Now Vera had the tall, rumbling figure all to herself.
Vera’s mother had raised her on tales of James Lowinger’s adventures. It was as if Belle had been planning all along to abdicate and leave the girl in his hands, as if she had guessed that the fact, and possibly only the fact, of Vera’s existence would be powerful enough to draw in James Lowinger from his perennial sailings around the South Seas, to rein him in just as his great strength was waning, so that he would be safe at last and seated, facing her, pouring milk in his coffee and muttering that he needed a spoon.
‘My grandfather needs a spoon,’ Vera said, raising her voice to hail the waitress. Roberta was a capable woman past thirty with a dreamy streak, often discovered, as now, with her gaze out of the window into the ankles of the passersby.
‘Where’s my Danish and where’s my sweetheart?’ he said, looking up plaintively for Roberta, his hand on the tabletop, his neck curling forward from rounded shoulders. ‘I might die waiting.’
‘We can’t have that, can we?’ said Roberta, plunking the plate down in front of him.
‘Cut or pick!’ he said to Vera.
It was his game. The first time they played it she’d been small enough to sit on his lap, and he was visiting the house on Ivy Street. Belle had cooked an uneven number of breakfast sausages.
‘We’ll divide them.’
Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.
‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’
Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.
‘Pick!’ she had said.
‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’
Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.
He had set her back down on her own chair.
‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’
‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’
‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger—’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘—What do you think?’
‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.
‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’
Today, Vera looked at the four quarters of the Danish.
‘It’s cut already,’ she said.
‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’
He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him – Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.
‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.
‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’
‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.
‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.
‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’
She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’
‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’
‘But they are mine.’
‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’
Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.
‘Is it catching?’
‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’
‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.
‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’
There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.
Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’
‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:
Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch
The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?
Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets
He sheds this lovely lustre
On his grief.
‘Who wrote that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’
‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.
‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’
‘No, Grandfather.’
‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’
He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’
‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.
‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d think that pearls were tears cried by the gods, or by angels.
‘The natives in the Malay Archipelago and on the coast of Borneo are convinced that pearls themselves breed. They say—’ and here he leaned toward Vera and adopted a stage whisper as if he were imparting a secret of the greatest importance ‘—if a few pearls are locked in a small box with some grains of rice and a little cotton wool for several months, that when the box is opened – abracadabra!’ His eyes widened and his great furtrimmed mouth gaped ‘—that there are several new pearls in the box! And,’ he added, ‘the ends have been nibbled off the grains of rice! Do you believe it?’
She did not know whether to answer yes or no, so she kept quiet.
Captain James Lowinger flat out laughed here, heartily and in a way not exactly mirthful. And as he laughed, water spurted from the corners of his eyes and he picked up the thin paper napkin that Roberta had dispensed with the Danish pastry, and wiped the water from his cheeks.
‘And there are a lot of men who wished that was true!’
He laughed down into his chest, and picked at the remaining bits of Danish on his plate.
‘Mind you,’ he said again, settling back, ‘these breeder pearls are just as tiny as a pinhead. So—’ His hands fell flat on the tabletop ‘—what’s the use of that? The Chinese grind them for medicine.’
They drank their coffee then. Roberta leaned on her cash register and stared gloomily out of the window into the Vancouver rain. But she was only pretending to stare; Vera could tell she was actually listening.
‘Well, do you believe it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said.
‘So, you don’t believe it?’ He peered at her.
‘Well,’ she began to doubt herself. ‘Maybe a little—’
‘When Columbus came to America, you know, he found that the natives on this continent believed it too. They had pearls galore, so many pearls, do you know? Pearls were not just in the Orient. No, not at all. When Fernando de Soto got to Florida he found the dead embalmed in wooden coffins with baskets of pearls beside them. In Montezuma’s temple, the walls were all laden with pearls. The Temple of Tolomecco had walls and roof of mother-of-pearl and strings of pearls hung from the walls.’
‘Where did they come from?’
‘Quite literally, they grew on trees. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes. In the Gulf of Paria, Columbus found oysters clinging to the branches of trees, their shells gaping open. Do you believe that?’
‘No,’ she breathed. This time she had to have guessed right.
‘Wrong!’ he roared. Roberta looked back at them, her reverie interrupted, and grinned to see the old man teasing his granddaughter, and Vera’s pale face heating up again to the roots of her nearly white hair.
‘Oysters really did grow on trees.’ He went all scientific on her then. ‘The oyster in question is Dendrostrea, or Tree Oyster, a mollusc that is to be found upon roots or branches of mangrove trees overhanging the water.’
She was reduced to silence.
‘There, I fooled you. But you got me going. What did you want to know? What were you asking about?’
‘Ceylon. You went to Ceylon.’
‘Oh, everyone went to Ceylon. My father too. Way back in the 1860s. That’s a long time ago, you can’t imagine how long, my dear.’
‘Of course I can. Seventy years ago.’ She was better at arithmetic now.
‘Give or take a decade, that’s how old your grandfather is. My father was away with the pearling ships when I was born.’
‘Just like my father was away when I was born,’ Vera offered this as a bond.
‘But I came to see you, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, you did.’
Captain Lowinger banged his thick cup on the table. It bounced. The windowpanes seemed to rock in their frames. ‘Consider yourself lucky. My father never came to see me. I am sure I remember being born. I looked around and he wasn’t there. I had to wait years to see him, as far as I can remember. When he saw me, he was not really satisfied. Later, he took me along to make a man of me.’
He rubbed the tips of his forefinger and thumb together. The good eye steadily gazed into Vera’s face. The other one saw her too, but she must have had a white cloud over her head. ‘It’s the way of men in our family. Seafaring men. Go off and leave the woman at home, minding things. It’s a good deal if you’re the man. Mind you, it never worked for me. I tried it with your grandmother, but she was not the type of woman who’d wait around. For that, I lost her and I lost your mother too.’
He looked sad. Roberta brought fresh coffee and he took a long slurp. ‘But we were talking about fathers.’
10 February 1860
Night was falling as they landed at the British garrison in the Strait of Manaar. Before they left the deck of their little vessel, Papa Lowinger took the boy to one side, looking away from the streaky red of the setting sun. That was his first memory.
‘Do you see that land there?’ Papa said to James, pointing into the darkness. The white waving beach and dark hills above were two miles away. ‘That is the island of Ceylon. The people here believe that it was Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Up in the hills lives the King of Candy.’
That impressed James, and he focused his sleepy eyes on it. The small base they had come to was separated from Ceylon only by a shallow arm of the sea, full of sandbars. Candy looked remote. Paradise was closer.
‘At low tide you can nearly walk there,’ Papa said. ‘There’s a string of sandbars called Adam’s Bridge. The people say it was the very spot Adam crossed over when he was expelled from Paradise.’
The bridge was a series of white sand circles and they gleamed under the moon as the water surrounding them went darker and darker. It glistened and seemed to beckon him. James knew that Papa was laying on an enchantment. He did that to people. His voice became like a swallow: it rose and dipped and winged its way into your heart, and then it took fright and flapped upwards and was gone.
The sand fleas were biting. Soldiers stood at the water’s edge, swinging their storm lamps by the handle, luring their boat in. James was bundled up and put in to bed. Through the wall he heard one of those tight-lipped voices. He didn’t know how men got them – at Sandhurst he supposed. His mother wanted him to go there when he grew up. But his father wanted to teach him the pearling business. He was still in the larval stage, white as a fish and squeaky-voiced.
The leader of the garrison talked on.
‘Time and again Ceylon’s conquerors have exhausted the great pearling grounds. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. We’ve let the banks rest now for four years. Each year we’ve made a survey to see if the oysters were ready,’ the barking voice went on. ‘Some years they are invisible, some years too small. We can’t wait much longer; at seven years of age, an oyster is too old: it will have vomited its pearl.’
Seven was James’s age. Too old!
‘We mean to auction off leases on the pearl fishery.’ That was a different English voice, also clipped, but lower.
The roar of laughter came from his father. He was European in origin, Papa. You could hear a husky German or Austrian in there if you listened. He was a man who left country and religion behind to journey after the pearl. He spoke in his peculiar way, hearty and learned, but rough-edged until he wanted to persuade you; then he was smooth as satin ‘The manner of getting pearls has always been a mad amalgam of religious rituals and native cunning. Now the British Army believes it can apply science to the problem?’
‘This year the fishery will again be great,’ continued the clipped voice in an unhurried way. ‘This is why we have invited you. I tell you, everyone has come to see.’
In the morning they set out in a native boat, pulled by a government steamer. It was all sand, and difficult going; water sometimes disappeared altogether. When this happened, native men with long bare legs jumped into the surf and attached ropes to the boat, and pulled it. They had to be pulled a long way around to find deep water again. It was only twelve miles down to the Bay of Candatchey, but it took for ever, the boat running aground and being pushed off. The soldiers were flaming hot in their red coats, and got a lecture from their leader about how they shouldn’t complain. But the man on the oars told James about the buffaloes that lived in the jungle beyond the beaches and frequented the roads like highwaymen; he said they were known to go quite mad at the sight of red. If a scrap of scarlet cloth flapped to the ground, the creature would run at it and trample it, then get down on its knees as if to pray, and gore it.
‘But your jackets!’ James cried, ‘they’re red as berries!’ The soldier rolled his eyes at James and went on to say there were elephants in this jungle, (‘pests’, he called them) and wild boars and even small tigers.
They made their slow way over the crystal sea toward the morning sun. They looked off to the Indian side and saw nothing but blue salt water divided into amusing little mazes. They looked to the Ceylon side and saw nothing but a huge reflecting collar of sand around a dim, green layer of trees. But something vertical stood out, wavering in the sun, a stick moving along the sand. It was a man running in a solitary manner along the beach. He had a most determined, yet peaceful expression, as if he were in a trance. Bearing in mind that they were passing through Adam’s Bridge, James asked his father if it was the first man himself.
‘Papa, is it Adam?’
‘Where?’ he said, absently. He was often that way.
‘There, Papa. Running.’ His image arrested James.
‘Adam?’ His father laughed. ‘Well, son, perhaps it is,’ he said.
And if it were, where was Eve? The boy wanted to know.
Now his father laughed long. ‘I suppose Eve will be along soon. Isn’t it for her sake he’s running?’
James supposed Eve had got behind. He looked long and hard on that shore, but he never saw her.
Papa eventually took pity on James. He squeezed his hand and then he said, ‘No, that man is called a peon. He is running from Colombo, Ceylon, to Madras, India, with the post,’ his father said. ‘It is five hundred miles and he will do it in ten days.’
James never forgot the sight of him.
How ridiculous he must have been, in the schoolboy grey flannels and blazer that his father had made him wear. His straw boater tried to lift off his head at every minute, so he was kept busy jamming it back down. His skin – so pink in contrast to the skin of every other human they met – prickled, stung with sweat, burned, and peeled until it bled. It took him many more years to supply himself with the bark he had as an old man, seasoned and lined and impervious to insult.
At last they drew in to the large, half-moon-shaped bay. There were hundreds of boats pulled up on the shore. The wind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.
He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.
There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile open-sided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.
James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.
It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girls who flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.
It was hot, huge and festive. Pigs squealed, donkeys brayed and people shouted in tongues. James stopped before a shy graceful animal like a small deer, in a cage. A gazelle, his Papa said, waiting to be sold. A worldly-looking monkey with a white beard made its way without touching ground, by climbing over the shoulders and heads of whole rows of people.
Papa kept him by the hand. Maybe he thought he’d be stolen. Maybe he would have been. He dragged behind, caught up by a snake charmer playing on a flageolet who coaxed his cobra halfway up out of the basket only to let him drop again. A scribe sat cross-legged on a straw mat on the sand with a little crowd waiting for him to put some message on paper. He crooked his finger at James, but Papa pulled him past. They ducked under the flaps of a tent draped with coloured carpets. An Arab with a long white headdress and a massive black beard greeted his father with open arms; he looked on James kindly and the boy shrank behind his father’s leg. Papa prised James off and showed him the scales, and the tongs, with which the trader handled the pearls, and weighed them. There were big brass sieves for sizing, a whole set of them, each with a different sized hole for the pearls to slip through, and the corn tongs he knew well because his Papa used them himself.
The men in line had pearls to sell. As for buyers, the richest of the rich were there, his father said. James was very impressed by how many of these exotic individuals his father knew by name. This one bought for the Sultan of Sarawak and that one represented the rulers of an Indian province. This man bought for the markets of Paris and London, for opera singers, and famous French courtesans. All this Papa told James. He waited while his father spoke to them and watched a man at a spindle, making holes in pearls. He had a half coconut sitting beside him, full of water, in which he dipped each pearl before he set to work on it. The pearls gleamed in the dim tent.
When they went out again, Papa took the boy to where, under the open sheds, rows of half-naked men were prising open the scabrous shells of oysters. They had white cloth wrapped around their heads and sat cross-legged. Only their hands moved, and if one moved too quickly or too far, one of the Malay soldiers came down on him with knife drawn. In front of them were little trays. A man circled briskly around the openers, and as soon as a few pearls appeared in the tray, he carried it off.
‘There’s the second best job you can have in the pearling game,’ said Papa. ‘If you’ve got nimble fingers and luck you might get away with a pearl or two.’
‘What is the best?’ James asked. He was anxious to impress him, the Papa newly in his life.
‘You’ll see.’
As the afternoon grew hot the breeze died. Papa pointed at a group of naked men behind a fence. ‘Those are divers who were caught swallowing pearls. They’ve been given a herb, and they’ll sit there until they’ve emptied themselves out. Some lucky fellow will have the job of looking for the stolen merchandise.’
The boy stared at the men. They were sullen and defiant as if determined to hold the contents of their stomachs in for ever. He half hoped they would succeed. The place stank of shit.
‘Who thinks of it?’ Papa said. ‘A pearl in a princess’s tiara may have been regurgitated – or worse—’ he said, rolling his eyes significantly ‘—under extreme pressure from that lot—’
James thought about that. It was ugly to contemplate, but not for Papa. He went on. ‘Isn’t it odd, isn’t it marvellous? A pearl may go from sinking in the most foul-smelling mass of dead matter you can imagine, straight to the most beautiful neck in the world. It will wash clean and look as innocent as a newborn babe. That is the beauty of pearls. They come up fresh again and again.’
His father was educating him, you see, as they strode in that sand, and hard work it was. He was a feeble boy and he whined, a mother’s boy, he had been until then. But Papa kept on, determined that the boy should know, and follow him in his way of life. James ate some roasted meat – goat, judging from the upset displayed by the goat’s relatives who were tied up outside. He thought he might be sick. Sweet-smelling smoke came from certain tents along the side of the crowd; this was where the men were smoking ‘bang’, his father said.
The air was alive with hailing and haggling, and Papa was joyous. He pointed out a weird solitary figure at the fringe of the water, facing out in the direction of the pearl banks. They called him the shark binder. Pullul Karras. His job was to keep the sharks from eating the divers. He did this by casting spells. Papa said that the man was a charlatan, but the divers would not go near the sea if he were not there.
‘His is the best job in pearling,’ Papa grinned.
‘Why?’
‘Why don’t you see? He has fantastic opportunities for snitching.’
Apparently everyone snitched.
The conjuror kept up a tranced dancing, his voice rising into a wail, and dropping to a polite appeasing manner, and his body curling and snapping up, arms flung high, repeatedly, like a whip. His eyes were glassy and his lips were black. Papa said that he was supposed to abstain from both food and drink. But, as they watched, he regularly hailed a young boy in a filmy fabric skirt, who had a brass tray with drinks on it. This was ‘toddy’ from the palm wine tree. The shark binder drank one and ordered another. Then another. Now his song came and went without its former conviction, and his arms lost their former height.
‘Papa,’ James said, ‘I don’t think he’s saying the chant right.’
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the sharks will get the point.’
There were fortune tellers and charm setters and religious fanatics. He watched an Indian with matted hair put hooks into the flesh of his breast. Then he was hoisted on ropes and swung around a post, his skin tearing.
‘Don’t look,’ his father said when James screamed. ‘He’s doing penance.’
The hour stretched on and the sun inched its way over to the west, where India lay. The boy wanted to see the divers.
‘The best are called Malawas and are from the Tutacoreen shore,’ said his father, speaking of them as if they were dumb animals, although James was certain they understood. ‘They’re Roman Catholics. A long time ago St Francis Xavier went to the coast of India and baptised the people. Because they’re Christian, they don’t work on Sundays but they also observe any festival, Hindu or Mohammedan. They want protection of all the gods, and you would too if you had to earn your living under a ton of water.’
James wanted to see them go down, so his father contrived for them to go out in one of the diving boats. They set sail for the banks at ten that same evening with the landward breeze. James lay on a wooden seat under a robe with his head on Papa’s lap. The sky overhead was a whirl of southern stars, brighter than any he had ever seen. The divers sat on the bottom of the boat, silent, dark, strangely passive shapes. There were ten of them, and several sailors on each boat. His mind went to where theirs was – he saw a shimmering heat, foul smells, salt, and wonderment. Then darkness. Tomorrow might bring their death.
He must have slept. The dawn was a miracle of gold and pink, with clouds shaped like a funnel through which the daylight poured. He watched the divers oil their bodies, and talk amongst themselves. Each had his set of equipment, ropes, and a large red stone shaped like a pyramid with a hole through the top. Each man picked up the rope and the stone with the toes of his right foot, and the net bag with the toes of his left. He held another rope with his right hand, and, keeping his nostrils shut with the left, jumped into the water and, riding on the stone, sank, rapidly toward the bottom.
James rushed to the edge of the boat. The water was so clear that, by hanging over the thwart, he could see to the bottom. Plunging, the divers became blurred black figures with wavy appendages. When the stones hit bottom they threw themselves flat on the sand and began to swim like insects. They were picking up oysters which lay on the sandy slope and thrusting them into the bags. After a minute, they pulled on the rope and the rowers, who now held the other ends, pulled hand over hand to raise them back to the surface.
And so it went, for hours. When they came to the surface, the divers spewed water from their mouths and nostrils. Sometimes their ears were bleeding. They unloaded, took deep breaths, and picked up their stones with their toes, then they threw them overboard again. They went down fifty times, and each time returned with a bag holding easily a hundred oysters. The boat was filling up with the thorny, grey shells; as they lay in the sun the two halves began to gape. James saw one man slip a wooden wedge in the gap. He watched without letting on as the man ran his finger inside the half opened shell, feeling for pearls. And once at least, James thought the man found what he was looking for.
He had few places to hide a pearl, this diver. He put his hand up and casually wiped his eye. James realised that the pearl was gone – into his eye. He did not tell Papa for fear the man would be punished. If sharks were near they were not biting. James sat in dread and fascination, watching the shining black men who shot in a stream of bubbles straight down into the crystal blue that extended to murk. They were down for what seemed like for ever, then they began to reappear, raised majestically like statues that had been buried.
This was his indoctrination to the pearl hunt. ‘I would like to be a diver for pearls,’ he said solemnly then. But his father said no. ‘No white man could ever go to those depths.’
At noon, the wind changed to blow them back to Ceylon. They sailed in, slowly, and when they neared the beach the oars came out. The gun fired and all the trading and singing stopped. The tied elephants brayed. The tambourines rattled to a climax; the crowd began to run toward the shore. Everyone stared out to sea. Owners and investors, fakirs, traders all, in their eyes a look James was to see more than he ever imagined – a look that was avid and fearful. These men had gambled everything on the find of pearls.
He had listened to his papa well, and understood that no one knew how good the oyster fishery would be. Perhaps the starfish had wormed their way in and eaten the flesh, or the seaweed growing on the shells had killed the animal. The anticipation became a murmur. The murmur became a roar. The sea wind with its sting of salt and sand blew in the waiting faces. Finally the boats were within calling distance. Then everyone – jewellers and boat-owners and officials with sticks in their hands, entertainers with monkeys on their shoulders, with skirts flying and veils lifting, robes flapping against legs – began to move toward the shore.
First James and his father’s boat landed, and then another and another. Amidst the shouting and embracing, the boy understood that there was a huge haul. A great cheer and a roaring began. The soldiers stamped about, excited for their chance to bid and make a fortune. The horses whinnied.
The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered
But the divers were herded off to be searched.
James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.
The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.
The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the moment although James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.
There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.
‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’
The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.
A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.
‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.
‘He says that a very great witch issued a counter-conjuration,’ explained the Superintendent disgustedly from his horse. ‘That was why the shark bit. He says he will prove he is stronger than she is by issuing an even greater charm to bind the sharks for the rest of the season. I suppose I shall have to pay him double.’
‘Do you see?’ whispered Papa. ‘He can’t lose, that conjuror. He’s got it covered either way.’
The conjuror began with further charms, more exaggerated and bizarre contortions, ululations, screechings and mumblings. Finally, his adherents appeared to be satisfied. Only then did the owners begin to unload the oysters. They lay in heaps to be sold in lots, unopened. When the auction began the bids were fast; each lot went to the highest bidder who then came and hauled away the bags.
It was on that day, in Ceylon, that James saw one more extraordinary sight. A small girl about his age. Proper, dressed for a garden party in flounces of white all dotted with yellow. Sashed and bonneted like Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, in all that sand and wind she held, over her small self, casting a useless pale shadow in which she was careful to stay, a red, ruffled umbrella.
His eye was drawn to the red umbrella. Red spot in the centre, making the whole scene revolve around it. She was the eye of the storm, that’s what she was. She was the heart of the matter.
‘Who is that?’ he asked his Papa.
‘That?’ his father replied, following his finger. ‘Don’t point!’
There were thousands of people on the beach. He had to point. ‘The girl with the umbrella,’ he said.
‘That,’ he said. ‘You mean she. She is the daughter of a man from the garrison. I believe he is called Mr Avery McBean.’
They were getting closer. She was plump and she pouted. She had a magisterial air about her. He knew as soon as he saw this child that she would make planets revolve around her.
‘Do you know her Papa?’ he asked.
‘I cannot say that I know her,’ said his father, ‘but I have been introduced. And so shall you be.’
And they set out across what seemed like the Sahara, this mile-wide expanse of dry sand. It grew softer underfoot the farther they went from the ocean’s edge. James’s feet sank into it, making each step a little harder than the previous had been, giving him the sense that even as he approached Miss McBean so also did he retreat from her, the sole of one foot moving backwards in the shifting sand and digging itself a little hole as he stepped out on the other. Slowly, ever so slowly, face into the wind and clinging to his hat, he made progress toward her.
Thus men approach their fate.
It was not quick enough. As mentioned, there were, in that area of Ceylon at that time, in the untrimmed jungles that lay behind that godforsaken beach, all manner of wild beasts. Elephants that came steaming out at road crossings, tigers whose golden eyes could be seen in the dark, and buffalos. The buffalos did not like red.
Just then one of these bad-tempered buffalos appeared out of nowhere. He caught a glimpse of the plump, pouting Miss McBean, and took exception to her red umbrella. He put his head down. A charging buffalo is not amusing. It was wide of shoulder with a bony ridge down its back and a tail with a point on it like the devil. Its hoary head was low with shiny black horns at the ready.
‘Papa!’ James cried. His heart began to pound. Had no one told Miss McBean about the colour red? Probably she would have paid no attention if they had. Or did she wear it as the soldiers did, with a fated desire to draw attention to herself?
The buffalo did not stop to think. He headed for her with murder in his eyes.
Dawdling and oblivious, she swung her umbrella over her head, then lowered it to waist level and then, holding it in front of her body as if she were a vaudeville dancer, twirled it. The animal bellowed straight at her.
James did not recall his Papa answering. But in a minute they were running in dry sand. The more they hurried, the deeper they sank. Papa held on to James with one hand and waved his hat with the other, hallooing like mad, though his words were lost in the wind. The buffalo ploughed on. A few men in the crowd shouted warnings. A soldier on horseback wheeled around and cantered toward the rolling red frills. A man who must have been the girl’s father appeared out of a tent and they suddenly were all, all – buffalo, horse and soldier, Papa and James, her doting dad – racing against sand and time toward the girl while she – surprised, but unflinching – got a whiff of danger, and lowered her lovely toy to the sand. She found herself staring down the nose of a charging buffalo.
And what did she do? She put one little fist on her hip and made as if to stamp a foot in a wee Scottish tantrum. But just as she lifted it off the sand, a long arm that might have belonged to a polo player grabbed her around the waist and scooped her up to hold her against a solid military thigh where she remained unbending and in full possession of her umbrella. The buffalo charged into empty space, looking foolish and disappointed.
Later that trip he must have met her. He must have heard her piercing little voice and seen her dimples and righteous blue eyes and pale protected skin. But the voice and the eyes desert him; he has no memory of them. He only remembers the untouched froth of her, the childish form of her, there on that mystic and desolate beach. He remembers her innocent and altogether misplaced lack of fear.
That was the charm. It was not the one his father meant to put on him, a bondage to the business of pearls. To pearls James became an ambivalent servant. To Miss McBean he became a slave, and remained so for many years to come.
The coffee was drained from their cups.
‘It’s all in the past,’ said James Lowinger. ‘You mustn’t be so interested,’ he chided, gently. ‘And not you, Vera, for certain. And a good thing it is that there are no pearls left in the oceans and rivers of the world, my darling,’ he said then with an irresistible and roguish look of tenderness. ‘You can be the first of our family to be free of it.’
Roberta fussed getting James Lowinger’s coat. He shambled to the door, this big man, and pulled his umbrella from the corner where he’d propped it, and paused on the step to open it skyward and herded Vera under it on to the street. She walked him carefully back to the warehouse. Fifteen minutes later, Vera stood waiting for the streetcar in the rain. The first in the family to be free of it. That meant the others were not free. Her grandfather was a captive, she saw that. His father too, from the sound of it: pearls were his religion. Her father must be a captive as well. It must be that which kept him in the Far East and away from her all her life so far. Even her mother, dead now, must have been a slave. The Lowingers were all that way, set apart. And so would she be. Vera Lowinger Drew: the last of a line of men and women whose lives were governed by the pearl. It was sad but glorious. She got off the streetcar and began to walk home. And now the pearls were gone, as the family was almost gone; it had come down to the two of them.
Or three.
She entered the house by the front door, throwing it behind her so that it slammed. Keiko emerged from the kitchen, smiling.
‘Vera.’ Probably she practised the name half the day. Vera was filled with scorn. She let Keiko take her bag. She could see behind her in the kitchen the shells and bowls of water that betrayed the various weeds and molluscs that would be her dinner.
‘Can’t we have meatloaf like everyone else?’
Keiko set the book bag on the side table. In her halting English she offered to learn how to make it, if Vera would teach her. Vera said never mind, she would only eat the rice. Rice was white and so was she.
Then she took her bag and went into her little room to read. Within an hour, the front door opened again and her grandfather’s step resounded in the little stucco house. Coming out to greet him, Vera was stopped by the vision of Keiko on her knees in front of him, pulling off his shoes. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she began to mutter, but the old man’s eyes, the one so bright and the other whitened, met hers and she subsided in shame.
And she went back to her room and did her schoolwork, biding her time, biding her time.
2
Ushiro
Attacking from behind
Two years passed this way. Vera, James, and Keiko. Now it was 1936.
Vera was thin, pale, and possessed of a ferocious will. Her features had sharpened, and her eye sockets were deeper. Her nose was longer, sharper, and had a bone. It was a patrician nose, her grandfather said, looking at it askance. ‘God knows you didn’t get it from me.’
Keiko tended to both her charges in the morning, seeing Vera off to school and bundling James to the streetcar to his warehouse. Then she washed every item that had been used since the night before; cutlery, dishes, towels, clothing. The fabrics she put out on bushes to dry, running out to collect them when it rained. Once her housework was done she too set out on foot, for the end of the street.
She went in the same direction as James Lowinger, but farther, down to the east end, to the shops in Japantown. Here she would learn the news about her country – never good, because of the war in China – and find the fish, radish, and seaweed she liked. She had a few friends there. One was a dressmaker who made tunics and jackets for Vera. The other was a fishmonger. She would return home before either Vera or James appeared. On the clothesline she pinned the squid to dry; it was transparent, at first, but slowly, as it hung, it turned brown. She cooked eels and little fish on a small charcoal burner on the back step.
She did not seem unhappy; she giggled often and ate heartily, smacking her lips. She smiled directly into the eyes of the neighbour ladies who had yet to think of one single thing to say to her other than, ‘Lovely morning isn’t it?’ They didn’t know what to call her; nobody had told them her name. So that when the first one, the most kindly, called her Mrs Lowinger and Keiko bowed in acknowledgement, that became her name. In this way Keiko was ensconced in the family and on the street. Days and weeks and months went by and Vera continued courting her grandfather and taunting his young wife, his not-wife. The word for Keiko, which Vera was to learn later, was aisho.
Vera was conscientious at school. She too had friends, ordinary girls in tunics and curled hair and rolled stockings; girls who were taking stenography courses and already had boyfriends. But like Keiko she did not like her friends to come to the house or perhaps they did not like to come to the house. Perhaps they had been told not to come. She was never certain. The girls didn’t tease her, just as the neighbours didn’t shun Keiko; that would be too obvious and they were all good Christians. They admired the old man they called Captain James. They were a little afraid of Vera: she was austere and thin. People did whisper that she had changed. It was an irregular situation, as her teachers said, in that house. They praised the girl for her English composition and her skill at volleyball. For being good to her grandfather. They did notice that she grew thinner and whiter (nothing but rice in that house!), and that she lost interest in her friends, and ran off to the warehouse every day when the bell rang. She’d taken it to heart they said, the death of a mother. What could be worse for a girl that age?
But Vera did not think of Belle. She did not, she believed, miss her mother. She could see past her mother now. Where once Belle had loomed, billowy and anxious-eyed, in the doorway between childhood and real life, now there was an absence, an exhilaration. The passageway was visible. Every day after school she parted from her schoolmates at the gate. She ran past the boys for the streetcar along Granville. On the boisterous streets of Gastown, still running, she neatly dodged little gangs of sailors and men with carpets braced over their shoulders and policemen who might ask her why she was at large. It was cold and the rain penetrated her coat; the sleeves were too short because she was growing so fast. The sky was glowering with low clouds; at the edge of the water in the reflected neon lights, red and green, bark and kelp floated on oily smears. She breathed in the air through her nostrils and felt free.
It would be twilight as she climbed the stairs on Homer Street. Through the fogged glass of the window in the upper half of the door she could see the green shade of Miss Hinchcliffe’s desk lamp. She tossed down her bag of books on the chair with the curved wooden arms and bade an offhand hello to Miss Hinchcliffe. Miss Hinchcliffe might have been about to leave for the night, but now that Vera had arrived she’d stay on. And from down the hall came the dry roll of her grandfather’s voice. ‘Is that you, Vera?’
‘It’s me all right!’ She shed the wet coat and hoisted it to the coat tree, and sitting in the captain’s chair, prised off her Oxfords one by one. In her sock feet she slid on the green linoleum to his door and peeked in. Her grandfather’s long narrow jaw seemed to hang a little nearer the blotter, as the curve in his spine deepened.
‘Hello, dear.’ He put his hands on the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He wavered halfway up, and then, with an extra push, stood.
She kissed his cheek. He smelled sweeter now. Like an old thing. It was death approaching, or maybe all the fish Keiko fed him. He smelled like a grandfather, not a sea captain. Of clean cotton and sweet tobacco and only a hint of the ocean.
‘Just let me deal with Miss Hinchcliffe and I’ll be back,’ Vera said.
Her presence at Lowinger and McBean had changed from being that of a visitor and a child to that of a watcher, and a keeper. Vera had adopted a bustle, as if she actually had jobs to do in the office. She stood in front of Hinchcliffe’s desk. ‘Did the shipment come in? Did he meet the man from Birks?’ She wanted to make sure that these visitors conveyed their needs to him, and not to the secretary.
Miss Hinchcliffe faced Vera with an ironic twist to her mouth. She protected the old man, but he refused to be endangered. Her expression said that Vera was a child and childhood was a phase; it would end, and she would go on to another passion, while she, Hinchcliffe would remain permanently on guard at her desk.
While Vera stood wishing she could get rid of Hinchcliffe. The secretary was like a foreign power. Her grandfather would find this ridiculous, of course. If she complained he would only chuckle; he would never say a word against anyone. He said the office couldn’t be run without her. Hinchcliffe sometimes complained of Vera as well.
‘She doesn’t need to come here day after day,’ the older woman said. ‘She’s taking up a great deal of our time.’
And James chuckled over that, too.
‘Did he have lunch?’ Vera asked.
‘He won’t eat the sandwiches,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. The sandwiches came around every day from a man with a cart; they’d been coming to everyone in the block for years. ‘That Japanese housekeeper has got him used to noodles. That’s all he wants.’
Vera bridled. Keiko was Vera’s to insult, not Miss Hinchcliffe’s.
‘She is not the housekeeper,’ Vera said.
‘What is she then?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe daringly.
Vera ostentatiously let her jaw drop open. You dare to ask?
‘Does she not cook the meals?’ Implied was, such as they are. A long pointed stare at Vera’s concave midriff.
‘Yes,’ said Vera. ‘She doesn’t actually cook much. Mostly we eat raw fish.’ She said this to annoy.
Miss Hinchcliffe rolled her eyes. ‘It isn’t my place—’ she began, but Vera could see that she did think it was her place.
‘I don’t think that—’ Vera flipped her plank of long, thin, blonde hair.
No one finished what they began to say.
Vera retreated to the table where the woodcut prints were kept. Someone had put out a set of three. She wondered if her grandfather had been looking at them. Or if he had left them there for her to look at.
‘Did you see those?’ he said, appearing at the door of his office, poking his head in, his large sinking head with the handlebar moustaches still hoisted to the horizontal. ‘Quite lovely. You can spend plenty of time lost in there.’ Idly, as if it didn’t really matter, he turned away.
The three prints had been enclosed in a folder, which lay beside them. On the front of the folder was written, in fading blue ink, in a hand that Vera did not recognise, Three Views of Crystal Water.
James disappeared back into his office, telling her they’d go for coffee in a few minutes, and she was left alone with the pictures.
The first view was of a seashore, seen from the top of a dune, as if an observer were crouched there unseen. Near the edge of the water was a circle of women, standing and sitting. They had built a small fire and it was this that drew them together, as if they were warming themselves. They did not huddle and shiver, but stood, tall, and elegant, revelling in their beauty. The women wore only a loose fabric draped over their hips, leaving belly and breasts bare. They were wet, hair dripping down their bare backs. Around their feet were baskets.
It was strange to name this a view of water, because the women were the interesting part, an even dozen of them, with their gently curved arms and their modesty, which she could feel, despite their nakedness. There was a child with them. The child had a small string bag of shells in her hand and a little three-pronged rake. The child’s clothing matched the women’s red underrobes. They had all covered their heads with a white kerchief with blue leaves. They had been in the water and had come out, and these baskets held their catch, perhaps seashells, or fish, although Vera could see no means of catching fish in the picture.
Yet, she realised, as she continued to look, more than half the picture was water. It was flat and turquoise close in, and, where rocks stood up from the surface, transparent: you could see through to the base of the rocks beneath. But out from this shore, the sea reached from one side of the paper to the other and up to a flat horizon. There were waves drawn on it, hard white lines marching relentlessly one after another. The sea was not easy for the small boats that dotted it.
She put the print aside. In the second print the crystal water was black and without waves. The sky was dark, but Vera guessed it was nearly dawn. There were stars, like pricks of white; the artist had copied these stars into asterisks of white in the water as well. Two people, their faces hidden in travelling robes that half covered kimonos of orange and peacock blue, were on a graceful, arched bridge that crossed a stream of water. Drawn together by equal forces from opposite sides to the highest point of the arch, they seemed to tremble there. They were not facing, but back to back: each had walked a few steps past the other, as if they had tried to pass by, but could not. There was danger in the air, and yearning. The woman reached back, a long tapered hand emerging from her robe; she handed the man a letter.
Vera gazed long and hard at this one. It was a very satisfying picture, with the deep black and the royal blue, and the orange patterns of both the kimonos, and the white letter changing hands. Whatever secret was here was successfully passed; she felt relief.
She lifted that print and put it to the side, revealing the last of the three.
In the third view, there had been a catastrophe. It was snowing and the ground was white. But on the horizon, far back in the picture, a pagoda was in flames, turning the sky orange. A road wound through skeletal trees from the gates of that pagoda down to the centre bottom of the picture, and on that road were two hooded women. One was on horseback; the other stood beside her. They wore black and white cloaks with pointed black hoods that draped over the sides of their faces, half concealing them. The mounted woman held a long spear with a curved blade. Vera understood that she would journey through danger, and must protect herself and her younger charge. Behind them, outside the pagoda gate, was a fearsome warrior in laced armour, brandishing his sword. He was their scourge, or their protector. His skirts flew up revealing thick legs in sandals, and the scabbard from his curved sword.
At first Vera didn’t see the crystal water. But there, under the snow-laden branch of a tree was a stream. Unfrozen, the water bubbled over rocks. Aside from the roaring of the flames it would be the only sound. The women would follow its path to safety.
Vera wondered who had named these Three Views of Crystal Water’. The pictures belonged together, and therefore they must tell a story. But it was not clear where the story began.
She stared at the three prints, making up a story that would put them in order. Twelve women went to the seashore to fish and were seen by a stranger. The stranger fell in love with one of the women; but she was promised, or bound. Her trusted servant met him in the dead of night and gave him a letter telling him to go away, that all was lost. However, he would not go away. Instead he set fire to the pagoda and killed everyone in it except the woman and her servant, who escaped, while he watched over the destruction he had wrought.
‘Ready!’ called James.
That day, they made their way down the few steps, next door to the flatiron building where Roberta presided, the Captain stepping gallantly but perhaps a little more slowly than the season before. Vera could see Roberta turn to warn the waiting others. Because by now it was known on Homer Street that the old merchant would come in. And he had an audience. There was the hatter, and a printer with inky hands, and another few traders, in rugs and fabrics. There was Kemp who also traded with Japan, and sometimes his son. There was Malcolm the mailman, if he’d finished his run. Vera and James nodded to the gathered audience, and went to their booth. Roberta’s fierce hand with her damp cloth swept across the table; they watched her midriff at eye level against the tabletop and heard her voice asking what they would have.
‘The usual,’ James said. And then exclaimed ‘Wet!’ with fresh surprise, as if it had never been wet before. ‘Wet today, Roberta.’ He surveyed the other coffee drinkers, now studying their napkins or gazing out of one window or the other to one street or the other. ‘Quite a crowd here today! Afternoon, Kemp.’
‘If it isn’t Lowinger, of Lowinger and McBean,’ said Kemp. ‘Where’s that son-in-law of yours? I heard he was in Madagascar. No, it was Marrakesh.’
They slid into their chairs. Vera was conscious that they made an odd pair, the old man and the girl.
‘I don’t know,’ said her grandfather. ‘He hasn’t been home for some time. Since…’ his voice trailed off. He always stopped talking when Belle or Hamilton Drew came to his mind. Soon after their marriage, they had moved here. Drew had been given the task of keeping the portside office open. The idea was to branch out from pearls. Canadian Pacific had plenty of steamships going to Japan and coming back with imported goods. Smart merchants bought them and divided them up and put them in new packages and sent them on. It was not easy to lose. But Hamilton…
Vera tried to picture her father. Was he part of her distant childhood? It seemed to her there had been a pram, and a sweet tooth for toffee. ‘I turned around and he was absent.’ That’s what her grandfather said about his own father. She remembered her mother crying.
This time James kept talking. ‘The trouble with my son-in-law,’ he said dramatically. He knew he had an audience. ‘The trouble is he was too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Just too late. For everything. He’s an imitator. Never had a thought of his own. Never could go his own way. Like the real people do.’ He sputtered to a stand still. Then he started again. ‘The trouble with your father was he was Scottish.’
Vera laughed at that one. Just one more reason her grandfather gave for not liking him.
He peered at Vera. ‘You’re thin, you’re pale, too, young lady. Are you eating properly? You know Keiko makes very good meals.’
Vera smiled primly.
‘You don’t want to be sickly.’
Unspoken words to follow were ‘like your mother’.
She was branching out too, from white food. She ate the Danish: it had white icing at least. She bit into it.
He laughed his pebbly laugh, the one she had come to love, the one of true mirth – as opposed to the other, hollow draining that was not a laugh but a view of the world.
He sipped his coffee. He had developed a tremor, and it spilled in the saucer. ‘You’re not going to try to get me to talk about pearls today.’
‘Everybody’s here and waiting.’
‘Nonsense. They’re here to have their coffee.’
James Lowinger liked to go out with the pearl divers, to see the stone go overboard and the men stand on it and let it carry them down to the bottom, like the lifts in the flat in London. They swarmed across the sea bed all arms and legs, as if they could stay down for ever. He wished he could do it. The rest of it he hated.
It was six years after his first visit, and the British had again announced that there would be a great harvest. His father got bidding for the rights to the oysters, and up went the price and down went the sun and suddenly it was his. He bought it all. The boats returned with hundreds of thousands of oysters, one in a thousand of which might have a pearl. The overseers slung the bags out of the boats and onto the sand.
Now, what to do? Papa Lowinger could hire the natives to open the shells. But then he still needed men to search for pearls. The larger pearls would be hidden in the hinge of the oyster. To remove such a pearl you’ve got to use bare hands and a special prising, cutting tool. So he had to trust some workers. And there were none he trusted. He could chain them and forbid them to chew their blasted betel nut because they would hide any pearls they found in their teeth, and punish them if they did. But he didn’t want the bother, or the brutality of it.
Happily some pearls came loose by themselves and turned up in the silt that built up at the bottom of the tubs. The pearls he found he bottled and sent back to London. But he still had hundreds upon thousands of oysters. He found a place outside Condatchey Bay, where the natives lived. He dumped his oysters in open tubs and they did their part like the docile creatures that they were and began to rot.
There was just one problem. The stench. It grew. In the heat, the dead molluscs smelled absolutely vile. And the smell clung; it did not blow away or dissipate after dark. Day after day, a week, two weeks, there was still the stink of it and more oysters coming in on the boats every day. The village rose up in protest and demanded that the English take the oysters away. But they were poor people and the natives needed the pearling fleets, and the traders persuaded them to let them stay on until they finished.
To keep an eye on the locals, James and his father stayed in a hastily built hut on the beach. James walked on the sand at night, looking at the stars, but it was impossible to escape the smell. He was ashamed. Of the filth. Of the big English brutes with their whips. Of the smell of death. He sometimes wondered if he himself were rotting.
When the rotting was done, and the oysters nearly water, they hired the women and children. They were the poorest of the poor – no one else would do it. Mostly naked they waded in to the mass of decomposing oyster flesh, and felt around on the bottom for pearls. They were up to their armpits in it, and kneeling, gagging at having their faces so close. His father’s men patrolled the edges of the pit with whips. James’s father himself was on a horse. From the height of his seat he saw an old crone slip a pearl into her mouth. He caught her before she swallowed and took her away and bound her to the mast in the hot sun and whipped her until she was nearly crippled.
At nights in their ramshackle house on the beach his papa swore about the greedy government that opened the fishery every year so that the pearls were getting smaller. James went out again to walk on the beach and saw the sun set over India. This is the family business, he thought to himself. This is how Mother got her fine hats and many schoolbooks.
The next day at dawn they woke to find a squad of local officials on the beach.
‘Move on,’ the men were shouting, ‘Go! Away with you!’
They waved their arms. The workers scrambled out of their tents half awake. The officials kicked in their direction, and began to fling sticks at them. The workers began to collect their few small possessions.
Papa came out of the little house to remonstrate. He put on his best manners.
‘Friends! Colleagues! What can I help you with?’
But he was confronted by a short, fat man, who had no small-talk. The Englishman had bought the right to hire the divers and bring up the oysters, he said, but he had not bought the right to let them rot there. He must move on.
‘Impossible,’ said Lowinger. ‘I cannot move this operation, which brings prosperity to you as well as to me. As you see. We are in the midst—’
Ceylon had anticipated his dilemma, said the fat man. In this case the government would help them out by taking two thirds of the oysters as a royalty.
By dark of night they moved on to another village, which had very few people. The oysters continued to appear, every day, on the boats from the pearl banks. James’s papa hoped the government did not notice him this time. He built huts and disguised them with palm branches. They dug trenches and lay the oysters down in them and caused water to run through to clean them. But still they smelled. The police came, but he bribed the police: the oysters were almost decomposed. When the inhabitants began to complain of the stench, he bribed them too.
Dead matter does not give way easily. As the oysters rotted they were infested with larvae and these larvae gave a man strange diseases. While the cleaning went on they had to have a big bonfire burning. It helped with the smell. One man fell into the flames and was burned; he was bitten by flies then and died of oozing infections.
Men’s lungs were damaged. The Chinese coolies seemed to manage the best. The old ladies who waded in the stuff, filtering all that dead flesh through their fingers, seemed indestructible but sometimes one would fall over and nearly drown.
There were flies everywhere. James could not breathe the air; it was oppression, and a plague upon the earth. They tried to clean it up. But more oysters kept coming out of the sea, every day. Lowinger had bought a share of the whole harvest, and the harvest was a good one. He moved from town to town but the locals refused to let him warehouse his putrefying little shellfish, pearls inside or no pearls inside.
At night in their house on the beach – once again, a shack made of boards thrown together, poles and a tin roof – James asked his father to pull up and leave. But no. Oh no, where pearls were concerned, Papa could always come up with a new idea.
When the next batch came ashore Papa produced four huge boxes lined with tin. They were like double-sized coffins. The tin was supposed to keep the smell in, and to stop any leakage when the flesh of the oysters started to go, as inevitably it would go, on the sea voyage to England. He had plans to ship the four large tin-lined boxes to England to be washed on the River Ouse at Buxted where there was running water. He had got a merchant ship to agree to take them. He sent the crates by ox cart to Colombo.
But there was some delay in the shipping. It could have been a storm; perhaps the ship needed repair or took another, better-paying load. The boxes sat sealed in the harbour. The oysters started to decompose and when they decomposed they set off the same disgusting smell, only this time it was enclosed.
James and his father went in to Colombo to pay the boxes a visit. James gave them a wary look. The smell was coming out through the hinges. He stared at the containers and thought he could hear popping sounds inside. There were chemical changes as oyster flesh decomposed, and those changes produced gas. He had an awful premonition.
The two entrepreneurs were not around when it happened. They were back at Condatchey Bay dragging more oysters out of the sea. But they heard about the explosions soon after. The gas blew open the tin-lined cases, and the explosion was heard all over Colombo. The air was fouled and the sky blackened for miles around. The smoke had not cleared when the government authorities were on the trail of the Lowingers, father and son.
They were little wiry men not far removed from the ones Lowinger hired to go down and shorten their lives under water. He scoffed at them all. But these authorities were impervious to insult. They responded by seizing the ruptured cases. They took them away and buried them; no one knew where, but James heard a report they’d gone by in bullock carts toward the jungle.
James’s father sat and fumed in his beach house. He made his son’s life hell, carping on about his schoolwork and having him write out algebraic equations. That made James anxious to go home to England, but his father wouldn’t abandon his oysters.
Then they had a visitor. A man came riding along the beach on his horse, a military man who, like many of the soldiers in Ceylon, had taken an administrative post in the local government. Add to that he gambled a little in the pearl market. His name was Avery McBean.
They’d all met before. He hailed them and then he jumped down off his horse. And who was behind him in the saddle, but that overdressed girl with her pout. Except now she was fifteen and on the cusp of beauty and thought herself even grander than once she had. James hated her on sight. She did not move from the saddle; she was six feet up on the horse and probably couldn’t. The conversation took place like that, with the girl watching from above.
‘We’ve impounded the tin-lined cases,’ said McBean. ‘We had to build new lids, for which incidentally, we’ll charge you. The exciting news is that we found pearls in there just as beautiful and just as big as you’d find elsewhere. However they are the property of the government. And you’re in a deficit situation, Lowinger.’
After the ranting and raving settled down, McBean offered friendly advice. He had figured out the system. You’d not see him buying up lots of unopened oysters. The only smart thing was to buy from the small independent boatmen who will wash a small quantity of the oysters themselves.
‘They’ll do you every time,’ said McBean, infuriatingly calm with his Scottish burr. ‘They see that the English are greedy and their greed makes them desperate and a desperate man has little success outwitting molluscs or little wiry brown men.’ The English, he said, as if he were somehow in a different category.
‘Thank you very much,’ said the senior Lowinger, ‘but you are wrong.’
‘Aye, if you say so,’ said McBean easily. ‘You’ll find out the wisdom of my words, sooner or later.’
And the girl sat like a princess on her steed. She smirked down on James. Neither child nor woman, she was something alarmingly in between. He squirmed. He went pale under his hot red face. She parted her perfect lips and stuck out her tongue at him. Then she giggled and rolled her eyes at her father. James smiled, uncertainly.
McBean got on his horse and whirled around.
She looked back over her shoulder and blew James a kiss.
He would never be free of her.
Vera hated to see her grandfather in his bed. For years she had heard people reassuring Belle that since the old man had been all over the world, he’d come home safe and sound and end his days with her. It was what you were supposed to do when you led a life of great danger. ‘He’ll likely die in his bed.’
Therefore, Vera thought bed was the most dangerous place for him to be. She tried to drag him out of it, in the morning. Some days he would shake his head, and go limp, as if all the energy had drained away under the sheets. She would jump on top and rumple up the sheets, prodding him, until he roared for her to go away. He would not come out of his room before she left for school, and those days were not good days for algebra and geography. Vera would worry about him and race to the streetcar for Homer Street as soon as the bell rang for the end of classes. When she burst in the door, her eyes would go first to Hinchcliffe’s face for any clue of mishap, and then to her grandfather’s office door. He’d be in there, a little pale, perhaps, and sinking into his chin. On the way to coffee she would hold his arm at every step he took.
But on other mornings he gamely shook her off with the lion’s roar she wanted, and said he’d be up just as soon as she left him alone. He would wash, and put on his white shirt for the office. Vera would pay a little better attention in school but still make haste for Homer Street immediately after.
On Sundays – most Sundays, if it wasn’t raining – they walked. This particular Sunday the sun was shining. They started at English Bay. James wore a wide straw hat, and Keiko wore a headscarf, blue with white figures on it. People glanced at them, as they passed, no doubt thinking they were an odd group. But Keiko never seemed to notice. She loved the bleached, lost logs that rolled in on the tide and was forever marvelling.
‘So big, so big,’ she said. ‘Where from are they?’
‘They’ve been logged somewhere up north I suppose,’ said James. ‘And sent down in a log boom, and got loose from it.’
‘Oh, oh,’ said Keiko.
Vera liked the kelp with its beads of bright green, which she could squeeze between her fingers and pop. She wandered down to the water to pull up some kelp and back to her grandfather to walk beside him, and away again to walk along a log and hop over another tangle of them, teetering on a rock. No one told her not to now. Her mother had loved to walk on the beach too, and they would pick up shells, and sometimes sit in the lee of the sea wall, looking at what they’d found. But her mother had been nervous of the sea and especially of Vera on the beach, afraid she’d be swept away or fall off a log. They talked about her mother a little then. How she had gone to boarding school in England. How he had been out of touch for so long, until she came to Paris. ‘We all lived together then,’ said James Lowinger reflectively. ‘Until she found Hamilton Drew. Or he found her.’
They reached the path through Stanley Park.
Keiko was different here from the woman she was at home.
She seemed to have known the water for a long time. She cast an expert eye on the rivulets and the bubbles in the sand and knew exactly what rock to pick up to find the crabs. She walked beside James, head inclined toward him, attentive to his words and to his step, if it faltered. But she was also listening to the wind on the water, and smelling the salt. Sometimes she stood and scanned the horizon.
‘Weather changing,’ she would say, or, ‘tide changing.’
‘Keiko knows all about the sea,’ James would say, squeezing her elbow. ‘All my life I have wanted a girl just like her. A deep diver,’ he would say. Then he would laugh, that dry chuckle that wasn’t really aimed at anyone. ‘Has all my life come to this?’ he said. ‘Do I talk about it as if it was over? I suppose it will be, soon. I suppose I could begin to sum it up.’
They went as far as the benches at First Beach before he sat. Keiko had tea in a thermos. She poured some into the tiny china cup that she brought for him. And when he spoke his eyes looked far out to the east as if there might appear, on the horizon, one of the great sailing ships he’d been on as a boy.
‘At weddings, the Indians used to bring up a pearl from the bottom of the sea and bore it through with a hole to symbolize the taking of a maidenhead. You wouldn’t understand—’
‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m an infant?’
‘We did it when your mother married that man, my son-in-law.’
‘You hate my father,’ said Vera sadly.
‘We saw through him, that’s all. It wasn’t difficult. We saw him for what he was. An opportunist. I saw that in him maybe even before he saw it. But your mother was determined. You couldn’t stop her. Even her mother couldn’t stop her. She said she’d give her a wedding and give her a pearl and give her away and that would be the end of it. Never speak to her again. And she never did.’
He shook his head and laughed again without humour, out of amazement, perhaps. ‘Far as I knew. Of course she wasn’t speaking to me either. When she stepped up to the priest Belle wore one rosee pearl in each ear, a perfect match they were. Your grandmother got them in Kuwait and had kept them all that time.’ He looked very thoughtful then. ‘She sold everything she could make a gain on. They were freshwater pearls from the bottom of the sea. It’s a magical thing, that. We also took our pension pearls and made a necklace so close to the earrings you’d have sworn they came out of sister shells. They got married and that was that. Hamilton Drew took it all. He took my daughter. He took the pearls. He took—’
He stopped.
‘What did he take?’
The old man thought about it for a while.
‘He took my name, that’s what he took. He took my good name and used it for his own ends.’ He brooded and when he spoke again he was back on the Romans.
‘You know Seneca had to chastise Roman women for wearing so many pearls. You can read about it, go look it up. Emperor Caligula’s widow wore pearls in rows and lines all around her head, her bodice, her sleeves and her hem. She wore them hanging from her ears, around her neck, on her wrists, and on her fingers. When she went out into the streets people had to look away so as not to be blinded. And it became the fashion. Ladies began to wear them on their feet, on their shoe buckles, in the thongs between their toes and between their legs too, no doubt.
‘Do you know why Rome invaded Britain? Your teachers probably told you something about Gauls and Caesar. But that’s all hooey. The real reason was the Romans wanted British pearls. They were freshwater pearls, found in lakes and streams, small and of poor colour, some said. But the Romans were desperate. The rage for pearls consumed them. Finally they had to pass laws, prohibiting persons of lower rank and unmarried women from wearing them. This greatly increased the number of marriages, as you can imagine.
‘But you see – and here’s the rub, my dears – pearls have always been connected with wars and theft and ugliness. It’s just the opposite of all that purity. Conquered people had to pay a tribute in pearls, just as they did in women, and in slaves. There was once a battle lost by an emperor called Pezores. I don’t remember what country was his. But he wore an unrivalled pearl in his right ear. Just as he was about to be killed by his enemies, Pezores tore this pearl from his ear and threw it ahead of him into the pit. Emperor Anastasius, the victor, was furious. He promised five hundred gold pieces to anyone who would comb the pit, full of dead men and dead horses. And hundreds did, pawing through that gore. But no one found the pearl. It was lost for ever, with the dead.’
Here James Lowinger shook his head. Vera knew they were talking about her mother again. And Keiko screwed the lid of the thermos back on, and put the tiny china cup back in the cloth bag that she hung around her waist, and they stood up and turned back along the beach.
It was as if he had run into a wall.
What was the wall? Vera wondered. It was the wall of death, perhaps. Belle had gone into it. Her grandmother, the Captain’s wife, must have gone into it, and now he himself was looking at it.
On Sundays when it rained, Keiko kept James at home. He coughed now, and when he coughed his whole body was wracked. Vera went out alone. She walked in the grey drizzle and thought about pearls, and slaves, and women. A fresh pearl white and perfect was beautiful. It had a value beyond price. But a marred pearl was worthless. A woman about to be married was ‘bored’ by a man; an eel could prise open the oyster shell and feed on the animal inside, swallowing the pearl as well.
James Lowinger could talk about pearls in literature, he could talk about pearls in history, pearls of the conquered and the conquerors. But any story hung subject to cancellation, as he rambled. Her grandfather said he did not want to tell. But he did want to tell. It was as if he had come home to tell her something. But the story began long ago; he could not tell it all at once.
‘You know I don’t want my stories falling on the wrong ears,’ he said, teasing.
‘Who do you mean?’
He put his finger alongside his nose. ‘You know who I mean.’
‘You don’t mean Keiko?’
Of course he didn’t. He held out his hand to her; his face was lit with the pleasure he felt in her nearness.
‘You mean Miss Hinchcliffe?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vera. She is no more than a functionary.’
‘You mean my father then.’
‘Oh, interesting suggestion. My son-in law,’ he said. ‘My erst-while son-in-law.’ James Lowinger took full responsibility for the error in judgement that had put Hamilton into the family: this weak link was his, not his beloved Belle’s and certainly not Vera’s. ‘What an unnatural cruelty! Do I still have a son-in-law when I have no daughter?’
Some days he mentioned the book again. Some days he said he had already got it half written. But he certainly would not finish. The problem was, he said–
‘I know, Grandfather. It puts you into an impossible struggle between truth and loyalty. You told me.’
‘Good girl, you remember.’
When James was ill Keiko nursed him and Vera went to school in a rage and fought with her friends and went after school to Homer Street, even though he was not there, to stare at the ukiyo-e. A silent Miss Hinchcliffe sat over her typewriter.
‘Where is Mr McBean?’ Vera asked her.
‘There is no Mr McBean.’
Vera did not believe this.
‘But his name is on the door,’ she said stubbornly. ‘See? Lowinger and McBean.’
Miss Hinchcliffe smiled in a pinched way. ‘I know it seems that way.’
‘Is he in the Far East, the way my father is?’
‘I told you there is no one called Mr McBean.’
‘Wherever he is, it is time for him to come back,’ said Vera.
‘Aren’t you going to go for coffee?’ Hinchcliffe would say.
‘Not by myself,’
One day when James was ill in bed, Kemp came down from the office above and took Vera to the coffee shop with him. When they burst in through the door shaking rain from their umbrellas, Roberta looked up with hope that the Captain would be with them. Malcolm the mailman was there, at the end of his rounds. The hatter was telling stories about the sailors and how one would come ashore and buy a smart hat, a Borsalino, say. Then he’d go on a big tear and lose it. The hatter could go around the bars and pick up lost hats in the morning if he felt like it. And the next day, before his leave was up, the sailor would come back and buy the same one again.
They murmured appreciatively at this homely story and then it was silent in the triangular café with its three booths.
Roberta said, ‘How is he?’
And Vera burst into tears.
The men sat embarrassed while Roberta took Vera in her arms and patted her on the back.
‘What are we going to do with her?’ she said to the others.
James Lowinger lay in his bed. His veins stood out under the skin on his head. Vera had not imagined that a head could get thinner, but his had. His flesh was clinging to his skull. He lay with his eyes shut but his voice did not change and he could still laugh so that it sounded even more as if his voice were gurgling down a drain. Day by day he grew lighter, his face more luminous. It was as if he were getting younger, on a cosmic timescale that had nothing to do with the days and the months and the years they were living through.
He spoke to Vera in a valedictory way.
‘A longing, almost like lust, to tell the tale as we have lived it, grows stronger the older we are. God knows that man’s lust is a subject of which I have some experience. I mean only the lust for objects. I say “only”, as if this were more manageable, more civilised than sexual lust: it is not, only an expression that has a more public acceptance.
‘I have no greed for gems or gold, which may strike you as odd. Indifference is rare in my trade and the one aspect of my personality to which my survival can be attributed. My lust inclines to the private and the physical, far healthier if you ask me. And for much of my life I was unsatisfied. It made me a good observer of others mind you. That is the story – how their lust entwined with mine.’
There were good days and bad days. Keiko heard news in Japantown that made her cry, and she wrote letters home, letters to which she got no replies. She found one man in Japantown who was from Kobe, and every few days she went to hear his news. But the letters he received were vague, and in contradiction to the news she heard in Vancouver. In Japan the people said the war in China was going well. Papers came to call up men and boys, and this was an honour, to serve the Emperor. Here, the papers said the Japanese were going to lose the war in China, and that the soldiers themselves were poor and hungry, and the people in Japan were even hungrier.
One day, while visiting her friend in the tailor’s shop, Keiko heard about the drowning of a fisherman. Although he was no one Keiko knew, and from a village many miles from her own, she was struck with dire premonitions and went home silent. While she was washing the dishes after dinner she told Vera about the sea near her home.
‘It can be dangerous if you don’t know. Every child is made to swim. The father throws—’ here she demonstrated with her hands cupped at the level of her knees, as if she were pushing a large bag of laundry over a wall ‘—throws the child over the boat into the sea. And watches. The child will go down and breathe in the water. The child will nearly drown—’ she mimed choking, dying, ‘then the father will dive in and bring the child back. But as soon as the child has’—she acted out spitting out the water ‘—the father again—’ she made the scooping motion with her arms ‘—into the sea. Second time, the child knows how to swim. Anyone who learn to swim that way – while going down to drown – is safe for ever.’
She did not bother James with her worries. He was very busy in his half-conscious world. At times he needed her care, calling out weakly, but good-naturedly, for tea. Sometimes he was sick on himself, and she came with a basin and towels to clean him. But he was often asleep. In his sleep he expended a great deal of energy. He thrashed and sometimes spoke, and even laughed, or scoffed, at imaginary companions in his dreams.
‘He simply must eat more,’ said the doctor.
‘He eat what he want,’ said Keiko.
But to Vera she explained. ‘He is fighting demons. Meeting old friends. It is very much work. That’s why he is so thin. He dreams away his food.’ She backed away from the bedside when the doctor came to look at James but she did not take her eyes off him.
The doctor did not push further. ‘He is old,’ he said. ‘He has come home to die, like an animal does.’
Keiko bowed and did not contradict the doctor. But when she and Vera were alone she spoke. ‘An animal does not come home to die,’ said Keiko. ‘An animal crawls away by himself. He come home for other thing.’
‘What other thing?’ Vera hung by her grandfather’s bedside and when he spoke she listened. Open, his eyes burned red at the rims and bright blue in the centre; his collarbones under the pyjama top stood up higher. Often she watched him sleep. Even then his eyes were busy under the lids.
‘Are you going to the office today?’ Vera asked, tearful, at the bedroom door.
‘I don’t think so, my dear. You’ll have to go for me.’
She went, crying.
As James Lowinger lay dying, he knew he’d been wrong about what was important. He’d been wrong about pearls, and even wrong about the stories. They were in the past. Soon he too would be in the past, and join his stories there. They were on record and official; in them he was clearly in command. They were of the mind and, in the life of his body, they were utterly worthless.
He sank into his body.
He sang, he wrestled, he suckled, he grappled and he danced with the love of his life in those last few hours. He lived to the full reach of his senses without fear or guilt, because what was to be regretted, now? He knew that Keiko came and went from the room with her basin and her cool cloth; he knew that she knelt beside him. He supposed, even, that she understood he had descended into a realm of pure delight, or rather that the world had risen away from him. He no longer felt the pain of Belle’s death, a pain he had tried hard to hide. He was loosed to his own flesh and every bliss it had to offer. That day, he lived one night, over and over. When it finally eased away he was ready, this time, to let go.
When Vera came home he was gone.
Keiko was quietly washing his body.
‘He works so hard,’ she said, ‘to die. He—’ and she acted out the thrashings and groans that had mysteriously accompanied his last hours. ‘And he—’ she closed her eyes and allowed a wide smile to cover her face.
Vera slapped her across the cheek.
Keiko stood with the red marks of Vera’s fingers spreading sideways over her cheekbone, and a well of deeper crimson, rage perhaps, climbing from her chest to suffuse her face. She said nothing. Vera burst into tears and ran from the room.
* * *
What can happen after a girl has fallen in love with her grandfather and with the storied life of her grandfather and his father too? Only one thing. The grandfather can die.
And that is what he did.
He died.
Not very original of him.
He couldn’t be blamed; he was old. All Vera knew was that here was the same thing all over again. Her mother, her grandfather. Her loved one, the one who took care of her, suddenly gone from his frame, leaving behind the waxy white flesh.
How did he die? She can’t tell you. She forgot about his warnings, his readiness for it. It seemed to her that at one moment he was there, entertaining the regulars in the coffee shop, and the next – when he had tricked her, by asking her to go on without him, leaving him with Keiko – he let go of his life.
It was as if Vera had just come through a sickness herself; she had been asleep and now she was awake.
The neighbours came out of their houses to help. He had to have a Christian burial, they said to each other. There was just Keiko and Vera, and Keiko had no idea what to do. Besides, none of the officials they dealt with would give her any standing, would allow her to be in charge. It had to be Vera. But Vera was fifteen. They spoke of the embalming, the funeral home, the grave site, and the cost of it all. Hinchcliffe took the bills out of Vera’s hands.
Keiko inclined her head at all these conversations, taking note of what was said although no one was sure she understood it. Her young face was unlined and patient and endlessly correct. Vera hated that. She gave herself licence to be awful to the woman, by behaving either with exquisite iciness or appalling rudeness, to keep her guessing.
A crowd of neighbours and Gastown merchants came to the funeral. How sad, they said, and wonderful man, as they came up to shake Vera’s hand. She stood between Miss Hinchcliffe and Keiko at the door to the visiting room in the funeral parlour. She did not like the way Hinchcliffe had taken over, but then who was to do it? Her mind spun with the nursery rhymes her mother had read to her. Parlour, she thought, come into my parlour said the spider to the fly. Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. The parlour was all burgundy and varnished wood and there was no air in it. There was no smell of the sea, not even in Grandfather’s clothes, because Keiko had cleaned everything so well.
The minister came; he hugged Vera and said that it was very hard, so soon after her mother’s death. The Captain did not go to the church the way her mother had. But he had lived a good life.
‘A good life?’ protested Vera. What could the insipid word ‘good’ mean in the days of James Lowinger? Did they mean he should have been content to die, as if he’d taken a large helping of life and ought not to be greedy? In fact his life was huge and sometimes horrible, but marvellous, and not to be taken away from her. She had asked for his stories but she could not piece it all together, or make a wholeness out of it.
‘He saw a great deal of the world, I suppose,’ said the minister dubiously.
Keiko knelt beside the coffin. Although they tried, no one could displace her. She sat on her heels and her face was on her hands, which were flat on the floor, folded up like a fan. She raised her body from time to time, and bowed, and then went back down, with no expression on her face. Like the women in the prints, Vera thought.
Vera’s schoolteacher got down on his knees beside her, trying to shake her hand.
‘Miss Tanaka?’ he said. He alone had troubled to discover her name.
When she wouldn’t raise her head he put his down on the floor beside hers and said loudly, as if to wake a sleeper, ‘Thank you so much for taking good care of Vera.’
He was the only one.
But it was because he thought that it was over, Keiko’s taking care of Vera.
‘I suppose her father will come,’ said the neighbours.
No one had thought of Hamilton Drew.
‘And your father? Will he be coming home?’ asked the minister.
Vera looked at Hinchcliffe.
‘We are attempting to locate him,’ the secretary said with a firm smile. ‘I have wired. I have also sent a letter. I am not certain where he is…’
And then they all went home.
And it was silent.
James Lowinger did not wake up and shake the house with his morning sneezes. And there was no bustle to get his morning tea or his shoes and no secret laughter coming from that room and no secret tears either, which was what Vera hoped for. She wanted Keiko to suffer. She wanted Keiko to show on her face the desolation of Vera’s insides. Since she had the temerity to love the old man, she might as well pay the price. What did she expect, taking up with a man so much older? She had to know he would die, didn’t she?
Vera’s pathetic hymns of grief, her English nursery rhymes, swirled in her head. London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow, what shall we do then? He had died; old men do that, that was what they did. Maybe it was even Keiko’s fault. There were many cruel things she planned to say to Keiko, but when she saw her, head bent over the little iron grill on the back step to cook fish, something moved inside of Vera and she could not.
She went to Lowinger and McBean after school. There was, temporarily, a sense of urgency in the warehouse. The captains came in their blue caps and Hinchcliffe talked to them tersely; they left again. There was no word from Hamilton Drew. Vera was curious, but not heartbroken. She did not remember the man, anyway. The business would have to keep on running, said Hinchcliffe; it could not close because they were always in the middle of a shipment, or an order, and there was no right time to stop. Vera nonetheless hoped that every day would be Miss Hinchcliffe’s last. That she would stand up from her desk and put on her coat and hand over the key to Vera. But no. Hinchcliffe showed no signs of going away.
The flurry of visits soon ended. Vera planned to ransack her grandfather’s office. But Hinchcliffe was there, letting nothing out in the open. She appeared to be very busy with filing and typing letters with two sheets of blue carbon paper behind them. Vera walked slowly across in front of her desk.
Was Miss Hinchcliffe sad?
Hadn’t she too been in love with her grandfather?
Vera used to think that. But now she did not.
She wanted to ask her if she’d seen any signs of the book he was writing, or was going to write, the book that put him in the famous conflict between truth and loyalty, but on entering the door once more after school she thought better of it. She did not want to alert Miss Hinchcliffe. She thought of her grandfather’s impish face, his long chin with the permanent dimple, his finger laid alongside his nose, and she wanted to cry, but she did not.
She wondered if the mythical Mr McBean would appear. She wondered if her father would come. Miss Hinchcliffe divulged nothing. Vera sped past her and disappeared into the back. The pictures lay where she’d left them.
Three Views of Crystal Water. She ran her fingers over the paper, the way he had the day she and her grandfather had looked at the pictures together. She told herself the story again. A stranger surprised the beautiful diving women taking their ease on the beach. A man and a woman crossed paths under cover of midnight on the arch of a bridge, and a letter changed hands. And then the third, conflagration: the pagoda in flames, the samurai at the gate, the women fleeing.
* * *
One day Keiko came to the warehouse with Vera. She presented herself to Hinchcliffe, bowing. Hinchcliffe barely looked up.
‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ Keiko began. She was still bowing.
There was no response. Hinchcliffe’s neck tendons showed more definitely under her chin, that was all.
Keiko looked to Vera for guidance. ‘We come to you,’ she began.
Vera nudged her to stand up straight. Hinchcliffe was gazing intently at a letter she was typing.
‘Hinchcliffe!’ said Vera, like someone prompting a rude child.
Hinchcliffe blushed red.
‘She’s pretending we’re not here,’ said Vera to Keiko by way of explanation. Keiko understood Vera’s English, but then so too did Hinchcliffe. This riled the secretary. She looked up.
‘Yes, Miss Tanaka, what can I do for you?’ she asked.
‘We must talk about what James left for us,’ said Keiko. ‘He told me—’
‘I have my instructions.’ Hinchcliffe’s face was elaborately innocent. Vera examined it closely enough however to be certain that the woman was struggling against tears.
‘Instructions from who?’ said Vera innocently.
‘I really cannot discuss it.’
‘What work are you doing now?’ asked Vera with equal innocence, nodding at the typewriter.
Hinchcliffe whipped her head around. She let her jaw drop in imitation – conscious? Or not? – of the insolent way Vera had previously let her jaw drop in their altercations. The pink of her face powder stood out like crayon on her cheeks, as her complexion took on the chalky pallor of anger.
‘How can you ask that? I have been keeping this business going for years, while the Captain…’ She raised her eyebrows in the general direction of Keiko. ‘Don’t you know it would all be nothing if it weren’t for me?’
Keiko was not giving up. She stood very firmly in front of the desk.
‘We have come to you.’
‘Yes?’
‘We have come.’
Keiko stood smiling, intermittently nodding, pulling Vera into her orbit, willing Vera to copy her. Somehow all three adopted her manner.
‘I see that you have come. But why?’ asked Hinchcliffe. Vera could have sworn she bobbed her head, in an inadvertent bow. She had lost the struggle now, but she did not know it.
‘I have to go shopping,’ Keiko said. ‘But—’ she pulled out the cloth bag she kept tied to a band around her waist. ‘Money is none.’
‘He had it in his desk,’ said Vera. She went into his office and tried to slide open the wide, shallow drawer under her grandfather’s desk, but it was locked.
‘Money is none?’ said Hinchcliffe.
‘He always kept the coffee money there.’
Hinchcliffe reached into her desk and pulled out ten dollars. ‘Coffee money I have. There’s coffee money.’
‘Coffee money is good,’ said Keiko, bowing again graciously. ‘And now we like to have fish money. Rice money. Coal money.’
Hinchcliffe produced several hundred dollars. It was a small fortune. And Keiko rolled it carefully and placed it in her cloth bag. Enough for two more months.
Vera watched carefully where it came from. And she recognised in the quick, practised gesture a habit, and she understood with a cold feeling around her heart, that it was the same gesture with which Hinchcliffe had given money to her grandfather.
‘Of course, I understand,’ said Keiko, bowing.
‘Maybe Mr McBean will come,’ Vera said.
There was something there under all of this but she didn’t understand it, not yet. Someday she would; it was a knot to untangle.
‘McBean?’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘What do you know of McBean? There is no Mr McBean, I have told you many times.’
And Vera thought perhaps this was true. There was no Mr McBean.
Hinchcliffe dusted her hands in a gesture that clearly meant, ‘I am through with you’. Once, twice, three times, the palms together, passing each other, as if she were removing traces of a noxious substance.
Hinchcliffe was the picture of the fierce loyal retainer behind the desk, a figure all too familiar in the lore of Japan. Keiko stood up to her full five feet in height now; the bowing was over. And while Hinchcliffe was still sputtering, now Keiko the humble widow was fully in control of the situation.
‘Understood. Understood. Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘Thank you. We are grateful. Vera and I so grateful.’ She bowed again.
Watching Miss Hinchcliffe dispense with Keiko gave Vera her first inklings of a sorrow that was not entirely selfish. She saw the hands, dusted together; she saw the firm little knot of Hinchcliffe’s lips, that oh so wasp Canadian, ‘Well what did you expect? You had it coming’, and she felt sorry for Keiko. She was her grandfather’s wife, sort of, Vera supposed. Which made her a sort of grandmother. Except that she was younger than her mother had been. Vera hadn’t thought much about Keiko’s age before.
‘How old are you, Keiko?’ she asked.
‘Two times as you,’ said Keiko, smiling shyly.
Thirty.
That night she watched Keiko slowly, carefully cooking the dried fish that she had soaked all day. And she ate it, to please her. Keiko did not smile too broadly. But she looked into Vera’s eyes and nodded, and gave a little bow. Then she got a haughty look on her face and dusted her hands. There was the soft sound of her palms brushing against each other, once, twice, three times. It was her first joke.
Vera burst out laughing. They laughed until tears got the better of them, and put their arms awkwardly over each other’s shoulders and sat, heads down, over the kitchen table. They were stuck with each other.
‘What we will do?’ asked Keiko.
‘I won’t leave you,’ Vera said. Her grandfather would want her to stay with Keiko. ‘All my life,’ he had said. ‘I wanted a deep diver.’ That was a very long time to want.
‘I won’t leave you,’ repeated Keiko.
Vera knew it was true.
The days crawled by, the weeks crawled by; she watched the size of Keiko’s cloth bag shrink. She returned by herself to Hinchcliffe.
‘We need to buy food. And pay for the bills,’ Vera said. ‘Where is the money for that?’
Hinchcliffe had not recovered from the fact that Keiko had got the better of her. ‘She is not his wife.’
Aisho.
‘He must have left money for her. And for me,’ said Vera.
‘It is better to wait until your father comes back,’ said Hinchcliffe.
‘And what if he doesn’t?’ asked Vera.
Miss Hinchcliffe said that since she first wrote about Captain Lowinger’s death, her father had not answered the telegrams.
In retrospect, it seems preposterous that they did not press her more. That they did not ask for a will. That no adult other than Keiko inquired about provisions. That no one questioned the ownership of the company. That the unknown person who had given Miss Hinchcliffe instructions did not appear, or at least give more instructions. That Hamilton Drew did not answer the telegrams.
But many things were mysteries and they were not to be solved because James Lowinger had died. And no matter what the neighbours called her, Keiko was not Mrs Lowinger. She did not speak good English and she was Japanese.
And Vera was no longer a child, but not quite an adult.
‘How will you live? Who will you live with?’ her teacher asked her. ‘Did Captain Lowinger provide for your schooling?’
‘I will get a job,’ said Vera.
The teacher mentioned the Depression. Men out of work everywhere.
‘I do know it’s a depression,’ said Vera. I’m not an idiot.’
You couldn’t tell her anything, the teacher remarked to his colleagues.
The doors of the neighbouring houses remained closed and few people expressed curiosity about how they were managing.
By mutual agreement, Vera and Keiko had arrived at the conclusion that it was beneath their dignity to go in front of Hindicliffe again.
‘I will find a job,’ said Keiko. Her eyes were round and bright. Vera read the newspapers to see what was available. But there were no jobs. And men came to the door almost every day asking for work, asking for food.
Keiko went to the dry cleaners and offered her services: they were Chinese. No no no, they said. Chinese workers were dying of starvation. And China was the enemy of Japan.
In Japantown her friends told her to go to the fishing boats. So Vera and Keiko took a long bus ride to Horseshoe Bay. They stood on the docks there and sniffed the air. It smelled of gasoline and kelp. But it also smelled of ocean and timber and wilder places farther north and they were excited. Keiko waited for the boats to arrive and spoke to the men in Japanese. She said she could dive. She said she could clean fish, scrub boats, anything. She said she was ama. But the men who ran the ships laughed. If they had jobs they had to give them to a man, with a family.
By then even the kindliest neighbours said, ‘But surely the girl’s father will come?’
But Hamilton Drew did not come.
Vera went again to the warehouse, which now was like a tomb; entering the door there was like entering a place of pain. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.
This time Miss Hinchcliffe said she had heard from him. The letter was postmarked in Kobe, Japan, she said, emphasising the capitals. He wished to return and settle matters. But he was unable to do so at this time. She had confidence that he would. In the meantime he had asked her to carry on.
‘You are lying,’ said Vera. She was certain of it; she could tell by the spots of red on the secretary’s cheeks. She backed away from the desk. ‘I will write to him myself.’ Then she ran out of the door into the evening gloom, so that the secretary could not see her crying.
‘What did she do before, in Japan?’ the kindliest neighbour asked Vera, about Keiko, encountering the two on the street.
‘I am a diver,’ Keiko said, understanding.
‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, her eyes jumping from Vera to Keiko. A furrow developed in her brow. Perhaps she thought that Keiko was a performing diver, like in a circus. ‘I don’t suppose there is much call for a diver here.’
Vera’s teacher advised Keiko to go to the aquarium; maybe Keiko could find a job cleaning tanks. This was a good idea, and they both went, but once again Keiko was refused. Men did that job.
They returned to Horseshoe Bay. ‘I am a good diver,’ said Keiko. ‘What I love to do. Go to shore I do it. Pick up shellfish under the water,’ she said.
They tried a strip of beach on Bowen Island. But even Keiko could not work underwater, not in Canada. It was too cold. One man told her to go to Australia, but she did not know how to get there. There was only one place she could dive. Japan.
And suddenly, more than anything, that was what Vera wanted. To go with Keiko to Japan. She was angry at Hamilton Drew. She did write to him, but all she could put for an address was Kobe, Japan. If her father came, if he at long last materialised, she wanted to be gone. To have disappeared somewhere, so that he would look for her, and mourn. Even better to have disappeared in the Far East, where he had disappeared himself.
She felt that she was a failure, a useless, unlovable girl. She had been insufficient to keep her mother alive, and no better at keeping her grandfather alive. Whatever it was they were fighting her father about, whatever it was the men were looking for, it was more important than she was: that was the message. She might as well go off to Japan, wherever that was: she was no good for anything else.
It happened quickly, after that.
Keiko’s fishmonger in Japantown would let her work to earn the money to get home to Japan. Only for three months, he said, she could clean fish. But you cannot take that girl with you, he said. She is white, and she will not be safe.
‘He must be crazy,’ said Keiko to Vera. ‘It is not so.’
‘Japan will have war with all the white people of the world,’ said the fishmonger. ‘It is you who are crazy.’
Because they knew it would be for the last time, they returned to Homer Street. Hinchcliffe was positively rigid, Keiko strangely poised.
‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ she said, bowing deeply. Hinchcliffe could not see the little smile around her mouth because Keiko’s face was directed toward the green linoleum floor. ‘We have much use of money you before given. And now we come to say that we like to go shopping more.’
‘It is for me,’ said Vera. ‘Grandfather would not have wanted me to be hungry.’
‘No,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘He would not. Whatever he left, it is for you. But he left nothing. I have looked.’
Vera felt as if she had lost him all over again.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.
Perhaps that was why Hinchcliffe opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.
Keiko and Vera were ecstatic. It would go toward their tickets.
Anger was not all that drove Vera to go to a strange country. There was something more grand and admirable, under the rage of an abandoned child. Japan was a palace of marvels. She wanted to go there to find beauty and tranquillity and mystery. She had seen this in the pictures. This was the Japan of her grandfather’s travels, of his life. She did not understand, or remember, that the pictures were ancient, that the world they described was one hundred and more years old. What difference did it make? The pictures spoke the language of dreams. She went to find the land where it was spoken.
But the language of dreams is loss. The love of beauty is elegy. Made of flesh, we see with the eyes of the past, over the shoulders of the living. The older Vera will tell this to her collectors, the ones who love the ukiyo-e but do not understand why. The ‘here and now’ that the ukiyo-e artists carved and coloured was already dying, even in its own time. It is useless to mourn or to fight it. We might as well celebrate. It is a kind of ecstasy.
But so dangerous, in the West. To give in is to give up ambitions. She will see this, in the prints she had examined so minutely, in her grandfather’s elderly wisdom. To adopt an inspired idleness, an absorbing ritual. It was so foreign and alluring in the land of her upbringing, her Canadian, Protestant upbringing. Though sad, Belle was never idle, but earnestly found digging up the flower beds or mowing the grass, rattling the dishes in the drying rack or sighing over the wringer washer. Never so beautifully turned out as the Japanese in their riotously painted kimonos behind a screen with chopsticks in their hair, busy in occupations of the moment, blissfully turned away from, but patiently awaiting, eternity. Vera would not get it right herself, not for many years.
Now she had an ambition.
She would go to the place where he had been, this grandfather of hers.
She would go into the pictures.
Maybe that is what happens to people who have been abandoned.
They go to the place where their abandoners have gone.
She went to where her grandfather had been.
But her mother had also left her.
She could not go to where Belle had gone. She would not go.
Later, when life was very dark and when she was nearly the age Belle had been when she died, Vera did think of going where her mother had gone. Of taking the bus, paying the exact fare, making her way along between the rows of seats, as that young mother with the faraway husband had done, lurching because her balance had never been good and it was worse with the medicine. And then ringing the bell for a stop. The handbag carefully left by the side of the bank.
She did not go that way.
‘For that you may be proud of yourself,’ said the sword polisher.
‘Do you think so? Some days I wonder.’
He offers neither condemnation nor praise.
‘You had another path to find.’
3
Uke-nagashi
Warding off: take and give back
Yokohama 27 February 1936
High, light piles of snow sat on every flat surface – benches, roofs, even the narrow edges of the incomprehensible street signs. The sky was black and luminous; red beams of emergency lights crisscrossed in the sky above their heads. Trucks were parked across each end of the empty street. Apart from distant sirens, there was not a sound.
‘This is not Japan,’ whispered Vera. ‘We got off the boat at the wrong place.’
Keiko stood on the portside walkway, one cloth satchel in each hand. She lifted her face to the night and sniffed the sea air, trying to sense her way back. She had been gone for nearly three years. She had told Vera so many times that she would cry tears of joy when she stepped off the boat onto Japanese soil. But her face showed confusion and doubt.
The street was nearly empty. Keiko swayed. There were always crowds, cars and streetcars, men stepping wide-legged in kimono or swiftly in black suits with round black bowler hats. There were always women with babies bundled on their backs. Now there was no one. Then into the emptiness came the sound of a snare drum. And footsteps, so many. Around the corner came a column of soldiers marching on the broad, empty street. The men’s eyes did not look anywhere but straight ahead. On and on they came.
This was the Japanese Imperial Army. Keiko and Vera stood silent, in awe. The soldiers held their bayonets over their right shoulders; one man in front held the flag, that red ball of a sun with its radial spokes.
The column of soldiers turned a corner and was gone. The footsteps echoed for long minutes after.
When the army had passed, one bystander ran, ducking from doorway to doorway. Another, in an army uniform, trained a limp fire hose on the front of a building. No water came out of the nozzle. It was as if he were waiting for the building to burst into flames.
Keiko told Vera to stand against a wall. She darted across the street; surely the man with the hose would tell her what was happening.
Vera watched their terse exchange. Keiko walked back slowly toward her charge. Vera could tell she was shocked despite her composure. Her shaky English was not quite up to the task of explanation. There had been a ‘fight’ in the army. More than a thousand army soldiers had gone into the Diet, the government chambers. Certain important men were dead, killed by soldiers. Junior officers had killed their superiors. ‘Savagely and without regard for the aged,’ was what the soldier had said. They even tried to kill the Prime Minister. What would happen next? Keiko had gone pale. ‘He said we should go home while the trains are still working. And stay inside.’
‘But what home?’ Vera asked. It was the first time she had thought about it: where would they live?
Keiko dug into her satchel for a headscarf. She wrapped it over Vera’s head, tying it at the nape of her neck, as if in that way she could make the girl blend in. Then, carrying their luggage, they began to make their way through the city to the train station. It was not very far.
Vera gazed around her; overhead the searchlight beams slashed and slashed the darkness. A man stood silently in front of the newsstand reading a sandwich board. Keiko read it out loud. ‘The Emperor has said the rebels will be caught and punished.’
Vera had not known until then that there was an emperor.
‘The officers will be killed. And others are killing themselves,’ Keiko said.
Vera did not understand why they would do that. Keiko spent some of their few yen to buy the newspaper. She was scanning the article for names.
‘Is someone you know in the army?’ Vera asked.
Keiko shook her head.
‘Someone who came to our village used to be in the army. But I believe he is not any more.’
She did not find his name, and Vera could see that she was relieved.
More snow began to fall, silent, and pink where it crossed the hard white beams of searchlights.
It was morning when they got off the train in Toba. The station was on a platform, high above the ground. There was snow here also but the sky was blue; behind were mountain slopes. At least the peaks were white and high and reminded Vera of the pictures. Not far away, the town ran down to a beach; beyond it was a bay of small, tree-covered islands.
Keiko and Vera carried their wrapped bundles through narrow streets, their feet cold and wet. They came to a house and the door was opened to them. The woman who looked at them gave a little cry and covered her mouth, and then ran behind a screen. A man came out. He was grave and stern, but not very old. He looked at Vera, and embraced Keiko, but he did not smile. Vera stood with her head hanging down. She was so tired she could have slept leaning against the doorpost. The man took pity, and let them come in and gave them a place to sleep.
When they rose it was night again. Vera sat in absolute silence; she could not say one word to anyone, and no one would look her in the face. It was as if she did not exist. This invisibility gave her a curious freedom. She watched, and listened. What she observed was that, overnight, Keiko had grown. She was a tall woman here, and stood straight. Her glance was direct. Her voice was loud and her movements decisive. She was Mrs Lowinger: she had been away in Canada and she had come home. Vera could not understand her words, but she knew that Keiko explained her as James’s granddaughter, now Keiko’s charge.
Vera did understand that the people in the house said they could not stay longer than a few days. The children were afraid of her. They asked if she were a devil, and Vera understood the question, and blushed fiery red. Their mother told the children to be quiet, but she did not look at Vera any more.
Keiko agreed that they must leave: all she needed, she said, was a bicycle, a job, and a little house. She repeated these words in English to Vera.
‘Come,’ she said, after the evening meal.
They went out of the little slope-roofed house and walked down the slippery hill to the shops. Men passed them going up; they bowed and greeted Keiko, restrained, but respectful. In the centre of the town there was a tangle of narrow streets. Along the streets were little shops with cloth banners hanging beside the doors. Keiko pointed into the dark insides. Here was where the men drank. Here was a cinema, new since Keiko had left. Here was a noodle shop, run by an old aunt of hers, and there a stationer’s.
There were few people out on the streets. The night air was raw with icy sleet, and on the pavements was a thick layer of slush. Vera begged to go back to the house. Once there, she slept again, hoping that she would wake up and find herself back in Vancouver.
But she did not.
On the second day, as soon as the household was awake, Keiko and Vera dressed and went outside. Again they walked down the hill into the town. This morning the sun was shining on the iced pavement and the women were abroad. One of them exclaimed in joy when she saw Keiko. She put down the bicycle she was pushing and embraced her. More women followed her example, and in a few moments Keiko and Vera were in the centre of a crowd of exclaiming, laughing women. They were all small, with rounded, strong bodies; under their old-fashioned bonnets with long brims were bright, curious eyes. Keiko proudly introduced Vera to each one. These were her friends, the ama divers, she told Vera.
These women stared frankly into Vera’s face. Their eyes were laughing and they looked her curiously all over, making exclamations to themselves. They pointed at her hair. But they were delighted. And Keiko was so proud. If Vera could have felt anything but a seething self-pity she would have been ashamed, as she had never presented Keiko this way when they were in Vancouver.
Keiko took her to the temple and to the vegetable stalls and to the harbour where the fishing boats came in. They walked up the hillside to get a view of Ago Bay, and Keiko showed Vera the rafts that floated in the protected inlets. These belonged to Mikimoto, the pearl king. Keiko explained that there were baskets of oysters suspended in the water under these rafts, and each of these oysters had been seeded with a pearl. The oysters had to be protected from cold and seaweed and other enemies, so that the pearls could grow.
But even the pearls could not pacify Vera. She was cold and afraid. Where had Keiko brought her? This was not Japan. It was frigid, and poor, and there were soldiers in the streets. The State of Emergency because of the attempted coup in the army continued. At night Vera lay on her floor mat and heard raised voices, harsh cries, and the sounds of drunkenness from the street.
Inside the home it was not quiet either. Keiko asked her brother to lend them money. The sounds of their arguing passed through each paper partition. Vera could not understand. She asked Keiko: what does it mean. ‘My brother does not have money,’ said Keiko. ‘He goes to borrow from a loan shark.’ There was little money to be had anywhere: the war in China was draining them all.
‘But then it is a bad war,’ said Vera. It seemed obvious.
‘You cannot say this. You do not speak against what the Emperor has asked of us. We must sacrifice.’
Then the brother relented and said that the country was running out of oil, but that you could not say that either, because it was a military secret.
‘If it is a secret, how do you know it?’ Keiko asked, full of scorn. ‘Do they tell you their mind, these lieutenants of the Emperor?’
‘Be careful what you say,’ the brother said, his face darkening. ‘You went away. You do not understand what we’ve become.’
But he did one thing for her, perhaps because her presence with the white girl made him fearful. He came home to say that the charcoal man had received his call-up papers. He would leave immediately, probably even tonight. As he was a single man, and lived alone, his house would be empty. The brother had arranged that Keiko could live there. She could put the rent the charcoal man asked for in a special metal box and save it for when he came home from the war. Now the brother stood at his door with his feet apart and his hands on his hips. Vera and Keiko packed their bags without even seeing the little house. When they left, the brother’s wife pressed some paper money into Keiko’s hand.
‘Perhaps the charcoal man will never come back from the war,’ said Vera, as they trudged back down the hill.
‘That is terrible to say,’ said Keiko.
The house was high up on the other side of the town, near the forest. Black dust was on everything, as if the owner had slept with charcoal and eaten with charcoal and lived with charcoal piled around him. Keiko began to clean. Vera sulked, until she could not stand herself any more, and then she got up and helped to wash the floor. The good thing, Keiko said, was that the owner had left a small pile of charcoal behind the house, and they could use it to keep warm. When that ran out they would go up into the forest to collect firewood.
With the money from her brother’s wife, Keiko bought a bicycle. They bought eggs and fish and a large bag of rice. It would last a few weeks, Keiko said.
‘I begged before, from Miss Hinchcliffe. I not beg again,’ said Keiko. ‘I am ama diver and I will find work.’
She went to the inspectors’ office and put her name on the list. But there would be no diving until May. In winter her fellow ama worked for Mikimoto cleaning oysters at the pearl farm. But even Mikimoto had fewer jobs now than before. All over the world the Depression had cut into the pearl business. Keiko spoke to her friends in the street. She heard that some ama had to go dekasegi, away from home. Some worked as farm labourers. There were no machines for this work, only women with long knives in the fields. Some went to Yokohama or even Tokyo, to do cleaning work. But in those strange places, there would be fewer jobs as well, Keiko reasoned. She was determined to remain in Toba. The Emperor’s lieutenants, she said, would not change the sea.
Vera stayed inside, huddled on the futon. It was her job to keep the fire going in the hearth. Every hour she got up and raked the coals, and put on more charcoal, and when the charcoal was gone she put on some of the twisted roots she and Keiko found in the forest. She could not believe this was happening to her. It was as if she had descended into a fairy tale.
‘Soon spring comes,’ said Keiko. ‘It is better.’
One day when Keiko was out, a man came to the door. Vera was afraid to answer. He tapped gently, and then he looked in through the window. Finally, Vera answered but she could not understand what he was saying. That evening, when Keiko was home, he came again. He was a friend with a message. A woman had slipped on the bamboo raft in Ago Bay where the ama worked cleaning the oyster shells. She had fallen into the icy water and her foot had been caught between the poles. She had broken her ankle.
Keiko met the others to take the ferry to work the next morning.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Keiko said to Vera when she left the house. ‘I will come back.’
Vera did not feel afraid. She felt nothing, other than cold. She lay on the floor, under the layers of cotton cloths that were meant to keep her warm, and hated Japan. She was afraid to go outside because she looked different and people stared. No one spoke to her. If they had, she would not have understood. Finally, in the afternoon, hunger forced her out. In town, one man looked her in the eye. He wore a heavy sack of tools on his back, and he limped. He had a long, grey, thin beard. When he smiled at Vera she could see that most of his teeth were gone, and she was frightened of him. She had no strength; climbing the steep streets with a bucket of potatoes nearly made her faint. Once a man came out of a shop waving a bamboo stick and shouted at her.
‘Why?’ she asked Keiko later.
‘Only because you are strange to him.’
She felt just as strange to herself. She wondered if she were still the same girl she had been. There was one tiny pane of mirror in the house, and it hung on the wall by the door in a small shrine. Vera looked into it over and over. What she saw was a ghost with lifeless, nearly white hair and a red nose that ran with the cold.
She thought of the pictures she’d pored over on Homer Street, and tried to find even one thing that looked like the Japan she had fallen in love with. There was wind, and rain, and snow, but the people were braced against it; they were not sensuous or graceful. There was no promise of cherry blossoms or teahouses around the bend in the stream, or after the shower had passed. Something frigid and hard had found its way into this tropical place. The snow was no genteel flurry of white to walk through in sandals. It beleaguered the people’s walking, and weighted their every gesture. Like great white waves, it was water turned enemy, lying stiffly at their feet, in the frozen froth at the sea’s edge, or crouching on the roofs and hills as if to kill.
When Keiko came home with her wages they went to the shops and bought coffee beans. Their biggest expenditure was for a hand grinder. Vera put the beans in the small wooden drawer and turned the handle, while the smell of coffee beans came out. It was the one thing that made her happy, because it reminded her of the café in the flatiron building on Homer Street. Keiko used the big iron pot that the charcoal man had left, to make broth and noodles.
One night when the sky was white with a freezing fog, Vera woke from her sleep on the floor mat to the sound of whistle blasts in the street. The blasts were shrill, and insistent. Footsteps pounded past the door. Keiko told Vera not to get up, but she herself stood by the window in the darkness, peering out. She could see down the hill to the rooftops of the main streets.
‘They’re chasing that man who everyone says is a Red,’ she said.
‘What is a Red?’
‘A Communist.’ Keiko sucked in her breath. ‘I can see him. He is on the roof next door.’
The shouting and footsteps were right outside their house. Vera cowered under her blanket. ‘Come inside, away from the window,’ she hissed at Keiko.
But Keiko stood where she was.
‘They are men in black. They have seen him. Now they’re running over the roof. I fear they will catch him.’
There was a brief exchange of shouts, and then the shots of a gun.
‘Did they kill him?’
‘No. They take him away.’
‘What did he do?’ Vera asked.
Keiko said something in Japanese.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I cannot explain.’
‘Please.’
‘He has been taken for what is called “Dangerous Thoughts”. There is a law against them. He will be in prison. Maybe if very many people know what he has said, the newspapers will publish that he has changed his mind,’ Keiko said, and climbed silently into bed.
Vera lay awake pondering the idea of thoughts that were dangerous. Could the police here read people’s thoughts?
‘I think we should go home again,’ said Vera in the morning.
She knew it would not be easy. ‘Maybe Miss Hinchcliffe will send us the money. Maybe my father—’
‘Be patient,’ said Keiko. ‘In a few months it will be spring.’ She got a calendar and hung it on the wall. She explained the way the Japanese counted the days: eighty-seven days after February 4
, which they call risshun, a change would come. On the eighty-eighth day, which would be the beginning of May, the fishing season would begin and they would sail for the summer island. They had always done this and would do it again.
Vera counted the days. Spring came, and the trees were in blossom, and there was warmth in the air that blew off the crusted remains of icy snow in the shadiest parts of the treed hillsides. With the ice went a stiffness and fear from the people.
When the eighty-eighth day came, the whole village set out together with ceremonial flags flying, nearly three hundred men, women and children, in small sailboats and a few motorboats. She and Keiko went in the boat of Keiko’s old aunt and uncle, and their son. They had one of the few motorboats. The island was twelve miles from the mainland, a journey of six hours. At the end they stepped onto a low, bare volcanic rock and were welcomed by a posse of wild cats. There were dozens and dozens of them, arching from behind the rocks, meowing and stalking with tails swishing, giving no quarter. Vera had never seen a wild cat. To her a cat was a pampered pet, sleeping on a pillow. Keiko explained that the cats were left behind the year before, and the year before that, for as long as the people had been coming to the summer island for the fishing season. They lived on mice and snakes.
They unloaded their belongings onto the pebbly shore. They brought very little, just their sleeping bundles, a few yakata and baskets containing rice, diving gear and cooking pots. Keiko gestured to Vera to lift up the cloth-tied bundles that she had brought. The men went to put in place the wooden docks that had been stored away from the water and the winter storms.
Carrying their bundles, the people walked all together up the small winding street that ran up from the harbour. The procession was natural, and unhurried, passing one after another of the low, weathered wooden houses that, like the cats, had been left behind the year before and the year before that for as long as anyone could remember. Stones were set in rows on the roofs of the houses, which were grey and matched the rock. As each family reached its home, the members disengaged from the group, bowed, and disappeared inside.
That first night of the first summer on the island, Vera lay down on the floor mat, exhausted from the day’s sail. She could hear nothing but the wind and the sound of the water, a hollow percussive sound as it broke somewhere over the rocks. Where had she come to now? This island was a farther place even than the village from her world. She wanted to cry, but Keiko was beside her. The old aunt and uncle and even a boy, near her age but a little older, could hear. She was determined not to make a sound. She went to sleep pretending she was dead.
But sunrise came even to the dead. Her spot on the floor was directly in line with the rising sun; a beam crept slowly over the windowsill, and made its way up from her feet to her face. Vera opened her eyes. She was awake in a wooden box. And it was as if she had woken up for the first time in a year. Every board and mat and corner and basket Vera could see was freshly cut and full of meaning.
The box had been constructed carefully, simply. Vera could see each board as it lay next to the other, and the beams that were the straight trunks of thin trees that lay across them. Probably years ago, perhaps even one hundred years ago or more, when this box was built, the trees grew on this island. Perhaps that was why there were no trees here now. They had all gone for houses. The wood was grey and in some places russet, and in spots it showed the stains of water that had got through. There were knots and eyes in it and where there was a hard round eye, the surrounding log had been shaven. That meant that all along the planks Vera could see round hard grey places like pupils, each one in the centre of an oval like an iris, so that the whole made an eye. They did not feel like peering eyes, but like spirits that were friendlier now, less strange.
The box was perfect, square at each end, with thin paper screens dividing their sleeping section from their eating section, and a hearth in the middle. Vera liked the neatness of it and the sense she had of being small inside it, miniaturised by the house that was itself like a toy house in its simplicity.
She stumbled outside and saw that the sun was turning the sky pink and gold, highlighting the stray clouds that wandered across the great empty dome above this flat floating land. As the sun came up, birds began to fly in circles over the houses. Vera imagined them living all through the dark night on the bare rocks, or roosting in the cliff in this comfortless volcanic ruin without a safe leafy tree to be seen.
She wished she had been the first up, but greeting the day as it dawned was a custom here, and others had been up before her. The village was coming alive creakily and with good cheer. She went along the street; the doors were open. Vera heard screens sliding, and water buckets clanging. The men stood and scratched and looked out at the water.
Vera had to stare to recognise these people, although she had seen them in Toba and even sailed with them the day before. They had shed their stiffened look, and the wooden gestures that made them strange all winter. They might have been coming out of hibernation. They had the alert and avid look of hunters whose season had come. This was home, their faces said; the long sojourn on the mainland had been just a waiting.
And, Vera thought, there would be no whistles and men in black uniforms here. This was a safe place.
The water lay all around, everywhere you looked. Vera watched as men stretched their arms, barked directions and trotted down to the water. There was much groaning and heaving as they lifted the fishing boats down from the wooden stands where they had spent the winter. Their words, though still indecipherable, sounded exuberant. The men shouted to be heard over the surf. They looked bolder and bigger than they had in town, stripped down to the skin, like people who had been freed.
But the women, especially, were changed from the huddled souls Vera had seen on the mainland. Gathering around the well, they laughed together. They had removed their bonnets. Faces open, they filled their buckets, one after the other. They stripped to wash, and then went bare-breasted through the streets, old and young. It was a matter-of-fact and purposeful nakedness. They took no notice of themselves or each other in this state, but trundled back to their houses, each one nearly the same as the next.
The children were in the sea immediately. Mothers set down even the toddlers at the water’s edge, where they began making curious, rocking steps outward.
As she looked at the easy working swing of the other women’s bodies, Vera was envious. She imagined herself the object of stares and curiosity. One old woman with tiny wizened breasts stopped Vera in the path. She pointed overhead to the brightening sky and rows of narrow clouds. It was a good sunrise; it had fish scales in it, the woman seemed to be saying.
Vera was so astonished to be greeted that she could do nothing but stare. But the woman went away smiling. Vera resolved to do just what the others did. If she went around bare in the sun her pale skin would burn and peel and freckle. Then maybe – she hoped – she’d turn the same colour as they were.
She continued on the path through the village, past the harbour and along to the far end where there was a little height and she could look down on the water and see the shaded scrawling on its surface. Like the pattern on a huge tapestry, it was repeated as far as Vera could see. She wondered what those long lines of bubbles were, if they were foam that came with an overnight wind, now diminished.
Vera counted four different birds. There were terns, gulls, plovers, and cormorants. She paid special attention to the cormorants because they were the best divers. They had necks like black snakes: she could see one out on the water; his head went full circle around. His eye was like the eye of a needle. Their fellows flew low over the water in squadrons with serious intent. Vera saw just one goose, far overhead, and thought perhaps he was lost. Turning on the spot in her high place, she looked back into the heart of the village to see how far advanced the morning was. People were still emerging from their houses with water buckets. She saw the smoke of a cooking fire coming from the house she thought was hers. But she did not want to go back yet, she wanted to go on and explore.
She could see the mountains of the mainland, distant and small off the side where the harbour was. The other side faced away into the open sea. The island was not large, maybe four times as long as it was across, a distance Vera could walk in half an hour, and shaped like an elongated figure eight.
It had taller cones on each end, and a marshy place in the middle. It must have been two volcanoes once; the remains had been stretched as if someone had tried to pull the two sections apart. The narrow middle had nearly disappeared under water. A bridge of boards lay across it in several places. She stepped down on the boards and a white snake shot out from under, hissing. She stepped off the boards and waded through the water, which had eelgrass in it, and noticed tiny fish darting right up onto the land.
Butterflies and moths, the names of which Vera had not learned, some pale blue and some pink, stopped on the pale wild flowers that spotted the grass. There were orange butterflies too that she recognised from home; they were named Monarchs. Vera pulled out a clump of bamboo grass; it was as fine as green hair and it cut her. There were many kinds of moss: the thick velvety green, the red, dry, wiry moss, the moss that consisted of tiny stalks each with a minute yellow head.
She heard the great honking, almost barking sounds rise from the misty beds of bamboo grass.
She stopped, terrified.
Wild jungle animals – lions or rhinoceros?
She was suddenly blind. The flat lines of the rising sun had got entangled with the grass, and there was mist too, caught probably because the shallow water was warmer here than elsewhere. Vera squinted and shaded her eyes. She could see large brown-backed shapes in the tall grass of the marsh. Like great dogs or coyotes, barking. Then one of them unfolded its wings and flapped messily into the air. They were giant, unruly birds. When she approached the grasses where they waded, bending and snatching little fish for their breakfast, two more flew up and the rest stalked away, out of sight. They made her laugh with joy.
She turned back toward the house. At home, breakfast was ready. As she drank her morning soup, Vera told Keiko about the huge birds.
‘You are lucky!’ Keiko said. ‘You have seen the cranes.’
She told the old people Vera had seen the cranes.
They smiled and nodded and looked very impressed.
Lucky, Keiko repeated. She told Vera they danced too but she had never seen them.
Suddenly, everyone was working. Keiko had taken her goggles and her lunch box and her fishing basket and had gone down to meet the other divers. The young boy, her nephew, with whom Vera had been steadily avoiding eye contact, followed Keiko. The old aunt had gone out to dig in the soil and the uncle to mending boats with the other older men. No one said anything about what Vera should do.
Vera walked along the path and stood and watched the ama boats go off. There was an oar in the back at the centre, pulled up so that the rudder didn’t hit the sand. The women came splashing aboard, all exclaiming about the water, which Vera understood was cold. The men and boys ran alongside, pushing. Then they hopped aboard, and an ama woman took the oar. She began to sway, rowing the boat, and they were gone, without looking back. Vera was left alone.
She headed in the opposite direction she’d walked earlier. Here too, the ground rose a little, unevenly. The street petered out at some houses, which looked older and more dilapidated than the others. A few old women and men scratched at the dirt with hoes.
She came to the end of the village. There was a path that continued: it went to a shrine, probably. There were always shrines, with wooden arches painted red, with stones that were mossy and covered with lichen. Long tapes hung in these shrines, from the branches of trees, and papers were tied on them, or amulets or dolls. Vera did not understand these shrines; she had seen them in Toba and always turned away as if they contained something she should not see. She went onward from the path to the shrine, and discovered a square house, taller than the others. Its door was shut. She peeked in the cracks. But she could see only darkness. There was straw on the ground in front of it, and a horrendous chill around it. She thought it might be a tomb. But no, now that her eyes adjusted, she could see there were huge, square, straw-coloured, dirty blocks of ice inside, packed down in a hole. How had it got here? Some of the men must have come out in the winter, and cut the ice and saved it.
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