‘Good thing he’s not pointing out that way,’ one of them might say, gesturing toward the open sea. ‘You’d never know where he would stop.’
Ikkanshi would go around the High Point and then turn an exact one hundred and eighty degrees, which would bring him back to the same path along the beach, returning to the far end of the settled strip, near the baths. Then he would get out and go into the baths with the other men.
There, a space would open for him on the bench. At first, when he entered, the rowdy brown-skinned men with their lined faces and strong torsos would drop their voices and their eyes. He said little, but grunted when the wind, the rain, the blasting heat, the number of awabi caught this year as compared with last year, came up in the conversation. If the fishermen expected him to put himself above them, they were disappointed. He put himself in their midst, a mystery.
But even a mystery is absorbed in an incurious place, and the men appeared to forget that he was different. Island life took its usual shape around him, neither including
nor excluding Ikkanshi. And that was what he wanted. That was what he should have insisted on. If the women talked about him, they whispered that he was old. He was not old. He was thoughtful. Maybe he was burdened. But even the women lost their curiosity after a time.
He had refused the wife his mother found for him. She was a young girl, very young, only eighteen, while he was thirty-two. He said that it was because he was going away and that he did not know how long he would be gone, practising his art, or even if he would come back. It was not fair to take a protected Japanese girl to the island, where she would be so different. Sometimes near sunset, as he walked along the beach, he would see Keiko at the well, or arm in arm with another woman. She was not married. This was strange because the
ama
girls married young. Very casually, in the baths, he asked about her. That one is fussy, the men said, laughing strangely. Or just, That one! And nothing more.
It was not difficult to find Keiko alone; it happened naturally that she was at her doorway as he climbed the path to the temple. He bowed to her the first time, and the second time he stopped.
‘Your knife, is it sharpened to your satisfaction?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you very much, sword polisher,’ she replied, and she giggled at his formality.
‘If you have any other metal tools, I would like to fix them for you,’ he said.
‘You are a soldier, I believe,’ she said. ‘You must save your strength for battle.’
‘I am resting now,’ he said. ‘For a long time.’
It seemed to him that her smile was a little warmer. Her voice was louder than any Japanese woman he had ever spoken to, and low pitched too. The sinews of her throat led down to a V between her small high breasts. Her expressive, active hands on their fine wrists swam before his eyes. She was so slender, one arm could pull her toward him.
He stepped away, for fear she could feel the pull that heated him.
After that he only bowed to her when they passed, and she bowed back. But then she appeared in the cool of the evening outside the temple. He understood that he was to follow her down to the shore by the rocks, out of sight of the village. Her boldness pleased him inordinately. He kissed her and could not stop.
That was the beginning.
From there it happened so quickly. They were lovers and there was, for him, no other moment in his day but the moment when he saw her and knew he was to follow. It was as he imagined, when he was in her arms. She took him with her strength and her subtlety. Only when she was satisfied and her eyes that had watched it all, unashamed, closed at last, did he assume control. And he was carried on passions he had never known before.
He imagined her in England, an England of which she knew nothing. He’d dress her in western clothes, and she would walk beside him on those crowded pavements he remembered, with big shop windows they could look into, and enormous tall stone churches with dark interiors full of tombstones. She would be brave, he knew: a woman who could harvest shellfish from the bottom of the sea would not be frightened of a double-decker bus.
Only when his thoughts came to the idea of the Japanese Embassy which would take them there, did his courage fail. She was only a local girl from a little fishing village, and would never be considered good enough. And anyway, he had withdrawn from the only service that could take him away from the island.
Not that night, but the next time the girls went out in the dark, Vera was finally tempted off the rock and into the immense salty arm of the sea. She lay on top of it, on her back, looking up. The moon had grown; it was half full. Then she rolled over and looked down. The sand was lighter than the air. She put her arms out sideways. She felt as if she were flying, that the sand was not ocean bottom, but ground she could walk on. She scooped her arms and went down into it, driving with her head to make a space. She felt the water take her weight and drew a big breath so that her lungs made her buoyant. When she was well below the surface, she blew bubbles out of her nose and rolled over to look up.
Long, fractured rays of moonlight broke their angle at the surface and plunged straight into the deep, passing her. The water was dark, lustrous blue. Hanako floated alongside, blurry, smiling, waving. Vera looked at Hanako’s skin; it was a green, grey colour. She followed her friend, swimming a foot below the surface, looking up at the blurred stars, and down onto the sand bottom. They swam near the black rocks, which, underwater, in the dark, were splotched with light-giving green rocks or clinging creatures, Vera could not tell which. When they surfaced, they trod water and whispered with their heads in the air and their shoulders underwater.
‘Look,’ Hanako kept saying, ‘look.’ She was looking over the surface of the sea. She took her lantern from the rock and swung it back and forth. Swarms of tiny glowing grains headed toward her in the water until Vera thought she would be speckled green like a frog.
‘A fish like a bird,’ she said, ‘it will come. It will jump.’
And it did. A huge winged shining creature flew out of the water. It seemed as big as a blanket. It flapped its huge wavy fins, and flopped under the waves again. It was electric blue. Vera shrank back against the rock shelf, her skin puckering into goose-bumps.
‘You promised!’
‘Yes,’ Hana said. ‘Promised. No bad fish. Playing.’
Vera cowered, and Hanako swung the lantern, but the flying carpet fish did not rise up again.
‘It is hiding. Come down,’ said Hanako. She made a neat surface dive and languidly kicked in a circle around Vera’s legs.
One big breath was all it needed. One big breath, and to bend at the waist and force her head down, like a wedge, into the heavy water. And then she was in it and tumbling down to touch the sand and crouch, looking back up to the sky beyond the surface, to the fuzzed moon. She could see the little halo of light from Hanako’s lantern on the rocky ledge and it made her feel safe. She pushed herself back up and burst out toward the moon, exultant. She was not afraid.
They dived again, over and over.
Vera crouched on the bottom as long as she could, but Hanako could always stay down longer. Once, when they were down, Hanako touched Vera’s arm and pointed, There. There. Lying in the sand, dotted with its wavy edges and long thin tail, was the big manta ray. Vera wanted to swim off in fear, but Hanako shook her head, No. It was peacefully grazing on the little green specks that were still swarming into the light source.
After that they came out into the water as many nights as they could, and they swam underwater and watched the fish in the dark. Some had glowing green stripes and others had great leonine manes that gave off a yellow light; they floated above the seaweed like so many coloured birds above a forest. And Vera adored the black silken beauty of it. She learned to recognise the creatures in their hideouts, to penetrate the disguise of the starfish that turns itself into a rock, and the tube worms that lay like dead twigs around the entrance to the octopus’s cave. Hanako showed her how to spot an octopus’s cave, by the pile of empty clamshells out in front. Sometimes they could see the octopus himself, just two eyes resting on a crooked arm, looking out through the mouth of the cave.
This creature was Vera’s favourite. After the night swims, and after she’d slept in the morning past sunrise, lying inert in the house as Keiko got breakfast and then set off to go diving, Vera
went by herself into the water of the shallow harbour and searched out the octopus. She loved the way it took so many shapes. It could be, on the sand, a large, ornate button, each of its eight legs curled tightly in clockwise fashion, a purple-red colour. Or it could be seen swimming with great determination, its head leading, pressed by the water into a bulgy arrowhead shape, with its legs streaming out behind in a bundle. Or it could be a wizened and pimply set of limbs, when, half-buried in sand, it lay on the ocean floor, waiting for something edible to come by.
Hanako showed her its small mop of eggs lying unprotected on the ocean floor. Nearby, the octopus was a dead flower, the petals all furled and lying in one direction, or a cluster of twenty little fingers, slightly luminous, palest pink. The eyes were the funny parts, because try as he might, the octopus could not quite hide them. They stood out from his wizened face whether he hid in algae or coral or sand.
Octopuses were the disguise artists of the underwater world, she decided. An octopus was soft, but not always. It had a way of telling you it could be dangerous. That you should back off. It stiffened, and its arms made flaring cape-like swirls, pale blue, and when it was even angrier, white. The eyes stood out sideways at the two ends of a hammerhead. Very close up – and Vera only got very close up to it by accident – it looked like a human baby, with transparent, veined skin, all crumpled in the folds. But if you surprised it, it reared up, like a tripod, white with black lace edges. Or else it wrapped itself up and became a white-spotted turban, its eyes the jewel in front. You looked away for a second and you could not see it. But you knew it was not gone; it had simply become invisible.
One night, walking back home in the dark, very late, Vera passed by the workshop of Ikkanshi-san. She thought that if he was there she would tell him about the octopus. But she didn’t see him in the workroom. The polishing stone sat by itself in the centre and it seemed to glow, although there was no moonlight there. It took her a few moments to notice him, in the win-dowless
dark, by the back wall of the room. Then she heard a muffled sound. It was unmistakeable, the bang of a generator. She had heard the one at the lighthouse often enough. This one was smaller, and packed in dried grass. You would not hear it unless you came very close to the door and listened. She could see that it gave power to a radio.
He was kneeling in front of the set, watching as the tubes slowly lit. Then he sat back on his heels, hands on knees, attentive to the talking. The voices became shrill, then explosive. He reached out to grasp the set in both hands, as if to shake it. He pressed his ear to the swollen circle that was the speaker. He was not aware that Vera was there. She was shocked: it should not be possible to surprise Ikkanshi-san. But he had turned up the volume loud to hear over the din of the generator.
The sounds that came out of the radio were scratchy and angry, a rush of Japanese oratory. Even he could barely understand it, Vera thought. She did not want to interrupt him, bent over the radio, all his energy trained on the speaker. She backed away.
The basket maker had come again. That was twice in one summer, perhaps a little unusual. Ikkanshi stopped and watched as the pedlar limped up the stony street, little more than a path, from the docks. All the houses were lined along it, each one looking out over the harbour. None looked the other way, or turned its back to where the boats came in. Ikkanshi attempted to pass by the man. This time the basket maker frankly revealed that he was looking for him.
‘I suppose your radio has given you the news,’ he said.
‘What news?’ Ikkanshi asked. ‘I live on an island; I do not think of news.’ He made up a skeptical look for the
other’s benefit. He had hoped his radio remained a secret.
‘Someone you knew at officer school has gone now from England to Berlin. It is your friend Oshima Hiroshi. He is the senior attaché in Germany now. They say he will be the Ambassador.’
Ikkanshi was surprised. This he had not heard. But he only gave a small bow and continued on past. The assumption was in these parts that the basket maker knew everything. One did not stop to ask him how.
Oshima in Berlin! He was indeed one of Ikkanshi’s friends from officer school. Of course Germany was important now, to the Japanese. The country had signed an anti-Soviet pact with the Nazis. He did not like it. But Hiroshi would. His father had been one of the architects of the new Japan. In fact Hiroshi had been in his mind the last weeks because the Canadian girl had been asking him about the others from Japan who were in London. Oshima was one of them. He had been quiet in England, and not particularly happy, Ikkanshi thought. He had not liked the British very much. He would do well in Germany, the sword polisher thought. He could speak German well.
Oshima was not, in fact, the most brilliant of students at the officers’ school. He was a small boy and shy, at first. He had clung to Ikkanshi who was one year older. In the barracks where they stayed as boys, his bed was near to the older boy’s. Ikkanshi used to watch out for Oshima at night, to see that he was safe and well when they went to sleep. The training was so difficult, and there was never enough to eat. He himself was used to it by then. He was one of the stronger boys, from the start, and his father had prepared him well for the rigours of the school. But Oshima’s father was away from home his whole youth, because of his role in the government. The others called him a Mama’s boy, while they had a chance. Ikkanshi sometimes kept a little rice ball that he could slip to Oshima at the end of the day. He knew the younger boy needed
that. In the silence, their eyes would meet, and say goodnight wordlessly.