Keiko didn’t refuse Vera, but neither did she say yes. They were two women, both young, but one no more than a girl, in their little house, dark timbered, dark with smoke, on the far side of Japan. Now it seemed audacious, what they’d done. Then it had only seemed necessary.
‘Your grandfather never talk about what happen if he
dies,’ Keiko said mildly. It was the nearest she came to criticising him.
‘Why didn’t you leave me in Vancouver by myself?’
‘You are only fifteen. Besides you begged to come.’
‘To the island, yes,’ said Vera. ‘But I didn’t know …’
‘You were determined,’ said Keiko.
And so on, round and round the arguments would go, always ending with the schoolmaster, and Vera’s stubborn assertion. ‘He doesn’t want me there. I know it.’
After that, silence. Keiko would not argue any more. There were two more days, days when Vera dragged her feet to school and sat, sulky and oversized in the desk, with the children. She shut her ears.
Keiko tried to explain, after dinner. ‘We Japanese are different,’ she began. ‘We do not think about being one person, but about being a part of our country. The State has decided it must have a war. We do not know why, but we cannot disagree. We need a war, so we need an army.’
‘I don’t want to be in Japan’s army!’
‘The army begins with children and home life. We must support and we must believe,’ said Keiko.
‘You don’t think that for a minute,’ said Vera. ‘You’re just scared.’
The very next day the teacher began to read the book aloud. He moved from his position at the front of the room and came to stand near Vera. The students were all kneeling in
seiza
on the floor, which was cold. She could feel the heat of his agitated body although he was two feet away. If a child closed his eyes and drifted, the teacher came over and rapped him on the temple.
‘Do you know who owns the clothes you wear?’ He looked directly into her eyes. He was full of gleeful hatred. ‘They are owned by his Royal Highness the Emperor of Japan.’
Vera scowled. She wanted to argue, but it was not possible, she could see that; arguing would have set him off.
He reached down to her shoulder and grasped the cloth of the jacket made for her by the tailor in Vancouver. He yanked it upward, looked with a smirk into her frightened eyes, and then let the cloth fall out of his fingers. Vera kept her eyes down. ‘A meal you eat,’ he said, his voice over her shoulder, ‘does not belong to you. Nothing is your own, not when you play and not when you sleep. Your food and your toys and your clothing belong to the State. In the same way, your lives belong to the Emperor.’
He moved away. Vera wanted to jump up and run. But her legs, bent at the knees, were cramped and full of pins and needles. Her head was below the teacher’s. When she raised her eyes he yelled, ‘Bow!’ When she bowed she could feel him, watching. Her neck felt naked, white. She decided that if he hit her, she would hit him back.
After dinner that evening she lay on the
tatami
mat and did not get up.
‘I’m not going to school tomorrow,’ she said to Keiko. ‘The teacher hates me. I will go to work with you at the pearl farm.’
Keiko said nothing.
At dawn Keiko stood at the door, tying the blue triangle of cloth over her head. It was marked with the two
ama
good luck symbols, a five point star drawn by a single line, and a sign like a tick-tack-toe grid, only larger, made with five lines going up and down, and five lines going across. Vera had a pair of Keiko’s overalls in her hands. She struggled to put them on.
‘I will come,’ said Vera.
‘No, you will not. The work is too cold,’ said Keiko. ‘Mikimoto Taisho will not hire you.’
‘I am an
ama,
so I will.’
‘You are only a beginning
ama,’
Keiko said kindly. ‘You do not know how cold it is and how difficult. You could fall into the water and drown.’ She explained to Vera how they would walk out onto the rafts that lay on the surface
of Ago Bay. They had to balance on the slippery bamboo poles that were lashed together to make the surface of the rafts. Their work was to pull up the metal cages of oysters that hung below in the sea. In the autumn rain, in the winter snow and wind. The women scrubbed the shells to rid them of barnacles and sea squirt.
‘I can work inside, then,’ said Vera.
But at the pearl farm only a few of the local women had inside work. And they were not divers. The inside women were like little surgeons, using sharp razors to slit open the gonad of the oyster, and to place inside it the bead of nacre that would form the nucleus of the pearl.
‘I don’t have to ask you anyway. I can go and ask Mikimoto-san if I can work at the pearl factory. He was a friend of my grandfather.’
Keiko set her jaw. ‘Mikimoto Taisho knows nothing of you.’
Mikimoto Taisho was king of life in Toba and Vera was defeated.
‘All right. I won’t come with you today, but I will not go to school either,’ said Vera, ‘and you cannot make me.’
‘No,’ said Keiko. ‘I cannot make you do anything at all,’ she said. ‘But if you will not be in school, then you must do something else.’
She began retying her kerchief. ‘Too strong, too strong,’ she said, shaking her head at Vera with a smile on her lips that told her she did not think there was such a thing as too strong at all. ‘I don’t know what to do with you. You would be a fine
ama,
but if you go back to Vancouver, where will be the man who will want to marry you?’
Her final thrust only made Vera scoff. To marry was the last thing she would ever want.
Vera sat on the
tatami
mat by the hearth. It was dark inside, although outside, she knew because she could see through the cracks around the window blinds, the sun
was rising. She heard voices in the street, the high-pitched, childish voices of Japanese women, and the huskier voices of men, and then the hard, humourless voices of the monitors who stood on the corners and commanded the children to form lines to march to school. She was far away from home.
It would be evening in Vancouver, and she would be coming home from school. There would be a soft wet smell of cedar trees and ocean, a different ocean smell than this one, somehow younger, less rank, more innocent, emptier. A coaxing radio announcer whose purpose was to amuse the housewives, not to harass them. Women would walk with their babies in prams and stand in clusters talking; men would stride home from the streetcar stop. Vera could walk in her mind every step of the few blocks home, turning the first corner at the bus stop at Granville, heading down past the big old Douglas firs in front of the grocery store and the post office, turning again beside the park with the swings, and heading straight, parallel to the beach and two streets above it, to the house.
But probably nothing was left in the house that had been her mother’s. Maybe it was sold in an auction, the neighbours coming in to view their chairs and their tables and their woodstove and coal bucket. Maybe, now, the house stood empty, and the neighbours walked past and shook their heads and said to each other, ‘They have gone; gone to Japan.’
She moved herself over to the window, and lifted the blind so that she could just see out, but not be seen. She leaned back against the timber post of the window frame, and cried scant, angry tears. She stepped into her house slippers that stood by the door.
The fire cooled. She raked the coals and put in more charcoal.
‘A fine shaped pearl is an accident that is impossible to account for,’ her grandfather used to say. And she wondered
about the other accident that it is impossible to account for, which is death, and before death, life itself. She wondered why she was born if everyone who was meant to love her had to die before she even grew up. She wondered if her father was dead too. Probably he was. She hugged these self-pitying thoughts to herself and went to the small glass that hung by the door beside the shrine. She looked at her face, and took a perverse pleasure in the way her mouth had tightened and turned down at the corners. She thought of her grandfather.
James Lowinger, the boy in the straw boater who had clung to his father’s hand on the beach in Ceylon, was lonely too. At fifteen, Vera’s age, he had begun working with his father. His book education ended when he went to sea. What did he dream of? The son of a wealthy man, he had a fortune already. He always hinted darkly about the bad that a fortune could do to a family. He never seemed like a merchant, or a man seeking to make his fortune. He thought about a great many things, and the pearl was always at the centre. ‘The bone of the gods,’ he called it, ‘the tears wept by angels.’
When James was older than the innocent who had travelled in Panama, but still young, he went to Kuwait. ‘The oysters I met with there,’ he had said to Vera, his eyes twinkling, ‘were of good quality. Most of the pearls of a distinct, yellow hue. But a few were a soft rosee.’
Kuwait was a romantic place, a city entirely dependent on the sea, where men of the sea swept through the narrow alleys in their white gowns as if carried by waves. It was a city of hundreds
of thousands, with a Palace and an inner souk where the mullah lived. In the port you’d see one hundred pearling vessels. When the diving season began, in May, the city would be emptied of men. But James had gone in August.
He did not like the town, but he could not leave. For one thing, he could not imagine what he would say to his father, coming home empty-handed. Or with no hands at all, as the case might be. They had nasty tempers, those Arabs; he did not wish to do business with them. It was a turning point in his life, he felt it. Walking the beach and looking down, he saw small jellyfish the size of his palm, sticking to stones. There were many others stuck to the sea wall, he noticed, where they dried when the tide was out. It was a black jellyfish, with a red underside. On examining it he realised it was what they call ambergris. When it dried hard the children held it up to the sun; they believed they could see the future in it.
‘What do they say?’ he asked an English-speaker.
‘They say, ambergris, ambergris, where are the divers?’
He met a merchant called Ahmad al-Farhan, an amusing fellow, a philosopher of a kind. Al-Farhan showed him some fine pearls of the creamy colour they favoured there, large, and perfectly round. He had others that were gargantuan, misshapen, and charcoal grey – fascinating in their ugliness.
Al-Farhan had been wealthy once, and had travelled to Paris to sell pearls. The King used to come to see his barques go in and out of the port. But that changed when he lost his money. His decline had begun on a sail to Bombay. A servant shook out his rug into the sea, when on the rug were spread his finest pearls. From this accident he had rapidly lost his money. His friends deserted him. He did not blame them. He said the rich were correct to shun him: after all, he might want to borrow money. But he minded that the poor had deserted him as well, because he was one of them, his house was open to them, and he would give them coffee.
Now he had only one ship left. He was going out at the very end of the season, and allowed James to accompany him.
He boarded in the evening in time for prayers. From the hillside mosque came the wolfish howl of the muezzins. The sailors were casting poison on the water to catch king mackerel. At dusk the divers rolled out their carpets, made of ropes bound together, in rows, on which they would sleep until dawn and the call to prayer. They preferred to sleep on oyster shells, but that would come when they’d made a catch.
At dawn the sun rose above the blistering white line of the sea. The divers donned black pyjama-like trousers, and shirts to protect them from the jellyfish. Then each one pulled out his own tortoiseshell noseclip and his leather finger covers, which gave him a sinister look. There were some, with longer hair, who also wore a black hood.
James sat beside a diver who was, strange to say, Bedu, from the desert, and had a little English. This Bedu, whose name was Hizam, was forced by need to come to the coast to dive for pearls in the summer season. He missed his camel, and his sheep, and his life of roaming. But as a diver he made good wages. He was allowed to sleep in the stern away from the damp. But more importantly, back on shore, women had to veil their faces before him. If, as with most Bedu, the women did not, this would indicate that he was not really a man.
Al-Farhan explained that the Bedu had courage as well as excellent eyesight, honed on their long rides through a landscape of sand, searching for the tiny dots on the horizon that might be friend or foe.
Each diver, before going into the sea, hung his peg on a string near the mast of the boat. This string of pegs was told like a rosary: the pegs were each made from the bones in a fish spine. The shipmaster counted the numbers of divers, shifting a peg along the thread for each one. When a diver had done ten dives, he rested. During their rest periods the divers shared puffs on the hubble-bubble to ‘wake up the head’ after being in water. Another took his place.
No sooner were the divers poised with their feet on the stones, or
hajar,
on which they would descend, than the chanter began.
Al-Farhan had hired him at considerable expense. It was his job to sing to keep the workers’ spirits up and even to put a sort of spell on them, so that they would work beyond the fatigue which would otherwise have stopped them. ‘He is like the man who leads a caravan, seated on camelback. If he has a good voice, the camels will walk almost mesmerised, sometimes until they drop dead,’ he said.
This bearded giant, with his long white robes, tipped his flat face skyward and let forth howls, bellows, and moans. His poetry apparently allowed for a choral response, and in their turn, the sailors murmured along like adherents to a religion.
This was the part of the pearling life that James adored and he was happy. The full sails pulled them onward under the blistering sun, while the dark heads of the divers popped in and out of the foam, and the netted bags full of shells clattered to the deck, and the operatic exhortations of the chanter worked on them all.