How did the soldiers come to think that every woman must be used? Was this how the soldiers treated their own wives? Were women animals to be mastered? Did they at first take them as reprisals? Did they feel they were about to die and that this was a reward, to rape another man’s daughter? Could it possibly be for enjoyment? It could not. There was nothing of glory or of any impulse he could see as human.
Ikkanshi told Keiko then, much that he had never told her. It was out of her experience, the training he had in officer school. Until she met him she had never met one of the samurai class. He had excelled in sword class. He described their training; how they’d all been taught they were superior to the others. Bodies they would find impaled on the end of their bayonets, bodies that briefly resisted their blades, were not animate, not spirit and flesh. They practised on straw bundles. The bundles were soaked in water to most resemble human flesh. They cut and cut, dissecting the bundle into smaller and smaller pieces.
Ikkanshi broke down, that evening. He mourned his beautiful training, the cuts themselves, the prayer that went into strengthening oneself in the spirit of the old
masters. He returned in his mind to his teachings. His beautiful
kata
– the economy of their movement, the spirit, the honour they had believed would be theirs when they raised the sword. All lost, and gone, and something dreadful in its place.
Vera came back and sat with them. When he looked at her face he wondered if she had gone away at all, if she had heard him.
‘Do you remember that you told me the name of your friend. It was Oshima Hiroshi. I said I would not forget it.’
‘I am impressed.’
‘I heard the men talking about him in the
udon
shop. He has come back to Japan.’
‘Truly,’ said Ikkanshi, inclining his head.
If, in fact, he was back home in Japan, Oshima must not have become Ambassador, as the basket maker had predicted. There must have been a flaw in his plan. He would be disappointed. But he would continue to work hard, whatever he was asked to do.
Oshima was touring the country, Vera said, and wherever he went crowds came to hear him speak. The people talked about him in the
udon
shop where she worked. Strange that Ikkanshi knew him so well and now he was a distant force in the wind of the times, a measurable influence on this larger destiny toward which they all rushed. For a few brief moments he felt sad, that the whirl of power had far overtaken him.
Ikkanshi thought he would like to find Oshima. He would watch, and listen, and one day he would hear where he was, and he would go there.
It was so dark. He lay down and slept there. In the morning he crept away, but of course he was seen. It would not help Keiko to have the whole town know he had visited her, Ikkanshi-san the sword polisher, once an officer, now a man with dangerous thoughts.
* * *
The third summer on the island, it was decided that Vera could dive
funado,
in the deep. And Tamio was to be her
tomahi.
‘Why do only the women dive?’ Vera asked Keiko. The divers she knew about were kept in chains by snarling merchants; they had no freedom and were likely to die young. But here on the summer island, the women plumbed the depths and grew old in perfect health, providing for their families.
‘The men used to dive, before,’ Keiko said vaguely. ‘But everyone knows it was not as good. We do not have as much success with the fishing when the men are diving.’
‘Why?’ asked Vera.
Keiko laughed, her mouth open, her face split like a tropical fruit. She was brown from the sun. ‘Some say it is because the men are only skin and bone and muscle, no fat to keep them warm.’
‘So it is only that women are fat? I don’t believe it.’
‘The old men say it is because the women are more graceful and move more easily in the water.’
‘What do you think?’
‘The Headman says that it is women who dive because we can withstand the sea’s cold; cold does not hurt us so much as it does the men.’
But Vera had seen Keiko suffer after standing on the icy rafts in winter storms, pulling up the oyster cages from below and scrubbing the shells. Cold does not hurt women! How convenient for them to believe that! Is this not what we like to think about any person or animal that we put to our selfish use? The fish bleeds but does not burn, the bird merely winks at the loss of its egg, the beef cow is too dull to feel the blade at its throat. But Vera wondered: how can you measure another creature’s
pain? Even a woman’s? To withstand pain is not the same as not to feel it.
‘But what do you think, Keiko?’
‘I think the difference is not so big between what a woman can do and what a man can do. But we see it once in a long time, when there is danger.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There is the danger of coming up too fast. The danger of the rope getting caught under a rock. All of these are dangers. I say the women dive better because we are calmer. When we are under, a sharp or panicky move would kill us, and so we learn to be absolutely calm.’
Vera was far from calm when she jumped off the boat. She gasped, sank, and found herself flailing. She thought she would die, swallowed by the cold foreign element that had every inch of her covered.
I am not from this place, she screamed in her head. Seconds ago she had been dominant in her element; heavier than air, she moved easily through it. But now she was helpless, weaker than the water. She tried to stabilise herself, but her limbs, green and yellow to her submerged eyes, were slow to obey. She watched as a stream of white bubbles came off her shoulders and thighs, like wings. She fought sinking, fought to go up for the air.
At last, her plunge reversed, she broke the surface. She thanked God as she had before that water had a surface, a line where it ended, just like that, and you were out of it, at least your head was, and you could breathe. Air had no such line, or if it did she had never reached it.
She grabbed the side of her boat, coughing, spitting. I will get used to it, she told herself. Hanako and Maiko and Setsu were lined up, each with one hand over the side of their own boats, laughing, they with their dark heads and she with her yellow one. She tried to shake the water off, like a dog. But they were resting in it, sleek, restored, like fish that had been held in hands and were now released. They let go of the boat then, rising and
falling, ducking and surfacing with the waves around their ears. They had shed their men and their houses and gravity too.
‘Tie on your weights,’ said Maiko. She was Hanako’s mother but she might well be Vera’s in water. Tamio handed down the weights with an impersonal, careful touch.
She tied them on, two iron bars, one at either side of her waist. She needed them to make her sink. She felt them drag her down, changing her. She was so heavy that she did not recognise herself. She could barely kick herself back to the surface and it frightened her.
She remembered that in Ceylon the divers had a stone on a rope. They held the rope between their toes. The diver stood on it, the rope was loosened and both plunged to the bottom. The stone made a lift shaft, pushing the heavy water out of the way, for a fast ride to the bottom. She was not going to get a free ride down on a stone. Here the women dived from the surface duckstyle, bending at the waist, thrusting themselves down arms over heads to break a path through the resistant sea, legs firmly together.
She adjusted her goggles. She checked that her knife was tucked under the rope at the small of her back. She watched Setsu give one powerful kick and disappear without a splash. One by one the divers folded, kicked, and disappeared. Maiko waited for Hanako. She went, with a huge gulp of air and a lot of kicking. Vera went an instant later and as she descended she saw, by looking back under her arm, Hanako descend, a streak of lighter green, a little barbed arrow with her arms straight out in a V, her narrow waist, the bulb of her hips, and her tiny, clamped legs.
Down and down and down.
At first she didn’t feel the air in her lungs, but then it made itself known, a pressure. It was too soon to feel this pressure. She knew she had not taken a big enough breath.
As she went deeper, the water became colder. It was clouded today, murky, filled with tiny dots of yellow-green, something stripped from the weeds far off, or driven off the ocean floor by
pounding waves. But she could see the dark stain of the bottom, ahead of her. She tried to find a crevice, a cranny, a valley between rocks, or a shelf, something of interest, where the awabi might be attached. But she was too inexperienced to judge: would it grow in that direction of the big shelf, or that? She could not see any of her diving friends now. She was in a green cloud.
Now the rocks in their fearsome shapes heaved up below her. They had been worn smooth or perhaps they were not made from the same fire as those near the island: instead of being black and frothy, they were brown, pink, gold, humped up and alivelooking, like animals at rest. There was one like a rhinoceros over which she skimmed; one with a fierce point that could have been the nose of a shark. They came at her suddenly as if she was falling down a tunnel, as if she were Alice falling, falling, down the rabbit hole, tugged by her weights. She dropped past the waving yellow leaves that topped some underwater lily; the luminous weeds like a long expiring doodle curled up toward the light, tickling her leg. But she couldn’t open her mouth and the scream was contained, swallowed, in her bursting lungs.
She saw a crevice between two rocks, a bit of lighter bottom that might be sand, and she wondered if the awabi would hide in there. Meiko would gesture to her if she were near, but some swell must have moved both her and Hanako away, because Vera combed this bit of bottom alone. She reached out to put her hand into the crevice, and felt the rough horny shell. Now she fought to right herself, to bring her feet down and her head up; but it was too hard, and there wasn’t time; she reached behind her back and brought out her knife and kicked to keep herself within range to slash at the muscle that attached the shellfish to its rocky home. She got half of it, but she couldn’t stand another second under there. She gave the bottom of the hateful shell one more slash – a slowed-down, artless, weak slash it was, and missed it altogether, except that her leg bumped up against the rough shell and suddenly bloomed with red. She was cut.
She thought she would explode, and pictured her blood as a bloom that would draw the sharks. Already she imagined the approach of the thirty-foot sawfish the Arabs feared, the one that would cut you in two. Her mouth burbled, about to open.
She had only to tug very hard on the rope at her back and Tamio would start the rapid hand-over-hand that would pull her up to air. She should try one more cut but no. She could not. She yanked the rope, hard. She felt him tug back and the rope lifted her off the bottom and out of the shadows of the rocks, past the strangling lilies, up, up to that overhead glow she was about to crack, up to where she could release this burden in her lungs. She flew through the barrier splashing and blasting out her staleness and she was free.
All of this took less than a minute.
Tamio smiled, into her eyes this time, while she clung to the edge of the boat. And as she expelled her air she made the sound that she had heard so often, the mournful whistle they called the
ama-bui.
And with her chin under water and her eyes steady across the surface, she looked at Tamio.
Meiko surfaced smoothly, unhurried, bearing an awabi. She turned and smiled at Vera but only for a second did her eyes rest on her face. They both looked to the space between them. And Hanako surfaced, face lifted to the sky, neck outstretched, her hands cradling another huge awabi.
Tamio pulled her out of the water. She saw herself in the green reflections on the surface, a wavering white-haired figure, mostly octopus legs and arms. When the surface moved, she was bent and swayed by it. Then Tamio lifted her into the boat. The water streamed off her. Vera had something of her own at last.
Keiko walked up the path beside Vera. Her step was sympathetic, in time with Vera’s, but tired, and perhaps sad.
‘Will you come to us for your meal?’ she said this day. ‘The aunt and the uncle miss seeing you.’
‘And Tamio? Will he be there?’ Vera asked. It would not be possible to contain all she knew and all that was happening
between the two of them and to visit in the house where she had been a child, only two years ago.
Keiko spoke without inflection, ‘No, Tamio will be at the temple preparing for the
O-Bon.’
‘Yes, I’ll come,’ she said.
The little hut was cool and dark, as always, darker than the hut of Hanako’s family, Vera realised as she stepped inside. It was because of the angle of the door, which was into the slope rather than away from it: the sun did not cross the floor as it did at Hana’s. On a hot day this was a relief, but after a day of diving into the twilight water, it felt like a small deprivation to enter it. Vera hadn’t quite understood before, how Keiko and her family were a little apart from the others. Keiko had been, on her return from Vancouver, momentarily triumphant: she had come as a respected widow: her old white man had not left her, in fact he had given her this child of his. But now the novelty of that was over; Keiko was different, she had broken the rules. She had come back if not defeated, at least alone, and although the exact details of her transgression would not be mentioned, she would face an imposed penance. Now it was obvious too that whatever linked Keiko to Ikkanshi-san before did so again.
Vera sat by the fire. She took her soup, silently. Keiko lifted her grilled fish off the coals and passed it to her. The aunt and uncle watched her eat and smiled.
‘Taller,’ they said, nodding.
‘Stronger,’ they said.
‘A diver now, an
ama.’
‘Yes,’ said Vera. She hung her head over her soup bowl and did not know anything else to answer. She felt the kindness and pride of these old people. And she was grateful. She looked to Keiko, under the fringe of hair that hung over her eyes, using it as a curtain, beseechingly. Help me out of this. Keiko sat calmly dishing out food.