‘You have learned much,’ she said. ‘Since you came here.’
Vera smiled and continued to look at her bowl.
‘But there is more.’
‘Always more,’ said the aunt.
‘It takes many years to become an
ama.
And the best are still the oldest ones. Maiko, and the others. Seventy-five and eighty years old. There is a reason. They have much experience.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean about the boy,’ said Keiko.
The aunt and uncle looked dumb, as if nothing had been said. Vera was glad for the dimness, which she hoped, was hiding her blush.
‘But we will talk about the diving.’
‘Yes?’
‘You know how deep you can go. You know it yourself. You test it every day. A little more. A little more. And you are so excited to find that you can do it and get back up to the surface. There are shells down there that you want. Each one is a little farther down, a little farther from the air, a little farther from the boat.’
‘Yes.’ That was the way it went, every day.
‘And so you try to go there. And when you come back with the awabi you are proud. The boy is in the boat, and he takes it from you. But you are the one who takes the risk. You are the one who might not get back safely, am I right?’
‘The
ama
always come back.’
‘Once in a long while an
ama
dies.’
‘How?’
‘The rope. It is the rope,’ said the aunt, clearly. She had caught on to the conversation for that minute, and then was gone again into wherever they go, those old women with faces like walnut shells and no teeth.
As Vera was leaving, Keiko spoke to her softly.
‘I was one who did not take the first man my village offered,’ she said. ‘I too fell in love with a stranger. He belongs but you do not. Not truly. Be careful. There may be damage.’ And Keiko said, ‘When a girl wants love she polishes the man she must have it with, until he shines.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vera.
‘He does not read books, he cannot talk, but you see possibilities. You think that he will come out of himself, your love for him will make him strong. You think that only you know, no one else. Be careful.’
And Vera was ashamed that Keiko saw it, so she grew sullen.
When Vera gave in to Tamio she heard only the sea in her ears. She was beyond the rocks at the far side of the island. She swam on her back and Tamio swam over her. Her arms and legs mirrored his, and together, with eight limbs, they were on octopus. They were both light, buoyed up by salt water.
When Vera gave in to Tamio there were no voices calling her back. Everyone had forgotten her. When she did give in it was because she had to have someone of her own. This would seal him to her. There was that thought and then there were no other thoughts. Here was a dive she understood and an act she knew already, from a space within, how to perform.
She dove inward. Physical hunger drove her on, and the heart of her wrestled away. Had wrestled away, even as his arms pinned her and his legs pinned her. Was it the words? The skin? The war? Was it only Vera: would she have done this, no matter where she fell in love? She stood beside herself with the safety rope, comforting: let go, it will be safe, if it is too dangerous, he will be there to pull you back.
She had gone to him. No one could bring her back. Keiko could not call her back although she could see through her and see into her future. Ikkanshi-san could not call her back although he watched them go down the path. Her dead mother stood on the High Rocks on the other side of the island. Her father did not answer letters. Tamio erased him, was erasing him daily.
Despite, or because of, her duplicity, she watched. There was the mirror of her own awareness. She wondered, who was this bold girl?
When Vera gave in to Tamio, she became a concave, glittering thing, a cup to his pouring, a vine to wrap around him. During the day when they went diving she tried to ignore him. When she and Hana walked out at night, her eyes scanned the ground, the low dry bushes, the forms of the fishermen on the beach, stretching dry nets, folding them, putting squid on the racks, running their fingers over the hulls of boats to see if there was a crack opening. Each of these men was not Tamio. She knew this by the shape of them, by the angle of their backs as they bent, by the length and shape of a calf or thigh.
And there was Tamio emerging from the street, or coming around the door of the temple wiping his hand across his mouth: had he been drinking? She could feel him approach and she veered away from Hana without so much as a goodbye. Then the High Place was not far enough. They were gone across the island as soon as they could retreat, into the high grass, over the mound of rocks, around the curve of the path that passed behind Ikkanshi’s hut, and along the narrowing footpath that went straight past Dragon Lake and into the western edge of the world where the sun was declining. When they got to the edge of the island it would begin. And it would not stop until the stars came out and glittered on the still black surface of the sea.
Ikkanshi saw her go. He saw them both go, Vera leading the way.
The grass was up over Tamio’s head, and even almost up to Vera’s. But she was grass-like herself, and golden on top.
They stepped into it and vanished. The grass swayed aside to let them in, and closed again behind their backs.
He was so taken with the beauty of their exit that he tried it himself. He went around early one morning behind his new room and walked into the grass, parting it ahead of him with his hands.
He stepped in and felt the narrow, sharp edges of the stems along his legs and hips. He put his hands in front of his face to prevent their cutting his skin; they felt like tiny razors against his cheeks. And he enjoyed the secrecy as the grasses enveloped him, front and back, swallowing him as a snake might, absorbing him so that only his dark shadow would have revealed that there was a body within.
He was not following Tamio and Vera. He knew what they were doing. He had done it himself. He had been in love with someone who was not the same. He was not following, but remembering.
When he first came to the island, and Keiko had been his lover, they too believed that no one saw them, or knew what they were doing. They met in the grass, this way. They walked to the other side of the island.
They tasted each other and the salt water too. There was nothing more wonderful. He thought so, and he believed she thought so too. It was not easy to stop. It was not easy to control. Night after night they pushed each other away and went back to their homes alone. He laughed at himself: he was not a very good monk. Still, he was not a man to marry, either. She was understood in the village to be a single woman. She was asked for, by the young men. But she said no. And then he was there, and she was taken. Everyone knew, but no one said. He knew he could not keep her that way. He said to her, you will not stand for this much longer. And she said no. Finally he was the one who ended it. He told her no, not anymore. I do not love you. Her face seemed to crumble, and she ran from him. It was what he intended, but not what he meant. He meant,
I cannot make the promise to you that would take me from my class. That was why, when the Englishman came, Ikkanshi watched her. He had no right to stop her going. Her going was his fault.
When the grass was tall he could nearly become lost in it.
He stopped by the Lost Lake, and sat on a rock. He began to think about his years in London. Friday nights he would rush by Tube to Covent Garden for the ballet. He walked along a street called Long Acre and gazed in at bookshops, button shops, the shops selling socks in thirty-five lengths. The specificity of it all had warmed his Japanese heart; the foreignness of it, the freedom, the way each person was different from each other person and proud to be so. He climbed up the steps between the white columns and through to the bright foyer of the Royal Opera House, while the British were alighting from their black taxis with the yellow lights on the roof, noisy with the excitement of being there. He would stand on the top rank of seats, looking down into the amphitheatre. On the walls were rows and rows of lamps, each with its own red shade. They were so small and intimate, strange to be in such a large public place. They were of the size you might have at your bedside, and there were so many of them, not one big light. How English that was, how it warmed him!
He knew people found it amusing that a Japanese military man would enjoy
Swan Lake,
and
Coppelia.
But he was entranced, like a child in one of their stories, taken away to the land of the fairies. At the Embassy the Japanese said the British would be easy to defeat because they were children themselves, with their predilection for sweets, and their silly rhymes, and the way they thought they could rule the world, especially Asia, simply because they were white. But he did not agree with that or any call to war. He knew that the British understood the darkness too. He watched
The Rites of Spring,
once, in that theatre. He knew
it was choreographed by a Frenchman, to music by a Russian, but it was the British who staged it, danced it, and plugged the doorways of the theatre. And after the dance, after the staged frenzy of mating and killing, those ‘childish’ people were shocked into silence and then, after the silence, shaken to find themselves on their feet roaring approval, ladies throwing their corsages and men stamping their feet. That was a vision, was it not, of the untamed impulses in humankind? It was no more strange to them than it was to him.
And on a Saturday, you could window-shop on Jermyn Street for tailored shirts and hairbrushes made of natural bristle, fat newspapers by the armful. Then you could sit in the tearooms in the late afternoon as it grew dark. He liked the waitresses at Fortnum’s in their starched white caps and ruffled white aprons over a grey frock. They were almost Japanese in the exactitude of their placement of the teacup, the napkin, the plate of scones. They did not like him or Hiroshi, who would leave the table early, tipping his hat in silence. Perhaps they did not approve of the slim woman who, eventually, joined him. She would tap on the screen of his open newspaper. He would lower it and there she would be, in her dove-grey straight silk suit, the one with the shoulder pads that were tiny replicas of military epaulettes, her hat pulled down over one ear to nearly cover the short-cropped chestnut hair. And he would be moved to near tears at her beauty, at her bravery.
There it is, you see, the heart of it. He had adored two women. The first betrayed her husband by falling in love with him. She went back to her husband but was not forgiven. The second he betrayed in the service of his warrior class, his artistry. And so she left this island, and went away herself. They were both, are both, brave. Bravery was for him the fatal quality, irresistible in a woman. It is rare, but no more so in a woman than in a man. Perhaps, one might
say, women were more frequently brave. Or is it only that the small slim frame, the resolute shoulder set above a delicate torso, a narrowed back to a small waist, seems incongruous to contain the heart of a lion?
It is why he loved the
ama.
He loved them for the dangers they faced daily with such calm humility. He loved them for what they knew after plunging down into the murky and cold water, always so close to death, but always swimming away and up bringing life with them. When he saw Keiko for the first time it was this way. He saw her heart-shaped face break open and the laughter splash out as she walked up the rocky bank. And he was breathless as if he himself had just dived to the bottom of the sea.
But he was not brave enough to be her lover then. He was born to marry another kind of woman, a soft, protected girl from some family known to his own. Not a rural girl from a fishing village, not an
ama,
the people of the sea. They speak a strange simple even coarse language! The women laugh and talk too loudly! They are like men, his mother said. But she had not seen them sitting on rocks by the shore around the fire, for all the world like the mermaids in those English fairy tales, who call mortal men away to their deaths.
Keiko was brave and he was not brave enough, and for his punishment spent years alone when she went to Canada. He imagined what it would be like for her. In London he had been the primitive, who talked the wrong way, under whose oriental appeal his lover was ultimately ashamed to have fallen. He had learned what it was to bring a blush to the cheek of the one in whose arms he had only hours before been lying.
Perhaps they were all betrayers, they who crossed borders for the sake of love.
And Vera and Tamio, how would that end?
* * *
What happened in high summer they did not foresee. The grass died. It bent under the heat, and under its own enormous growth that had been brought on by the sun. And as it bent it lay down on itself, the lower part of the stems curving and lying on the ground, so that these entirely vertical stands became curved, sickle-shaped clumps that were not nearly so high nor so thick a screen. And there was the path their feet had beaten. And there the two children, on an adult’s errand, headed across the island, heedless that their screen had collapsed. Ikkanshi would wish them well and smile and then turn away to give them the privacy they wanted. But others felt differently. What had been hidden was acceptable, when it was hidden. When it was revealed, it was not the same.
The third summer ended, and the people left. Ikkanshi remained on the island alone. Now it was established and the others did not speak of it.
Listening to his radio, Ikkanshi was kept informed of what they called the development of China. What the radio operator in Surrey told him: that the Imperial Army in Manchuko was collapsing under the strain. That the soldiers had killed their officers and that rape continued, by soldiers who knew that they themselves were without hope of going home alive. That it had become clear to the officers themselves that China was immense and could never be brought under Japanese control. And at the same time, there were hostilities on the Russian borders. On August the second, he learned that their soldiers were under a barrage of shells and bombs at Chankufeng. The hills were aflame and the ground had become mud, and one unit actually dug into the mountainside for shelter where they stayed until the diplomats arranged a ceasefire that no one believed would last.