‘Hanako?’
Maiko looked. The rope was taut. She issued a short question, then spoke sharply to her younger cousin.
‘Can you feel her?’
‘The rope has not moved.’
What was she doing? Was she cutting a big shell?
He could not tell; the rope felt tight.
‘Pull her up!’
He pulled. He could not make the rope come up.
Had Hanako found an awabi worthy of cracking her lungs to haul it off the ocean floor? Was she out at the far extension of her rope? Was she lingering, ashamed at having nothing?
There was no time. The longest dive was one minute and a half and that was only the oldest divers.
There was no time. Instantly and without words Maiko and Setsu took a breath, scooped water, and vanished, their feet marking the small incision in the water as they went.
Vera trod water with her face planted straight down. It would be easy to find her: the rope was clearly visible stretched down into the blue-green, into the murk. Hanako’s
tomahi
pulled and pulled on her rope, but it thrummed like a harp string. He began to scream for the others. He was not calm. But he was a man, and his place was in the boat. It was the women who had gone to get her.
What made Vera dive after them? She was afraid. She had already made one dive. She had brought up a shell. She had passed the test. And she was useless to help.
But she dived, praying for her weights to carry her faster than the first time, straight and sure, alongside Hanako’s rope. She passed the tops of the doodle weeds, entered the looming shadows of a menagerie of rocks. She entered the gold zone of the sandy bottom, saw where the dark rocks were, and the blackness between them. And she saw Hanako.
She was standing, upright on the bottom, her arms gently adrift on the current, her hair lifted over her ears. She stood, graceful and apparently unharmed, and Vera was relieved until she realised that it was impossible to stand like that on the bottom. The water wouldn’t let you. And then she saw Hana’s rope, snagged under a cornice, keeping her down, tethered like a goat.
Even then Vera did not quite understand.
It looked as if the accident had been a gentle one, as if death had come and the girl had not struggled. It must have taken only two or three breaths. She might have tried to loosen or cut the rope around her waist; maybe too she had reached for it where
it was caught in the crevice, but if so, the water had laughed at her efforts, and erased them. It had taken all the force from her, all the resistance. She was like one of the many enchanted helpless plants Vera saw daily, waving to the sea’s sway, mesmerised by the music that was no music at all, but silence.
She reached for Hana’s hand.
It floated away.
Setsu swooped down between them. Vera saw her withered hindquarters, the frog kick of her feet, the masterful thrust of her sinewy right arm. She slashed at the rope over and over, finally cutting it. Maiko caught Hanako in her arms, trapping her so that she would not waver off in the company of the currents. Even then Hanako did not rise. Like Vera, she was weighted to make her stay down. They had to tie her again to a rope, to be hauled to the surface. The
tomahi
hoisted her into her boat and laid her across one of the struts that served as seats. Maiko turned her on her stomach and pressed on the strong muscles that crossed her back, what they called the wing bones. Water gushed from her mouth but no air rushed back in.
All twelve boats returned early that terrible morning, towed in lines by the ones with motors, with white flags instead of the many jubilantly coloured ones that would show they had caught many awabi. Those who were left in the village, mostly old women and little children, came down to the harbour. And the cry went up that there had been an accident. The men came running, with a door on their backs. Quickly they took Hana’s small light body and laid it on the door. Then they ran to the bath. The fire had been lit already. They poured hot water on her body, in attempts to revive her.
But the hot water did not bring her back. As they lifted her body out of the bath, no one spoke. There were no words for the sorrow of that day. Vera stayed near her friend. But she knew that Hana was gone. If she, Vera, had been with her on the bottom, she could have freed the rope. If she, Vera, had taken that second dive more quickly, she would have seen her friend standing on the ocean floor, exactly as she stood outside her door
in the wind, her hair lifting off her shoulders and her arms so graceful. Vera would see that over and over, throughout her life. Hana was smiling sadly, but her eyes were closed and tears were running down her face.
Vera could not have seen the tears. Hana was wearing her goggles.
When they carried Hana to the temple the following day, her body was wrapped in a white kimono, a
kyokatabira.
It was tied right over left, which was the opposite to the way she would have tied it in life. The priest had spent hours the night before writing on it with a black brush and ink. Vera did not know what he had written.
‘A prayer,’ said Keiko, ‘a message for the gods who will welcome her to paradise.’
She had with her a small bag containing coins for her to pay for her passage over the bridge to the land of the dead. She was buried near the old shrine, where there were other graves, each with a small stone.
Maiko was calm. She did not cry. She stood and was supported by the
ama
women, who made their soft whistle, the
amabui,
the same soft whistle that they made when they came up for air.
Teru was not calm. He appeared to be broken. He could not stand up like the policeman he wanted to be. He could not watch. He had never been tender, until now. He tried to speak, and his hands rose helplessly from his sides and sank again. He could only raise his eyes pitifully skyward, and then drop his chin again.
Tamio held Vera’s head in his lap for a long time, when they went to the rocks on the back of the island. He looked out to sea and he stroked her hair.
But the season was short and so the diving began again, only two days later. In the
amagoya
the soup was heating. The eggs, soft-boiled, were ready. Silence prevailed because they all thought of Hana.
Maiko knelt up near the fire. Her head was bowed.
‘It was a freak accident.’
‘One in a million dives, it happens.’
‘It could have happened to any of us.’
‘But it didn’t! It was Hanako.’
‘So young,’ said Setsu.
The silence became heavier.
‘It is a terrible thing.’
She had been down only two and a half minutes; that’s how quickly the women reached her. But there was finality in her pose, as if she’d accepted that brutal, short statement: her dive was her last. The
ama
could see it, instantly. She had changed from a living body to a body adrift, caught on a rock. They’d seen others, the dead things that the water disposed of.
Maiko and the grandmother cried, something they had not been seen to do in the village. The women listened to them. The soup began to boil and someone pulled it off the fire. Someone else poured it into the little bowls they’d brought in their baskets. They waited another minute while Maiko and her mother composed themselves. Then they passed the warm round bowls hand-to-hand around the circle.
Maiko looked at Vera.
‘You lost your friend,’ she said.
Vera could say nothing, so she looked down at her lap. She knew her loss was small compared to Hana’s mother’s. But it felt huge.
‘But you will go on to become a brave diver. I am very proud of you,’ Maiko said.
Vera was a part of the world, down there and up here too; that too was because of Hanako.
Years later Vera learned how it is possible to revive a person who had been underwater even for an hour. Then, it was not, or they did not know it was. The wind peaked as they drank their soup in the
amagoya
and ate their eggs. The women talked that day: if there might have been a better way.
‘If you put your hand into their mouth and try to open their throat they’ll breathe again,’ offered Setsu.
‘Who told you that?’ grumbled an older woman. ‘Someone who has never tried! The jaws are locked.’
‘The’ jaws, and ‘are’ locked. She could not say ‘her’ jaws, and ‘were’ locked.
‘If you press your fingers here –’ the woman reached around behind Vera’s neck and pushed her two index fingers into the joint that opened and shut her mouth ‘– it unlocks.’
‘There was nothing,’ said Maiko. ‘It was decided. It was determined. The gods had spoken.’
Vera wiggled her jaw and the two probing fingers disappeared.
‘I understand what happened to Hanako,’ Maiko said to Vera. ‘She was trying to please Grandmother and me by getting the biggest awabi. She was trying so hard that when she went under the rock arch she forgot that she had a rope tied to her waist and that she couldn’t rise without going back the way she came. And by the time she realised, she could not return the way she came, she had stayed too long.’
And Vera understood. The important thing was not to think of the result, of the praise you will win, and how your family’s share of the catch will be bigger. The important thing was to simply be there, an instrument without pride. It was what Ikkanshi taught. To think of action done through you, not of yourself doing it. Maiko was saying the same thing that Ikkanshi-san said. Observing oneself doing well is the error. Trying to please is the error. Trying to prove is the danger.
It is not the dive; it is the rope. Keiko told her. The
ama
told her. They were not afraid, until there was the rope.
Vera went back in the water that day. She dived and rested and dived again. She was inside herself and watching. After the evening meal with Maiko it was too sad to stay with the family. She felt she was a stranger now, in their grief.
‘I will go home to Keiko,’ she said, and Maiko said she understood.
But Tamio was there, in the house. And Keiko was not always there, but gone.
The feeling was too strong inside the four wooden walls. She could not sleep. She felt that what they did together was palpable in the air, between the old aunt and uncle, who still said nothing.
Keiko went to the sword polisher. Vera followed her.
‘Perhaps you have made that new room for Vera,’ Keiko said.
And he said that it was very likely he had done so.
Vera moved her sleeping mat to the empty room. And when she was inside it, she stood, and looked out of the little window, and saw the path through the grass. And it was her first move, away from the village. She did not see it then.
She went to meet Tamio at night because she was tired, and finished with being alone. The day in the cold water and the dim blue light of the undersea brought her so close to death that she wanted the life of him, the breath under his ribcage, and out of his mouth, the quick grapple of his eyes when she fitted herself against him.
No one spoke of it. Maiko kept her eyes down. Perhaps she understood; perhaps she did not understand. Teru walked with his head down as if he did not see her.
Now, again, it was as if she had just come, and she had no Hana. Vera thought about her escape. To get away she needed money. She had saved a little – only a few hundred yen – from her winter work at the Pearl Museum. But on the summer island there was no money; everything went to the Headman and the Fisherman’s Union. Each family was given its allotment. She still looked in every shell, for pearls. She even looked in the eels they ate, in case she might find a pearl.
Every day she saw the sword polisher already at work over his whetstones when she rose to go diving.
‘You are very quiet,’ he said to her one day.
‘Sabishi,’
she said.
Lonely.
He continued the smooth movements over the blade.
‘I thought you were finished.’
‘I have tested its sharpness, but there is still work to do,’ he said.
‘What else?’
‘I will work on the handle, where there is an engraving, called
the horimono.’
It was an engraving of the god Fudo. It was a strange portrait of him; his wrathful face was buffoon-like and he had a swirling tail. Ikkanshi had cleaned this, to bring out its worn lines, thinking he might learn who had made the sword, four hundred years before.
‘Do you see? He carries the rope to bind the emotions and the sword to cut down evil.’
They peered at it together: this Fudo, despite his great size, and his weapon, and the threatening way he stood ready to attack, with a strange grimace on his face, might almost be comic.
‘It is a valuable old blade. I tell myself its
kami
is not destructive but life-giving. Do you see? He is laughing.’
Vera did not see.
He explained how he had taken an iron bar and polished the blade itself, to bring out the wavy
jihada
that makes it look like a living thing. Finally he would oil it, because rust is always an enemy. The oil was there to prevent rusting. The polishing stone exposed new spaces between the crystals of iron and steel, and that allowed damp to come in. The oil would stop that. He showed her the clove oil. It smelled sweet.
‘How long will it be before you are finished?’
‘If I work it in twice or three times a week for two or three months, all the water that has come inside the blade will have been replaced by good oil, no rust.’
‘Then what will you do with it?’
‘I have thought about this a great deal,’ said the sword polisher. ‘And I have decided it is not in my power to say what will become of the sword. It may stay here with me. Or someone will come to collect it.’ He spoke of the sword as if it had a mind of its own. He looked down the blade, squinting over its gleam with one eye. It was as if he had had no business with it; it had been sharpened, it had been polished; it would be oiled; it would carry on: nothing to do with him.
‘I thought you were going to keep it hidden,’ she frowned. ‘Because it is a very good sword, and now they are using very bad swords.’