A strange thing happened then; my awareness lifted up and out of my head and I seemed to be watching from a place in the silk-draped ceiling. The skinner took greater and greater care with his work. We had become quite jolly. He took one
last crack with it, and the whole piece collapsed into dust. The doctor yelped and called for his nanny; we all stood and gaped at the rubble. The pearl that was worth ten thousand was now utterly worthless.
And I had to pay him.
I gave him a promissory note as that was all I had. I walked out into the sweaty Hong Kong night. I went to the bird market and strolled dizzily between the cages. I heard bird call from the caged ones for sale all around me and I thought, I am free and they are not.
Thus I ended my pearl trading days without a fortune and in fact without a bean. Or a McBean. Lowinger and Nobody.
Let me offer you an apology for my life, dear: I begin to ask what it was worth. I confess a fondness for this place, this Gastown. Perhaps it was all leading me here.
Vancouver was handy to the Orient. We came to it, English by name but farther back a muddle of Jew and Cossack, who knows. We found it open for business and we set about weaving it into the rest of the world. You’ll not find me on your honour role of pioneers, farmers or town builders, but I did something and that was to make it interesting. We kept the store open. And you were born there, with your links to older spots on the planet.
You might think me a lascivious old fool bringing home a woman approximately one-third of my age. I fell in love. How could I not? A naked dive to the bottom of the sea was an augury of a short life. But in Japan the radiant
ama
women young and old set off with their lunch boxes and made a day of it, ferrying contentedly back and forth from the depths a dozen times an hour. I watched the
ama
women for years before I found Keiko. She was not a woman of twenty-eight, to me. She was a woman of the ages, strong, brave, beautiful, and straight as her plunge to the sea bed. Men love a woman who dives deep. Even though they might not follow.
I trust you to her and her to you. She’s all I have to give.
As for The Redoubtable Miss McBean, I never doubted she would outlive me. I heard she became religious and that the fortune she made buying jewellery at auctions she gave to some charity, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Molluscs, no doubt, just to thwart me. The pair of fine rosees from the freshwater spring in the bottom of the sea, Belle’s wedding pearls, had gone somewhere, no doubt on with their mischief.
And so I leave you all of it, which is nothing.
Oh one thing. You’ll have the pictures. Among the objects of the world, they were what I loved.
The document was signed, ‘Your loving Grandfather, James Lowinger.’
There was a poem Vera liked to read:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage …
Ezra Pound wrote it, one man from this big continent of North America who loved the small archipelago of the East. But then he was mad.
In the years following the war, countless Westerners fell in love with oriental ways, and tried to explain them. They searched Vera out, often wanting to tell her some tale of their own. The wisdom was that east-seekers were only looking for a better view of themselves, that a mirror stood on the horizon just where the sun rose. That’s why it blinded the eyes.
She didn’t really go to the East, she said. She went to an island
off the mainland, any island, it could have been, off any mainland.
‘What was it like?’ the professor would say, eyes all over her.
She told him, or her.
Island life is measured life. Between the arrival and the departure, that is the time you have. All you will have is what you bring from the outside world, and what grows there. The longer you stay on the island the more you begin to match yourself to the food that is there, the seaweed, the little shellfish, the fish. Some try to garden, but nothing much grows. You are allowed no excesses. The portions are small and always weighed against what remains. You soon learn to control your greed.
Island life is a resignation. The ferry comes once a week, and leaves promptly on schedule. First you long for it; then you feel a mild pleasure on the day it will arrive. Then you forget to look for it. Eventually you fear what it will bring from the outside world to disrupt your harmonies.
There were no letters from Keiko, during the war.
And Vera could not go to Japantown and find her friends to ask them what was happening. Japan was cut off from the world, cut away from the flesh. Or perhaps Vancouver was cut off. There was no fighting; there was just the news, the news and the cocktail bars where she sat with Horace. The cocktail bars and the warehouse, where Vera began to sort the pictures.
And she thought about her father. She wondered if Hamilton Drew was indeed her enemy. He came to see her, bitter that she had left and blaming the collapse of his Blind River empire on her defection. As suddenly as it had begun, their father-daughter romance, the one the poets say must be had, was extinguished. And she couldn’t hate him, not the way the others had. He seemed a little fragile. His dreams were running him ragged.
But already he was talking about Labrador. He’d found a passage in an old book alleging that in the Ungava Region of the Province of Quebec, pearls had been found by trappers and fishermen from Montreal. They were white and of good lustre. No
one had ever searched for them, but Indians and Eskimos – ‘Many,’ he said – knew their location. Recently, he told her, two beautifully matched pink pearls, weighing about fourteen grains each, were found in one Ungava mussel. He was going to get some. That was if the Hudson Bay traders hadn’t beat him to it.
The end of the war came. Vera saw the atom bomb on the newsreels. There was the aeroplane’s wing, the instant white, soaring cloud like a godhead. There was flattened landscape after that. Red sky, red earth, bones and dust: cities pulverised. There were living figures in swaddling, their staring eyes that did not accuse, or even seem to understand. There were the doctors, before long, taking off the bandages, to show that healing was possible. They saw the layers being peeled off, or picked off, and wet, angry flesh.
Then there was the arrival of the Americans. Horace was cynical about that: he could afford to be; he was one. There was a marine standing shoulder to shoulder with the Japanese policeman who directed traffic, watching his hand signals, and mimicking them. When MacArthur arrived, his motorcade went down the empty street. All the people stood with their backs to him. Horace whistled through his teeth. How do they dare show their hatred? he asked. Vera understood: it is not disrespect, but courtesy. The victor had great power, which might blind them.
Suddenly the public was full of pity for these enemy people. Send me food or send me bullets, the General roared: the people are starving. Vera saw cheering children outside General MacArthur’s residence singing happy birthday. Women voting and even being elected. Farmlands taken from the big landlords and divided. The military establishment destroying the weapons arsenal.
She saw Hiroshima, what was left of it: streetcars running through a cremated landscape. She saw the now-human Emperor shaking hands: there had been a decision not to implicate him. He was a strange little man, near-sighted, with thick, round glasses, not at all like his picture in the shrine at the summer island. He was trotted out and stood up before crowds. Vera remembered
when he had owned her lunch, and the clothes on her back.
She closed her mind, as she had closed it since leaving Yokohama, to what had happened to the ones who had cared for her. The sword polisher had fooled her: she hated to be fooled, she hated not knowing. All the while he had been working for Hitler. If Keiko was his lover, she must have been just as bad. She had compassion only for Tamio – they had sent him away to die in his boat. That was the worst of it.
Horace was a good man: he helped her. ‘There are many meanings of a gift sword,’ he told her. ‘Suppose Ikkanshi had a reason for what he did. Suppose he was forced.’
Another time he would try, ‘And Keiko, she was like your mother.’
‘She was not! I had a mother, not at all like that.’ ‘All right then, Keiko was the older sister you never had. She was the one adult who had stayed with you, and protected you.’
‘She sent me away.’
He’d give a wry smile. ‘You know about the Judgement of Paris? She was the one adult who was wise enough to give you up.’
Vera heard about the terrible pain of keloid scars. She saw footage of life in Japan, life going on; there were still temples and monks tolling bells and scrubbing floors. There were pictures of Marilyn Monroe visiting Tokyo. Of smiling Japanese women in madras shirtwaists with vacuum cleaners. Still, in the background, she could catch sight of hurried tiny people in crowds, people sitting on streets begging, hiding their faces. They could be people she knew. But transformed by current events their faces were not those of her friends. She looked at every account she could find, but she never saw the sea, never the fishing people.
Horace told her when Mikimoto started up his pearl farms again. He found some pictures of Japanese fisherwomen in headscarves. She knew she had to return to the summer island. But she did not go. She was not ready.
And then one day he showed her the article in the magazine with the sword in the picture. That friend of your sword polisher?
The one who was Ambassador to Berlin? He’s being tried in Tokyo.
Vera was a woman of thirty, a dealer in objects of beauty. But if you asked her, she would tell you differently. She was a simple girl in a dangerous trade living by her wits and what strength she could muster, an
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diver in Ago Bay, the Sea of Kumano Nada, facing the Pacific Ocean.
They say no man is an island. Vera said we all were.
Simplify that,
the sword polisher would say.
Every man and woman is an island.
That is too big. Simplify again. Nothing extra. Nothing assumed. Only what is necessary and what you know.
I am an island.
The war went on and on, like a long, long winter. One cold morning, Pearl Harbor screamed from the radio into his new room where, by then, Ikkanshi was accustomed to being alone, reading and thinking. A surprise attack, yes. They had been taught to seize the advantage.
He stood outside and looked above him to the huge empty sky. How beautiful it was, blue and silent. It fooled him into thinking he was apart from it all. But he knew now that from that same sky, remonstrance would come.
In the final year there were bombers over the island. The pilots enjoyed strafing the people on their way to or from dropping their gift on the mainland. They came so low it was like a greeting. Once in a while, looking up, Ikkanshi could see the face of the enemy, a young man doing his patriotic duty.
When Vera had first come she asked him if he were a
prisoner there. He was not a prisoner, not on the island. But he was a prisoner, of sorts, in his country. He was suspected of being against the war and as the suspicion grew, and the war grew, he
was
against it. After he had written to Oshima that he knew of no man worthy of the
meito,
Ikkanshi imagined the police would come for him. He had insulted the Ambassador to Germany. He had insulted Hitler, whom Oshima had in mind as the recipient. True, he had given up the
meito
when the basket maker came for it. But he had no reason to keep it. The sword would go to its purpose.
The police did not come for him.
The basket maker did.
He had a small package. He was exceedingly formal. He bowed to the floor presenting this short weapon wrapped in its fine embroidered cloth. It was a
wakizashi.
Ikkanshi understood the message. He was to disembowel himself.
He thanked Bamboo and put the package away.
He had a great deal of time to reflect. The massacre of Nanking stayed with him. The Imperial Army’s crack troops had overrun the river to reach the town, row after row of soldiers following each other to drown in the mud, so that the last ones could run over the drowned one’s backs and reach the opposite shore, and achieve the advantage.
He puzzled over why a people would launch their nation into a world-wide blood bath against impossible odds, at the behest of a remote, superior Emperor. He concluded that they had the minds of slaves, not slaves of the Emperor, but of their own ideas. They were honour-bound but their honour was based on appearance and not on true meaning. In consideration of how it would be seen, one was to die uselessly. In consideration of disgrace in military eyes, he was to dispatch himself from this earth.
Once he understood this, he no longer had the mind of a slave. To change was at the same time very difficult and very simple. He had to think for himself, be fearless in quite
a different way. He thought about resistance and how it had always been there, slow and silent, sometimes laughing, not seen.
In time of crisis the people were obedient to the Headman. Take the banishment of Tamio: the people did what they believed was for the best of all. A ‘Headman’ ruled in families too; women were obedient to husband or father. On the summer island it was different. No one spoke about this difference, but it was there. The
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divers were a force, by virtue of their diving skill. Their labour earned the village keep.
The women did not agree with sending Tamio away. But they had not raised a voice against the Headman. They achieved their rebellion in small ways. Tamio’s boat was strong enough for him to reach land. But he had no fuel. Keiko removed a precious can that Ikkanshi used to power his generator. Ikkanshi knew but said nothing.
The diving women knew the empty islands between here and the mainland. Perhaps Tamio stopped on one. Perhaps they brought water and food. It was not spoken of.