Requiem (30 page)

There was no time to think about my abandonment in this large, strange place because a bell rang out loudly and the building expanded like a bellows in response to the sudden noise. Children came from every direction, through the doorway and into the classroom, but they slowed when they saw Miss Paxton. They became completely silent when they saw that I was already in my seat at the back of the room. After one quick glance around, I knew that there was no one like me in the class—no other child with a Japanese face.

Every child seemed to know exactly where to sit. Perhaps some order had existed before school began. All I knew was that within seconds, every desk was filled. Order prevailed until a girl in my row held up a note and said she had to be near the blackboard because she couldn’t see properly. Miss Paxton nodded while she read the note, and had the girl exchange seats with a boy in the front row.

Miss Paxton then called for complete silence. We stood, sang “God Save the King” and recited the Lord’s Prayer, and the school year began.

To start off the day, Miss Paxton said, “Let’s take turns, class. As you all know, on the first day of school, we stand beside our desks, one at a time, and say our names out loud. Both names,” she reminded. “Last and first. I’ll begin. My name is Miss Paxton.” She said this as if Miss was her first name, and then she printed MISS PAXTON on the board.

As I was in the last seat of the farthest row, my turn came after everyone else had finished. I stood, pressed a hand to the back of my desk and said, “Okuma, Binosuke,” putting my last name first, because I was not certain what I should do. I sat down quickly.

The children laughed so loudly, I became confused and wondered if, instead, I should have given the surname of my first, and not my second, father. I stood again and the room went silent. I blurted out, “Oda, Binosuke,” and my cheeks felt as if they had been slapped.

“Did you just say two different names?” said Miss Paxton. She looked down at her attendance sheet and then back to me.

I nodded and sat in my seat.

“And how do you come to have two sets of names?” she said.

I told her I had two because I had once lived in the family of my first father.

“Stand up again,” she said. “How many fathers have you had?”

“Two,” I said, and quickly sat down again. All of this sitting and standing made the class laugh even harder.

“What kind of names are those, anyway?” Miss Paxton said. “What kind of names, class? Shall we hear them again? Stand up and tell us, so that we can understand.”

“My name is Bin,” I said, thinking that if I gave only my shortest name, no one would laugh.

“Bin,” said Miss Paxton. She printed
B-I-N
on the board in giant letters with white chalk, and she drew an even bigger
X
through my name.

“Bin is not a name we use for children in this country,” she said.

“We say bin for dustbin or garbage bin, but it is not a name we give a child. We’ll assign a name that we can remember, an English name. We will call you Ben. Can you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said. And I wanted to leave this room and never come back, even knowing that Okuma-san would not let me stay home from school.

Miss Paxton printed
B-E-N
on the board and erased my crossed-out Japanese name.

When the day was finished, I walked out the school door alone. Behind me, I heard a boy’s voice mutter: “So long, rice paddy. Don’t bother coming back.”

Okuma-san was waiting for me at the end of Main Street as he had promised. When he asked how the day had gone, I said, “Fine.” I told him nothing about Miss Paxton, nor did I tell him that my name had been changed back to an English name again.

But that was only the beginning. On my second morning, Miss Paxton said, “Stand up, Ben. Stand beside your desk and tell the class your mother’s name.”

I had only one mother, but I wasn’t certain if Miss Paxton was laying a trap. I did not want the class to know anything more about my family, so I stood and spoke quickly. “My mother’s name is Oda, Reiko.”

And the entire class, as well as Miss Paxton, laughed as if they would never stop.

Every morning, for the rest of the week, Miss Paxton made me stand and say the name of my mother aloud so that the class could start off the day with a good laugh.

Miss Paxton was my
Sensei
, my teacher, and I knew that I had to show respect and do what she told me to do.

No one else in the class was asked to stand and say the name of a parent.

Miss Paxton was not able to make me cry.

That was my first week in my new school.

I
had never had a school art lesson until the year I was in grade eight. It was 1950, and an announcement was made at the beginning of the year that art classes were to start on Friday afternoons in late November. When I heard this, I felt an excitement that was physical, an excitement I had not known before.

On that first Friday morning, my heart beat faster. I raced through morning lessons. The clock slowed, intentionally. No one in our class knew who would be giving the lessons, but it was rumoured to be one or the other of two veterans, each of whom had fought overseas during the war and had returned to take up teaching again.

I had already had an encounter with one of the veterans, Mr. Abbott, and I was hoping he would not be the one to teach art. His regular class was geography, and he was also responsible for physical education. After gym class one day the previous June, a boy complained that his wallet had been stolen from a bench in the locker room on the main floor. I was accused of the theft. Mr. Abbott believed the boy and, despite my protests, took me to the principal’s office, where both he and the principal tried to force me to admit my guilt. But I would not; I was innocent. My pockets were turned inside out and my desk was searched, but the wallet was not found. “I’ve dealt with these Japs before,” Mr. Abbott told the principal. “I’ll get it out of him yet.”

While I was being threatened that a letter would be sent home to my father and that I would be expelled, an older boy came running into the office and said the wallet had been found in another boy’s locker. Mr. Abbott turned and left the office. No apology was made. The principal sent me back to my classroom. I never learned if the real thief was punished. I do know that for several days, in the schoolyard outside, the boys chanted, “Stealer! He’s a stealer!” when I came near.

I recounted none of these events to Okuma-san. Nor did I tell him that the covers of war comics occasionally turned up in my desk drawer in the classroom. There was always a Japanese soldier depicted on these covers. A soldier with an ugly yellow face, large buck teeth, eyes squinting behind thick glasses. I ripped up the covers and learned not to react. If someone started a fight outside, I did not run away. I did have a few friends, boys my age, and though they did not join the taunting, they did not come to my defence. It was too risky for them.

Occasionally, letters arrived from Mother. Keiko wrote, as well. She and Hiroshi were both in high school and doing well. Our camp school had not let us down. I had kept up my own marks, and was at the top of my class every year. When Mother wrote and asked about my grades, I reported back. But whenever a letter came from her, I fell into a dark mood and brooded for days. Our old lives were far away. I had not seen my first family since 1946. No one had the money to travel.

Okuma-san was saving money to move us to Ontario the following year and had been promised work in Ottawa as a music teacher. Letters had been coming and going. The job was at a small college, teaching music to students of high school age. He would be giving both group and individual lessons. One of his conditions was that I would be able take my high school studies at the same college. Of course, a piano would be available to him. Okuma-san had always kept up his practice on the plank keyboard, which had a permanent place against one wall of our chicken coop. After years of listening to Beethoven rapped out on ponderosa pine, I could tell almost as soon as he began which piece he was playing.

One day in the early fall, when I came home from school scuffed from fighting, I walked into the chicken coop and saw a small refrigerator tucked in behind the door and plugged in overhead. Okuma-san had purchased it secondhand. Mr. Boyd had picked it up in his truck and had helped to carry it in and set it up.

We had nothing to keep cold in the refrigerator that afternoon, except for one egg. We set the egg on a shelf by itself and laughed as if it were the funniest thing we’d ever seen. The refrigerator rattled and buzzed every time we opened the door. Okuma-san said he would buy cold food the next day, milk and butter and meat. He did not comment on my appearance, though it was obvious that I’d been in a fight. The two of us kept opening the door to look at the egg. During the night, I was wakened by the rattle and I heard Okuma-san in the kitchen, opening the fridge door again. I pictured the lone egg in that cool and empty space.

Another afternoon, Okuma-san had a secondhand turntable to show me when I came in from school. He had bought it that day, along with a great find, a record of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto that someone no longer wanted, though it was almost new. Okuma-san prepared our supper and I set the table, and the two of us sat in silence while the music surrounded us. Okuma-san could not keep his fingers still. Every inch of space in the room was filled with glorious and noble sounds. Hands and fingers played real keys. The second movement was so beautiful it seemed to float into the walls of the chicken coop. When it was over, we listened again as if for the first time. Had we been seated in one of the grand concert halls of Europe, we could not have enjoyed it more.

That evening, Okuma-san told me about the
Heiligenstadt Testament
, which Beethoven wrote when he was thirty-one years old. He had addressed it to his brothers, one of them by name, but it was never sent and was discovered among his papers after his death.

“It is a sad document,” said Okuma-san. “Very sad. Because in it, Beethoven finally accepted his permanent infirmity, his deafness. Imagine, at thirty-one and with the kind of genius that was inside him. Who knows how he was able to triumph over those devastating conditions? Maybe his deep love of life and his love of God allowed him to continue.”

The kitchen was almost dark by then, and I went to bed feeling that the music was still inside me. I did not want the feeling to escape.

On the Friday that art classes began, I had begun to worry about the possibility that Mr. Abbott, the gym instructor, would walk into our classroom and announce that he was the teacher. I knew he could make my life as difficult and as complicated as he wished it to be. It was a relief to me when the other veteran—there wasn’t a student in the school who did not know which two teachers had fought in the war—Mr. Owen, walked through the doorway and announced, “Today we will begin the study of art.”

Mr. Owen had fought in the Battle of Hong Kong and had been wounded. A bullet had gone through his cheek. There was a large scar on the left side of his face. His left eye was lower than the right, as if it had been mangled in the process of being wounded. He had been taken prisoner in Hong Kong by Japanese soldiers and was sent to Japan to work in a factory. Everyone knew how weak and sick he had been at the end of the war, when he’d finally returned home.

Our first class was a drawing class, and that was fine with me. Mr. Owen wanted us to draw either a horse or a dog. He handed out art paper and then he began to draw on the board with chalk, demonstrating a model of ovals and circles that could be created into a horse’s head and belly and back. The outer lines could be erased after a likeness had been found.

The demonstration of the dog began with two ovals and a circle. The circle was positioned behind the oval and transformed into a long, floppy ear on each side of the head. Another oval was positioned on its side and became the dog’s seated body. Legs and tail were added at the end.

I drew the horse, but did not need circles and ovals to help me. From memory, I drew one of the wild horses from the camp.

Mr. Owen walked up and down the rows of desks, looking over our shoulders. He was impressed with what I had done.

“It’s good, Ben. It’s really very good. You didn’t need any of my teaching aids to get started. And as you already know, there are many ways to draw a picture.”

He asked me to stay after class that day.

“Ben,” he said, “have you ever looked at real paintings in a gallery? Would you like to borrow some of my art books? I have quite a library at home. It’s important, when you are an artist, to look at the work of others and to know what has been done before.”

I agreed, cautiously. I was not accustomed to excessive kindness from teachers. But a friendship between us began that day.

Mr. Owen helped me to pay more attention to the natural world. He encouraged this so as to provide me with grounding. To start with basics but to be aware of every aspect of my own creations. “Look at what is around and between the objects you draw,” he told me. And I did. I began to focus on the spaces between, the angles and shadows, the fragmentation of light. I even began to wonder if I could draw these on their own: the shapes and groups of shapes above and between and below—instead of the objects themselves.

It was almost a decade later when I experimented in earnest this way, divorcing myself, freeing myself from being bound to actual objects, appreciating abstract shapes, real and imagined, and the ways they could exist for their own sake.

Along with Okuma-san, Mr. Owen helped me at the beginning of this journey. He challenged me to believe that every new drawing and painting deserved the excitement I gave to it as I searched for new forms that might bring it to life. Even when I was in grade eight, this was deemed to be important.

Some days, during those Friday afternoon classes, my classmates would ask Mr. Owen to tell us about the war. One time, he spoke about being a prisoner in Japan.