The Pearl Diver (17 page)

Once again he is caught in the middle, wondering
whether stopping will prolong the day’s pain or whether
it will become a moment he takes back and will perhaps,
one day, savor. Stop right there and sit on that fallen tree,
have a nice talk, just the two of them. But they keep on
climbing; neither has said a word since they left the house
two hours ago.

It was the previous spring, while out viewing the plum
blossoms, when his mother spoke of it. She said that she
knew how difficult it was to feed everyone with the small
rice field, told them she didn’t want to become a burden
on them and that she wanted to do this. His wife turned
and bowed deeply to his mother, showering her with praise
for her thoughtfulness and courage.

“We can’t do this,” he whispered to his wife late that
night on the futon.

“You heard her; it is what she wants to do. We are not
forcing her.”

“But it’s my mother.”

“It’s her choice. It can’t be helped.”

She stops about three-quarters of the way up the
mountain. She breathes heavily, but not much more than
he.

“I stop here.”

“I thought we were going to the top of the mountain.”

“Here the leaves are still changing. On top there are
few trees.”

He looks away, not sure what to say, or how or where
to place his eyes.

“You should go on before it gets too late and turns
dark.”

What do I say?

Where do I look?

What will be left of me after this?

“Go on.”

He looks up from his lowered head. She’s on her knees,
bowing to him, like his wife does, will do at the entrance
of the house when he returns tonight. He bows back to his
mother; both look, but neither can hold it.

Before he realizes that he has done so, he has taken
the first few steps down the mountain. He imagines she is
still on her knees in a bow, but he can’t, doesn’t dare, turn
around, and knows that if he does, he won’t be able to
go through with it. Only when he has walked fifteen or
twenty minutes does he look back. Just trees.
The same ones
he didn’t notice an hour ago. He stops and looks a long
time at the trees, this path, and he knows that he will
never see them, will never walk this path again.

Weeks later, the man is certain that if only he knew
for sure, the pain would subside.

One morning on the way to the charcoal factory, he
sees, up above the mountain, distant crows and hawks
soaring in a circle.

Two days later, he sees an old man walk by with his
son and he wants to confront them, ask them where they
are going. But he remains silent, pretending he doesn’t
see them heading toward the base of Mount Otake.

The following week, over by the shrine, he notices the
maples, which are scalded red. The cedars remain dark
green; what’s left of the oaks, gold. All enhance each other.
Here in the valley, when the colors are at their most vibrant, he knows that up in the mountain the leaves have
already fallen.

ARTIFACT Numbers 2030, 2031
Two musical instruments

Other instruments, other songs have begun to enter her nights. Instruments she finds much more soothing than the accordion and harmonicas. Instruments that can ease her into sleep: a cello, a bass. Instruments she hears for the first time: maracas, a lute. Instruments she is familiar with: a Japanese
kodaiko
drum, a bass drum, tambourines. And now that she can differentiate between them, she allows herself to take in the music, some nights lying awake listening, some nights going up to the Lighthouse. A couple of times, she has even fallen asleep there, on the tatami mats, the rehearsal all around her.

ARTIFACT Number 2188
A homemade beeswax candle

At least for tonight, the patients will have names, she thinks. Their given names, if they know them; if not, the ones they chose in their first week here. She knows very few of the names, most before her time here.

They paint their Nagashima ancestors’ names on thin
washi
paper cut into six-inch squares, four squares per lantern. Some work on the frames of the wooden lanterns, others making the candles from beeswax. The paper sides are attached to the frames, the candles secured inside. It takes the better part of a day and the following night on the final day of the August Obon holiday.
They go down at dusk to the shore at the bottom of the cliff. The night is sultry, no hint of a breeze even down here on the shore; the mosquitoes are greedy. They wait until it is dark, stars bright, mixing in with the specks of light from Shodo Island. A soft orange glow in the distance on the mainland. First, she thinks it is the remnants of sunset, but when it doesn’t go away, she realizes it is the lights from the city of Okayama, twenty miles away. They all have matches, and for those who can’t strike them, the others do it. The matches pop and flare; the candles inside the lanterns are lighted, illuminating the names painted on them. Above them, atop the cliff, the pounding every few seconds of a large drum thunders over them.

She helps a couple of the patients launch their lanterns in the water and then gets the first of hers—Miss Matsue, December 1946, painted on the sides. Carefully, she sets it in the sea, the lantern for the patient she has never met, and it floats away along with the other lanterns, a crooked river of light crawling, illuminating the way home for the spirits.

She goes over and picks up the second of her lanterns, lights the candle. Next to her, Mr. Munakani, the former naval officer, is preparing the lantern for Miss Min. She waits for him, and they send them off together. On the sides of her lantern, the name of her uncle Jiro is painted, along with the years 1971 and 1972, the year when she last saw the fire atop the mountain on her birthday, and the year when she first didn’t see it. She watches until the last of the lanterns burns out, or drowns in the sea, and only the echo of the drum is left behind.

ARTIFACT Number 2083
A small black-and-white television

On this March evening, she passes by Building C-7 and hears it. She hears it but can’t believe it, stunned. Never before on Nagashima has she heard this. She imagines things that sound like it: a bawling cat perhaps—there have been a few over the years; the wind through the trees, but she dismisses this almost immediately; one of the musicians squeezing the likeness out of an instrument. It stops, but then begins again. She looks through the window and sees a gray glow, some patients and a couple of nurses watching a TV as a mother changes the diaper of a screaming baby. She stands there until her breath steams the window and she is no longer able to see into the room.

ARTIFACT Number 2400
A brochure of the Blue Bird Concert at
Kyoto City Auditorium

Three days before leaving Nagashima for the second time, Mr. Oyama gives her the key and she goes that evening. It is still an hour before dusk, but inside the windowless oval-shaped room, it is dark. She takes out the flashlight, goes past the rows of white urns from left to right, finds the one with Man, twenty-seven, on it, making certain that this is it; there is one other painted the same, but it is much more to the left, from the earlier years. She removes the urn, places it in the bag she has brought, locks the door, and goes back to the Lighthouse, where the Blue Bird Band is practicing.

When Mr. Endoh,
the director of the Blue Bird Band, asks her, she wants to accept, but doesn’t think she can do it. Memories of that trip to Mushiage are still very much with her; the doubts have singed her. “It would be for only two days,” he says, “and since you are our biggest fan, we would like for you to come.”

And in May, she is here in the city that she passed through on the train with her uncle all those years ago. Now I am forty-seven; thirty-eight years ago I was here, she thinks. She sits, on this late morning, in the darkness of the empty auditorium, listening to the rehearsal. The band seems so small up there, not because she is that far away— she sits only eight or nine rows back—but because she is used to seeing them play in the Lighthouse, a room a tenth the size of this stage. She hardly listens to the music, has heard it all every night, over and over, for the past few years. Her mind is on something else this early afternoon in the Kyoto City Auditorium, sinking into the soft chair that flips up when her weight isn’t on it.
The longer she sits here, the shorter her time is to do what she must do. Something she has been thinking of doing so much that she isn’t aware that she is thinking of it.

And before she knows what she is doing, before she can talk herself into, or out of, it, before she can applaud herself, she is out the door of the auditorium and onto the street with all of them. All the people of this city, who in the next few minutes will know who and what she is, or none of them will know. Everyone or no one, that’s the way it will be.

Outside of the auditorium, although it is an overcast day, she shades her eyes. This is when she realizes that she has left her hat on the seat. The hat she has been wearing her whole life, it seems. To keep the sun off. But today, she thinks, I am not one of them. I don’t need a hat or anyone to help me or tell me who or what I am or what I need or don’t.
There are taxis lined up on the street, a half dozen of them.

Ever since she accepted Mr. Endoh’s invitation, she has studied the maps of Kyoto. But now that she is here, she can’t move. Here, in the exact place where her finger started every one of those imagined journeys in this city. Started all of them here, finished all of them here, because this was the one place on the map that she knew for certain she would be. The Kyoto City Auditorium. From here, her finger stepped across great distances in no time: from the Heian Shrine, to the Golden Pavilion, to the teahouses, to the center of the city, to the Philosopher’s Walk.

Now that she is here, not only a finger on a piece of paper, but all of her, she isn’t sure what to do or where to turn. Her first step is in the direction of the taxis, and after a few steps, she stops. She has never been in a car, much less a taxi. She moves a little closer and observes. A man goes up to the first taxi in line, taps on the window, and steps back from the door, which magically pops open. She observes. Some of the taxis sit with their back left doors opened; others don’t. She waits for the next taxi and then gets in. The door closes as bafflingly as it has opened. The driver turns to her. She wants to get out, run back into the security of the soft seats and the darkness of the auditorium, the music around her. She doesn’t know how.

“Where to?”

“What?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“The Philosopher’s Walk.” She blurts out the first place that comes to mind, although she had wanted to go first to the Heian Shrine.

The taxi pulls away from the auditorium, and in a few minutes the driver glances at her in the mirror, asking, “Which end of the walk do you want to start?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which end? The north or the south?”

“Whichever is closer.”

She keeps her eyes on the little machine in the front by the driver, the numbers it clicks off—200 . . . 230 . . . 260 . . . 290. She clenches her small purse with the money she has saved over the years, and that which Mr. Shirayama gave to her before she left.

“Is this your first time here?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“Okayama.”

“The Bizen area? My family and I went there last year. My wife loves Bizen pottery.”

“I’m from the Oku area, not far from Bizen.”

She wishes the driver would stop talking, but she also doesn’t want him to stop. The more he talks, the more he may find out; but also, the more he talks, the more comfortable she becomes, because she isn’t being noticed. Maybe she could belong, could get along out here. Alone. The taxi stops and the door pops open, again surprising her.

“Seven hundred and twenty yen.”

She hesitates, then grabs the first amount of money she finds, hands it to the driver. He gives her back the change, pushes the little machine in the front, and the 720 disappears.

“Enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you.”

She gets out of the taxi and it pulls away. There is a small canal, running in the opposite direction—the Philosopher’s Walk. She had never heard of the place before Mr.
Yamai mentioned it, when she went in for a fresh bandage and gauze on one of those mornings when her leg was infected. Maybe he was from this city; she isn’t sure why they were talking of it, but he said, “If you ever go there, go to the Philosopher’s Walk. Away from all the tourists and crowds. It is a place,” he said—and she remembers the words exactly, not because they made sense to her, but because they didn’t—“that smells of that most beautiful smell, the smell of thought.”

And she stands there along the narrow canal lined with trees, taking a deep breath, and another, she smells nothing other than May trees, the flowers, the canal. He was always much too educated for her, with his intense passion for knowledge. Along the canal, there are not that many people. The ones who pass pay her no attention. She goes slowly, searching for the right place to do what she has come to do. After rounding the bend, she sees no people within sight. She removes the small velvet sack from her handbag, opens it, and begins scattering the ashes in the canal.

“At least some of you has returned home, Mr. Yamai,” she whispers as the ashes float by. Some of them sink. A large orange-and-white carp opens its mouth, as if the ashes are food, then slips back under the water. She stands there until the last of the ashes are taken away by the slowflowing water. She follows them. And she continues on until a small waterfall carries them down and under the water to unknown places, where she can no longer go.