The Pearl Diver (22 page)

“But what do they do?”

“They are living a lie, Miss Fuji. Each day, they leave home in their suits, take their briefcases, as if they are going to work. Their wives have even prepared lunch boxes for them. But what their wives don’t know is that their husbands have all lost their jobs and that they come here and wait out the day before going home at night.”

“Won’t their wives find out?”

“Eventually, they will have to tell them or . . .” He pauses and takes a drink, adjusts his baseball cap. “Or they will find out. That’s what happened to me. My wife found out. I didn’t go up a mountain like these men; I went to parks or rode trains to different places. But I was living a lie, like them. Now I am just trying to live.”

“You lost your job?”

“I became sick first; then I was released from my position.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I have a sickness, one they don’t know much about. It’s rather new. One that deprives a person of all dignity, one that leaves you to wither away, to die alone.”

She stares at him, not to bore deep into his being, but her years as a nurse have taught her to notice physical signs. Other than the cough and a blisterlike spot on the side of his neck and the one she has seen on the top of his forehead, along the hairline, she sees nothing else that would make her believe that he has leprosy. His thinness doesn’t point to this, either. He stares back at her and she feels as if he knows something about her, as if he brought her here to make a point that she, too, is living a lie.

“So, you are not from around here?” she asks.

“No, about one hundred and fifty miles from here. My wife and son now live with her mother. They told her family and friends that my company transferred me to Tokyo. That’s why they haven’t seen me around. On the holidays, they say that I am too busy to come home, or they go away for the holidays, say they are meeting me and we are going to a hot spring or something.”

“Don’t people think that it is a little strange?”

“Maybe at first, but the longer it goes on, people let it go, just keep quiet about it, as if it will all go away.”

She braces herself against a tree, takes a deep breath.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to be going back. I don’t feel so good. It’s probably the heat.”

They retrace their steps along the path, passing the men, many of whom have opened their lunch boxes, taken out their chopsticks, and have begun eating.

Her restlessness Won’t allow her to sleep. Within seconds of leaving the hotel, she finds a taxi and takes it to the beginning of the arcade shopping street. It isn’t as late as it seems, but the arcade is quiet now, only a few people out. A fast-food restaurant remains open. The rest of the businesses have their metal shutters pulled down; boxes of garbage are stacked in front.

This is a street she has walked often during these past two months, but it appears so different at night, without the crowds. From the corner of her right eye, she sees one of the boxes move. This is one thing that she feels best about herself—her eyes have always been sharp; not the disease or age—she is sixty-four now—has damaged them. She turns around, sees the boxes move again. Looking closer, she sees that they are not boxes of garbage, but boxes taped and strung together into a house. All along this street, under the roof of the arcade, there are these self-made houses.

The box houses are only on the right side of the street. She tries thinking of the significance of this but comes up with nothing. Not far from where she first noticed the moving box, a man, not all that much younger than she, stands and is running a plastic string through a couple of flat boxes. He slowly weaves the string through and around until it is one long sheet. Surrounding him, chest-high, boxes make a square. She wants to look down inside the box house, see what he has in there, but she doesn’t go any closer than where she now stands. She moves her eyes to a cluster of men, who are wobbling and staggering against one another, laughing loudly, talking much too loudly for the distance between them. One of the men, a necktie hanging crookedly from his open collar, a gray suit coat on the hook of his finger, stops next to the man building the house and glances at him.

“What’s that?” the man with the tie stammers, almost falling back, as if the words have shoved him.

The man continues working on the boxes, his head down.

“It’s a box. No, excuse me, it’s your house. Is that your house?” He laughs loudly; the other men with him jostle one another and laugh.

He repeats his question.

“Is that your house?” More laughs from the others.

She is so tired from this long day that she only wants to sit down right here in the arcade, curl up, and sleep. She leans against one of the shuttered shop doors and watches the drunk men laughing and taunting.
The man still ignores them, stoops down and places the last flat piece of the box on top, works the corner strings through the top sides of the boxes. The roof shuts him in, away from the men. The drunk man knocks on the side of the box. Knocks again.

“Is anyone home?”

Before she knows what she is doing, she is next to the man, standing between him and his friends.

“Leave him alone,” she shouts.

The man is startled, but he regains his composure, laughs at her.

“What’s wrong with all of you?”

The group of men grow quiet; a couple of them try to muffle drunken laughs. One of the men goes over to his friend.

“Come on, let’s go.” He pulls him by the arm.

“Come on.” He manages to get his friend to take a step, and the man’s feet follow one step at a time.
The others follow them down the arcade street; soon they are all gone and it is only their fading laughter that she can hear. She walks the opposite way, hears a soft “Thank you” come from inside of the box house. She doesn’t answer, then turns left on a small side street and heads in the direction of the river, only two blocks away.

The river is a calm one, one that you can’t see flowing until something floats by. She doesn’t have to wait long before a bottle comes into view and meanders past. She crosses the bridge and walks along the narrow sidewalk. Shortly, she arrives near the freeway underpass. Cars rumble above; trucks seem as if they are dropping on her.

Here, there are more substantial houses, made of boxes, blue tarps, sheets of plywood, old rugs. A permanence to them. Outside, a woman is squatting, stirring a pot of something. They nod to each other. A small dog whimpers and roams as far as its chain permits. The houses, built close to one another, go on for about a hundred yards. She notices that many of them have small rugs or mats in front, a pair of shoes or slippers sitting atop them. She goes over the shoes, tries remembering what kind Yasu wears. They all look like his, yet none of them do. She isn’t sure what to do or in front of which house to place the bottle of cough medicine she has brought.

A truck thunders overhead and she wonders how can they sleep with all the noise, the highway less than sixty feet above. She remembers those sleepless nights in her early months at Nagashima, and all the others that came, and she once wondered if she would ever sleep in her life again, but she did, and so, too, do they.

In this narrow hotel room, she knows she will not spend another night here. This hotel room, she thinks, where one can pull the heavy dark curtains tight, deceive the day by turning it into night, but where night is always itself.

This thought gets her off the bed and she throws open the curtains and the sunlight hurts her eyes. She takes a shower, dresses, packs her little suitcase, stands in line at the train station, and gets a ticket for where she is going, where she knows that her story must end.

Even before she
arrives here at Shima Peninsula, a place she has always wanted to go, the most famous place in the country for pearl divers, she knows what she is going to do and how she’s going to do it. There wasn’t much of a choice. The what she knew before even leaving the station; the how came later while she slept on the long train ride on her way here. When she awoke, she was happy, knew that it was right. There will be no more controlling her; this time she will have the final say.

That she never gave any thought of returning to Shodo Island doesn’t surprise her; she long ago lost any sentiment to go back to her home island for a visit. Maybe thirty years ago, but not now. It is the diving that, after all this time, still has a place in her life, the one thing that has never abandoned her. And this is why she is standing at the front desk of the hotel, asking about boat rentals.

“Yes, we have small pedal boats that you can rent for a thousand yen per hour.”

“No, I don’t want a pedal boat. Do you have rowboats?”

“Rowboats? Excuse me a minute, ma’am.” The young man goes over to the woman at the other end of the counter and they talk. He returns with the woman, who asks, “Are you sure you want a rowboat, ma’am?”

“Yes, that’s what I asked for.”

“Who is this for, ma’am?”

“Me, of course.”

“Well, rowboats are not something we usually get requests for. We have kayaks.”

“Will one of these kayaks take me out there into the sea? Out where the divers dive?”

“Sure. Have you ever been in a kayak?”

“No, but I’m sure I can handle it.”

“Kayaks are two thousand yen per hour. Would you like one?”

“Yes, but for tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“What time do the divers go out?”

“There are three shows each day—eleven, one-thirty, and four.”

“Shows?”

“Pearl diving, ma’am. We offer a ten percent discount on tickets if you’re staying at the hotel. Also, if you’re interested, there is a Pearl Diver Parade of Fire, where the divers swim out into the ocean with burning torches, and later the Pearl Diver Queen Contest.”

She waits awhile before talking to the lady behind the counter.

“I’ll just take the room for tonight. I’ll check on one of the boats later today.”

The room is twice as large as the small place she had for the past couple of months. She opens the curtain of her seventh-floor window and sees the blue sea. The woman at the desk confused her with all the talk about shows and parades. She probably thought that she was a regular tourist coming to see one of the attractions.

She takes the sidewalk down to the shore, hoping to get a glimpse of the divers. She doesn’t see any, and when she asks where they dive, she is told she can find them over by the small pavilion. She passes quite a few shops selling pearls; she thinks of the pearls she had found in her years of diving— nineteen of them, about halfway to a full necklace. She remembers the one diver, the lucky one, who spoke so loudly, and how she was always finding pearls. The shops have shell necklaces, photo postcards of sexy-looking divers in revealing suits. She imagines herself in one of those partially see-through suits and laughs. How ridiculous.

When she arrives at the pavilion, there is a line of people, and she passes them. One woman tells her that tickets for the show can be bought over there by the restaurant. Again, this talk of a show. She buys a ticket, and when the gate is opened, she finds a seat in the pavilion, which is built out on the rocks and into the sea. She thinks of the vending machines that Yasu told her were atop Mount Fuji.

The show begins with a young lady explaining the history of the divers on Shima Peninsula. The young women, who are posing as divers, go underwater. There is a loud applause as the divers rise to the top, each holding up a shell, giving a beautiful smile and wave. She wants to tell the people next to her that in four diving seasons, she found nineteen, that those sexy suits are not what the divers wore, and that she, so tired from the dive, couldn’t smile and wave. She excuses herself, leaves the pavilion, and finds a bench to sit on. The extreme weakness is upon her again, and while sitting, she looks around for a place to eat, but although she has hardly eaten anything in the past couple of days, she has no desire for food.

Soon it will be over. Soon she can give herself back to the sea. Her place. One final dive. Last night on the train, she had a fleeting sense of giving up, quitting; the guilt slashed through her. But she knows that it is only a matter of time, months, maybe a year. She is not ready for another fight.

She is too late for the Pearl Divers’ Parade of Fire, but in time to see the last of the Queen Contest. Onstage, there are eight young women all wearing the same thin white semitransparent suits, divers’ goggles resting atop their heads, and high heels. A man with a tuxedo and microphone walks up to each of them, asking the common questions.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“What is your blood type?”

“AB.”

He goes along the row of girls, asking the same kinds of questions. She laughs to herself, knowing that not a one of those beautiful, thin girls could last a single dive; they couldn’t make it fifteen feet under before fear would thrust them back to the surface.
Their little bodies couldn’t stand five seconds of the cold. This isn’t who we are, who we were, she thinks.

Late that night, as she sits in the outdoor stone hot spring, she can’t even enjoy this, her final night here, the idea of which, only twenty-four hours before, she was so at peace with. A peace now splintered by her confusion over the day’s events. She thinks how the final dive, which she had so much craved, has been crushed by the need to get away from this place.

A couple of women enter the hot spring and sit across from her, talking. One of the women goes underwater for a second and resurfaces.

“Look, a pearl!” She holds up the imaginary pearl in her hand. They both giggle.

Miss Fuji is exhausted, but she manages to stand up to leave, and as she moves past them through the waist-high water, she turns and says, “That’s not how it was.”

There is no dock where the taxi drops her off in Mushiage, only water. The wall where the dock was connected is nothing more than ragged chunks of cement. She stands and stares into the water, but it offers nothing to keep her interest. She picks up her suitcase and continues toward the fishing boats. A man stands on the prow of one, hosing down the outside of it.