Requiem Page 8

  Lena got up then, and pulled on her clothes and went outside, barefoot. I lay there for a few moments, thinking about the night before. Anger, public gestures of love. There was so much that was private between us. Unexpressed? In language, maybe.

  I got up and went to the kitchen and made coffee and glanced outside, surprised to see a thin shroud of low fog suspended over the river. The ashes of the bonfire had been washed away in the night by a soft rain neither of us had heard.

  Lena was looking down at layers of shale beneath her feet. She leaned forward, her dark hair dangling over dark water, and picked up what appeared to be a perfect stone to add to her collection of smalls. It had been washed up by the river and was lying outside the fire circle. She was so close, I could see the way the stone fitted her palm. It was round and speckled and hard, and grey lines ran through the surface like old veins. She leaned over the river again and swished the stone back and forth in the water. Patted it dry against her jeans and inspected it once more. Held it like a talisman and smoothed it against her cheek, up down, up down, an even motion.

  And then, abruptly, she let go. Flung it out to the current. Gave it back to the river from which it had come. I remember thinking that she was perhaps satisfying some past—or even some future—anger of her own. Then she turned and walked up the stone path to the porch. I handed her a mug of strong, hot coffee as she came through the door. She held out her right hand, grasped the mug, and dropped it to the floor.

  CHAPTER 9

  1942

  At the Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver, Father and the other men were separated from the women and children and taken to a different building in Hastings Park. Boys over thirteen had to join the men. Mother, Hiroshi, Keiko and I were in the larger group, and were led to the livestock building that would house us for several months. After that, trains would be taking us north and inland, far up the Fraser Valley to hastily—oh, how hastily—prepared camps. The protected zone had been declared: no person of Japanese ancestry would be permitted to live within one hundred miles of the coast. Everyone over sixteen, men and women, had been registered and fingerprinted. Each of us was identified as an enemy alien. Cars and trucks, cameras, radio transmitters, radio receivers, firearms and ammunition were confiscated.

  But the Security Commission had no idea what to do with us, and there was still no carefully considered plan. They wanted us off the coast, and Pearl Harbor had given them the opportunity. They wanted the men’s fishing licences, more to the point. That was the real reason. Japanese families caught too many fish and were too industrious on their farms. Get rid of the imagined fifth column, never mind that we were citizens.

  All of this I came to understand much later, long after we had left the camp. And Mother told me once, but only once, how she had halted in disbelief in the doorway of the empty building at Hastings Park. It was the moment before we were led to the stables and open cattle stalls, and she had placed a hand over her mouth while being pushed from behind, certain that she would vomit from the smell. Surely a mistake had been made. Surely we were not expected to live in such a place. Not in that stench of animal urine and manure.

  “Think of it,” she said. “Just think of it.”

  I watched her private shame close over the memory.

  If a mistake had been made, no one was making such an admission. Into the stalls we went, exhausted after our journey. Each of us was given bologna, a piece of bread and a drink of watered-down milk. After that, children were put to bed on straw ticks that had been laid out on bunks in the stalls. Our family was assigned two double bunks and drab army-issue blankets. There was no privacy until the women began to hang sheets as dividers between stalls.

  That was the beginning wave, the wave that preceded the tide of families that followed, hundreds and thousands arriving month after month. More people than any of us had ever seen in one place. At its peak, Hastings Park was housing and feeding more than three thousand, most of us in animal stalls.

  The stall we lived in reeked of horse and cow, of sheep and goat, of lime and urine and mould and dirt. Clumps of manure stuck to our feet when we walked through the building. What we saw from the doorway was a high metal gate, with barbed wire encircling the park. There was no sign of Father. The only men in sight were either RCMP or guards stationed at the gate. Beyond the guards, I could hear streetcars rumbling by outside the park. I had never heard such a sound before, and I was fascinated by the rattle and clang of bells as sparks scattered and sizzled in the wires overhead.

  In the bathroom there were ten open showers, no divisions between. A series of taps dripped above a long metal shelf and I remember a row of children’s bums while we were all being washed at the same time. Hiroshi and Keiko and I stood giggling on three wobbling boards while we were soaped and rinsed, and while water ran between the boards into a drain in the floor. The toilets along one side of the room were sheet-metal troughs. There were no seats, no partitions, no privacy. Not at the beginning, not when we arrived. Only when some of the women dared to protest, only then were toilet seats brought in and flimsy partitions erected.

  Our mother and all of the other mothers began to scrub. Mother’s hair was damp; she was on her hands and knees and she pushed back the curls on her forehead. Day and night, water flowed past the edge of our stall through a long, connected trough that angled in and around the aisles of concrete. If someone was rinsing clothing farther up the aisle, soap bubbles floated past our stall. Whenever bubbles stuck to the cement sides of the trough, I reached over and popped them with my finger. Makeshift clotheslines were strung everywhere, and I remember running with other children under hanging clothes. We ran in and around sheets, blankets, long underwear and damp towels until our mothers came to collect us and restored order. There was little for children to do, but there was always washing going on, even in the night. Our own mother scrubbed our clothes after everyone else was in bed. When she undressed or changed, she climbed up onto her bunk behind army blankets or had Keiko hold two pieces of towel together in front of her, for privacy.

  But it was the maggots that disgusted her the most. I knew they were there; I could see them swarming. And they stayed in memory because Mother talked about them for years. First, she asked for disinfectant and was given some. But even after more scrubbing, the maggots stayed on—in the pallets where we slept and in manure under the boards of the shower room. Once a week, because of damp and mould, we had to drag our straw ticks outside the building so that stuffing could be removed and new straw put in. But the maggots stayed on.

  Mother wrapped us in coats to keep us warm and she draped an extra sheet to thicken the partition around our cramped living space. Other families, strangers, lived all around us. It was never quiet at night and we had to listen to the high-pitched, rhythmic sobbing of a woman whose stall was two aisles away from ours. She cried every night. And every morning she woke up with puffed and swollen eyes.

  Three times a day, we were led to the poultry building, a large, high-ceilinged area filled with rows of tables made from planks placed end to end over trestles. We ate in that lime-and-poultry smell while an RCMP officer stood on top of one of the long tables and guarded us. I have always wondered who imagined that we were ripe for sabotage, a poultry room filled with women standing in line collecting bowls of food for their children. At the time, I was terrified of that long-legged, uniformed policeman high above us, a man who watched as I chewed porridge that was served in one lump in the morning, as I chewed macaroni for lunch, and chunks of tough stewing beef or fish poached in a tasteless white sauce for dinner. Everything was covered in white sauce. At night, some sort of fast-cooked rice was served, the likes of which no mother we knew had ever prepared.

  Because Mother had to spend so much time standing in line to collect food for the three of us, there was often nothing left when she went back for her own meal. She wasn’t the only woman who went hungry. It took numerous meetings and letters explaining conditions before the proble
m was resolved, and before slightly more palatable food in larger amounts was brought in.

  Any news to be had was exchanged and passed on by the women in the dining room. We had not heard from Father since we’d been separated on arrival at Hastings Park, and Mother told Keiko in a flat, worried voice that he might have been taken away to a work camp. One of the rumours was that husbands, fathers, uncles and older brothers had been sent to camps as far away as Ontario and were required to wear circular targets on their backs so that they would be easy to shoot if they tried to escape. Other men were assigned to work crews and were said to be building roads near the Alberta border or in the northern part of our own province of British Columbia. And just as we thought we would never see any of the men again, Mother’s younger brother, Aki, turned up.

  Uncle Aki had been living and working as a fisherman on Bainbridge Island in Washington for several years. Only months before we were rounded up, he had moved to Steveston on the B.C. mainland. Now, he managed to get a message to us saying that he was close by and had been put to work as a cook in the kitchen, adjacent to the poultry building. His wife, our auntie Aya, had arrived that day, the message said, and she was in the same livestock building where we were living. Uncle Aki wanted Mother to look out for her, and Mother set out immediately, going up and down the rows of stalls to see if someone new had arrived. We did not know Auntie Aya very well because Uncle Aki had married when he was living in Washington. Whenever he had visited, he’d arrived on his fishing boat. After he’d moved to Steveston, he brought Auntie Aya to Vancouver Island to meet us, but only once. So far, they had no children.

  Uncle Aki also told Mother in his message that he’d learned that Father was still in Vancouver, but was being held in a special detention centre in the city. That was why we hadn’t heard from him. Every day, men were being sent away, it was true, but so far Father had not been among them. Father’s brother, Uncle Kenji, had been taken to a road camp; that much had been found out. Father was doing what he could to keep our family together, and he was trying to obtain information about moving us to a self-supporting camp. To do this, he had to prove that money would be coming to him from an insurance policy and from the auctioning of his boat.

  And then, one day, when rains were pounding the rooftops and while I was staring out at the barbed-wire fence, Uncle Aki came to the doorway and stuck his head inside. When he saw Mother, he called us over. He was not wearing a cook’s apron and hat, but a dark suit and a long grey coat and fedora. At first, I wasn’t certain who this was. He looked like an imposter who might have slipped into Uncle Aki’s good clothes. But he really was our uncle. He had baked during his spare time between meals, and the guards on duty allowed him to bring a tin container filled with raisin cookies, as well as a parcel for Auntie Aya, who ran to the doorway to greet him.

  Auntie Aya was shorter than Mother, and had deep-set eyes and much thinner cheeks. Auntie Aya looked more like our older sister than our aunt. Mother came to the entrance and hugged her brother, and Hiroshi and Keiko and I came running over. Uncle Aki handed us the cookies and told us we were to share with other children in nearby stalls.

  For days, we talked about the taste of those cookies and how happy we had been to see our uncle’s friendly face when he grinned under the shadowy brim of his hat and was recognized. Auntie Aya, however, was having a difficult time adjusting to conditions in the livestock building, and she sometimes spent hours sitting on her bunk, staring at nothing. She told Mother she couldn’t sleep because of the sound of sobbing at night. It was only when a doctor was called and a baby was born in the same aisle as Auntie Aya that she roused herself and made a move to help others. The birth of the baby, a boy, had happened quickly, and the people in charge had no time to get the woman to hospital. She had two other young children and needed help. Auntie Aya was often seen after that, walking up and down the rows between stalls, the new baby bundled and held to her shoulder. She told us that she wanted a baby of her own and was getting practice. When she wasn’t helping with the baby, she sometimes supervised lessons, as she had agreed to help with the loosely organized attempts to keep school-age children learning.

  If Auntie Aya had at first been reluctant to get involved in other people’s misfortunes, our own mother had gone into action from the beginning. There were many older women in the building, and several had become ill and needed help washing their clothes and getting to meals. I tried to stay close to Mother while she moved about, in case something unexpected might happen. Surrounded by strangers every moment, I had begun to worry about being separated from her, or from my brother and sister. I missed Father, whom none of us had seen for almost two months. Only when Mother was told that we were being sent north did we learn that he would be joining us again. But not until the day we were to board the train.

  In the meantime, even more women and children had arrived at the livestock building, which meant that those of us who had been there the longest had to move on. Buses and trains were taking families away, heading to ghost towns from the former gold rush days and to camps in places named Greenwood, Kaslo, Slocan, Tashme, New Denver, Lemon Creek—as well as to work the sugar-beet fields in Alberta. Faces that had become familiar disappeared and were never seen again. And then, one morning, shortly after breakfast in the poultry building, we were told by guards that our turn had come, that Father had arranged for us to go north. Auntie Aya was to travel with us, though we did not see Uncle Aki until just before the bus arrived to take us to the train.

  Everything had to be packed up quickly. Damp clothes were yanked from lines, divider sheets and blankets tugged from ropes and racks. Other families were led out of the building with us—some faces were familiar, some were not—and we were herded onto a bus and driven to a station platform, where we were to board a train. There we stood, in a huddle beside the tracks, once more clutching bundles that had been newly tied with string.

  Husbands and fathers were now joining the group, and families were reunited in the confusion as everyone crowded around heaps of suitcases, baskets, hundred-pound sacks of sugar and rice, paper shopping bags, buckets and boxes, rolls of bedding coiled with rope. We were adrift in a sea of bent-over backs, a blur of shapes and colours. I moved closer to Mother, who was wearing her navy blue coat again but this time with a scarf wrapped around her head and tied under her chin. A huge black train thundered in—the Pacific Great Eastern—raising cinder dust as it puffed and wheezed to a halt in front of us. Hiroshi leapt forward, and Mother hauled him back.

  “Stand still,” she told him sharply. “Take your sister’s hand and look after her until you are told to board the train.”

  I saw how tense she was when I looked up at her face.

  “Hold your bundles tightly,” she said, quietly now. “Don’t look back. Your father will find us. Uncle Aki has seen him. He is helping the old people and he has to look after the sacks of sugar and rice. He has to be certain that the crate that holds our stove gets into the freight car at the back of the train.”

  Father had been brought to the station separately, but at the time we boarded, there was still no sign of him. Mother told me to lift my feet high onto the steps of the coach. A tall policeman in uniform, the ever-present RCMP, leaned forward and picked me up suddenly, as if I weighed no more than a piece of cloth fluttering through the air.

  “There you are, young fellow,” he said, and he set me down gently in the doorway between coaches.

  I was feeling the weightlessness of the moment, the pleasurable rush of my body through air, when I heard Mother’s voice below. Her refusal of help. She climbed up by herself and looked away until the policeman stepped back and offered to lift someone else.

  We claimed facing double seats, Hiroshi and Keiko on one side, Mother and I on the other. I was pushing my palms across the rough bristles of upholstery, and I looked up to see a conductor and a different member of the RCMP making their way through the long aisle of the coach. One by one, the two men removed ev
ery linen square that had been buttoned to the top of the seatbacks. No dark head of Japanese hair would be touching those starched white linen squares. Again, Mother turned away until the men had passed us by.

  The train began to jerk and halt, jerk and halt. Father had not found us. He had not come to the train, after all. And then, just as we were pulling away from the siding, I saw him outside, running to reach the steps at the end of the coach.

  “Thank God,” Mother’s voice whispered above me. “Thank God we are together now.”

  But Father was agitated and out of breath, and he scarcely took note of the fact that he hadn’t seen us for a long time. He picked me up roughly and plunked me down between Hiroshi and Keiko on the facing seat. They both squirmed and wriggled but did not dare to complain. I was trying to hear what my parents were saying, but Mother lowered her head and whispered, raising her palm in front of her lips so that she would not be heard by others crowded around us. A cold rain had begun outside and was trickling down the thickness of distorted glass in the train windows. I watched Mother as she stared over our heads while she listened to something Father was telling her. She leaned back into the seat. With no expression on her face except one of extreme fatigue, she closed her eyes.

  We arrived at our destination in the evening, and pulled our bundles down from the overhead racks, only to learn that we were not allowed to get off the train. We were at a railway station beside the Fraser River, on the edge of a town we were not permitted to enter. One more rule that had to be obeyed. Father pushed our bundles back up on the racks, and snapped at us and told us to sit down again. The train backed up and stopped, dead still, on a siding away from the main tracks. Angry people from the town were parading along the length of the train, holding signs up to the windows in the fading light. They did not want us there. Not even to sleep on the train.