Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [15]
Cho-Cho knew what her maid was really saying and Suzuki knew that she knew. Nothing was spoken, all was understood, and the transition was made: Suzuki would continue to spread her futon in a corner of the house, and asked permission to make ‘a trivial contribution’ to the household expenses. Cho-Cho insisted that she must stay until she found more comfortable lodgings. It was, of course, they agreed, a temporary arrangement.
Next day, Suzuki put on her thick cotton work clothes and went out into the pre-dawn mist and the unknown territory of her new life.
After the silk farmers had gathered the bulging cocoons from mulberry trees stripped bare to feed the ravenous larvae, they took them to the factory. Suzuki joined the line of girls waiting to take charge of the loaded baskets and carry them indoors to the cauldrons of boiling water, where the process began.
When she stumbled home from the factory long after dark, too exhausted to eat, an odd reversal of roles took place: it was Cho-Cho who persuaded her to nibble a few grains of rice; who undressed and washed the dazed girl and helped her to the futon spread out for her while, half asleep, she tried to describe her day.
‘Poor worms! They work so hard, spinning threads, wrapping themselves in their fat cocoons, and then they’re tipped into cauldrons and boiled alive. I have to pick out any that have become moths—’
‘But why?’
‘They crack open the cocoon, to get out. The thread is broken, useless.’ She yawned, too tired to cover her mouth. ‘When the cocoons are soft, we scoop them out of the water and very carefully start to wind the threads on to iron reels. They’re beautiful, as fine as cobwebs.’
‘It sounds difficult.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Difficult. I have acquired a skill.’
But when Suzuki spoke of the awesome size of the silk workshop; the long lines of tables where the women worked; the impressive quantity of thread produced – ‘the thread from one cocoon can measure from the door to the shore’ – she said nothing of the boiling vats that spilled over, scalding her arms, the fingertip testing of water temperature, the dangers of unstable machinery.
When she came home one night with bleeding hands, she shrugged away Cho-Cho’s alarmed questions.
‘Machinery can break down. Girls are injured.’
Cho-Cho, distraught, spread healing ointment on the damaged fingers.
‘You must take greater care.’
Together the two women clung to a precarious existence, and in the small house on the hillside Suzuki could still inhabit another world, one where a baby learned to crawl and then to walk. Where the air was fragrant with steaming rice and shoyu and where clean clothes flapped on the line outside the door. Alongside her at the workbench were girls who slept in cramped, airless dormitories, who had to line up for baths, moving from factory to sleeping quarters like prisoners. She pitied them; she considered herself blessed.
Occasionally Sharpless visited, bringing a tactful gift, small enough to be acceptable, slipping an additional offering to Suzuki, who could discreetly add it to the household store.
Cho-Cho welcomed his visits; he was a link with her father, with life as it had once been, and with Pinkerton. He trod warily, conscious of his privileged status, careful never to overstep the mark. He was behaving, he hoped, in a properly Japanese way. At least on the surface. But then, to the Japanese, he reminded himself, the surface was the reality. He felt reassured.
One day, as he was complimenting Cho-Cho on the precocious intelligence of her child, she committed the social indiscretion of cutting in, her voice barely above a whisper; attempting English, as she often did with him, for practice.
‘Sharpless-san, where is my husband?’
Where was Pinkerton? He had no idea, but he attempted a vague explanation of the difficulties of maritime life. The lieutenant could be anywhere.
‘Ah. So I will wait.’
Sharpless learned to be devious. Back in town, he quietly arranged to extend again the lease of the house, telling the landlord that the money had been sent from America.