Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [95]
Joey took the book in his hands, while Mr Murakami talked of calligraphic quality, strength of line – ‘perhaps due to the Japanese way of drawing from the elbow, not the wrist, as is the case in Western art.’
The memory of a scene . . . the feeling between waking and dreaming . . .
Somewhere a wheel is turned and with infinite slowness he is flayed, the flesh gradually stripped from his body leaving him peeled of his American sense of self. But what will take its place?
41
As summer slipped away the sky took on a dirty yellow tinge, the sickly trees around the perimeter lost their foliage and withered leaves dropped slowly, like stained snowflakes, lying in drifts on the hard ground. In the camp a division could be seen as clear-cut as the red, white and blue layered angel-food cake served up on the Fourth of July. The split was generational: the children had classes and team games. The young men clustered, buzzing like wasps, radiating resentment. The older internees watched and waited, with the patience a lifetime of experience had taught them.
As the temperature dipped, the barracks simmered. Labour disputes, hostility, long-drawn-out pain of one sort and another merged and flared into riots. There was an accidental shooting: a man shot allegedly trying to escape. The soldier was punished: for ‘misuse of official property’ – a bullet – and fined one dollar.
For Joey, increasingly sunk in the past, when the present intruded as it did now, it collided bruisingly with a lost world described by those who were still able to revive its essence. Real life jolted him out of the seductive tranquillity of contemplation where he was living a dream; guided by old hands his telescope moved across the landscape of the past to show him ancient courts and emperors, warriors, ceremonies, the forming and refining of a closed realm.
And there was the more recent past, Perry’s five black-hulled American frigates that steamed into Edo harbour in 1853, and what followed, as one century gave way to the next. Within the cramped horizon of the camp he explored unknown worlds, absorbed the small tragedies and triumphs of ordinary people; their hopes and disillusion.
He moved through the barracks, passed from one bleak room to the next, sitting cross-legged, listening to these quiet people, some fluent, others faltering, as their voices drew him into their past.
. . . ‘My grandmother was a picture-bride . . . she saw my father first time on Ellis Island. Before that, just photos; he proposed by letter. She was wearing a hat with flowers. She pulled out a flower and gave it him . . .’
. . . ‘My grandfather came from Osaka to Oregon. A farmer. He grew cabbage and squash. Never a day off in forty years . . .’
. . . ‘My father went to college. He studied science, mathematics. Masters, Ph.D . . . . My mother gave thanks he died before Pearl Harbor.’
. . . ‘My family has a shop – had a shop – we sold shoes. American shoes are too big for Japanese feet, we imported small sizes . . .’
. . . ‘We have fishing boat . . . No time to sell when internment came; we tie up boat in harbour . . .’
. . . ‘Before she came to America, my mother arranged the flowers every week in the Baptist church in Nagasaki—’
Nagasaki? Would she have known a girl called Cho-Cho who married an American sailor?
But the flower-arranger, Mrs Shioya’s mother, was part of a vanished past where everyone was long dead. Unlike Cho-Cho who lived on, unreachable. Unless she, too, was now a statistic.
42
Nancy had found a college in Massachusetts that would accept Joey; where he could continue his studies. She wrote to give him the news, ending with a happy flourish: ‘So as of now, you’re out of there!!’
Afterwards she realised she should have picked up from his letters the way he was thinking. His reply came as a shock.
‘Dear Nancy, it’s good