Poached Egg on Toast (28 page)

Tosh withdrew his hand, but his face was expressionless. The man from Marseilles stared out the window. Judith gave up the impulse to explain. She did not look pregnant, but was—five months—and she felt it in the September heat.

“My wilting gravid wife,” Tosh had said, the night before.

“Don’t talk to me about being gravid,” Judith said. “I have to survive these temperatures. I’m not leaving this air-conditioned room, not if I’m dragged. Not even for dinner.”

“You’ll starve our child.”

“Too bad.”

But Tosh had phoned room service. And the unnameable efficiency they’d come to expect with both irritation and delight had produced a four-course meal, whisked into the room. The waiter tucked linen napkins into the necks of their
yukata
, dressing gowns supplied by the hotel. Judith removed her napkin as soon as he left, and placed it on her lap. She was trying her best to deal with the constant supervision, the scrutiny.
Gaijin
. She was the foreigner.
Hakujin
, white face. Nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. For being the only one.

Their guide returned to the bus, leading thirty-one bedraggled men and women. Hours earlier, they’d been strangers to one another. Now, they were pitched together for a three-day tour by luxury coach. Citizens of nine countries—Judith and Tosh were the only Canadians—they were counted by Teruko each time they placed a foot on the steps of the bus. Teruko now fired a disapproving look towards the back. Judith, Tosh and the man from Marseilles had refused to visit a national treasure,
her
national treasure.

“I can’t do this,” Judith said, half-aloud, but only to Tosh. “I’m conserving my strength for Hiroshima this afternoon. I want to see the Peace Park, the museum. My clothes are sticking to my skin. I don’t want my backache to get worse.”

“Why are you feeling guilty?” said Tosh. “If you’re falling down from heatstroke, what’s the point?”

Judith settled into the corner of the bus. She closed her eyes and imagined their child. She did her best to pretend that this was not a land of extreme heat, not a land of ocean trenches, active volcanoes, ruthless, broiling sun. The man from Marseilles leaned sideways across Tosh, tapped her on the arm, produced a bottle of Vichy from his shoulder bag, and a paper cup. He patted his own tummy. Maybe he understood, after all.

Judith had not considered this trip a pilgrimage until it had become one. A pilgrimage for Tosh,
Sansei
, third-generation Canadian who had never been to Japan. For his mother, who died before her thirty-eighth birthday in a British Columbia internment camp. For his father, who, decades after the end of the war, had purchased a small orchard and owned, once again, a tiny piece of land. Especially for him, as he was the only real link Tosh had to his ancestral past.

His father. Who, during their summer visits to the Okanagan, knew no greater pleasure than to sit across from them at the kitchen table after a day’s work, and instruct them in the history of his forebears. As he spoke, the muscles flexed and tightened in his arms and throat. Father, who’d been sent to Japan on a small boat with other
Nisei
male children of his generation for education in the pre-war years. Who, responding to some internal signal, rose abruptly from the table, clapped his hands to wake the gods, and offered a bowl heaped with cherries, or a fat, ripe peach from his youngest tree, and set it high on the altar shelf.

It was a pilgrimage, too, for
Nisei
and other
Sansei
whom Judith and Tosh were now meeting throughout Japan. They trickled into the mainflow from San Francisco, Honolulu, Kamloops, Saskatoon. Each had crossed the 180th meridian, losing a day in mid-air. In some unplanned way, for everyone, the trip had become a search, an attempt to make sense of an ancient culture, fragments and rites of which they half knew and which they were passing on to their children, or their children’s children, with some loosely rooted feeling that they were right in doing so.

For Tosh, there might not have been a trip at all. Three weeks before departure, he’d received a letter from Ottawa telling him that he would have to change his name legally before a passport could be issued. The name on his birth certificate did not match the name on his application. Did the missionaries, said Judith, forget to tell the Prime Minister? That, in the internment camps high above the Fraser, they’d renamed all the little Japanese children whom the Prime Minister had himself interned?

Decades later, the habit was hard to shake. Tosh dropped his English name, the one bestowed upon him in the camps. He printed
Toshio
, the name which had been declared unpronounceable by the missionaries, and returned the application. The passport arrived two days before he and Judith flew to Japan.

And what of pilgrimage by association? Judith felt both lightly connected and not connected at all. It was the way she thought of the five islands, shakily attached to the Earth’s core. She was insider and outsider, mostly out. Away from Tokyo, sometimes three or four days at a time, the only Caucasian face she saw was her own, staring back from hotel mirrors. Tosh, on the other hand, and for the first time in his life, was slipping into physical harmony with his outer world. Some shadow of himself left her side again and again, as he mingled with clerks, travellers, pedestrians. Her husband, the stranger. Judith watched the unmistakable human exchange, from which she was excluded, take place in streets, in lineups and crowds, in subway cars. Tosh was expanding, while she was shrinking—despite the newly forming child inside her.

She was also aware of a hint of meaning, a cause. But what cause? It was like being on the edge of a society that was immersed in anonymity. Manners were held in place by invisible controls as fragile as the breadth of a hair. Controls that could momentarily give rise to panic. The absence of chaos was what made Judith aware of a subterranean rumbling, a deep muttering beneath the surface.

Before Honshu, before joining the tour that would this afternoon arrive in Hiroshima, Judith and Tosh had travelled on their own up the Inland Sea, staying at various places on the Island of Kyushu. They’d stopped over in a village of cultivated hills and raw coastline. Climbed to the top of a hill, where they’d been greeted by a Shinto priest on the open veranda of his outer shrine. A weathered
torii
gate, brilliant in lacquered vermilion, reared itself in brush strokes against the sky.

The smiling priest was directing visitors to put coins into a mechanical dispenser. He intercepted and distributed the folded papers as they fell out of the slot. Judith deposited a coin while Tosh went off to see the gardens. The priest assumed that she did not speak Japanese, and began to read aloud, translating into English.

The smile fell from his face as if he had slipped behind a mask. He stared at Judith and, once again, she became aware of a subterranean rumble of panic. The priest shrugged.

“I do not understand. This is unlucky fortune. There will be a difficult labour.”

The priest could not be blamed, after all. How could he know about the floating cells curled inside the womb? Judith accepted the folded paper. The priest turned his attention to the young man who was next in line, awaiting translation.

She found Tosh beside a stream in a remote part of the garden. A cupped bamboo pipe clicked as it filled and tipped, filled and tipped. Did Tosh leave her side this often when they were at home, or was it only in Japan that she was noticing?

“That’s only the first part of the ritual,” Tosh said, when she blurted out the priest’s translation.

“What do you mean?”

“You have to tie the paper to a branch. To close the circle, to complete the fortune. A branch of a
sakaki
tree.” He was concerned and amused at the same time.

“So?”

“Interrupt the rite.”

“Don’t tie the fortune.”

“Something like that.”

“Cross-fertilization, confusion.” Judith had a sudden image of purging herself of the unlucky Shinto paper at a Buddhist temple. She would tie it to a Buddhist tree.

On the way down the path she walked grimly past the
sakaki
tree, where paper hopes and knotted dreams fluttered in the hot breeze.

During the next few days, she had carried her own folded paper as if it were a living object at the bottom of her purse. A threat of gloom, a curse, a piece of paper two inches long weighing her down.

Tosh teased her at the hotel. “Don’t be so serious. The person next in line might just as easily have been given it. It might have been a man. It probably means something like
labour diligently
, something as mundane as that.”

“A man didn’t get it. I did. I’m the one who’s pregnant.”

“Why don’t you take it down to the desk and ask for a second translation? Maybe the priest used an indefinite article by mistake.” Tosh spoke Japanese, but could not read the written language.

“No,” Judith said. “No and no. I’m the one who looked into the priest’s face. I’m the one who has to thwart fate.”

Now, they were part of a group. And, since six o’clock in the morning, they’d been led by a fraudulently cheery Teruko, to three of the four temples she wanted them to see before the bus continued on to Hiroshima. At the fourth, while the others milled about the low temple platform, removing shoes, sliding their feet into paper slippers, Judith left the bus and hurried around to the rear of the building. The path was lined with rugged stone lanterns, which hugged the ground as if they’d blundered up through the earth. Cicadas shrilled against the bark of trees, but could not be seen. She pulled the twisted paper from her bag and looked around to ensure that she was unobserved. She tied the fortune to the twig of a thorn bush, and fled. Her body was light. Free. Teruko’s face closed when she saw Judith join the group, late. Judith smiled sweetly.

Teruko was talking about masks. She had herded the group back onto the bus and now held a microphone in her hand. She was excessively thin, and wore a navy blue suit that seemed to be a company uniform. Her glistening black hair was pinned at the back of her head, but it wobbled as she gave what was a formal explanation. Perhaps she’d memorized the words, Judith thought.

“There are many kinds of masks. They have fixed faces; these are guardians of the temple. Dogs, devils, animals, even a manbeast. Evil in concrete form is able to repel evil itself. But masks,” she added, “are also used for gentler purpose. A mask can still the spirit inside. The blank face reveals only what it chooses to reveal.” She was not looking at Judith. Deliberately, Judith thought. “When the mask is used in art,” she went on, “it is placed between the eye of the beholder and the spirit of the object.”

The mask might represent multiple faces, Judith thought, but if it’s left to the beholder to supply meaning, then meaning will never stop shifting. Why were the Japanese so preoccupied with masks in the first place? Why the preoccupation, through centuries of art, when the living face was so accomplished at drawing every expression into one? Had she not lived with Tosh for many years? For one disconcerting moment, she believed that her own face revealed everything.

Teruko’s expression shifted to a place between forced politeness and disdain. Teruko had two and a half days left to lead her tourists from one landmark to another—
gaijin
, foreigners, every one.

When she stepped off the air-conditioned bus into Hiroshima heat, Judith recoiled as if flames had waved her back. The driver had parked at the edge of the Peace Park, beside three other motorcoaches. The group formed a huddle on the cement, trying to stay in the shade beside the bus. Teruko raised her hand and commanded silence. She announced that tourists from all over the world visited the site every year, that the stone chest beneath the sheltering curve of the cenotaph held the names of the victims, now close to two hundred thousand. She told them abruptly that they should be back at this spot by five o’clock. Departure would not be delayed for latecomers. Pamphlets in many languages were available. The bus driver handed Teruko a Coke, and the two, without a backward glance, walked off towards a staff building outside the entrance to the park.

At first, no one in the group made a move. There seemed to be a collective reluctance to go forward, to see what had to be seen. The foreigners were on their own. Judith opened a bright red umbrella she had borrowed from a cache at the front of the bus. Earlier in the day, Teruko laughed outright when Judith used one of these in the sun. Indeed, when Judith now opened it to protect herself from the heat, three young Japanese women standing near the fountain burst into giggles. Judith tried not to explain their behaviour to herself; she knew she’d get it wrong. Laughter could be met with humour. Stares could be endured. Paranoia could be pushed down, out of reach.

But the old feeling was revived. The feeling that always depended upon where she and Tosh happened to be. At home, she’d forgotten. Or perhaps it hadn’t mattered in the last place they’d lived. One afternoon in Toronto, she read from the window of the subway,
Death to mixed races
, but she told herself it didn’t apply to them. How could anything so murderous make sense? There and here, when she and Tosh were together, they thought about it only if the rules, imposed from without, forced their participation.
Did you notice that time? Yes, I wondered if you did, too
.

From the guidebook, she now read the awkward, translated English. The fountain is a monument dedicated to those who so craved the water. The mother and child statue in desperation fleeing from the ravage.

The fountain had been erected in front of the museum, a long, glass building. The group had quickly dispersed. Perhaps the others were wandering the grounds or the streets, looking for air-conditioned tea-houses. Teruko had made it clear that the bus door would not be open again until five. Judith and Tosh began to climb the museum stairs.

The first room, though air-conditioned, contained rank, dead air. Two Japanese couples were moving off behind a partition. In the next room, displays were presented in realistic detail: twisted spoons, sections of bridges, chunks of concrete, mutilated buttons, fragments of clothing, flattened pots and pans, melted steel, indistinguishable char. Random objects that happened to be at or near the hypocentre that sixth day in August when citizens of wartime Hiroshima were going about the ordinary business of trying to stay alive.