‘Perhaps the charcoal man will never come back from the war,’ said Vera, as they trudged back down the hill.
‘That is terrible to say,’ said Keiko.
The house was high up on the other side of the town, near the forest. Black dust was on everything, as if the owner had slept with charcoal and eaten with charcoal and lived with charcoal piled around him. Keiko began to clean. Vera sulked, until she could not stand herself any more, and then she got up and helped to wash the floor. The good thing, Keiko said, was that the owner had left a small pile of charcoal behind the house, and they could use it to keep warm. When that ran out they would go up into the forest to collect firewood.
With the money from her brother’s wife, Keiko bought a bicycle. They bought eggs and fish and a large bag of rice. It would last a few weeks, Keiko said.
‘I begged before, from Miss Hinchcliffe. I not beg again,’ said Keiko. ‘I am ama diver and I will find work.’
She went to the inspectors’ office and put her name on the list. But there would be no diving until May. In winter her fellow ama worked for Mikimoto cleaning oysters at the pearl farm. But even Mikimoto had fewer jobs now than before. All over the world the Depression had cut into the pearl business. Keiko spoke to her friends in the street. She heard that some ama had to go dekasegi, away from home. Some worked as farm labourers. There were no machines for this work, only women with long knives in the fields. Some went to Yokohama or even Tokyo, to do cleaning work. But in those strange places, there would be fewer jobs as well, Keiko reasoned. She was determined to remain in Toba. The Emperor’s lieutenants, she said, would not change the sea.
Vera stayed inside, huddled on the futon. It was her job to keep the fire going in the hearth. Every hour she got up and raked the coals, and put on more charcoal, and when the charcoal was gone she put on some of the twisted roots she and Keiko found in the forest. She could not believe this was happening to her. It was as if she had descended into a fairy tale.
‘Soon spring comes,’ said Keiko. ‘It is better.’
One day when Keiko was out, a man came to the door. Vera was afraid to answer. He tapped gently, and then he looked in through the window. Finally, Vera answered but she could not understand what he was saying. That evening, when Keiko was home, he came again. He was a friend with a message. A woman had slipped on the bamboo raft in Ago Bay where the ama worked cleaning the oyster shells. She had fallen into the icy water and her foot had been caught between the poles. She had broken her ankle.
Keiko met the others to take the ferry to work the next morning.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Keiko said to Vera when she left the house. ‘I will come back.’
Vera did not feel afraid. She felt nothing, other than cold. She lay on the floor, under the layers of cotton cloths that were meant to keep her warm, and hated Japan. She was afraid to go outside because she looked different and people stared. No one spoke to her. If they had, she would not have understood. Finally, in the afternoon, hunger forced her out. In town, one man looked her in the eye. He wore a heavy sack of tools on his back, and he limped. He had a long, grey, thin beard. When he smiled at Vera she could see that most of his teeth were gone, and she was frightened of him. She had no strength; climbing the steep streets with a bucket of potatoes nearly made her faint. Once a man came out of a shop waving a bamboo stick and shouted at her.
‘Why?’ she asked Keiko later.
‘Only because you are strange to him.’
She felt just as strange to herself. She wondered if she were still the same girl she had been. There was one tiny pane of mirror in the house, and it hung on the wall by the door in a small shrine. Vera looked into it over and over. What she saw was a ghost with lifeless, nearly white hair and a red nose that ran with the cold.
She thought of the pictures she’d pored over on Homer Street, and tried to find even one thing that looked like the Japan she had fallen in love with. There was wind, and rain, and snow, but the people were braced against it; they were not sensuous or graceful. There was no promise of cherry blossoms or teahouses around the bend in the stream, or after the shower had passed. Something frigid and hard had found its way into this tropical place. The snow was no genteel flurry of white to walk through in sandals. It beleaguered the people’s walking, and weighted their every gesture. Like great white waves, it was water turned enemy, lying stiffly at their feet, in the frozen froth at the sea’s edge, or crouching on the roofs and hills as if to kill.
When Keiko came home with her wages they went to the shops and bought coffee beans. Their biggest expenditure was for a hand grinder. Vera put the beans in the small wooden drawer and turned the handle, while the smell of coffee beans came out. It was the one thing that made her happy, because it reminded her of the café in the flatiron building on Homer Street. Keiko used the big iron pot that the charcoal man had left, to make broth and noodles.
One night when the sky was white with a freezing fog, Vera woke from her sleep on the floor mat to the sound of whistle blasts in the street. The blasts were shrill, and insistent. Footsteps pounded past the door. Keiko told Vera not to get up, but she herself stood by the window in the darkness, peering out. She could see down the hill to the rooftops of the main streets.
‘They’re chasing that man who everyone says is a Red,’ she said.
‘What is a Red?’
‘A Communist.’ Keiko sucked in her breath. ‘I can see him. He is on the roof next door.’
The shouting and footsteps were right outside their house. Vera cowered under her blanket. ‘Come inside, away from the window,’ she hissed at Keiko.
But Keiko stood where she was.
‘They are men in black. They have seen him. Now they’re running over the roof. I fear they will catch him.’
There was a brief exchange of shouts, and then the shots of a gun.
‘Did they kill him?’
‘No. They take him away.’
‘What did he do?’ Vera asked.
Keiko said something in Japanese.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I cannot explain.’
‘Please.’
‘He has been taken for what is called “Dangerous Thoughts”. There is a law against them. He will be in prison. Maybe if very many people know what he has said, the newspapers will publish that he has changed his mind,’ Keiko said, and climbed silently into bed.
Vera lay awake pondering the idea of thoughts that were dangerous. Could the police here read people’s thoughts?
‘I think we should go home again,’ said Vera in the morning.
She knew it would not be easy. ‘Maybe Miss Hinchcliffe will send us the money. Maybe my father–’
‘Be patient,’ said Keiko. ‘In a few months it will be spring.’ She got a calendar and hung it on the wall. She explained the way the Japanese counted the days: eighty-seven days after February 4th, which they call risshun, a change would come. On the eighty-eighth day, which would be the beginning of May, the fishing season would begin and they would sail for the summer island. They had always done this and would do it again.
Vera counted the days. Spring came, and the trees were in blossom, and there was warmth in the air