The Patriot (30 page)

Well, he had learned not to answer Bunji. It was no use. Besides, he did not believe what he said. Men like his own banker father owned China and they hated the communists. And had not the Japanese papers reported again and again the rout of Chinese communists by their own government? Bunji was growing middle-aged with prejudices. He dismissed such things from his mind and entered his office as usual. He had hoped, at the new year, for an advancement, at least in his salary, but there had been none. Mr. Muraki explained at the annual new year’s feast for his employees that there could be no increase in salary this year because of an unexpected and heavy rise in taxes, in order to strengthen the Emperor’s army defenses by sea and land. He had only to say “The Emperor,” and all was accepted—that is, by everyone except I-wan. He felt no loyalty to this sacred emperor, and it was not in him any more to worship anything.

He sighed a little as he sat down. When the second child came, Tama would have to twist her wits to make the money stretch over him, too. His own father had not sent him any money for a long time, and he did not like to ask unless he were in need. Why, he wondered, did the Emperor want more defenses now that Japan definitely possessed Manchuria? The military party, probably, growing in power—but he cared nothing for Japanese politics, or indeed any politics since the League of Nations had let Japan do as she liked. Politics he had put behind him as a waste even to think about.

He had worked nearly the morning through on classifying the inventory of goods held still unsold, when the maidservant who had come running in to call him to Jiro’s birth now appeared, serene and demure, having stopped to brush her hair and put on a fresh kimono and clean white cotton socks.

“Well, what is it?” he said, looking up at her, surprised.

“Honorable, I am to tell you Ganjiro’s come.”

“What do you say?” He leaped up and seized his hat.

“He is here, very fat and so healthy,” she beamed on him. It was lucky to be the bearer of such good news. The two clerks were bowing and hissing softly through their teeth with pleasure.

“Just before the Festival of Sons!” the maid said, laughing.

He went off at once, stopping only to put his head in at Bunji’s door and say, “My second son is come and I am going home.” He took pride in saying it coolly as though every day he had a son. “What?” Bunji roared. But he went on, only nodding to affirm it.

He did not let himself hurry along the street, and he listened to the maid’s chatter as she clacked along behind him. “It was as sudden as today’s sun and rain. One moment Oku-san was as well as you are, sir. The next, she said, ‘I feel changed—it’s beginning.’ I ran for the midwife, and soon as she came the child arrived, sound and so handsome. And Oku-san said, ‘If this is all the trouble of having a son, I can do it any time.’” She laughed heartily at her mistress and was very proud of her.

And indeed there was nothing unusual in the house. The smell of the food which Tama had been cooking before she lay down was fragrant, and he was hungry when he smelled it.

“I’ll have your dinner when you want it, sir,” the servant said, and knelt to take off his shoes.

“In half an hour,” he replied.

Behind screens he found Tama on her bed holding Ganjiro in her arms and Jiro, now able to run, much astonished beside her. I-wan could not believe she had done with the birth. She was not even pale. She lay on the soft mattress spread on the mats and looked up at him mischievously as though it had all been a trick. In a corner of the darkened enclosure the midwife was hastily putting away something.

“Tama!” he whispered.

“Here we all are,” she answered. “It is a boy, as I said.”

“So!” he answered. He scarcely knew what to say. Jiro’s birth had been a tremendous event. But this boy had come tranquilly into the world. At this rate, he thought, in a few years the house would be full.

“I wanted it all over before the Festival of Sons,” Tama said proudly.

“So you arranged it,” he replied.

And she laughed.

“Go on and have your dinner—it is carp, too, today. That’s another lucky omen.”

“Shall I not stay home this afternoon?” he inquired.

“What would I do with you?” she asked. “I shall sleep and Jiro will play in the garden with the maid. That is all.”

So he had eaten his excellent dinner and gone back to work. Tama was one of those fortunate women, he thought, who breathe out health with every act. Nothing was too hard for her to do. And with all else she found time, too, to be free of everything when he came home. Long ago he had ceased to wonder at anything she knew. He expected her to know everything. He had come to take for granted that his house was always neat and the flowers fresh every day, and the food delicately prepared and Jiro’s face always clean and happy. Whatever came, he could never be sorry he had married Tama. If sometimes he felt himself yearning beyond her for some sort of spiritual stir which had nothing to do with her, he put his discontent away. He wanted nothing to do with dreams if Tama were the reality.

On the Festival of Sons they went nowhere, since Tama’s days of uncleanness after birth were not yet over. Ganjiro was less than a month old. But she made great preparation for the day. Over the house that morning he had helped her to raise the two paper carps, which were the symbol of the day, a big black and white one with gold eyes for Jiro and a small red one for Ganjiro.

It was a fair day on the fifth day of the fifth month of the sun year, and Jiro was shouting as the wind blew the carp. There was an extraordinary wind blowing in from the sea that day. Tama had taken Jiro up in her arms, and then I-wan took him, saying, “He is too heavy for you yet, Tama.”

“Hold him up, then, so he can see,” she had replied. They had stood looking at the carp, the wind tearing at their garments.

“A home with sons,” Tama said proudly.

He did not answer her. It occurred to him at this moment that his sons were growing up with festivals he had never known as a child. Tama loved festivals and made the most of every one. He remembered his own joy over the new year and over the Dragon Festival and the Festival of Spring—all days Jiro and the little one would never know. After all it was the woman who shaped the life of the house.

“So, Jiro,” Tama was saying to the child, “remember, the carp means boy—because it swims upstream against the current, in the cold mountain streams.”

It was at that moment he saw, or imagined he saw the pole from which the carp flew, sway. At the same instant the wind, which had all morning been growing higher, fell utterly quiet. He and Tama with one movement looked out to sea. It looked strange and dark and swollen. There was a low deep roar, whether from the sea or from inside the earth they could not tell.

“Tama!” he cried, frightened.

“Earthquake,” she said. Her voice was small and quiet and her face went white.

He had learned to take tremors of the earth as nothing, an earthquake as a matter of constant possibility, and yet he had never seen a great one. Sometimes in the night he and Tama had awakened to feel a shudder beneath their mattress and dust falling on their faces from the ceiling, and to hear the crack of beams and wood. Tama always got up and dressed and waited in watchful silence. He knew that all over the city in every house people waited like that, helpless and yet prepared. But each time the earth had subsided. Today, though, there had been this fierce wind.

Now she ran toward the house, but the maid was already running out with Ganjiro in her arms. From the house behind her came sudden creaks and then loud cracks. There was no doubt that the pole bearing the carp was now swaying with something that was not wind.

The maid, without a word, thrust the baby into his arms also and ran back into the house. Tama came out with the drawers and boxes into which their clothing was folded, and in a moment the maidservant followed, her arms full.

“Where shall I put these children?” I-wan gasped. “I must help.”

“Please—stay with them,” Tama replied, quietly.

He wondered at these two women, they were both so quiet. It was as though they had rehearsed many times the thing which they now did. Back and forth they went until in a very few minutes in the open space about them were all their chief possessions. There were not many. Their most precious things, the best of their scrolls, some fine pottery Mr. Muraki had given them, jewelry that I-wan had given Tama when they were married, the silks his mother had sent, she had put into a warehouse in the city, built for safety in earthquakes.

“Where shall we go?” he asked her when at last she stood beside him and reached for the baby.

“Where can we go?” she asked simply. “There is no escape when the earth heaves.”

They stood, waiting, their faces to the sea. He held Jiro hard. But Jiro was not crying. He, too, was looking at the swollen ocean. And then Tama gave one moan of horror and put her hand to her mouth. The sea was gathering near the horizon into one great wave, no, not so much a wave, as a tide, a great bank of water, stretching across the surface of the ocean. There was no crest upon the wave. It was simply there, immense and dark, lifting against the sky.

“It can’t reach us,” Tama whispered.

“It will cover the lower city,” he answered, and felt his gorge rise in him to make him sick. But he could not turn his head away. On it came, seeming motionless and as though it were simply swelling more huge. But in reality it was rolling toward the shore at greatest speed, gathering the waters with it as it came. Far below them they could see people running out of their houses and climbing the hills everywhere—away from the sea.

“It always comes quickly,” Tama said.

He had never seen her like this—so still. He did not know whether or not she was afraid. He wanted to run, to escape somehow, but she held him there.

Then the wave struck. There was still no crest until the instant when it crashed with such a roar as shook the whole island. Then it broke and surged in a mass of foam. Houses and streets disappeared. The whole sea seemed to have rushed in.

“This may sweep as far as my father’s house,” Tama said in a low voice.

They watched. And more horrible than the onward rush was this next thing, this outward backward moving of the same tide, which seemed to suck out to sea in its enormous flood houses, people, trees, everything it could reach. The whole island indeed seemed to be moving out to sea.

I-wan groaned and buried his face in Jiro’s shoulder. And at that instant the earth shook under his feet. He heard rocks crashing down the hillside and he put out his arm for Tama. Even at this moment her body was firm and strong.

“Our rock will not move,” she said. “That is only loose rock. And there are the fields above us—not rocks.”

It was true. Above them lay a valley running almost to the top of the mountain and because a small stream ran through it, it had been terraced for rice fields on both sides.

He felt once more the sickening unsteadiness of the earth swaying beneath him.

“The wave is coming again,” Tama said, “but it will not be so great.”

He heard it strike, this time a lesser roar, but he did not look up. Jiro clung to him, his arms about his father’s head. Still he did not cry, and the small child was sleeping. I-wan remembered how Bunji had spoken of Japanese sleep, how nothing waked them, used as they were to noise and movement in babyhood, upon their mothers’ backs.

There was a soft slithering sound, a loud cracking of falling wood, and the sound of tearing paper. He looked up. With surprisingly little noise and less dust the house had fallen into a heap.

But before he had time to cry his dismay, Tama said, “There, it is over. And we are alive.”

She turned her back on the ruined house. Only then did she sit down. The sea, full of wreckage, was subsiding, and now the wind was beginning once more. He felt his legs begin to tremble.

“I have seen much worse earthquakes,” Tama said. She wiped her face with her sleeve and then uncovered her bosom and began to feed her child. He sat down on the box beside her and let the maid take Jiro from him. Now that it was over sweat was pouring down his whole body. He could feel himself wet under his clothes.

“It is worse than anything I have ever seen,” he said.

“Oh, there are far worse,” she repeated.

He looked at her. She was sitting there as calmly as though the house which she loved were not in a heap behind her.

“Now what shall we do?” he asked, after a moment.

“Rest a while—and then see if my father’s house is harmed,” she said.

A man in a short blue coat came climbing up the hill and appeared among a clump of bamboos. It was a ricksha puller from her father’s house. He bowed before them.

“I have been sent,” he said, “to see how you are.”

“My father and mother?” Tama asked.

“All is safe,” he replied. “The gate house is fallen and part of the kitchen, and the garden we do not know, but the main part of the house is safe and no one was even hurt except the young mistress who was in the kitchen and was held by a beam over her thigh. But she is now resting and in less pain. The ceremonial teahouse is not touched.”

“Ah, how fortunate we are!” Tama cried.

They rose and stood for a moment and I-wan could not but turn and look at what a little while ago had been his home. Tama’s eyes followed his.

“We can easily build it again,” she said.

“Not here,” he said, not knowing why, except it seemed not safe ever to build his home here again. But Tama insisted.

“Yes, here. The sea reached for us and could not get us. It is a good place to build again.”

He was too shaken to argue it with her and he followed her, carrying Jiro, down the hill by the way the man led because the road was gone. And behind them came the maid, her arms full of whatever she thought precious enough to be taken. She had said nothing from first to last.

He never forgot that day. The safety of the Muraki house, the comfort of a roof standing over their heads and of food hot and ready to be eaten, the quiet and the kindness—these were miracle enough. But unforgettable above all was the miracle of silence—Mr. Muraki’s silence as he walked about his ruined garden where the streams had raced over broken walls and had swept over tended mossy slopes and torn them away and uprooted the dwarf trees as priceless as any curio, Bunji’s silence over his young wife’s broken thigh, Setsu’s silence in her own pain—I-wan was never to know Setsu well, but her eyes, fine eyes in a plain face, he never forgot—the silence of the people on the streets whose houses and relatives had been swept out to sea, the silence of the little clerk in his office, solitary now that his brother was dead—this silence he never forgot.