The Pearl Diver (14 page)

She smiles and her hands get moving again.

“I would be glad to try to help you. I’m just shocked that anyone would ask me to do such a thing.”

“It’s Mr. Munakani.”

“The one with leprosy?”

Miss Min, stunned, looks back at her. And they look at each other for quite a while before they both start laughing. They laugh and laugh, so loudly that others passing by can hear. She takes her hands from Miss Min’s back to wipe away the tears, using her sleeves to avoid the ointment on her hands. Then, after a calm in the laughing, they both start up again, and more tears run down Miss Fuji’s cheeks. This keeps up until she finally sees Miss Min through a watery blur, and she realizes that there are no tears in Miss Min’s eyes, or on her cheeks, or on the futon.

Where do all those tears go? she asks herself.

“I would be glad to help you, Miss Min,” she says once again, removing the towel from her back and helping her on with her cotton robe, which she sleeps in.

“Thank you, Miss Fuji.”

“It’s okay.”

“No. Thank you for the laughter.”

“You, too, Miss Min. Good night.”

“Good night, Miss Fuji.”

She closes the door, arrives at her building, feeling alone. When did the tears of laughter turn to such a river of sadness? She knows that tonight will be one of little sleep.

The following week, she goes to see Mr. Munakani. Miss Min and Mr. Munakani have known each other for quite a while. He is a former naval officer and has an interest in Korea, often talking to Miss Min and a few other of the Koreans about their country. She often feels a sadness when around Mr. Munakani because he still has enough of himself left from before the disease for her to see what he once was. Still hints of broad shoulders, strong hands, a tough, square face, large eyes. With some of the patients, it takes some imagination for her to re-create them, and some she can’t do at all, but with Mr. Munakani, it is easy.

She feels uncomfortable with this position of go-between, not sure about how to bring up the subject. The past few nights, she has gone over and over possible ways of approaching it:

Miss Min would like to marry you.

What do you think about marrying Miss Min?

I know someone who would like to marry you.

All seemed too direct, childish. She wanted to go and ask someone for advice but thought this would be wrong. She knows nothing of this task of go-between, nothing of the formalities.

They sit drinking barley tea, sharing small talk and rice crackers. Then it is out there.

“Miss Min would like to marry you, Mr. Munakani.”

It shocks and relieves her at the same time. The longer Mr. Munakani doesn’t say a word, the more difficult, awkward it is. She wonders what she did wrong. Was there something she skipped?

“I can’t, Miss Fuji. I can’t ever allow myself to marry.”

“She’s a wonderful person.”

“That she is. But it’s not Miss Min I object to. It’s not that at all.”

She sits there, not sure where to go next, so she allows Mr. Munakani to speak when he is ready. She wishes she had more barley tea to drink.

“It is the rules of this place that stand in the way.”

“Rules? You are allowed to marry, Mr. Munakani.”

“Yes, I know. But if I get married, I must agree to sterilization. And that, Miss Fuji, I can’t do. Not even for Miss Min, who, as you say, is a wonderful woman.
They may take everything else from me, but this is one thing, at least for now, that I have control over.”

She thinks of how she will tell Miss Min. But what is there to say?

“At the clinic I’ve heard the doctors tell patients that in a couple of years after the sterilization, they can be desterilized.”

“You believe too much of what they say, Miss Fuji.”

She holds the teacup in her hand, stares into its emptiness, a few granules of brown tea at the bottom.

“Who has ever heard of such a place? A place without the playing and laughter of children.”

She says nothing, again waits for him to continue if he wants.

ARTIFACT Number 1059
A medical release form

“Of course you can leave, Miss Fuji,” Administrator Kaneko says.

She stands there before his desk, stunned at the words. Even more startling to her than the fact that she is even standing there. Something she went and did, no real plan, just walked right in and asked to speak to him. Is it possible that if she had asked five, ten years ago that the answer would have been the same? She wasn’t prepared in any way for these words, so matter-of-fact. He digs through a filing cabinet and pulls out a thin yellow folder, tosses it on the desk while shutting the cabinet drawer with his other hand. He opens a folder, pulls out a paper, turns it so she can read it.

“We have patients go over to Honshu almost every day. However, in order for release, permanent release, Miss Fuji, there are a couple of rules that must be followed. First, you must be free of the disease for twelve months. So, of course, that means the earliest you could get your release, if your test proves you are free of the disease, would be around this time next year. Secondly, you must have a job secured before you are given your release.”

“A job?”

“Yes. We can’t have you thrown out there without a way to support yourself. We don’t want you to be dependent on others, troublesome.”

“How can I get a job?”

“Now, I didn’t say it was easy to do this. There are many other hurdles to overcome, Miss Fuji.
You have to live near a sanatorium so that you can get your medicine each day.”

“Can I go back to my diving?”

“Sure, if you return each day and get your medicine.”

She thinks of the rowboat that brought her here. Impossible to return each day.

“Can’t I be given a month of doses at a time? Or go to a clinic?”

“We can’t do that. The laws don’t allow the distribution of the medicine other than single doses. Thus far, there have been no medical establishments set up to distribute medicine in the communities.”

She pulls her eyes away from the paper sitting on the desk in front of her. The walls are blank except for a couple of medical certificates. She gives Administrator Kaneko a quick bow and turns to leave.

“But Miss Fuji, don’t you want to take one of these release forms with you?”

“No thank you. I’ll come back and get one at a later date.”

Again, she gives a quick bow before opening the door and leaving the room.

ARTIFACT Number 1012
From the bookshelves at Nagashima

When you are lonely and have nothing to do,
Let this song be your friend,
In place of I who hardly come to you.

—Empress Sadako’s tanka for Hansen’s disease patients

Unless I illuminate myself like a deep-sea fish Nowhere would I find even a glimmer of light.

—patient, Akashi Kaijin, from the tanka collection
Haku Byo,
1939

Leprosy is a disease like tuberculosis and other infective diseases, and is not a result of a curse.

It is not a hereditary disease.

It is caused by small germs similar to the germs of TB.

There are two types of patients, the infective and non-infective.

It is only the infective patients that spread the disease to others by contact. Out of about 1,500,000 cases in India, only about 400,000 are infective.

Leprosy is curable, and in recent years there have been great advances in the treatment of this disease.

Leprosy is preventable. All necessary precautions should be taken for protection against infection.

In addition to the rational and helpful attitude on the part of individuals, an organized and determined effort on the part of the whole community is required to eradicate leprosy.

—from
Leprosy in India,
by Dharmendra (1958)

Among the discussion topics at the 1958 Global Leprosy Conference are: the organization of leprosy control programs in the South-East Asia and Western Pacific Regions and the latest findings on Promin and the disease and the policy of isolation. The disease, medical experts state, is rarely contagious and they call for an end to quarantine of most patients.

—from the 1958 Global Leprosy Conference;
host city: Tokyo, Japan

ARTIFACT Number 0199
Woman, sixty-one, painted on an urn

Less than twenty miles away, in the city of Okayama, the streets are lined with flag-waving citizens as the runner carrying the Olympic torch passes by. Miss Fuji is walking back from Clinic B when she passes Mr. Oyama, and he greets her on this January evening.

“One thousand eight hundred and seventy-one.”

ARTIFACT Number 1609
A wheelchair

She isn’t sure what to make of the rain. It hasn’t rained here before on any of her birthdays, and today she is forty-three and doesn’t know what to think. As she has on every birthday since her uncle’s visit, she goes down to the dock after sunset, but this year she takes an umbrella with her. It isn’t a heavy rain, only a steady drizzle. One where, if she were going out for a quick walk, such as the half mile from her room to Clinic B, she wouldn’t even take an umbrella, allowing the light rain to dew her face, her hair, her clothes.

It was in a rain much like this one, just months before, when out pushing a patient in a wheelchair, that she slowed her walk and stood there for a second, turning her face up to the sky, feeling the rain against it. She had remained like that for a little while before realizing that the patient was getting wet. She pushed the wheelchair quickly, almost breaking into a run, as if to make up for lost time, to hide her embarrassment. How could she forget, be so stupid, and before she could check herself, she had said what she was thinking.

“There’s no reason to apologize. I feel things by remembering them. I can still bring back the memory of the pain of a bee sting, how it is similar to that of a shot, but lasting longer. I remember leaving my umbrella at home in the morning, walking to school in the rain. A light rain, like today. I enjoyed it. My mother never understood why I did that, always told me that I was going to get sick. Maybe she was right.”

“Right about what?”

“Me getting sick.”

She slowed her pace a little, startled, looking at the patient pointing at himself.

“I’m joking, Miss Fuji.”

She kept the wheelchair at a slow pace, but faster than when they had first started out from the clinic. Neither of them said anything until the patient told her to stop. By then, she had forgotten the rain and wanted to get the patient back to his room. Again, he told her to stop, and she did.

“Please, remind me how it feels.”

She hesitated, wondering if he was joking, waited until he spoke again.

“Remind me.”

She leaned her head back, as she had done a few minutes earlier, again allowing the drizzle to graze her face.

“It is a warm rain, and it falls so softly that it almost tickles as it hits my face. But as it gets very close to tickling me, to where I want to rub my face, the tickling stops, and it goes back to feeling warm and soft again.”

“Thank you.”

That day, she had felt good, almost excited, as she moved the wheelchair again, as if she had learned something new, had taken a step forward somehow. Maybe it was the simplicity of what had happened, but suddenly it all started to become clearer to her. How all those years here she couldn’t understand how the patients could damage their hands and feet, how they could be so careless, how it angered her. How, even though she was surrounded by them, she was one herself—the longer she stayed here, the more she needed to remind herself of this—and maybe this made it all the more difficult; maybe it took something as simple as a light rain to make her understand them, and herself, a little more.

And, today, in the darkness of her forty-third birthday, it is the same kind of rain that falls as she stands on the dock holding an umbrella, which she has yet to open. She is early, as on every birthday, but there isn’t that rising excitement there had been the previous years. Because of the rain. Not that it doesn’t feel good, for it does, but because of the fire and whether or not he will climb to the top of the mountain and make one—the mountain for which she still has no name, not sure if she ever knew it or whether she has forgotten it. And what if he doesn’t light the fire tonight? she thinks. What do I do then?

She isn’t sure how long she has been waiting, whether the rain has picked up or if she has been standing there long enough for the rain to start getting her wet, uncomfortably so. She waits as long as she can and then opens the umbrella, the rain still soft enough that she must concentrate to hear it hit the umbrella, soft enough that it takes awhile before it gathers and begins dripping from the edges. Still, there is no fire on the mountain, which she can’t see the outline of, but there have been other birthdays where she couldn’t see its outline, and then magically the fire would pop out of its head, putting some shape back into the island for an hour and a half.

She tries counting the number of years she has come down here to the dock for her birthday and is shocked that she can’t differentiate between the years, the birthdays, for nothing about them is different, unique enough to help her mark the passage of the day, the years. She knows that her uncle visited her in her fifth year here, and she does the math: nineteen years; she can’t believe that today is the nineteenth year that she has been coming here. But it must be so, she tells herself; the numbers don’t lie.

Would I still be diving? she begins to think, but she stops herself from those dangerous cliffs of a question. She backs away from it, but in doing so, she bumps into another troubling question: Is it because of the rain that there is no fire or because there is no one left to make it?

It is well past eight o’clock; she can feel it in her tiredness. She closes the umbrella, surprised to find that it is no longer raining, and returns to her building where this week she is the first on night watch.

The question accompanies her all through the next day, and it walks with her down to the dock that night, and it is still with her the following day and again down at the dock that night as she stares in the direction of Shodo Island. It remains dark, dark as the answer to that question: Was there no fire because of the rain, or was there no one left to make it?