The Pearl Diver (6 page)

The hands:

Fingers like toes, stubs, much of it self-inflicted damage: the man who had a finger ripped off when it was caught in a fishing net being thrown out to sea, how he stared at the air, where seconds before a finger had been; the woman, while making new clothes for the patients, cutting off the tops of two fingers with the scissors; the woman who developed gangrene, her left hand ballooning to twice its size before she went to the clinic and it had to be amputated.

Nearly every time she touches these hands, she is angered, angered at the carelessness; she hates the carelessness—how if they had paid more attention, probably none of it would have happened. And she knows that all she has to do is think back to that time when she cut her arm while diving, how there was no pain; if it hadn’t been for the blood, she wouldn’t have known about it. Still, there are times when she is massaging a pair of hands—although they have become fewer recently—that she feels irritated. She can tell which of the patients have self-inflicted damage to their hands, which have been destroyed by nerve damage from the disease. Those self-inflicted ones are much more random, a finger or two, parts of them, those from nerve damage much more uniform, a balanced destruction.

The feet:

The woman, who while walking barefoot, sliced her foot on a piece of glass, how she nearly bled to death not knowing of the wound. The orthopedic boots, made and designed by the patients in the woodworking shops, help them to walk, the artificial feet, legs from the knee down. How she sometimes removes these artificial limbs when giving massages, places them next to the futon or props them against the wall. Those who still have their feet, the bend of them collapsing toward the arch, the crinkled, crushed toes. For them, the orthopedic boots, so they don’t damage their feet while walking.
With the feet, she is much more forgiving, for they are often out of one’s sight, self-inflicted damage easier, more understandable, but not the hands.

The eyes:

The young man already wearing the blue glasses, helping to preserve the nerve function of his eyes. Are even the plum blossoms blue? she wonders. How sometimes while giving a massage, she is talking to the patient and he has fallen asleep, but she will talk on for a while, not realizing that the patient has done so, the nerve-damaged eyes never completely closed. No eyelashes, no eyebrows to protect them, the protruding forehead giving them that lion look she has read about from the books on the clinic bookshelf.

The mouth:

Here, patients in the advanced stages of the disease rely on their memories the most. Memories of the taste of a pear; the burn of drinking the freshly made brown rice tea too fast; the texture of a mountain potato; how she wants to wipe away the spittle that hangs, drips from their unfeeling mouths.

The nose:

Flat, splayed, twisted, some with nearly none at all, the septum gone, nothing to hold it in place, collapsing it.
With the worst of the patients, she places a menthol balm under her nose before massaging them. The overpowering stench of mucus built up in their noses—the smell of the rotting flesh is something that even after all this time, all these massages, she can’t get used to. The mucus draining out— she always has a towel handy to place under their faces when she massages their backs.

And when she returns to her room, she refuses to allow herself to feel sorry for any of them. She can’t allow herself to do that, for if she does, it will crawl into her in the form of self-pity, and that, she knows, is also selfinflicted, also a sign of carelessness.

Her future is somewhere on this island, everywhere, lurking in each patient she sees who doesn’t see her, every one she touches who doesn’t feel her hands, the patients whom she knows in time she will become. The waiting more difficult than the actuality.

But her future doesn’t come. In her sixth month at Nagashima, she begins receiving her shots and taking her doses of Promin. The only future that this assures her of is one of nausea, vomiting, headaches, loss of appetite, wearing a head covering and long sleeves in direct sunlight. Even this future is unpredictable—sometimes all of these side effects after taking the medicine, sometimes none, or a combination of them. Even in this, she has been lucky; others have skin rashes, blood disorders, a bluing of the skin from the medicine.

Months and months pass, and now she can count the months as years. Still she has only the two numb spots on her body—the left forearm, the lower back. Medals or curses—she isn’t sure how to wear them. The one thing that keeps her going is knowing that she is not alone, that there are all the others who arrived that same year as she did, several years before, and in the years after. And she is like them. Living here every day in all their outer normalcy, amid all the inner torment.

She has been waiting thirty minutes and is still an hour away from where the nurses sit honing their needles on whetstones. If it were winter or suffocatingly hot, she would have stayed back in the room, waiting for the line to dwindle, but she likes the fog. It reminds her of being underwater, how the sea allows only a little of itself at a time to be exposed; even the sound—where it is coming from, how far away it is—doesn’t wholly reveal itself.

Knowing that it is much too early to be doing so, but still, to help pass the time, she begins studying the patients, checking for those favoring their left legs. This morning, because of the fog, she can see only fifteen patients in front of her. She, along with them, all take a couple of steps every minute. It is the stops and starts and all the standing that makes her infected right leg throb. The thought of another needle in that leg is unbearable. She feels the pus oozing through the antiseptic gauze, reminding her that she must stop by the school before beginning her rounds of massages and bathroom cleaning.

The infection in her thigh, the chills, the uncomfortable sleeping position left her with another restless night of sleep. She likes sleeping on her right side, cradling her arms around the pillow, but the pain in that thigh forces her to sleep on her back. This is the second infection she has had in the past six months, but this one she endures, recalling the first time and how the nurse sliced open the infected area without using anesthesia. She daubs it each night with cream and wraps it in the reused gauze.

The trees have nearly undressed themselves of the fog by the time she reaches the entrance of the building. Behind her are another five, six hundred patients. She has spotted a woman favoring her left leg and she keeps an eye on her until they enter the building. She steps out of line, checks where the nurses are positioned, walks over to the woman, asks her if she would like to switch sides. They do, and now she waits on the far left side of the four lines.

The air is stuffy, full of the familiar smell of medicine. Four nurses, a line for each, two patients per nurse, per minute. They scrape, scrape the needles over the whetstone, plunge them into the bottle of liquid Promin, patients expose their thighs, needles inserted, pulled out, the patients move on, scrape, scrape the needles over the whetstone, plunge them into the bottle of liquid Promin, patients expose their thighs, needles inserted, pulled out, the patients move on, scrape, scrape the needles over the whetstone. She is nearly put to sleep by the repetition, but she moves step by step, and when it is her turn, she lowers the left side of her loose cotton pants, hears the scrape, scrape of the needle against the whetstone, sees it plunge into the bottle of liquid Promin, feels the pinch as it goes in, comes out of her thigh, and she moves on.

There is little reminder of the fog when she goes outside; all but the very top of Key of the Hand Island is once again visible. She walks toward the schoolroom to get some clean gauze and knows that, for yet another couple of days, her future is frozen, while at the same time another day is about to pass her by.

Before entering the school building, she stands off to the side of the path, in a patch of bushes, and starts to unravel the bandage on her right leg. It is wet and sticky with pus and a little blood. She knows that without the bandage, the pus will stain her pants, but it is the privacy—not so much needing to be alone while exposing her leg, but the need to be alone with her pain—that she seeks. The much-used bandage sticks to her thigh more and more with each lap that she unravels. She wants to scream, to cry, but she concentrates on a bird she has spotted in a tree, bores into it for strength. When the bandage is finally off, she gives her body a little time to relax. She is sweating a cold sweat, wants to sit down. The day has hardly begun, she tells herself, way too early to think about resting. She forces herself toward the school building.

Most are sitting on the floor of the schoolroom, stretching and smoothing out the antiseptic gauze, when she enters. They are here every morning, this soon to be the first graduating class of Nagashima High School, and they remain for lunch, then for their three hours of classes. They work with care, the correct amount of tension when stretching the tears in the gauze, the difference between having to cut the gauze in two, losing a foot or two of the material, or squeezing yet another day of existence out of it.

She doesn’t like coming here, feels uncomfortable among the educated, she herself having attended only seven years of school before beginning her diving at the age of sixteen. She arrived a few years too early to attend school, which only started here last year. Now, although she isn’t all that much older than they are—five, maybe six years—she feels much the elder in this room.

Trying not to draw attention to herself, she goes directly to the corner where the rewrapped gauze and bandages are stacked. But he sees her; she knows it before he even speaks, as if he were waiting for her.

“Good morning, Miss Fuji.”

“Good morning, Mr. Yamai,” she says, continuing in the direction of the bandages, hoping that they will only exchange greetings.

“I didn’t see you getting your shot today.”

“I was a little late.”

“Your leg isn’t any better.” He points at the bandage in her hand. She wants to toss it away, but she sets it in the laundry bag that Mr. Yamai has come to collect. She picks up a new bandage and tries not to walk too fast out of the room. Mr.
Yamai, with the laundry bag flung over his shoulder, follows her. When he catches up, he secretly hands her another bandage, which she quickly thanks him for, shoving it in the left pocket of her jacket.

“I hope to see you on Sunday night, Miss Fuji.”

“I don’t think so, but maybe sometime when my leg is feeling better.”

“Miss Min will be telling a story this week, and this month we’ll be reading some of Natsume Soseki. It will be a good time to attend.”

“I can’t promise, but maybe if my leg is better.”

“I hear you
are telling a story this week, Miss Min.”

“Yes, this week is my turn. Did Mr. Yamai tell you?”

“Yes. Why do you know?”

“Because he wants you to come some night.”

“I’ve told you what I feel about going to those kinds of things.”

“It’s only people telling stories and reading from books.

It’s mostly done for those of us who can’t see well enough to read ourselves. Mr. Yamai is a nice young man. He’s about your age, isn’t he?”

“You sound like a mother trying to marry her daughter off, Miss Min.”

“A lifetime is much too long to be spent alone.”

Although her leg hasn’t improved all that much, she goes on Sunday night. She is surprised by the number of patients who have gathered. In the back of the large room, she finds a cushion and sits. It isn’t long before Mr.
Yamai steps to the front and the voices immediately hush. A studious man— maybe it is the round black-framed glasses, or the fact that he is a teacher at the Nagashima School.

“I’m glad that all of you could make it tonight, and I’d like to welcome the first-timers.” He looks her way and stops for a second. “Tonight we will read several of Natsume Soseki’s short stories. If any of you have any suggestions for future books, please tell me. Before we read from our book tonight, we will have a couple of stories told by Miss Min.”

Mr. Yamai stops talking while the room fills with claps. She searches for Miss Min but doesn’t see her at first, not until the patient next to her points to the right of Mr. Yamai. Miss Min is sitting in a chair, her shy smile deflecting the clapping. She thinks of all the massages she has given Miss Min, and her often talking during them.

“For those of you who haven’t joined us before, this is Miss Min’s seventh time to tell us stories. Okay, Miss Min.”

Again there is clapping, and Miss Min stands up and gives a bow, sits back down, and then the room is silent:

Out of a single giant cedar they carve the prau, four village men long. From early in the morning, when the young
girl came down with the fever, and for the whole of the day
and all of the night, the villagers work.

It was this way five years before, when the man’s skin
burst out in blisters—the prau worked then—only the
man died, and the village was spared. Six years before
that, when a young woman returned from the jungle,
foaming at the mouth and crazed, then, too, they had begun to build a prau, but they stopped when her mother
found the puncture wounds of the viper on her daughter’s
left shoulder. The demons hadn’t sent disease their way,
only the normal strides of nature. But with this girl and
the fever, they knew they had to get the prau built and
sent off as soon as possible.

As the women work on the image of the man, creating
him from husks, tree bark, palm leaves, the men hollow out
the insides of the tree. Children feed the workers, whose
hands are too busy to stop. They turn their heads away
from the work only long enough to have some water
poured down their throats, atop their heads. The village
elder comes to the shore.