The Pearl Diver (8 page)

She walks the stony beach, sits at the edge of a wooden dock. She has to catch her breath, not only from the swim but also from the realization of where she is. The other shore. How easy it was. The realization that she could run away is nearly too much for her. Run as fast as she can. She has about five hours before dawn. How far away could she be in five hours? Twelve, fifteen miles? She does a quick calculation, then laughs at herself. Where does she run? Whom does she run to? She has no clothes other than the thin cotton robe she wears, no shoes—her sandals are back on the dock—no money. No chance. Like the few others who have tried. One patient, three years ago, drowned in this very channel. Several others were caught, and after spending a long time in the isolation building, they were paraded past the other patients, searing, mocking into their memories not to try it.

It isn’t all that long before she is dry. August, even past midnight, is hot enough to dry her. Across the way, only darkness, barely a trace of Nagashima. Everybody is deep in sleep over there. The fishermen are still an hour or two from awakening, over here. She is alone. No one in this country knows where she is. This thought alternates from ecstasy to anxiety. The most freedom she has felt since her diving days. Lifetimes ago.

The dock moans and groans, following her all the way to the land. She feels the sting on her stomach and chest from where she brushed the rocky bottom of the shore.

It is a small town; she can tell that even in the dark, even after walking only a couple of minutes. Her bare feet are tender against the cement. It is not any different from other fishing towns she’s been to. Except now, at this hour, there are no people. She goes along the main street. She hears to her right the soft lapping of the tiny waves. She passes a noodle shop, a market, which, she can tell from the smell, is for seafood, a couple of other little shops, a few houses. Everything asleep, all within hearing and smelling distance of the inlet of the sea. So quiet here. Up the street, there are two buses parked—MUSHIAGE BUS CENTER reads a sign. She checks the small schedule in front, a bus every hour and forty-five minutes. One to Oku Station, the other to Hamanaka.

She goes to the port, sees dozens of fishing boats nudged by the water, dancing out of rhythm with one another. Small boats, for two or three people. The whiteness of their skin glows in the night. On one of the boats, a man looks like he has just awakened.
Ten yards from her, a small kerosene lantern showing the outline of his frenzied hair. He looks at her; she’s not sure how much he can see, but he is looking. She doesn’t budge. When the flame of the lantern is jiggled by the wind, she realizes that she shouldn’t be here. She starts to run, away from the man, his boat, lantern, his wild hair. When she gets to the main street, she has to stop and think which way to turn. Left and down the street, passing, she’s certain, the houses, market, noodle shop—sees none of them. She is at the small dock, not sure how far from the man. Hundred yards. Three feet. Can’t be all that far. She doesn’t pay any attention to the creaks she is awakening on the wooden dock, she gets to the end of it, slips herself into the August water, goes under, and points her head toward Nagashima.

ARTIFACT Number 0243
A photo of the Mushiage-Nagashima ferry

He, as was true with so many of the patients, had had his last moment of freedom on this shore of Mushiage, the same dock, not far from where she now sits on this late night, where the ferry brought them across the channel. The same dock that he would have stood at on the day he arrived in Mushiage at the age of fifteen. The dock where an official from the leprosarium marked his footprints, preventing others from stepping where he had walked.

She has learned not to ask Mr. Shirayama of the days before his arrival, because, although he talks openly about every detail of his years here, he is guarded, protective of his days before Nagashima. As if he has dripped water on that salty mound of his memory and allowed it to dissolve grain by grain. Once, she asked him what his real name was, and when he didn’t respond, she thought he hadn’t heard, so she repeated the question. He glared at her and still said nothing. He glared at her until she turned away.

But, after almost four years of knowing Mr. Shirayama, he has told her some things, or at least allowed them to slip out. It was in 1939, eight years after they opened this facility, nine years before she arrived here, that Mr. Shirayama traveled nearly a hundred miles by freight train, and then, from the station, walked the remaining twelve. It was spring, most of the way a slight grade down toward the coast, from where he took the ferry the final five minutes here.

Unlike herself, he hadn’t hidden from the police. His parents had delivered him to them. That is all he has ever told her of his years with his parents—they never looking back at him as they left the police station. Still, to this day, it is their backs that he remembers, and the huge burden he placed on them. He was a disgrace to his family, neighbors, town, a fifteen-year-old boy who stoked unmentionable fear into others, one who had become a burden to the country’s expansionist dreams, and the wars that were a part of it.

Burden.
That one word damaged him more than the disease. Burden—those little mites that gather in your tatami mats, in your futon, the splinter deep under your finger— something that you can go on living with, but with nearly every move, you are reminded of it.
The constant reminder from all those people around you about how much better their lives would be without you. Subtle and sometimes not so subtle reminders. Sighs. Stares. Rushing their children away when you pass nearby. Whispers. Pointing. He was, still is, he once told her, that mite in your tatami mat, that splinter burrowed in your finger.

These are the few scraps of his life before coming to Nagashima that she knows, and she wishes he would tell her more. But she, too, has her secrets, things she has never told him, anyone. How this shore, for instance, across from Nagashima, is, at night, hers.

ARTIFACT Number 0198
A calligraphy brush

All through the winter, she watches his breath as he paints.

Man, forty-five. Boy, seventeen. Woman, thirty-five. Man, fifty-six. Man, forty-four. Woman, fifty.

Sometimes, she can stand for as long as ten minutes before he acknowledges that she is there. She isn’t sure whether this is because of his deep concentration or his eyesight, which has nearly abandoned him. His face, inches from the surface. Inches from the slender brush, bristles bunched tightly together by the black ink, which has left miniature footprints on his glasses. He doesn’t have much of a surface to work on, the urn about the size of a small canister for storing green-tea leaves, smaller than his hands. Not much left after you burn a body for a couple of hours, she thinks. No matter how big the person, all about the same size when a pile of ash.

Watches his breath as he paints.

Girl, nineteen. Man, thirty-nine. Boy, sixteen. Man, fifty-five. Man, forty-three. Man, fifty. Woman, twenty-eight.

It takes him about thirty minutes to paint each urn. An hour or two on some days. Then, for a week, none at all. She imagines that he must have been working nonstop back in 1934, when the Muroto typhoon crushed this area. More than 180 urns needed that late September. Patients, staff. The raw beauty of typhoons and how they don’t discriminate.

His breath as he paints.

Woman, forty-six. Man, forty-two. Man, fifty. Woman, fifty-one. Man, fifty-five. Man, forty-one. Man, forty-seven. Woman, fifty-nine.

A kerosene heater at his feet. Sometimes he bends over and warms his hands near it. The hands, which, when he laughs and claps them together, clap only with the heels of the palms, the stumps of his fingers never getting involved. He twists his wrists side to side, up and down in front of the heater. Does this for a while, and then his breath appears once again when he moves away from the heater and back to the table.

Man, fifty-one. Girl, eighteen. Man, forty-eight. Man, forty-two. Woman, forty-one.

He was one of the first patients back in 1931, and he started painting when, later that same year, Mr. Nakahara, the original painter of urns at Nagashima, died. He pushes his thick glasses against his twisted face and squints real hard before acknowledging her for the first time.

“One thousand two hundred and fifty-one.”

This is how Mr. Oyama, the Nagashima urn painter, greets people. Says this as he works his way around the grounds in his wheelchair, or in his room when you enter, or here in this shack outside the crematorium. And for the rest of this day, he will greet everyone with “One thousand two hundred and fifty-one.” Unless, of course, someone dies; then his greeting will have a number added to it, but only after the urn is painted.

He turns back to his table, and today, like all the days of the past week, it is slow. He has two lines of urns, six in one row, four in the other, and one by one he paints them.

Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man.

Woman. Woman. Woman. Woman.

He prepares for spring, which begins tomorrow, and it will be two months into it that she will turn twenty-four. Half of her urn is already answered; all he has to do is wait for her final number before he must paint.

ARTIFACT Number 1002
A pair of rubber boots

His feet, nearly white, the skin like jellyfish, loose and falling off, leaving large patches of raw flesh exposed.

“When are you going to ask for those rubber boots, Mr. Yamai?”

“I know I have to, but the administrators don’t like us asking for things that are so basic. Besides, I don’t think they like the things we have been doing with the readings and stories.”

“But it’s only a pair of boots. Other patients have boots.”

“Those are the orthopedic boots. It’s as if they are punishing those of us whose disease hasn’t progressed.”

“Go and ask for the boots.”

ARTIFACT Number 1012
From the bookshelves at Nagashima

Pai Miu is sick. The Master went to see him and, holding his hand through the window, exclaimed, “Fate kills him. For such a man to have such a disease! For such a man to have such a disease!”

—sixth century B.C., China, when Pai Miu, a disciple of Confucius, dies of what is believed to be leprosy

Those suffering from
ta feng
have stiff joints; the eyebrows and beard fall off.

The wind scatters throughout the muscles and comes into conflict with the
wei chi,
or defensive force. The channels being clogged, the flesh becomes nodular and ulcerates. And because of the stagnant movements of this defensive force, numbness results.

The vital spirits degenerate and turn cloudy, causing the bridge of the nose to change color and rot, and the skin to ulcerate.
The wind and chills lodge in the blood vessels and cannot be got rid of. This is called
li feng.

For the treatment of
li feng,
prick the swollen parts with a sharp needle; let the foul air out until the swelling subsides.

—from Nei Ching by Huang Ti (600 B.C.)

garlic used with marjoram cures the lepras;

mustard with red clay is used against the lepras;

nettle in wine cures the facial lepras;

wine sediment is rubbed in against the lepras;

boil the root of scammony in vinegar to the consistency of honey, with which the lepras are rubbed;

fat of the porpoise carries away the lepras.

—ancient folk medicines for leprosy

Patients were segregated in leprosaria in Europe in the Middle Ages. Leprosy became know as “the living death” where funeral services were conducted when a person contracted the disease declaring their death to society. Leprosy sufferers had to walk on a particular side of the road, according to the direction from which way the wind was blowing; some areas required them to wear special garb, wear a declaration sign around their necks and to ring a warning bell announcing that they were “lepers” from which people should flee. Other discriminating laws of the church and state required that use of separate seats in churches, separate holy water fonts and in some cases in Britain they had a “lepers’ slot” in the church wall through which the “leper” may view the communion service but not “contaminate” the service by his or her presence.

—from
Leprosy in Theory and Practice,
by Drs. R. G. Cochrane and T. Frank Davey

The WHO—at the fifth International Leprosy Congress in Havana, Cuba in 1948—recommends that sulphone (Promin) should be a major treatment for leprosy. It is accepted that temporary isolation might still be necessary, although for infectious cases only. The committee suggests that ambulatory and domiciliary treatment could be safely and satisfactorily given to most patients. Leprosy has ceased to be a “special” disease, and has simply become a disease for which early diagnosis and treatment of cases were recognized to be essential.

—from World Health Organization reports

It is necessary to have laws which make it possible to force leprosy patients to be contained in sanatoria even if it is against their will. Sterilization is a good way to ensure that the disease will not be transmitted among family members. To escape from a sanatorium should be made a crime for patients and as such be punished.

—Dr. Kensuke Mitsuda, testifying before
the House of Councilors’ Public Health Committee, 1951

ARTIFACT Number 0983
An old map of Honshu

The last visitor she will ever have comes in the spring of her fifth year at Nagashima.

She appears nervous, perhaps still stinging from the memories of her sister’s visit the summer before. They sit in the same room, at the only table. Her uncle Jiro is a short, compact man, much more like her than her sister.

“How are you feeling?”

“I feel fine. I do.”

“You are no different from the way I remember you. How long has it been since I’ve seen you?”

“New Year’s, six, maybe seven years ago.”