Читать книгу Fish of the Seto Inland Sea - Ruri Pilgrim - Страница 11

At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the International Red Cross appointed Shintaro to be responsible for war casualties. He was one of the few doctors in the country qualified in European medicine. He was stationed on an island of Oki in the Japan Sea where the Red Cross Hospital was set up. Anticipating that the war would last more than a year, Shintaro took his wife and young family with him.

‘Haruko ojosama, there is a Russian man’s body washed up on the shore. Let’s go and see,’ a young servant said to Haruko.

He knew she would come. He was excited and itching to go, but thought that it would be prudent to take one of the children with him. It would look better than leaving work on his own. Of the four children in the Miwa family, the younger two were not old enough, while it was unthinkable to ask Haruko’s older sister, Takeko. At the age of seven, Takeko was a prim young lady. Haruko was different. When she heard the servant, she neither asked questions nor hesitated.

Haruko went out through the gate ahead of the servant. Once outside the garden, the servant rolled up his hakama (wide trousers). Haruko hitched up the skirt of her cotton kimono. Both of them took off their geta (wooden footwear) and, carrying them in their hands, ran along the dusty lane leading to the sea shore.

There was a crowd of some fifty people standing on the beach looking at the body, which was lying on the sand face up. It was late spring and the breeze felt pleasant to the people who were standing around.

‘Huge!’ a well-tanned and bow-legged man exclaimed, looking at the body.

‘If the country is big, it is natural that the people are big,’ someone else said. He meant to state a fact, but the villagers broke out into fits of laughter. ‘They may be big, but we defeated them.’

The Japanese navy had attacked a Russian task force and won an outright victory. Everybody was good-humoured, as though this success was a personal achievement. They forgot about the dead body for a moment. It lay as though it had never known life.

Several children tried to peep between the onlookers’ legs and were scolded and chased away, but someone noticed Haruko and said, ‘Ah, the doctor’s daughter,’ and let her get inside the circle of men.

Haruko thought that the colour of his hair was strange, like an ear of wheat. The face was unnaturally pallid. The eyes were closed. Haruko crouched down to take a closer look.

‘Aren’t you afraid, Haruko ojosama?’ a shop-keeper asked. She shook her head. There was hardly anything that made her afraid, she thought. She was not like Takeko, who was scared of almost everything and squeamish as well.

‘Look at this.’ Someone standing behind Haruko pointed at the chest of the body. A gold chain with a green enamelled ball about one centimetre in diameter hung from the neck. She had noticed it but was not sure if she was allowed to touch it. Tiny diamonds encircled a small piece of glass at the top of the green ball, and threw little rainbow-coloured lights in the sun.

The man bent over the body and picked up the pendant, turning it around. Standing up, he told Haruko to look through the top. It was a small magnifying glass. When she managed to focus, she gasped. There was a foreign lady inside the small green ball. She was sitting sideways with one elbow lightly resting on a cushion. She had long reddish golden hair and blue eyes. Her shoulders were bare. She had something red and gold around her neck and on her ear.

‘Haruko ojosama,’ the servant whispered, and poked at her. She turned around indignantly and realised that her father was coming with several people, among whom were the head of the village and the chief of police.

Her father was busy talking to the others about identifying the body and taking it to the temple.

‘Do not touch him. You must respect the dead, enemy or not,’ she heard him say to the villagers. He was also saying to the police chief, ‘There may be more bodies drifting this way.’

Two days before, Haruko had been to the beach with the same servant and they had seen many columns of black smoke on the horizon.

‘There are fifty Russian warships.’ Someone was knowledgeable. ‘They came all the way from the North Sea, taking eight months.’

‘Eight months!’ a fisherman repeated in surprise. ‘Ships like that cannot be in the sea for long without supplies. Barnacles and seaweed grow on the hull. If they are not cleaned off they will slow down the ship. Even our little boat ...’

‘Yes, yes.’ The first man interrupted the chatter impatiently.

The world knew the difficulties of the task force and watched its heroic progress through the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the South China Sea, the East China Sea and, finally, the Sea of Japan. Anchorages en route were mainly hostile. The long suffering of the sailors was nearly over. The year was 1905.

The motive for this extraordinary expedition by the Russians was to secure command of the Sea of Japan by reinforcing the First Pacific Fleet based at Port Arthur. The Russians had leased this port at the southern tip of Manchuria from the Chinese. But Port Arthur had fallen and the entire First Fleet had been destroyed by the Japanese navy. The new objective of the Russian Commander Rozhdestvensky, was to carry as many of his warships as possible safely into Vladivostok, north of the Sea of Japan. The last thing he wanted was to meet the Japanese en route.

For the Japanese the confrontation with the Russian fleet was the culmination of half a century of struggle and preparation. Technology was behind. The nation was poor. Most people had only millet and dried fish to eat. And yet the Japanese had invested heavily in the navy. Those in power were conscious of the vulnerability of an island nation that lacked the natural resources to modernise. A nearby land empire in China would be a lifeline. If they lost the sea battle against the Russians, the Japanese army, which was narrowly winning in Manchuria, would be isolated. It would not take long for them to be ousted.

As the Russian ships neared their destination they had to decide whether to take the direct and shorter route to Vladivostok through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan or sail along the east of the Japanese archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese did not have enough warships to meet them in two places. Which route would the Russians choose? This was the question in everyone’s mind. The nervousness of naval headquarters permeated down to the streets. Rumour had it that a samurai in white clothes had appeared in a dream to the Empress and said, ‘Don’t worry. They will come to the Sea of Japan.’

Standing on the beach, Haruko saw the columns of black smoke far away above the horizon, and heard a man mutter, ‘Thank God, they came this way.’

The news that Haruko and the servant had been down to the beach to see the dead body had already reached home by the time they entered the house.

‘What have you been up!’ Ayako sighed and smiled at the same time. ‘Can’t you behave like a girl?’

‘How can you go and see a body!’ Takeko made a show of shuddering and covered her mouth with both hands in a gesture of horror.

Haruko ignored her sister. She did not dislike Takeko, who was two years older, but she could not respect her.

In the morning, Takeko often said, ‘I don’t feel well,’ before setting off for school. ‘In that case, you had better stay at home,’ her Miwa grandmother, would say and Takeko would stay at home. After all, she was a girl; she did not need an education. As a girl of a well-to-do and long-established family she would have good marriage prospects if she was pretty, and that was all that mattered. Even at school, Takeko often said she felt ill and went home, leaving her books and other belongings for Haruko to bring back later.

For Haruko, school was important. Besides, she enjoyed it. The work was easy for her. She could dominate the village rascals in the classroom. She was given prizes. And she always finished her homework before the lesson was over.

That night, the Miwa children sat on cushions placed on the tatami floor while their father had his dinner. The children usually finished their meal early around a big table with their mother. A maid sat and attended them. Shintaro had his meal later, attended by his wife. He had a small table to himself, and Ayako sat by a little rice tub with a tray on her lap. The dishes were more elaborate than for the earlier gathering. There was soup in a black lacquered bowl with gold and silver chrysanthemums painted on it, a broiled fish with garnish and more plates of vegetables in season. Saké was served as well. As Shintaro ate, he talked to his children.

‘And what did you see in the pendant that you were peeping in?’ he asked Haruko that night. He had seen her on the beach.

‘I saw a lady. Is she Russian?’ Haruko relaxed. She was not going to be scolded.

‘Very likely. She must be his wife or fiancée.’

‘She had jewels around her neck.’

‘Did you like them?’

‘The jewels? I don’t know,’ she said. They had seemed so unreal that she had no feelings except awe. Shintaro laughed.

‘What is a pendant?’ Takeko wanted to know.

‘Russians are enemy,’ three-year-old Sachiko said.

‘Haruko.’ Her father called her as she was getting ready to go to school the next day. ‘I want you to come with me to the Russian hospital ship today. I will send someone to fetch you from school.’

‘But I cannot miss school.’ It was an awful dilemma. To miss school was bad. On the other hand, she had been told that her father’s word was absolute.

‘I will send a note to the teacher. It is to help me visit the wounded and make them feel better.’

‘Russians?’ Ayako opened her eyes wide with astonishment. She forgot her usual modesty in front of her husband and protested, ‘You cannot go to the enemy place with a little girl. They will kill you.’

‘No, no. They will not kill us. They are doctors like me and their patients.’

Ayako was not totally convinced but did not say any more.

‘In foreign countries,’ Shintaro explained gently, ‘it is the wife’s duty to go with her husband on such occasions.’

‘Wife!’

‘Yes. Wife. You see, in foreign countries, wives attend dinner parties looking like the lady that Haruko saw in the pendant, and are able to carry on conversations with other men.’

‘Do foreign women eat with men from the same table?’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they think it is sociable.’

Most of Shintaro’s knowledge of life in Russia came from reading translations of novels by writers such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

Although she did not understand why Shintaro wanted to take Haruko to see the Russians, Ayako had Haruko’s special kimono, which was kept for New Year’s Day, spread out on the tatami floor and dressed her daughter.

‘You must stay with your otohsan. I heard that foreign men have hair all over their body like animals,’ she told Haruko. A rickshaw came and Haruko climbed up after her father. He held her in front of him. She was almost hidden behind a large bunch of flowers that the servant handed to her.

‘Foreign wives are like geishas,’ Ayako confided to her maid, Kiyo, later.

The hospital ship was a small vessel of about three and a half thousand tons but as Haruko stood in a little boat ready to be hoisted on board, the side of the ship soared up beside her like a cliff. They were winched up in a kind of basket. Shintaro was tall among fishermen and tenant farmers but the person who approached them on the deck was of another species. He was like a bear. A reddish beard covered half of his red face around a big nose. Her mother was right. His hands were covered with golden hair even between the knuckles.

‘This ojisan is the captain of this ship,’ Shintaro told Haruko. Although ‘ojisan’ meant ‘uncle’ it was freely used by children for men of their parents’ age. But this giant was not another ojisan. Shintaro amiably shook hands with him and talked in German. Then he handed Haruko the large bunch of flowers he was carrying for her. Pushing her gently towards the Russian, he said, ‘Give the flowers to the captain.’

The giant said something. His voice was deep and sonorous. He took the flowers from her and, still talking to Shintaro, put his large hand on her head. The hand covered her head and she could see the tips of the fingers. The hand was heavy. She shuddered a little. Her whole body went rigid.

‘Were you scared?’ Takeko asked when father and daughter came home.

‘No,’ Haruko said. ‘Not at all.’ She had decided never to tell anyone that she had wet herself when the large hand was placed on her head.

Soon after the Tsushima naval battle, the war ended, and the Miwas went back to the family home in the southern prefecture of the main island by the Seto Inland Sea.