"The Favorites" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waters Mary Yukari)

chapter 5

There was no chance to ask questions until late that night, when Sarah and her mother finally lay down on their futons.

They were side by side in the parlor. The walls were plastered with a mixture of fawn-colored clay and chopped straw. Like all traditional parlors it had a tokonoma, a built-in alcove of polished wood. Within it hung a long summer scroll with flowing black script. The scroll was the only object of pure white in the room, and it leapt out at the eye from inside the shadowed recess. At the foot of the alcove, in a shallow glazed bowl, Mrs. Kobayashi had arranged a single yellow lily from the garden, deliberately angled across long clean lines of summer grass.

Back in America, Sarah hadn’t remembered much about this room. But as soon as she arrived, everything had fitted seamlessly back into her memory, like the pigeon calls this morning. In fact when she first entered this room, she had immediately noticed that the stringed koto, which her mother had played in her youth and which stood in its original sheath of faded red silk, was now leaning against the tea cabinet wall instead of the tokonoma wall.

Sarah and her mother lay on their backs. Moonlight shone through a gap in the heavy drapes, which were slightly open to let in the breeze. For the first time that day, the house was utterly silent.

“When I was little,” said Mrs. Rexford, “there used to be a snake living up in the attic.”

“Ugh, a snake!” said Sarah. “Did you see it?”

“No. I just heard it at night, when I was lying in bed. The mouse would run-its nails went k’cha k’cha-then there was a quick dragging sound. After that, it got quiet again.”

“Weren’t you scared?” Sarah asked, even though she knew better. Her mother disapproved of timidity in any form.

“What for? Snakes bring good luck to households, remember? In the old days, farmers stored grain in the attic. Grain attracts mice, and mice attract snakes. So having a snake in your attic meant you were wealthy. During the occupation, I’d listen to that sound and feel safe, because the snake was protecting our black-market rice.”

“Black-market rice? In this attic?” Sarah strained her eyes in the moonlight. She could make out the shadowed, roughly hewn rafters of the ceiling, curiously out of sync with the polished gleam of the alcove and wall posts. The attic was silent. Never in her lifetime had Sarah heard any sound. But these were modern times after all, when nothing exciting ever happened.

She shifted her body to look over at her mother, and the buckwheat-husk pillow gave a loud crunch. Mrs. Rexford lay with her hands clasped behind her head. In the moonlight her face looked unformed and unfamiliar, framed by a cloud of hair loosened from its French twist.

They had never slept together in the same room before.

“Mama?” Sarah spoke softly, aware that these rooms were divided by nothing but paper panels. “How come things are awkward with Granny and Auntie?”

“Hmm?”

“I heard you talking in the kitchen.”

Mrs. Rexford gave a sigh of reluctance. Sarah waited patiently. Usually her questions were met with a brisk, “You’re still a child, it’s none of your business.” But this time-she felt sure-her mother would take her into her confidence as a form of damage control.

Sure enough, her mother whispered, “I suppose you’re old enough.” She switched to English. “But you’re not to tell Momoko or Yashiko-they don’t know yet. And don’t bother your grandmother.”

“Okay.”

“Your auntie Masako was adopted as a baby. The Asakis weren’t her real parents.”

“Oh. Then who were?”

“She and I have the same parents,” said Mrs. Rexford. “She’s my full sister by birth.”

“So Grandma’s her real mother…?” Sarah’s mind raced back over that morning. The tightness between her temples intensified as her brain realigned itself.

“That means your auntie is your true aunt. And Momoko and Yashiko are your true cousins.”

Sarah mulled this over. “Why did Grandma give her away?”

“She didn’t just give her away. It was more complicated than that.”

They were silent. Outside in the lane, a neighbor’s bicycle crunched slowly over the gravel.

“Here’s what you need to know. After your real grandfather died in the war, your grandmother was beholden to the Asakis. It was wartime and…things were complicated. She didn’t want to give up her baby, but she felt she had to. That’s it, basically.”

“But why-”

“No more questions.” Her mother switched back to Japanese. “We have to get some sleep.” Resigned, Sarah rolled onto her back and pulled the light summer comforter up to her chin. “Good night,” she said.

“Good night.”

She closed her eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t shut down her brain. It was as if she’d been awake for so long, she had forgotten how. Inside her skull the echoes of Japanese voices chattered on and on, and would not stop.

After several minutes, her mother spoke again. “You mustn’t judge your grandmother. It was a difficult time.”

“I won’t.”

“In-family adoptions are actually an old tradition. In the villages, if you didn’t have children there was no one to take care of you in old age. So extended relatives had to help each other out. But they always kept the child inside the family. Japanese people never give away their babies to strangers.”

“Hmmm…”

“People still do it. Sometimes it’s to maintain the family line. That’s really important, you know, because family altar tablets have to be passed down from generation to generation. Or else rich families do it so they can pass down assets to a member of their clan.”

“Is that why-”

“No. Go to sleep.”

Mrs. Rexford soon drifted off. Sarah lay listening to her deep breathing.

If she had known of this adoption as a child, she probably would have thought nothing of it. Small children accepted everything as normal. After all, how was this any stranger than her grandmother marrying two brothers? Talk about keeping things within the family! Mrs. Kobayashi had married twice, the first Mr. Kobayashi for love and the second Mr. Kobayashi out of necessity. It had never occurred to the girl to find this curious. As a child, all she cared about was that her grandpa was related to her by blood, even though he wasn’t technically her grandfather.

Her thoughts drifted to the attic, silent now, emptied of snakes and black-market rice and the energy of a turbulent past. She thought of the war that polite people never mentioned-the war that had brought illegal rations into this house, caused her grandmother’s second marriage, and somehow contributed to her aunt’s adoption. In the shadowy rafters, the brutality of those times seemed to still linger.