After the story, I crawled out of her lap and turned to face her. “What was the song?” I asked. “The one that Princess Pari recognized.”
“You know it.” My mother laughed, and sang: “Pururun mul, Kang muldo mot miduriroda…”
I sang the last part with her. “The river song. I’ll never forget it, okay, Mom? You sing that song, and no matter what, I’ll find you, okay? I’ll be like Princess Pari, and I’ll rescue you.”
The first Saturday after my mother died, I went to the canal. I parked at Ala Wai School, retracing the path from the playground through the park toward the canal. Still used, probably by several classes of elementary school kids since I was there, the red-dirt path—narrower than I remembered, made by smaller feet than mine now—wandered through the park’s date trees and ended at my old hiding place beneath the bridge. Bending over, I crawled under one end of the bridge and fit myself onto the same ledge I sat on those many years ago. Looking down where the water of the canal licked the rocks, I saw a handful of date pits. I remembered how I would search the ground under the date palms and how if I found some of the small, hard fruit, I felt that I would have good luck, as if they were pennies, only better, because they were a gift from nature. When I gnawed the thin flesh from its seed, I would thank the Birth Grandmother for looking out for me.
As an adult, I discovered that Foodland sold pitted dates in large plastic tubs. I bought one and couldn’t wait to experience the taste I remembered from childhood. I opened the tub in the car, ripping the seal with my teeth, but when I popped a date in my mouth I was disappointed. The fruit was too sweet, too thick in my mouth, and I missed being able to suck on the seed.
Next to the pile of seeds, half swallowed by the mud, was a once-white satin shoe, the kind girls wore to their wedding or to the prom. And next to the shoe, draped limply among twigs and mush, a condom. I’d seen all these things in the canal before, along with the arms and heads of Barbie dolls, beer bottles and soda cans, shit, newspaper boats and hats, and dog-paddling rats. Occasionally I would spy a jellyfish or a tilapia, the trash fish, and before it flipped away, my heart would beat faster as I waited to see if it would sing me the river song, thus revealing itself as a soul in disguise.
The Saturday after my mother died, I watched the water of the canal lap at the trash under me and waited for something, some sign from my mother. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I never caught a glimpse of a fish that might have carried her spirit.
When the time came, when she needed me, I had failed to rescue her. No Princess Pari, I could not swim to the far shores of death to pull my mother back to life; I could not even put my feet in the water.
6
The day after Induk called me out of the river, I went looking for the spirit I knew I could never find. Go to Manshin Ahjima, Induk said as she dipped her hand into my chest and pulled out my maum, the force of my heartbeat, and led me forward by a silver thread.
I walked and slept, walked and slept, and throughout the journey kept my eyes fixed on Induk beckoning before me. At times, her form would blur until it doubled, then quadrupled, and she would become Induk and my mother, and in turn my mother’s mother and an old woman dressed in the formal top‘o of the olden days. I realized I was walking with my ancestors.
I tried running to my mother, but she shook her head and remained just outside my reach. It was then that I noticed that she held a small book, no bigger than the palm of my hand, which I recognized as the Ch‘onja-chaek, the most basic school primer. When she began to turn the pages, I strained to read what it said, but to my surprise, I found I could not understand the words. Even concentrating on the rapidly moving pictures milked most of my energy.
As my mother flipped through the book, I saw myself and my sisters as children, hanging on to our mother as she moved through our barley field and tended to our garden. And I saw us holding on to her body as we cried the death cries for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.
At this point my mother closed the book. When I asked her why I could not see the rest of the book, the oldest spirit, whom I knew to be my great-grandmother, said, If you read the final chapters, you would know the universe. You would be dead.
When I looked up, I was alone and could smell the sea, so I knew I had followed the river west. Ahead of me I saw the cluster of small adobe homes Induk had told me about, nestled into the hillside. I knocked at the first house, wanting to ask if I could sleep in the courtyard. No one answered there, nor at the second home I came to. Finally, after failing to wake anyone at the third home, I entered the courtyard anyway and disrobed at the well. In the cold night, I laid my clothes on the brittle mud surrounding the well and bathed in the ice-cold water, wanting to purify myself and knowing I never could.
My skin felt waxy, as Induk’s had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.
The women from the camp wanted to do these things for her, but in the end we left her, just as the soldiers had, mounted on the pole, her nakedness only half concealed by the forest’s undergrowth, her eyes dry and open and staring toward the river.
When my husband brings home toys for our newly born daughter, I pick out the dolls with the plastic skin and the unyielding, staring blue eyes and put them in the linen closet. Their skin feels like day-after-death skin, cold and hard though still faintly pliant. I feel sick thinking of my baby lying next to, gaining comfort from, the artificial dead. After I bury the dolls under the sheets and towels, I pick up my child, placing her against my chest. My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life.
I try not to think of the dolls, stacked against each other in the closet, staring at us through the doors and walls with their unblinking, sightless eyes.
I woke at dawn with my fingers dangling like bait in the water at the edge of the river, and a rope looped around my neck. Old-lady breasts, flattened and elongated from years of childbearing, flapped against the side of my head. When I tried to sit up, the breasts squawked, Aigu! The dead is sitting up! and swung away.