by Tod Davies.
My mother was born in Kobe, in Japan, in the Portuguese Catholic settlement there. She spent most of her childhood between Hong Kong and the lesser known island of Macao, across the bay, where her Portuguese/Chinese ancestors had lived since the 16th century: merchants, accountants, and pirates.
When it was time for her to go to school, she was sent, as were all the daughters of the Portuguese Catholic merchant class on that island, to an Anglo-French convent in Tokyo. This was where Catholic girls were taught, even then somewhat anachronistically, to be the good wives and mothers of the Catholic haute bourgeoisie. They learned English and French. They read Chesterton and Pascal. They learned to curtsey and to pour tea. They learned to wear pearls under their nightdresses to keep their sheen.
World War II broke out, trapping many of the boarding school girls in Japan. My grandmother, who had a British passport and could still travel freely, went to Tokyo to try to get my mother and her older sister, who didn’t and couldn’t, away. But then the borders closed.
They settled down uneasily for the duration of the war. My mother was twelve years old.
She refused to talk about those days when I was young, and what I knew—or thought I knew—was carefully put together from crumbs of information scooped up and hoarded over the years.
I did know that when the war began, she had a cat. I don’t remember who told me about this cat, whether it was my aunt, or my grandmother, or whether in some unguarded moment my mother let fall something about it herself. I didn’t know the cat’s name, or its sex. I thought it was black, though I don’t remember who told me so. I knew that my mother had charge of the cat, along with the care of a small suitcase packed with family jewelry: trinkets inherited mother to daughter, mother to daughter, down the years in her family in Macao. It was her job to watch over them.
In one night, she lost them both.
Bombs fell. That was all I was told, no details. As a child in peaceful San Francisco, I imagined this cautiously, even fearfully. None of the adults would talk about it. In my mind, it happened at night in Tokyo: red and yellow lights flickering from a permanent fire on the horizon; crackling noises, screams and shouts, as if coming from the old loudspeakers of a history exhibit in some children’s museum: “We Bomb Japan.” Because of course it was we who dropped those incendiary bombs on my mother and my aunt and my grandmother. The United States. America. We bombed Tokyo. I was confused by this, and touched it gingerly in my thoughts, as if probing for a sore spot in my mouth. When I was a teenager, a friend of my father’s, who had been a bomber pilot in the war, realized he must have been one of the planes over Japan the night my mother lost her jewelry and her cat. I remember the grown ups laughing about it at dinner.
I thought about this often as a child: about my mother and my aunt and my grandmother, all alone, unprotected in a strange land, their foreignness and their sex impossible to hide. They were very brave. My mother’s bravery took this form: that when she told me about that night, the one where she lost both the jewelry and her cat, she told it in the form of an apology.
“I was asleep and the bombs started to fall. I had all our jewelry in a little suitcase under the bed. But I got scared and I ran away, and the house was bombed, and the jewelry all gone. And I’m so sorry I lost it, Tod! It should have been yours. And I lost it all.”
I would try to comfort her by saying, quite honestly, that I didn’t care about the jewelry at all: all that mattered was that she was safe. We’d laugh about it, the same as she and my father’s friend had laughed.
She told me that story over and over. The way I remember is that she told it at least once a year. But it was always very short—she didn’t linger on it. And it was always as an apology—always.
Also it was always untrue.
As a matter of plain fact, there was much about the story that was a lie. She never liked to tell me the entire truth about her life. She said that was because I would write about it. She said she planned to write her own life someday.
We would be going through her jewelry drawer, which was also where she kept her lingerie and our school report cards. Whenever we opened that drawer, it seemed, she would tell me the same story, which I now know cunningly hid some of the most important truths. I listened then. I always felt badly for her and tried to tell her that everything was okay now; she was an adult and in America and her daughter didn’t mind at all that the jewels that should have been hers had disappeared. “After all,” I would say. “If you’d gone back for them, I probably wouldn’t be here at all.” And we’d laugh again.
I did mind, though. Not about the jewels. But something else. That was the only story she told me. It was the only one from her childhood that she would tell. I wanted those stories. Never mind the jewelry: it was the stories that mattered. I wanted the facts of that story.
We never talked at all about the cat who died the same night the jewelry burned. I tried not to think about it: the little cat terrified in the dark house, the loud noises, the smell of fire. I couldn’t bear to imagine it, all by myself, when I was a child. I tried not to think about that.
When I was four or five, I had a cat myself, a tiny but definite kitten, who would sleep, safe and purring and warm, curled up against me under the covers of my bed. She was too small, much too small, to be on her own, but one day my mother let her out of the garage onto the street. I remember watching this in paralyzed horror from the top of the basement stairs and screaming, “Don’t let her out! Don’t let her out! Don’t let her out!” And I remember my mother giving me that superior, slightly contemptuous look that I had already learned to identify as a sign of adult fear, and saying, “Don’t be silly. She’ll be fine. She’s a cat.”
There was another look on her face, one I couldn’t identify until much time and experience later. She was looking intently at my little cat with an exploratory frown. I can see her face as I write this, her beautiful young unlined face, round and smooth like the full moon. It looks down at that creature and it wonders: “Can you survive? If I let you out, will you find a way to live?”
But the kitten didn’t survive, not that one, not that time. She was too small, and I never saw her again.
I still remember standing on those stairs as my mother let the kitten go. I can still remember knowing that there was no way to stop her, even though it meant the kitten would be alone, cold, lost, wandering forever. I knew what would happen. But of course there was nothing I could do.
I knew, somehow, that this loss was because of that first loss of hers, the cat lost, killed, my mother terrified. I knew she was touching that loss again, like a sore in her mouth, gingerly, by letting me feel loss myself of a similar kind.
I thought that was the end of this story. But then, much later in my life, I began to have my mother’s nightmares. And the only way I discovered this was because of that first cat. For traumas never go away. They simply repeat themselves. Until they are heard. And understood.
I was writing a book at the time. The narrator of the book was a tormented man, one who had lost his home and family in a war, but who had chosen the winning side as his own. The same side that had killed his family.
He would repeat, over and over, the trauma, but in the action of the book, he did so by torturing others as a contemptuous strongman on the winning side. This tortured my narrator, in turn. But he had no way to understand what was happening to him.
Neither did I. At least at first.
As I wrote, the nightmares began. They would go on all night. I would wake up gasping for breath, or, in the worst versions, screaming. Every night. Sometimes two, three, four times. I would wake up in terror, straining to hear the distant sound of the freeway, since that would prove to me that no nuclear device had fallen while I slept.
Those dreams of an atom bomb weren’t the worst ones, though. The worst dream—I still shudder when I remember it—was of a flash of light coming in the window over my head and slamming into the opposite wall. This was the dream I would wake from, screaming.
This went on for weeks. I questioned my unconscious in every way I knew. What was wrong? Would it tell me? But my own personal unconscious was silent.
I went to the doctor. She gave me a thorough checkup, found nothing physically wrong, and advised a therapist. She handed me a referral. I put this aside. I was puzzled. I didn’t feel that this was a psychological problem. And if it wasn’t a physical one, it was something . . . unknown.
Then, one night, I had that nightmare of the light flashing in the window, slamming into the wall, over and over, me waking with a scream each time. This couldn’t go on. Not only was I getting no sleep, but neither was my poor husband.
So I called the therapist. By coincidence, she’d had a cancellation that day. I went in and explained my situation. “It’s some trauma from your childhood,” she said, soothingly.
No, no, no, I said. I have a very good relationship with my unconscious. When I ask it a question, it answers. This time, when I ask, there is silence.
But the therapist, a very kind, intelligent, secular Jewish woman, didn’t know me. So she just nodded, but was unable to keep a look of disbelief from crossing her face.
Weeks went by. The dreams continued. My writing continued. I had yet to make a connection between the two.
The therapy continued. Uselessly, in my opinion, though I liked the therapist very much.
Then, one night, I had another dream. It was of a terrified, miserable black and white cat in a spotlight. He was a young male, and he looked at me imploringly. It was a nightmare. But it was a new kind of nightmare, one I had never had before.
I woke up, and I thought, “Who was that cat?”
As it happened, there was another therapy session that day. But the therapist could make nothing of the cat either. I had never had a young male cat, let alone one that was black and white. I had never even known such a cat.
Truly despairing that I would ever be free of those horrible nightmares, and wondering if I would have to set up a different bed so my husband could get some sleep, I headed to our local swimming pool for a swim to clear my head.
In the parking lot, I posted on Facebook a description of the nightmare of light coming in the window, asking if anyone had ever had anything similar, and if so, what it had meant.
While I was swimming, the cat from my dream kept coming into my head.
Why?
When I got out, and back to the car, I absently checked my Facebook page. A friend, a scholar of psychic history, had suggested I look into epigenetic trauma.
Idly I googled it. Epigenetic trauma. Unmastered pain passed down genetically to the next generation.
A black cat.
No, I thought. It can’t be. I couldn’t be. But just in case, I called my mother from my cell phone, there in the parking lot. I felt a bit silly meaning to ask her what kind of a cat had died in that bombing, in, so I thought, Tokyo, so long ago.
When she didn’t answer, I was a little relieved. I didn’t leave a message. But when I got home, there was a message on my landline’s answering machine. “Did you call me? Did you call me?”
My mother. Who usually ignored my phone calls. I rang her back.
“It wasn’t important, Mother. Just a silly question. What kind of cat was it who died, you remember, the night the Americans bombed and you lost your jewelry?”
“Oh,” she said. “It was a young male. Black and white.” Then she giggled.
That put me on high alert. My mother giggles when a particularly painful idea occurs to her. It’s her first line of defense.
“Good thing I ducked,” she said, still giggling.
What?
WHAT?
“Oh yes,” she said. “I was looking out the window, you know, in the little hut where your aunt and grandmother and I lived in Kobe, and I saw the bombers coming straight for us. So I ducked, and the bomb went right over my head, into the wall behind me. It set the house on fire, of course. We got out, but the three cats died.”
There was a pause while I digested this. “Mother,” I finally said carefully. “If I call you tomorrow, will you tell me the whole story again so that I can take notes?”
“Of course!” she said breezily. And she did. I did. I looked at the notes after with astonishment. There was no doubt about it. I was having her dream.
My therapist was aghast. She didn’t believe it was possible. I brought the notes in to show her. I told her about the friend I called to make sure I remembered correctly what I had known about the story. He, a writer and a Western secular atheist, was equally aghast. “Oh my God,” he said, “you definitely told me it was when the firebombing happened in Tokyo. I know because I told you to write it down. I made notes myself in case I ever wanted to write about it.”
I didn’t know about Kobe. I didn’t know about the little wooden hut. And I certainly didn’t know about a little girl staring out the window at the American bomber plane sending a bomb shooting over her head into the wall behind her.
I do now, though.
Shaken, my therapist had to admit there was something there. “Have you had the dream since?” she asked, almost frightened.
No. I hadn’t had the dream since, I said. And I never had it again.
“But there’s more,” I said. “I looked up the bombing of Kobe, and the anniversary was the day I called you because I couldn’t take the nightmares anymore.”
We were both silent then. There was nothing more to be said.
I never had that dream again. And as the weeks went on, and I finished the book I was writing, it slowly began to dawn on me, ‘dawn’ in just the way light starts faintly in the sky until the whole of the landscape before one is in the light.
My mother was in Japan during the war. The Americans bombed my mother, and killed her cat. She knew the atom bombs had been dropped nearby. And she chose to become an American. It was safe. Be on the winning side.
My narrator. My hero. I was writing my mother’s trauma.
It was the cat who told me what I was writing about. The cat who helped me master it so it didn’t have to be passed down one more time.
And was it my imagination? My mother seemed so much calmer now. Even my brothers noticed it. Was it just the mellowing of age? Or had that old friend, trauma, finally been released to go on its own way?