“Where shall we go?” he asked her when at last she stood beside him and reached for the baby.
“Where can we go?” she asked simply. “There is no escape when the earth heaves.”
They stood, waiting, their faces to the sea. He held Jiro hard. But Jiro was not crying. He, too, was looking at the swollen ocean. And then Tama gave one moan of horror and put her hand to her mouth. The sea was gathering near the horizon into one great wave, no, not so much a wave, as a tide, a great bank of water, stretching across the surface of the ocean. There was no crest upon the wave. It was simply there, immense and dark, lifting against the sky.
“It can’t reach us,” Tama whispered.
“It will cover the lower city,” he answered, and felt his gorge rise in him to make him sick. But he could not turn his head away. On it came, seeming motionless and as though it were simply swelling more huge. But in reality it was rolling toward the shore at greatest speed, gathering the waters with it as it came. Far below them they could see people running out of their houses and climbing the hills everywhere — away from the sea.
“It always comes quickly,” Tama said.
He had never seen her like this — so still. He did not know whether or not she was afraid. He wanted to run, to escape somehow, but she held him there.
Then the wave struck. There was still no crest until the instant when it crashed with such a roar as shook the whole island. Then it broke and surged in a mass of foam. Houses and streets disappeared. The whole sea seemed to have rushed in.
“This may sweep as far as my father’s house,” Tama said in a low voice.
They watched. And more horrible than the onward rush was this next thing, this outward backward moving of the same tide, which seemed to suck out to sea in its enormous flood houses, people, trees, everything it could reach. The whole island indeed seemed to be moving out to sea.
I-wan groaned and buried his face in Jiro’s shoulder. And at that instant the earth shook under his feet. He heard rocks crashing down the hillside and he put out his arm for Tama. Even at this moment her body was firm and strong.
“Our rock will not move,” she said. “That is only loose rock. And there are the fields above us — not rocks.”
It was true. Above them lay a valley running almost to the top of the mountain and because a small stream ran through it, it had been terraced for rice fields on both sides.
He felt once more the sickening unsteadiness of the earth swaying beneath him.
“The wave is coming again,” Tama said, “but it will not be so great.”
He heard it strike, this time a lesser roar, but he did not look up. Jiro clung to him, his arms about his father’s head. Still he did not cry, and the small child was sleeping. I-wan remembered how Bunji had spoken of Japanese sleep, how nothing waked them, used as they were to noise and movement in babyhood, upon their mothers’ backs.
There was a soft slithering sound, a loud cracking of falling wood, and the sound of tearing paper. He looked up. With surprisingly little noise and less dust the house had fallen into a heap.
But before he had time to cry his dismay, Tama said, “There, it is over. And we are alive.”
She turned her back on the ruined house. Only then did she sit down. The sea, full of wreckage, was subsiding, and now the wind was beginning once more. He felt his legs begin to tremble.
“I have seen much worse earthquakes,” Tama said. She wiped her face with her sleeve and then uncovered her bosom and began to feed her child. He sat down on the box beside her and let the maid take Jiro from him. Now that it was over sweat was pouring down his whole body. He could feel himself wet under his clothes.
“It is worse than anything I have ever seen,” he said.
“Oh, there are far worse,” she repeated.
He looked at her. She was sitting there as calmly as though the house which she loved were not in a heap behind her.
“Now what shall we do?” he asked, after a moment.
“Rest a while — and then see if my father’s house is harmed,” she said.
A man in a short blue coat came climbing up the hill and appeared among a clump of bamboos. It was a ricksha puller from her father’s house. He bowed before them.
“I have been sent,” he said, “to see how you are.”
“My father and mother?” Tama asked.
“All is safe,” he replied. “The gate house is fallen and part of the kitchen, and the garden we do not know, but the main part of the house is safe and no one was even hurt except the young mistress who was in the kitchen and was held by a beam over her thigh. But she is now resting and in less pain. The ceremonial teahouse is not touched.”
“Ah, how fortunate we are!” Tama cried.
They rose and stood for a moment and I-wan could not but turn and look at what a little while ago had been his home. Tama’s eyes followed his.
“We can easily build it again,” she said.
“Not here,” he said, not knowing why, except it seemed not safe ever to build his home here again. But Tama insisted.
“Yes, here. The sea reached for us and could not get us. It is a good place to build again.”
He was too shaken to argue it with her and he followed her, carrying Jiro, down the hill by the way the man led because the road was gone. And behind them came the maid, her arms full of whatever she thought precious enough to be taken. She had said nothing from first to last.
He never forgot that day. The safety of the Muraki house, the comfort of a roof standing over their heads and of food hot and ready to be eaten, the quiet and the kindness — these were miracle enough. But unforgettable above all was the miracle of silence — Mr. Muraki’s silence as he walked about his ruined garden where the streams had raced over broken walls and had swept over tended mossy slopes and torn them away and uprooted the dwarf trees as priceless as any curio, Bunji’s silence over his young wife’s broken thigh, Setsu’s silence in her own pain — I-wan was never to know Setsu well, but her eyes, fine eyes in a plain face, he never forgot — the silence of the people on the streets whose houses and relatives had been swept out to sea, the silence of the little clerk in his office, solitary now that his brother was dead — this silence he never forgot.
And the next day everything had begun again, the building of houses and the cleaning away of wreckage and the putting up of the torn sea walls. Everyone worked as though at an old task, often done. And Tama said, “Now that we have to build again anyway, we may as well make the house bigger.”
He was ashamed of his own question. “But if it happens again — and again?”
“That is as it will be. We can always build again,” she answered.
He had not the face to complain of anything for himself when all over the city people were going back to wreckage and ruin. And those missing who had been swept out to sea…. He was drawn again and again during those days to the part of the city which lay on the shore.
“Are you building your house again exactly where it was?” he asked an old fisherman.
The man turned small somber black eyes upon him.
“Where else?” he answered. “My father’s house was here and my grandfather’s.”
“But if the same thing happens again?” I-wan asked.
“It will happen again — we know that,” the man said.
This took on a meaning for I-wan that was far beyond what he could then express. It seemed to him he saw Tama far more clearly than he ever had before. Beneath her woman’s ways and her gaiety there was something desperate and resolute, something that had nothing to do with what she might wish to have or to do. So, beneath the playfulness of these people who knew how to enjoy as children enjoy, was also this dogged resolve which made them able to endure anything if they must.