In a Flash

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Carolina sucks in her breath, and her hands fly to her face.

  Pessa said a servant packed this suitcase for her. What servant did such a thing? Cruel to Pessa, cruel to the bird.

  “We’ll bury him,” I say quietly. “When the other guard comes back. The nice one.”

  “Wrap him in the white paper. He can be a mummy.”

  “Good idea,” I say. “Do you want the tiara as your treat?”

  “The guards would hate me if I wore a tiara. It’s better not to have a treat at all.”

  I wrap the bird in the white paper and stuff the coat and tiara back into the suitcase. I go to close it, but see a cloth pocket glued inside the lid. I pull out newsprint. It’s Mickey Mouse, “Great Adventures.” Everyone loves Mickey Mouse. Papà read those stories aloud to us back in Italy. Even Nonna laughed. I remember this very issue.

  Carolina puts her hand on the back of my neck. “Is it something else bad?”

  I take deep breaths to keep from crying. “It’s funny. We can read it later.” I put the newsprint away. “Change your clothes.”

  “But you can’t change yours. You don’t have any.”

  “I don’t feel dirty yet.”

  “Yes, you do. That’s the real reason we opened Pessa’s suitcase. You’ve always said being dirty is disgusting.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “If you don’t have clean clothes, I don’t want them, either.”

  I give a small smile. “All right.”

  “The bird is sad,” says Carolina. “Sad enough that it’s time for your treat.” She smiles. How she can look so genuinely happy, I have no idea. I force a smile in return.

  Carolina opens her suitcase. She lifts out her clothes. There on the bottom is a photo. Nonna.

  I clutch it to my chest. “How…”

  “I was afraid the red box wouldn’t fit into your suitcase. So I took out the most important thing.” She shrugs. “Then you fit the box in….”

  “You did good.” I kiss her cheeks. “But promise me, Karo-chan, promise me that you won’t keep other secrets from me.”

  “Even good ones?”

  “You must tell me everything, Karo-chan. I mean it.”

  “I promise.”

  Footsteps click on the floor below. We hurry down the stairs. It’s my favorite guard. “Please,” I say, “we need to go outside. We need to bury someone.”

  “Who?” he asks in alarm.

  I unwrap our mummy bird.

  His face softens. “Go bury it in the farmer’s field. I’ll watch you from the doorway.”

  We bow, then walk out into the onion field and squat between rows. The earth near the plants is soft. I pull out three onions to claw a hole big enough for the mummy. Carolina places the bird in. We cover it together. I set the onions in the path for the farmer to find.

  “We should sing something,” says Carolina. “My teachers say singing is a way to give someone else energy to help them on their way.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Do you know ‘Children’s Greengrocer’?” she asks.

  “I sang that in third grade, too.”

  So we sing about three children whose father has gone to war. They push a cart to market to buy the things they need to stock their family store. The cart is heavy, so they have to work together, and they are proud and happy to do it.

  “And now,” I say, “because this bird is so sad, you get another treat.”

  “Not my onions!”

  I jump up. A bony farmer stands behind us. He threatens us with a long piece of wood. I bow to him. Carolina bows to him. “We are not bothering your onions, honorable farmer,” I say. “We are singing.”

  “I heard you.” The farmer picks up the three onions. “If you didn’t mean to eat my onions, why did you pull them up?”

  “We buried a bird,” says Carolina.

  “A bird?”

  “It was dead,” says Carolina. “Your onion field is a good place for a bird to rest.”

  “What kind of bird?”

  “A yellow one.”

  “A pet?”

  “It belonged to a rich woman,” says Carolina. “She gave it to us.”

  “She gave you a dead bird? Not a nice gift.” The edges of the farmer’s mouth twitch. He’s fighting a smile! “All right, my songbirds. You have a choice. Run back to where you came from. Empty-handed. Or sing to my wife and take these onions away in exchange.”

  I stare at him in astonishment.

  Carolina bows. I quick bow, too.

  “We prefer the second choice,” I say.

  I look back toward the house. The guard’s not standing outside watching us. I look ahead. The farmhouse is really close. It won’t take long to sing to the farmer’s wife. And this guard never gets angry; that’s why he’s my favorite. But if he does, the farmer can explain. And Carolina wants to go, I can tell. I want to go, too. It will be so good to be with someone other than military people even for a little while. I calm myself. We’ll be all right.

  We follow the farmer to his house, and he calls his wife to the door. We sing to the clearly dumbfounded woman. The farmer tells her about the dead bird that someone gave us as a gift. And now he smiles freely.

  The woman beckons us inside. She walks to a window where a bird sits in a cage. “A white-eyed warbler,” she says. Green and yellow, with black legs, and a white ring around each eye. It’s lovely. The bird snaps. Insect wings stick out from its beak. Ha! That’s why she can keep a pet—it doesn’t cost anything to feed it.

  As we walk back, Carolina swings the onions by the green stalks. “Do you think we can visit them again?”

  “I’ll ask our favorite guard.”

  He still isn’t watching from the doorway. Good. He won’t even realize we left the field.

  Oh dear, there’s a truck out front! I run inside. Our guard argues with a soldier who has Carolina’s suitcase in his hand.

  “Lella!” screams Carolina. She grabs her suitcase.

  I don’t see Pessa’s suitcase anywhere.

  “Get into the truck,” says the soldier to Carolina. “Now!” He looks at me. “You, too.”

  “See? They came back,” says our guard.

  The soldier glares at us. “Go!”

  3 FEBRUARY 1944, NAGOYA, JAPAN

  We stand in line, shivering. February snow flurries cloud the windows. They come faster and thicker by the minute.

  “Attention!” shouts the guard.

  “Good morning, honorable soldier,” we murmur in Japanese, bowing from the waist.

  The guard wears black boots, a tan uniform, and a helmet. He calls out the roster. We listen carefully because his pronunciation of Western names is garbled. When he says my name, I answer, “Yes,” loud and fast. Since Carolina and I were brought to this internment camp, the number of people has grown to nearly fifty, all Italians with the misfortune of living in Japan at this horrible time. Italy surrendered last September, and in October declared war on Germany. At least Italy hasn’t declared war on Japan—yet.

  The guard counts us, but this morning, he counts only the adults. That feels ominous. Maybe he’s overlooking the children because we can’t escape. We’re too hungry, too cold. Besides, where would we go? It can’t be that he’s overlooking us because he assumes we’ll die.

  “At ease.” The guard announces today’s job assignments.

  I put my white arms around Carolina from behind. They look like bones. Carolina hugs herself. Her arms are nearly blue. Inside her shirt, Lella makes an extra layer against the cold. It’s not enough. The other children’s arms are hidden—not by long sleeves but by the fact that they wear multiple shirts and at least one shirt is large enough that they can keep their arms inside it. This morning they look like a waddle of penguins. />
  Each person came with a suitcase, except Carolina and me. We have only hers, and when we arrived here, we found it had been ransacked. The only things left were her deck of cards, Lella, and the photograph of Nonna. And someone had thrown in the newsprint of Mickey Mouse from Pessa’s suitcase. Anything that anyone else could use was gone.

  No one here acknowledges that we have nothing. We’re outsiders. The other Italians band together in the groups they’ve traveled with since being taken. The ambassador and Pessa looked alert when we first appeared. I thought they might band together with us, and maybe the ambassador could help us find Papà. But after I told Pessa her suitcase had been stolen, she didn’t come near us. The ambassador sometimes looks at us almost apologetically, but he stays right by Pessa’s side. I don’t care. They sleep in a different building anyway.

  At first, not having extra clothes didn’t matter; the weather was warm. Sure, we were dirty because we couldn’t wash our only outfits, and being filthy mortified me. Our hair smelled sour, moldy. But after a while, filth was nothing compared to hunger. Then the rains came, hard and long. The air inside our houses dripped. The guards insisted that we do all chores in the central building. So we dashed from our building through the rain to the central building, then went all day in wet clothes with teeth chattering. Others changed out of their wet clothes. Carolina and I couldn’t. The others said they had nothing to spare. No one had packed for winter. Somehow, they had thought they’d be sent home to Italy before winter. After all, no one is military. Some people are diplomats from the Kyoto consulate; many are scholars. They expected to be treated with traditional Japanese courtesy. When they weren’t, they closed in on themselves.

  These days, they won’t look at Carolina and me—the have-nots.

  I think about Papà a lot. We are somewhere near Nagoya. I overheard that from the guards. In school we studied the history of Nagoya, but all I know about it today is that it was bombed last year by the Americans at the same time Tokyo was bombed, and it’s far from Tokyo: four hundred kilometers. The prisoner-of-war camp where Papà is cook is close to Tokyo. It’s the next train stop after Yokohama. So Papà is far away.

  But I still feel him. I sense him working all the time, but unable to sleep because of worry about us. I see his face as he looks at my bare arms now. I hear him scolding me for being stubborn and not putting my arms inside my shirt.

  I can’t obey the Papà in my head, though. Not about this. That’s because I always hold to the ambassador’s words about strategy. My bare arms are strategy. I insist on touching Carolina constantly. That means that one arm needs to be out in the air. Oh, I could take turns nestling one arm at a time inside my shirt. But I want everyone to see my cold arms. Let them relent and give up a shirt.

  Carolina has become more stubborn than me. She keeps her arms out in the air, too, though she’s so skinny now that both arms fit inside her shirt. Even when she’s napping, she leaves her arms open to the air, and she naps a lot. She just lies down on the ground and sleeps.

  As the guard’s eyes pass over us now, Carolina says something under her breath to Lella. At the same time, she reaches one hand under the hem of her shirt, and I know she’s caressing the rag doll’s foot. This is a habit. We’ve all developed habits. At night people open their suitcases, and their chests relax as they fondle a familiar object. Owning something helps.

  So when the stealing began, it felt inevitable. As things disappear from suitcases, people blame the guards. But they look at each other with narrowed eyes. Since the first thefts, people wear all their clothes. And layers help against the cold.

  The guard says, “Dismissed.”

  A few adults gather for calisthenics before breakfast, though most go wait in line at the toilets. Men first, then women, then children. That’s the order for weekly baths, too. If we need a toilet before our allotted time, we have to wake up earlier.

  I’m in the toilet line. When it’s my turn, I place my feet in marked spots and squat over a pit. The spots are farther apart than at school, too far for Carolina, so she uses the chamber pot. When we first came, I wanted to use it, too, but the guard said no.

  I’m weak today. The weaker I grow, the more I’m sure I’ll fall in.

  The girl next in line whispers, “Don’t look down.”

  I know she’s trying to be nice, and I don’t look down now, but I will have to look down later. That’s because it’s my job to empty Carolina’s chamber pot into the pit. Big white worms writhe in the dark down there.

  Now I join Carolina in the line for “coffee,” made from roasted corn. A man, Antonio, is in front of us in line. He coughs and brushes stray fallen hairs off his shoulder, and that one slight action makes him sway. The fingers of his left hand trill the air. He looks down at his hand, and I see him move his lips, as though he’s talking to himself. He puts his hand behind him and trills the fingers more. He lifts his hand to the side of his face and pulls on his fingers.

  A woman, Virginia, stands in front of him, and jerks his hand back down to his side, then faces forward again.

  “I can’t feel my fingers,” he says in Italian.

  “Hush, Antonio,” says Virginia, without looking back.

  Antonio swings his head to both sides. Terror twists his face, but he keeps quiet. No one wants to attract a guard’s attention.

  He’s a big man, but he’s sick.

  I look at Carolina’s blue arms. No one here has a calendar, so it’s easy to lose track of time. But the radios were loud on the second anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Carolina’s birthday is 7 December, the day before the bombing. So we know she has turned nine. My birthday is at the end of February, and if I’ve kept time correctly, it’s now 3 February. I’m almost twelve. I should have a lot more strength than she has, yet I’m so tired. How much worse it must be for her. “Carolina,” I say into her ear in Italian. We always use it to remind the others that we’re Italian just like them. “Put your arms inside your shirt.” She doesn’t do it. “Now,” I say fiercely. “Or else. Why won’t you do what I say?”

  “I do what you do.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “No, it’s not. You know things.”

  My heart stops. My little sister thinks I know how to get through this. She counts on me. Where did all that talk about the two of us taking care of each other go? Doesn’t she listen to Papà in her head the way I do? “I know nothing, Carolina.”

  She punches me in the belly. “Don’t say that. Say the right things, or don’t talk.”

  I want to punch her back. But the guard will notice.

  After “coffee,” we help make the rice gruel for breakfast. Then all of us eat in a circle on the floor. Some adults used to stand, but they got too weak. And no one is allowed to lean on the wall. So everyone sits, and the weakest lean on other people.

  After breakfast Carolina threads needles while I huddle with the women and darn socks. Japanese soldiers hate holes in socks. So boxes of holey socks appear each day. We sew fast, pausing only to exhale onto our frigid fingers; the amount of food for dinner depends on the number of socks we darn.

  A Japanese boy passes by, sweeping with his long broom. “Want thistle?” he whispers to me in Japanese. “Mugwort? Chickweed?”

  “We got diarrhea the last time we ate that stuff,” I say, and keep stitching.

  “I know what you want. A kimono.”

  A kimono with big sleeves. A boy’s kimono would be big enough that I could fold Carolina inside with me. “I have nothing to trade.”

  “Your sister has cards.”

  Carolina jerks her head up from her task of threading needles. She looks at me and mouths, “NO.” She fingers her cards every night. My eyes plead with her. She looks away. Stubborn.

  “All right,” I say to the boy.

  “Bring them tomorrow morning.�
�

  In the late afternoon we all go to our houses. As we walk, I look for ways to escape so we can go find Papà. I do this every day.

  Carolina and I live in a house that holds sixteen people. The downstairs has a room for the police in the daytime, a corridor with a storeroom and toilet pits, and a room with a table and benches, where we eat the evening meal. Then there’s the kitchen with an oven, the only warm place. The second floor consists of a large room that would take eight tatami to cover the floor. We sleep in rows burrowed under futons to keep warm; the windows don’t shut well.

  The best place in the house is the room behind the kitchen, where the couple whose last name is Nishino lives. They guard us at night—a strange idea, for they’re old. They walk bent like cupped hands, and they don’t have the heart to be harsh. They talk with Carolina and me at night. I would have thought they liked us, except I don’t count on anyone liking us anymore.

  When we get to our house today, the water in the bottles to use at dinner is frozen. We set them by the fire to melt. The food basket holds four eggs and a can of sardines, for sixteen of us. We boil the eggs, then scoop them out to make rice in the same water.

  Rita is using the handle of a spoon to cut the eggs into quarters when her husband, Xeno, comes up behind her. “Adults should get bigger portions,” he says.

  Rita stands with the spoon in her hand. I stop stirring the rice so I can hear every word. Finally she says, “We always divide it equally.”

  “Adults need more.”

  Rita puts the spoon down. “Do you want the children to starve?”

  “Children need less.”

  Rita stares at the eggs. My stomach squeezes so hard, I nearly yelp.

  “Shame,” calls out Silvia. “Shame, shame, shame on us for even discussing this.”

  We finish cooking in silence. But when Rita fills everyone’s bowls, Carolina’s and mine hold less. Even less than Mariella’s, the only other child in our house. She’s older than me by a couple of years—but still. At least Carolina’s and mine are equal. At least I don’t have to fight myself over whether or not to give her some of mine. At least that.