The Diplomat’s Daughter

by Karin Tanabe

  “I promise,” Christian said with a compassion that surprised him.

  In front of car 12, it was the same scene as in front of car 4: women and children, and INS agents wrangling them. They all wore tags that had been affixed with string instead of shoelaces. No one had boarded yet, and Christian could no longer see Klimek, who he was sure had gone back to the Home the second they were out of his sight.

  Christian tried to make small talk with Inge, but she was more interested in crying than talking, so they stood there, letting themselves slowly freeze from the toes up. After fifteen minutes, their breath was forming clouds so thick they lingered in front of them like cigarette smoke before dissipating, and Christian’s hands, his right still intertwined with Inge’s bare left one, had gone numb.

  “Sorry we don’t have gloves,” said Christian. “Braque asked us to leave them for the other children since we’re going to Texas. We won’t need them there. It’s very hot.”

  “I didn’t have gloves anyway,” Inge admitted. “I did when I arrived, but I traded them to Nadia Sitko for her jelly bears.”

  Christian was going to ask what a jelly bear was and how Nadia Sitko had smuggled them into the Home, but Inge’s lip was already wobbling.

  When an INS agent finally directed them to, they boarded the train, which smelled like sweat even though it was still empty and 26 degrees outside.

  Inge and Christian were the only ones not laden down with suitcases and trunks, so for the first hour they just sat and watched the chaos, trying to stay out of the way, sitting tightly together on the dirty cloth seats. Women screamed in German at their children, who ran through the train banging into the luggage and each other. Before anyone was settled, the train was well out of Milwaukee, heading southwest for the trip through Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and then into East Texas before turning due south.

  For another hour, Inge continued to sit next to Christian, not talking, not answering him anymore, but still holding his hand tightly. Then, finally, when they were approaching Springfield, Illinois, and the still beauty of Lake Michigan was far behind them, she leaned over and fell asleep against his shoulder. She would stay like that for the next three hours, her mouth slightly open, her head bobbing off him only to be placed gently back on by Christian’s careful hands.

  As the landscape turned from snowy and wet to just cold and then less cold, Christian’s thoughts returned to how easy his life had been until then. He’d been preternaturally good at everything a teenager in Wisconsin needed to be good at. He was book-smart enough, but not too smart to draw attention, he drove a nice car that he worked on with his dad even when it didn’t need work, he excelled in sports, and he was very well liked by girls and their mothers. And because of the success of Franz Lange, usually by their fathers, too.

  But the way he was driven out of town by FBI agents—it had changed everything. He knew that people in River Hills now believed that his parents had been arrested as foreign enemies, which meant he was implicated as well.

  He was only a semester away from graduating from high school and had plans to attend the University of Wisconsin and maybe walk on to their football team. He was going to apply in the spring, knowing that he’d be accepted handily. His father had been donating money to the football team for years, and Christian’s grades were strong enough even without his father’s money. But now, college seemed out of reach. Would he even be allowed in after the country had declared him an enemy?

  He tried to let his confidence in his parents’ innocence rock him back to sleep, but halfway through Missouri he heard the word, and he knew sleep would evade him for hours.

  Hitler. It was said once, and then five minutes later he heard it again. Then again. The conversation was in German, but he could understand it perfectly.

  “There will be many who support the Führer there.”

  “I know,” said a woman diagonally across the aisle from him while her very young children climbed all over the seats. “My husband is one of them. He was able to write to me and said that when Fritz Kuhn is released from prison, if there is still war, he will be transferred to Crystal City, too.”

  Christian had known who Fritz Kuhn was before the FBI agents had accused his father of writing to him. He was the head of the German American Bund. Christian first heard him on the radio when he spoke at Madison Square Garden in 1939. He had dubbed President Roosevelt’s New Deal “the Jew Deal.” Franz, listening with him, had described Kuhn as one of the biggest idiots that Germany had ever produced. “And we have produced plenty,” he remembered his father saying. Since his speech at the Garden, Kuhn had been arrested and imprisoned for embezzlement and tax evasion and the Bund had lost the following it had in the late 1930s. But that was not the case for everyone, it seemed.

  Christian tried to ignore the conversation as he looked out on the America he had never seen. The train’s speed transformed it into brilliant streaks before his eyes.

  At night when the children were quiet and Christian could hear only the mothers’ rhythmic breathing and the train’s thundering wheels, he let the fear of what lay ahead of him set in. He squeezed Inge’s little hand, this time letting her comfort him. If a child of seven and a half can endure all this, then I better be able to, he thought to himself. But then the sun came up and the babies started to cry for food, and he suddenly felt not very different from them.

  After thirty-one hours of travel, the train was seventy miles outside San Antonio and the landscape was bone-dry. This was winter in a part of the planet where the soil felt like sand between your fingers and the air lay hot and dense in your lungs.

  “I don’t like it here,” said Inge, when she finally woke up. She pressed her snub nose flat against the glass. “It’s all the same color. It looks like a place that will make me sneeze.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” said Christian, as the world they knew went out of focus for good.

  “Give the little one this candy,” said the woman who had been talking about Hitler, offering a slightly melted butterscotch in a foil wrapper. “She is your sister?”

  “Yes,” said Inge, before Christian could say no. She reached out and grabbed the candy, shoving it in her mouth. Christian nudged her, and she got up to give the woman a hug of thanks.

  For the last thirty minutes, Christian wrestled with his own anxiety while he tried to persuade Inge there was nothing to worry about.

  And then it was over. They were in Texas, and the doors opened with a loud, tired groan onto the San Antonio train station. Christian looked out the window, with Inge peeking out from behind him. Together, they saw that the platform was packed with American men in uniform.

  “Are they all here for us?” she asked, climbing over his knees.

  “They can’t be,” said Christian, trying not to stare at the men, who all seemed to be around his age. Instead of the exhaustion and dread that were caked onto Christian’s face, they appeared buoyed by the glamour of the uniform, the heroics of war, perhaps even the probable death that was looming for them.

  “Follow me,” an agent said, nudging Christian’s foot with his own. He ushered them off the train and told them to walk as fast as they could, giving Inge a firm push forward when she paused to look at the stained-glass windows of the station.

  “I want to see my mother,” she said, startled.

  “You will. She’s going to be waiting for you,” said the agent.

  They passed the soldiers, who eyed them suspiciously, and were hustled to a parking lot.

  “If these soldiers find out all these broads are Germans, they’ll harass them all the way out the gate,” he heard one INS agent say to another. In the distance Christian could see an Army bus and people standing in front of it.

  “Wait here. Your parents are coming,” the guard told them, but Inge was already off and running.

  Christian could see his mother, one of two women in the group of fathers. She’d grown visibly pregnant instead of just soft around the midd
le. She beckoned for him to run to her, and without thinking, he did.

  “You’re finally here! My baby. My always baby. They promised me you were in good hands at that orphanage in Milwaukee, but I cried myself to sleep over it every night,” she said, her arms tight around him. “Were you okay? Do you promise me you were all right? No one tried to hurt you?” Christian thought about his concussion and the shoe thrown at his head with a pitcher’s gusto every day and said that he was fine.

  “But I wish they had let me go with you instead,” he said, relaxing into his mother’s hug. “Was it awful where you were? Were you with Dad?”

  “All that is for another day,” she said. “You’re safe, and you’re here with me. That’s all it takes for me to feel happy again.” She let her son go and explained that she and Inge’s mother had shared their worry night after night. “But I knew you would take care of the little girl on the train. That’s the kind of heart you have. I told Elke Anders that you would.”

  “That’s him, there,” Christian heard Inge saying behind him in German. “Big kraut. He held my hand for two days on the train and only let go when I asked him to because someone gave me a candy.”

  “Don’t say kraut!” her mother replied, shocked.

  “Jack Walter said I am little kraut and Christian is big kraut and now that we are gone from the Home there is no kraut left, so who will he call kraut?”

  Her mother smacked her hand and told her never to say that word again. Then she walked over to Christian and threw her arms around him the way his own mother had just done. With her thick brown hair and thin frame, she looked like a movie star in shabby clothing.

  “You are an angel, Christian Lange. Inge’s angel,” she said, in tears. “Helene, your boy . . .” She touched his face. “I’m so thankful.”

  “I was happy to watch her,” said Christian, who was soon transferred from her arms back to his mother’s arms. “She gave me something to think about on the trip.”

  “How are you feeling?” he asked his mother as they all made their way onto the bus.

  “I’m tired. My back is sore. But without you here, it’s been this baby who has kept my sanity.”

  Since the night the agents had come to the house, Christian had grown even more thankful for the baby. At first, he’d been shocked, and distressed at what a baby might do to the calm of their lives, but now he appreciated the hope it was giving his parents. Something good for the Langes, despite what was happening outside the womb.

  “What’s the camp like?” he heard Inge ask her mother as they settled onto the old bus’s vinyl-covered bench seats.

  “Oh, it’s all right, Schätzen. There’s a swimming pool and lots of other children to play with. You’ll like that. And since it’s so warm here, you can start swimming very soon.”

  “Like summer camp,” Inge said, smiling.

  “Yes, Schätzen. That’s what it’s like. Summer camp in March.”

  CHAPTER 5

  EMI KATO

  AUGUST 1942–MARCH 1943

  Norio had explained to Keiko that as much as the Japanese Embassy had pleaded with the U.S. State Department, the Americans would not let her and Emi stay at the Greenbrier hotel alone. The American government was removing all their staff—the FBI agents, the State Department employees—from West Virginia as soon as the Japanese diplomats sailed in June. The only place where Emi and Keiko could go besides prison was an internment camp. And the government had decided that they’d be going to a largely female camp in Texas.

  “But why can’t we just go back to our apartment in Washington?” a very weakened Emi asked her mother from her hospital bed.

  “Your father said it’s not an option. They don’t trust us to be there without surveillance. We have to go to one of these camps.”

  “But what is an internment camp exactly?” Emi’s chest still felt like there was a hot iron on it and despite the nurses’ constant doses of medicine and fluid, she was still coughing up blood at night. Her breathing was very labored and she couldn’t walk to the bathroom without having to stop to rest—how was she going to make it to Texas?

  “I don’t know what an internment camp is precisely,” said Keiko, “but I know that the Japanese-Americans are being sent to them. Whatever it is, it won’t be for long. And we won’t leave until you’re better. That they promised me.”

  A week later, Emi was told that her father would be coming to the hospital but that he wasn’t permitted to be in the same room as her. He would stand outside the building and she would be allowed to wave at him from her window.

  They waved for ten minutes, Emi crying as she held up a piece of paper that read, ai shiteru, otōsan. I love you, father.

  “What if he doesn’t make it back to Japan? What if the boat is bombed? This will be the last time I ever saw him, through an American hospital window. Not even able to touch his hand,” said Emi through her coughs and sobs.

  “Don’t think that way,” said Keiko, with tears in her eyes. “Do not let war—or illness—turn you into a pessimist.”

  “I don’t think war is producing many optimists, Mother,” said Emi, watching her father get into a car.

  After one month in the hospital, the women were told that Emi was healthy enough for them to travel to the internment camp in Seagoville, Texas. They were assured that it would be a short stay and that they would soon head to Japan and be reunited with their family.

  The Kato women were used to long journeys, but they’d had the luck of always doing so when they were healthy. While Emi was no longer contagious, she still needed to take medicine for six more months and was a very weakened version of herself on their train ride down to Texas. The government officials had toyed with letting them travel to Texas alone, without FBI accompaniment, but in the end, they sent a sullen agent with them. In healthier times, the presence of the man would have bothered her immensely, being treated like a criminal when it was only her place of birth that was the problem, but Emi was barely awake for the entire journey. She absorbed the noises and the smells—children complaining about the hard bench seats, women eating noodle salad and days-old rice—but her eyes stayed closed, as her mother’s hand rested on her forehead, monitoring her temperature.

  When they finally arrived at the camp, the first thing they both noticed was the barbed wire surrounding the buildings.

  “But the buildings themselves are not bad looking,” said Keiko, smiling at her weak daughter. “It looks like an American college.”

  Emi stared at the long two- and three-level brick buildings that seemed to have grown out of the earth, as there was nothing else for miles around them but dirt, a water tower, and some dry, browning shrubs.

  “If you say so,” said Emi, following a man in a sand-colored cowboy hat who worked at Seagoville and was barking orders at them.

  Emi spent the first two weeks of their time in Seagoville in and out of sleep, still fighting the illness that had grounded them in the United States. On their fifteenth night there, her fever spiked, but by the next morning she had a clear head and a clear chest and was able to walk around the camp for the first time.

  “I hate it here,” Emi declared, sitting on her creaky twin-sized bed in their tiny stark room after her mother had taken her on a tour of the camp.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to like it,” said Keiko, sitting on her bed, which was less than three feet away from Emi’s.

  “What a small, unpleasant room,” said Emi. “I’m glad I’ve been asleep for two weeks. Do we know how much longer we’re here for?”

  “Your father and the embassy staff are doing their best to get us on the next boat to Japan. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. We have to travel with others who are repatriating. Thousands of others. We can’t just row there on our own, can we?” Keiko smoothed and folded her clothes, though they were already neatly folded and placed on the only shelf in the room.

  “Have I received any letters from Leo?” Emi asked. “You did send him
our address before we left the hospital? You promised you would.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Keiko. “But like I told you at the Homestead and at the Greenbrier, America has cut off mail exchanges with many countries. That must be the reason that the last letter you received from Leo was just after Pearl Harbor. And it’s a miracle that it made it through. You’re lucky it arrived at the embassy—and that Leo had the foresight to mail it there—before we were all sent away.”

  “But perhaps when we are back in Japan?” said Emi, reaching under her pillow for an old letter from Leo that she had received the month before the Pearl Harbor attack. “Then our letters might reach each other?”

  “Perhaps,” said Keiko, placing her clothes back on her shelf.

  Emi coughed again, her lungs rattling, and shook her head in disgust as she watched her mother try to occupy her time. “If I hadn’t fallen ill, we would already be back in Japan. Instead we are in a women’s correctional facility in awful Texas.”

  “Internment camp,” her mother corrected her.

  “The irony of that term!” Emi exclaimed, pushing her own unfolded clothes onto the floor. “Camp. Like someone would choose to be here so they might do a spot of canoeing.”

  “Emi, quiet down,” said Keiko. “You’re not well yet. Listen to your voice. You don’t even sound like yourself. And this acting out. It’s not like you, either.”

  “I heard you,” said Emi, her face defiant. “You thought I was asleep, but I heard you speaking to the woman next door. Setsuko something. She said that this camp, Seagoville, used to be a minimum-security federal prison. Then they just ripped down that sign and replaced it with one that said internment camp. So technically, we’re being jailed. We are in a prison.”

  “Emi, you should be onstage. Truly,” said Keiko, shaking her head at her child. “Are you really sick, or have you just been pretending to sleep for two weeks so you can eavesdrop on my conversations?”

  “Why are there so many women from South America?” Emi asked, ignoring her mother’s criticism. “Setsuko said she was from Peru. Why are they interned? It sounds like they weren’t even in this country until a few weeks ago.”