by Karin Tanabe
They walked past rows of little houses, which Christian thought looked more like garden sheds than homes. The roofs barely sloped and the brown walls looked very thin and nailed hastily together. Some people had tried to make their exteriors more cheerful, adding a few plants out front, while others had let their circumstances dictate and were treating their places like camping tents. When Christian reached his family’s house, it was obvious that they were in the second group.
They stepped inside, and his mother pointed to a suitcase by the door.
“Before I left Wisconsin, they let me go home, with an escort, to pack some of our things, your things. I have them here.” She brought Christian over to a large suitcase and unzipped the top. “I wasn’t able to bring much. Just clothes, really. But I did manage to bring your football. The one that was autographed by that boy you and your father like so much.” She dug through the top of the case and produced it. It needed some air but the Don Hutson signature was white and clear. Christian turned it over, fitting it between his thumb and pointer finger, ready to throw a pass to no one.
His mother leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. The small laugh and smile lines on her face that had barely been apparent in the fresh air of Wisconsin were creased more deeply, and her lips felt cracked.
“This place will age me five years in five months,” she said, sighing.
“I doubt we will be here for five months more, Mrs. Tomato Soup,” his father said, trying to cheer up his wife. He crossed the room and opened his arms for Christian to throw him the ball, which he did, even though the room wasn’t more than ten feet long.
“It’s not a very big space,” he said to Christian, trying futilely to mask his misery. “And we have to share it with another family. But we are surviving.”
“It’s awful is what it is, Franz,” said Helene, taking the ball out of his hands. “And for what?” she snapped, losing the composure she had been radiating since she picked up Christian at the station. “For eight thousand dollars sent in all innocence to Jutta? For lies told about you? I am sure it was Martin who made that convenient call to the FBI,” she said, her lip curling as she mentioned Franz’s deputy at Lange Steel. “It had to be. He saw the perfect opportunity to take your company. Report you as a Nazi and then Lange Steel is his. Your hard work. Your years of sacrifice. Now that you’re here, he’s free to take it all from you.”
“For the hundredth time, it wasn’t Martin,” said Franz. “He’s my oldest friend in America. He would never do such a thing. I’m sure we’ll have a letter from him any day now.”
“You keep believing that, Franz. Please, do. But it’s always the one just a notch below you who pulls you down.”
“It could have been someone in the neighborhood,” said Christian, remembering the cars moving slowly down their street when he left their house.
“Yes! Exactly,” said Franz. “It could have been.”
He put his hand around his son’s broad shoulder and said, “Come, I’ll show you around.” They turned the corner and he said, “Unfortunately, we all have to sleep in the same room. And your poor mother with the baby.” He shook his head at the two beds in front of him, both twin size, and said: “We only have two. Maybe they can bring us another one, or you and I can take turns sleeping on the floor. At least it’s warm here. It’s not like having to sleep on the floor in Wisconsin.”
They both looked down at the dusty floor, and neither said anything about the two lizards scampering under the first of the twin beds.
“Just tell me this is all their mistake,” said Christian, sitting down on the closest bed.
“Of course it is,” said his mother, who had followed them. “Do you believe we did this? That we are spying? Nazis? Sweetheart, you don’t really think that,” she said, growing visibly upset.
Christian and the rest of America had been hearing about the Nazis, and Nazi barbarity, for more than a decade. In the early thirties, since much of the campaign for what Hitler announced as a new world order was centered in Germany, Christian, though very young, had paid attention to it when it was in the news. He knew that Germany meant his family, him. He listened to the radio reports fearfully, but as he grew up, he went from being a little boy who was scared of something beyond his grasp, to a young man starting to understand the horrors. In the summer of 1942, Christian read an article—from the New York Times but reprinted in the Milwaukee Sentinel—that reported on a killing center in Poland, targeting Jews. He’d spoken about it with his father, who’d said that it was hard to know what to believe. The media, the American government, didn’t even seem to know. But at the end of 1942, when the Allies joined together to denounce the killing of the Jews in Europe by Nazi hands, Christian started to believe every word he read about Nazi atrocities. By 1943, he understood that even normal Germans were involved in the cruelty, but it still felt very far away.
Stuck in Crystal City, he was forced to confront what it meant to be a German. Maybe the FBI agents were right. Perhaps Jutta and her husband were Nazis. And what about on his father’s side? It was certainly possible. The young men would at least have to fight for Germany. And what did that mean? Killing the Allies, or worse.
“I don’t think you’re guilty,” Christian replied to his mother, honestly. “I just haven’t seen you since that night with the agents. You’ve never had a chance to explain. And now we’re here in this place.”
“There is nothing to explain,” said Helene. “Except a grave American mistake.”
Christian raised his eyebrows and reached for his mother’s hand. He believed her, but that did not change their circumstances. “What are we going to do, stuck in here?” he asked, looking around the cramped room.
“We are going to live our lives as well as we can. Nothing is forever. Certainly not this,” said Franz.
CHAPTER 7
CHRISTIAN LANGE
MARCH–APRIL 1943
A week later, Helene started to feel the baby kick. Christian was walking back from his second day at the German school when he saw his mother approaching. She had a smile on her face that belied her dismal surroundings. Christian had planned to tell her how his German abilities did not extend to writing essays in the language, but when he saw her happiness, he decided to delay the bad news. Within just a few days of his arrival, he’d learned why he couldn’t attend the American school. The elected spokesman for their side of the camp was intensely pro-German and anyone who sent their children to the American-style Federal School was deemed a traitor. There were whispers that one family’s food had been withheld for several days because their daughter, who spoke no German, enrolled there.
“Put your hand here,” Helene said when she’d reached Christian. She placed his right hand on the top of her stomach. She was wearing the dress that was given to women when they arrived, and Christian thought it made her look plain and homespun, definitely more Mrs. Tomato Soup than Mrs. Country Club.
They waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. Christian started to fidget, and his mother laughed at him. “Do you have somewhere to be? Wait to feel the baby.”
So they waited. Mothers walked by them and smiled, teenagers coming out of school slowed down and whispered, and finally, when Christian was about to pull his hand away, embarrassed, the baby kicked.
“I felt it!” he said, pressing his hand harder against his mother’s belly.
“I told you it would be worth the wait,” said Helene, her voice full of delight.
Christian thought of the tiny body inside his mother bursting with life. He imagined the growing organs, the heartbeat, the developing brain and he felt sorry for it. He wished it could be born far from loaded guns and barbed wire. At least it would have love, he thought, looking at his mother’s joyful face.
Helene kissed her son’s hand and walked off, letting him catch up to the other boys who were making their way from the school to the German mess hall, where they worked prepping the next day’s milk delivery. Internees in the ca
mp woke up to a bottle of fresh milk on their stoop every day, one of the measures that the camp’s warden took to show that he was going well beyond the laws of the Geneva Conventions. The camp, it was whispered among the internees, was one President Roosevelt took great pride in, and the guards didn’t want any suicides or fence jumpers to ruin his vision. “They want happy prisoners,” his father had told him. “So just remember, it could be much worse.”
For Christian, sharing seven hundred square feet with another family and sleeping on floors with scorpions did not make for a happy prisoner. The view of miles of barbed-wire fencing him in did not help, either. The orphanage had changed him—he felt it in his newfound patience. Even gentleness. The way he felt toward Inge, had guarded her on the train, he was sure the old Christian would not have been as kind. But it didn’t mean he was elated about his circumstances.
Then there was the camp’s segregation. In two days, Christian had learned how bad it was. Though he had seen the large group of Japanese internees when he came in, invisible lines kept them apart inside. The Germans and Japanese, despite being allies in the war, occupied separate sections of the camp, ate in separate facilities, worked different jobs, and played different sports. The only places where they mixed were the hospital—as illness never discriminated—and the swimming pool. The few Italians were sprinkled among the Germans, but they kept to themselves, too.
Work would help keep Christian’s mind off things. That’s what Franz Lange had said when he explained that he was working in the camp’s central utility building. A classmate named Kurt Schneider had told Christian he should volunteer for the milk prep job before he was given a much more painful assignment than washing and filling milk bottles. In the camp, all the men and older boys had their jobs assigned by Joseph O’Rourke, the camp commander. Kurt said that if he told O’Rourke that he was already a milk slinger, he’d let him remain a milk slinger.
“You caught up fast,” said Kurt as soon as Christian was next to him again. They spoke English, as Kurt’s German was so poor that he was only in the fourth-grade class in the German school despite being seventeen years old.
“So your Deutsch is good enough to put you in twelfth?” asked Kurt, taking long strides to keep up with Christian’s.
“Yeah, I grew up speaking German at home. I’m decent. My writing’s not, but I’ll survive.”
“Lucky you. You might have teachers who aren’t completely stupid. My teacher is a pig farmer. And the tenth-grade history teacher is an electrician. Only teaches the history of the lightbulb. Most of the German teachers didn’t even go to school. I heard the kindergarten teacher used to be in prison.” Kurt grinned at a passing group of girls and whistled. Christian stopped walking and Kurt shrugged. “You got to try with all of them, then maybe it will work with one of them. I don’t look like you, Hollywood. All tall and blond. I need a different approach.”
“Working the odds,” said Christian, moving again. “I respect that.”
“Anything to keep your mind occupied in this place. You don’t want to get fence sickness. You’ll be in the hospital for something while you’re here. Everyone is. Just don’t make it for fence sickness.” He stopped in front of the mess hall and looked down the road to where a group of mothers was standing. “Was that your mother you were talking to before?” he asked. “She’s a—”
“Don’t elaborate or I’ll have to knock your teeth out,” said Christian. He had no desire to knock anyone’s teeth out; he just felt it was obligatory to say it, especially given his mother’s current state. The thought of a fight made him think of Jack Walter the shoe thrower and he wished he were still in his room at the Home instead of fenced in in Texas.
“Come on, Tarzan,” said Kurt. “I’ll introduce you to Herr Beringer, who can put that aggression to work moving dairy products.”
As soon as Beringer saw Christian’s size, he was very happy to enlist him into his milk prep ranks.
“You’re lucky you came to me first or you could have gotten one of those piss-crap after-school jobs that O’Rourke has been handing around like gumballs since the Wisconsin train came in,” he said. “They might have put you out working the crops with the Japanese. Big kid like you. And it’s only getting hotter. You want to till soil in a hundred and twenty degrees with mountain lions and black widow spiders lurking around you? Trust me, you don’t. Lucky you found the milkman before that happened.”
Christian started to thank him, but Beringer shoved a crate of empty milk bottles into his hands instead. “Wash these until you can see yourself in ’em. They’ll be refilled and delivered by the men tomorrow morning. You boys can’t work the first shift—you’ve got school. So just wash ’em and put ’em over there.” He pointed to a corner of the room that was filled floor to ceiling with empty, crated milk bottles.
“We get paid for this?” Christian asked Kurt as the two started washing in four large metal sinks. “I thought you couldn’t use money in camp.”
“Paid? I guess we get paid,” said Kurt. “If you call ten cents an hour getting paid. We barely use money in the camp. Instead they issue us fuzzy green fake coins, about five bucks’ worth a month. You can buy some junk with them in the store. Cigarettes. And drinks in the beer garden.”
“As in beer?” asked Christian, filling the first sink with soap and the second with cold water.
“Definitely. This is prison. The old men feel sorry for us. They’ll pour you as many as you can pay for. And then if they’re drunk enough, which they always are, they’ll slip them to you for free, as long as you’ll listen to them talk about the war. Germany’s going to win, in case you didn’t know.”
Christian was on his tenth set of a dozen bottles, soaping them and scrubbing them with a sparse bottlebrush, when he heard a high-pitched scream. Kurt let his already clean bottle bob in the soap as they listened. It was followed by a louder scream, and then another, before everything went quiet. The screams had come from somewhere outside the mess hall. Beringer dropped the milk bottle he was holding, which smashed on the floor. He jumped up and ran out the closest door, followed by the boys.
Christian went out last, as he was by the farthest sink and was the least comfortable around Beringer. When he got outside, he could see everyone gathered in a circle around something.
“What is it?” Christian asked a younger boy who was also hanging back.
“Someone got hit,” he replied.
“I know who it is,” Christian heard Kurt say. “It’s that woman from near the school. It’s Christian Lange’s mother.”
Christian pushed in front of the other boys, shoving them so hard that one of them fell, cutting his hands on the fragmented milk bottle shards that were all around the loading area of the mess hall.
Christian, his shirt and pants wet from the washing, looked at his mother lying on the ground. She was faceup, her legs dirty and limp, her eyes closed. Terrified, he held his breath as if he were about to plunge into a pool before he dropped down next to her. He put his hands on her face and checked to make sure there was breath. It was faint but there. His eyes traveled down, and he saw that there was blood all over the bottom of her dress.
A daytime guard, one of the many who patrolled the camp in their big blue pickups, stood there. He bent down next to Christian, his stiff blue jeans full of dust, his hands dirty. “I didn’t see her,” he said, frantically. “She just came out of nowhere. I don’t know what happened. I just didn’t see her.” He put his ear against Helene’s nose to see if she was breathing.
“She’s pregnant!” screamed Christian, pushing the guard away from his mother. “How the hell can you not see a pregnant woman?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t,” said the patrolman again. He had taken off his cowboy hat and was holding it over his stomach. “I swear I didn’t swerve to hit her, I just didn’t see her.” He kept repeating his line to the boys around him while Christian tried to wake up his mother.
“She’s not lying in the
middle of the road!” Christian screamed from his position on the ground after he had gently shaken Helene again. “She’s on the side, she’s where she should be, but you hit her anyway! You might have killed her and the baby.”
“Shit,” said the guard, looking at Helene’s protruding belly and the blood on her dress. “Let’s put her in the back of the truck. Quickly. I can get her to the hospital faster than they can get up here.”
Christian kneeled down again and picked up his unconscious mother with the help of the guard and Beringer. They loaded her onto the truck’s flat bed and Christian sat next to her battered body. “They could both die,” he said softly. The baby his parents had wanted for years, the mother he had never successfully detached from: they could both be dead.
“What can I do?” asked Kurt.
“Find my father,” said Christian. “Franz Lange. Get him to the hospital. Tell him what happened. Q section, duplex Q-45-B. We share with the Kalbs.”
Kurt took off running while the truck sped away and Christian held his mother’s slack hand. “They could both die,” Christian repeated to the guard.
“Your mother is alive,” said a nurse once they had arrived at the hospital and his mother was unloaded onto a stretcher by the staff.
She walked him inside the small hospital to a chair near the front door. “You can’t come in with her, but we will find you as soon as we know anything, I promise.” She’d explained to Christian that she was a nurse from the United States Public Health Service, as was Dr. Oliver, the physician in charge. Christian saw some young Japanese-American women in white uniforms go into his mother’s room and the nurse explained that they had trained some of the internees as orderlies and nurses’ aides. “We’ve had more illnesses than we imagined and they make things run smoother. Don’t worry, your mother is in qualified hands.”
When Christian’s father arrived fifteen minutes later, sprinting to the hospital door, the nurse said she would bring him straight back to Helene’s room. He didn’t stop and comfort his son, just shouted his wife’s name until the nurse quieted him and let him through.
