by Karin Tanabe
Christian sat in the tiny waiting room for an hour, but when he heard his mother screaming so loudly that he was sure the sound carried back to the mess hall, he ran into her private room. As short-staffed as the hospital was, there was no one to stop him.
He didn’t knock on the door, but flung it open, only to see the doctor holding a tiny, blood-covered baby in his arms, still attached to his mother by the thick spiral of umbilical cord. It was a girl, as his mother had prayed for, and she was dead.
“Christian, get out of the room right now,” said his father, seeing him first, but Christian didn’t move. He just stood there staring.
The baby girl was going to end up nothing but a bloodstain on an internment camp hospital floor. A dead baby, just twenty-four weeks old.
“The American killed my child!” his mother was screaming at his father in German. “He’s a murderer!”
The doctor didn’t quiet her, but continued the delivery, cutting the cord and handing the baby to the nurse.
“Don’t look, Christian!” his father shouted again, but his son couldn’t divert his gaze. The baby was pale blue, with tiny bulging eyes and translucent hands. She looked amphibian. Christian kept staring as the nurse wrapped her in a thin white blanket and tucked it over her face while the doctor delivered his mother’s placenta.
The nurse turned away from Helene to take the baby out of the room, but Helene reached out for her, almost falling off the metal delivery table.
“I want to hold her!” she screamed. “Take that blanket off her and give her to me!” She was kicking her legs hard and one of the Japanese-American women had to press her forearms against them to keep her from thrashing herself off the table.
The doctor and the nurse looked at each other and finally placed the dead blue baby on Helene’s almost bare chest, still wrapped in the blanket. Helene unwrapped it and held the little girl tight against her, but the baby’s head flopped to the side, her limbs hanging unnaturally, covered in thick vernix.
Helene started to sob loudly and lose her grip on the baby. But she fought off the nurse’s attempt to take her.
“I want to hold her, and I want to name her!” she shouted. “And I don’t want her buried in this desert hell!”
Christian closed his eyes, stunned, and saw the baby’s dead eyes, gray as stones, following him around the room. He imagined her pale face that would never smile, her cold cheeks that would never be kissed.
“Christian. I mean it,” said his father, moving to his mother’s side. “Get out of this room. Let me be alone with your mother. Right now.”
Christian turned and walked out. He didn’t head to the chair at the front of the office as he should have. Instead, he just stood in front of the closed door picturing the baby’s tiny dead face.
He could still hear his mother sobbing, and he instinctively moved to go back inside.
“Why don’t you wait a bit?” he heard a voice say quietly from behind him. Surprised by the British accent, he spun around to see a young Japanese woman in a white uniform. She was holding a pile of folded bedsheets. “It’s your mother in there?” she asked.
Christian confirmed with a nod.
“I heard what happened,” she said, handing the sheets to another young woman who walked by. “I’m very sorry. But she probably wants some privacy right now. I know I would. I’m just finishing my shift. Why don’t you walk me to the swimming pool and then come back here? I bet the air will make you feel better.”
“The fresh Texas air?” asked Christian.
“It’s better than in here,” said the nurse. “Let’s talk about something else than all this. At least for a little while. Then when you feel better, you can come back and ask to see your mother.”
Not ignoring the fact that the nurse was very pretty, Christian nodded yes and together they walked out of the hospital.
“If you don’t mind, I have to stop at my house to get my bathing suit. I didn’t bring it to work today and I really want to swim before it’s too dark,” she said once the hospital was out of view.
“On the Japanese side?” said Christian, immediately realizing how stupid he sounded.
“Yes, of course,” the nurse said, laughing at him. “Are you afraid to go?”
“No,” said Christian, feeling foolish. “I’d be happy to walk you there.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tease you. I really am sorry for your mother. It’s terrible what happened.”
“Thank you,” said Christian, suddenly surprised by tears. He wiped them away, even more embarrassed.
“I think you have to cry when a baby dies. I’m sure I’ll cry, too, tonight when I’m alone. It’s awful,” she said sympathetically.
Christian looked at her and noticed how high and sharp her cheekbones were. It was probably what everyone noticed about her first. It would have given her a severe look if she hadn’t had such a pleasing face, softly curved at the jaw. He looked away before she noticed him staring and said, “Let’s, as you said, talk about something else for a little while.”
Realizing that she hadn’t introduced herself, the girl stopped and said, “I’m Emi Kato. It’s Emiko, actually, but everyone in America prefers to call me Emi. And I’m not a nurse. I’m just a nurse’s assistant. An aide. The seamstresses dress us up like nurses, I think because they’re bored.”
“Which do you prefer?” asked Christian. “Emiko or Emi?”
“Emi is fine,” she replied. “I’m trying to pretend I’m still living the same American life I was before I was fenced in here. The name Emi helps a little bit.”
They both paused as two guards walked past them, guns slung across their shoulders. It was anything but the same American life.
“Does your side have a piano?” Emi asked after a few minutes of walking in silence.
“A piano?” said Christian, surprised. “Why would we have a piano?”
“I thought maybe the German school would. Or the beer garden. I asked the Nisei girls—those are the second-generation Japanese girls—who go to the Federal School and they don’t have one there. I thought perhaps the Germans get preference for something like a piano.”
“Why would we get preference?” asked Christian, his voice catching as three Japanese children walked past them, but not before looking at him with surprise. Emi didn’t seem to notice.
“Because you seem more American to them. So maybe more worthy of a piano,” said Emi.
“Because we’re white? And that entitles us to music?”
“Do you have one or not?” she asked.
Christian looked down at her hands, which were long and slender. The hands of someone who had spent years of her life at a piano, he guessed. “No. Well, I don’t think so anyway. I’ve only been in school for two days and I don’t play, so I haven’t paid attention. But we don’t really have anything, do we, so why would we have a piano?”
“Morale, perhaps,” she said, pausing as an elderly woman said konbanwa, good evening, to her.
“I don’t think they care very much about our morale. Yours or mine,” Christian argued. “If they did, they wouldn’t have put us in a sandbox full of scorpions and sharpshooters.”
“Sharpshooters?” Emi asked, following Christian’s eyes up to the closest watchtower.
“Them,” he said pointing. They could make out two men in the tower waiting to see if one of the internees was stupid enough to run. “Sharp like accurate. So if we try to escape, they won’t miss when they shoot at us like dogs.”
“Let’s try to avoid that,” Emi said. “I think your mother has gone through enough.”
At the mention of Helene Lange, both were quiet again.
Christian finally said, “I’d like to hear you play the piano.”
“Then having a piano would help.”
“I’ll find one,” said Christian, realizing how Emi had gone from pretty to beautiful with every step. He looked at her hair, straight and clean despite the dust of the camp, and imagined runni
ng his hands through it. Then he imagined running his hands through it while she lay next to him. He stopped himself before he imagined anything further, embarrassed that such lustful thoughts could cut through his grief. “Were you interned before Crystal City?”
The wind had picked up and Emi was busy gathering her long hair to one side of her neck to keep it out of her eyes. Christian was already sure that if he could just watch Emi wrestle with the wind for the rest of his time in the camp, he would never get fence sickness.
“I’m not American. I’m Japanese,” she said after her hair had been tamed. “And my father is in the Foreign Service, so I was interned right after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. My mother and I were in Seagoville, near Dallas. And before that, I suppose I was interned in a different, much more pleasant fashion.” She paused and looked up at the sunset, which was starting to spread all over the sky in a way that seemed unique to South Texas. “There was a piano and a group of talented musicians in that place,” Emi added. “And there was wonderful food. But that’s a story for another time.” They had reached what Christian imagined was Emi’s family bungalow. It wasn’t a double like his. Emi’s family had its own small space.
She was in and out in two minutes, but in those two minutes, the sun had turned from pink to red and was spreading like paint behind her little house.
“So. The piano,” she said, putting her bag over her shoulder and starting to walk again.
“I’d like it if you came over to our side,” Christian admitted. “I’d like to see you not play the piano, because I don’t think we have one.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Emi. “Watching someone not play the piano is just watching someone being alive.”
“That doesn’t seem so bad given what happened today,” said Christian. “Will you come and not play?”
“I won’t promise anything,” said Emi, turning the corner toward the big round swimming pool.
“That’s a promise in itself. To not promise anything.”
“Don’t try and trick me,” she said smiling. “Plus, it’s easier for a German boy to come to the Japanese side than it is for a Japanese girl to go to your side. And even harder for me since I’m not Issei or Nisei. I’m just passing through.”
“But you could try.”
“I could.”
“Why don’t you tell me that ‘story for another time’?” he asked, slowing his steps as they got closer to the swimming pool, which was designed and built by the internees. “I don’t think I should go back to the hospital yet.”
“It’s not very exciting, but I suppose that’s welcome after what you saw today. I was just going to say that before Texas, we were interned somewhere quite beautiful.”
“You weren’t imprisoned?”
“Imprisoned?” she said laughing. “The entire Japanese diplomatic corps? If the American government treated the Japanese diplomats and their families badly, word would travel to Japan and the American diplomats over there would be treated badly in retaliation. There were no harsh conditions. After the bombing, we had to sleep at the embassy, on just mattress bottoms. The kind without tops. Does that make sense? There must be a better way to say it. Mattresses with just the springs,” she said, making a bouncing gesture with her hands.
“Box springs,” said Christian.
“That’s it. Spring boxes.”
“Box springs,” said Christian again, fighting a smile. “And after the box springs?” he asked as Emi frowned at her mistake.
“The box springs lasted a few days and then we were escorted out of the embassy by FBI agents. There were people on the sidewalk when we left, some taking our pictures, others yelling at us. Yellow this and that. You know the insults. But they would have been even more irate if they knew we were taking a train to Hot Springs, in Virginia, and staying at a nice hotel called the Homestead. It wasn’t bad at all. The food was good, and they let me go swimming and play the piano. After a few months there, we were transferred to the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia. That was beautiful, too, and the last place I played the piano because I became very sick and couldn’t travel soon after.”
“Sick?” asked Christian. “What was wrong?”
“I contracted tuberculosis. I was very contagious, so they wouldn’t let me travel to Japan, not on a boat with so many important men. But my mother stayed with me. We are the only two associated with the embassy that are still here in the United States. They didn’t close all the consulates right away, but eventually, those people made it on board, too. The MS Gripsholm. A Swedish ship. That’s what they sailed on back to Japan.” Emi looked over at the pool, which was almost empty. She said she should hurry before it closed, but Christian didn’t want her to go yet.
“Were the diplomats angry that they had to live in hotels, cornered off, and then be shipped away?” he asked, more interested in the way her lips moved than the answer.
“I think most saw it as what had to be done,” she said. “We aren’t wanted in this country. We are the enemy. It isn’t a matter of Issei, Nisei—first-generation, second-generation Japanese-American. Almost none of us are American citizens. Some of the wives and children are foreign, but the men are employed by the Japanese government. It’s not safe for us here; we have to return. So now my mother and I are waiting for the next boat.”
“And until then you are here, volunteering at the hospital and going to the Japanese school,” said Christian.
“I’m not going to the school,” Emi replied. “I’m twenty-one. I haven’t been a student for quite some time.”
“But you must have gone to an English-speaking school recently. Your very proper English—despite your box springs—is perfect.”
“Since my English impresses you, do you want to hear my German?” she said, smiling modestly.
“Natürlich spreche ich auch Deutsch. Glaubst Du mir das nicht?”
“I certainly do believe that you speak German,” he said. “I believe you can do just about anything.”
“But let’s speak English here,” she said. “I don’t want everyone to know that I speak German. Then they’ll figure out that I’m eavesdropping on the German nurse’s aides at the hospital.”
“Kein Deutsch mehr,” said Christian, promising to keep her secret. “I’m not even going to ask why you speak German.”
“Good, then I can volunteer that story the next time we meet. Hopefully I’ll see you again before I’m sent back to Japan.”
“Do you know when that will be?” asked Christian, his heart already dropping at the thought.
“No, I don’t. But none of us know when we’re being repatriated. That’s one of the hardest parts of being here, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“Almost all of us will be sent back,” said Emi. “You to Germany. The Italians to Italy. It’s not just me and my mother on the next Swedish boat.”
“Me to Germany?” echoed Christian. “Why would I go to Germany?”
She stared at him incredulously. “Why? Because that’s what happens. You’re being traded for Americans overseas. An American in Germany will come here, and you will go there. That’s why they are allowing families to be together here, because they’ve agreed to be repatriated. Didn’t your parents tell you?”
Christian stood there, staring at the beautiful Japanese girl with the British accent, in a starched white uniform holding a bag with a bathing suit and a towel. He was too shocked to say anything more.
“You should go back to your mother now. I’m sure she wants to see you,” Emi said after the silence between them had grown heavy.
“I should,” said Christian, backing away. After a quick goodbye, he ran back to the hospital thinking about Emi Kato. Her confident beauty. Her spring boxes. How she was going to look in her bathing suit. He had felt ashamed that she had taken his mind off his mother, off the dead baby, but he felt a little less bad now that he knew what his parents hadn’t told him. They were being sent to Germany.
When he
reached his mother’s hospital room, he didn’t see the frozen eyes of the dead baby girl anymore, only Helene and her desperate grief. She gestured to him to come closer and when he sat down next to her, she put her hands on his head and cried about her baby, the man who had killed her, and the country that had made him. After holding the little girl’s limp body against her chest and feeling just her own heartbeat when there should have been two, Helene Lange had started to hate America.
CHAPTER 8
EMI KATO
MARCH–APRIL 1943
Keiko stopped in her tracks as she reached the front door of the little house in the D Section of the camp near the Karate Hall. “Is that my child?” she said looking at Emi sitting on the front steps, her long shorts folded just below her knees, her white shirt billowing out above them, almost two sizes too big. “It can’t be. My child doesn’t sit on the stoop. She goes directly inside and lies on her bed pretending she’s dead so that no one will socialize with her. So who, then, is this?”
“I don’t pretend I’m dead,” said Emi, moving over on the step to let her mother up. “I just rest my eyes. I’m recovering from tuberculosis, remember?”
“Of course,” said Keiko compassionately. “But I have seen you swim twenty laps in the pool, barely coming up for air, your legs kicking so strongly that your whole body is almost out of the water. So I was under the false assumption that your lungs were healed.”
“They work differently underwater,” Emi protested. “My gills must help. And who says I’m out here to socialize. It’s just a little less hot today. I thought I’d enjoy the weather.”
“You enjoy it then,” said her mother, putting her hand on Emi’s shoulder as she made her way inside.
Emi listened for the latch closing on the door and pushed her feet out into the sandy road. It was true that she hadn’t tried to make friends, but who was there to make friends with? She was one of the only women her age at Crystal City, too old for the school-aged crowd, yet not identifying with the young mothers, who were always trying to comfort their crying babies and little ones.
