Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  We all drank some home brew out of Ben’s mother’s flower vase. Went home after dark. I must have been looking at my feet, because I hadn’t noticed the moon. Abe-san was out front with Mariko. They were sitting on a straw mat staring at that huge orb just rising. Abe-san held a mask in front of him. He’d stare at it for a while, then at the moon, then at Mariko’s face, then at the mask again. I started to walk by. “Where you go now?” he asked. “Nowhere,” I said. “How can you do that?” he asked, laughing.

  I sat down with them. The moon, orange at first, had turned white. Then I said the obvious: “It looks like a face.” “Yes,” Abe-san said, “but what kind of face?” He was sitting cross-legged with his hands on his thighs. He had thick, well-used hands—not like mine, which are small and soft. His face was lifted. Was it the moonlight that made his eyes look so tender? Mariko slid over by me. “We’re writing a Noh play,” she whispered, though I couldn’t see they were doing anything.

  Later, when we went inside for tea, we did not turn on the lights because the moon brightened the room. “They say it makes you go crazy,” I said.

  “What does?” Mariko asked.

  “Moonlight.”

  Abe-san laughed hard. “Buddhists say, full moon means enlightenment.” He laughed again. “But that’s same thing, desu-ka?”

  Mariko was sketching and I wondered how she put up with this mad old man and whether she missed Will. In front of her were drawings of a stage, and a backdrop, and masks that weren’t human faces but animals, and a waterfall.

  “Noh theater began in fourteenth century,” Abe-san began. “Before Christopher Columbus,” he added delightedly and looked at me. “What were you doing then?”

  “Digging roots with a stick and making arrowheads.”

  Mariko lay on her stomach and continued drawing.

  “Young boy, Fujiwaka, son of Noh master, made Noh live, even today. Changed name to Zeami. To understand Noh, have to begin training very young like he did. Seven years old. That’s all you do for whole life. Study Way of Noh,” Abe-san said, then put the mask he had been holding into its silk case.

  “How old were you when you began carving?” I asked.

  Abe-san looked dismayed. “Twelve. That’s why I was no good. Look,” he said, holding out his hands. “These grow flowers; that’s all.”

  “Oh Grandfather …,” Mariko said, looking up at him.

  Abe-san picked up a block of wood. “This wood give me much trouble. Always. Each time, just as hard. One mistake and … shtt … that’s it. Throw away. Start from beginning. Each cut represent what I am, each stroke. If make bad one, then I’m bad. Have to know self first, then self of wood. Noh mask isn’t for Halloween. They’re alive! So, desu. See, I put it away,” he said, indicating the mask in the silk bag, “but it’s alive in there and when I put mask on, it takes me. There is no me then.”

  “How can there be no you?” I asked.

  Mariko sat up and laid the sketches out on the floor. They were drawings of more masks—fantastic-looking things with antlers and fangs and long beards.… When I looked back, Abe-san had rolled backward on the floor and lay motionless. Mariko cupped her hand over her mouth, laughing. I didn’t quite see how it was funny, but then his body began shaking and Mariko’s laughter burst out and I found myself laughing too. But at what?

  Abe-san sat up and gave me a fierce look. “What you call ‘I’ is swinging door. Wind go in and out. Birds too. When you breathe in like this”—he inhaled—“door moves. When you breathe out”—he exhaled—“door moves too. That’s all.”

  I sat for a moment trying to understand what he had said. “How does one become a swinging door?”

  Abe-san smiled. “I thought we were talking about Noh.”

  “Maybe we are.”

  “Yes!” he hissed.

  Mariko poured tea, then lay down on her cot, the one that was so close to mine on the other side of the wall.

  “Thank you,” Abe-san said, tipping his cup. When he finished drinking he said: “Noh is same thing as Zazen. Zazen is same as life. Not your version of life, or my version of life, but life as it is. Not future or past—Noh is not made-up story. Each play, each mask, each movement of actor is epitome of all human emotion,” he said, then shook his head in despair. “I talk too much.”

  Mariko turned over. She had been lying on her side with her back to us and as Abe-san talked I could not help but admire the line of her hip under the thin kimono.

  “Who am I when I am not breathing out and not breathing in—that in-between moment?” I asked.

  Abe-san either didn’t hear or pretended not to. I asked the question again. Something about the room seemed strange then. Mariko’s hip looked like a wave and when Abe-san turned his head, it was like a great ball rolling. He smiled.

  “Now you are ready to learn,” he said.

  A hard driving storm came in from the north last night. Clouds all the way down to the ground, as if there were no mountains. That’s when I feel loneliest here. The mountains represent a freedom we all long for. A place to go, to get out of the noise and confusion of Camp, the noise and confusion of my own mind. Will would be pleased to know that Heart Mountain is not a “happy camp.” Many agitators answered “Yes-Yes” on the loyalty questionnaire, tricking the administration in order to avoid deportation.

  Saturday. The “dissidents” formed the Fair Play Committee and Toki Ohara has come forward as a “Fair Play Committee of One.” He gave a strong talk about the unconstitutionality of confinement and encourages us to protest it continually and vigorously and stand up for our rights as American citizens. After listening to him, I thought, here’s a guy who speaks his own mind and seems to know more than any of us about the Constitution. He’s in his early fifties, a Nisei from Hawaii, and a member of the ACLU. The talk was well attended and I wrote Will to tell him the resistance is in full swing.

  Will’s letter was returned by the censor. No explanation given. What a farce this democracy is.

  Mom read a poem she had received from a friend at the Gila, Arizona, Camp:

  My husband’s interned

  And my son is a soldier,

  Oh, all so hard to bear:

  I lament

  Encaged behind wire.

  After, I asked whether she thought the guys who were soldiers would do what I’ve done—advocate draft resistance—if they were here, and she whispered, “Don’t tell your father, but, yes, I think so.”

  Wrote a letter to Kenny, one to Li, and another one to Will. The ones to Li and Will were returned again.

  December 5. Some young boys had been arrested for sledding outside the perimeter of the camp. The oldest boy was eleven. They were handcuffed by the MPs and taken into custody. The editor thought we should go over there and scoop the story. The kids looked awfully scared.

  One was crying and I told him he hadn’t done anything wrong and nothing bad would happen to him. When the parents arrived, one of the mothers became hysterical and grabbed her small child out of the MP’s reach and the MP yanked him back. I grabbed him by the arm. “What do you think you’re doing here?” I demanded. “These are just children.”

  That kind of shook him up. I guess he was used to bossing everyone around. Well, Nisei are pretty good bosses too. I told him he was going to be on the front page of the Sentinel. “Maybe the wire service will pick it up too,” I said, though Ben and I knew they wouldn’t. When the director came, we left. Later the charges were dropped. In the morning we received even worse news. One of the Camp’s great painters, Chiura Obata, stepped out of the shower and was beaten up by a pro-Japanese agitator—one of those wild Kibei. He had to spend three weeks in the hospital. Mariko knew of his work. “You see,” she said, “that’s what Will thought about me too. Just because I’m a painter he thought I had no political thoughts. That’s not true. We’re not pro-Camp, pro-administration, pro-anything. We want our freedom like anyone else. We paint about it, instead of talking, that’s all.”
r />   December 15. Lots of snow, Pop in and out of his slumps. In the summer he cheers up because things are growing, but as soon as winter comes, he suddenly realizes he’s not the head of the family anymore. Mom is busy with all her classes and I with the paper and Abe-san and thoughts of girls. He has to make his way around camp on his own. I watched him walk to the mess hall. He has friends, but he clings to his Issei formality, then can’t understand why he’s lonely. The suitcoat he wears has gotten wrinkled and the lining is tearing out, something Mom would never have let happen before. He pays no attention. The only thing he cares for is his little cactus planted in a coffee can. First thing he does every morning when he gets up is turn it toward the sun. And every evening, turns it back.

  I realized, watching him that day, something about giri—duty to one’s parents. I have stayed here in this Camp because I thought the experience would give me insight into the workings of human society, and it has. But it’s more than that. I relocated with my parents. Hate and resent them as I have, I’m bound to them now.

  December 21. Winter solstice. The Issei walk around bowing and saying “Happy New Year” because they haven’t been accustomed to celebrating Christmas unless they’ve converted. Snow on the ground, Christmas decorations on all the barracks, even a tree in the mess hall. Mariko caught me in the office and held mistletoe over my head and kissed me. Yikes. I broke out in a sweat. It was all in fun to her, but for me …

  December 24. Back in November, Mom and Pop had asked what I wanted for Christmas. Told them I wanted a swimming pool, a new bathing suit, and fins. This morning, opening my few packages, I had to laugh. Didn’t get the swimming pool, but did get the trunks and flippers. I’ve hung them on the wall above my bed as a reminder of life elsewhere—California, here I come.…

  After dinner, walked around the periphery of the Camp alone. All the lights on the barracks made it look like a ship at sea, but a ship on a voyage with no ports of call. We drift endlessly.

  Christmas Day. McKay here with presents for Mariko and Abe-san and enough food for all us, baked by Bobby Korematsu. Mariko looked young in McKay’s presence even though I think she’s older than he is, and very beautiful.

  Later. Went to look at Mariko’s giant painting. It’s a triptych and will hang from a big pine log McKay brought. The paper is thick—almost like cardboard. She smears the paint on with big cloths tied to brooms and brushes the size you’d paint a house with. After the first layer of watercolor has been applied, she wipes it off with a clean cloth, then paints over it again, then wipes that off, and so it goes, ten or fifteen times. The effect is stunning. The surface is absolutely even in hue and texture, almost polished, and with a depth you can’t see but sense is there.

  New Year’s Eve Day. Mariko raised the sixty- by thirty-five-foot panels between the end barracks. Behind it, Heart Mountain looms, as if it were an extension of the painting, rising out of Heian clouds. The middle panel shows the tip of the camp, then a thick layer of clouds with a beautiful silver sheen covering the middle. The top panel is mountain, clouds, and waterfall. The painted mountain is so big, the peak is out of the frame. Above, the real Heart Mountain rises, snow-covered.

  We hoisted it up at nightfall. No wind, thankfully, but a full moon. Went home to shower, then came back. The panels flap in the breeze like a big genoa jib sail. Many people came to see it, old and young. At the front of the crowd, Abe-san stood, legs apart, arms akimbo in kimono and new tennis shoes (a Christmas present from McKay), looking at the painting proudly. When I told him I was afraid it would get ruined hanging outside, that it belonged in a museum, he agreed, then laughed at me.

  Went home. Mariko was asleep on top of the bed, her feet covered with paint:

  Midnight. Now it’s 1944. Another year in a concentration camp. We pause to celebrate the holidays, but the war goes on. Night battles off the Solomon Islands, heavy fighting in Italy, a sea battle in the Eastern Arctic, preceded by senseless deaths in the Aleutian Islands last spring.

  How helpless I feel! We’re not beaten or tortured or starved or raped here—but another sort of torture is inflicted. Our freedom to act has been taken from us. Last week, got so mad while getting our weekly pass to go to Cody to get the Sentinel printed, I kicked a hole in the administration office door.

  Sat on my “thinking rocks.” Drank a toast to Will and the others at Tule Lake, to Abe-san’s wild spirit, to Mariko. Then I threw the glass against the rocks.

  27

  New Year’s Eve. The last days of 1943 had been marred by a sudden spread of the flu, grown to epidemic proportions, and the graves reserved for soldiers coming home in boxes were beginning to be filled by both young children and old people who had succumbed to the virus. No bands were scheduled to play in Luster that night, and at dark, Velma Vermeer thought the streets looked nearly empty of cars. For two weeks she had manned the switchboard day and night, on call as the county’s one doctor was, the only link between the doctor and his patients. The local hospital was filled to capacity, and once again Dr. Hoffman came out of retirement and put in his hours—inanely as ever—over the beds and bodies of the ill.

  Though ravaged by wind, the Christmas decorations still hung over the main street of town. Velma thought the blinking lights on the scrawny pine trees wired to lampposts looked pathetic. Nevertheless, she took down one of the two New Year’s hats she and Harry had kept from their first celebration together, unfolded it, and set it on the dining room table, along with one sherry glass and the cut glass decanter so rarely used the liquor it held had begun to look murky.

  There had been one emergency call for the doctor since noon, but now the switchboard was quiet. It was not a night for social calls. She thought it must be grim business for him, bringing in the New Year at deathbeds.

  Since Harry’s suicide, Velma had become reclusive. She began to think of herself more as a voice than as a physical presence. It wasn’t any particular incident that made her start to stay in, but a general feeling of insubstantiality. She envied the two gold stars that appeared in the windows of women who had lost sons or husbands in battle. But it wasn’t that. “Anyway, Harry wouldn’t have done well in battle,” she thought as she dusted the black switchboard. But he could have entertained the troops. How many times they had pretended they were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when, in fact, they were only strolling down the main street of Luster to open the movie theater. She had sold the theater. Now she rarely appeared outside her house, away from the tangled lines and blinking lights of the switchboard, where the voices mixed inside her like colored waters. “I’m just a voice to all of them,” she thought. “I no longer need a body.”

  The previous spring, she had planted a victory garden out of patriotism—but did the work at night so no one could see her. She had planted it during the week of a waning moon, with a silk scarf tied around her head, and, stooping over the ground, dropped seeds at random into the furrows. She let it be known that anyone in need was welcome to come harvest the garden. Peas came up with carrots, and broccoli and onions with beets and lettuce, and beans with peppers and corn and tomatoes and squash.

  “You don’t need much food if you are just a voice,” she said to herself; while she watered the garden by moonlight, and, indeed, she had lost so much weight, her flowered dresses hung from her bones. She remembered the days when Harry had been alive—how busy they were, how much a part of the town. Harry had always said she had known things before they ever happened, implying not that she was prescient, but merely understood how a small town operates, and so could predict the goings-on. And because she could listen in on any conversation, she made it her business to know who was feuding with whom, who was in love with whom, when their babies were due, when the parties were held—as if keeping a record of such events in case someone wanted to know what life in Luster had been. She had had no time for Harry’s dreams and light shows and operas, but put her calls through efficiently, her sharp, reprimanding voice reminding every caller tha
t she could and would listen in, likening herself to a terrestrial St. Peter before whom every citizen would stand for judgment. Now, nearly bodiless, she imagined herself akin to an angel.

  Sometime before midnight, Velma opened the venetian blinds wide enough to watch the street. It was grimly quiet. She held the paper hat in her hand. Once white with gold cardboard trim, the paper had yellowed unevenly. She saw Carol Lyman’s black coupe race by. Was that Willard in the passenger seat or another man? The switchboard buzzed. Another call to tell the doctor a child was being taken to the hospital and would he please meet them there. As she put down the headphones, she thought of the years before there were cars when the doctor went from house to house with a horse and buggy, an oil lamp clamped between his knees to keep him warm.

  At five minutes to midnight she stepped into the back room, poured herself a glass of sherry, positioned the faded hat on her white head, and lowered the heavy brown arm of the Victrola onto Harry’s treasured record of Caruso singing an aria from Aida.

  The tiny house filled with sound and for one glorious moment she thought she understood Harry, and what it must mean to be a great singer whose life begins at the lungs, surges up, vibrates the cranial cavity, and bursts forth from the front of the head. To be a voice and nothing else. To be song.

  Willard couldn’t sleep that night. Mañuel and Porfiria were laughing and talking loudly. Always, when Willard couldn’t sleep or had been awakened by bad dreams, he went to his mother’s room. She had lined the hall with nightlights—like a runway, she had said—so he could find his way. How many times he had followed the lighted path to her.

  She had come home early from Snuff’s. Willard went to her room an hour after she had gone to bed. He saw that she slept with a scowl on her face and tried to smooth the skin of her forehead, then picked up her hand by the wrist because he thought her long, painted fingernails looked like the bloodied spurs of fighting birds. For years she had soothed him by making designs in the dark with the glowing end of her cigarette. He didn’t want that now. He wanted to be driven, as she had driven several times before, down the hill, across the river, to see, once again, the furious glare of the Camp.