by Lee Langley
Kazuo punched the air. ‘Man, this is your break for independence! Freedom!’
Combing his hair in the hut mirror, Ichir paused to admire his reflection: an all-American dude, cool and sardonic – perfect. Ruefully he confessed his love of things American: the language, music, clothes, movies and, closest to his heart, the classic comics – ‘Batman! Superman! Captain America! I love those guys. I was planning to suggest a Japanese superhero for Marvel. Not any more, I guess.’
Conversations as closely harmonised as a barbershop quartet swung the four through personal biography, thwarted aspirations and shared anxieties. Gradually reticence slipped away and Joey could speak of his mother without embarrassment, could allow himself to wonder aloud what might be happening in Nagasaki: the town had docks and factories, inviting bombs. At night, after lights out, the murmured voices hung in the air, helping him into sleep.
Though even here he had spasms of uncertainty, wondering if the others, when he was absent, shifted into a different key, to a place where he could not follow them.
Deracinated, he felt at home nowhere – and certainly not in a tar-paper hut in a dust bowl. Most evenings he lay on the narrow bed, reading, tilting the book to catch the weak light of the overhead bulb, dwelling on exchange systems, solicitary gifts, wave-pattern navigation, magic necklaces, the sexual mores of remote peoples; the role of a father. It was difficult for tribal reasons for a father to give a gift to his son; what he passed on were intangibles: magic and dance. Assets that no one could take away. What would Ben have passed on to him, Joey pondered, had he survived? What precious, intangible paternal gifts would he now be cherishing?
What would those ethnographers have made of this community, this closed society? Almost certainly they would have integrated, tried to learn the language, investigated ceremonials and social customs. Joey could not do the same – or rather, he chose not to. He gazed into the darkness that lay behind his eyelids, and absented himself. The people he observed were no more than figures in a landscape. He himself, sealed in his bell jar, could not have been heard even had he called for help. And again that emptiness loomed, a chill place where warmth and comfort should have been. A shoulder to cry on, though Joey never cried.
He spent daylight hours in the open air, pacing the camp perimeter, gazing out over the flat land to the turtle-shaped hump of hill on the horizon. He was edgily aware of the watchtower looming above the barbed wire, the machine gun swinging lazily as the guard moved – but there was little personal risk that he’d get shot: blond haired, in his open-neck shirt he could have been an off-duty guard. Between pacing he made drawings: birds in flight or feeding; insects creating supply routes . . . When some of the women constructed a chicken-run in the compound, he sketched the strutting fowls, colouring his drawings with paint from the camp schoolroom.
Ichir studied Joey’s rough drawing of an aggressive rooster, nodding approvingly: ‘Hey man, you’re an artist.’
‘No. I lack originality.’
‘That’s Yankee thinking. The old Japanese artists were never expected to be original; they’d have got some funny looks if they tried originality. Follow the masters, was the rule. That’s why I’d be good at the superheroes. Keep faith with the masters!’
‘You need to come out of your shell,’ Taro said as they lined up for a shower. ‘This not talking to people, it’s no help.’
‘I’m not asking for help, I just want to be left alone.’
‘There’s a dance tonight,’ Ichir called from the open concrete shower stall. ‘You should come.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’ll be sorry.’ He towelled himself dry and slipped on his shirt. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss the Café International Cabaret, featuring . . .’ He reached into a pocket, read aloud from a flimsy leaflet, “gaily attired Tri-State girls”. Who could ask for anything more? Tanoshimi yo! Let’s party!’
Taro called over: ‘Ever dated a Japanese girl, Joey?’
‘Never met one.’
Kazuo said thoughtfully, ‘I always meant to cross that fence, the word was, American girls are easy –’
‘Easy like a porcupine!’ Ichir laughed ruefully.
‘– but I never dated an American girl. I never knew how to get through to them. I guess I just don’t understand them.’
Joey said. ‘It’s not easy.’
Girls were a foreign country with their own customs and prohibitions. There were girls in that now remote outside world who gave signals Joey thought he understood, that encouraged border-crossing and exploration. Then, at a certain point, they threw up barriers, became as protective as aboriginal natives fending off unwelcome visitors to sacred sites.
American girls, blondes with June Allyson hairbands or Betty Grable sweaters, college classmates from homes no different from his own, were tricky enough. These Nisei, born in the USA, inhabited a terra incognita criss-crossed with cultural fault lines that could crack open beneath his feet. The old people believed in the old ways, but what of the young females? What did the books say about that? Check the footnotes, look in the index for culture, society and human behaviour. See under: Virgins.
By the time Joey arrived at the dance, Woody Ichihashi’s Downbeats were well into their repertoire of Glenn Miller and Woody Herman. The dance floor was crowded, the music soared, coloured lights hung from the ceiling. As Woody put it: with the Downbeats on board, the mood was upbeat.
Joey wove through the crowd, keeping away from the dancers. Two circuits of the room confirmed what he had suspected: this place was not for him. Points of light glittered off shiny black hair and spectacles; mouths wide in laughter revealed teeth so even and so white his own seemed dull as old tombstones. He was caught in a crossfire of voices, none individually loud, built into a bombardment that almost drowned out the music.
A plump, jolly girl beckoned to him from behind a white-clothed trestle table.
‘Hi, welcome, irrasshaimase! I’m Amy.’
He nodded. Offered a half-hearted response.
‘Joey.’
She waved at the table.
‘So, Joey, help yourself: lemonade, cola – we even have ocean cocktail – sort of. I used tomato water, soy sauce and a drop of rice vinegar. It’s okay, maybe needs more salt.’
He looked doubtfully at the jug of liquid. ‘What’s that floating on top?’
‘Seaweed. Dehydrated. Not as good as fresh, obviously, but it’s not bad.’
‘Thanks.’ He took a glass of lemonade.
‘Where you from, Joey?’
‘Portland.’
‘My folks are from Washington county.’
‘Ah.’
He moved off, skirting the dance floor, aware of her disappointment, feeling bad but not so bad that he was prepared to extend the conversation. One slow circuit of the room and the lemonade was finished. He placed the glass carefully on a side table and headed for the door.
‘You don’t like the music.’
She wore a pale green dress printed with red flowers and in her hair a barrette on to which she had threaded an artificial crimson flower. Small, delicately built, she looked closely at Joey, her face tilted upwards.
‘My name’s Lily.’
‘Joey.’
‘Hi. So you don’t like the band.’
‘No, I mean yes. I like the music . . . Actually, I can’t really hear it. Too much noise, I guess.’
‘And you don’t like the people.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I can tell.’
He shrugged. ‘I only got here a few minutes ago; that’s pretty quick to draw conclusions.’
‘Not really. You walk around the camp, always alone. You don’t come to the social evenings in the canteen.’
To be made conscious that he had been watched gave Joey a sense of wariness. In the future he would no longer be able to lose himself in solitude; she had taken away his greatest freedom: the ability to act unselfconsciously, and he felt a spurt
of anger.
‘I certainly don’t like the idea of being watched – more than we already are, here.’
‘But you watch everyone. All the time. That’s okay?’
Suddenly he was part of someone else’s field trip.
‘Leave me out of this, okay? Get yourself another hobby.’
He stepped out into the warm night. Glancing back just before the door clicked shut he saw her face, a flinching whiteness, a recoil as though she had been slapped.
He should go straight back and apologise; he had been needlessly rude. He should go in and say sorry; she was standing right by the door. But as he stood debating with himself, a couple moved past him, murmuring polite phrases, blocking the doorway. A boy was approaching the girl in the green dress; he touched her arm and led her on to the dance floor. The door closed.
Backing away, Joey came in line with the window: the bright room was framed in the darkness like a movie screen – the naked light bulbs, touchingly transformed into glowing orbs with cheap coloured paper; the packed dance floor, bodies moving to a jumping beat. He picked out the girl in the red and green dress, the flower in her hair, smiling at her partner, looking straight into his eyes, no upward tilt.
He stood for a while, then walked on towards his hut, the music still loud in the night air, coming through the thin wood of the dance hall walls. He threaded his way through the barracks, glimpsing in the gaps of half-drawn curtains parents and grandparents sitting on upright chairs in their bleak huts, reading, or staring at the wood-fire while their offspring sang along with ‘a Gal in Kalamazoo,’ and jived away ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas . . .’ The music streamed through his body, gradually rinsing him clean of gloom and resentment. He reached the hut and stood for a moment, feeling the throb, receiving it through the soles of his feet. He began to sway, to move, then to dance, singing aloud, spinning in the tiny space, swerving to avoid wood-stove, beds, and home-made dresser. Arms flung wide, stomping on the beat, he swung round to find Ichir standing in the doorway, head cocked, observing him.
‘There’s actually a dance floor just down the way. You’d have more space.’
‘I don’t dance.’
‘So I see.’
Ichir crossed to his bed, combed his hair and stared at himself critically in the small mirror hanging on the wall. ‘I’ll be back late. Got a date.’
‘A date?’ Joey looked sceptical. ‘What? Cocktails? A piano bar? Gourmet dinner –’
‘A date, Joey, does not require that stuff. Just the night sky and a little privacy.’
He was gone, and though the bouncy music still drifted through the darkness, for Joey the beat of life had gone out of it. He dropped on to the narrow cot and sat reviewing the brief, unsatisfactory evening. He found himself, like the old people he had glimpsed, staring blankly at the wood-stove. Blues in the Night.
A green dress printed with pinky-red blossoms. A crimson flower in her hair. A flower name. Lily. She had smiled, touched his arm, tentatively. He had behaved like an asshole.
He re-ran the scene in his head, changing the dialogue, reaching for a line to make her smile. She was about to laugh: would she throw back her head, American style, wide-mouthed, showing even white teeth, or would she stifle the impulse, cover her mouth with her hand in the traditional way of the old country?
Next time they met he would apologise; tell her he’d been in a lousy mood. She would forgive him, and they would linger over a canteen meal, cutting the overcooked fish into ever-smaller pieces, no longer aware of taste or texture. In the movie-house of his mind they were dancing; he touched her cheek.
Next day he looked for Lily but it seemed she and her parents had left Tule a couple of hours earlier: the Quakers had found a family to sponsor them in Boston.
That evening in the hut he noticed lying on the table by Ichir ’s bed, next to his watch and some candies wrapped in cellophane, a crumpled red flower. He picked it up.
‘Where did this come from?’
Glancing up from his book Ichir reached for one of the candies.
‘I told you I had a date.’
Was her name Lily? Joey wanted to ask. Did she – Did you –
He dropped the flower back on the table, picked up his towel and headed for the shower block.
On the next social evening Joey was approached by one of the ‘gaily attired girls’, one with fashionable, unnaturally curly hair. She tapped him playfully on the arm and asked him to dance.
‘My name’s Iris.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. It’s really Ayame, but that means iris. Well, really it means moonflower, but that’s way too Japanese!’ She laughed, showing her teeth.
As the music died away while Joey’s arms still encircled her, she tilted up her head and allowed her body to sag against his. She smelled of flowers and face powder.
‘Would you like to go on a date?’
‘Yes,’ he said fervently.
‘I have a rubber,’ she whispered. ‘Mail order.’
36
The presidential cavalcade moved slowly through the streets, Roosevelt waving, smiling his bright, paternal smile, cheered by his loyal subjects. As a morale-boosting exercise, FDR was visiting the shipyards and war industries in Oregon.
Nancy, part of the Democrat support team, moved with the parade, saw the President smile and wave from his open-topped limousine, cloak flung back from his shoulders. The sun glittered on his spectacles, masking his eyes. What was he thinking? He was a world figure now, meeting other world figures at summit conferences. They inhabited an exclusive universe, these people, the air around them filtered, their bodies guarded, protected from the tribulations of unimportant individuals; monarchs in all but name.
‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself !’ he had declared once, giving new hope, a new deal to desperate people, Nancy among them.
Great days. A great man. But times change and men with them, and she was less easily persuaded by politicians today. He had earned their trust, then. Now he smiled and waved but not all of his loyal subjects were sheltered by his paternal wing: some were rounded up and shipped out to bleak corners of the land to languish behind barbed wire.
This grim Oregon neighbourhood was no jewelled route to glory, no road to Samarkand, but a glow of satisfaction came off the President’s countenance that she had observed on other politicians. It came with power, perhaps.
She had thought of FDR in earlier days as the true Democrat, a calm, philosophic prince, a Solomon dispensing wisdom, a good man; but ‘good’ could depend on where you stood, and why.
With the cheers of the crowd in her ears, for a dizzy moment it seemed to Nancy that Roosevelt had metamorphosed into a modern Tamburlaine, riding in triumph through the city.
Around her, arms and flags waved. The President smiled, raised his hand, a patrician salute acknowledging the populace. Nancy’s arms hung rigid by her side.
37
The names tantalised: Tule Lake, Klamath Falls and Link River . . . In strong winds the flow had been known to blow backwards, north into the lake, leaving the riverbed dry, the clay swirling, following the pattern of the vanished stream. The names tantalised, conjured up moisture, but all around was dust.
Guards checked the perimeter, bored, firearms loosely swinging. With dust coating their uniforms, pink flesh obscured by a sandy veil, they looked like figures of straw and clay, clumsily executed. High above the barbed wire the watchtowers loomed, machine guns turned inwards.
The soldiers disliked this term of duty; they disliked the enemy aliens, pale, fragile women, quiet children, sullen youths and small men whose lowered eyelids concealed their thoughts. The soldiers wished themselves elsewhere – in the real America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or on the battlefield, where they could be shooting the bastards instead of checking them in and out for work projects or farm duty; counting numbers for sickbeds. Individually these people were weak as kittens, but among the guards it wa
s a known fact that Japs could operate with the awe-inspiring team spirit of termites destroying a building. In that solidarity lay their strength. They needed watching.
The watchful eyes, the mistrust, fed a determination to simulate ‘real life’ to fight off despair. So there were baseball games, judo classes, basketball, chess, badminton, music – ‘Don’t miss the symphony concert, Tuesday!’ Joey learned to recognise the traditional festivals – cherry trees improvised from rags and twigs, lanterns from scrap metal, giant chrysanthemums out of wrapping paper. Older internees recited haikus by Basho. The young, defiantly modern, dressed up for Hallowe’en.
Joey continued to slip through the social net: he volunteered for necessary maintenance work, chatted to those who ate at the same table; listened to recitals, dropped in briefly at dances and went on an occasional date; but he was never part of a group.
Was it his imagination or did the conversation flower into vivacity when he left the table? He was not the only product of a mixed marriage – what Ichir called ‘half-breed kids’. But the others, less physically different, had assimilated painlessly, had been drawn into the community. Was it his fault or theirs? Nurture or the legacy of Pinkerton genes that kept him apart?
He read Nancy’s latest letter with its snippets of anodyne news, mention of a book she had read. His grandparents sent love; Mary increasingly frail but bearing up bravely.
‘And how goes it, Joey dear?’
Rain, seeping from the roof trickled down the tin chimney of the wood-stove, hissing into steam. The room felt humid, tropical. His inner South Sea island.
In that faraway country, the outside world, the war went on. Sequestered and alienated, the young ones blotted out the fact of the conflict with music and gossip and sometimes feverish laughter, furtive sex; older internees took it silently, in the spirit of gaman, clustering round radios and listening anxiously to the ebb and flow of events from the impossible position of limbo.
Limbo was an undiscovered country that Joe was becoming familiar with: which side should he cheer on? The army defending families in Japan, or the army fighting the enemies of America? Those who had bombed the ships on Honolulu, or those who were now his jailers? After Pearl Harbor came the battle of Midway – each a disaster or triumph, depending on where you stood.
