by Monica Hesse
With me she was sick. This time she is sick. This is a good sign. There is at least one way in which this time is not like March. Many ways, I correct myself. Nothing at all alike.
“Did you see anything else while you were out?” my mother asks. “Here, come help me.” She nods me over to the army cots she and my father sleep on, picking up the blanket. My cot is on the other side of the room, and so is my trunk, which serves as a bureau, bench, and nightstand. Between us is the table; on the table is a porcelain bowl that we use as a washbasin. Our room is sixteen by sixteen feet, in a building with three other units of the same size. We share the common kitchen facility with the other families. The smell of most cooking makes my mother vomit. At least our house has a kitchen.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I offer.
“Because I’m making the bed.”
“Why don’t you let me make the bed?”
She doesn’t relent, just looks at me expectantly until I pick up the other end of the blanket. “A new busload of people came,” I start. “I helped Mr. Mercer run an errand. And also…”
“And also?”
And also there was a girl in a lavender dress, I almost want to say, but it makes no sense to mention that; I will probably never see that girl again. “And also I talked to Mr. Kruse. Or, I guess he talked to me,” I add hurriedly.
Mutti’s jaw stiffens and she gives the blanket a violent shake. “What did he say?”
Before I can answer, the door behind me creaks open. “What did who say?” Vati removes his hat and works the door shut again. It doesn’t close right. The walls bow in a curve, something to do with the heat. At home Mutti would have had him wash off in the spigot out front before he came inside, but now he would be stripping naked in a dirt road so narrow that at night I can hear the snoring of four families.
“Margot was telling me about some new arrivals,” Mutti says breezily. “Japanese?”
Vati nods, going to the basin and scrubbing his face. “Did they have news?” The war outside moves in leaps of time since our news is so censored. When my mother and I arrived, our train got to share news of Monte Cassino, an abbey near Rome the Allies kept attacking. A few months ago, a train arrived and the people on it said thousands of American soldiers had landed on a beach in France. So it might be over soon? we wondered, but nobody let us out, so the war must not have ended.
“I don’t know if there was news,” I tell Vati. “I didn’t really talk to them.”
“Then what did who say?”
Behind him, Mama’s eyes dart in a warning.
“Mr. Kruse,” I say after a beat, because I haven’t been able to think of a lie in time. “After I got the books.”
Vati nods. “Did he happen to mention how the swimming pool was going?” He asks it in a way that could be casual, but Mutti is shaking her head, telling me not to answer.
“He—he said they’re working on it, but we really didn’t talk for very long.”
Vati sighs, sitting down at the table. “They’re not using the right material for the lining. It’s black, which makes it impossible to see the bottom. I honestly don’t think they have any engineers consulting on the whole project.”
Last year when Vati sent his first letter from Crystal City, he told us there were plenty of good, decent men, and “a few delusional Nazi sympathizers.” In his next letter, he told us, bemused, that one of the delusional men had been elected German representative. In his third, he said that, as representative, Mr. Kruse got to give out work assignments, and he chose the men who came to his meetings.
It doesn’t matter, Vati had written. As long as I have my family here, none of it will matter. But then we came here, and it did matter, because there was only so much furniture he could build for our small room before he ran out of things to do.
“So it sounds like you’ve gone there, then?” I ask tentatively. “The pool. It sounds like you’ve been spending time at the construction site?”
“I’m not going to join up with him, Margot.” His shoulders stiffen.
“I didn’t mean that. It’s—I know it bothers you to think they’re not doing it right.”
“I know they’re not. You see the furniture I built here. Did I cut any corners?”
“Right, that’s what I mean.”
“Why would you think the worst of me? Why do you act like I need to be babysat?”
Mutti closes her eyes. Not now, her face says. Please not this now.
His hand slaps the table. “The pool is inside the camp. When I go for a walk, I am also inside the camp, if you haven’t noticed. The camp is less than half a square mile. I have walked every foot of that, including the pool, on multiple occasions. I am not specifically seeking out the pool, but there are a limited number of locations where one can walk and still be inside the camp. And, again, staying inside the camp is the only way to not be shot dead.”
On the other side of the wall, I hear what sounds like someone tiptoeing, and a chair scraping. The neighbors can hear that we’re fighting. Laugh, I tell myself. Laugh so the neighbors know we’re fine, it’s an absurd joke. Laugh so my father knows everything is okay.
“Somebody should talk to Mr. Mercer about holding another vote for the representative position,” my mother says. “The Japanese don’t seem to have trouble: They’re organizing a kite-flying event for their national holiday. What is our leadership doing? Negotiating how many times they can parade a swastika around on Hitler’s birthday. Building secret distilleries to get drunk on grain alcohol.”
“I thought you didn’t like the Japanese leadership, either.” Vati sighs, the anger in his voice deflating. “The voting. Because they won’t let women vote as they’re not technically prisoners.”
“It’s a stupid rule. Not prisoners? So they’re guards, then?” Mutti says archly. “They’re camp employees? They’re Texans who accidentally wandered in through a barbed-wire fence and said, Well, this seems lovely, I think I’ll stay awhile.”
I think for a minute that he is going to yell again. Instead, he snorts. The knot in my stomach loosens as the snort turns into a laugh. At the fact that we’re all behind this fence together, but some are considered prisoners and some aren’t. “Can you imagine?” Vati plucks the air in front of him, picking up a pretend telephone receiver. “Hello, Crystal City? This is the Jones family in Houston. We’d like to make a reservation. How long? Is indefinitely available? We’d like to make sure we stay indefinitely.”
He’s still laughing when he looks down at the pile of books on the table. “I forgot that you went to the library! Did they get the newest edition for the chemistry book? I wondered if it would have curium.”
“Not chemistry,” I say finally. “There’s no chemistry book.”
“Margot hates chemistry now,” Mutti adds. “Me too. I forbid her from bringing chemistry books into the house.”
It takes my father a second longer than it took my mother. “Did the rejection slip say anything in particular?”
“Just what it usually says,” I tell him.
What usually happens is that my father requests books from the camp library. For books that aren’t in stock, the requests travel to the University of Texas a hundred miles away. Sometimes we get the books.
Sometimes the requests come back: Denied by the US Government. Those replies mean that my father isn’t allowed to read the books. Books about building things or about revolutions are considered too dangerous for enemy aliens. Books about chemistry also, apparently. “All the other books came,” I offer hurriedly. “I wouldn’t have had time to study more.”
“Anyway, it’s done. No use crying,” Mutti says, untying her apron. “I’m going to walk to the entrance and watch the new arrivals. I won’t be on my feet long,” she adds, before Vati or I can protest. “I just want to stretch my legs.”
She leaves, and my father sighs. He took the news about the book well. He seems mostly his old self again, with a fraction less happiness. An infinitesim
al fraction, the weight of a feather. But I wish I knew how to quantify it. If I knew how much the happiness weighed, I’d know how much my father could afford to lose before he disappeared.
“Latin or geometry?” He straightens in his chair, shaking tension out of his shoulders.
“Are you sure?” I say uncertainly. “We don’t have to.”
“Should we do Latin or geometry?” He wiggles his fingers at me so I’ll hand him a book, the same as he has done a hundred times, until I hand him the right one. “Of course I want to, kleine Schnecke. We can’t have you fall behind, because the war can’t last forever.”
FOUR
HARUKO
THIS IS JUST A SCHOOL. THIS IS JUST AN AMERICAN FLAG, POKING out of the ground in front of what is just a brick building, and this could be anywhere, really. Except it’s not.
“You look darling,” Chieko says, clucking approvingly at my rose seersucker dress.
Chieko lives two Victory Huts down from us, and I met her last week, a few days after my family arrived, at the mess hall. “It’s Chinese rice,” she said, watching me try to make sense of the strange texture. “They don’t know that there’s a difference.”
Chieko plays tennis back home in San Francisco, she told me. And she has all the Glenn Miller records, and her father owns a film projector which, she explained when we met, is used once a week to screen movies outside. The camp employees choose—Westerns, musicals—and keep track of which we like. I learned this at my first movie night, when a guard with blond hair and freckles told his superior that my row yawned six times during Dancing Pirate. Nobody yawned during the newsreel that came before it. Edited propaganda, maybe, but it was still a sudden sharp taste of the outside world.
“Tell your sister to walk closer with us,” Chieko says. “It looks bad, her being back there all by herself like she couldn’t find anyone to be friends with.”
Chieko is exactly the right kind of friend for me to have here. She lent me a pair of anklets with pink trim because they complemented my dress. She’s been here since the beginning of summer; she knows everything about the camp. I should be so grateful to be friends with Chieko.
“Toshi, come walk with us.”
My sister can hold a grudge, and she hasn’t forgiven me for slapping her. Every night we’ve been here she’s dragged her cot away from mine to sleep next to our parents in the next room. So instead of walking to the washrooms with Toshiko in the morning, I walk with Chieko, who knocks on my window before it’s even light. Someone is always there before us, holding their piece of cardboard to use as a privacy screen. It will feel normal, Papa told me the first day, when I didn’t know about the cardboard and my mother and I took turns holding our skirts wide to block each other’s stalls. It will never, I thought. A week later, I check the latrine for crickets, and I urinate behind cardboard, but I tell myself every time that it’s not normal.
The school is one-story, redbrick, shaped like a U. In the middle of the U is a courtyard with a small playing field, and on the other side of the courtyard, facing the U, is one of the guard towers. As we walk past it I hear the sound of a whistle. Not angry like a police whistle, but friendly. The three of us look around.
“Good luck!” a voice calls.
I’ve now turned in a full circle looking for the source of the whistle and the voice.
“Up here.” The guard leans out of the tower so we can see him. “Here, catch.” A handful of small square things flutter down. Chewing gum, wrapped in waxy paper. Chieko shrieks and covers her head. “Sorry it’s not Wrigley,” the guard says. “Wrigley is shipped away for soldiers.”
He’s young. Wavy blond hair bleached from the sun, tanned skin with freckles across his nose, the same guard who was observing me at movie night. Ken’s age. I wonder how he managed to get this job, guarding us, when so many of the men his age are off fighting. Most of the guards here are older than my father. Sagging, slow, unfit for combat duty.
“Thanks,” I call back cautiously, wondering if he should be talking to me.
“What?” He shifts his body so his right side instead of his left is facing us, and leans out of the tower. “Sorry, I’m a little—in this ear I can’t—what?” He cups his hand over his right ear.
So that’s why he’s here instead of somewhere in Europe or the Pacific. He couldn’t pass the hearing test. Ken has perfect hearing. Ken and his stupid perfect hearing.
“I said, thanks,” I yell, making sure to enunciate my words. “But are you sure that’s—” And then I don’t know how to finish my sentence. Is that legal? I want to ask. Is that appropriate, for you to be throwing us chewing gum? Instead, I notice a black-and-white logo affixed to the side of his helmet. “Is that an M&O Cigars sticker?”
“It sure isn’t Elitch Gardens.” He grins. “Who do you go for in the Denver tournament?”
“Baseball isn’t really my fav—wait, how did you know I was from Denver?”
“I heard you, last night at the movies. I am, too. Well, when I was a kid. Do you think we’ll get a pro team soon?”
“My brother says no,” I call up.
“I’d take that wager.”
Who are you rooting for? Let’s meet at Merchant’s Park. I heard the Nisei All-Star team might visit next year.
I wasn’t lying to the guard, I never followed baseball; I could not care less whether Denver ever got a professional team. But I overheard a hundred versions of this conversation between the boys at home: Japanese boys who took me to Nisei socials, white boys who sat next to me in school. I ignored a hundred versions of this conversation, because I didn’t realize I might never get to hear them again. Now, I rack my brain for anything to say about baseball, anything to keep me in a normal conversation about normal things from home.
Chieko nudges my shoulder. “We’re late.”
“The Cigars,” I say hurriedly. “Obviously, I’d root for the Cigars over Elitch Gardens. But the Grizzlies over everyone. And thanks for the chewing gum.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
“Thanks, Mike,” I say, as the bell rings and Chieko pulls me toward the school, where dozens of others swarm into the building.
“Where are all the German kids?” I whisper as we walk through the double front doors, elbowing past a cluster of younger boys, finding the right hallway for Toshiko to turn down.
“Hmm?” Chieko looks for our own room number in a corridor of black-haired students.
“The German kids. Do they have a different entrance?”
“Come on, let’s get inside and get good seats.” She pulls my arm, maneuvering me into the classroom she’s decided is ours. Inside, she waves to some of the people she knows, promising to introduce me later but unwilling to commit to a desk until she’s made a predatory lap around the room. I know how this is played, how to choose the right seat and say the right things. I’m trying, here in Crystal City. I’m trying hard.
“What about those seats?” I point to a row with only one other girl in it. Close enough to the back to avoid seeming too eager, but not the very back row, which should be reserved for the boys to pass us notes. This was the row the popular girls would have sat in at my school, the row it took me years to sit in.
Chieko sees who the other girl is and makes a strangled, disapproving noise, shaking her head no. “Why not?” I ask.
She’s a repat, she mouths. She might leave soon.
“What are you talking about?”
She grabs my elbow again, steering me to a corner where the girl won’t overhear us. “Her family volunteered to go back on one of the ships to Japan.”
“There are no ships going to Japan,” I say, confused.
“The government wants to bring the American soldiers home. So families here, they can volunteer to be repatriated back to Japan. An exchange.” Chieko looks impatiently over my shoulder, watching the seats fill up.
“We aren’t soldiers—why would the Japanese government accept us? Why would we volunteer?” The thought bothe
rs me. “Are the Americans making her leave? Isn’t she American?”
“Can you ask me this later?” Chieko says. But the conversation has already taken too long. No empty rows are left, and now we’re going to have to sit next to the repatriating girl. Chieko sighs.
Sorry, I mouth, but I can’t stop thinking about how she said go back, when you can’t go back to a place you’ve never been.
Our teacher, Miss Goodwin, is younger than I expected, with clothing and makeup nicer than Crystal City requires. She gestures to a box of textbooks and it’s not until the last of us has collected our books that the classroom door bangs open, and all of us turn to stare.
A sunburned white girl with frizzy hair. The girl who documented our arrival in her book.
“Yes?” Miss Goodwin asks, because the girl is still standing there clutching her books to her chest and hasn’t said a thing. The boy behind me starts to laugh; a second later more join in.
The girl blushes, reaching into the pocket of her skirt for a folded piece of paper. “I’m sorry I’m not on time. They didn’t believe I was supposed to be in this school,” she says, handing the note to Miss Goodwin. “But I am. Supposed to be here.”
“Margot Krukow,” Miss Goodwin says, handing the note back. “Take any empty seat.”
I don’t know if she doesn’t hear the other students whispering as she walks down the aisle, or if she’s very good at pretending. Her eyes are dark gray and they’re hard to read.
Chieko told me yesterday that the Nikkei community in California was so big that her school was almost all Japanese students. Mine wasn’t. I have been the student that Margot is now, walking down the aisle while other students laugh under their breath. I have worked on ignoring the whispers. Even though I hated that she wrote in her notebook about my incoming train, even if her father is a Nazi, I have been that student enough to feel like I should smile at Margot now, as she holds her books tighter and searches for a seat.
