by Monica Hesse
I have also been that student enough to decide not to smile now, to instead feel myself tense as she walks closer. Next to me, Chieko does the same, willing Margot to choose a different row. We don’t need to be the row with the Nazi girl on our first day.
But there are no other seats. Thanks to my mistake earlier, the empty one is next to me.
“You dropped these.”
She’s talking to me, touching my hand to get my attention. Her fingers are rough and calloused. I turn to tell her she can keep it, whatever it is, my pencil or book cover, because as long as her hand is on mine, people are whispering about me, too.
“You dropped these last week so I brought them for you,” she says.
“That’s a little strange.” Chieko laughs, to break the tension in the room. I make myself laugh, too, until Margot turns back to her own desk.
Except it’s not a pencil, what she leaves on my desk. It’s a bunch of lilies. Made of silk, but for a minute when I see them on my desk, blue and soft, and I see the way Margot handles them, like they are the most precious thing she’ll ever touch, I forget that they’re not real.
MARGOT
Haruko remembers things wrong. She told you what she wished was true. I didn’t put the flowers on her desk. That would have meant that I brought them to school, expecting to see her. That doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t expect to see her. I didn’t put my hand on her hand and say, You dropped these. I never would have. I was careful to barely look in her direction.
I think Haruko prefers her version because it makes it seem like she had no choice in the matter. Like I forced myself into her life.
I did have the flowers. That part was true. I had them pressed between the pages of my book, but she didn’t see them until later, much later. She said, They were my mother’s. She said, You can keep them to remember me.
I kept them.
I know this correction seems like it’s a small difference. It’s a big difference. I know the way I am telling these stories seems mundane and boring. Horror grows out of mundanity. If you’re paying attention, it always starts small. We all tell the versions we wish were true.
None of this matters anyway. Whether I tried to give her the flowers then or later. She doesn’t know my version of the story; she’ll never know it. She can remember things however she wants.
But it’s a big difference. You can’t change endings by going back and changing beginnings.
FIVE
HARUKO
I WAIT FOR TOSHIKO AFTER SCHOOL AND WE WALK HOME together, down the narrow dust paths that pass for streets. “How was your first day?” I ask, but I don’t press when she shrugs. Before I turn away, she makes sure I see her wrinkle her nose at me, though, so I know she’s almost done being angry.
Our parents are in our Victory Hut. Both of them, since my mother has evening shifts at the hospital, and my father is already home for the day. There are no natural roles for a hotel clerk at a camp for enemy aliens. The Japanese council here has promised to look for something suitable, but in the meantime they have assigned him to work in the spinach fields. It’s a hard job to get, Chieko told me, since it’s outside the fence.
“How was school?” my mother asks, but she’s barely paying attention to Toshiko’s answer, murmuring, “Good, good,” before Toshiko is through the first sentence. Mama got her uniform last night, a white coat to wear over her clothes. My father called her Dr. Tanaka when she tried it on, but she couldn’t stop worrying over the sleeve length, and she spent the whole evening with her head bowed over a Japanese textbook lent by one of the other internee doctors, murmuring to herself: Lacrimal. Ethmoid. Zygomatic.
“My day was also fine,” I say, since she hasn’t bothered to ask.
Instead of responding, she hands me a manila envelope with War and Navy Departments, V-Mail Service written on the sender label.
My heart thuds.
“It’s from Ken,” she says, as though anyone else in the US Army would be sending us mail. “We waited for you to read it.”
Ken. It’s been months since we heard from him. Months since he wrote from some training camp in America that we weren’t allowed to know the location of. He made jokes about his commanding officers in that letter, how one of them walked pigeon-toed with a waggling rear end, and we read it around the table and laughed.
The last time we heard from Ken, the FBI hadn’t come yet. I’d written Ken back, telling him I’d stopped going to the soda fountain because the new people who worked there were morons who couldn’t make a simple phosphate, and that my friends who thought he was a loser before now found him attractive in uniform. My parents wrote him when we learned where we were going but we never heard back. “He has more important things to worry about,” my mother said then.
The letter now has already been opened—all of our mail is inspected—but Papa nods that I should take it out of the envelope. The sheet of paper in my hand is small, half the size of a regular letter, with Ken’s handwriting shrunken, too. V-mail: Ken wrote this, wherever he is, and the government copied it onto a roll of microfilm with thousands of other soldiers’ letters to save on shipping costs, and then it was printed again, but smaller.
Cursive. The letter is in cursive; that’s why my parents haven’t read it yet. Mama can’t read English. Papa’s speaking English is almost perfect, his printed English is very good, but aside from the signature he mastered for forms at the hotel, he barely knows cursive. The letter is addressed to all of us, but Ken must’ve known I would be the one to read it.
I run my hands over the page because it’s the same page my brother once touched, before remembering that’s not how V-Mail works. He never touched this. It’s a copy of the real thing. “Read it!” Toshiko bounces on her toes, and I clear my throat.
“Dear Papa and Mama, Haruko and Toshi,” Ken writes.
Boy, is it good to have a minute to sit down and write. I just sat down after the longest bivouac. That’s when we hike and make a temporary encampment and sleep in the dirt. It’s not so bad and at least it comes with plenty of fresh air. Nothing like filling your lungs with some fresh air from the countryside! Plus, the towns we pass are pretty, almost like postcards.
What kind of town, you ask? Tsk, tsk, I’m not allowed to tell you! What I can tell you is that all the kids who live here have learned to recognize American soldiers, but they are confused as the devil when they see a bunch of Japanese-looking guys in American uniforms. We try to tell them, mostly through hand gestures, that we’re American, but they usually don’t believe it until we pull out a real Hershey’s bar. Then they’re clambering all over us. It’s a hoot.
The other fellas here are swell. I’ve made so many friends. Most of them are from California and I can’t wait to visit them there one day. Boy oh boy, we’ll paint the town.
Anyway, I am fine, and I hope you all are, too. I sent this letter to Crystal City because Papa told me in his last letter that he thought you’d all be there by now. Write soon.
Kenichi/Ken
I finish and my family is still while I refold the paper and hand it to my mother.
“That was a good letter, don’t you think?” She smooths it between her fingers. “He seems healthy.”
“A very good letter.” My father sounds even more relieved than my mother. “He’s doing us proud.”
“Where do you think he is?” Toshiko asks. “Germany?”
“Nobody is in Germany yet, Toshi-chan,” my father explains. “Except the Germans. We haven’t invaded there yet.”
“Unless it happened since we got here. No other trains have come with news. All we know is we hadn’t invaded Germany before we left home,” Toshiko says.
My tongue is numb. I can’t join in because I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Ken sounds healthy, for someone who is not Ken. It is a good letter, for someone who is not Ken. It’s a hoot? Ken never would have talked like that. Ken didn’t use slang. He wouldn’t be making lifelong
friendships with a bunch of fellas. I once watched my brother spend an entire school dance sitting alone under the bleachers because he said the comic book he was reading was more interesting than getting all sweaty on the gym floor.
I was the one who cared about making friends. I was only under the bleachers because one of the white girls at the dance had asked me if my father was bucktoothed like the advertisements showing pictures of General Tōjō. The cartoon ones that read: What have you done to help save the country from THEM? The ones that had a drawing of the Japanese general as a captured mouse, with the words “Jap Trap.” I’d forced myself to laugh at her question because Jennie was laughing, too, because in order to be popular at a school with barely any Japanese students, you had to make yourself laugh at things like this.
Stay here with me, who cares? Ken had said as I crouched in the new cap-sleeved dress I’d promised my mother I would wear to every social event for two years if she would let me buy it, if she would let me go to a regular school dance instead of the socials at the Japanese church. It was my father who convinced her in the end, my father who liked that I was popular at school, who listened to American big band music, and learned American dance steps, who conspiratorially told me to let him handle convincing my mother.
We don’t need to tell our parents everything, Ken said. I’ll say you danced all night long. He handed me a handkerchief and went back to reading, pretending he wasn’t watching me.
My brother could not have cared less about walking through the beautiful countryside. Ken loved the indoors: word puzzles, backgammon, long games of criss-crosswords where he arranged letter tiles into fiendish combinations. Ken would only use the word bivouac to talk about how bivouac is a useful word if you’re playing criss-crosswords and have drawn a lot of vowels. But now here that word is, in a letter that is apparently from him.
Ken, the American army’s pride, one of the Nisei boys who convinced the government that they could be trusted to join the service. He joined when he turned eighteen. Nobody expected him to, but my skinny, sarcastic brother did anyway.
“We can be very proud of Ken,” my father says again, but hearing it makes me bristle.
Ken didn’t join just because he wanted to. Ken joined so our family could hang a yellow ribbon in our window. So I could tell the girl from the dance that my brother was off fighting. So it would be clear, in a city that had only six hundred Japanese people, that we were as American as everyone else.
But when the FBI men came to our kitchen, did my father say that? Did he talk about how his son was in the 442nd division, and how Ken had left for boot camp on a bus waving a handkerchief out the window?
He didn’t tell them anything about Ken at all. He didn’t explain anything or defend himself. He offered them a drink, the good hotel clerk my father had always been. He told my mother and sister and me to sit at the table and not move. He apologized for the desk drawer sticking. He was so deferential, while the FBI went through that drawer and opened our closets. As if he’d done something wrong, as if we all had.
And then something happened. Something suspicious, something strange. While the federal agents were rolling up our living room rug to check underneath, my father caught my eye. He shook his head slightly. To me, to no one else. To a question I hadn’t even asked, he shook his head. I had never seen him make that gesture before. I didn’t know what it meant.
I’ve spent every day since then replaying that head shake. Every single day since the FBI took Papa and left behind our ransacked apartment, wondering what my father wasn’t saying, and thinking of the fearful look in his eyes while he wasn’t saying it.
Ken is going on bivouacs for nothing. Ken left for nothing. We are getting letters that pretend to be cheerful but only sound wrong, and my family is too desperate to acknowledge it. How can they not see that cheerfulness is something to worry about, too?
“He sounds great!” is all I say, though. Because even now, I know I don’t need to tell our parents everything. “Boy oh boy! What a time he must be having. I can’t wait until he comes home so he can tell us all about it, can you?” My family nods along as I coo over the letter. I make sure my voice is very cheerful.
“I’m going for a walk,” I say. “I’m going to listen to some of Chieko’s records.”
“Help me set the table first,” my mother says. “And make sure you’re back in time for roll call.”
This is not a normal place. This is not a normal time.
I manage to stay cheerful for as long as it takes to set the table, and for as long as it takes me to tell Mama the gingham she bought for the tablecloth is very nice, and then I go outside where I make it to the end of our dirt road before I burst into tears.
SIX
MARGOT
September 4, 1944
Number of people who thought to bring chairs from their houses for our first roll call: 0
Number of people who have brought chairs today: 7
Number of people who have also brought bottles of soda: 15
Temperature: ? (We’re not allowed a thermometer. A thermometer might be considered a dangerous tool.)
WE ARE COUNTED. TWO TIMES A DAY. THE GUARDS DO IT EFFICIENTLY. It happens in rows and columns while we stand in a clearing near our houses. Once in the morning, before the temperature gets too high, and then once in the evening, when it drops.
The camp’s main entrance is on the west side of the compound, which is also where the hospital and the laundry are. On the south side is Federal High School, the tennis court, and most of the Japanese housing and Japanese facilities and businesses. The east is a small orchard and the site of the swimming pool; the north has the mess hall off a street called 11th Avenue, a recreation hall off Lincoln Avenue, and the library off Arizona Street. The north and central part of the camp also have German housing as well as the German establishments and school, and the space between the houses and school is where we are counted.
Women bring knitting, children bring schoolwork to stay occupied while we wait. I should mind it: the hot sun, standing on one leg and then the other so my feet don’t fall asleep. But I find comfort in order, knowing where my family is and that we’re here together.
Tonight we are counted hurriedly. Not quickly, exactly, because the guards try not to be sloppy. But in a way that feels rushed. It’s because of the sky. Overhead are mackerel clouds that mark a coming storm, the kind of weather that would make Vati and me rush to put the cow in the barn. The wind bangs a loose shutter against Mrs. Schmidt’s tar-paper shack. Mrs. Schmidt has shutters. I turn to share that new information with my mother, before remembering I came straight from the library and I’m not standing where I normally do.
“Four ninety-five?” the guard with the shiny forehead calls to the other.
“Four ninety-four,” the guard with the big mole calls back. Around me people groan, because it means we’ll start over. It should be 495. That’s how many German prisoners are counted every day here. It’s 495 today, too. The second guard didn’t notice that when he passed the row in front of me, Mr. Fuhr was squatting down, resting his knees. I would explain this to one of the guards, but they wouldn’t be allowed to take my word for it.
The guards start again from opposite ends, irritable now. Mrs. Schmidt’s shutter bangs. I’d taken out my Latin book planning to memorize a few verbs, but now I’m doing what everyone is: measuring the sky and wondering if the weather will hold before the count is done.
Out of the corner of my vision, a flash of movement. It’s a girl, running toward us.
For a minute I think that means I was wrong: Maybe it was actually 494 people before. But I’m never off in my counting, and the running figure isn’t German, either.
It’s Haruko, the lavender girl. Her dress today was pink and she didn’t say a word to me the whole day though my desk was eleven inches from hers. I don’t know if she knows my name.
“Hey,” one of the guards calls out to her, breaking off in the middle of hi
s counting. “Whoa, there. Hold on a minute.”
Her eyes are puffy; she looks like she’s been crying as she stops to talk to the guards. Haruko shouldn’t be here. She should be counted later, on the Japanese side of camp, that’s how it works. Where are her friends, the people she ate lunch with, who I can already tell will be popular? Why is she here, and alone, and crying?
I’m studying her again, like I was at the entrance gates, only now others are watching, too. Stop it, I want to tell them, because I feel like whatever is making her cry now must be whatever was making her angry when I first saw her, just boiled over, finally. We’re all invading her privacy.
I know what it’s like to want your thoughts and feelings to be contained, and to be afraid the whole world will see them.
The guards are looking at their watches and then toward the darkening sky as they try to figure out what to do with Haruko, and how to finish the count before the storm comes. Finally, one points over to the rest of us, telling her to join the row in front of me.
She has to walk directly past me to take her place, and as she passes, I surprise myself by calling out her name: “Hi, Haruko.”
She glances over to me for a second before dabbing her face against her shoulder and then dismissively staring ahead again. I’m embarrassed I said anything at all.
My parents told me their one fear about me going to the federal school was that because there were so few German students, it would be hard for me to make friends. I didn’t say it would be a relief for me to have that excuse. At home I’d always wished it really was because I was a year younger than the other students, which is what Vati said. Or because I was too reserved like my mother thought. But part of the reason I was serious and literal is because, when you can tell you are different, it’s safer to be careful. To keep things in a box. To respond to what other people are actually saying, not to what you think they might mean.
