The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  The corner of his mouth tugs. “I slid a dime through the hole.”

  “Vati!”

  “And the landlord never looked again. At any of us, actually; he spent the next three months avoiding us in the breakfast room.”

  “And you didn’t have to fight him,” I say.

  My father shrugs. “I wonder if I should have protected her instead of letting her deal with that on her own.”

  “She protected herself.”

  “She was so tired, and you were sick that winter, and none of us were getting any sleep.” He swallows hard. “But we would pile under the blankets and stare at you for hours and talk about what a life we were going to build.”

  I search for the right things to say to my sad, breaking father, but there’s nothing. I can’t think of anything. The sun has gone down while we’ve been talking; it’s almost all dark now.

  “Should we go back?” my father asks, and I nod because the anger has left his voice.

  Inside, my mother is still talking to Haruko’s mother. She looks up when she sees us. “I was telling Dr. Tanaka again that her offer to find me some tea was very kind. Very kind,” she repeats, this time looking at Haruko’s mother. “Which I may be happy to take you up on, if I find myself again feeling as badly as I did this afternoon. Right now I’m feeling much better.”

  She waits for the aide to translate before she continues. “And I know my husband is also very grateful. We were both so affected by the heat.”

  Dr. Tanaka doesn’t protest about the tea anymore. She gives a polite nod, and then gestures to the aide that they should give my family privacy again. Before she leaves herself, though, she steps closer to my mother’s bedside and begins to rearrange her pillows, moving one so it’s lower behind my mother’s back, creating more support for her to lean on. When she speaks again, it’s in English, and low enough that I’m wondering if she’s trying to talk privately to my mother, or if she wishes my father and I weren’t around. “Need tea, need anything,” she says. She enunciates each word carefully. “Need anything, come to me.”

  It’s so kind. It’s so humiliating, because in her concern, I see how she sees my family.

  EIGHT

  HARUKO

  THE OPPOSITE OF SERENE, I THINK TO MYSELF AS I WALK HOME through the dust. Whatever I was in front of Margot in the icehouse was the opposite of everything I have tried to be since coming here. I said more than I should have said and asked more than I should have asked, and let myself be so much more raw than I should have let myself be. She listened to me talk about Ken, she listened to me talk about my father. I shared my secrets and she barely told me anything in return. Why did I pour everything out?

  I arrive at school the next day debating what to say to her, but it turns out I’ve worried for nothing—Margot isn’t there. The desk I’d so desperately wished empty the day before stays empty all day long.

  And she’s not there the day after that, and a crazy part of me wonders whether I made everything up, whether I really hid behind a block of ice praying a guard wouldn’t find me. When I finally ask Miss Goodwin, on the third day, if she knows what happened, she seems surprised I care Margot is gone. “Her mother has been sick,” she explains. “Margot is looking after her.”

  I could try to find her house; it wouldn’t be against the official rules. But some rules are official, and some rules are quietly understood and everyone knows to follow them. The Japanese people that I know here—they are businessmen and doctors and teachers. The first round of German prisoners, my father said, came here because they were the ones who built the camp. They’re laborers, farmers, construction men, who asked to stay in Crystal City when it turned out nicer than the prison where they’d been living. We were never meant to be here together.

  Maybe she has left the school. Her parents could have decided to send her to be educated with the rest of the Germans. Which would be good, I remind myself. Her never coming back to my school is exactly what I should want. It’s exactly what I thought I did want, until Margot put the bobby pin in my hair while I cried and cried about Ken, and for a brief sliver of time someone else was holding my fears.

  Plink. Plink.

  Chieko, knocking on the window. Wake-up time, line time, see how many minutes I can get away with making my shower last when the limit is supposed to be three. The longest I’ve succeeded yet is six. Today an old woman starts rattling the wooden shower door after four. We all try to steal shower time. It’s the one place any of us can ever truly be alone.

  Maybe she got sick with whatever her mother had. Maybe she swallowed too much dust, trying to help me in the storm.

  Chieko talks for a long time before she realizes I haven’t joined in. About how the monks giving Japanese lessons after federal school hours are mean, and I’m lucky my parents aren’t making me and Toshiko go. About how there’s another sugar shortage, which means our rationing will change, about how the pool is going to open soon. Chieko has adjusted to all of this. She’s never broken down. She has an older brother, too, but he sleeps in the room next to her and she knows where he is every night. She looks at me and thinks that I am like her. I want to be. I wish I could just be like Chieko.

  “So I think I will anyway,” she says, as we brush our teeth after our showers. “Do you?”

  “Think I will what?” I say, trying to sound interested.

  “Go to the judo match later. Are you paying attention at all? Hey, do you want to come over tonight? My father got the film they’re showing on Saturday; he’s going to test the reel.”

  “Do you think it’s strange that we don’t watch with the Germans?” I ask.

  “What do you mean? We have our own projector. They have their own projector.”

  “I don’t know. I just—like that Margot girl. If we wanted to go to the Saturday movie with her one night, could we invite her to the late showing when we had the reel? Or go to the earlier showing at the German recreation hall?”

  “Marg—” Chieko’s face screws up while she tries to place who I’m talking about. “I told you, if you want to see a movie twice, you can come to my house when we test the projector; you don’t have to go to the German screening. You’re so funny sometimes.”

  Geometry, social studies. Guards come in while we study; they’ve done this every day, whispered a few words with the teacher and glanced at us sitting in our desks.

  Miss Goodwin passes me a note. My father forgot his lunch. Correction, I think: My father forgot the concept of packing his own lunch because it was something my mother always did, but now she has a job, too. Could I go to the mess hall and get him something during my own lunch break, the note asks, and bring it to the gate? It’s the second time this has happened this week.

  Margot could be gone, not just from school, but completely gone from the camp, and I wouldn’t know.

  Crystal City is like the snow globe my father once got: a whole city in a bubble. You can feel momentarily fine inside it, until you want something on the outside and you realize your entire world, and everything you are allowed to do, or see, or buy, or read, or eat, or look at must exist inside the fence with you. If Margot was on the other side of the fence, even two feet, she would no longer exist in my world.

  Home economics. We girls learn to baste a hem. I am terrible at basting my hem.

  Physical education.

  Margot.

  She’s there: sitting in her seat when I get back from playing volleyball, her notebook already open while Miss Goodwin tells her to stay after class for the assignments she missed. I’m still sweaty from the match, my hair clinging to the back of my neck.

  When she sees me she tentatively smiles. “Hi.”

  Hi, I say, but in my head. Before I can say anything out loud, Chieko arrives behind me, and then the rest of the girls in my class. “She’s back,” one whispers.

  I don’t think she meant for Margot to hear it. But she did; her ears turn pink. When she looks toward me I can tell she knows I heard i
t, too, and she’s wondering if I’ll say something to defend her. I should. I should tell Linda to mind her own business. I should at least return Margot’s hello, so she doesn’t look crazy for offering it.

  I don’t, though. I can’t in front of everyone. My tongue won’t move. Talking here feels public and strange.

  When I sit down, Margot averts her own eyes, her face fully red, and starts turning the pages of her book faster than she could possibly be reading them. My stomach fills with guilt, but I can’t find a way to speak to her until the period is half over, when Chieko is at the blackboard doing a math problem, and the rest of the class is distracted.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I whisper out of the side of my mouth. “I wanted to—”

  “You wanted to what?” she whispers back flatly.

  “I wanted—”

  The bell rings while I’m figuring out what I wanted to say. Lunch. I wanted to thank her? I wanted to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone else what we talked about? I wanted to suggest we shouldn’t talk again? Her steady gray eyes are waiting for me to finish.

  The bell rings again and I’m too late. She’s out of her seat and through the door, and I’m staring down at the note from Miss Goodwin. My father.

  The mess hall isn’t far away. I pick up beef stew and bread with oleo, the meal served today for the families who don’t have kitchens yet. At the gate, the guard from the spinach field hasn’t arrived to pick up the lunch, but there’s another one standing just inside the fence.

  “Hey, Colorado!”

  “Mike,” I say. He was here last time I brought lunch, too.

  “Chewing gum?” He holds out his hand.

  “Hmm, I don’t know.” I try to adjust my brain away from what I should’ve said to Margot and be here with Mike instead. “I’m more in the mood for a Mitchell Sweet from Hammond’s.”

  He throws his hand across his chest, pretending to be offended. “An arrow through my heart,” he says. “You reject my gum and you imply that Hammond’s is better than Baur’s? This was the last pack from the store in town. Should I give it to someone else? There’s an old German man here from Colorado Springs who I could talk to instead.”

  Hammond’s. Baur’s. A Mitchell Sweet with caramel and marshmallow. Mike is the only person I’ve met inside the fence who also exists back home.

  “No, I’ll take it, I’ll take it.” I hold out my palm.

  “Are you sure?” He playfully snatches his hand back. “Because this old German man—” Mike breaks off and his smile disappears. Another guard has arrived. Mike stands up straighter, clasping his hands officially in front of him. “Afternoon, Officer.”

  The other guard watches us, hovering a few feet away instead of climbing up the tower to take his post. “Does this detainee need any assistance, Officer?” he finally asks loudly. “Anything I can help with, since I’m sure you’d like to be off on your lunch break?”

  “Miss Tanaka has been instructed to deliver lunch for her father. She has permission to wait until someone comes to pick it up, and I have been assigned to open the gate.”

  The older guard, still suspicious, finally huffs up the ladder. Mike puffs his cheeks in an imitation of his colleague. “He gets grumpy because he wants all my attention for himself,” he whispers, then looks over my shoulder. “Oh, your father is here.”

  Two figures approach the fence. My father, in shirtsleeves and worn pants covered in dirt. A bandanna around his neck. I didn’t think he’d be here. Last time I just passed the food to an employee. But here he is, escorted by a guard, dressed worse than he ever would have dressed to go to work at home. He wouldn’t have dressed like this to take out the garbage.

  “Haru-chan!” He smiles when he sees me waiting.

  “I got your note. I brought the food.” I hand the pail to Mike, who unlocks the gate and hands it to the other guard, who inspects the contents before handing it to my father. The exchange complete, I nod and start to turn.

  “Why don’t you stay?” he calls. “There is enough food that we can share.”

  “I have to get back to school. I took up my lunch hour running to the mess for you.”

  “Did you eat while you were there?” I shake my head no. “So, more reason to stay.” He opens the pail and pushes a slice of bread through the fence links. “You have a few minutes. And I have to wait here until the guard finishes his lunch anyway.”

  His guard has produced his own lunch pail and is eating a sandwich while talking with Mike. I don’t want to stay, but I can’t figure out a way to be so deliberately disobedient as to leave my father standing here, eating alone behind a fence.

  Except, I realize, he isn’t inside the fence. Not right now.

  “Look what happened,” I say. “What side of the fence we’re each on. Somehow I’m the one in prison now. You’re on the outside.”

  “Haruko.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Can’t we have a pleasant lunch together?”

  “Of course we can, Otousan,” I say, but I am being impolite through my politeness. My father has never required formal honorifics and it comes out of my mouth sounding mocking.

  He sighs. “Haruko, what is wrong?”

  I roll the leftover bit of my bread into a ball. Why am being I so rude to him? Why am I living up to the Nisei stereotypes published in the Rafu Shimpo back home, the angry letters from old Issei men complaining that we second-generation girls have no respect for our elders.

  “I know you are not happy to be here,” he says. “I don’t think there is any person in this camp who would not prefer to be somewhere else, but the way you are behaving toward me…” He shakes his head. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

  Yes. There are a dozen things I would like to talk about. Why is he letting me be so rude? Where is the lecture on shitsuke that I should be getting about using good manners? My father might be less strict than most of my friends’ parents, but still I used to get that lecture in Denver: if I was late coming home, if I was giggling in the middle of church.

  Is he letting me be rude because he feels guilty I’m here? Because he thinks I know something?

  I would like to talk about the things I haven’t allowed myself to say out loud until I said them to Margot. The things hiding in the back of my brain that I didn’t even realize I felt.

  “Haruko?” he asks again.

  “Why didn’t you protest when they said they were going to take you?” I blurt out.

  He closes his eyes and sighs. “We talked about this.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “What would have been the point? If the government decided it had evidence against me, then the government had made its decision.”

  “You could have tried.”

  “Did that work with any of the other families who are here?” he asks. “No matter how they tried to fight it, did you see it work? Shikata ga nai.” It cannot be helped.

  My father still doesn’t know everything that we went through. How my mother spent a frantic month trying to give away all our possessions to neighbors and friends. “For safekeeping, temporary,” she said, as she handed away her grandmother’s tea set, my roller skates, our good dishes. It was easier to give things away at the beginning. When people realized what my father had been accused of, they were afraid to associate with us. Every Japanese person who lived on the West Coast had already been relocated, forcibly removed from their homes. The only thing keeping those of us in Colorado safe was the fact that the government wasn’t evacuating noncoastal states. If my father had been taken, that meant nobody was safe after all.

  My father was not with my mother and me when our hair salon posted a sign on the door: NO JAPANESE, or when a car drove past and the window rolled down and the driver threw a bottle of soda at us that splashed all over our clothes. We were so humiliated. I was so serene. “It’s okay, Mama, probably an accident,” I said. I didn’t tell her that the English-speaking driver had yelled, Yellow bi
tch! before he drove off.

  “Why are you asking now?” my father says again.

  I am asking now because there are terrible things that I have not been able to stop worrying about. I am asking because something happened on the day they took him. Something he almost told me, but didn’t.

  “Why are we here, Papa? Why are we really here?”

  He quickly glances over to Mike and the other guard before lowering his voice to a hiss. “You know that they did not need a reason to take any of us. Stop asking questions, Haruko.”

  And that is what worries me. They didn’t need a reason. The government didn’t need a reason for doing any of this. People were taken because of the artwork they had on their walls, the martial arts they practiced for their exercise. People were taken because of Executive Order 9066, which said the government could invent military zones and relocate anyone it wanted. The government could have taken us because of that, and then we would have gone to a camp run by the War Relocation Authority, which is where the West Coast Japanese went. But they didn’t do that with us. They said they were taking us because my father was passing messages to hotel guests. They put us in a camp run by the Department of Justice, which was meant not just for Japanese people but specifically for enemy aliens.

  It’s such a specific charge.

  “I just want to know the truth,” I say, desperately, too loud. Mike has looked up because even with his bad ear, he heard me. I lower my voice again. “You looked at me, on the day they came to take you. I want to know—”

  “Thank you for bringing my lunch,” my father interrupts. “Now go back to school. Your questions are not helping.”

  “But would you tell me?” I ask. Nearby, the guard who brought my father keeps checking his watch. It’s time for them to leave; he’ll come over any minute.