The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  “Not really,” I press on. “You told me facts. You didn’t tell me what it did to your family.” I can see that I’m upsetting her, but I can’t figure out why. Isn’t this what friends would do, even secret friends? I’ve told her things I haven’t told anyone else. Doesn’t she see how that would make me feel grateful, but also exposed?

  “I don’t want to talk about what it did to my family.”

  “You said that—”

  “I don’t want to talk about what it did to my family. My family is fine. We are here and we are fine.”

  She scrambles to her feet, her face flushed, and I close my mouth, stunned. I wanted her to tell me something, but this doesn’t look like vulnerability, it looks like fear.

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I didn’t know it would upset you so much. That wasn’t fair of me.”

  Margot is looking into the oil lamp, the flame flickering off the curved walls and blocks of ice. “What does being fair mean to you?” she asks, frustrated. “I don’t know if the rules in this camp are the same as outside. We’re not even allowed to have chemistry books.”

  “Sometimes talking helps.”

  Her eyes flash. “And sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “I really didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Her breathing slows, and she reaches over to adjust the lamp. We both watch the flame on the walls.

  “I didn’t mean to get angry,” Margot says, composing herself. “But I would do almost anything to protect my family, even things that didn’t make sense. And I am sure your brother… I’m sure he is the same way. Trying to protect you. I’m sure that even if you can’t see him in those letters, he’s doing what he thinks is best. Everyone here is doing what they think is best for each other.”

  She looks toward the door, and then back to her notes piled on the floor. “It’s almost dinnertime.”

  “Can I come back here tomorrow?” I ask, surprising myself. “We have an extra pillow. I could bring that. It would be more comfortable to sit on.”

  She bites her lip, thinking. “If you want to.”

  “The pillow, and maybe some food,” I offer. “And, Margot, what’s best would be for Ken to be honest with me. You can’t just—you can’t decide what’s best for someone else. Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, gathering her things. “I think people end up doing things for reasons we don’t understand.”

  HARUKO

  I should have seen it. I should have guessed by that conversation that the events that were going to ruin my life had already begun to occur, and I didn’t even know it, and they weren’t the ones I thought they would be. It’s never what you think it will be.

  MARGOT

  Nothing had begun to occur. Sometimes people will do inexplicable things to protect the people they love. That was all I was trying to say.

  TEN

  MARGOT

  September 21, 1944

  Diameter of the swimming pool: 100 yards

  Water required to fill a circular swimming pool with a diameter of 100 yards: 1,250,000 gallons

  Bathing suit styles that have appeared in the General and Union Stores in the past two weeks in anticipation of the swimming pool opening: 5

  Bathing suit styles that Haruko says are not “hideous”: 0

  “I HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU,” HARUKO SAYS. “BUT I CAN’T GIVE IT to you unless you come with me now.”

  “I can’t come with you now,” I mumble, even though I’m dying to know what she’s talking about. “I have to do something for my parents before the lunch hour is over.”

  We’re alone in the classroom. I didn’t realize Haruko was orchestrating it when she sighed loudly and said, “I guess it’s our row’s turn to clean the blackboards.” But this morning, our row meant just the two of us: Chieko and the other girl are both on Yell Squad and had permission to leave early and rehearse for the celebration later. It also wasn’t actually our row’s turn to do anything, but no other students were going to correct Haruko, not today, when they wanted to run home for their bathing suits. Now we’re alone and wiping the blackboard with wet cloths and buckets.

  “This is for your parents,” Haruko tells me. “Your mother, at least. It’ll be quick. But you have to come with me—he’s meeting me at the gate on the Japanese side; that’s where he’s stationed today.”

  “Haruko, then I definitely can’t come with you,” I say, leaving aside the fact that I don’t know who he could be. “You know I don’t go there.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” she says triumphantly. “We’re going to say it’s for our teacher. That we were selected to pick up a gift for Miss Goodwin. It won’t be strange for you to be there if it’s for school, and I heard that her birthday really is next week.”

  I’m smiling, of course I’m smiling, her triumph and excitement are contagious. But Haruko is talking about a public act in a place I don’t belong. The federal school is supposed to be neutral and I am already out of place. It turns out only twenty-four German families ignored Mr. Kruse’s recommendation and sent their children here, and none of the others are in my year.

  “Do you really want us to walk through camp together?” I ask, pulling Haruko to reality. “When nobody else knows we talk after school? When we barely look at each other all day?”

  “You know that’s your decision as much as mine now,” she responds quietly, scrubbing the same section of blackboard for a long time.

  I say nothing because she’s right and she isn’t. It’s still easier for her not to spend time with me at school. But it’s also easier for me to not talk to her there, rather than risk having other people see us being friendly and convince her I’m too odd to spend time with. And it’s easier for me not to have her at my house, where my father might be in the kind of mood where he says something about the Americans. So, it’s a decision we both made. But it’s her decision because she’s embarrassed by me, and it’s my decision because I’m embarrassed by me, too.

  Still, in spite of all this, I have a friend. As long as I am careful, as long as I don’t open up too much and ruin everything. I have a friend who hid from a storm with me in the icehouse seventeen days ago, and then kept coming back. She brought dried plums. I brought an extra pair of socks for mittens. She brought a skirt she was sewing. I brought a button for it. She hummed something while she sewed it on, and I remembered the tune the rest of the day.

  “Margot?” She flicks water on me from her bucket. “Margot?”

  “I think it’s better if we don’t,” I tell her finally.

  Her face falls. “I just wanted to do something for you. You never talk about yourself, you let me talk all the time, you told me about the icehouse. I wanted to pay you back.”

  “How?” My legs are wet. Listening to her, I hadn’t noticed I was holding the sopping rag against my dress.

  “It’s nothing big,” she says quickly. “The guard that I’m—Mike?—he’s nice to me. I asked if the next time he was in town he could look for some tea that was more like what you said your mother wanted than what we have in our store. It took him a couple of weeks but he found two kinds and I don’t know which is better. And I can’t—I had to use the American dollars that I brought with me, and I couldn’t put aside more than for one box. Mike is going to bring both kinds, and then return the one that’s wrong.”

  She looks embarrassed at her lack of money, but I don’t have any at all. My family used all our American dollars within two months of coming here, to order necessities from catalogs. Now we get the standard four dollars a month in tokens, to be used for incidentals, and we ration them carefully.

  Haruko wants to use all her extra money for me. My mother hasn’t been sick in a few weeks, but that’s not the point. Haruko told her guard friend about me. She planned a surprise.

  “You’re smiling,” she says.

  “I do smile sometimes.”

  “You’re actually smiling instead of telling me that it will actually t
ake more than a minute because of the distance to the eastern gate, which you somehow will have memorized.”

  “Well. It will take more than a minute. It will take six minutes to walk there.”

  “That’s a yes?”

  Haruko needs the icehouse so there is a place where she can be who she really is, I think. And talk about the things she is afraid of without upsetting her parents. I need it because I am grateful for a place where I am not myself.

  I don’t know what we would look like outside the icehouse, if we would make sense at all. I want for it to work. I would like so badly for it to work.

  “Yes,” I agree now. “It’s a yes.”

  “Does it look like your side?” She tilts her head, watching me as we walk down a street in the Japanese neighborhood. “Are the houses different or anything?”

  “You’ve seen our side. The day we met.” There are a few people outdoors, women sweeping the stoops of their tar-paper huts, but so far they’ve looked only slightly curious about my presence.

  “I saw the German school before the dust storm came, that’s all,” she says. “What does your house look like?”

  “Like these.”

  “What else? Margot, I’m just asking you to describe a house. It’s one room? What about the outside?”

  “There are planter boxes outside that my father built. He built a little porch, too, so my mother could sit outside. And he’s going to make a bassinet. So we can rock the baby to sleep.” My mother suggested it last night, something else to keep him busy, and my father agreed, and we all had a happy evening.

  “That sounds nice,” Haruko says. “Your father sounds really nice. Maybe I’ll meet him one day.”

  “He is nice,” I tell her, ignoring the second part of what she said and looking around at two Japanese boys tossing a baseball, a mother and daughter hanging clothing on the line.

  “How did he meet your mother?”

  “At a dance,” I say, because I don’t mind talking about the happy times. “My mother didn’t want to go. She doesn’t like dancing. She didn’t give away her dancing shoes from that night until we came here, though; then she said she had to because she knew there wouldn’t be enough space.”

  “I bet your family will be assigned bigger quarters when the baby comes—we get the two rooms because there are four of us,” Haruko says. “See if you can get one close to the east side of your camp. I always think that those must look out into the orchard. It would be nice, to look out at trees and not at a fence.”

  We come to a small, unmarked building that Haruko tells me is the Union Store, which looks like the General Store’s twin: the same structure used for houses, but with a screen door and a bigger wooden porch than houses are allowed to have. The guard tower where she’s meeting Mike is less than fifty yards away.

  There are more people standing outside the Japanese store than I’ve ever seen outside ours. Haruko hesitates as we get closer; it must be out of the ordinary here, too. Some of them are looking at me. It might be my imagination, but I don’t feel like their curious looks are as benign as those of the other people we passed.

  “It’s fine,” Haruko says, determined. “The milkman is German; he’s here all the time. And there’s Mike already.” She points to a young guard with blond hair. He raises his hand. “Are you okay to wait here? I’ll be right back.”

  I wave her off, but almost immediately wish I hadn’t. The people outside the Union Store are all my grandparents’ age, talking to each other animatedly, and now I’m certain at least some of their whispers are about me. I try to look purposeful, to make it clear I’m waiting for Haruko. I wish she would hurry. In the distance Mike opens a bag he’s carrying, and I see them discussing the contents.

  “Are you lost, miss?” One of the old men on the porch looks at me meaningfully, and the others fall silent, too.

  “It’s—it’s for school,” I stammer. “We had to pick up something for school.” I should go over to Haruko. I should have suggested that; it would be better than me standing here by myself.

  “This might not be the best time for you to be here,” the man says. His voice isn’t rude, but it is pointed. He glances back to another older man. Only then do I notice how everyone else seems to be orienting themselves around that other man. He’s holding a small rectangle of paper and his face looks gray. “Just for now, you might want to leave,” the first man says.

  “I have to wait for my friend.”

  “Perhaps you might ask her to hurry.”

  I gesture at the distance and am filled with relief when I see Haruko already walking back toward me, proudly waving two canisters of tea. She gives me them when she gets back, oblivious to the tense air. “This one has peppermint, which you said was important, but I didn’t know if it was more important than Saint-John’s-wort, which it doesn’t have. Here, the ingredients are on the side.”

  I don’t want to ruin this gift for her, so I try to ignore the people on the porch and concentrate on the ingredients she’s pointing to.

  “This seems fine,” I say, after scanning the first can.

  “No, but the other might be better. Read that one, too.”

  “This is good, really. Go give the other back to Mike,” I tell her, wanting to leave. I glance back to the store and then lower my voice. “That man told me I shouldn’t be here. I’m making people uncomfortable.”

  Now she looks over to the group clustered on the porch. “I don’t know any of them,” she says. “But I’ll explain you’re here with me.”

  “Let’s just leave.”

  “No.” She looks worried. “It’s better for me to tell them it’s for school, before some other gossip spreads halfway around camp.”

  I watch as Haruko speaks to the older men in Japanese, keeping her eyes low, nodding toward me and shaking her head. I watch as one of the men hands her the paper they were all looking at before, a telegram. Her lips move as she reads it, and they quiver a little when she hands it back. She says a few more things to them, then comes back to me.

  “Let’s go,” she says, turning back in the direction we came from. We still have both canisters of tea.

  “What happened?” I ask, trying to keep up with her. “Don’t you have to give one of those back?”

  “I’ll find him in a few minutes,” she says tightly, picking up speed.

  “The point of you asking me to come was so he could return one today. Did you get in trouble? What did those people say?”

  “Mr. Ito’s grandson. They got a telegram. He’s missing in action.”

  “Ken.”

  I know that’s what she must be thinking.

  She’s shaking her head. “His grandson wasn’t in the 442nd. He was only a quarter Japanese. He was somewhere else. But they told me—”

  “That they didn’t want to see a German person.”

  “Not right now. Just not right now.”

  “What else did they tell you?”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, but her question has a hitch in it.

  I stop. We’re almost to the edge of the Japanese neighborhood. “The man said something else to you. After you read the telegram. What else did he say?”

  Haruko is forced to stop, too. “He told me that I might want to think about us being friends. That school was one thing, but it wasn’t wise for us to be friends.”

  “Oh,” I say, watching Haruko play with the label on one of the canisters.

  “I made you come,” Haruko says. “And you were right, I shouldn’t have.”

  “We’ll know not to do it again,” I say.

  Haruko nods, but she still looks troubled.

  “Unless,” I say, fearing the worst but making myself continue. “Unless you think it’s better to stop seeing each other in private, too.”

  “No, no, I don’t want that.” She looks back in the direction of the Union Store, now invisible. Her voice cracks. “Margot, what if it had been—”

  “It wasn’t Ken.”
/>   “It wasn’t the 442nd today but it could have been.”

  “Why don’t you go back?” I suggest. “Go back and see if you have a letter from him. It will make you feel better.”

  I watch her run, back toward her camp, wishing I could go after her, knowing that won’t happen.

  Apfelkuchen. That’s the errand I was supposed to run during my lunch hour. I have tea for my mother now, and she also told me this morning that she had been craving apple cake, the kind that our neighbor in Fort Dodge used to make.

  They sell it at the camp bakery for two red cardboard tokens. I’ll buy it even though it’s more than I should spend. Now I’ll be able to give her tea and cake at the same time.

  “Margot!” a voice calls when I walk up to the bakery.

  “Heidi?”

  She’s sitting on the steps out front, drawing something in colored pencil. Immediately, I look around to see if Mr. Kruse is nearby.

  “Are you going to the swimming pool?” she asks. “I’m making a sign. My mama said there was a big celebration for the opening, and that I could get a cake. I’m going to get the same kind of cake I got when I turned seven last month. I just have to finish this.”

  “I have tokens to buy cake, too. And then after I check on my own mama, I’m also going to the swimming pool. I’ll look for you there.”

  Inside, two girls my age stand at the counter. I recognize them both. One of them, Lena, was on my train, and she was friendly to me until it became clear that my family was going to speak in English and skip meetings. She’s wearing an apron; this must be her part-time job. The girls were laughing when I opened the door, but when they see me they stop.

  “Can I order a slice of cake?” I ask, and Lena silently goes to cut it.

  Less than an hour ago I felt horribly out of place on the Japanese side of camp. Now I’m where I belong and I still don’t belong. The other girl, Adali, makes uncomfortable conversation with me, about how Mrs. Fischer has just put Pfeffernüsse in the oven, if I want to wait for them to come out. About how it looks like my school is also getting out early for the pool opening. We’re both saved from talking longer by the sound of the door chime.