The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  “And then you came here,” I whisper.

  “We had to by then. It was too late to go home, after all. And then my mother was… gone. For months. I don’t know how to explain it. She was there, but she wasn’t there. But when we came to Crystal City she got pregnant again. Now this baby is the miracle. And my family is together. The way we had planned it all along. We were together, and that’s what we’d said was important.”

  Finally, she stops with her long horrible story and looks at me, searching for something.

  “It was a mistake,” she says finally. “I can now see that it was a mistake for us to come.”

  She hasn’t moved since the beginning. She’s still sitting on the ice block; her arms are still wrapped around her knees and she’s still shaking.

  “You need a blanket,” I say. I find one bunched in the corner, shake it out, and wrap it around Margot’s shoulders, rubbing up and down the way my mother used to when Ken and Toshiko and I were small and we would step out of the bathtub freezing and wet.

  Rub rub rub. Hum a tuneless song.

  “I’m warm enough now,” Margot says.

  “Your lips are still blue.”

  “But I’m warm enough now.”

  “Oh. Right.” I stop rubbing her shoulders, but then it feels like my hands are hanging uselessly at my sides and I don’t know what to do with them, like all of a sudden I’ve realized for the first time that I have hands and they don’t work.

  My heart is clattering inside my chest. I feel like Margot must be able to hear it. I can—it’s pulsing in my ears—I’m thinking about everything she’s been hiding, and how much it must have cost her to hide it.

  “I should go,” she says. “My mother. I’m supposed to bring her ice.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I should.”

  But she doesn’t go, and neither do I, and I am looking at her for the first time and seeing who she really is.

  “Haruko. I didn’t tell you everything before because—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” she says. “I didn’t tell you because I was afraid if I told you everything, I couldn’t handle it. And neither could you.”

  “I could.”

  “Are my lips really blue?”

  “A little.”

  “They don’t feel cold.”

  “They’re cold compared to mine. See?”

  I press my index and middle finger to my own mouth, which suddenly feels hot and swollen, and hold them there for a minute, and then I take those same fingers and press them against Margot’s. Her lips are chapped. She closes her eyes. I feel her breathing, and then I feel her stop and hold her breath. I feel my pulse, very faintly, in the tips of my fingers, pressing against the cool of Margot’s lips, and slowing so that every beat crashes in my ears.

  I feel—

  “Hello?”

  The icehouse door has opened. It’s not the only time it’s happened since we’ve been coming here, but it’s the only time we haven’t noticed it in time to turn off our lamp and hide. A detainee, a cheerful-looking older man, carrying a bucket to chip some ice off into.

  “You girls having a picnic?” he says, noting our blankets as he sets about gathering his ice. “Smart way to beat the heat. Don’t know why I never thought of coming in here and doing the same thing for an afternoon.”

  As soon as the door opened, I had removed my fingers from Margot’s lips. I had done so by smearing them across her face, so that anyone who saw would think I had been helping her remove a smudge, kill a mosquito, something innocent and explicable.

  “You girls go to the pool opening?” the man asks, chipping away at his ice. “It was something, wouldn’t you say?”

  Margot’s eyes are wild.

  “I was leaving,” she yelps, loud enough for the man to hear. He’s still puttering around behind us. “I should get back to my family.”

  “Me too,” I say exaggeratedly. “Homework.” I’m still shaking from whatever just happened. What just happened? “Why don’t you go ahead? I’ll clean up here.”

  When she leaves, I fold the blankets with unsteady hands. I put out the oil lamps and tuck them in the corner, while making polite conversation with the older man, who tells me he has a granddaughter my age.

  When he leaves, too, I sit on my pile of folded blankets, trying to calm myself, trying to collect my thoughts. I suddenly feel like I have never been here in the icehouse before.

  I have no idea what just happened.

  Something pointy is digging into my thigh, from inside my pocket. The corner of an envelope. I forgot. I almost forgot.

  That’s what I had gone back to do, earlier today after we got the tea, after I walked Margot to the border of the Japanese neighborhood. Check the mail to make sure there wasn’t a telegram saying Ken was missing in action. There wasn’t. But there was a letter.

  Alone in the icehouse, I take the envelope out of my pocket, and then take the letter out of the envelope. One page. One side of one page. Whatever Ken is lying about, at least it will be short, and I cannot believe I feel relieved to be reading this right now, to have something to focus on.

  Dear Family, Ken writes.

  And then he writes nothing. Or he writes everything. The point is that I can’t see what Ken has written because it has all been censored, all of it, inked over by thick black lines. Line after line, paragraph after paragraph.

  I’d been afraid of all the terrible things Ken could tell me in a letter. That he’d had to shoot someone. That he was missing an arm. An ear. I thought nothing could be harder than hearing lies about what he was going through, but I was wrong. What is harder is having to imagine what your brother is going through, and knowing that whatever terrible things you might imagine, the truth might actually be worse.

  HARUKO

  I don’t regret that, that afternoon in the icehouse. It will sound strange to say, but out of all the things I could and should and do regret, that afternoon is not one of them.

  FOURTEEN

  MARGOT

  IT’S DARK BY THE TIME I GET HOME.

  I don’t know how long it’s been since I left. It could have been an hour. It could have been three. I am thinking of the way Haruko pressed her fingers against my mouth. I am embarrassed to be thinking about this instead of worrying about my mother. About my breaking family. But for the smallest of seconds, it felt like all of that disappeared because all of the blood in my body had moved to where the lavender girl was touching my lips.

  In the gray of the night I can still make out the silhouette of the sad little planter boxes that won’t grow flowers.

  My mother and father sit at the table. My mother holds a wet cloth to the left side of her face. Her blond hair sticks to her forehead. They’ve been waiting.

  “I brought more ice.” I hand the ice-filled handkerchief to Mutti, exchanging it for the used one she has pressed against her face. She accepts the trade but makes sure to tilt her head away so I can’t see how badly she’s hurt.

  “Margot, we’re glad you’re back,” my father says. His voice is raw. I wonder how long he cried after I left. How long they both did. He gestures to the empty chair across the table. One of the rungs is broken off, it’s the chair he threw to the floor earlier. “There is something we’d like to discuss.”

  I know the emotion I’m feeling is hate, but it’s hard to recognize it as that, feeling it toward someone I love. How can he offer me a seat, like he is conducting a business meeting? I look at my mother, waiting for her guidance, but she won’t meet my gaze. I want to tell her we could run. We could run from here right now.

  “Margot,” my father says again.

  “Margot, sit,” says my mother.

  I want there to be a way to run from my father but also bring him along. Get us all away. Finally, I pull out my chair.

  “Thank you,” he says. “I want you to know that what happened between your mother and me is complicated. We are both und
er a lot of stress. Everyone here is.”

  “You were going to hit her,” I say. “He was going to hit you,” I say to my mother.

  “I have apologized to your mother,” my father says. “It was a horrible accident that will never happen again, and I mean that.” He clears his throat. “And we have made a few decisions. That we think will make things easier on the whole family.”

  Can married couples in Crystal City separate? Would they send my mother and me to live in another hut? Thirty-seven houses. Because of my numbers, the way I have tracked all the shipments, I know that there are exactly thirty-seven unoccupied huts at this time.

  “What are the decisions?”

  “We have decided,” my father says, “that you will no longer be going to the American school.”

  “What do you mean? Mutti, what does he mean?” I ask, but she still won’t make eye contact. “I like the American school.”

  “We’ve decided that if the German school is good enough for other German children in the camp, it is also good enough for you.”

  No, no, no. I’m shaking my head back and forth. He keeps saying that: we. I want my mother to jump in again, like she did the last time he talked about the two of them as a unit. Don’t bring me into this, she said.

  But this time all she does is to readjust the ice cloth on her face. A few shards spill onto the table. My father sees, and immediately takes the cloth, carefully refolding it. He’s always been a good caretaker. When I was young and sick to my stomach, I always wanted him, instead of my mother, to hold my hair back.

  “The German school doesn’t have advanced courses,” I protest. “The person they have teaching math is a plumber, not a teacher.”

  My father knows all of this. They’re the same reasons he gave when we talked about what school I should go to. “And it’s not certified. If I go to the German school, then I might have to repeat a grade when we go home. I’ll need an accredited diploma from the federal school to get into a university.”

  Across the table, my mother bites her lip. For the first time, she looks up, but not at me. She and my father exchange a glance. I don’t know yet what’s coming, but I can tell it will be bad news. He puts his hand over the one of hers that is not holding her face. It’s a gesture that says he is taking care of things.

  My mother opens her mouth like she is finally about to say something, but at first all that comes out is a dry cough that reminds me, somehow, of a broken bird.

  “You have to understand, Margot,” she begins. My father raises one finger and clears his throat, telling her that she does not need to speak. He will take care of this, too.

  “That is the other thing,” my father says. “We have decided that the federal school will no longer suit your needs because we will not be going back to Iowa.”

  “Where will we go?” I ask, but I already know the answer and I can already hear the blood rushing in my ears.

  “We’re going to our real home, on the next ship. We’re applying to be repatriated on the next available ship to Germany.”

  FIFTEEN

  MARGOT

  September 22, 1944

  Bottles of Grapette required for a field trip outside a fence: 36

  Hard-boiled eggs: 72

  Prison guards: 2

  FIELD TRIP DAY. IT’S WRITTEN ON THE BLACKBOARD IN LETTERS that someone has drawn a wreath of flowers around: Field Trip Day. The day we will all meet to leave the fence. To help us develop a sense of camaraderie and a sense of school pride.

  It is my last day at Federal High School. My father let me come today for the field trip mostly because I needed to clean out my desk.

  “Tell him you need to finish the math unit,” Haruko says when I tell her about last night, as everyone else watches two boys throw the baseball they’ve brought along for the trip. “Tell him you need to take the next test.”

  “Would you tell that to your family?” I ask. “Would you really tell that to mine, after what happened?”

  She closes her mouth because she knows the answer is no, to both questions.

  “I can’t think about it now,” I say, because thinking about it is making my eyes sting, in plain sight of everyone else. “Any ship departures are probably months away; they might not be organized at all. I can’t—”

  “Watch out!”

  I barely have time to duck before the baseball flies over my head. Haruko quickly wipes her own eyes. “Maybe you should watch out,” she calls to the boy, and then, to me, quietly, “Okay. We won’t think about it now. There’s lots of time for it not to happen.”

  I’ve seen her get emotional so many times, but never like this, because of me. But I can’t ask her about that. Even if we weren’t surrounded by our entire class, I wouldn’t have the words.

  We all go out to the flagpole, for one last count before leaving. Some of the girls are in pants, with kerchiefs over their hair; a few of the boys have ball gloves in addition to the baseballs; someone has a guitar. We also have a pair of guards to accompany us for the whole day. They look happy for the assignment, but they are still carrying guns.

  A pretend-fun day. That’s what Haruko suggests we think about today as we exit the school. Pretend-fun. Not a day when things are actually better, because we know that’s not true. But a day when we pretend things are better. That I am not about to be sent to a different school. That Haruko’s brother is not sending censored letters she can’t read. That my father is not trying to get us repatriated to Germany. That Haruko’s father was not giving her worrisome answers to questions. That my mother’s lip is not swollen.

  We’re going to walk about half a mile, Miss Goodwin says, and then we’ll be in a nice spot for a picnic.

  As the gate opens and I walk past the fence, the most unexpected thing happens: I laugh.

  Because I can see the horizon and there are no fences on it. Because we can walk in a long, straight line without running into a guard tower. Haruko gives me a curious look.

  There’s a stream outside the camp, beyond the line of vision from inside. It’s not pretty, but it’s one I’ve never seen before. I’d been aching so much to look at something new. There are new trees. A new road, with new paving.

  “It looks the same,” Chieko says to Haruko. She sounds disappointed. “When my bus got here it was nighttime; I’ve never seen outside. But it looks exactly the same.”

  “It doesn’t look the same,” Haruko says. “There’s no fence.”

  They are both right. The landscape outside the fence is so similar to the landscape inside the fence. Except out here, there’s a sky, long and uninterrupted. I look at Haruko and smile, giddy, because she understands it, what the real differences are.

  We walk through the small, dusty downtown of Crystal City. In front of the post office, a woman holding the hands of two young children looks confused when she sees the group of us, an unexpected addition to her small town. She smiles at first, and then, when she realizes who we must be, grabs her children’s hands more tightly.

  “She thinks we’re going to kidnap her children in the street?” Chieko whispers.

  “Or that our enemy anti-Americanism is contagious,” Linda says back.

  “Good morning,” Chieko greets the woman with elaborate politeness.

  Even this, the sidelong glances of Crystal City residents, doesn’t bother me as much as it could, because they can’t change the fact that for one day, at least, we are not in the camp.

  We stop at a spot along the stream, where the banks are thick with mesquite trees and low enough that we can wade into the water. Mess hall workers have sent along wax-paper parcels with cold fried chicken and hardboiled eggs. The boys who brought the baseball are organizing a game. “We need outfielders. Do any of you girls know how to throw?” one of them asks the cluster of us, and Chieko, Linda, and some of the other girls volunteer. Haruko quickly raises her eyebrows at me, and I shake my head.

  “I’m too starving for baseball,” she tells the boy. “I’ll c
ome cheer after I eat.”

  When everyone else has gone farther up the banks, where the land is flat enough for a game, I let Haruko make her way down through the mesquites, and then follow a few minutes later. She’s sitting on a low rock, her shoes and socks already off.

  “You should be there.” She points to another rock and I realize what she means: If we were in the icehouse, that’s where my hay bale would be. Now that we’re away from everyone, I think I hear a shyness in her voice I’ve never heard before, but maybe that’s my imagination. It must be my imagination. She peels me an egg by rolling it between her palms until the shell cracks into tiny pieces. The sky is such a pale blue it’s almost white.

  “I wonder if the students at the German school get field trips outside the fence,” I say.

  “I wish we didn’t have to go back to camp at all,” Haruko says fiercely. “I wish we could turn in the other direction and keep walking to—what’s the biggest city near us? San Antonio?”

  “It is. But we’d keep walking in the same direction to get to San Antonio. We were already walking east.”

  “Is that where we’ll go after the war? San Antonio?”

  “After the war?” I repeat. “I think after the war they let people go where they want to, probably. I don’t think we all will go to the same place.”

  “I don’t mean, we all. I mean you and me. Where are we going to go after this is finished? I could get a job at a soda counter,” Haruko continues. “I’m good at it. You’ve never had a lime rickey as good as the ones I make.”

  “I’ve never had a lime rickey at all.”

  My face flushes hot. She’s mentioned an after. She’s mentioned a we. I never would have let myself dream of a world so big. A world where I am far away from Frederick Kruse and what happened in my Victory Hut. There will be an after. This war won’t last forever. There will be a time when we will have a whole other life.