The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  “He would get better,” I say stubbornly. “Once he’s away from this.”

  Mutti shakes her head. “You can’t picture him there. I can’t picture him there. Sometimes people are too broken to start over.” She swallows. “Listen to me, Margot. I don’t want this, either. But I don’t know what else to do. The people at home have sent their husbands and sons to risk their lives and die in the war. Can you imagine your father going back to Iowa and praising Germany? They would kill him.”

  This time, she stops me before I can say anything. “It’s true, they would,” she continues. “When we get out of here, we will find a new way to start over. You can do it. I was not much older than you when I came to America. It was hard, but I managed. But if we went back to Fort Dodge and your father said out loud the kinds of things he was saying after the swimming pool, everyone we know would want to kill him. And I would die of shame.”

  NINETEEN

  MARGOT

  September 23, 1944

  Times I have gone to the icehouse in one morning to see whether Haruko might be there: 3

  Times she has been there: 0

  THE NEXT DAY I HEAR VATI WAKE EARLY ACROSS THE ROOM, AND before I can decide whether I want to acknowledge him he’s already gone. Mutti has an appointment at the hospital. A routine one, she says, to check on the baby. I go with her, but it’s the blond doctor and not Haruko’s mother who conducts the exam.

  So maybe Ken is still there, and the family is still spending time together. Or maybe Haruko doesn’t want to see me. Maybe after her brother’s visit she is feeling foolish about the conversation we had yesterday, about indoor plumbing in our make-believe house in San Antonio. In the icehouse, the blankets and the lanterns stay folded and placed exactly where we last left them.

  On Monday, I start at the German school. It’s different. It’s smaller, eight of us are in my class. It’s formal. When we arrive at our desks in the morning, we’re expected to stand next to them until the teacher gives us permission to sit. We learn botany. We learn geography, but German geography; and history, but German history. The curriculum is useless to me. None of it will prepare me for the future I want.

  The other students here are from families that have applied to be repatriated. At school they talk about it excitedly, repeating things their parents have told them about Germany. Later at lunch a few of them find me privately, and ask what the federal school was like. Did we have pep rallies, they want to know. They say their old schools in New Jersey or Massachusetts had pep rallies.

  After school, I’m walking past the main gates, a long route to the icehouse, when I hear my name.

  “It’s Margot, right?”

  I shield my eyes. “Ken?”

  Haruko’s brother is in uniform, not the wrinkled shirt he was wearing when I knocked on her door. It makes him look older and more formal. I immediately look around, but I don’t see Haruko nearby; Ken is alone by the gate. “Are you leaving?” I ask.

  “If the car ever gets here. That’s my escort, trying to figure out where it is.” He nods to where another man in uniform stands by the guard tower, speaking into a Handie-Talkie.

  “Is—”

  “She and Toshiko went back to school already. I made them. I told the whole family that it would be… easier.”

  I want to ask how his visit was. And how Haruko is. I want to ask him to do his impression of the governor of Colorado’s secretary. But maybe he would think that was strange. He probably doesn’t know I know about that. “I bet they were really happy to see you. I bet Haruko wishes you could stay longer.”

  He shrugs. “I think she does and she doesn’t. I don’t know if I was making her happy by the end of the visit.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard in here, to be the people we used to be.”

  That sentence comes out before I can really think about it. Am I saying, we, meaning Haruko and me? Or we, meaning all of us?

  “To survive,” I explain. “Sometimes to survive you have to pretend that you have always lived here. That you wanted to live here.”

  He stares at me. “You don’t seem like my sister’s other friends.”

  “Oh.”

  “That probably sounded rude. I didn’t mean it to.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Haruko told me once that you were not like her other friends, either.”

  “What did she say I was like?”

  “She didn’t mean it to be rude then, either.”

  “She trusts you,” he says. “Haruko was really popular at home, but I don’t know if she really had any people who—she is… something different with you.”

  “What do you mean?” I take a step closer.

  Ken looks out through the fence. In the distance I can see a jeep puffing in the dust, probably the car sent to pick him up. The other man in uniform puts down his Handie-Talkie and goes to the gate to flag it down.

  “Margot. Will you do something for me?”

  Ken doesn’t wait for me to answer. He looks back and forth between the car and me, and then, seeing his escort isn’t watching, reaches into his breast pocket. “I have another letter for my sister.”

  “You didn’t mail it?”

  He hesitates. “It’s not the kind of letter I can put in the mail.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell her whatever is inside?”

  The jeep is getting closer; Ken talks quickly. “It’s not something I want to tell her. Not yet, I’m not ready yet. I was going to leave it under her pillow, but I knew she’d just open it, so then I thought I’d scrap it entirely, but—the letter is in case I don’t get a chance later.” He stares at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying? In case I don’t get a chance.”

  “I understand.”

  He hands me the envelope. Sealed, because it hasn’t been through the censors like the other mail we get. No return address saying it’s come via the War Department. Just Haruko, in the middle of the envelope.

  “Don’t give it to her unless you have to. Okay?” he says.

  “I promise.”

  The big Crystal City gates are creaking open, and the escort motions for Ken to come out. He straightens his posture, transforming into a soldier in front of me. When he gets almost to the car, he turns around again. “Make her a scavenger hunt on her birthday,” he calls out. “She pretends she hates them but she doesn’t.”

  He gets in the car, and I watch as it disappears down the dirt road.

  By the time I get to the federal school, where Ken said Haruko went, she’s already come out of the building, past the flagpole. She’s alone. I check to make sure, but we’re in such a public space that I hesitate in going over to her until I realize she’s already running toward me.

  “I went to the icehouse,” she says immediately. “Twice. I almost left a note but I didn’t want anyone else to find it.”

  “I went, too. I thought about going to your house again, but I’d already gone there once.”

  “I thought about trying to find your house, too, but…” She trails off, but she didn’t need to finish the sentence. After what she has seen and heard about my father, why would she want to come to my house?

  “Ken is leaving today,” she says. “He told us he didn’t want anyone to wait with him, but I shouldn’t have left him—I was going there now.”

  “He’s gone already.”

  “How do you know?”

  Should I tell Haruko that I saw him? One day Haruko and I might read his letter together in the icehouse. But only in the worst possible circumstances. So is there any point in telling her the letter exists? Or in telling her that I talked to her brother at all?

  “I passed the gate and there was a jeep driving away. Nobody else was outside.”

  Her head drops. “I shouldn’t have left him,” she says again. “Why would I let him just leave?”

  It’s been three days since we’ve seen each other but it feels like twenty, and I can’t stop wondering what Ken would have said about us, and I am awkward aga
in like the first time we talked. “Do you want to go there now? The icehouse?”

  We both turn and start walking back in the direction that I’ve just come from.

  “Was it nice to see your brother?” I ask, at the same time as she says, “How is the new school?”

  “My father is trying to make moonshine,” I blurt out, because it seems like the kind of thing that might make her laugh. “They have secret hidden distilleries.”

  “Moonshine?” she repeats. “Like, Al Capone, 1920s gangster?”

  “They blew up a distillery. Apparently making moonshine involves the same materials as building a bomb.”

  We’ve reached the wall of the school, right in the nook of the U shape. Haruko stops, lost in thought.

  “It wasn’t what I expected it would be,” she says.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “The visit. He wasn’t what I expected, and the conversation wasn’t what I expected.”

  He knows it didn’t go like you wanted, I want to say. He feels bad about that. “In what way? Did he explain his letters?”

  “Sort of. He explained that he was sick.” I want to ask more about what she means by sick, but Haruko is biting the inside of her cheek like she still has something else to say. “Do you think—do you think that the government thinks they’re doing the right thing?” she says.

  “They have to, right? At least some of them. Why are you asking?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about something Ken said. He said—I can’t even remember what he said. Ken talked about how letting myself be happy here was dangerous, because it wasn’t true. He made me feel like Crystal City might explode at any minute.”

  “It might. The treacherous distilleries.”

  She smiles. “I’m not explaining it well. It’s not like I haven’t always known where we were. But somehow, until I talked to Ken, I didn’t realize what it meant that we were all here.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I do,” I whisper. “I really do know what you mean.”

  We’re standing against the side of the school, and though nobody has walked by yet, they could anytime. Having this conversation outside, when the sun is so high that we barely cast any shadows at all, makes these words bleaker.

  She’s thinking about Ken, and I am thinking about Ken’s letter in my pocket. And the fact that it only took a few months for my family to turn into the opposite version of what my family had always been. I didn’t know that was the number I should have been recording in my notebook the whole time. The only number that ever mattered. The number of days for my father to lose himself.

  “It feels like it is going to be impossible for all of us to come out right,” I say.

  “Not right, exactly,” Haruko says. “More like whole. It feels like it is getting more and more impossible for all of us to come out of this and still be whole.”

  She shakes her head quickly, resetting her thoughts. “I was thinking we should get a chaise longue in our apartment in San Antonio, right?”

  “A chaise longue?” I try to keep up with the conversation.

  “It’s sort of like a combination between a sofa and a bed. They’re really comfortable. I was thinking that when I leave here, I want all my furniture to be really comfortable.”

  She leans back against the brick wall, wrinkling her nose. I have a sudden urge to touch her nose, her hair, to go with her to the icehouse where it’s dark and private. There is throbbing, deep in the pit of my stomach.

  “San Antonio is where the Alamo is, isn’t it?” she asks.

  “It’s a museum now.”

  “Good. We should make a list of all the things we want to do. Starting with the Alamo. Then jobs. Then an apartment. Then chaise longues.”

  She tilts her head. I think she’s going to say something else, but instead she cups a hand over her ear.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say, but then I do hear a noise. It’s faint and far away; I can’t make out what it is.

  Haruko steps away from the building, peering around the corner.

  “It’s coming from by the pool,” she says. “Some kids messing around.”

  I follow her out into the clearing. Away from the building, I can hear the noise better, too. She is right. It is coming from the direction of the pool. But it’s not kids messing around. It’s someone screaming.

  MARGOT

  I know you’re collecting stories from the war. What did you call them? Personal histories? You were collecting personal histories from the war, and Haruko told you about me, and you came for my story, too, and then you’ll—I don’t know what you’ll do with them.

  I’m not sure if Haruko told you that from then on it was awful.

  From then on, there is nothing about this story I like.

  TWENTY

  HARUKO

  MARGOT IS A FASTER RUNNER THAN I AM. SHE GETS THERE FIRST, and she puts her arm out, stopping me. At first I think it’s to keep me from crashing into her, but it’s to prevent me from seeing what she’s already realized has happened.

  The crowd at the pool is three-deep, some people in street clothes but most of them in bathing suits. Hair scraped back from their blotchy, exerted faces, arms wrapped around their goose-bumped waists.

  “Let’s not go any closer,” Margot says.

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s just not.”

  But when I start to move, she follows me. I push through the crowd in their damp towels until I’m close enough to see what’s happened.

  The lifeguard—the one who I know is really a camp guard, but wearing a bathing suit instead of his uniform—is a skinny man with suntanned skin. He’s pulling something out of the pool.

  It is a dead animal. A stray dog that jumped in the pool looking to cool off. It is a wad of clothes—a prank played on someone who will now have to walk home wet and cold. These are things I tell myself because you can make yourself believe almost anything, really, if you try hard enough and if you want badly enough to ignore the truth.

  It’s only when the lifeguard has laid the object down on the ground that I see there is another object already there, next to it. Somehow seeing the two of them together, as a set, is what makes me realize the white and the red colors I’m noticing are bathing suits. And somehow it’s only when I realize they are bathing suits that I also realize the two objects are little girls.

  Two little girls, pulled out of the pool, limp as rag dolls. Toshiko.

  It’s not Toshiko. I can see that now, they’re both too small to be Toshiko. But they could have been, Toshiko in her red bathing suit that used to belong to me. The lifeguard smooths the black hair away from the face of the girl in the white bathing suit, the one he’s just pulled out of the pool. He turns her on her stomach and spreads her arms out into the shape of a T, and then he straddles her tiny body and begins to apply pressure to her back, compressions that begin at the middle and stroke up toward her lungs in a steady rhythm. Out goes the bad air, in comes the good air, remembers a numb part of my brain. Artificial respiration. You can also time it by counting Mississippis, we learned at my YWCA class. One Mississippi. Press. Two Mississippi. Press. The guard’s bony frame moves up and down.

  “My father said the bottom of the pool needed to be painted white.” Margot’s voice next to me is low and angry. “He said it was too dark for swimmers to tell when the water was getting deeper.”

  The girls have goose bumps on their legs; they need blankets.

  “One of them slipped under the lane line into the deep end,” the boy next to me whispers. “The other tried to help her. I always thought that if people were drowning they would call for help. But the girls weren’t calling for help at all, they just kept bobbing under the water. I thought it was a game. I think the lifeguard didn’t realize what was happening, either; at first no one realized what was happening, then someone else had to yell at him to save them.”

&nbs
p; Save her, I think, we all collectively think, pressed against one another’s clammy skin. Thirteen Mississippis. The lifeguard has been joined by a Japanese woman in a white coat who slips in and efficiently drops to her knees. It’s my mother in her hospital uniform. She barks a quick order to the lifeguard and immediately begins to work on the other girl, who has light brown braids, a little German girl.

  And then someone else comes: A round-faced woman flying toward the pool deck in a housedress and slippers.

  “Where is she? Where is she?” she yells out, elbowing her way toward the lifeguard and the two little girls. “Ruriko!” As she pushes through the crowd she calls out her daughter’s name, the daughter who is still receiving chest compressions from the lifeguard, endless Mississippis. A wave of nausea passes through my stomach. It’s Mrs. Ginoza, who arrived with me on the same train, who organized all of us to walk to the camp on that first day when the bus was broken down. “Ruriko, you’re all right, I’m here,” she wails.

  “Stop,” my mother says to her without looking up or breaking her count. “Madame, you cannot interfere while the lifeguard is trying to help your daughter.” She must recognize that it’s Mrs. Ginoza, but her voice is clinical.

  “She’s going to be all right?” Mrs. Ginoza says. “She knows how to swim, her uncle taught her back home, she could hold her breath a long time. She’s going to be all right.” She lurches forward again.

  This time my mother looks up. “Somebody keep her away,” she instructs shortly. A fat woman with a towel wrapped under her armpits reaches out to Mrs. Ginoza, folding her in closely, making clucking sounds, preventing her from running back over to Ruriko.

  “Ruriko wasn’t supposed to be at the pool today,” Mrs. Ginoza babbles to the fat woman, to nobody and all of us. “Today she was going to play hopscotch. With her friend, she said. Other people heard her tell me that, too, my neighbors all heard.”