The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  But I didn’t go over. Things were happening so fast. She was all the way on the other side of the crowd. I didn’t know if I’d be able to work my way through, or if she would have wanted me to. I didn’t go over, even when she was taking off her own necklace and wrapping it around Heidi’s neck. She picked up Heidi’s head so gently to do it, making sure the necklace didn’t get stuck on either one of her braids.

  Mr. Kruse arrived, near the very end, after Heidi had already been placed on the stretcher. He put one arm around his fragile wife, and his other hand on top of the white sheet, on what was Heidi’s arm or leg. She was so little on that stretcher. She barely took up half of it. Where her head was, a water stain spread beneath the sheet; her hair was still wet from the swimming pool.

  As soon as I realized it was Heidi Kruse, my throat closed in sadness, but also in fear.

  I think about what my mother said, about how we should be grateful that there were only distilleries to occupy Mr. Kruse’s stupid followers with.

  Be grateful there aren’t serious things for them to get angry about.

  TWENTY-TWO

  MARGOT

  September 26, 1944

  Capacity of the German community center: 200

  Number of people it takes to carry a tiny coffin: 4

  BOTH FUNERALS, ON THE SAME DAY. THERE’S NO REASON TO POSTPONE them. Extended family doesn’t need to be given the opportunity to travel in. Most of the girls’ families are either in this prison camp, in another prison camp, or across an ocean.

  The Lutheran minister conducts Heidi’s service. Most of the German families go to it, squeezing into our community center and around the doors outside when the building reaches capacity. School is canceled and so are all but the necessary work shifts. On the Japanese side of camp, the Ginozas are holding their own funeral with a Methodist pastor in their own community center. All day long, all through the camp, when I see people stopping into the General Store or the bakery, they are wearing dark colors.

  Mr. Kruse is in a suit that looks like it is borrowed. He was a construction foreman back in his home state of New York. I seem to remember that. He might not have thought he’d need a suit here. Mrs. Kruse is in a black shirtwaist dress, shiny around the elbows from use and age. They sit in the front bench, poker straight.

  “They have to be,” Mutti whispers to me. “If something like that happens to you, every moment that you are not holding yourself up, you are falling down.”

  HARUKO

  I WEAR MY BLACK DRESS AND A SPRITZ OF TABU PERFUME, AND when I spray some on Toshiko’s wrist, too, I can tell she is thinking of two months ago when she asked me why I would ever pack such silly things and what I ever thought I could use them for.

  Afterward there is a reception in the Japanese community center where we all take plates of food we don’t eat and have awkward conversations.

  I stand in the corner with some people from school, while the girls twist their handkerchiefs and talk about how sad it is. The boys tug at their shirt collars and look like they wish they knew how to stop the girls from crying. There aren’t any guards, not at the service or at the reception. They must have been instructed to give us space. I haven’t seen Mike at all since the pool.

  I couldn’t get to the icehouse last night. My mother didn’t want us to leave the house. I don’t know if Margot tried to go; I’ve seen her once today, from a distance. She was leaving the German General Store and I was leaving the sewing hut with a dress of Toshiko’s: she only owned one dark enough to wear to a funeral, but she had grown too tall to wear it. I was assigned to lower the hem, putting to use my terrible sewing skills from my terrible home economics class.

  I had waved to Margot. I started to jerk my head in the direction of the icehouse, but then her father came out of the store behind her and she shook her head that she couldn’t. She quickly raised two fingers on her left hand instead: two PM. Could I come at two PM? I nodded, and then when her father looked up, I pretended that I’d been nodding to someone else.

  After an hour in the reception, drinking watery punch, my father finds me and says it’s time to go home.

  “Could I stay and say goodbye to everyone?” I tell him I’ll follow him in twenty minutes. It’s almost two; I had been waiting and waiting for a chance when my leaving wouldn’t be obvious. My father tells me to come home now, though. It won’t take long, he says, but he and my mother want to talk.

  MARGOT

  WE SING HYMNS THAT MOST OF US KNOW BY ROTE. WE RECITE THE Apostles’ Creed, we recite the Lord’s Prayer.

  I was afraid there would be a Nazi flag or a salute to Hitler, but there’s not.

  My mother is uncomfortable sitting for so long. She doesn’t complain but I can tell from the way she grimaces in her seat. As soon as the service is over my father goes to talk to the Kruses and I move to walk my mother home. On the way out the door she stumbles over a loose stone. When I grab her arm to steady her, she yelps.

  “The baby?” I ask.

  “It’s nothing.” She pulls her wrist away.

  “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  I take her arm again, gently this time, and roll up the sleeve of her dress. Midway up to her elbow are small bruises. Too big for my own fingers to have made just now.

  “Mutti, what are these?” I ask.

  She looks down. “Yesterday. When I heard what happened at the pool. It was so terrible, I lost my balance for a minute. Your father had to catch me.”

  “Is that really what happened?”

  “I thought I was going to faint again.”

  “Mutti. Is that what happened?”

  “What are you asking, Margot?”

  “You know what I’m asking.” My voice rises, hysterical. “Mutti, you know what I’m asking.”

  Did my father help my mother because she lost her balance? Or did my father hurt my mother because this time I wasn’t there? Even if it were the former, would I ever believe it again?

  “Let’s go home, Margot.” The people coming out of the community center are starting to look at us. “There is nothing more to be done here. Stop getting upset, Margot. There is really nothing more you can do.”

  My father has finished talking with the Kruses. He walks over to us now, and I shrink back from him before I can help it, unable to think of anything but the bruises on my mother’s arm. “It’s settled, then,” he tells my mother. She nods, she already knows what he is talking about.

  “What’s settled?” I ask.

  “The Kruses,” he says. “There’s a repatriation ship leaving for Germany in two days. The Kruses had their names on the list to be on it. They can’t leave yet, though. Mrs. Kruse won’t leave without Heidi, and organizing that will be complicated.

  “I said they could put us on the list instead. I said we would take their place.”

  HARUKO

  MY MOTHER IS ALREADY THERE BY THE TIME WE GET BACK; SHE’D LEFT the reception early to make the rounds of her patients. When we come in the door, she looks at my father, not me. “Did you tell her or did you wait for me?” she asks.

  “Tell me what?” It can’t be a letter from Ken yet, he only left yesterday, and even so, I was the one who checked the mail this morning. Maybe a letter from someone else. I can’t imagine what other news my parents would have.

  “We have good news,” my mother says. “We have made arrangements for you to leave.”

  “Leave? Leave what?”

  “The camp. In a few months, when you turn eighteen,” she continues, looking to my father for support.

  “Back to Denver,” he says. “Mr. Mercer permitted us to contact the Japan League, and they found a family who is willing to accept you as a boarder. You remember the Watanabes; you met them a few times.”

  “A boarder?” I say, like the only thing I know how to do anymore is repeat words.

  “They’ll give you room and board in exchange for some light housework,” my mother says. “Mostly being a mother’s helper, as
sisting with the cooking and laundry. But you should have enough time for studying.”

  Slowly, what my parents are saying is beginning to sink in. “You’re sending me home to do laundry?”

  “And study. At the beginning of the semester, you’ll enroll in a nursing program that accepts Japanese students.”

  “I don’t want to be a nurse.”

  My mother sets her mouth into a weary line. “We are sending you home. And this is the arrangement we were able to make in order for that to happen. Mr. Mercer has to make sure your papers are in order, but he said he’ll try to work quickly. We should be very grateful.”

  My voice rises. “When did you ask him to do this? Why did you ask him to do this?”

  She looks at my father again and he is the one who answers. “We had him make the call right after it happened yesterday. After the swimming pool.”

  “It was too terrible,” my mother explains. “We wanted our family to be together, but this is not a place to be young. This is not a place we want you starting your life as a young woman.”

  “It’s not so bad here.” I can feel myself starting to get frantic. “I can handle it here.”

  This is not the answer they were expecting me to give. It’s also a lunatic answer because it is bad here. Worse than I imagined it, in some ways.

  “It’s good news,” my father says. “We thought you would be happy.”

  Free. I could be back home, in a place where there are no fences. A place where I could pretend the last few months of my life never happened, and if I live long enough, that pretending might actually work.

  They talk more about the details. “Are you listening?” they ask. “Haruko, are you sure you’re paying attention?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  HARUKO

  “YOU’VE DONE SO MUCH,” I SAY SOFTLY. BECAUSE THE ICEHOUSE isn’t an icehouse anymore. Margot has shoved around the hay bales and ice blocks to make a living room. Everything is covered in blankets, not just the work blankets that are usually in here, but blankets that Margot must have brought from her family’s hut, and pillows that must usually be used for sleeping. Both oil lamps are lit at their brightest, and positioned around the shed in a way that makes it feel not like a shed but cozy, inviting. It’s a house.

  “You were a little late, so…” she starts. But I’m only twenty minutes late, and this must have taken an hour. “Look,” Margot says. She runs over to one piece of furniture. It’s two bales of hay pushed together, and a pillow along one.

  “Is that a chaise longue?”

  “I had never seen one before so I didn’t know exactly what it was supposed to look like, but you said a combination of a sofa and a bed.”

  “It’s exactly right.”

  “Sit on it. Tell me how it is, and then try the armchair next. Careful of splinters, under the blanket it’s a packing crate.”

  “Are those—” I ask, pointing to something else, on her pretend coffee table. A bottle with flowers in it.

  “From your mother’s hat. You should take them.”

  “No, you should. You should keep them to remember me.”

  I blurt out the last bit and then realize I’ve said too much. Margot doesn’t seem to notice, though. In fact, her eyes are red and she doesn’t seem be focusing much at all. “What’s wrong, Margot?”

  “Nothing. How’s the armchair?”

  “It’s perfect. Why don’t you sit in it and tell me what’s wrong?”

  She shakes her head quickly. “There are two universities in San Antonio. St. Mary’s and Our Lady of the Lake. Both of them admit girls, but both of them are also Catholic; I don’t know if you need to be Catholic to go there.”

  “How did you learn about these universities?”

  “The library. There’s a set of encyclopedias, but fifteen years old, so it’s hard to tell if the information is up to date. Also, in the 1940 census, the population of the city was 254,000 people and it’s growing really fast. That’s bigger than I thought, which is good, right? Lots of places with jobs.” She paces around all her pretend furniture, talking faster and higher.

  “Margot. Are you being serious?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—we talked about San Antonio but…” I pause. “Neither of us has actually ever been there.”

  “Been there yet. That’s why I researched. That was the plan, right? We have a plan.”

  She is so hopeful, and I wish I could let her keep talking, or say, Our Lady of the Lake sounds interesting, tell me about that. But I can’t, it’s not fair.

  “If I was going right after graduation, I should be applying now,” she continues. “If we think the war will be over by then. But if I end up waiting, I can find a job and save up money.”

  “Margot, I need to tell you something,” I say softly. “Come and sit with me.”

  “I wonder if there is a way to keep taking classes at Federal. I could still go to the German school in the day but I could do Federal work in the evenings.”

  “Come and—Margot.” She’s still pacing, touching the furniture, straightening tiny wrinkles. “Margot. My parents want me to leave.”

  She tilts her head, the same way I must have when I heard the news. “What do you mean? Leave where?”

  “Leave here. In a couple of months. There’s a family in Colorado who will let me come stay with them and go to nursing school.”

  “You don’t want to go to nursing school.”

  A nice family of five, I repeat, like my parents told me. Light housework, Saturdays off. Share a bedroom but the little girl is a quiet sleeper. Can I drive a car? If not, they will teach me.

  “I guess the camp is trying to—to make it possible,” I stammer on. “To place the American citizens who came here as voluntary prisoners, when they turn eighteen. Like—”

  “Like Betty Asamo,” she says. “Secretarial school.”

  “Like Betty.”

  “I don’t turn eighteen for another year,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “What about opening our soda fountain?” she asks.

  I shake my head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  “What about our apartment, and the private bathroom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The whole point is we were supposed to be starting over together.”

  “I’m not saying I want to go, I’m saying—”

  “But instead you’re going to leave me. You can’t leave me. You can’t leave me alone to deal with all of—with all of—”

  She suddenly falls to her knees, they buckle underneath and I run to her. I put one hand on her thin, shaking back, rubbing in circles, feeling her spine and her shuddering rib cage.

  “We have to go together,” she sobs. “I want to go with you. If I ever didn’t make that clear, I want to. I want us to go together. Do you?”

  “This isn’t my idea,” I say, and what I’m really doing is pleading for forgiveness. “I didn’t ask my parents to do this.”

  “But did you tell them you wouldn’t go?” she demands.

  “How could I tell them I wouldn’t go?” I ask. “Shhhhh. Shhhh, it’s okay.”

  “The same way I did!”

  “The same way you did what, Margot? Shhhh.”

  She looks up at me through tear-filled lashes. “Today. My father told me we were going on the ship back to Germany in two days, I told him I couldn’t go. He said I had to, but I said I wouldn’t.”

  My hand freezes on her back, on the faded cotton between her sharp shoulder blades. “Margot,” I say slowly. “Are you telling me that you are leaving in two days?”

  “No, I’m telling you I’m not leaving in two days. That I was going to find a way to stay here.”

  “How?” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to.

  I thought there was more time. For both of us. I thought I would have a couple of months to figure out what to do about Denver, and now she is telling me that we only have two days before she
gets on a ship to go to a country where we are not even allowed to send mail.

  “I don’t know yet,” she admits.

  “But you were trying to get me to stay here,” I say slowly. “Even though you are leaving.”

  “That’s not what I was doing. I am going to change my father’s mind.”

  “How?”

  “I will.”

  I want to believe her. I want us both to believe her. But the more times she repeats her plan, the more foolish and impossible it sounds.

  “Margot, what are the signs that that was going to happen? What was going to change his mind in the next two days?”

  “Something could change.”

  “Has he shown any signs?” I plead. “He’s building exploding distilleries. He marched with the Nazi flag. He was about to hit your—”

  “Shut up.”

  I reel back, taking my hand off her shoulder. “Don’t tell me to shut up.”

  “Then don’t leave.”

  Her voice is desperate, but I’m trying not to let myself be swayed by emotions. Margot wants me to stay, when she is about to get on a boat? She wants to subject me to the same loneliness that she is unwilling to bear herself?

  “But you’re going to leave, Margot. You’re going back to Germany—”

  “Not back, I’m not from there.”

  “You’re going to Germany. And what am I supposed to do then? You’re getting angry at me for planning to leave soon, but you were going to leave me. You were going to leave me alone here.”

  “Because they’re deporting my family. Not because I get to go home. And I told you, I’m trying—”

  “Margot, it doesn’t make a difference where you are going or why. Our friendship was going to end anyway, the second one of us walked out the gates of this camp.”