The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  Margot cringes away from me as if she’s been slapped. Her face fills with horror and then hurt.

  “Our friendship was going to end anyway?” she spits out. “I didn’t realize that you saw us as so… temporary.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “How did you mean it?” She rises to her feet, wiping tears away.

  I only meant that we wouldn’t be able to see each other every day. I didn’t mean it like our friendship wasn’t valuable, I want to say. I didn’t mean it like being trapped in a dust storm with you wasn’t the only good thing that happened because I came here.

  But I also didn’t think she’d be so angry with me, either, for pointing out the facts that are obvious in this situation. “For God’s sake, Margot, aren’t you a little happy for me?”

  “Happy for—” She stalks across the icehouse, then whirls around to face me. “Happy for you? Because that’s what I should be? I should let you tell me about a fantasy that is never going to happen? And then be happy for you when you leave to go home and I leave for a country I don’t know at all?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “I didn’t realize this was just something to keep you busy until you got back to… to your real friends and your real life. I guess I misunderstood. What we were.”

  “What were we?” My hands are tingling, I am feeling this conversation in my whole body. I take a few steps closer.

  “Margot, tell me what you think we were.”

  She freezes like a frightened deer, like my question has terrified her. She looks over her shoulder for an escape; for a second I think she’ll run past me, out the door. But there isn’t an escape, not from what we’re talking about, not from what is welling in my chest. “You know,” she whispers.

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The last time we were in here, Margot,” I prompt.

  Color rises in her cheeks. “When the old man came in and interrupted us,” she starts. “Before he came in.”

  “What else?”

  I don’t know exactly what I want her to say. But the man came in and interrupted us five days ago. Just five days ago, even though it feels like a lifetime. And whatever moment happened then felt so important. But it was also one moment. How can I be expected to make decisions about my whole life based on one moment? For a person I have known barely a month? For a feeling that was so fast and so strong, and that I can barely even describe?

  I should tell her all of that now, but the words won’t come out. I’m suddenly angry with her for making this harder. For even existing. If she didn’t exist, this would be an easy choice for me. I should want to leave. I would want to leave if it weren’t for her.

  “Tell me,” I say, taking another step closer. Because if I am going to stay here, and help Margot try to stay here, and turn down my chance to go home, then I need her to say why I am doing it.

  “You know,” she says again.

  “I need you to say it.”

  “I can’t.”

  She won’t say it. My heart deflates, or maybe my heart shatters, because she won’t put this into words.

  She’s leaving. I’m leaving. We’re leaving. The situation is hopeless. What good would admitting anything out loud at this point do anyway?

  “Are you sure?” I ask, and all she does is blink back tears.

  I swallow the tears rising in my own throat. I make my voice come out harsh. “Then I have no idea what you’re talking about. I guess you did misunderstand.”

  “Haruko—”

  “I guess what happened five days ago is that you were giving me strange looks, and the old man came in and I thought I would die of embarrassment? Is that what happened?”

  “You don’t mean that,” she says.

  “I mean it,” I insist, talking over my screaming brain. “It was so embarrassing. You left and I had to explain to him that we barely knew each other at all.”

  I can see the pain and humiliation I’m causing her. But I’m saying this because I’m angry that she missed her chance and because there are no more chances. Because anger is something that you can apologize for later, while hurt is something that you have to live through.

  “I guess you did misunderstand,” I say again. “I guess that when you’re not used to having any friends, you can get desperate. It means something more to you than it does to the other person.”

  Her shoulders fall. Her whole body looks like it has fallen.

  “You don’t mean that,” she repeats. She says it quietly, in such a genuine way, in such a hopeful, open way, in a way that gives me every opportunity to take it back. You’re right, I didn’t mean it, I was saying these awful things because I am angry and scared.

  “You were here for months before me, and how many friends did you have? You had no friends. I pitied you.”

  And now what Margot is supposed to do is yell back. Tell me to go to hell. Tell me that I was the one who came crying to her that first time, needing someone to talk to, needing someone to read my letters. Shouldn’t it be obvious to her that I was always the one who needed more? And now what I need is for her to say terrible things back to me, so we can get it all out of our systems and there is nothing left to do but hold each other and cry.

  But she doesn’t do what she’s supposed to do. She doesn’t overreact. She stares at me and I see that I’ve wounded something deep inside her.

  “I guess it doesn’t have to mean anything to either of us, does it?” she asks. “Not anymore.”

  “I never should have let you think we were friends,” I tell her, the final, awful words flying out of my mouth. “I wish I was leaving tomorrow so I wouldn’t have to see your Nazi family again.”

  Margot rushes around the room, gathering her blankets, trying to leave before she starts to cry again.

  Wait, is what I should say. I didn’t mean it. Let me explain. But I don’t say anything. Because it’s better to hang on to my anger as long as I can before it turns to grief.

  It’s better to leave it until tomorrow, when I’m calmer. It’s better to sit here on this pretend chaise longue in the pretend living room that is the closest thing to a real life we will ever have.

  There is dust in my throat and I’m all talked out.

  HARUKO

  We didn’t leave it until tomorrow, of course. We didn’t leave it until any other time, because that night was the last time we ever spoke.

  MARGOT

  Haruko meant that night was the last time we ever spoke out loud. I have spent every night since then talking to Haruko and wishing I could hear anything back.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARGOT

  FREDERICK KRUSE IS IN MY HOUSE. FREDERICK KRUSE, THE MAN I have been thinking about in one way or another since I first heard about him in my father’s letters almost a year ago. Only now he looks smaller than I could ever imagine a human man looking. Shriveled, like his life has been sucked out of him through his eye sockets.

  Which it was. The second he saw Heidi on the deck of the pool. The one piece of humanity I was always sure about in Mr. Kruse was how much he loved his daughter.

  He’s sitting between my father and Mr. Mueller now, slumped in a way that makes me think it is only the back of the chair helping him stay upright. If it weren’t for that, he would be on the floor.

  “Mr. Kruse,” I say automatically, as my heart finds an even deeper level of hurt, thinking of Heidi. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  My father glances up at me and his eyes dart to the door. He wants me to leave. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I mumble, backing toward the exit.

  Crystal City doesn’t feel like it’s in its box anymore. It has overtaken all of us. I can only feel pain, my own and everyone else’s. It is so acute that it feels like an object, something that has weight and dimensions.

  I guess you did misunderstand, she said.

  I want to believe it was just a fight. People have them.
People get over them. Or so I have heard. I never fought with anyone before coming here. And now all that happens here is fights, which get worse and worse and never better.

  And she fought by picking at the softest parts of me. The things I hate most about myself. Your Nazi family.

  My Nazi father, who is my greatest shame. And Haruko knew that. And she said it anyway.

  “Go, but don’t be gone too long,” my father tells me as I back toward the door. “We need you to come back and pack.”

  “Pack?”

  “You don’t have too many things, do you?”

  In the middle of all of this I somehow forgot that this was the cause of the fight in the first place. It wasn’t that both of us are trapped here in Crystal City, but that both of us are leaving, and we were fighting about who got to go first.

  That’s not true. We were fighting about the fact that I thought something was real, and it was never real for her.

  And now she is the one who gets to go home, and I am the one who has to leave the only country I have ever known.

  A train leaving the day after tomorrow. Pack your things. Leave Crystal City. Not to Iowa. Not to an apartment in San Antonio. Not to any of those places after all.

  I will be working on my grandparents’ farm in a matter of months. I won’t go to college.

  She’s going to college, and she doesn’t even care about it. Her family loves each other. They will love each other and find a way to be happy in almost any place. My family can’t be happy in Germany. I won’t be. My mother won’t be. My father thinks he will be, but he’s wrong. He’ll be relieved for a minute, and then he’ll wonder what we’re doing there, and by then it will be too late.

  I am just trying to be rational. I’m just trying to take control of the situation. I’m trying to make everything fine.

  I never should have let you think we were friends.

  I wish she hadn’t let me think that. Every part of me wishes that. My eyes are starting to sting again, and my brain won’t stop replaying everything we said to each other.

  I guess you did misunderstand.

  “Do you have many things?” my father asks again.

  “Just the trunk, Vati.”

  “I have a present for you. Books the library was going to discard; they’re only missing covers. Be sure to pack those, too; we can study them together on the train.”

  “Study them for what?” Just let me leave. Just let me get out of here.

  “We’ll talk later,” my father says. “We are lucky to get to go so soon.”

  I leave the house, as my father asks me to. It will be the most profound thing that I do in my entire life.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HARUKO

  A MOTHER’S HELPER. I COULD GO BACK AND BE A MOTHER’S HELPER in Colorado, I tell myself. I could get on a train going in the opposite direction from the one I took here, one where the window shades get to be open the whole way. I can go home.

  I’m telling myself this because I have been in our hut for over an hour, and distracting myself is the only way I have been able to not do what I want to do, which is go to Margot’s house. Tell her, Let’s run away, right now—take whatever food is in her kitchen, use up our cardboard tokens to buy the rest; the tokens won’t do us any good in the outside world anyway. Dig a tunnel, or climb a fence, or petition the United States to recognize Margot as an adult, so that she can make her own decisions and not get on her own train.

  “Will you write me letters from home?” Toshiko asks. Our parents must have told her about the plan while I was in the icehouse.

  “I’m not leaving quite yet.”

  “At least twice a week. And send me pictures, and have my friends write me. I wish I could come with you.” My sister throws her arms around me, and I know it’s partly because my parents told her I’m leaving and partly because she can tell I’m sad.

  “Oh, Toshi. I know you do. Me too.”

  When there is a knock at our door, my heart leaps because I know it is her, that she was able to see that my awful words were only masking fear.

  But when I run to the door, it’s not Margot.

  It’s Mr. Mercer, with his hat in his hands, standing in our doorway, almost as tall as the frame.

  “Miss, ah, Tanaka? Are your parents home?”

  He must have come to talk to my mother about the drownings. That’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Interviewing everyone who was there. My mother can tell him things, probably, like how long it takes a person to drown and whether they did everything they could.

  When my mother sees who is at the door, she smiles. “We told Haruko the good news,” she says to him, nodding at me to translate. “She is very grateful to you for advocating on her behalf and working so quickly. Aren’t you, Haruko?”

  “I am very grateful to you for advocating on my behalf,” I repeat back.

  But instead of smiling or wishing me congratulations, Mr. Mercer has a pained expression on his face. “Maybe you should go get your father,” he says to me. “This might be easier with him here for translations.”

  “I can translate. Toshiko and I both do it.”

  “Just the same. Sometimes it’s easier to have parents translate things.”

  My mother is prodding me in the back, because she doesn’t know yet what Mr. Mercer has said, and I can tell that what she wants is for me to be a good host. “Can I offer you a beverage? We have Coca-Colas in the icebox.”

  “I think you should get your father. Right now.” His expression is serious, and it makes my blood cool. Mama is beginning to realize something is wrong, too—there have been too many exchanges between me and Mr. Mercer that have not been translated back to her.

  “What’s going on?” Toshiko asks, emerging from our bedroom.

  “Papa is out back. Go get him now.”

  Mama, driven by politeness made even sharper by fear, insists I get Mr. Mercer a Coca-Cola even though he doesn’t want it and it’s the last one in the icebox. I hand it to him in the glass bottle and he holds it awkwardly between his big hands while the rest of us line up in a row on the other side of the table.

  “This is a bit of an awkward situation we have here,” he says. He has red creeping up his neck, sweat dampening his collar. “And I’m not going to lie, it’s not a pleasant one, and it’s not one I want to be having.”

  “What is it?” my father demands. “Is it Kenichi? Just tell us.”

  “What? No. Your boy is fine, as far as I’ve heard. It’s that—” He looks down at the soda bottle sweating in his hand, and decides at last to take a sip, and the sip seems to take an excruciatingly long time. “It’s that, ah, you’ve been approved for repatriation in a few days. I’ve approved you. Myself. Today.”

  Repatriation. Back to Japan, where I have never been.

  My family sits in stunned silence, and my father is the one to break it, in a voice tinged with relief. “There is a mistake,” he explains. “We didn’t apply for repatriation. When the war is over, we plan to go back to our home in Colorado.”

  Mr. Mercer looks pained. “I know you didn’t apply for this. This was an administrative decision. Based on information that I received today, we have decided it is better for the safety of the camp if you leave.”

  Administrative decision. The phrase floats above my head. When the FBI came to our apartment months ago, this was the sort of thing they expected me to translate. Tell your mother it is an administrative decision. Does she understand?

  “I know it’s an awkward situation,” Mr. Mercer repeats.

  “An awkward situa—” I start, but before I can continue, my father puts his hand firmly on my shoulder.

  “Can you give us any more information?” he asks. “Can you tell us any more about what brought this about?”

  “Like I said,” Mr. Mercer repeats. “I know it’s an awkward situation.”

  My father’s hand on my shoulder increases in pressure. “It is not an awkward situation,” he says. “It is not
a matter of you accidentally having our luggage sent to the wrong bungalow. You are trying to send us from our home.”

  My stomach is in knots. It’s happening again, almost exactly like last time: an official man who has random power telling us that we will be forced to leave, and me wanting to know why, what is the evidence, what is the nature of these allegations.

  My father said home, and I don’t even know what that refers to anymore. What is our home? Denver, where we no longer have an apartment? Crystal City, a place that a few months ago I swore I would always hate?

  “I think it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to share where the information came from,” Mr. Mercer says. “Only that it was a reliable source, and it has to do with a—with a plot. Against the camp.”

  “This is ridiculous,” my father says. “A plot? There is no plot. Talk to my wife or my daughters. None of us are guilty.”

  “Perhaps you would like to discuss this away from your girls?” Mr. Mercer asks.

  “Why? I have nothing to hide from them. When would I have time for this plot? You know where I am at all times. I am here. I am standing for roll call. Or I am working in your spinach fields under armed guard.”

  His voice is icy and he’s saying everything I wanted him to say months ago. He is my father again, in control and unafraid, as Mr. Mercer plays with the cola bottle in his hands. “The plot had to do with explosive materials that were discovered in a place that we know you had access to, Mr. Tanaka.”

  “Explosives?” my father asks, confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Search the house, there are no explosive materials here.”

  “Like a bomb?” I interrupt. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Materials to build a bomb?”

  Mr. Mercer looks uncomfortable. “Yes.”

  Oh God. Oh God, Oh God. I know what the explosive materials are. I know they’re not explosive materials. I know they’re not explosive materials. I know they’re pieces to make a distillery, a stupid distillery that will probably blow up, but not on purpose, and definitely not because my father put them there.