The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

  The Fukuda family defied the dust clouding the air and making it hard to breathe, and found their allotted lodging. Each hut was divided into six units measuring roughly twelve by twenty feet per family, separated by thin partitions of tar paper. There were twelve huts per block, forty-two blocks in total; each of them had a canteen, laundry, showers, and latrines. The camp occupied a vast area, but the eight thousand evacuees had to live in little more than seven thousand square feet. The detainees were soon to discover that the temperature varied between an infernal heat in the summer and several degrees below zero in the winter. In the summer months, as well as the terrible heat, they had to endure the constant onslaught of mosquitoes and dust storms that darkened the sky and scorched their lungs. The wind blew all year round, bringing with it the stench of the sewage that formed a swamp a half mile from the camp.

  * * *

  Just as they had done at the Tanforan racetrack, the Japanese organized quickly at Topaz. Within a few weeks there were schools, nurseries, sports areas, and a newspaper. They created art from bits of wood, stones, and other material left over from the construction of the camp. They made jewelry from fossilized shells and peach stones, stuffed dolls with rags, and toys with sticks. They started a library with donated books, as well as theater companies and music groups. Ichimei convinced his father that they could grow vegetables in boxes despite the harsh climate and alkaline soil. This encouraged Takao, and soon others were copying him. Several issei decided to start a decorative garden. They dug a hole, filled it with water, and so made a pond that was the delight of the children. With his magic fingers, Ichimei built a wooden yacht that he sailed across the pond; less than four days later there were races of dozens of these small boats. The kitchens in each block were run by the detainees, who performed marvels with dry and canned goods that were brought in from the nearest towns. The following year they would also use the vegetables they managed to harvest, watering them by the spoonful. As Heideko had foreseen, the unusual amounts of fat and sugar they consumed soon led to problems. The lines for the latrines stretched for several blocks; the need was so desperate and anguished that no one waited for darkness to compensate for the lack of privacy. The latrines became blocked with the diarrhea of thousands of patients, and the rudimentary hospital staffed by white personnel and Japanese doctors and nurses could not cope.

  Once the pieces of wood for making furniture had run out, and tasks had been assigned to all those who felt impatience gnawing at their entrails, most of the evacuees succumbed to boredom. Days seemed endless in this nightmare city supervised by disinterested guards in their nearby towers and in the distance by the magnificent mountains of Utah. Every day was the same, nothing to do, lines and more lines, waiting for the mail, passing the idle hours playing cards, inventing pointless jobs, repeating the exact same conversations that gradually lost all meaning as the words became threadbare. Ancestral traditions began to disappear, parents and grandparents saw their authority diminish, couples were trapped in a proximity without intimacy, families began to disintegrate. They could not even sit down together for meals, but were forced to eat in the din of the communal mess halls. However much Takao insisted the Fukuda family sit together, his boys preferred to go with others of the same age, and it was hard to restrain Megumi, who had turned into a real beauty, with pink cheeks and flashing eyes. The only ones free from the torments of despair were the little children, who roamed the camp in packs, getting up to mischief and imagining adventures, and saw all this as one long vacation.

  Winter arrived early. When the snow began to fall, each family was given a coal-burning stove, which soon became the center of social life, and discarded military clothing was distributed. These faded green uniforms were too large, and were as depressing as the frozen countryside and black huts. The women began to make paper flowers for their dwellings. At night there was no way to prevent the wind, which brought slivers of ice with it, from whistling through the cracks in the huts and lifting the roofs. Like everyone else, the Fukuda family slept in all their clothes, wrapped in the pair of blankets they had been given, curled up together on the camp beds to lend each other warmth and comfort. Months later, when summer came, they would sleep almost naked and wake up covered in a layer of ash-colored sand as fine as talcum powder. Despite all this, they considered themselves fortunate, because they were together. Other families had been split up; first the men had been taken off to what were known as relocation camps, then the women and children sent to another one. In some cases it was two or three years before they were reunited.

  The correspondence between Alma and Ichimei suffered right from the start. The letters took weeks to arrive, although the postal service was not to blame so much as the slowness of the Topaz officials, overwhelmed by having to read the hundreds of letters that piled up on their desks every day. Alma’s letters, which in no way put the safety of the United States in danger, were allowed through without a problem, but Ichimei’s were so mutilated by the censorship that she had to guess at the meaning of his sentences between the lines of black ink. His descriptions of barracks, food, latrines, the guards’ behavior, even comments about the weather, were all regarded as suspicious. Advised by others more practiced in the art of deception, Ichimei sprinkled his letters with praise for the Americans and patriotic outbursts until he felt so nauseous he had to stop. Instead he decided to draw. It had been more than usually difficult for him to learn to read and write, and at ten he was still not sure of all the alphabet, which he mixed up without proper regard for spelling, but he had always had a good eye and a steady hand for drawing. His illustrations passed through censorship without a hitch, and so Alma was able to learn about the details of his life at Topaz as if she were looking at photographs.

  December 3, 1986

  Yesterday when we talked about Topaz I didn’t mention the most important thing, Alma: not everything was negative. We had parties, sports, art. We ate turkey at Thanksgiving and decorated the barracks for Christmas. People sent us parcels with candy, toys, and books. My mother was always busy with new plans; everyone respected her, even the whites. Megumi was in love and overjoyed with her work at the hospital. I painted, planted the vegetable garden, mended broken things. The classes were so short and easy that even I got good grades. I used to play almost all day long; there were lots of children and hundreds of stray dogs, all of them the same, short legged and with wiry hair. The ones who suffered most were my father and James.

  After the war, the people from the camps spread throughout the country. The youngsters became independent; the idea of living isolated in a poor imitation of Japan was finished. We integrated into America.

  I think of you. When we meet I’ll make you tea and we’ll talk again.

  Ichi

  IRINA, ALMA, AND LENNY

  The two women were having lunch under the historic stained-glass cupola in Neiman Marcus on Union Square. More than anything, they went there for the popovers, served warm straight from the oven, and the pink champagne, which was Alma’s favorite. Irina ordered lemonade and both raised their glasses to the good life. In silence, so as not to offend Alma, Irina also toasted the Belascos’ wealth, which allowed her the luxury of this moment, with its soft music, elegant shoppers, willowy models parading in high-fashion dresses to tempt purchasers, and obsequious ­waiters wearing green ties. This refined world was infinitely removed from her Moldovan village and all the hardships she had suffered in her childhood, let alone the terrors of her adolescence.

  The two women ate peacefully, savoring Asian dishes and ordering more popovers. A second glass of champagne loosened Alma’s tongue, and on this occasion she talked about Nathaniel, her husband, who was nearly always part of her reminiscences; she had managed to keep him alive in her memory for three decades now. Seth had vague memories of his grandfather as an exhausted skeleton with burning eyes propped up on downy pillows. He was barely four years old when his grandfather’s painful expression was gone forever, but he had n
ever forgotten the smell of medicines and eucalyptus vapor in his bedroom. Alma told Irina that Nathaniel was as generous as his father, Isaac Belasco, and that when he died, among his papers she had found hundreds of IOUs for loans he never called in, and precise instructions to pardon his many debtors. She found herself unprepared to take charge of all the matters he had left unfinished during his devastating final illness.

  “I’ve never in all my life worried about money matters. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “You were lucky. Almost everyone I know has money worries. The residents at Lark House all scrape by, and some of them can’t even buy the medicines they need.”

  “Don’t they have health insurance?” asked Alma in astonishment.

  “The insurance covers part of the expense, but not all. If their families don’t help them, Mr. Voigt has to draw on Lark House’s special reserves.”

  “I’ll go and talk to him. Why did you never tell me this before, Irina?”

  “You can’t solve every case, Alma.”

  “No, but the Belasco Foundation could maintain the park at Lark House. Then Voigt would save a stack of money he could use to help the neediest residents.”

  “Mr. Voigt would faint in your arms if you suggested such a thing, Alma.”

  “What an appalling thought! I sincerely hope not.”

  “But tell me more about what happened to you after your husband died.”

  “I was drowning in all the paperwork, when it finally occurred to me to ask Larry. My son had lived quietly in the shadows and had grown up to become a cautious and responsible gentleman without anyone really noticing.”

  Larry Belasco had married young, in a rush and without fuss, both because of his father’s illness and because his fiancée, Doris, was visibly pregnant. Alma admitted that at the time she was so preoccupied looking after her husband that she had few opportunities to get to know her daughter-in-law, even though they lived under the same roof. Yet she ended up loving her dearly because, quite apart from her virtues, Doris adored Larry and was a good mother both to Seth, the little mischief maker, who soon was bounding around the house like a kangaroo, driving out the lugubrious atmosphere, and later to Pauline, a placid little girl, who kept herself amused and seemed to have no further needs.

  “Just as I never had to worry about money, so I never had the bother of domestic chores. In spite of being blind, my mother-in-law looked after the Sea Cliff house until her dying breath, and after her we had a butler, who seemed to have come straight out of one of those English films. He was so mannered that in the family we always thought he was making fun of us.”

  She told Irina that the butler was at Sea Cliff for eleven years and left when Doris dared to suggest how he should do his job. “It’s her or me,” the butler told Nathaniel, who by this time no longer left his bed and had little strength to struggle with this kind of problem, despite his having hired all the staff. Faced with this ultimatum, Nathaniel chose his brand-new daughter-in-law, who, despite her youth and her belly rounded by seven months of pregnancy, had already proved herself a compulsive lady of the house. During Lillian’s lifetime the mansion had been run with goodwill and spontaneity; as for the butler, the only noticeable changes were the length of time it took to serve each dish at table and the cook’s sour expression, because he could not stand him. With Doris’s strict regime, the house became a model of precision where no one felt completely at ease. Irina had observed the results of her efficiency: the kitchen was a spotless laboratory, no children were allowed in the living rooms, the wardrobes were scented with lavender, the sheets were starched, daily meals consisted of minuscule portions of fancy dishes, and the flower displays were renewed weekly by a florist. All of this however did not lend the house a festive atmosphere, but made it as solemn as a funeral parlor. The only thing that the magic wand of domesticity had spared was Alma’s empty bedroom, as Doris held her in reverential awe.

  “When Nathaniel fell ill, Larry took charge of the Belasco law firm,” Alma went on. “He ran it very well from day one. So when Nathaniel died I could delegate the family finances to him and devote myself to resurrecting the moribund Belasco Foundation. The public parks were drying out and were filled with garbage, needles, and used condoms. Beggars had moved in, with shopping carts crammed full of filthy bags and their cardboard shelters. I know nothing about plants, but I threw myself into gardening out of love for my father-in-law and my husband. To them it was a sacred mission.”

  “It seems as if all the men in your family have been kindhearted, Alma. There aren’t many people like them in this world of ours.”

  “There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed. You don’t know Larry very well, but if you need something at any time and I’m not around, don’t hesitate to turn to him. My son is a good man, he won’t let you down.”

  “He seems very serious, I wouldn’t dare disturb him.”

  “He’s always been serious. When he was twenty he looked fifty, but he got stuck like that and has stayed the same as he’s aged. Just look, in every photograph he has that same worried expression and drooping shoulders.”

  * * *

  Hans Voigt had established a simple system for the Lark House residents to judge the performance of each member of staff, and he was intrigued by the fact that Irina always obtained an excellent report. He guessed her secret must be her ability to listen to the same story a thousand times over as if she were hearing it for the first time, all those tales the old folks keep repeating to accommodate the past and create an acceptable self-portrait, erasing remorse and extolling their real or imagined virtues. Nobody wants to end their life with a banal past. However, Irina’s secret was in fact more complicated: to her each one of the Lark House residents was a replica of her grandparents Costea and Petruta, to whom she prayed every night before going to sleep, asking them to accompany her through the darkness, as they had done throughout her childhood. They had raised her, toiling on a thankless patch of ground in their remote Moldovan village, where not even the slightest breeze of progress blew. Most of the locals still lived in the country and continued working the land just as their ancestors had done a century earlier. Irina was two years old in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, and four when the Soviet Union collapsed and her country became an independent republic. Neither of these events meant anything to her, but her grandparents lamented them, as did their neighbors. They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment. Anyone who could leave did so, including Irina’s mother, Radmila, so that the only ones left behind were the old and children whose parents could not take them with them. Irina remembered her grandparents bent double from the effort of growing potatoes, faces lined by the August sun and freezing Januarys, with little strength left and no hope. She concluded that the countryside was fatal to health. She was the reason her grandparents kept on struggling, their one joy—with the exception of homemade red wine, a drink as rough as paint stripper that gave them the chance to escape their loneliness and boredom for a while.

  At first light, before she walked to school, Irina used to carry buckets from the well, and in the evening, before soup and bread for supper, she would chop wood for the stove. In California she weighed 110 pounds in her winter clothes and boots but was strong as an ox and could lift Cathy, her favorite client, like a newborn babe to transfer her from her wheelchair to a sofa or the bed. If she owed her muscles to the buckets of water and the ax, she owed the good luck that she was alive to Saint Parascheva, the patron saint of Moldova and the intermediary between the earth and the kindly beings in the heavens. At night as a child she would kneel with her grandparents before the saint’s icon to pray for the potato harvest and the health of their chickens; for protection against evildoers and soldiers; for their fragile republic; and for Radmila. To Irina as a chil
d, the haloed saint in the blue cloak who was holding a cross seemed far more human than the silhouette of her mother in a faded photograph. Irina did not miss her but enjoyed imagining that one day Radmila would return with a bag full of gifts for her. She heard nothing from her mother until she was eight years old, when her grandparents received a little money from their distant daughter. They spent it cautiously so as not to make their neighbors jealous. Irina felt cheated, because her mother did not send anything special for her, not even a note. The envelope contained nothing more than the money and a couple of photographs of a stranger with peroxide-blond hair and a harsh expression who looked very different from the young woman in the photo the old couple kept next to the icon. After that they received money from her two or three times a year, which helped alleviate their poverty.

  Radmila’s drama was similar to that of thousands of other young Moldovan women. She had become pregnant at sixteen by a Russian soldier passing through with his regiment and from whom she heard nothing more. She had Irina because her attempts at abortion failed, and she escaped far away as soon as she could. Years later, in order to warn her about the world’s perils, Radmila told her daughter the details of her odyssey, with a glass of vodka in her hand and two more already down the hatch.