by Traci Chee
I like working with Mary. Her hair, which is normally in her face, is pulled back, so you can see her eyes, which are shaped like dark seeds. It also means you can really see her scowl at you when you mess up.
She eyes my knifework, frowning. “Don’t cut yourself.”
Sheepishly, I move the paring knife, the only kind of knife they’ve left us after the raids, away from my thumb. “Thanks.”
She rolls her eyes.
Tommy and Aiko were supposed to have been here too, but Mr. Harano wouldn’t let them come. He’s strict, their father, and I don’t think he treats either one of them very well, because it seems like they’ll take any excuse to be away from their apartment when they can.
It’s nearing curfew, so Mrs. K. wraps a jar of each batch of tsukemono in a furoshiki and ties it neatly, handing it to me with a little bow. “For your mother and sister,” she says.
I take it, bowing back. “Thank you, Mrs. Katsumoto.”
“Did you give him the one he bled in?” Mary asks from the table, where she’s wiping down the cutting boards.
Mrs. K. looks horrified. I can see her almost reach for the furoshiki, then hold herself back. “He did what?”
Mary laughs. I love her laugh. It’s loud and brash, and I don’t get to hear it often—I don’t think anybody does—but now it fills the barrack, following me as I bow again and step out into the night.
When I get home, Mother claps her hands as I unwrap the furoshiki. “This is so kind,” she says, holding each of the jars to the light. Some of the colors are pale still, but the daikon is already turning sunbeam yellow in the turmeric.
“We must find a way to thank them,” she says, patting the top of each jar, as if blessing them.
I reach into my back pocket for the handkerchief of rice. “I also got—”
I’m interrupted by a sharp rapping at the door.
We freeze, staring at each other, wide-eyed. It’s after seven p.m. No Japanese person should be knocking right now. Which means . . .
“Internal security,” someone says. “Open up.”
The air feels fragile, as if breathing it will fracture something. Cautiously, Kimi lays the book she was reading on her cot and gets up, padding across the floor in her slippers.
As soon as she opens the door, the internal security officers barge inside. There are two of them, their faces pale, their hands hard and grabbing; they’re coming for me, and I—
It’s like Mr. Tani all over again. The lights are too bright; I’m bewildered and blinking. I’m being seized by the arms.
“That’s him,” one of them says.
“You’re under arrest,” says the other.
I blink slowly. I am?
“What for?” Kimi demands. Her hands are on her hips.
“Curfew violation.”
Mother is motionless, clutching the jar of takuan to her chest like it’s the only thing she can hold on to. It’s okay, Mother, I think.
“It’s only five minutes past seven!” Kimi snaps. She’s small, slender, her head sometimes seeming too big for her neck, like a doll’s, but now she gets into the officers’ faces, her eyes narrowed, her canines sharp.
I’ve never seen Kimi stand up to anyone before.
It is kind of magnificent.
“Five minutes past curfew is past curfew,” one of them says.
“But he—”
The other one cuts her off: “You’d better pack a bag. Quick, now.”
She glares at them for a second, her eyes brimming with tears, before she spins around, stuffing my clothes into a suitcase. Trouser legs and shirtsleeves flying like kites in the pale yellow light of our single bulb.
Mom still hasn’t moved, and neither have I.
“What’s this?” one of them says, lifting my closed fist. “Contraband? Let go.”
I try. I want to tell him I try.
For some reason, I’m thinking of the eggs in the road, the cartons of eggs, the yolks oozing out, into the mud, yellow as melted butter.
“Come on, you Jap—”
He has to pry open my fingers, wrenching them back one by one, and it hurts, I want to tell him it hurts, until the handkerchief drops.
Dirty, uncooked rice spills all over the floor. I hear the grains rattle, but I can’t look down. Tears form in my eyes, blurring my vision.
The internal security officers laugh.
Then one of them is at the door, and the other one has my suitcase. “Move,” he says, prodding me.
I trip, banging my knee into the edge of my cot.
He grabs me again, shaking me. “Don’t try anything funny, now.” I’m being marched toward the door, but my legs aren’t working. I fall; I hit the floor; there are grains of rice beneath my fingers.
Mother finally finds her voice: “Kiyoshi!”
“What’s the big idea?” one asks. “D’you think this is a joke?”
I am trying to get to my knees when he smacks me across the head, and then I really start crying. The tears come hot and fast and large, burning down my cheeks. I don’t mean to; I don’t even know why I’m doing it. I’ve been knocked around worse than this, but—
I think of that judo teacher who walked down those steps with grace. I don’t want to be uncooperative, or slow, or weak . . . but I am. Mr. Tani knew it, and Mother and Kimi knew it, and I know it, and now these men know it too.
They’re seizing me now, they’re roughing me up, but I am soaring out of my body, I am untethered from my own bones, from the grip of their hands, from my tears. I am safe, even though they are hurting me.
Kimi is screaming at them as they shove me down the steps. My tongue splits as I accidentally bite down on it. I am in the dirt, tasting blood and dust.
I think of the smell of oranges, sunlight flashing in the leaves.
Then I’m being pulled toward a truck, I’m being arrested, and I don’t know if I’m coming back.
The last I see of Mother and Kimi, they’re standing in the doorway, Mother still holding the jar of takuan, and the light behind them is the color of egg yolks.
* * *
They don’t tell me how long I’ll be here. They don’t tell me if there’s going to be a trial. They just throw me in the stockade and leave me.
The stockade barracks are like the ones in the rest of camp, but they’re crammed wall-to-wall with cots. The men in here are like sardines, jam-packed so close together, there’s hardly enough space to walk between beds.
The room smells like body odor and cigarettes, with the faint hint of vomit.
But Stan is here.
I hardly recognize him when I see him, because his head’s been shaved, poorly, I think, with uneven patches here and there, and he’s lost so much weight in the last twenty-four days, he looks like you could snap him in half.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he says, struggling to sit up. I think he’s sick. His skin is moist and pale, and there’s a sour smell about him, like bile.
“Don’t get up,” I say, helping him back under the covers. “You look terrible.”
“Gee, you sure know how to flatter a guy.” He grins. One of his teeth is missing.
I think of his legs being knocked out from under him, of his face being mashed into the dirt. My fault.
“Stan, I’m—”
He squints at me, putting on his glasses, which have been broken and taped back together. “Ouch. You could crack a mirror with a face like that. Here.” He tosses me a rag. “What’d they get you for?”
Gently, I touch the rag to my swollen lip. “I was out five minutes past curfew.”
To my surprise, Stan laughs. “At least you know what you did! Some guys get hauled in with no explanation at all.” He looks a little wild, laughing like that, with his uneven hair, his missing tooth, that shine of sweat on his forehead.
I try to smile, but it’s hard to smile when I want to cry again. I sniff, trying not to meet his gaze. “What happened to your hair?” I say.
�
�It’s a good look, right? I call it ‘Buddhist chic.’” He rubs his stubbled head, and his gaze turns solemn, despite his light tone. “Some of the guys jumped me. They wanted everyone to have the same haircut. Solidarity in baldness, I guess.”
I glance around the room, where men are lying on their cots, sleeping, or reading, or smoking and talking in small groups. Against one wall, someone plays a ukulele. Most of them are wearing knit caps to cover their shaven heads, but I spy the judo teacher who was arrested during the night raid, playing a game of Go. He looks like that statue The Thinker, his chin resting atop his fist, a paragon of stillness amid the stinking chaos of the barrack.
“That guy has hair,” I say, pointing.
“That’s Mr. Morimoto. They respect him too much to jump him.” Stan leans back against the pillow with a sigh. “You’d think it’s the judo, but in reality, he bites.”
“Really?”
“Nah, it’s the judo. And the whole leader-in-the-community thing.” Stan chuckles. “How’s Mary and the rest of the family?”
“They’re doing fine. You don’t need to worry,” I tell him. “How are you?”
“Stir-crazy and mad as hell. No matter how many times I tell them I was at the movies that night, they still think I’m one of the guys who threatened the project director. They haven’t questioned me in a while, though. What d’you wanna bet they’ve forgotten I’m here?”
I keep thinking of him falling, of his body hitting the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.
Stan blinks, his mouth half-open in surprise. “Huh?”
My hands knot in his blanket. “For getting you arrested.”
He laughs again. “Those goddamn ketos arrested me.” He pats me on the arm. “Come on, don’t look like that, Yosh. It’s not your fault I’m in here. You didn’t do anything wrong. None of us did.”
I get him a cup of water, which I make him drink. “I wish I could believe you.”
THURS., DEC. 30
The stockade is no joke.
For more than a hundred prisoners, there are only five toilets, and three of them aren’t working. There’s no hot water and only one tub, so we wash our faces and clothes in the sinks, shivering in the winter chill. Most of the time, we stink.
In another part of the camp is a tent called the “bullpen” where Lieutenant Swinson, the Police and Prisoner Officer, puts anyone who looks at him funny. It’s guarded day and night by an MP with a rifle and bayonet, which means the prisoners have to sleep out there on the frozen ground with only a bit of canvas and a little stove to protect them from the cold.
I haven’t been to the bullpen yet, and neither has Stan, and we go out of our way to stay out of trouble.
He’s on his way to being healthy again, but because of the poor conditions, illnesses sweep through the barrack in waves. Someone is always coughing, or vomiting, or running a fever. To pass the time, I think, and to distract themselves, the stockade prisoners decorate the walls with pictures of pinup girls and family photographs. Someone’s always playing guitar or the ukulele, and there’s always a game of hanafuda going so the guys can gamble for cigarettes and oranges.
Stan and I keep to ourselves mostly, talking, or reading letters we receive from camp:
Dear Stan and Yosh,
Do you know about Radio Tokyo? It’s a broadcast from Japan, and some of the men in camp can pick it up with their radios. (Don’t ask me which men, because I don’t know.) I haven’t heard it myself, but sometimes I see these flyers with highlights from the broadcast. Can you believe it? They’re saying Japan is winning the war in the Pacific. They talk about these big American casualties, all these warships sunk and everything. The numbers don’t make any sense at all, but people in camp eat it up.
They’ve convinced my parents, anyhow. They’re talking about trying to get on the next prisoner exchange ship, even though I tell them our governments have their own agendas in who they want to send back. I suppose I can’t blame them—they only want to return to Japan as soon as possible.
I don’t know what I’m going to do if that happens. I’ve never been to Japan, and you know how bad my Japanese is, Stan. I can barely say こんにちは. But I don’t want to keep disappointing them.
I’m enclosing a pack of gum. Hopefully it won’t be confiscated.
Take care of yourselves,
Tommy
P.S. Aiko sends her love. Mary gives you the finger.
P.P.S. No, Mary gave me the finger. To you, she says, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
We don’t receive the pack of gum, of course. Sometimes we don’t even receive our letters. It’s like that here. Random. Every so often, someone is taken away for questioning, or someone is locked in the bullpen or returns from the bullpen. Someone new is arrested, or someone is released. There’s no logic to it, no reason we’re here, and no end in sight.
And under the jokes, and the songs, and the laughter, there’s that feeling like the air is being stretched tighter and tighter and tighter, and soon, all it will take is one move, one step, one breath, for it to snap.
* * *
On December 30, Lieutenant Swinson takes two prisoners from our barrack and puts them in the bullpen. He gives no explanation.
In protest, we don’t leave the barrack for roll call. The men have done things like this before, Stan tells me, when they weren’t getting enough rice, or when they wanted a sick prisoner to be taken to the hospital. It feels new to me. To not move, and to do it on purpose, and to have that be powerful somehow.
The judo teacher, Mr. Morimoto, asks that the prisoners in the bullpen be released, since there was no reason for them to be there in the first place.
Lieutenant Swinson tells him that if we clean up the stockade, he’ll let the men out of the bullpen.
Mr. Morimoto says we can do that, if we have supplies like mops, buckets, rags, and soap.
We don’t get them.
But Mr. Morimoto begins cleaning all the same. Taking one of his own undershirts, he leaves the barrack to begin wiping down the latrine.
Those who are healthy—or the ones who aren’t slinging the bull, gambling, or lying around, at least—join him. After making sure Stan is resting, because he’s still weak, I help clean the sinks. In the frigid water that flows from the taps, my fingers quickly go numb.
Mr. Morimoto’s hands are cracked with cold and the dry air. It must be painful for him, I think, scrubbing grime from the drain, but he doesn’t complain. His face is placid, even though there is a deep anger in his eyes that I’ve also seen in Stan’s.
“Why are you doing this, sir?” I ask after a while.
He grunts. “What do you mean?”
“Lieutenant Swinson didn’t get us the cleaning supplies.”
“If someone always said, You have to do this for me before I do this for you, then nothing would ever get done,” he says. “If I say I will do something, then I do it. Acting in a forthright and honest manner is the only way to retain one’s dignity.”
I glance around the latrine with its three malfunctioning toilets, and at the soiled rags in our hands. I think about the men being arrested and the men being released; the bullpen and the interrogations; and the letters we receive or the letters we don’t. I think about the unpredictability of it, the dreadful whimsy, as if our lives are no longer governed by sense or patterns, and so we cannot rely on anything, not on food, or warmth, or security, or freedom. “Even here?” I ask.
Mr. Morimoto nods. “Especially here.”
FRI., DEC. 31
Although we spent all yesterday cleaning the stockade, the prisoners in the bullpen aren’t released. Mr. Morimoto doesn’t look surprised, just weary.
“What do you think is going to happen?” I ask Stan.
“I bet Swinson’s gonna want us to sit in a circle and braid each other’s hair or something. Maybe a tea party.”
I grin and give his bald head a rub. “You’ll be left out, then.”
He shoves me off, grimacing. “Tea with Swinson? I’d rather eat my shoe.”
At the mention of food, my stomach growls. We had only two slices of bread for breakfast this morning. “You might have to,” I say, “if things continue as they are.”
Like yesterday, when it’s time for roll call, no one leaves the barrack. One of the MPs comes to yell at us, but no one moves. No one is even tempted.
I keep thinking about what Mr. Morimoto said about acting according to his beliefs. We don’t all believe the same things in here, especially about whether we’re Japanese or American, whether we want to stay in this country or go, but we all know that our treatment in this place is unjust, and that makes it easier to act as one.
Soon, however, we hear the gate rattling open, the sound of boots hitting the frozen ground. Soldiers march around the exterior of the barrack, banging on the walls with bayonets, shouting, “Get up, you lazy Japs! Time for roll call! Come out on your own, or we’ve got ways to make you come out!”
I lean over to Stan, whispering, “Are they talking about gas? There are sick guys in here.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t think a little tear gas will clear up their sinuses?” He sounds like he’s joking, but he’s so angry, I can almost feel it coming off him in waves, like heat or cold.
Mr. Morimoto sighs and draws a hand down his face.
And we obey.
The air is frigid as we file out of the barrack. It hits the back of my throat like a thousand needles. Behind me, Stan starts coughing. I turn around to help him, but someone shouts at me to keep moving.
When I hesitate, Stan gestures me onward.
Slowly, we line up, standing there with the cold seeping into our bones as they count us.
One Jap, two Japs . . . eighty-eight, eighty-nine Japs . . . one hundred thirty Japs . . . one hundred ninety-nine, two hundred Japs . . . in a stockade meant for less than a hundred.
I can’t feel my fingers anymore. In my shoes, my feet have gone thick and solid as ice. All around me, men are coughing and sniffling. Two rows ahead, I can see one of them shivering so hard in his coat, he looks as if he’s going to shake apart. I hope it’s over now; I hope we can go back inside.