by Julie Otsuka
“Just resting.” He could smell her hair, and the dust, and salt, and he knew she’d been out there, in the night, where it was dark.
She said, “Miss me?” She said, “Turn down the radio.” She said, “I won a nickel at bingo tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go to the canteen and buy you a Coca-Cola.”
He said, “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”
She dropped down onto the cot next to his. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did tonight.”
“I wrote Papa a postcard.”
“What else?”
“Licked a stamp.”
“Do you know what bothers me most? I can’t remember his face sometimes.”
“It was sort of round,” said the boy. Then he asked her if she wanted to listen to some music and she said yes—she always said yes—and he turned on the radio to the big band channel. They heard a trumpet and some drums and then Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Martha Tilton singing, “So many memories, sometimes I think I’ll cry. . . .”
IN THE DREAM there was always a beautiful wooden door. The beautiful wooden door was very small—the size of a pillow, say, or an encyclopedia. Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see.
For the Emperor was holy and divine. A god.
You could not look him in the eye.
In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God.
Only something always went wrong. The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it. Or maybe a bell was ringing somewhere—somewhere in Nevada or Peleliu or maybe it was just some crazy gong bonging in Saipan—and the nights were growing colder, the sound of the scrabbling claws was fainter now, fainter than ever before, and it was October, he was miles from home, and his father was not there.
THEY HAD COME for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. “Grab your toothbrush,” they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up, and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.
He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.
Grab your toothbrush.
Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.
We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
Into the car, Papa-san.
Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth’s, he was sure of it.
Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.
THE NEXT MORNING his sister had wandered through the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.
“The edge of my bed,” their mother had said.
That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy’s uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor’s army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. “From now on,” she said, “we’re counting on our fingers.”
The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. “No more rice balls,” she said. “And if anyone asks, you’re Chinese.”
The boy had nodded. “Chinese,” he whispered. “I’m Chinese.”
“And I,” said the girl, “am the Queen of Spain.”
“In your dreams,” said the boy.
“In my dreams,” said the girl, “I’m the King.”
IN CHINA the men wore their hair in long black pig-tails and the ladies hobbled around on tiny broken feet. In China there were people so poor they had to feed their newborn babies to the dogs. In China they ate grass for breakfast and for lunch they ate cats.
And for dinner?
For dinner, in China, they ate dogs.
These were a few of the things the boy knew about China.
LATER, HE SAW CHINESE, real Chinese—Mr. Lee of Lee’s Grocers and Don Wong who owned the laundry on Shattuck—on the street wearing buttons that said, I AM CHINESE, and CHINESE, PLEASE. Later, a man stopped him on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s and said, “Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!”
Just to set the record straight.
But by then the man was already gone.
Later, there were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m.
And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.
Later, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden.
Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY went up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.
ALL THROUGH OCTOBER the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.
A dust storm would blow for hours, and sometimes even days, and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it would stop, and for a few seconds the world was perfectly silent. Then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking, and from out of nowhere a flock of white birds would mysteriously appear in the sky.
THE FIRST SNOWS FELL, and then melted, and then there was rain. The alkaline earth could not absorb any water and the ground quickly turned to mud. Black puddles stood on the gravel paths and the schools were shut down for repairs.
There was nothing to do now and the days were long and empty. The boy marked them off one by one on the calendar with giant red X’s. He practiced fancy tricks on the yo-yo: Around the World, Walk the Dog, the Turkish Army. He received a letter from his father written on thin lined sheets of paper. Of course we have toothpaste in Lordsburg. How else do you expect us to brush our teeth? His father thanked him for the postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle. He said he was fine. Everything was fine. He was sure they would see each other one day soon. Be good to your mother, he wrote. Be patient. And remember, it’s better to bend than to break.
Not once did he mention the war.
HIS FATHER HAD PROMISED to show him the world. They’d go to Egypt, he’d said, and climb the Pyramids. They’d go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They’d see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they’d glide through Venice in a black wooden
gondola.
“The moon above,” he sang, “is yours and mine. . . .”
THE DAY AFTER THE FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father’s hair in the bathtub. He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone. “I should have taken it with me,” he said to himself. He worried that there were large messy people now living in his old room who played cards night and day and spilled sticky brown drinks all over the floor. He worried that the FBI had returned to the house to search one more time for contraband. We forgot to check under the floorboards. He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.
FROM TIME TO TIME they heard rumors of spies. Takizawa, people whispered, was a government informer. Possibly a Korean. Not to be trusted. So be careful what you say. Yamaguchi had close ties to the administration. Ishimoto had been attacked late one night behind the latrines by three masked men carrying lead pipes. They say he was providing the FBI with the names of pro-Japan disloyals.
“WHAT DO I miss the most? The sound of the trees at night . . . also, chocolate.”
“And plums, Mama. You miss plums.”
“That’s right, I miss plums. I’ll always miss plums.”
“Maybe not always.”
“True, maybe not. There’s something that’s been bothering me, though.”
“What is it?”
“Did I leave the porch light on or off?”
“On.”
“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?”
“You always turned off the stove.”
“Did I?”
“Every time.”
“Did we even have a stove?”
“Of course we had a stove.”
“That’s right. The Wedgewood. I used to be quite the cook once, you know.”
SLOWLY THE BOY SPUN the dial. He heard organ music playing on the Salt Lake City station. Then rhumba music. A swing band. An ad for Dr. Fisher’s tablets for intestinal sluggishness. “Folks,” a man asked, “do you feel headachy and pepless in the morning?” “Nope,” said the boy. Then the news came on, and the Western Task Force was landing in Morocco, and the Central, at Oran, and in the Pacific Islands the American forces were dying all over the place.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he’d take a direct hit over Leyte and he’d have to eject. He’d float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he’d say, and then they’d shake hands.
NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. “It’ll be red,” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot—“He showed me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.
“What did it look like?” the boy asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes I do.”
She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.
The boy said, “I know.”
One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall.
“I’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul. Night after night he had lain awake waiting to hear the sound of the scrabbling claws but all he had heard was the banging of a loose door in the wind.
She placed the tortoise in the bottom of the hole and filled up the hole with sand and then she shoved the spoon deep down into the earth. “We’ll dig him up in the spring,” she said. “We’ll resurrect him.”
HE WAS THERE, above his mother’s cot. Jesus. In color. Four inches by six. A picture postcard someone had once sent to her from the Louvre. Jesus had bright blue eyes and a kind but mysterious smile.
“Just like the Mona Lisa’s,” said the girl.
The boy thought He looked more like Mrs. Delaney, only with longer hair and a halo.
Jesus’ eyes were filled with a secret and flickering joy. With rapture. He’d died once—“for you,” said his mother, “for your sins”—and then he’d risen.
The girl said, “Mmm.” She said, “That’s divine.”
LATE AT NIGHT, in the darkness, he could hear his mother praying. “Our father, Who art in heaven . . .”
And in the morning, at sunrise, coming from the other side of the wall, the sound of the man next door chanting. “Kokyo ni taishite keirei.”
Salute to the Imperial Palace.
NOW WHENEVER HE THOUGHT of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. “My daddy’s an outlaw,” he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.
He’d be thinking these things, and then the image would suddenly float up before him: his father, in his bathrobe and slippers, being led away across the lawn. Into the car, Papa-san.
HE’LL BE BACK any day now. Any day.
Just say he went away on a trip.
Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing.
Stay inside.
Don’t leave the house.
Travel only in the daytime.
Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese.
Do not congregate in one place.
When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing.
Remember, you’re in America.
Greet him in the American way by shaking his hand.
NONE OF THE OTHER FATHERS had been taken away in their slippers. Ben Okada’s father had been arrested in his golf shoes while practicing his swing on the lawn. Woodrow Teshima’s father had been arrested in black wingtips and a rented tuxedo at a Buddhist wedding in Alameda. And Sugar Sawada’s father, who had already lost a foot and some of his memory—only the bad ones, Mrs. Sawada had always insisted, with a friendly wink and a smile—in the First World War, had bowed once toward the east before being hauled away drunk in his single black boot, waving his crutches and shouting, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”
Sometimes the boy comforted himself with the thought of Tommy Tanaka’s father, who had been wearing white toe socks and an old pair of wooden geta when the FBI had caught him red-handed in the garden, cutting down last year’s chrysanthemum stalks.
Geta, the boy decided, were worse than slippers.
Much worse.
“SOMETIMES,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “I’ll look up at the clock and it’s half past five and I’m sure that he’s on his way home from the office. And then I’ll start to panic. ‘It’s late,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘I should have started the rice by now.’ ”
THE TREES APPEARED suddenly, and without warning, on a sunny day in late November. They were willow saplings, trucked in on
flatbeds from some faraway place. The mountains, perhaps. Or the banks of a river. Someplace where there was water. All day long the men in each block planted the trees in front of the mess halls and at evenly spaced intervals along either side of the firebreaks. Sweat covered their brows as the broad blades of their shovels twisted and flashed in the sun.
At the end of the day, when nobody was looking, the boy plucked a small green leaf from a tree and slipped it into his pocket. The next morning he put it into an envelope and sent it to Lordsburg.
“THE SOIL’S TOO ALKALINE,” said his mother. “Those trees won’t last through the winter.” She stood by the window in her nightgown slowly brushing her hair. Outside it was beginning to snow. Two searchlights crossed in the darkness and fanned out across the fence and then they went out. A few seconds later they went on again. She pulled out a gray hair from her head and let it fall to the floor. “I’ll sweep it up in the morning,” she said. Then she turned to him. “I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?”
He shook his head.
“It fell off somewhere between Provo and Nephi. I haven’t felt right ever since.”
He watched as she twisted her hair into a rope and pinned it up in a bun. Her hair was dark and shiny in the light but her eyes were tired. “You look okay,” he said. He did not remember his mother wearing earrings on the train.
She closed her eyes for a moment and then she opened them wide. “I wonder where it went.”
“What did it look like?”
“It looked like a pearl,” she said. “It was a pearl.”
“Maybe it rolled behind the seat.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.”
He picked up the gray hair off the floor and held it up to the light. She looked at him and then at the strand of her hair in his hand and then she turned off the light and they stood there quietly in the darkness watching the snow fall across the black barrack roofs. The snow was clean and white and blowing in gusts. “I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”