by Monica Hesse
And I was different. I was odd in a way they didn’t know how to describe and I didn’t know how to fix. The people in my class said I stared too long and too much at the visiting student teacher. I didn’t, though, not how they meant, not that time. She was just nice to me.
The wind plasters my skirt to my knees. Two women ahead of me produce scarves from their apron pockets and tie back their hair. “Four ninety-six,” the second guard calls out over the howl. All of us who are supposed to be here plus Haruko.
“Y’all might want to hurry home,” the first guard calls out. “Sorry this one took so long.”
People barely acknowledge him before starting to run back to their houses before the storm. I stall for a minute wondering if I should try to find my parents, but there’s something wrong with the sky. For a thunderstorm, it should be dark gray; the air should feel heavy. This sky looks greenish orange, the color of a faded bruise, and the air is sharp. Almost like the sky before a tornado, but it’s September and tornado season is early spring.
“Wait,” a voice behind me calls, just as I’ve decided to go home. “Margot, wait.” I turn. Haruko looks around, panicked.
“Behind us and then turn left,” I yell over the growing howl, barely registering that she does know who I am as I direct her to the Japanese side. Why is the wind so loud?
“What?”
“To get to your house. You need to turn—”
“What?”
I run over and grab the sleeve of her cardigan, pivoting her in the right direction. I mean to let go, but as soon as we’re facing east, my throat drops.
It’s not rain. Across the flat land, half a mile away but moving fast, a black wall as long as the horizon is rolling in our direction.
“It’s a dust storm,” I shout. That’s why the sky felt wrong. Not water. Dust. Haruko stares at me, rooted to the ground. She hasn’t seen it. “A dust storm,” I say, pointing to the black wall, and I no longer feel shy talking to her, because the storm is something I understand, and it’s bigger than my own fear.
Finally, Haruko turns in the direction I’m pointing and her eyes get wide. The sky flashes. The wall of earth is more than a mile high; these storms can choke people, blind them.
We’re on the edge of the German side, in front of the German school. My house is blocks away, too far to run to. “This way,” I yell, trying to pull Haruko toward the school, but she doesn’t follow until I start to let go and run without her. I use the hem of my skirt to cover my nose and mouth, but I can barely see a yard in front of my face. At the school’s entrance I throw my shoulder against the door. Locked.
Around us, buildings have become big, shapeless shadows. I hear Haruko yelling something, but I’m busy trying to hold the map of the camp in my mind, figuring out where we should run next while my hair whips around my face and the wind is screaming.
Keeping my right hand on the side of the building and my left holding a bunch of Haruko’s sweater, I snake along the wall until I get to the corner. “Seventy-five yards—” I start to call out, but as soon as I open my mouth, dust pours in and I’m burying my face in my skirt again, gasping for air and tasting only cotton.
We run, slipping over loose stones and branches, and all I can see of Haruko is her feet stumbling next to mine, her own outstretched arm disappearing into the dirty air.
Did I miscalculate? We keep running south, and after a second that feels like an hour, my hand meets a wall of brick.
The icehouse.
It’s supposed to stay locked but it usually isn’t; detainees from both sides of camp use it. Still, I hold my breath until the handle turns, and then I shove Haruko ahead of me and wrench the door closed with a cold, metallic click.
We’re both panting. My throat and nose burn and I rest my hands on my knees until I can catch my breath. Water, I think, but there isn’t any. It’s all ice and no water. I spit on the concrete floor of the round shed, trying to empty the taste of dirt. When I look up again, Haruko is still standing where I pushed her. Her eyes are glassy and her hair has come loose from its pins; there’s a hole in her sleeve I must have accidentally put there.
“You should, too,” I tell her finally. “Spit. You don’t want to swallow the dirt.”
After a minute she clears her throat and spits.
“Better?”
Instead of answering, she wipes her mouth and goes to the small window in the door, still unsteady on her feet. I start to pick my way around the perimeter of the shed, seeing if there’s a thermos or something else with water. There’s not, but toward the back I do find an oil lamp and a work blanket, which I spread over one of the hay bales buffering the ice blocks.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Haruko says finally, her voice cracked and dry.
“This is a bad one. Usually it’s light dust, like beating a rug with a broom. Do you think you should sit down?”
“It looks like the mountains. When it’s a clear day in Denver. That’s what that dust storm looked like. A mountain. And then when it was on us, heavy snow.”
“In Iowa we have tornadoes,” I offer. “They’re worse than this. The science is the same with dust storms and tornadoes. Instability in the atmosphere, when dry air meets moist air. I don’t think it’s the same with snowstorms.”
She looks at me oddly. “I wasn’t talking about the science. I just meant that for a second the storm reminded me of home.”
My face turns red, because of course that’s what she meant. Don’t be so literal, Margot.
“In a way, this reminds me of home, too,” I tell Haruko finally, trying to make a joke. I gesture to the other blocks of ice. “I haven’t been cold since I left Iowa.” I don’t wait to see if she smiles before I take my Latin book from my pocket and shake the dust from between the pages. “Anyway, even bad ones usually don’t last more than twenty minutes.”
After two or three, Haruko leaves the window and mimics what I’ve done, finding her own blanket and spreading it over her own bale, across from me with the oil lamp between us.
“That was nice of you,” she says. “To help me.”
“It’s fine.” I stay focused on the page.
“Especially since I was… especially because of school today.”
“It’s fine,” I repeat, not sure what else to say. “You were lost and the storm came fast. I didn’t know if you’d be able to get home.”
“I didn’t mean to end up on the Naz—on the German side of camp.” She looks away, embarrassed, and I pretend that I didn’t hear what she said. “I was turned around.”
“Why were you crying?”
“When?”
“A half hour ago. You were running and you looked upset. I thought I could see when you walked past me that… Never mind.”
“I wasn’t crying.” She takes the disheveled bobby pins out of her hair and lines them up on her lap, blowing dust off each one, slowly putting herself back together. I don’t know why she’s lying, but it’s none of my business. I turn another page and try to memorize verbs.
Her hair rustles as she combs it with her fingers, working through the waves section by section. After a minute, she clears her throat. “Margot—it’s Margot, right? You pronounce the t at the end? How did you come to Crystal City?”
“Through San Antonio,” I say. “Like you did, probably. And then into Crystal City. The bus wasn’t broken when we got here. We took it all the way in.”
She shakes her head. “No. I mean before that.”
I blush again, the second time I’ve misunderstood what she was saying. “Why?”
“We’re stuck. I was just making conversation.”
“Why? Is it because your other friends aren’t here?”
She winces, but I didn’t mean to accuse her. It’s that I need to be careful to make sure I understand the terms of this conversation. Is she bored? Is she looking for something to repeat to everyone else back at school tomorrow?
“I suppose I’m asking because it
’s easy to end up in a camp if you’re Japanese. That’s all the government needs to know about you. But there are tons of German immigrants in the United States. They didn’t lock up all of you. Only the ones…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. What she means is, to be German and end up in an enemy camp, you must have done something really wrong.
I wish I did not want to answer her. I wish she wasn’t being curious about me. I wish she wasn’t pretty. I wish I wasn’t so aware that this is the longest conversation I’ve had with any other person my age in Crystal City and that she doesn’t know anything about me, and so maybe because of that, we could be friends.
“My father is a farmer,” I start carefully. “An engineer in Germany, but—there were a lot of German farmers in Iowa.”
A whole community. Barn-raisings. Parties on St. Thomas’s Day. She is right, they didn’t lock up everyone. They barely locked up anyone.
“There was a hall the next town over where we went to hear a band play every Friday. The owner invited my father to hear a speaker from Chicago talk about the American Nazi party. He said he was inviting just a few friends.”
Mr. Schweitzer had been good to my family. Was he good enough to warrant my father agreeing to see the speaker? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Chapters of the German-American Bund were all over the United States by then, giving lectures about the American Nazi party. Twenty thousand had gone to Madison Square Garden to listen to a man named Fritz Kuhn talk about preserving the Aryan race in the United States.
“So you are here because your father’s a Nazi,” Haruko says.
“He’s not a Nazi.”
She doesn’t respond, but I can hear her doubt.
“Vati just went to the one meeting, as a favor to a friend. He didn’t believe in what they were saying.” I try to keep my frustration in check; this isn’t how I wanted the conversation to go. “He came home and said the meeting was a dozen old, wrinkled men talking nonsense. But later, when the FBI came, they said he had signed in at the meeting. They had a sign-in sheet, so he signed in. So the FBI took him. And we followed.”
I try to remember the story calmly. The facts. First, there were two months of us not knowing where he was, if he was even still in this country, if he was even still alive. Then, there were four months where we were trying to join him, but those four months are another thing in my life I don’t like to talk about.
Haruko whispers something. I can’t tell if I’m meant to hear. “And then you got on the train” is what she says. “And then all of us got on the train.”
There is no point in looking out the small window anymore. It’s nothing but a swirl of dirt. It must be barely after seven, but outdoors it looks like midnight. Indoors the oil lamp casts a weird glow on everything in the room. I can make out the contours of Haruko’s face enough to know that she’s not sneering, the way I worried she would be. She takes in a breath, hesitating before she speaks again.
“I was crying because we got a letter from my brother,” she says. “He’s in the 442nd. Do you know what that is?”
“The army?”
“Japanese division. Boys like him wanted to fight for their country.” She juts her chin out, like she thinks I’ll contradict her.
I’ve never heard of the 442nd, but I don’t think this is the right time to say that. “If you got a letter, then that means he’s okay, right?”
She bites her lip. “He says he is. My parents think he is.”
“You don’t?”
“I wish I did, but I don’t. I can tell.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I just can.”
She uses the corner of her work blanket to quickly wipe her eyes. I think she is hoping I won’t notice, but this girl, who was stone-faced when she was reunited with her own father, who was confident and laughing in school, can’t stop crying when she talks about her brother.
“What’s he like?”
“Ken?”
“Yes. I’ve never had a brother. I’ve almost, but—I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
Haruko sucks in a quick breath, and the noise that comes out next is halfway between a laugh and a sob. “He is like—he is like, if he were not my brother, I would probably not be friends with him. We’re not interested in the same things. He never cared about what other people thought. He would make up the stupidest—and it was okay. When I was with him, I did, too. Because I didn’t have anything to prove. He understood me. He understood what it was like to be—and our parents did, too, of course, but they were from Japan so it was different, they didn’t need to fit in the same way. Ken understood what it was like to be both things, to be—”
She cuts herself off and looks embarrassed. Tears roll down her face, making little wet streaks in the dust. “Nobody here has asked me about who Ken really is, besides that he’s a soldier.” She shakes her head. “I know I’m not making any sense. I know I’m not—why am I telling you all this?”
“Because I asked,” I say.
She laughs, like my answer is funny, and I realize this was another question that I wasn’t supposed to answer literally. “That’s not what I—” She stops, and her breath comes out chopped and ragged as she tries to stop crying. “I guess. I guess because you asked.”
She looks down at her lap, twisting the blanket between her hands. “Margot, earlier at school. I’m not a mean person. I just…”
“It was easier for you not to talk to me.”
She twists the blanket harder. “Yes. It was easier for me not to talk to you.”
I want her to add something to that. To say that she’s sorry and things will be different in school tomorrow. But she doesn’t, and I try to fight my disappointment because honestly I shouldn’t expect her to. Why would she?
It will just be this, then. Those are the terms. We’ll have this one time in the icehouse and we’ll never talk again.
I keep my eyes on the ground, where I see something metallic. One of Haruko’s bobby pins. I pick it up and clean it against my dress. It’s a new thing, a shiny new thing to look at. There are no bobby pins in the general stores. You should keep this, I want to tell her. You should make sure you hold on to this. You won’t be able to get another.
Haruko is watching me. “Why aren’t you angrier?” she asks me. “When you talk about how you got here, you sound so matter-of-fact about it. Aren’t you mad, if you think your father doesn’t deserve to be here?”
“I can’t be angry,” I say without having to think about it. “After they took my father away, I thought I would never see him again. But then I saw him again. So it could have been much worse.”
I wish I knew how to explain more, why anger isn’t an emotion that makes sense for me to have. How, in order to survive here, you have to decide that you chose to be here. You have to find a way to put Crystal City into a box, instead of letting it box in you. Count the new inmates. Notice the new things. My family will get out of here intact, and we will go home to Iowa, and that is what matters. The rest of this is something to be observed. The bad parts don’t have to be remembered and they can’t be explained.
It could be so much worse.
“Haruko. I saw your family on the first day you came.” It’s a risk, to tell her this, but she seems so upset, and if we’re never going to talk again, it might not matter what I say now. “I saw you and I thought….” I hesitate, because I don’t want her to think it’s strange, how much I remember about that day. “You didn’t look happy.”
“Why would I look happy? I was reporting to a prison.”
I blush. “I mean, you didn’t look happy to be seeing your father. You looked alone.”
“You thought you saw that?”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
A pause that feels like it lasts forever. Then Haruko’s shoulders suddenly fall and she slowly shakes her head back and forth.
“You weren’t wrong,” she whispers. “I’m so angry. I’m so angry all the ti
me.”
“I know it’s hard, what they did to your fath—”
“I’m angry at my father,” she interrupts. The words come out harshly, in a rush. Her voice echoes off the wall of the icehouse and it’s a different tone than she’s had until now.
“Why?” I ask, trying to keep up. “Did he make your family follow him?”
“No. I mean yes, but no. It was my mother’s idea. She was the one who put in the request.”
“Then I don’t understand. Do you think your father does deserve to be here?”
I say it because I couldn’t immediately think of another explanation, but I don’t expect it to be true. I expect her to explain how I’m wrong, the way I did when she asked about Vati.
But instead, Haruko’s face breaks open. Her mouth twists in anger at my question, but she can’t manage to yell at me for asking it.
“You can tell me, if you want,” I say softly. “I don’t have anyone else to tell.”
I mean, I don’t have anyone else to tell in this camp, but I also mean, ever. I’ve never had secrets with anyone.
Haruko looks pained. “I think,” she whispers.
“What do you think?” I lean forward. The straw under my blanket digs into my thighs.
“I think something happened on the day they took my father that I don’t understand.”
As soon as the words have left her mouth, she buries her face in her hands, like she is ashamed. She’s crying again; it hurts her to say what she just did. It seems that it hurt her the way it hurts me to ask my father if he is going to ask for a job at the swimming pool. But I can’t bring myself to talk about my father. And I don’t know what else I should say, or how else I should offer comfort, or whether she would want me to.
I still have her bobby pin, making wavy indentations in my hand. When she lifts her face again, I hold the pin up. May I, I gesture, since it’s the only thing I can think of to offer.
She doesn’t say no, so as carefully and non-clumsily as I can, I slide off my ice block and kneel in front of hers. I take a piece of her hair, and I smooth it back against her head, sliding the pin into place. I feel the dust coating her scalp on my fingers, but beneath that, I feel how her hair is soft and thicker than mine.