The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  “Where have you been, Jakob?”

  “How could you?” I whisper before he can answer my mother. He has to know that I saw him at the pool.

  The curtain flickers in the house next door, the one that shares a flimsy wall with ours. I barely know these neighbors, but I know them enough to know they would be horrified by what my father has done. My mother must realize this, too; she backs into the house again, shutting the door behind my father when he follows.

  My father takes his time. He splashes water on his face. He takes his outer shirt off, examining a hole in the elbow. Stalling. “Before you both get upset, let’s calmly talk through this.” He hangs the shirt on the back of a chair.

  “This is not a thing that can be talked through,” Mutti hisses.

  “Ina, I couldn’t keep sitting here, with nothing to work on, with no way to contribute. You understand that, right? I couldn’t keep being useless. This doesn’t mean I agree with everything they stand for. Just with a few premises.” He turns to me. “Do you see what I’m saying, Margot?”

  No. No, that’s not right. I wanted the explanation to be different. I hoped he would tell us that he was spying, maybe, or that this was a scientific experiment.

  “You shouldn’t agree with anything,” I say. “Their whole… their whole…” I search for the word Vati used. “Their whole premise is hateful.”

  “When did you decide this?” My mother stands behind me in her dressing gown. “This morning when you said you were going for a walk? This afternoon when you said that maybe you would go look at the new swimming pool after all? Earlier than that? You must have known what we would think of this, or you wouldn’t have kept it a secret.”

  My father holds up a hand. “I don’t have to think they are right in every single matter in order to think that their other points hold water. You can’t deny that we’ve been discriminated against here. Organizing ourselves into a group is a smart strategy.”

  “Was it just for the job, then?” I try to wrap my head around what he’s saying. “Was it so Mr. Kruse would put you on the next crew?”

  “No, it wasn’t!” He points at me, excited that I’ve asked this question. “Listen, I’ll explain. We thought America was so great?” He laughs, sweeping his hand around our small room. “The America that brought us here? It is obvious the country only cares about its own citizens. So what is so wrong with Germany wanting to have a policy that puts its citizens first, too? What is so wrong with wanting to join an organization that will dedicate itself to me and my family? I don’t have to be a Nazi to see that. Your mother and I came here and gave this country everything—”

  “Do not bring me into this,” Mutti interrupts. “Don’t you dare.”

  “We did,” he insists, turning to her. “We decided we would come here and we would learn how many original colonies there were, and who wrote the Declaration of Independence. And for what? So they could decide we would never be American enough for them, and put us in here?”

  I’m trying to put my thoughts in order. I want to have a discussion where we lay out evidence and he sees that I’m right because I have more correct points in my column. But I already know my father is right about one thing: Logically, there is no defense for us being here.

  I have always known this. No matter how many shipments of new detainees I count and swimming pool volumes I calculate, there is never an answer at the end of my calculations.

  My father never would have become a Nazi if they let him stay home with our family.

  Or would he? Did he really just go to that first meeting as a favor? I’m having such a hard time remembering who my father was before. But he can’t have partial credit for this. Marching with a Nazi swastika is not like algebra, where you can get the wrong answer but be right some of the time. This is all wrong.

  “I don’t understand,” I say again. “I don’t understand why you had to carry that flag.”

  “Because he is weak,” my mother spits. I’ve never heard her like this. My father whips his head around.

  “Don’t you call me that.” His voice gets lower and quieter until his last word is barely more than a whisper. “Don’t you ever call me that.”

  “I will call you what it is the truth to call you. You have become a weak man. Bad things have happened to you? Bad things have happened to me. They have happened to this whole family. To thousands of people. You lost your job? Thousands of men lost their jobs. You are in here? So is Margot. So am I. Is it right? Of course it is not right. When the war is over and we leave here I will go to my grave making sure the United States knows it is not right.”

  “I am not saying that it hasn’t been terrible for you,” Vati says. “I am doing this for you. I am doing this for us. I am making the choice that will put our family first.”

  “You’re making the choice to support Adolf Hitler,” Mutti says. “A man who has assumed power through manipulation and lies and hate. That is despicable.”

  “Shut up, Ina,” my father says softly. “Shut up right now. Adolf Hitler doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  My mother lets out a sharp laugh. “Yes! Yes, there is no Hitler here! And do you know why that is, in some ways, the stupidest thing of your little endeavor? That is the stupidest part, because it means that none of what you are doing is even real. If you were marching your ugly little flag around in Germany, singing your ugly little anthem, you would probably be doing it while preparing to go off and fight in a war. You would be on the wrong side of it, the evil side of it, but at least you would be risking your life for the idiot thing you believed in. But you are not in Germany. You are not being bombed. You are living in a camp where your food and clothes and beer are provided by the government you now profess to hate.”

  “Shut up.”

  “So you and Frederick Kruse, marching around the little camp? That is not standing up for something. That’s two desperate little boys waving a bit of cloth, pretending to be brave when in fact they are pathetic.”

  “Shut up!” my father says again. He’s not speaking softly anymore. He pushes back his chair so fast it topples, landing with a crack against the floor. He raises his hand.

  The way he flung her hand away at the hospital. The way he was angry because he thought we were not respecting him as the head of the house. The way we have tiptoed around him for months.

  “No!” I yell, lunging toward him.

  I’m afraid he’ll do it. For the first time, I’m actually afraid of my father and what he could do. I reach for his hand and he pulls away from me, and then I’m off balance and spilling to the ground. My mother rushes toward me, but she’s forgotten about the fallen chair. Her foot twists around the rung, and instead of shooting her hands out in front of herself for support the way I did, she’s keeping them wrapped around her midsection, protecting her belly.

  “Mutti,” I cry out, but I can’t get there in time, I am frozen in horror as the side of her face slams into an upturned chair leg, as her lip splits open. I reach out at the same time my father calls, “Ina!” and my mother’s body splays out on the floor.

  “Oh God, Ina, are you all right?” he says. “It was an accident, I didn’t mean—”

  “Stay away from me.” She thrusts one arm up, blocking him. “For God’s sake, stay away, Jakob.”

  “I promise—” he starts to beg.

  “I don’t care about your promises!” There’s blood on her tooth and her mouth.

  She pants on the ground while I rub her back, and then, after a minute, she reaches to her lip, wincing. She motions for me to grab her hand and help her to her knees. Her skirt is twisted around her hips, her blond hair undone from its bun. She faces my father. “This is your bravery? You’re going to hit your pregnant wife?”

  “Ina—” my father starts again, but he doesn’t get anything else out before his words turn to sobs. His own knees buckle. “Ina, Ina,” he says, and then my whole family is on the rough wooden floor of our hut on the day I was suppo
sed to go swimming.

  My family is not fine. We haven’t been fine for a while. Haruko has spent her time here trying to figure out what her father might be hiding from her. I’ve spent mine ignoring what’s happening in front of my own face. For the first time I am really seeing it, how broken we are. As if it’s not even happening to me.

  “Don’t move, don’t move, Mutti. I’ll have a neighbor go for the doctor,” I say.

  “I don’t want the doctor yet,” my mother says, watching my crumpled father still sobbing in front of her. “Give me some time alone with your father. Leave, Margot.”

  “I don’t want to—”

  “Leave for an hour. Go get some ice for my face. Your father and I need to talk.”

  Numbly, I fumble for the door handle behind me. I wrench it open and stumble down onto our wooden steps. Without really thinking about what I’m doing, I walk briskly past the little dirt plots in front of the little tar-paper houses of the camp. Eight tar-paper houses. Two with curtains. Keep Crystal City in a box. Past the clotheslines hung with shirts and faded dresses drying in the sun.

  THIRTEEN

  HARUKO

  BY THE TIME I GET TO THE ICEHOUSE FROM THE SWIMMING POOL, Margot is already there, her knees drawn up and her arms around them. She doesn’t seem to notice she’s shivering as she stares toward the wall.

  She also doesn’t acknowledge me when I climb over the ice blocks to get to our spot. “I didn’t know if you’d be here,” I say, when it’s clear she won’t speak first.

  I’d waited to see if she’d come back. Long enough to see the Nazi marchers disperse and the rest of the crowd look confused and uneasy, until Mr. Mercer announced we should move on with the festivities and Chieko cheered with Yell Squad.

  I tried to swim, but it was hard to focus once I realized what had happened. The man holding the flag had looked after Margot as she ran away, and then somehow I knew. It wasn’t in the swimming pool crowd that Margot had spotted her father.

  She still hasn’t said anything. Her teeth chatter.

  “It was too crowded to swim much,” I say.

  Nothing.

  “My sister flipped off the diving platform and almost lost her bathing suit.”

  Nothing.

  “So your father, would he hate me?” I don’t try to control the bite in my voice. “I can’t remember. Are Japanese people an inferior race, or are we—what was it Hitler called us in his pact—honorary Aryans?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” she whispers, closing her eyes.

  “I bet it won’t last very long, though. Once we’re done helping you by distracting the Americans, he’ll turn on us, too.”

  “What do you mean, when you are done helping me? We don’t live over there. Neither of us is fighting.”

  “That’s what I told the old people at the Union Store earlier today, but your father seems to disagree. Your father seems to think you’re very, very German. I guess that’s why you never tell me anything about your family. Is that why you never want to answer my questions?”

  “I told you, he didn’t—he wasn’t—” she says. “I don’t know what happened to my father.” She finally opens her eyes and they are dull and bloodshot. “I wish you could have known him before we came here. Today he told me that our house in Iowa is gone. And even if it wasn’t, our landlord wouldn’t let us come back. For my father, it’s like our family became the enemy overnight.”

  Margot’s excuses are infuriating because she is talking like there was no choice, like what her father did and became was inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable. They can’t make us become animals.

  “I’m so sorry,” I spit out, “that your father had to wake up and realize that you had become an enemy overnight. But at least you didn’t have to wake up and realize that other Americans had thought of you as an enemy all along.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  I mean that the reason this imprisonment is hard for Margot’s father is because they didn’t know yet that this country was unfair. They got to be—I think of another word I didn’t know the Japanese translation for when the FBI man made me say it to my mother—assimilated. We are worried your father has not fully assimilated into the United States. Tell your mother that. Did you tell her? Ask her if she understands.

  The West Coast Japanese had already given the government their shortwave radios, and they had already agreed to their curfew, eight PM to six AM, but it wasn’t enough, it was never enough. It was so easy for the government to make those rules. You can’t hate someone all of a sudden. It takes practice. It takes a long time.

  “I already told you that all the Japanese people on the West Coast had to report for assembly,” I tell her. “The government drew a line, and if you lived on the wrong side of it then you were rounded up and sent to assembly camps in old racetracks and carnival grounds, and you slept in stables—the ones meant for horses—until the permanent relocation camps were ready. And then those people had to go to wherever the government said. To Wyoming, or Idaho, or—”

  Or Colorado. There was a relocation camp in Colorado. For West Coast Issei, located a few hours from home. Camp Amache. We learned about it in church; we made care packages for the people who were being sent there, toothbrushes and handkerchiefs and magazines, and delivered them at the train station one Saturday morning. I handed a package to an old woman and she told me how the stables had been converted to “apartments” but she thought they still smelled like hay and manure. How she was afraid she still smelled like hay and manure. How I felt so sorry for her. I have told Margot all of this before. I told her this one time at the icehouse, and she didn’t share anything in return, because she never did.

  I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, and I don’t know if I’m more angry because of what her father is, or because she hid it from me. I trusted her with my secrets.

  “I’m sorry,” Margot says.

  “Sorry for what? For letting me think your father was different? For not having to go to a transit camp first and sleep in a horse stable?”

  Her jaw clenches a little. “We did have to go to a transit camp.”

  “You what? You never mentioned anything like that.”

  “We did, Haruko. For four months. On Ellis Island.”

  The absurdity of what she’s said makes me think I must have misheard. “Margot, what are you talking about? Ellis Island? Like, the Statue of Liberty?”

  “Did you know that it’s not a national park anymore? It had been one. People think that national parks are all wild places like Yellowstone. But actually places like the Lincoln Memorial are part of the National Park Service, too. But Ellis Island isn’t a park anymore.”

  “It’s—”

  “It’s a camp,” she says.

  I take a step closer, a piece of my anger replaced by confusion. “It’s a camp?”

  “I’d been once before. When I was little. My grandpa was sick and we went to Germany. When we took the ship back it docked in New York. There were vendors selling shaved ice. It’s funny, I barely remember Germany but I remember the Statue of Liberty and the shaved ice. When Mutti and I went there this time to wait for our Crystal City papers, we weren’t on the island with the statue. We went to a big warehouse with rows of cots. There wasn’t any privacy. Not partitions or… or stables, I guess. In the beginning, you tried keeping your nightgown on while you put your skirt on underneath. After a few weeks, it didn’t matter. There was no point.”

  Margot looks up at me. She tries to smile. Her face—her gray eyes, and her crooked nose—her face is so open and so fragile. For the first time, I feel like a door inside her has opened. I take another step closer, and then kneel in front of her.

  “Most of the prisoners there weren’t from Iowa like Mutti and me,” Margot continues. “They were from New York. One girl had lived in one of the tall buildings right on the water. She said she could see her apartment window from Ellis Island. I didn’t really believe her; I could b
arely make out the building, but she said she could. At night, when they turned all the lights out, she would cry. After a month, she would also pull out her hair. Her scalp bled.

  “Somehow I had talked myself into thinking that was related to my mother waking up with blood on her cot,” Margot says. “That the girl from New York had woken up and gone and bled on my mother’s sheets. Even though it made no sense. Even though there was too much blood. My mother woke up and her mattress was covered in blood. She woke me up and we called for a doctor. The guard came, as quickly as he could, I think, and brought a nurse with him. They took her to the medical center. I thought the guard was being concerned, but when I tried to follow, he told me to get back in bed. He wasn’t helping her. He was guarding her. To make sure she didn’t try to escape. To make sure it hadn’t all been a ruse.”

  Her eyes fill with tears and then the tears are spilling over her cheeks, and she’s still talking, she’s still looking into me as her words are coming out as hiccups. The brave way she’s trying to talk through it makes something course through me, something tender and strong and unfamiliar, and I don’t want her to have to do this for me, and I also don’t want her to stop.

  “You don’t have to,” I tell her. “We can talk about something else.”

  “No, I need to finish,” she says. “I need to finish because it happened. Because the baby is why we had decided to follow my father to begin with.” She swallows. “I used to just think my mother got sick.”

  “When did you think that?”

  “Three other times. I was too young; I thought there were times when she got sick and needed to be in bed. This was the one that went the furthest. This was the one that was supposed to be the miracle. That’s why my mother and I decided to come here. So that we could be together. Even if it was behind barbed wire. We voted, we all agreed unanimously that my mother and I would come. I chose this place, for that reason. Only it turned out it wasn’t a good reason, because when my mother came back from the medical center on Ellis Island she wasn’t pregnant anymore. She was tired, and she’d stopped talking, and she was not pregnant anymore.”