The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  He says all of this in English, of course, but my mother must understand at least the basics. She’s grabbed my shoulder and is holding it so tightly I can feel her fingernails through the cloth of my dress.

  Mr. Mercer’s smile falters. “Y’all know I wish I could,” he says carefully. “Y’all know if it was up to me, you could have your visit in private and Ken could stay as long as he liked. But unfortunately I don’t make all the rules.”

  Of course you make the rules! I want to scream at him. How dare he act so bashful. How dare he pretend he doesn’t have power, when he has all the power? When my father is begging him to let Ken come and sleep in the same house as his own family. When my whole family’s life has been torn apart, and my brother risks his own life every day, and Mr. Mercer’s job is guarding a bunch of women and children in Texas.

  “Please,” my mother says. She enunciates her English words very carefully. “Please. Ken stays with us.”

  Mr. Mercer thinks, tapping his finger against his chin.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says finally. “Ken is the first soldier we’ve had come and visit Crystal City, and we’re still trying to figure out the right protocols here. But we absolutely appreciate his service to our country. I’m not supposed to do this, but how about this: If you promise to have Ken back by, say”—he stops to check his watch—“eight o’clock—then Ken can spend the afternoon with you all. Eight o’clock is when I was planning on leaving tonight, and I’ll drive him to the hotel myself, on my way home.”

  He turns quickly to the sergeant, who gives an infinitesimal nod that this is acceptable, then expands his hands benevolently to us.

  “Thank you,” we all say, over and over, groveling, as if what he’s given us is some unprecedented humanitarian gift, rather than the most basic act of human decency. “Thank you, you are too generous.”

  SEVENTEEN

  HARUKO

  PEOPLE PEER HUNGRILY AT US AS WE WALK WITH KEN THROUGH camp, my mother on one side and Toshiko on the other, my father and I behind. “My brother, visiting from the war,” Toshiko calls out as we show Ken the Union Store and then the hospital, where the other doctors and nurses rush over to offer congratulations and to tell Ken how much they’ve heard about him.

  “How boring that must have been for you,” he tells everyone. “I’m so sorry.” And then the women laugh and slap him on the shoulder.

  We only have to introduce him a few times; camp gossip takes care of the rest. A few people I’ve never met come to ask Ken if he knows their nephews or neighbors in the 442nd, and by the time we get back to our cottage, our front step is already lined with bowls of rice and vegetables neighbors have stopped by to donate. Made by families who live in the huts with kitchens, so that we can eat in our own house, too, instead of going to the mess hall.

  It’s a little after three PM, an odd time for a meal, but since people have given us food we decide to eat it, pulling over a trunk for my sister and me to sit on like a bench.

  My mother has only just served the food when there’s a knock at our door, a neighbor wanting to congratulate us. This happens two more times, and on the fourth knock my father sends me to answer the door. “Haruko, please tell the neighbors we will bring Ken to meet them later this evening,” my father says. “And perhaps you could ask this visitor to spread the news so we don’t keep being interrupted?”

  But this time it’s not a neighbor. Margot is still wearing the clothes from the field trip earlier this afternoon, the hem of her skirt dirty from where we sat on the bank of the stream. Her face looks frantic and then, when she sees me, filled with relief.

  “I’m sorry I just showed up,” she says immediately. “I didn’t know what to… you didn’t come back and I… One of the assistants at the hospital told me this was your house.”

  I cannot believe that she came to find me here, not after what happened the last time she was on this side of camp—the embarrassing looks and the people asking her to leave. But she came here in spite of all that, for me. “It’s good news—” I start to say, and then there are footsteps behind me, a hand on my shoulder.

  “Margot, this is my brother. This is Ken.”

  Her face turns from concern to elation; she takes Ken’s outstretched hand and shakes it.

  “I’m so, so glad to meet you,” she says. “Your letters, all of the things Haruko’s told me. I feel like I know you.”

  “My sister showed you my letters?”

  “I didn’t introduce you,” I interject. “This is Margot. She’s my friend.”

  My mother appears beside Ken to find out what is taking us so long. It’s only when she looks past me, out into the street, that I see what she must be seeing: Several of our neighbors peering from behind their curtains or loitering in their yards in a way I’ve never seen them do. A lot of it is because they want to see Ken, but some of it is because a girl with blond hair has run up the street and knocked on our door.

  “Mama, this is Margot. We go to school together,” I explain in Japanese. “Or, we did, until today. We were working together on a project. She came to tell me some things I needed.”

  “Margot.” My mother looks as though she is trying to place where she knows Margot from. “I hope your mother is well. Has her morning sickness abated? Everything else is good?”

  Margot waits for me to translate. “I think her morning sickness is better. Haruko helped—I mean, my mother has some tea that will be helpful, I think.”

  “Very good,” my mother says in English, looking back and forth between us, before turning to me again. “People were so kind to bring us food. We don’t want to let it get cold, and I am sure your brother is hungry.”

  “I’ll find you later,” I tell Margot, even though what I really want to do is invite her inside. “To talk about homework.”

  After we finish dinner, my mother rinses out the containers that people brought the food over in. “We could play cards,” she offers. “Or, Kenichi, are you tired? You could lie down for a little while on one of the girls’ beds. We have some books I could give you to read. Or, Haruko has a friend whose father has a nice film projector. Or maybe we could—”

  “Why don’t Ken and I return the bowls?” I say spontaneously. “Papa has been at work since this morning; you are all probably tired. We can return them and give you a rest.”

  “No, no, we can wait.” My mother looks stricken at the idea of us leaving and the family not being together. “People will understand if we don’t return them today.”

  But I’m already grabbing Ken’s hand. “I want to. And I didn’t get to show Ken the school before. He said he wanted to see that, didn’t you?”

  Ken barely hesitates before nodding, like in the old days: Mama, Ken and I have to stay after school because we volunteered to help with a clothing drive. Isn’t that right, Ken? They’ll probably keep us late. “We can be back soon. Still lots of time for us all to spend together.”

  Toshiko opens her mouth like she wants to come, but she doesn’t ask. We never invited her along when we were sneaking out in Colorado, either; she was too young. My mother watches us leave, and then stands at the doorway until we turn off our road, trying to follow Ken with her eyes.

  It ends up taking just ten minutes to return the bowls. “Let’s keep walking, though,” I say. “I don’t feel like going back yet, do you? I’ll show you the school like I told Mama I would.”

  Ken shrugs. “Whatever you want.”

  “Because if you’d rather not walk to the school, I guess we could find a quiet place to sit for a little—”

  “Whatever you want, Haruko.”

  Now that we are away from our parents, Ken changes. At first I think it’s in my imagination but it’s not. Even though we talk and talk, Ken is not really talking. He answers my questions, and he laughs when I laugh. But it’s always a beat too late, like he is waiting for me to tell him when the joke is, or like he doesn’t really understand what a joke is. His shoulders droop, and so do
the corners of his mouth. He’s tired, I tell myself. He’s just tired, because he’s traveled a long distance, but he’s here, and he’s all right, you can see for yourself.

  We keep walking. We pass a guard tower, and Mike is working. I steer Ken over in Mike’s direction and call up a greeting.

  “This is my brother. Visiting from the 442nd. I’m showing him around.”

  Mike nods and performs a jaunty salute. “A fellow man in uniform. Glad to know you.”

  Ken doesn’t say anything. He looks at Mike, whose fingertips are still at his forehead, for what feels like a long time. Mike glances at me, wondering if he did something wrong.

  I stare at my brother. Finally, he raises his own arm—the wounded one, the one that made him cry out when I hugged too hard—to return the salute.

  “So, where’s my chewing gum?” I ask Mike after the awkward pause, wanting Ken to join in, to have this afternoon be fun.

  “You caught me unaware. I’m out.”

  When we leave the guard tower I glance sideways at Ken to see if I can tell what he’s thinking.

  “You have interesting friends.”

  “Mike is from Colorado, too. He gives me chewing gum. He always has extra. For me and Toshiko both.”

  Ken stops. “I actually wasn’t talking about Mike. Who is Margot?”

  “I told you. She’s my friend from school.”

  “She’s read all of my letters. Do most people have friends here who are German?”

  “Some do.” My face flushes as I babble on. “Do you know who Margot would remind you of? That girl who used to come into the soda fountain, and then spend the whole time sitting at the counter with her nose in a book, and in the beginning we thought something must be wrong with her because she was so—”

  Ken is shaking his head back and forth.

  “Can we not?” he says quietly.

  “Can we not what?”

  “Can you not ask me to talk and laugh?”

  “I wasn’t trying to make you talk and laugh. I was trying to show you around and—”

  “I can do that in front of Mama and Papa, but when we’re not around them, can you just… let me rest?”

  “Sure. Of—of course,” I stammer. “You don’t have to talk. I was trying to give you a break from the family.”

  But it turns out it is hard to say nothing to a person. Especially when it is a person you are used to saying everything to. Ken and I have always had something to say to each other, and if we were quiet, it was comfortable quiet. This silence with Ken doesn’t feel comforting, it feels like a hole.

  We passed the school a long time ago. We’ve been making a square around the periphery of the camp. Now we’re coming up to the big, circular pool, where I can already hear kids laughing.

  “Do you want to go swimming?” I ask him. “I told Mama that we’d be an hour; we have time.”

  “Not really,” he says.

  “Come on, it opened yesterday.”

  Really, I am embarrassed to admit to myself, it’s that I don’t want to be alone with my brother. What kind of sister am I? I’ve spent the past month angry at Ken’s letters because I felt like they were hiding something. And now I have him here, and I’m doing exactly what I didn’t want him to do. I’m so cheerful I’m making myself sick.

  “They sell men’s bathing trunks in the Union Store. I have tokens, I can buy a pair for you.”

  I pull him to the store, where I make a big show of pretending to care whether he purchases the blue swimming suit or the black one, and then to the pool where I make a big show of choosing a shady patch on the concrete, where we’re far enough away from other people to not be bothered. It’s mostly smaller kids, but both Japanese and German. And their Japanese and German mothers are talking to one another while their children swim, and that doesn’t seem strange at all.

  This could be a place where I could come with Margot. Where nobody is hiding and everyone is supposed to be here.

  “Haruko?” Ken asks. I’ve been staring at the pool without moving.

  “It’s nothing.”

  I dangle my legs in the water, making splashes to entertain Ken, but he stays on the deck, still wearing the shirt he borrowed from Papa so his uniform wouldn’t get mussed around camp.

  “Are you modest all of a sudden?” I ask when I walk back, wringing out the wet edge of my skirt. “How are you supposed to swim if you don’t take off your shirt?”

  “I don’t want to swim, Haruko.”

  “You don’t have to swim, just get a little sun.”

  I tug on the hemline of his shirt until he obliges, wincing as he pulls the top over his head. He crumples the T-shirt next to him.

  I thought he would be more muscular, strong and tan like the GIs we used to see in magazines. Instead he is thin, so much thinner than I remember him looking before. I can nearly count his ribs. His torso and arms are covered in bruises. And his wounded shoulder is covered by a big piece of white gauze.

  “Happy?” he says.

  Oh, Ken. “Does it still hurt?”

  “What? My shoulder?” As if I could be talking about anything else. “It’s not serious,” he says.

  “It looks serious.”

  “It’s not. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise, you’re not a doctor.”

  Ken sighs. “If it were just my shoulder I don’t think they would have given me leave.”

  “What do you mean—is something else hurt?” I ask.

  He smiles the saddest, most ghostlike smile I have ever seen. “My brain,” he says, lightly touching his index finger to his temple. “Battle fatigue. Combat illness. They said I’m sick in the head.”

  “No you’re not!” I say automatically.

  “Would I make it up?”

  “You need to rest so your shoulder can heal. That’s all.”

  “Haruko. The government doesn’t send soldiers home because they have minor flesh wounds. People are shot all the time there. They go to a hospital tent and rest until they are better. They send people home if there’s something more broken. And there is for me. Something more broken than everyone else.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” I ask.

  “It’s not one thing that happened.”

  “What are the different things that happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says shortly. “They had me meet with head doctors. A psychiatrist. He examined me. He said I will be fine.”

  “Did he say they can treat it?”

  “I am treating it now. R & R. They said I needed a few days away from the front, and I would be fine, everything would be back to normal. They told me to go see a movie. Dance with a pretty girl.”

  I watch the breeze ripple across his skinny arms, raising goose pimples, making the soft hairs on his forearms stand on end. A toddler runs past us, faster than he should on a pool deck, and his mother swats at his rear end.

  “Where is back, Ken? When you say that after a few days they’ll send you back, where are you going?”

  He glances at me and shakes his head. “You know I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

  “But what does it matter?” I wheedle. “Tell me where you’re going.”

  “Loose lips might sink ships,” he says, parroting back the poster that we used to see all the time in Colorado, a picture of a military cargo ship sinking into the ocean because some unknowing American had accidentally gossiped in front of a spy.

  “An enemy’s ear might be near,” I say back automatically, the text of another poster. That poster, of a big black-and-white ear, used to hang right across the street from the hotel. Underneath An enemy’s ear might be near, it said, Stop all loose talk to strangers. It always seemed a little too silly to be effective. Ken and I used to make jokes: An enemy’s feet might be just down the street. An enemy’s spleen might be close but unseen.

  We did it until our father told us it w
as inappropriate. That Nisei children couldn’t make jokes to deal with the dark mood, because people might not know we were joking. Ken signed up for the 442nd shortly after, when he turned eighteen, and I bet nobody thought he was joking then.

  “An enemy’s gallbladder is very, very badder,” Ken says.

  I burst out laughing. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Ken laughs, too, and it’s an old-Ken laugh that makes my heart leap. This feels like being with my brother again. My real one, not the one who sends overly cheerful letters, or who says his brain is sick.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I thought of it a while ago when I was on guard duty. It was a long night, and I was doing anything I could to keep my mind occupied. I wanted to tell you, but I was pretty sure if I put it in a letter they would think it was some kind of secret code and censor it out anyway. You should have seen me at the time, though. This tall Japanese-looking guy, in an American GI uniform, laughing to himself like a crazy person about gallbladders, pacing up and down this little cobblestoned street.”

  “So you were in a place with a cobblestoned street!” I say.

  I don’t know why I want to know so badly where my brother has been, except that it feels safer, somehow, if I can picture him writing from a place, not just from a void in my imagination.

  “Nice try. They all have cobblestoned streets,” he says wryly. “Being hundreds of years old, and all.”

  “Not Italy,” I tell him. “If you were stationed in Italy, instead of walking on cobblestoned streets, you could be stationed on a gondola.”

  He laughs again. But this time it takes him longer and he won’t look at me. “Let’s talk about something else,” he says.

  “It’s Italy! It is, I can tell by the way you’re not looking at me.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he says quickly. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I know you didn’t say anything. I guessed. Because I am your sister and I am a genius.”

  He’s supposed to laugh at that now, too, and maybe punch me in the arm or try to push me into the pool.