The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

He doesn’t, though. He just buries his head in his hands, scraping his fingers through his hair. “I’m stupid. I’m so stupid. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know how it just slipped out.” His face is twisted and he’s breathing heavier, too.

  “It’s just a country, Ken,” I try to reassure him. “The only thing you told me—and you didn’t tell me, really—is the name of a country. And who cares about that? Everybody already knows that Nisei soldiers wouldn’t be allowed to go to the Pacific front, so that only leaves Europe, and Europe is small. Right? I only guessed Italy because my marks were so bad in geography that Italy and France are the only countries I know. Except for Germany. Now I know Germany. Because of, you know, Hitler.”

  “It’s not a joke, Haruko,” he says, agitated. “Things have unintended consequences. Even silly things. There might not be any silly things anymore. I shouldn’t have told you that. I shouldn’t be telling anything to anyone.”

  The splashing in the background is distracting, and I want to scream at everyone to shut up, just shut up. I reach for Ken’s good shoulder, but barely touch him before he shrugs my hand off. He shakes his head in what looks like a warning. It looks like the same kind of warning I have seen before.

  “Ken,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I need to ask you something. I need you to take it seriously.”

  “What, Haruko?”

  “Ken, do you think Papa had unintended consequences?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The question I have been afraid to ask. The question I tried to ask my father the day I brought his lunch to the fence.

  “When they took him, did you ever wonder if there was a reason for it?”

  “A reason for it?”

  “Some way that he actually did something. That he actually was passing messages between guests.”

  It’s such a specific accusation. It always has been. It’s always been such a specific accusation.

  “Think of it. Maybe he didn’t even know he was doing it. Maybe someone just came to the front desk and said, I have an envelope to leave for my colleague. Papa would have passed it on, you know he would have.”

  Ken flinches, the smallest flinch. “God, Haruko, what are you talking about? What has our father ever done in his entire life that would make you ask something like that?”

  “Ken, the day they took him, he thought about telling me something. You were already gone, you didn’t see. But something odd happened. The FBI were in our house, and he thought about telling me something but he didn’t.”

  “You have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “I can’t explain it, but I know what I saw.”

  “And what if you saw something?” Ken explodes. “What would that matter? You are already here and these questions could hurt our family. Why are you still asking them?”

  “Because I want to understand what happened,” I say, just as angry. “And right now I don’t understand anything. You sent us these letters that don’t even sound like you, and then the ones that maybe would sound like you were censored. They came to us with these black lines through them. And now I don’t know whether that’s because the censors don’t understand your dumb sense of humor, or because you’re sick, but do you have any idea how terrifying that was for me? I worry about you. All the time, I worry. So please tell me, Ken. Tell me anything. Tell me what it’s like over there. I won’t tell anyone else, I promise. Is it bad?”

  He doesn’t answer, so I poke him. I meant to lay my hand on his arm, but at the last minute I become his little sister again and I do what I always did when I wanted him to pay attention to me, what Toshiko does when she wants me to pay attention to her, jabbing at his arm with my index finger. “Is it bad?” I ask again, more quietly.

  He reaches down and catches my finger mid-poke. “Over there—it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he says slowly. “I’ve seen the worst things I could have imagined. Do you understand?”

  I nod, even though what he’s told me isn’t possibly enough for me to understand.

  “But I’m doing my best to serve well,” he says. “So that I can come home and you can get out.”

  “We’re okay here. You don’t have to worry about us.”

  “You are not okay,” Ken says, more fiercely than I expected him to. “Don’t let yourself think you are okay. Don’t let yourself think this is normal. It’s not.”

  “I’m not saying it’s normal. The whole country is not normal. We are at war.”

  “No. I am at war. I am in the war. You are in a prison. That’s not normal.”

  He turns away from me, watching the little kids do cannonballs off the diving platform and into the pool. Every time one of them hits the water, the sound makes him flinch. “Have you ever heard of Manzanar?” he asks a few minutes later.

  “It’s a camp, right? Back in California?”

  Before I ever heard of Crystal City I had heard of Manzanar, maybe in a newspaper, maybe through the Japan League. The name sounded like another fairy-tale place, even more than Crystal City. A lost place that time forgot. Xanadu. Camelot. Manzanar.

  “Do you know about what happened there?” Ken says. “Do you know about the Manzanar uprising?”

  “No.”

  “The Manzanar uprising is what some newspapers are calling something that happened there. Some detainees thought the white cafeteria workers were skimming off goods and selling them on the black market. There was a riot, and it ended with the guards firing into a crowd—”

  “I don’t want to hear about that.”

  “With a machine gun—”

  “I don’t want to hear about that,” I say louder.

  “Guards fired into the crowd with a machine gun,” Ken says, louder than me. “Two people died. Two people died.”

  “That wouldn’t happen here,” I say. “I don’t think the guards here would do that.”

  “Why wouldn’t that happen here?” Ken asks. “Manzanar was a camp, like this one.”

  “It wasn’t like this one. This is a family camp. That’s what they said it was, a family camp, and there are schools, and stores, and—and a football team.”

  “Do you think the other camps don’t have families?” Ken asks. “Do you think that all the Japanese children in the entire United States are here in Crystal City? Maybe they treat you better because you’re enemy aliens and they think Japan might be watching, but you shouldn’t think you’re that special.”

  I look at my brother. “Why are we talking about this? Why do you want to make us have this conversation? You just said: You will go back to war, and I will have to stay here. Why are you telling me things like this when I have to stay here?”

  Nothing about this reunion has gone the way I pictured it would, all the times I pictured him coming back. We’re not happy. We’re not carefree. Ken is sick and I am scared and we’re talking about things that only serve to confirm that sick and scared are the right things to be.

  “Because,” Ken says. “I don’t want you to ever forget where you are. You are a prisoner here. I don’t care if you have a new friend, or if there’s a school newspaper, or if there are books in the library, or if there are community picnics. Or if there’s a football team everyone comes out to cheer for. At the end of the day you’re a prisoner in the only way that matters. If our family wanted to leave, they wouldn’t let you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  MARGOT

  VATI AND A MAN I BARELY KNOW ARE SITTING AT OUR TABLE when I get back from running to Haruko’s house. It’s Mr. Mueller, the pockmarked man who fixes appliances around camp. I’ve only ever seen him with Mr. Kruse. But now it’s just him. He and my father both have wet towels draped over the backs of their necks to keep away the heat and they’re drinking ice water.

  “—told them we were trying to make marmalade, and they believed it,” Mr. Mueller is saying. He’s laughing hard, almost wheezing. “Scheisse, it’s a good thing it was as bad as it was. The p
arts were too mangled for them to see what it really was.”

  He slaps his hand on the table and wipes tears from his eyes.

  My father laughs, too, but his laugh doesn’t seem comfortable. Frederick Kruse is not a good man, but he hides it well. He’s courteous and polite, like most of Vati’s friends at home were. Mr. Mueller is vulgar, swearing in German and leaving his shirt unbuttoned low. I can’t recall seeing my father spend time with someone like him.

  “Technically speaking, the concepts behind a distillery and behind a bomb are not so different,” Vati says tightly. “When it blew up, you’re lucky they believed you were making marmalade. They could have assumed you were making a bomb.”

  “No kidding?” Mr. Mueller finishes his water. “Didn’t want to get anyone killed, just drunk.”

  The distilleries. They’re talking about the illicit homemade alcohol distilleries around camp. One must have exploded.

  I slide around the table toward my half of the room. I don’t want to be here for this. I’ll get my books and go to the icehouse. Except Haruko won’t be there. She’s with her brother now. I could head back to the school, except I don’t go to that school anymore, I realize. Today was my last day.

  “How are you, Margot?” Mr. Mueller asks, as I open my trunk to search for my notebook. “Your father tells me you will be starting at the German school on Monday. I’ll have to introduce you to my sons. You’ll like Barrett: He’s very smart, not an ass like me.”

  “You were worried you wouldn’t have friends at the new school,” my father says. “Barrett plans to attend university in Munich when the Muellers go back.”

  “Where’s Mutti?”

  He nods to the door leading to the communal kitchen. I bet she’s been in there since Mr. Mueller arrived. Her split lip from last night was a bruise by the time she woke up this morning, gray and lilac and traveling halfway up her face. She hadn’t wanted to leave the house because of it. Vati made a show of telling her to rest, that he would stay with her, do all the cooking and cleaning.

  Mr. Mueller doesn’t wait long for me to say anything about his sons before he turns back to my father. My notebook isn’t anywhere in my trunk. I get on my hands and knees to search under the bed.

  “Anyhow, all of that brings me to why I am here today,” Mr. Mueller says. “Frederick would obviously prefer that our stills don’t keep exploding. This was the second one. Luckily the dummkopf guards never found out about the first. Do you have any thoughts on how to solve this problem?”

  “I’m not really a drinking man.”

  “I’d say it’s more of a mechanical problem than an alcohol problem.”

  “I’m not a mechanic, either. I don’t know that I can be of any particular help.”

  “Oh, just give it a try. If you had to guess.” Mr. Mueller’s glass has been empty for a few minutes and my father hasn’t offered him more water. It makes the hopeful part of me believe Vati is ready for him to leave.

  But then instead of declining again, or rising to signal the end of the conversation, Vati rubs the side of his head. It’s what he does when he’s thinking; I have seen him make the gesture a hundred times. “Well. It seems like there is probably just some kind of leak, and the vapors are catching on fire?” he says. “Again, I don’t have any experience.”

  “But you’re an engineer. Frederick says you completed graduate school back in Berlin. He thought you might be at least willing to take a look.”

  Now I can see the gears whirring in my father’s head, the way they always do when he has a new project, a new way to be useful. I used to love seeing his face light up like that. It’s not fair for him to do these things that make him look like his old self, when he’s not.

  “Do you have any more parts?” Vati asks Mr. Mueller. “I can’t imagine you buy what you need for this sort of project at the General Store.”

  “You’d be surprised at how creative we can be. For the stuff we can’t gin up on our own, there’s a man who is with us—Wilhelm Boehner; good man, I’ll introduce you—who has one of the laborer jobs outside the fence. His contact gets the parts to a little storage shed. It’s where workers store their equipment.”

  “Guards don’t go inside?”

  “Never. Wilhelm brings them back piece by piece. They never suspect a thing.”

  My father sighs. “I suppose I could try, at least. While I’m waiting for a different job. Building alcohol distilleries is not particularly what I am interested in doing.”

  “We’ll pay you in product.” Mr. Mueller winks. “You’re not a drinking man, but others are.”

  It’s just what my mother was saying. Petty criminals. Acting like they are brave spies, with their contacts and their smuggling of equipment. When really they are just bored men trying to make illicit alcohol to get drunk inside the camp.

  Only a few months ago, the mention of Frederick Kruse’s name made my father angry. Now he has become one of the lackeys.

  “Let’s go to the beer hall,” Mr. Mueller says. He nods at his empty glass. “I could do with something a little stronger than this now, in fact.”

  Another reason the distilleries are idiotic. You can buy beer with cardboard tokens already.

  “I can come along for the stroll,” Vati says.

  I go through the door that leads to the kitchen. My mother has opened the icebox, leaning into it to feel the cool air on her face. When I come in she starts to turn away before realizing it’s me.

  “I know I’m not supposed to,” she says, nodding toward the open icebox. “I know it melts everyone’s things.”

  “We can always get more ice. Leave it open if it makes you feel better,” I tell her. “Vati’s gone now. They left.”

  My mother nods. Even with the icebox door open, it’s hot in here, several degrees warmer than our main room. My mother’s dress clings to her. In the past few weeks, her belly has truly begun to show. A smooth, round bump protrudes from underneath the loose cotton.

  “Is that man his friend now?” I ask. “Is he going to be here a lot?”

  “I don’t know, Margot.”

  “Is he coming back for dinner tonight?”

  “I don’t know, Margot. I don’t know who his friends will be now.” She bangs the icebox door closed.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “You should try speaking in German at home now,” she replies, in German, instead of answering my question. “Your conversational skills are fine, but I wonder if we need to go over terminology for a school setting. If I can remember myself. It’s been a while since I had an advanced math course in German.”

  “A plumber is teaching the math classes,” I say to her in English. “I’m not sure how advanced they’ll be.”

  Mutti sets her mouth in a firm line, but I think I see exhaustion under it. “Smart people find ways to succeed in circumstances that are less than desirable.”

  “Do they build distilleries?”

  “We should be glad they are talking about building distilleries. It’s a foolish thing to focus on. You and I both need to hope they never find something bigger to care about.”

  She puts her hand on the door of the icebox and hesitates before finally deciding to open it again, putting her face back in toward the cold.

  “You could move out for a little while,” I say. “You could request another hut here.”

  “And after?” She raises an eyebrow. “What would you and I do after?”

  “We could work.” I try to picture my mother and me in our own house. But when I think of living somewhere else, what I keep picturing is the apartment that Haruko described to me in San Antonio, with a screen door and a private bathroom. The one that we were talking about when we were interrupted on the banks of the stream, before I could figure out how much of what we were saying was real.

  She closes the icebox. “Margot, I have not had a job besides being your father’s wife since coming to this country. I am not an American citizen. Who would hire me after the war
? When all the American soldiers are coming home from fighting in Germany, who would look at my job application and say, instead of hiring this twenty-two-year-old man who has served his country in the war, let me hire this forty-one-year-old pregnant German woman with no work experience who spent the war in an enemy alien internment camp?”

  My mother places a gentle hand on her stomach. “I need your father. I want this baby.”

  “Then we need to convince him to let us go home,” I beg. “To take our names off the list for Germany. We have friends in Iowa. People who can help him start over there. Do you really want to go back to Germany? You don’t, do you?”

  My parents were young when they left there after the Great War because their country had become poor. My mother’s parents are still there, but they are old, and since my father’s parents died, I’ve never heard my parents mention a single other family member or friend. We barely get letters from there. They left that life behind.

  My mother looks at me. “We can’t go home,” she says. “Look at your father now. Do you think he would fit in at home? Do you think we could have a happy life there?”

  I try to picture Vati back in Iowa. At the feed store. At the general store, trading jokes with Mr. Lammey. At a party in someone’s home, talking about local politics or whose crops are doing well this year.

  Most of Vati’s friends weren’t sent to camps. Haruko was right the first time we talked. It was not like with the Japanese, where entire communities were sent away. With us it was like a scalpel: a German here, a German there, while the rest of the Germans and the rest of the town went about their business.

  Our friends at home went to Europe to fight. Or they are spending the war collecting scrap metal or raising victory gardens. I think those are things that are still happening outside these walls. Sewing quilts. Buying war bonds. Supporting the war effort in a world that is the same as the one we are living in, but completely different.

  I try to picture Vati going back into their world. He’s too angry. He believes things about America now that he would not get away with saying. But the thing is that he believes those things because he is stuck here.