The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

  I know who would have told Mr. Mercer something like that. I know the only person who could have told him something like that.

  How could you.

  How could you.

  Because she was angry I had the chance to leave? She would ruin my family because she didn’t want to be left here alone? Margot went into Mr. Mercer’s office and told him it was my father who needed to be locked up, not hers.

  Because I broke her heart.

  “It’s a lie,” I choke out, interrupting the adults who I now realize are still talking. “The person who told you that was lying.”

  My father stops mid-sentence and looks at me. “How do you know that?” he asks.

  “It is a lie, isn’t it?” I say. “You didn’t do what he is saying you did.”

  “But do you have evidence?” he asks.

  “Evidence, like proof? How can I have evidence against something that is not true?”

  “An explanation, then?” Mr. Mercer offers. “Do you have an explanation?”

  How can I explain it in a way that makes sense? Images and fragments swim in front of me. A dust storm. An icehouse. Cold lips, a terrible fight, my heart hurting. “Someone—if someone were angry with us. Or with me,” I start. “If someone were angry with me, and they wanted to get back at our family, then this is what they’d do. They’d invent a story that would hurt me. They’d—”

  I know that the way I’m phrasing this is confusing, and everything is made even more confusing by the fact that my father is translating for my mother, and Mr. Mercer keeps interrupting to ask questions.

  “Haru-chan, I appreciate that you are wanting to help the family,” my father says. “But these creative stories only confuse the issue.” He turns back to Mr. Mercer. “What you need to do is interview every man I work with. Ask any of them if I could have done what you say I did. Ask any of them whether they ever noticed me doing anything with these—these explosives you speak about.”

  “We did,” Mr. Mercer says, twisting the soda bottle. “A man named Wilhelm Boehner says he saw you with the materials.”

  Wilhelm Boehner. I have never heard of this person, but he must be a German man covering for whatever German prisoner is really at fault.

  “They’re not stories!” I break in again. “I’m not talking about a hypothetical situation, I am talking about someone doing something to our family.”

  “The person who made this report—” Mr. Mercer clears his throat. He looks at me meaningfully, I think, but my parents don’t seem to notice. “The person who made this report is not connected to someone who could have placed these explosive materials where they were ultimately found.”

  “How do you know there’s no connection? Maybe you didn’t check hard enough!” My sister is sobbing in the background, and I have lost all of my ability to act serene or polite. “What is wrong with you; why aren’t you listening to me?”

  This was what my father was talking about when I confronted him about why he didn’t fight harder to let us stay in Denver. What could he have done? They are about to take him again on charges I know are lies.

  So even as I’m trying to continue, my voice is weakening and I don’t know what I’m trying to say because I don’t know how to articulate what happened. Why Margot would have done something like this. How we ever had enough feelings to turn into this much anger. I’m continuing to babble but my words don’t make sense even to me.

  “This is outrageous,” my father says. “We have done everything you ever asked. This is completely outrageous. We’re not leaving. My son is fighting for America. He is coming back to this country. We’re not leaving.”

  “Does it have to be so soon?” my mother asks. “These are serious allegations. Can’t you take a few weeks to investigate them?”

  Mr. Mercer looks pained again. “These trains and ships are not on a regular schedule. It takes months of coordination to find the right window. It has to be now.”

  “Months of coordination from your end,” my father says. “But a minute’s notice for us. Is that how it works?”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me, Mr. Tanaka.”

  Say something, I yell at myself inwardly, but I feel paralyzed; it feels like everything is happening out of my body, out of my control.

  Say something, I yell at myself again, but then before I know it, the door is opening and Mr. Mercer is walking out, his back darkening the doorway, and starting down the path.

  “Wait,” I call out, finally finding my voice, as my mother pulls me back into the house.

  “It will be all right,” she says. “Everything will be all right.”

  But that’s not the point, that was never the point. Everything might be all right in a new and different place, in a new and different time. But this current world has completely crumbled. My world is gone.

  “We need to find the suitcases,” my mother says quietly. “Everybody, wash your face, put yourself together, and start to pack.”

  MARGOT

  That did happen. I need to be honest about that. This is not a time when Haruko was remembering things wrong. This is not a time where I can say it was a misunderstanding, or that Mr. Mercer misinterpreted something. Or that something slipped out before I had a chance to correct it. It is not like I had the information tortured out of me. I wish I’d had the information tortured out of me.

  Mr. Mercer had his head on his desk when I came in. He told me to sit down anyway because I told him I had to talk to him about something that couldn’t wait.

  It is about the safety of the camp, I told him. I can give you information that will impact the safety of the entire camp, but before I tell you I need you to promise you’ll help me.

  This sounds serious, he said.

  Some people are planning to escape, I told him. They are going to set off a bomb near a guard tower. They are keeping supplies for the bomb in the supply shed near the spinach field. The organizer is Ichiro Tanaka. He is the foreman of the crew who is hired to work outside the fence. He has a key to the shed. You can check. I can wait here and you can check to see that the supplies really are there.

  How do you know? he asked me.

  I know because Haruko Tanaka told me.

  Why should I trust you?

  Because Haruko Tanaka is my best friend and it kills me to tell you this.

  It’s best for me to say what happened as closely as I can remember. Without emotions, without descriptions. Otherwise it could look like I am trying to make excuses. I am the one who knows what happened, and I have to be honest about it.

  Why are you telling me this? he asked.

  I am an American and I believe in America, I told him. People who would plan something like that are a danger to the rest of us. I know you have had to repatriate people for doing things like this. I think that is fair.

  I stopped there. It would be better not to push him too much. But he liked that answer. He nodded at that answer.

  If this is true, it is the most serious offense that has ever been committed in this camp, he said. We are trying. It’s not easy. I don’t even know if any of this is the right thing. He buried his head in his hands. He looked upset. He looked tired. He looked like he wished I had not come to him. I wasn’t expecting him to talk so much; I must have caught him at the end of a long day. The funerals had just happened that morning. Everyone was angry. He must have felt like he didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

  I cannot repatriate the Tanaka family, at least not yet. I don’t know if you realize it, but the next train is leaving in two days. Carrying both German and Japanese families. It goes to New York; the ships sail from there.

  I know, I said. My family is supposed to be on that train.

  There is no room on the train. It’s already carrying volunteers for repatriation from other camps. I can’t fit another family on the train.

  Would it help if it were less full? I asked. Would it help if one German family wasn’t going back after all?

  Is t
hat really why you came to me? he asked. A light seemed to go on in his head. Because you and your family have decided you want to stay here and not be repatriated?

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything at all.

  Is that why? he asked again. Did your father send you here because he changed his mind?

  I said I had important information for you, and I said I needed your help. Check to see if I’m right, I said. If the materials aren’t there, it doesn’t matter anyway.

  My secretary will see you out, he said. Would you mind closing the door behind you.

  That was it. That was every single word that was spoken in that office. I’ve tried to remember them as best I could. I don’t think I left many out.

  If you are a person who thinks reasons matter and that there are usually extenuating circumstances, I could talk about other things. But if what you want to know is, did Haruko have it right when she assumed that I had betrayed her, then the answer is yes. I did. Everything she thought was true was true.

  TWENTY-SIX

  HARUKO

  THIS TIME THE BUS IS RUNNING. BUSES, PLURAL. TWO OF THEM, lined up to collect us from the gate and take us to the train station. The train will come and there will already be people on it, prisoners from Seagoville and Kenedy, the two other camps in Texas. Then we go to New York, and then we get on a Swedish boat that ferries us halfway around the world and then it will return carrying Americans. Or people they think are more American than me, at least.

  The other people waiting to board are excited. They’ve been waiting and planning for this; they signed up for this. People from school, the ones Chieko warned me to stay away from because they were only going to leave, keep coming up to tell me they didn’t know I was going to be on this ship; why didn’t I tell them earlier? I don’t know what to tell them. I’ve been moving through the day like I’m sleepwalking.

  The band is here, the same one that welcomed us. Missing its trumpet player. The trumpet player is coming with us on the bus, he and his wife and son. A lot of the camp is here, actually. Come to watch us leave, the way they came to watch us arrive, because it passes for entertainment. Chieko’s here, talking on the other side of the rope to some people from school who are not getting on the bus. She hasn’t made eye contact with me.

  A camp guard, one I don’t know, is trying to organize all of us into straight lines. Easier for the counting, to make sure everyone gets on the bus who is supposed to. Toshiko keeps trying to hold my hand. It’s like last time, only this time I grab on, too. Everything is like last time, except reversed. And except for Margot.

  She’s not here sitting on the fence post like she was when we arrived, making notes in her little notebook. I don’t blame her for not wanting to show her face.

  I blame her for everything else.

  “And I will show you where I went to school,” my mother is saying to Toshiko. “We can get you a spot there, too. It’s the best school for girls in the country. You will love the building; it is old and pretty.”

  “I’ll be seeing it for the first time, too,” my father adds. “Think of that: Your mother and I both came from Japan but we have never lived there together.”

  They have both said the same thing at least three times. It’s beginning to make me think that they don’t have very many stories about their childhoods to share, that they really can’t remember much at all about living in Japan.

  Technically, our repatriation is voluntary. This is one of the things that was apparently discussed yesterday when Mr. Mercer’s words seemed to be floating above my head. If we leave now, voluntarily, then my sister and I will be eligible to come back to the United States sometime in the future. If we waited for an investigation to be carried out and they determined my father was guilty and forced us to leave, then we might never have that chance. That’s what made my parents agree to go along with it.

  So my mother and sister and I are not being deported, technically, just like, technically, we were never really arrested.

  “Are you ready?” my father asks. The gates have been opened and our line is moving through the fence and toward our buses.

  Our luggage has to be loaded into the storage compartment before we can board. I turn around and look one more time at the guard towers, the fence, the road leading to the swimming pool.

  At Margot. Her blond hair has come loose from its braid as she fights her way through the crowds gathered to see us off. I watch her elbow past one woman and duck under another’s armpit, her face red and sweaty. She scans the crowds, looking for me.

  I could make it easier if I called out to her, if I said her name or waved my hand. But I can’t bring myself to. All I can do is watch her, when it’s like the first day, when I saw her taking notes and didn’t know who she was or what she would become. I hate that a part of me is happy to see her, and that my heart leaps before it falls.

  “Haruko?” Toshiko asks, because we need to keep walking but I still haven’t moved my feet. Our parents are already ahead of us.

  Margot finds me and our eyes lock, she on one side of the fence, I on the other.

  “I’m right behind you,” I tell Toshiko, dropping her hand. “Save our seats on the bus.”

  I don’t know why I’m walking toward Margot, but when she sees me do it, her eyes melt with relief, or maybe remorse.

  At the fence, her fingers curl around the chain links. I’m close enough to see the perspiration on her neck from running to find me, and to feel how her shaking hand is making the fence vibrate. She’s holding something, a folded tube of paper, trying to pass it through.

  I reach out to take it. The goodbye band is pulsing in my ears. My fingers brush against hers, through the fence, and hers are as small and rough as they were the first time I ever felt them.

  The contact makes my fingers spark with static electricity, and suddenly I can’t take her letter. Whatever it says, I don’t want to know; however she apologizes won’t be enough. I don’t have a letter to give her. It’s not fair for her to get to have the last words between us.

  I drop my hand and pull away. No, she shakes her head. I can’t bear to look at her face anymore, so I turn and walk back toward the bus, trying to ignore the sound of my name and the words that I imagine I hear her yelling above the band.

  Margot stands at the fence while I board. I know her gaze doesn’t leave me the whole time, because when I find my seat next to Toshiko, and when I lean my forehead against the pane for one last look at this place I hated—when I do all of that, I see her eyes are still on me. She’s followed me exactly to my seat, still holding the letter in her hand.

  Forgive me, her eyes are saying, and the only thing my eyes are saying in return is Never.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  MARGOT

  THE BUS PULLS AWAY. IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE IT’S OVER SO QUICKLY and so finally. Around me, the musicians from the band are packing up their instruments, the other people who had come to see the bus off are heading back to their houses or their jobs.

  And I’m still standing there, with Ken’s letter in my hand. I knew she wouldn’t want to see me, or hear anything I had to say. But I still owed her Ken’s letter, I thought, and I was a coward for not trying to take it to her yesterday. In case I don’t get a chance later is what he said. I know this isn’t what he meant. But what if he does never get a chance, because of me?

  I slide my finger under the envelope flap. I shouldn’t. It’s none of my business. But what does it matter now? What does any of it matter? This letter that isn’t even addressed to me is the only piece of evidence I will ever have that Haruko existed.

  Like every letter Ken wrote while Haruko was in Crystal City, it’s short, just a few lines on one page.

  An enemy’s big mouth is what brought you down south.

  What you asked me about Papa—you must stop wondering about that. Promise me, you will stop wondering and get on with your life. I didn’t mean for any of this to turn out this way.

 
An enemy’s big mouth. It must be a private joke. He left her a joke, and an apology for everything that happened to her. I wish I had thought to do something like that.

  I can’t think about that. It’s over. I have to get home to my family. I did what I did.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  HARUKO

  THIS USED TO BE A CRUISE SHIP ONCE, WHERE RICH PEOPLE TOOK rich vacations. Someone says that as we board. A cruise ship that was conscripted for war things after the war began.

  But my family isn’t in the rich-vacationer part of the ship. There are more than two thousand of us on board, the equivalent of a small floating city, and the place my mother and Toshiko and I have been assigned is on a lower deck. When we board what I think is the lowest deck, we still have to take another flight of stairs down. The hallways get narrower, and there’s already a faint smell of vomit from someone not used to the rolling motion of the sea.

  It took us nearly a week to get to New York by train. And then we had several weeks of waiting there before all of our paperwork was processed and our boat arrived. And then it was several days after that, on the boat, before I learned that if I buried my face in my pillow at night, nobody would know it was me crying. The decks are set up like dormitories with bunk beds. It’s hard to tell exactly where noises come from.

  I spend a lot of time walking, up and down the stairs, around the deck in endless laps. One night, snow is falling from the sky. It shocks me to realize how much time has passed, that it must be November.

  On the walks I overhear conversations among passengers who have come from Crystal City, and passengers who have come from Seagoville and all the other godforsaken camps in all the other godforsaken places.