The War Outside

by Monica Hesse

It turns out that I hate boats. It turns out that seasickness is worse than train-sickness.

  It turns out I will walk anywhere, overhear any conversation, do anything I have to do in order to make sure what I’m not doing is thinking of Margot. How angry and guilty and hurt I am. Not thinking about how cold and small her hand felt when we stood in silence and watched the Nazi flag. Not thinking about the last things I said to her.

  It turns out that it’s possible to wish you were back in a place that you never wanted to go to begin with.

  My father is a thin figure when I see him standing alone at the stern of the ship, leaning over the railing with a collar pulled up against the wind. It’s just before curfew, and I haven’t seen him since lunch the day before when we ate in the mess hall. Now the sky is dark and my father is looking into the gray smears that the clouds make against the sky.

  “Helen.” When he sees me, he unwraps his scarf, wrapping it around my neck instead.

  “Haruko is fine,” I say. There’s no point in being Helen on this boat, or at any other time in my near future.

  We are both silent for a minute.

  “I think we will be there soon,” he says. “I heard some crew talking. A few days at most.”

  “I’ll tell Mama and Toshiko.”

  “Do you have everything you need on your deck?”

  “Toshiko ate dinner tonight. I think her seasickness is getting better.”

  My father nods and looks out again into the black. He seems to be struggling with what to say.

  “I hope you both know that I’m sorry that we are going back to Japan,” he says. “I didn’t want to. And I’m sorry for all of—” He struggles to find the words, to describe the vastness of what we’re experiencing, eventually sweeping his hand out over the ocean. “For all of this. I have been meaning to tell you that.”

  “You don’t need to.” I shake my head.

  “I do. I know you feel that I disappointed you.”

  “You weren’t trying to build a bomb, Papa.”

  “Do you believe that?” He leans in closer to me. “I swear I wasn’t, Haruko.”

  A sharp light cuts across our faces: a crew member carrying a lantern, making rounds. “Everything all right over there?” he calls. “Miss, is this man bothering you?”

  Papa steps back, embarrassed. “I’m just talking with my father,” I call to the crew member, who looks over his shoulder a few times while continuing his patrol.

  But this small indignity, my father being accused of yet another thing for which he is blameless, fills me with anger. At the man with the lantern, at America, at myself.

  “You and Toshiko shouldn’t be having to pay like this,” Papa says. “To be taken away, yet again, from your friends.”

  And the anger I feel toward myself twists into shame. My friend wasn’t taken away. My friend sent me away. My whole family, because of me.

  “Papa.” I touch his coat sleeve. “I know you weren’t trying to build a bomb. Because I know what happened. And it’s my fault. It’s my fault we are here.”

  “Of course it’s not.”

  “It is, Papa. It really is; you have to listen to me.”

  He considers this. “Okay, Haruko, I’m listening.”

  “My friend Margot. You saw her once, she came to our house.”

  “What about her?” I see him trying to place her, and it gives me time to think about whether I really want to tell him this. But I have to. I can’t go to the new place the same way I came to Crystal City, carrying mistrust and confusion.

  “It was Margot who told Mr. Mercer that lie about the escape. I’m almost positive. She was angry with me because I’d been mean to her.” Because I’d been more than mean to her. “But I never thought she’d do something like she did.” And a part of me still can’t believe it. “I wish I could go back and never talk to her to begin with, Papa. I wish I could go back and never—never even look at her to begin with, and I’m so, so sorry.”

  It’s only because my face feels cold that I realize I’m crying, that I’m crying and the wind is so bruising that the tears have frozen on my cheeks. It’s sadness, and regret, and also loathing myself for still thinking about her when she has done something so unforgivable.

  I wait for him to yell at me, or to walk away.

  “Did you hear me, Papa? I’m sorry.”

  “We don’t need to talk about it. It’s done,” he says. “It’s behind us.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? My friend is the one who went to Mr. Mercer. She did it because she was mad at me, and—”

  “It’s not your fault,” he interrupts again. “It might not even be Margot’s fault.”

  “It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

  “It might have been Margot who went to Mr. Mercer. But if that’s true, he shouldn’t have believed the accusations of a teenager, without a more thorough investigation. And Margot might have had her own reasons. Even if you don’t know what they are. Even if they are not good reasons. We have all done confusing things.”

  He’s looking off into the distance, into something I can’t see, and I don’t know how he can possibly defend her after what she did to us.

  When he speaks again his voice is so quiet I can barely hear him.

  “Haruko, I am going to tell you something now. It is something I wondered if I should tell you before.”

  “What, Papa?”

  The light of the lantern cuts across us again. The lantern man is on the second lap of his rounds. When the beam swings across my father’s face, I see that it’s covered in the same shiny ice tears that mine is.

  And suddenly I know.

  I know that the thing he is about to tell me is the thing he was thinking of telling me on the day that the FBI took him.

  “What is it, Papa?”

  He clutches the railing, looking back out into the sea that is so big and so black.

  “I did it,” Papa whispers.

  “You did what?”

  “I did what the government said I did. I did share state secrets.”

  My heart forms a cold, ropelike knot in my chest. I’ve wanted an answer to my question, but I didn’t want the answer to be this.

  “Not like they said it happened, Haruko. Not on purpose. But I did.”

  The waves are loud. Beneath the collar of his coat, I can see that he’s wearing an old shirt that he used to wear to work, that my mother used to iron and starch on Monday afternoons. Now the collar is dingy and the top button is broken in half, but I can still see him heading off to work, absentmindedly smoothing his lapels.

  “A hotel guest?” My voice comes out in a choke. “That’s what they said happened, that hotel guests were using you to pass information to Japan. Wait, what do you mean, not on purpose?”

  I am picturing information scribbled on a sheet of paper, a businessman telling my father that he has to rush off somewhere, but could my father pop this letter in an envelope and mail it? That’s the kind of way he could accidentally transmit information.

  He is already shaking his head. Not a hotel guest. Not the scenario I’m imagining.

  “A general,” he says. “I told a general who used to come into the hotel restaurant. He was a nice, friendly man who had traveled all over the world. I’d taught him a few Japanese phrases and he asked for me whenever he came for dinner so we could chat.”

  “You told a general what, Papa?”

  “Asked him. Actually. I asked him a question about a unit of soldiers, and the information I had was information that I shouldn’t have had. I asked the general whether he knew anything about Camp Patrick Henry and whether the soldiers were treated well there. Especially the soldiers who were scheduled to ship out on April twenty-seventh.”

  “How did you have any of that informa—” I begin. The lantern light warms my face. The crew member’s footsteps get louder, pounding the ship’s deck while he circles again on his third round. I lower my voice. “How did you have that information?”
>
  “As soon as I asked him that question, the general became a different person. He wanted to know why I was asking. Why I cared about a United States military base. Mostly he wanted to know what you did—how I had come upon that information. He asked that again and again. But I wouldn’t tell him. Because he’d already decided I was not to be trusted, and so I knew I couldn’t trust him.”

  “Papa, tell me what happened,” I beg my father. “It’s too late for any of it to matter anyway. Whether it was a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or something else. Start at the beginning and tell me what happened.”

  Papa looks around to make sure nobody else is on the deck. He slowly lowers to the ground, bending one knee. He unlaces his shoe, working his heel out of the brown leather and searching for something between his foot and the sole. He removes a folded piece of paper, soft and crumpled, and, still kneeling, lifts it above his head until I take it.

  War and Navy Departments, it says. V-Mail Service.

  It’s a letter from Ken. I’m confused at first, that my father managed to get to one of Ken’s letters before I did, but then I realize I have seen this letter before. In the dark I can barely make out the address on the envelope, but it isn’t Crystal City, it’s our apartment in Denver. This is the first letter Ken ever sent us.

  “I don’t—”

  “Open it,” my father says quietly. “You will.”

  My father follows me as I walk away from the stern, closer to an entrance with a light. Inside the envelope is Ken’s precise block print, and when I see it I remember when we first received this letter. Papa read it out loud to the whole family. We were all so proud. We were all so together.

  Crazy family, the letter starts.

  Alas, you were hoping this would be a letter from some other dashing soldier, but it’s only a letter from Me. Perhaps you can show it around a little, and the neighbors will be impressed by your son? Probably not—and I wish I could tell you where I was, but they say that’s not allowed. A real big no-no. Though what I can tell you is I have a commanding officer who looks just like the pigeon that used to beg for scraps outside the soda fountain. Remember him—his rear end used to waggle like he was a beauty contestant? I swear, my commanding officer has the same walk. Can’t look at him and not picture him as a bird, Klomping all over the park.

  Hey, did you have a chance to see if you could track me down a book of crossword puzzles? Easy ones, even. Not too difficult for you to imagine, I’m sure, that I’d love to have something to occupy my brain a little bit.

  Really, it’s not so bad, except for all these infernal bivouacs they keep making us go on, which they say are to prepare us, but frankly I think I’d vote for the version where they prepare us by letting us stuff our faces and sleep on really soft mattresses. Yet here I am, learning to be an excellent soldier.

  All I wish is that People here were a little less excited about going overseas. Rudimentarily, I understand it’s going to happen and that, In fact, it’s why we all signed up. Let me be honest, it’s a little scary, which I can tell you even if I can’t admit it to the others—and at least the food is good, though my pants are going to increase from a size 27 to a size 29.

  Love, Kenichi/Ken

  “Do you see it?” my father asks quietly.

  “See what? What am I looking at?”

  “It’s probably harder to see when you don’t know men’s clothing sizes,” my father says. “A size 27 waist is very small. Ken hadn’t been a size 27 since he was twelve years old.”

  “He put the wrong trousers size?” I ask. “He was joking around?”

  “He wasn’t joking. He always liked puzzles.”

  “Yes, and we sent him some puzzles, didn’t we? We sent him some crosswords?” After we got this letter, I had put a book of acrostics in a package along with a Bit-O-Honey and a Pearson’s nut roll. I used my weekly sugar ration; I still remember making sure Ken knew I’d used my sugar ration. This letter sounds like Ken, the real Ken, the one I knew from before the war started and the one who had disappeared by the time he came to visit us in Crystal City.

  “The first letters,” Papa says finally. “The capitals.”

  Crazy: C. Alas: A.

  And only then, when I’m combing through the letter word by word do I finally see it—the odd capitalizations of Me, and Klomping. The sentences beginning with Yet and Rudimentarily, which seem odd and stilted. All the oddly capitalized letters.

  C.A.M.P. P.A.T.R.I.C.K. H.E.N.R.Y. A.P.R.I.L 27–29.

  “Ken was the one who told you about Camp Patrick Henry.”

  “It’s in Virginia.” My father’s voice is flat. “I actually didn’t know for certain where it was until they brought me in and questioned me. Until they asked how I knew that there was a group of soldiers leaving for the Western Front on April twenty-seventh from Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia.”

  The ship hits a rough wave. I pitch forward and grab the door frame. I want to vomit.

  Is this why we are here? Because my brave American war hero brother was also a good son and didn’t want his family to worry about where he was, so he devised a silly little way to tell us? Because he didn’t think it would be a big deal, and because my father happened to mention it to the wrong man? Is this why we got on the train?

  “I didn’t know that they would say it was a state secret,” Papa says. “I thought Ken was just giving us a game to play, to see if we could figure it out.”

  This is what my father wanted to tell me in our apartment the day he was taken away. This is what I didn’t understand.

  “Ken’s letter is the reason why they came and took us.”

  I’d wondered, once, when I read one of his cursive letters with Margot, whether he was writing in cursive because he was trying to send a message to me. Really, it was because he knew he’d already sent a damaging message in the one my father could read.

  “I couldn’t tell you. I thought it would be better for only me to know.”

  “But… it wasn’t a state secret, was it? It couldn’t have been.”

  Even as my mind is trying to work through what he’s telling me, it doesn’t make sense. A whole army base that thousands of soldiers move through isn’t a secret. The people who live in Virginia would notice truckloads of soldiers coming in and out. It’s not a secret, especially not to a general.

  “He kept asking me where I’d gotten my information,” my father says. “How I knew. How many people I’d told. I couldn’t tell him.”

  “But if you were a spy, that doesn’t make sense. He thought you had learned information that was valuable to the United States government, and he thought the first thing you did was to share it with an official of the United States government? If you were a spy, you would have been an incompetent one.”

  “In a different time, I think that would have mattered. He might have been able to think things through more carefully. But people are not themselves right now.”

  I am so tired of this excuse. Of hearing that we have to excuse people for acting the way they act because they are scared. That I should excuse Margot because she was scared. That we should have excused her father because he was scared. That I should excuse a general because he was scared. I am scared. Ken was scared. We are all scared.

  “People are exactly themselves,” I say wearily. “People are exactly who they have always wanted to be; it’s that now they have an excuse for it. Now they can pretend that they care about the country’s security. Did you try to explain? Did you try to tell them it was just your son, sending you a puzzle in code?”

  “I could never. I could never let him know it was Ken. I was afraid that they would do something to him. That they would send him to—to—”

  “To a place like Crystal City?” I finish. “To a place like they sent all of us?”

  “To someplace even worse,” my father says. “Haru-chan, can you imagine the punishment if they thought Ken had enlisted in the army as a spy? It didn’t matter to me if I was punished. Do y
ou see?” He sounds anguished. “I would have gone there alone. It never occurred to me that they would send women there, too, and children. I didn’t know your mother would want all of you to come. I was only trying to do what was right.”

  I don’t know what to say to him. He looks so sorry and I feel so wrung out. I reach down and take my father’s hand, the least and most that I can do.

  The guard is coming around with his lantern again. And ahead of us, far in the distance over choppy water, I see a dark purplish shape and I can’t tell if it’s land, or if it’s shadows cast on the water, from the moonlight shining through a cloudy sky. My father and I look out together.

  “A crew member told me we’re arriving tomorrow, if the weather is good. The next day if it’s not,” Papa says.

  “You said that.”

  After a while, he puts his other hand on my shoulder. “Curfew,” he says softly. “It’s time for bed.”

  “You go. I’ll go soon.” He pauses like he wants to make sure I’ll go, but thinks better of it.

  After he leaves, I watch the purple grow closer. The wind is cold and my borrowed coat is not warm enough, and I stand until I am numb. I stare ahead, because there is no other place to stare, because our ship is moving in one direction and my heart is moving in another, and the only way forward is forward. I watch until I’m sure what I’m seeing is land.

  TWENTY-NINE

  MARGOT

  May 15, 1945

  Number of prisoners left in Crystal City: 1,494

  Number of Germans: 512

  Number of Germans in my family: 3, always 3, never more

  IT DOESN’T MATTER WHY PEOPLE DO THINGS. IT DOESN’T MATTER because sometimes things are wrong, completely wrong, no matter why they were done or what justifications people try to give.

  The war ended in Europe. V-E Day. A day of Victory. The camp employees were weeping with joy. Some of the detainees, too. Some of them because they assume the whole war will be over soon. Some of them because they assume Germany must have won, that the newsreel played before the last movie was just propaganda. The camp employees’ tears look joyful, but some people can only imagine that Germany must have won. Two boys get in an argument about it in school. One said that Germany would return to its former glory now. The other said, How stupid are you?