The Last Year of the War, page 10
She had a little brother like I did, and also a younger sister.
Sometimes Nell and I would sit together at the tiny camp library and look at back issues of Hollywood magazine. Or we’d walk to the digging site at the pool and she’d point out to me all the cute boys who went to the Federal High School, both German and Japanese. Or we’d watch our fathers and other men play soccer at twilight and listen to the buzzing of cicadas.
I could close my eyes at those moments and almost believe I was just an ordinary American teenager living in an ordinary little town that never asked much of you.
But then I’d feel a plastic coin in my pocket that only had value here, or I’d hear the bugle calling us to roll call, or I’d see the holstered gun of a guard and I’d be slammed back to reality, where I wasn’t an ordinary American teenager after all. I was a German teenager who didn’t speak German and had never been to Germany, who was now living thirty miles from the Mexican border.
I didn’t know that girl at all.
10
In the seven weeks before school started, I learned that even though Germany and Japan were allies in the war, in our camp there was nothing we had in common with each other except our predicament. The camp made Iowans, Californians, New Yorkers, and Peruvians either one or the other: German or Japanese. Only the youngest children seemed unable to see the delineation that supposedly had categorized us into two kinds of people and only two. It wasn’t uncommon to see preschool-aged children of both nationalities playing together on playground equipment in the cool of the day, but the older an internee was, the less you saw him or her interacting with anyone not of the same nationality. There were a few Italians in the camp, too, but people treated them like inhabitants of another planet, or as if they were invisible.
Nell told me it was this way in school, too. She was also attending the American high school despite opposition from many in the German camp community.
“We keep to our own pretty much,” she said on the day before classes were to begin. We were sitting on her front step eating rainbow snow cones with our knees drawn up to our chests so that no rogue fire ants could crawl up our ankles.
“Why?” I asked. “Do we have to? Are there fights?”
“No.” Nell had drawn out the word. “Well, there’ve been a few fights of course, but it’s mostly just because . . . I don’t know. It’s just easier. There aren’t that many of us compared to the Japanese. So. You know.”
She didn’t elaborate. Then she told me as she crunched on bits of ice that a number of the Japanese students at Federal High went to the Japanese school in the afternoons, leaving before the last period at the Federal School began.
“Their parents make them go,” she said. “So that if they get sent back to Japan, they won’t flunk out because they don’t know the language. Or how to write in their alphabet. Have you seen it? It’s not even letters.”
This was the first time I heard that families at Crystal City could get sent anywhere other than to the cities they had come from.
“Why would they get sent to Japan?” I asked.
“Because,” Nell replied, in a tone that suggested I should know the reason why.
But I didn’t know yet, so I just stared at her.
“That’s what they do here,” she explained. “If you’re Japanese and want to go back to Japan, they’ll send you. If you’re German, they’ll send you back to Germany. They’ll send you back even if you don’t want to go, if they don’t want you in America anymore. If you’re a Nazi, they’ll send you back for sure.”
I needed a second to absorb this information. I immediately thought of the little white button with the tiny rosebuds painted on it and how my father had said the family who’d lived in our quarters before us had been allowed to go back home, and how strange the tone of his voice had been.
“I’m not a Nazi,” I had finally said, as syrupy melted ice peeked out of the bottom of my paper cone and dribbled down my curled fingers.
“Well, I’m not, either. But they don’t care what we are. It’s what our fathers are that matters to them.”
“My father isn’t a Nazi, either!” I couldn’t believe I was having to say these words again. I thought I was done saying them after we left Iowa.
Nell drank some of the liquefied ice from her cone and licked her lips, now tinged blue. “Mine’s not, either, but he’s got friends who are. They’re going to end up doing what they want with us anyhow. My father says they always do.”
“Who? Who are they?”
Nell smirked at me as though I were an ignorant child. “The government.”
She’d abruptly changed the subject then, telling me she was going to try to sit by a boy she liked named Kurt at the movie that night and would I sit with her instead of my own family? The camp was playing Penny Serenade with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I had seen it two years ago when it came out, but I told her I would. When it was movie night, you went, no matter what the movie was. We didn’t talk more about families being sent back to where their parents had come from, but the thought of it needled me the rest of the day.
That night after Max was asleep, I crept out of bed and stepped into the main room. Papa was sitting at the kitchen table that had been provided us, looking over his notes for his first day of class at the German school. There was no glow from a lamp on the other side of the blanket where his and Mommi’s bed was. She had gone to bed already. The room was warm and still. He looked up from his papers when he saw me.
“What is it, Elise? Can’t sleep?”
I moved toward him as I shook my head.
“You nervous about school starting up tomorrow?” he asked.
“No. Maybe a little. Are you?”
He smiled. “Maybe a little.”
I sat down in my usual chair. “The family that was here before us, they got sent back to Germany, didn’t they?”
Papa’s eyes widened a bit. “Did someone tell you that?”
“No. I just . . . I just figured it out,” I said. “No one really goes home from here, do they? They leave, but they don’t go home. They go to Japan or Germany.”
Papa paused a second before answering. “Some do get paroled and leave here for home.”
“But most who leave go to Germany or Japan. Right? That’s where they go.”
He put his pencil down. “I’m not worried about that happening to us, Elise. Some of those people wanted to go back to Germany. Mommi and I don’t. America is our home now. When the war is over, everything will go back to the way it was.”
Papa had said something to this effect before in his letters from North Dakota, on the train, and as we settled in to our new existence at Crystal City. Each time he did, I wanted to believe him. That’s really all it takes to believe something. You live each day as if it’s true because you want to.
“Okay,” I said, and he wished me sweet dreams and I returned to my room.
I got back into bed, choosing to believe that he was right about where we would be when the war ended and that school here at the camp would be no different than it had been in Iowa. There were cliques in Davenport. Plenty of them, in fact. Far more than two. There were the popular kids, the smart ones, the rebels, the girls who slept around and the boys who slept with them, the rich kids, the other-side-of-the-tracks kids, the bullies, the misfits, and all those like me who just didn’t want to be alone. Perhaps it was going to be easy, just like Nell said, because there were just the two kinds of people: the children of German parents and the children of Japanese parents. It couldn’t be simpler than that.
When morning came and all of us—except for Mommi—got ready for the first day of school, I found I was looking forward to going. I had liked school before Papa’s arrest. I got decent grades; I liked learning; I had a group of friends to eat lunch and gossip with. I never got sent to the principal’s office, never cheated on tests, never faked a stomachache so that I didn’t have to go. I liked going to pep rallies and singing in the choir and passing notes in class. School at the camp was perhaps the only thing that was going to be normal. There would be classrooms and a cafeteria and a gymnasium and teachers and cute boys and math tests to study for. Just like how things used to be.
It was that, and yet it wasn’t. The camp’s American high school had a population of about 150 students that fall, and well over two-thirds were Japanese. In Davenport, there had been three times that many students and I don’t think anyone had been Japanese. I had never seen so many Asian teenagers in one place. When I stepped inside the building with Nell at my side I felt transported to another continent. She had met me at the corner of Arizona Street—she lived one street over on Lincoln—and walked with me the four tiny blocks to the school on the corner of Meridian Road and Franklin Avenue.
The building wasn’t brick and mortar like the schools in Davenport had been, like all the schools in Iowa had been. This one was what my father called a manufactured structure. It hadn’t been built on-site; it had been fabricated elsewhere and brought over in pieces on big flatbed trucks. The school’s furnishings had come from a surplus of used equipment other schools in Texas didn’t want. The high school in Davenport, which I had been inside for plays and concerts and basketball games, had echoed with the beat of its past: in the trophy cases outside the gym and the scuff marks on the polished wood floors, on the shelves of books in the school library that smelled uncannily of sage and other savory spices, and on the plaque on the wall by the front doors that memorialized the alumni who had given their lives in service to their country in the Great War. But this building seemed like a cobbled-together mishmash of old and new, and nothing spoke to me of a proud past or a promising future.
Nell sensed my unease as we made our way down a main hallway no wider than our old one in our house back in Davenport. “It’s not that bad,” she said. “Just try not to compare it to your school back home.”
We gathered in its auditorium—which served as a multifaith chapel on weekends—for a welcome-to-the-school-year announcement from a Mr. Tate, who was called the superintendent, not the principal. The German Americans sat on the left side, outnumbered by the Japanese Americans, who sat on the right. There were some conversations taking place, but it was not like the back-to-school assemblies I had been to in Davenport, where the student body, who’d all gone to school with one another since kindergarten, was a hive of dialogue and had to be quieted with repeated admonitions from whoever on the staff had been appointed to bring the room to order. As I looked about the largely Japanese crowd, I could see some of the students were clearly already friends with one another, but at least half looked around in subdued apprehension; they were new, like me, and still grappling with how life had changed in such a short amount of time. Everyone who was chatting spoke English, except a few times when a student would turn to another to make a hushed comment in Japanese. A couple of the German students did this, too. Nell and I sat next to a German American girl named Nathalie, whom I had met over the summer, and who was Nell’s closest friend at the camp. Nathalie, a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl from New Jersey, was cool toward me as I took my seat. She’d already made it clear without saying a word that she wasn’t thrilled about my moving in on her tight camaraderie with Nell.
After Mr. Tate welcomed us, the teachers each walked up to the podium to introduce themselves. The faculty, borrowed from the state of Texas and paid well by the INS, all spoke with South Texas accents that made their words sound like they’d been swirled out of their mouths with honey spoons.
We were handed our class schedules, and then a sorry excuse for a bell clanged, signaling that we were to report to our first-period class, which for the ninth-grade population was English.
“Let’s hurry or we won’t get a good seat,” Nathalie said, popping up from her chair, grabbing Nell’s arm, and hauling her to her feet.
Nell laughed and looked down at me. “Come on!”
As I started to rise from my chair, my class schedule fell from my grasp and floated to the floor, where it was immediately swept up in a tangle of feet.
By the time I had it back in my hand, Nathalie had led Nell out of the room. I tried to dash after them, but there were too many students also wanting to get to the exit. When I finally made it to the hallway I could see only black-haired heads with a smattering of fair-haired ones, all farther ahead. One of them turned; it was Nell looking for me, but I don’t think she saw me before Nathalie had pulled her around the corner. I pushed my way ahead, excusing myself until I was at the same corner and I saw the two of them enter a classroom past the main entrance that we’d all come through earlier.
When I got there seconds later, the classroom had already filled to the last few open desks. I saw a sea of mostly Japanese faces, twenty-five at least, and only eight students of German descent. Nathalie and Nell were in the middle of the room, seated at desks that were side by side. Nell was haggling with a large boy with reddish brown hair who had apparently just folded himself into a third desk next to Nell. She was telling him that someone else was sitting there and that he had to move.
“I don’t see anybody sitting here,” he said, and then he turned around to say something I couldn’t hear to another German boy sitting behind him.
Nell looked to the door and saw me standing there. She shook her head in annoyance and nodded toward the boy who had taken the seat she’d tried to save for me.
She began to look around the room for another seat and so did I. Three Caucasian boys sitting together in the back all glanced at me as I stood surveying the room and then looked away, disinterested. Two German American girls, deep in conversation, sat near the trio of boys but with no seats next to them. A lone German American girl, seated on the far outside aisle, was staring out a window. There were only two empty seats left now: one surrounded by Japanese boys on all sides, and another at the back next to a Japanese girl who would change my life. Nell saw the open desk by this girl, too, and mouthed, “Take it!” She’d no doubt also seen that the only other available chair was surrounded by Japanese boys.
As I moved toward the Japanese girl, I saw she had a charm bracelet on her wrist that looked remarkably like one I’d been given by Mommi and Papa for Christmas two years earlier and that I was wearing that morning. She was talking to another Japanese girl and didn’t look up at me as I passed her to get to the desk next to hers. I sat down and noticed the old desk was etched with graffiti. At the topmost edge of my desk someone had carved a four-word commentary: You shred it, wheat.
“Hey. We have the same bracelet.” Mariko broke into my silence, her voice sounding remarkably ordinary, like my own.
I looked up from my desktop and turned to face her, not knowing her name yet. She had porcelain skin and shining black hair that fell like a silk fringe just past her shoulders and that she kept off her face with mother-of-pearl barrettes. Her beautiful slanted eyes appeared nearly closed as she smiled at me, and I wondered how she saw anything at all—a stupid pondering as I look back at it now, as Mariko saw so much that I couldn’t see. She was small boned and perhaps a few inches shorter than I was. Her blouse was pale yellow, and she wore a plaid pleated skirt similar in style to the one I was wearing. Her Keds had surely been white once but were now the color of weak tea from too many days strolling about in Texas dust. From the neck up, Mariko looked every inch as though she had materialized from some faraway city in the Far East, but her voice, her clothes, her anklet socks—all of them could have been mine.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied dazedly. “I mean, I saw that, too.”
“My name’s Mariko Inoue,” she said. “I’m from LA. You’re new, aren’t you?”
I nodded, still shocked at how American she sounded. She was from LA. Los Angeles.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Elise Sontag.”
“Sontag. That’s the German word for Sunday, isn’t it?”
I gaped at her. How could she know a thing like that? “Um, yeah,” I said after a moment’s hesitation.
“You start to pick up on some of the words people use around here,” she said, noting my astonishment.
The teacher who had earlier introduced herself as Miss Goldsmith swept into the room as Mariko said this, her arms laden with books and the class roster. Mariko turned her attention to the front of the class.
As the teacher placed what she held on a gray metal desk, I noticed for the first time that there were pictures on the wall, copies of Renaissance paintings I didn’t know the names of then, though I do now. Venus and the Three Graces, The Annunciation, Head of a Woman, Raphael’s Madonna of the Rose. Their wooden frames were scuffed and nicked, and the colors in the reproductions had faded, suggesting they’d hung for many years somewhere else, a sunny art room in a Texas high school perhaps. They’d probably been placed in a warehouse of other old and obsolete classroom equipment out of which the camp schools had come by their meager furnishings.
Miss Goldsmith shushed those still chatting in the honeyed tone she had used earlier to introduce herself. The room fell quiet.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” she said pleasantly, as though we really did have a say in what we did next.
Miss Goldsmith proceeded to call the roll, struggling rather comically to pronounce Japanese first and last names, coating every foreign word with her lilting southern accent. When she got to my name, she pronounced my two-syllable last name with three syllables. I don’t quite know how she did it. I raised my hand and said, “Here,” and she smiled in my direction and marked the roster.
