The Last Year of the War, page 14
The inside of the Inoue house was very much like our home, with the same drab furniture and linens. But Kaminari, who was a budding artist, had painted posters that hung on the walls, of ocean landscapes and trees and flowers and the little Japanese children who played on their street. Their quarters also had a sweet and spicy tang in the air, very different from the fragrances that lingered after Mommi cooked.
The family all spoke Japanese to one another inside the house, easily reverting to English whenever I was part of the conversation. Chiyo and Kenji were kind to me, and I knew I was welcome in their house, but I could also tell they weren’t sure if it was wise for Mariko to prefer my company over that of every Japanese girl she knew at the camp. On the day I was finally going to see Kenji’s hives, I asked Papa and Mommi and Max to come, too. My parents had been wanting to meet the Inoues and ascertain for themselves if Mariko’s parents were comfortable with her and me being such good friends. I just wanted the parents to meet.
We walked to the edge of the citrus grove, where the hives were kept in white cabinets that looked like bureaus for pajamas and underwear. The end of September was near and the air was at last turning slightly cool in the late afternoon. The low-hanging sun hit the bees at just the right angle, so that their little gold and black bodies glimmered as they buzzed about the structures.
We stood back from the hives at a safe distance as Kenji moved about them in protective gear. He opened drawer after drawer and removed pieces of honeycomb, working quietly and slowly, like a white ghost, puffing smoke onto the bees from a little can with a long snout to calm them. The bees acted as if they couldn’t even see him, or if they could, they didn’t care.
“The smoke makes it hard for them to smell my father,” Mariko murmured to us. “If a bee smells an intruder, it will alarm all the other bees. But if they can’t smell him, they won’t perceive him as a danger.”
Kenji put the pieces in mason jars and screwed on the lids tight. The jars he placed in a wooden box that also had a lid. With all the drawers closed now, Kenji began to step out of his coverings. Then he picked up the box with his gear over his arm and started walking to where we—all my family and Mariko—were standing, watching him. When he reached us, he bowed and then shook Papa’s hand. They had just exchanged names when Chiyo arrived with a plate of manju—sweet Japanese dumplings filled with red bean jam.
While the parents made polite talk and nibbled on the manju, Mariko, Max, and I ate our sweets with gusto and then dared one another to see how close each one of us would step to the hives. I kept an ear trained toward our parents’ conversation, to pick up on any thread of talk that might somehow mean a complication for Mariko and me. But they chatted about the things ordinary parents talk about when their teenage children become friends and the mothers and fathers meet. They did not talk about the war, or the armed guards holding us hostage here, or the subtle friction between the two major nationalities at the camp.
Our parents would not be attending game night together or walking side by side to the post office or sitting on the bus together on one of those infrequent shopping trips to the city. But they were friends now; not like Mariko and I were, but at least our dads had shaken hands and talked about life as it used to be when one was a chemist and one owned a vegetable and herb shop, and our moms had traded tips on how to get creative with what was available at the marketplace. Mommi had told Chiyo the manju was delicious and that she’d send over some pfeffernussen the next time she baked some.
Max asked Kenji if he could help him at the hives sometime—much to Mommi’s alarm—and Mariko’s father said that his help would be most welcome. Too soon we had to start walking back home to be in place before the twilight accounting.
At school, Nell seemed both put out and impressed that I had so quickly found a friend in Mariko Inoue. Nell’s family and the Inoues had arrived in Crystal City about the same time, so they had met each other in the last two months of eighth grade. But Nell had apparently been given the same advice she’d tried to give me—about staying to my own kind—and she hadn’t made any effort to get to know Mariko. In the weeks after Mariko and I became friends, though, Nell would sometimes sit by Mariko and me at lunch, with a quiet and reticent Nathalie in tow. And I’d often sit at lunch with Mariko and her Japanese American friends, none of whom she knew before coming to Crystal City. They were from San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco—wondrously Spanish-sounding places I had only ever seen spelled out on a map—and they sounded as American as I did. And sometimes Mariko and I would just sit by ourselves at lunch and talk about the kinds of things young teenagers talked about, things that had nothing to do with war or detention camps or the ache of lost freedoms.
One early October afternoon, when Mariko and I were at her quarters after school, she asked if I wanted to see the book she was writing. I did, of course. From the day she first told me she was writing one, I’d wanted to see it.
We were in the room she shared with her sister. Kaminari and Tomeo both worked at the camp administration building after school—Kaminari worked in the typing room and Tomeo helped with translating for the Latin American Japanese. Kenji was at the hives and Chiyo was at a Victory Hut where a team of Japanese women had taken on the task of making large batches of tofu—a staple of the Japanese diet—which was a soft, custard-like food made from soybeans. Mariko reached under her mattress and withdrew a notebook, the ledger type, where the pages are already bound inside. The cover was a tightly woven salmon color.
It looked like a real book. I must have looked duly impressed. Mariko laughed.
“I’m only on page forty,” she said, pleased with my awe. “I figure I have another hundred to go.” She hesitated a moment before extending it toward me.
I reached for the book and opened it to the first page. Mariko had penmanship like mine—not perfect, but not illegible, either. The words had been written in pencil and the sentences bore evidence of erasures here and there.
I can still remember the first few lines.
Long ago in the land of Akari, a king and queen, who very much wanted a son to continue the royal line, had a baby girl. They loved their daughter, but still yearned for a son. The following year another girl was born, and the next year, another. Then many years went by and the queen did not have any more children. Doctors were consulted, and magicians and priests and wise men. No one could tell her why she’d not had any more children. Finally, when their daughters were ten, nine, and eight, the queen found herself with child again. This baby, she knew, would be the longed-for son. She was sure of it. But when the time came for the baby to be born, the fourth child was also a girl. They named her Calista, and she was not like her three sisters, who liked to play with dolls and were afraid to get their hands dirty and who danced about in frilly dresses. Calista was not like them at all.
Mariko took back the book after I’d read the first page and I told her I thought her story was very good.
“So is Calista a tomboy?” I asked.
Mariko looked at me with a furrowed brow, as though I had made a critical error in thinking. “She is herself,” Mariko said.
“I like her,” I said. Because I did.
“I’m glad.” Mariko smiled as she slid the book back under her bed. “I’m not sure I’m much of a novelist, though. Starting was easy, and because I was so bored at Manzanar, I wrote quite a bit there, but the farther along I go the harder it is to know what to write. I think that’s why I want to work instead as a theater critic or maybe as a travel reporter.” Mariko tucked the blanket that helped conceal the notebook tight under the mattress and then turned to me as she sat back on her knees. “But even so, Calista is someone I want to be like. You know? I want to be brave like she is. Like she had to be.”
I was quiet for a moment as these words hung between us. I was reminded of what Papa had said to me in that sweltering train car as Max and Mommi slept.
“My father thanked me for being brave for my mother,” I said, sharing my thoughts aloud with Mariko. “But . . . I didn’t feel like I’d been brave. I still don’t. I was afraid the whole time he was gone. If you’re a brave person, don’t you know it? Don’t you feel it?”
Mariko was quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe being brave is different from being unafraid. If you’re not afraid, what is there to be brave about?”
We heard the front door open then and the sound of Chiyo’s voice.
“Do you want to help me with my story from time to time?” Mariko whispered as we started to rise to our feet.
I nodded, glad to have been asked, but unsure if I could help Mariko with even one sentence. I didn’t think of myself as a highly creative person.
Still, from then on, whenever I was at Mariko’s house and she’d pull Calista’s story out from under her mattress for us to work on, I felt as though I was being given a chance to imagine the kind of person I might dare to be, even when all hope seemed lost.
13
We internees were not without a voice at Crystal City. Mr. O’Rourke, the camp director, allowed us to choose leaders from among our two communities to represent us at meetings designed to improve camp life. To be truthful, I did not pay a great deal of attention to the politics of our existence at the internment camp. It was enough for me to navigate life at the American high school, even with Mariko at my side. Apparently it had been a bold move on my parents’ part to enroll me there—the German community wanted all its children to attend the German school as a sign of solidarity and national pride. I only cared about making good grades and being assured that none of the boys thought I was ugly or stupid. It made no difference to me what our community leaders expected of me.
But I would hear Papa and Stefan talking in the evenings about the German internees who were our spokesmen. Papa wasn’t happy with the chosen leadership of our side of the camp and he would say so to Stefan, who would then caution Papa about communicating that displeasure.
“Everything that gets said here gets heard here, Otto,” Stefan said one fall evening. It was clear he wasn’t talking about the guards, who did in fact listen to every conversation we had if they were within earshot. He was talking about the other internees, especially those in positions of control.
Stefan then told Papa that three months before my family arrived, the elected leadership of the German internees, all of whom at the time were loyal to Hitler, had taken down the American flag in the German recreation hall and had replaced it with the Nazi flag. The flag was promptly removed by furious guards who were on patrol that evening and who then shredded it to bits. Apparently a number of German internees complained about the treatment of the German flag to the International Red Cross, as well as the government of Switzerland, which, being neutral, had been designated as liaison for German internees in matters related to our internment. The commissioner of the INS soothed the infuriated internees by flying no flag at all in the German recreation hall. But there was still tension among the German camp leadership and camp administration, and between internees loyal to the United States and those loyal to the fatherland.
Back in July, when we’d arrived, the spokesman for the German internees had been a man named Karl Kolb. He was from New York and he had been working for a German camera company. He and his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter had arrived at Crystal City a few weeks before we had. Kolb was apparently a man who liked being in charge and he was quickly elected to be spokesman for the German internees. He decided, much to Papa’s annoyance, that his fellow internees would not be allowed to talk to O’Rourke on their own. Instead, any complaint or comment or suggestion had to be filed with a German internee council, of which he was the head. Before Kolb, O’Rourke assigned day jobs to the internees who wanted them, and most did, but Kolb wanted to hand out job assignments himself. It was Kolb whom Stefan Meier took my father to see the day after we arrived about a post as a science teacher at the German school.
Papa asked Stefan one evening why O’Rourke had given Kolb that kind of power. Stefan thought it was because O’Rourke had been instructed to run a peaceful camp. The Allied camps weren’t to be compared in any way, shape, or form to the Axis camps, which we’d all heard via the newsreels and newspapers were deplorable. If that’s how the German internees wanted to be represented at the camp, O’Rourke wasn’t going to stand in their way.
Papa and Stefan would also talk about an internee named Fritz Kuhn, who had the ear and the confidence of many of the German internees, but Papa did not like or trust him. Kuhn and his wife and their fifteen-year-old son, Walter, had also arrived before us. Kuhn was not like Papa, even though he was also a chemist. He had been the Hitler-appointed leader of the American arm of the Nazi Party, the German American Bund. He was also a decorated World War I soldier, having won Germany’s Iron Cross for his military service. Kuhn was apparently well-known in Germany, and of all the Crystal City internees ripe for repatriation, Germany was most interested in a prisoner exchange that would include Kuhn, even though he’d served forty-three months in prison for embezzling prior to coming to Crystal City. Kuhn’s wife, Elsa, and their son had also been arrested as enemy aliens, and the thought that fifteen-year-old Walter had been treated that way still makes my soul tremble all these years later. It angered Papa that men like Kuhn had risen to the ranks of leadership for the German internees.
Stefan Meier said it was the same in the Japanese community. Their leaders were issei loyal to Japan. The Italians were so few in number, they did not have community leaders.
In early December, evergreen trees were trucked into the camp and anyone who wanted to could take one home to their quarters to decorate for the holidays. None of us had our Christmas decorations with us, of course, but Mommi, Max, and I made ornaments out of cardboard and hung candy canes that we’d bought at the marketplace with our camp money.
Mariko’s family didn’t celebrate Christmas, not like we did, although her parents had been giving them holiday gifts since Tomeo and Kaminari were in grade school. She had told me well before Christmas that her grandparents on both sides were Buddhists but that her parents weren’t practicing any faith at all, which freed her to enjoy the Western religious holidays as much as she wanted. She loved our Christmas tree and made some ornaments of her own to put on it.
About the time those Christmas trees were being delivered, a German internee named Heinrich Hasenburger became the new official spokesman for the German internees. Papa couldn’t understand how the man had pulled this off, because he got fewer than two hundred votes out of more than six hundred that were cast. It infuriated Papa that even within the tiny little cosmos that was Crystal City, where every action of ours was controlled, a man like Hasenburger could strong-arm his way into being the one in control. Papa did not approve of him and wasn’t afraid to say so.
One Friday morning, Mommi went to the marketplace to buy groceries. By this time, the single camp grocery canteen had become two; the one we shopped at was called the German General Store, and the other was known as the Japanese Union Store. Both canteens sold basic groceries but also ethnically distinct food items. I’d been inside the one that Mariko and her family shopped at several times, but never to buy anything. On this particular day, Hasenburger had posted sentries to police the front door to the German General Store. The sentries had been instructed not to allow anyone in who opposed Hasenburger. Our family was on his list of opposers and Mommi was turned away. Papa tried to go later and came back again, angry because he’d been turned away, too. The camp stores were staffed by internees and there was no one from administration physically at the marketplace to whom Papa could appeal. He would have had to break ranks with the community to report to camp officials what had happened to him, so Papa said nothing. Then on Sunday afternoon when we wanted to go to the Café Vaterland, we were told we wouldn’t be allowed inside.
The man at the front door said something in German, his arms crossed stiffly over his chest.
Papa said something back to him.
The man shook his head. “Nein, nein,” he snapped.
Papa turned to us. “Let’s go,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to go in there anyway. And maybe he didn’t at that point.
“What did that man say to you?” I asked.
“That this place is for Germans who are proud to be German,” my father replied, as we turned for home.
Mommi wanted to go to O’Rourke and complain to him about what Hasenburger was doing, but Papa thought this was a bad idea. I told him we should buy groceries where Mariko and her family shopped.
“This will blow over,” he said. “If we go to the director or I try to buy rationed food meant for the Japanese community, it will just get worse for us.”
I knew what he meant about going to the director. It would have been like me tattling on Lucy Hobart.
“But I have nothing to make for us for supper,” Mommi told him.
“We will eat,” was all Papa said.
We ended up having our evening meal in the mess hall, where internees who didn’t have kitchens in their living quarters or who were new to the camp took their meals. On the menu that night was spaghetti, which I loved. But we didn’t know any of the other people eating in the hall that night. We walked home afterward to sit by our Christmas tree and play spades.
At school the next day I told Mariko what the leader of the German community was doing to people who didn’t like him, and that he wasn’t letting us shop for groceries in the marketplace.
