The Last Year of the War, page 17
“No, it’s not,” I said. We were sitting in art class. Mariko had already left the Federal School for the day.
“I saw the list. Your name is on it.”
I didn’t feel even a tiny tremor of fear. “It’s a mistake, then. We’re not going.”
She stared at me for a moment like I was a foolish child. “Do you really think that’s the kind of list to have a mistake on it?” Nell finally said.
The first wave of uncertainty whooshed over me. “It has to be a mistake,” I said, but there was dread in my voice and she heard it.
“You might want to talk to your parents,” she said, shaking her head in pity for me.
I couldn’t wait for class to be let out. As soon as school was over, I rushed home. When I walked into our quarters, Papa and Mommi were there, sitting at our little kitchen table drinking coffee as they typically did after Papa’s last afternoon class at the German school, although in recent weeks I had noticed their afternoon coffee times had tapered off. Papa often didn’t come home now until just before roll call. I had thought nothing of this, nor of Mommi’s increasingly quiet demeanor. I knew she wasn’t happy here; she didn’t have school to go to or a best friend like I did to give her imprisonment a veneer of normalcy. I just thought Papa was busy with after-school activities like many teachers were, and that Mommi was missing the comfortable and satisfying life we’d had in Davenport.
Max wasn’t home when I stepped inside; he was no doubt at Hans’s house. My parents could see immediately how distraught I was, and Papa asked me what was wrong.
I told them what Nell had said to me. “She said our names are on a list. The same list her family is on.”
Papa and Mommi exchanged looks. I felt my heart shudder.
“Elise,” Papa said gently. “I need you to sit down.”
“Why?” The fear was ice-cold now. I wanted to run.
“Please. Sit down.”
“Why? Why should I sit down?”
Another glance passed between my parents.
“Why should I sit down?” My voice trembled as the repeated words fell out of my mouth.
“Please, Elise,” my mother said softly.
“I don’t want to sit down! Why is our name on that list?”
“We were going to wait to tell you until closer to Christmas . . .” Papa looked over at Mommi. Her eyes were glistening.
“Tell me what?” I said, still standing.
“It’s not a mistake,” Papa said.
The room seemed to sway for a moment. “What are you saying?” I said, as everything seemed to tilt.
“We’re being sent back, too. We’re going home to Germany.”
“What?” I said, though I had heard him clearly.
“I’m sorry. It’s out of our hands. It’s been decided. We’re leaving right after Christmas,” Papa said.
“Who? Who decided?” My voice sounded high-pitched and childish in my ears.
“It’s . . . it’s complicated, Elise.”
“No, it’s not! You have to ask to be sent back to Germany. You have to volunteer for it!”
Papa inhaled and then let the air out, as though he’d needed fresh oxygen to tell me what he said next. “I knew this might happen to us. I was told that our coming here to Crystal City—so that we could all be together again—might mean we’d be sent back. I was told it was a possibility. I didn’t think the war would last this long, Elise. I thought it would be over in a matter of months after I was arrested. Germany was losing ground in Russia. German soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands in Stalingrad. I . . . I thought it would be over by the first Christmas we were here. I didn’t know it would last this long. I agreed to it.”
“What do you mean you agreed to it!” I yelled at my father, something I had never done. Not like that. I half expected him to point to the tiny space I shared with Max and say, “You go to your room and don’t come out until you’re ready to apologize for speaking to me that way.” But he merely answered my question with the same calm tone as he might have if I had asked what time it was.
“It was a condition of our coming here to Crystal City. I had to agree to it. I signed a paper. I thought the war would be over before anything came of it. I thought we’d be back in Davenport by now.”
“But why?” The question came crumpled out of my mouth, laced with a sob. “You’ve done nothing wrong!”
“I can’t prove where my loyalties lie, Elise! It looks to them like I mean America harm. They can’t look into my heart and see that I don’t. And there are Americans in Germany behind enemy lines for whom they want to trade us. I am an enemy to them, and those other people are loyal citizens, stuck where they don’t belong.”
My father looked away from me to gaze down at his hands, folded together on top of the table. He had always been gentle with those hands. I trusted them. I trusted him.
But I couldn’t make sense of what he was telling me. I didn’t know how to believe Papa had chosen this for us, that he’d agreed to it when he’d requested that we be reunited at Crystal City. Why had he even wanted to come here if he’d known being sent back to Germany was a possibility? But this was a question with edges too sharp to ponder at that moment. I would come to understand the why of this in the months to come, whenever it seemed we were in a labyrinth of hell itself and I looked at my mother’s face and saw the guilt there. She would come to blame herself for what was about to happen to us. She hadn’t been strong enough to manage her life without my father physically in it. Papa had requested Crystal City because Mommi had been unraveling and he’d been desperate to find a way to stop it.
“How long do we have to stay there?” I asked, my voice not much more than a defeated whisper.
Papa was quiet for a second. “When the war is over, we’ll decide if we want to try to come back to America. We’ve been told we can apply to re-immigrate if we want to.”
“If we want to?” I echoed, needing his assurance that he was already thinking we would. Surely he was, wasn’t he?
But all my father said was, “Yes. If we want to.”
I stood there in the spinning room, shaking my head and thinking the words No, no, no, no, no. I didn’t want to go.
“I’m staying here,” I said, sounding like a child.
“That’s not an option, Elise. Besides, we’re a family. And we stay together.”
“I don’t want to go!” I yelled.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Papa said calmly but with an edge of authority to his voice that had been missing from the conversation until now. “This is not how Mommi and I wanted to tell you. But it is the way it is. We are leaving for Germany after the first of the year.”
Tears that had begun to prick my eyes started to slide down my face. I ran to the room I shared with Max and slammed the door.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to run headlong outside the gates, past the armed men on horseback.
I wanted to run and never stop.
It had taken me a year, but I was finally feeling like a normal teenager again. I’d come to Crystal City with nothing from my former life but a suitcase of clothes. I’d still had my family, but everything else that had been home to me—including all my friends—had been yanked out of my hands. But now? Now I had a best friend again. I was doing well in school. I was making plans for my future. I was happy.
It was all going to be taken away from me again.
I didn’t want to go to Germany. Not to live. And not now. Germany was the enemy. Germany was at war.
I didn’t even speak the language. I didn’t want to speak the language.
Everyone there would hate me because I was an American. In Ger-many, I would be the enemy.
And what about the bombings? We had heard about Hamburg. Were there other German cities the Allies had bombed? There was also whispered talk that Allied soldiers were now marching across France.
Perhaps that meant the war would be over soon, just as Papa had originally hoped, and our stay in Germany would be just an extended visit to Oma, something we’d been wanting to do as a family for a long time.
As the tears washed away the worst of my anger, I began to consider what I could do to endure this terrible situation. Perhaps I could survive, even carve out a measure of happiness, in Germany until I was eighteen. I could come back to America and join Mariko in Manhattan as we had planned, and we’d do what she’d said we’d do: find out what I was good at.
It was only two and half years until I turned eighteen. Just twenty-eight months. And really, what choice did I have? I would have to go with my family.
Papa knocked on my door, probably having heard my sobs subside, and asked if he could come in.
I didn’t answer; he opened the door anyway. He stepped inside and sat on the edge of my bed.
We sat quietly for a few moments.
“I don’t speak German,” I finally said, and he knew I was telling him how afraid I was of being alone again. Friendless. Hated, perhaps, in a land at war. There would be no friend like Mariko in Germany. I didn’t see how there could be.
“You speak some,” Papa said, easing his arm around me and pulling me to his chest. “And we have a few weeks before we go. Mommi and I will teach you as much as we can until then. Look how quickly Max picked it up.”
“Max has had a year with it,” I muttered.
“You will learn it more quickly than you think, Elise. Trust me. Your mother and I came to America not knowing a word of English and we learned it by living here. You will pick up the language. I promise you.”
I will only be there twenty-eight months, I was saying in my head. Twenty-eight months and then I’m going to New York with Mariko.
Papa had told Max and me many times how beautiful southwest Germany was. Rolling hills of spruce and maples, half-timbered houses with geraniums in all the windows, beautiful old villages with cobblestone streets and city-center fountains, and cathedrals and castles. And my Oma was there, the grandmother for whom I was named. I could spend the necessary months there and perhaps even enjoy them as I counted them off one by one until my eighteenth birthday, provided the war had not altered the state of Papa’s childhood home. This thought struck me hard at that moment, that there was a war going on, and we were going to be heading right into it.
“What about the bombs?” I asked. “What about what happened to Hamburg?”
“That’s four hundred miles away from where we’re going. Hamburg’s at the other end of the country.” He spoke his answer so quickly. It was as though he had asked himself this very question and therefore had the answer at the ready.
“But there are Allied soldiers marching across France. People are talking about it.”
“We’re not going to be in France. And Pforzheim isn’t a military town. It’s surely not a target.”
“But aren’t you and Mommi afraid of the war?” I asked.
This time, several seconds passed before he answered me. “Yes. A little. But we can’t stay here. We have to go.”
“And we’ll be safe there?”
More seconds of silence hung between us. “I have to believe we will be,” he finally said.
He looked into my eyes and I saw how tired he was. Of everything.
“I’ll go, but I’m coming back to America when I turn eighteen, Papa,” I said. “I’m not staying there. I know Germany is home for you and Mommi. But it’s not home for me.”
After a long moment Papa nodded. “Fair enough. Just . . . you don’t need to tell Mommi your plans right away, hm? Give it some time.”
“All right,” I said.
“That’s my girl,” Papa replied, thin relief in his voice.
* * *
• • •
I waited until after school the next day to tell Mariko. She sensed something was on my mind in our first-period class. When she asked what was wrong, I told her I had something to tell her but wanted to wait until after her last afternoon class at the Japanese school. We met up in the orange grove, and as we sat in the shade of one of the trees, I told her everything my parents had said, and everything that I’d said in return. I’d imagined Mariko would be angry, like I had been, but her eyes filled with tears of sad acceptance as I shared my news.
“My father wants us to go back to Japan,” she said when I was finished, and she wiped at her eyes with her fingertips. “He would have us leave tomorrow if they let him.”
“It’s not fair what is happening to us,” I said a moment later, as I realized Mariko and I would likely have been parted no matter what Papa had agreed to.
“No, it’s not.”
I sighed heavily, picked up a shriveled orb of decaying fruit, and tossed it. “I’m going to be alone again. No one is going to want to be friends with me. Not there.”
“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” Mariko offered.
I picked up another rotten orange and threw it. “Maybe.”
“Look. We’ll write to each other,” Mariko said encouragingly. “We can still be best friends. And we’ll meet up again in New York. When we’re eighteen, just like we planned. We’ll do it.”
“I counted the months. It’s nearly two and a half years until we’re eighteen.”
“The time will fly by.”
I was already missing her. “Will it?” I blinked back tears that were beginning to burn.
“I’m sure of it.”
“You promise you won’t forget me?” I said.
“Cross my heart.”
Mariko and I were quiet for a moment.
“Is it . . . dangerous where you are going?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Papa doesn’t think so. Germany is a big country.”
“But you’ll be careful anyway. Right?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know what it meant to be careful in war. I had a sudden vision of the drowning Japanese girls as they sank below the surface of the water in the pool. “Be careful,” all the mothers—including mine—had said the next day and the next and the next. What they were really saying was, “Stay out of the deep end. Don’t go where your feet can’t touch.” Did war have a deep end? Was there a place where your feet just couldn’t touch? I didn’t know.
We rose from the ground to begin walking back to our quarters for the evening roll call, musing not on what war was like, but rather on all the things we would do and see and eat on our first day in New York City—free and eighteen and finished with everything the world of our parents had laid upon us.
* * *
• • •
The next few weeks Mariko and I spent as much time together as her father would allow. Kenji had grown increasingly sullen and angry, and I think he was envious that my family was being allowed to repatriate when his wasn’t. Only Japanese diplomats were being deported back to Japan. The United States wasn’t brokering any deals with Tokyo to send able-bodied men and women home to them. The situation with Kenji became so bad that Mariko told me not to come over to her house anymore so that her father wouldn’t see us together. I wasn’t a good influence on Mariko; this was what Kenji thought. I was too Western. I was going to make of Mariko what Tomeo and Kaminari had become.
Christmas came and went, and the day of our departure grew ever nearer. My parents were not allowed to venture past our quarters, as they were not to have contact with anyone not likewise being repatriated, lest they be given messages or codes to take with them to Germany. On the day before we were to leave, however, Mariko and I planned to spend every moment of daylight together. When she wasn’t at my doorstep right after breakfast as we had arranged, I snuck over to her house. Mariko had asked me to stay away from her quarters, and I had done so, but this was our last day. She was late coming over to see me. Something was wrong.
I hovered near her triplex for what seemed like a long time, gathering the courage to walk up to her front door and knock on it. To my relief, Chiyo—not Kenji—answered.
“Mariko can’t come out,” Chiyo said tonelessly. She looked tired and devoid of emotion. From behind her, I heard Mariko’s voice saying, “Please let me talk to her, Mommy! Please?”
Chiyo didn’t turn around or acknowledge that she’d heard Mariko. She just continued to stare hard at me. Like she wanted me to go, and yet didn’t.
So I didn’t go. I just stood there and stared back at her.
“Please let me talk to her, Mommy?” Mariko begged.
A few seconds later and without a word, Chiyo swung the door wide and stepped aside. Mariko, standing behind her, closed the distance to me in a few quick steps. My best friend’s eyes were red from crying. The pale red imprint of a slapped hand lay across her right cheek.
“Mariko,” I said in a whisper.
She said nothing, just shook her head.
Chiyo finally turned away from the doorway, but not before gazing back at me now with a hopeless look. She walked away from us and into the back room that had been Tomeo’s. Mariko didn’t step outside where I was, and she didn’t invite me in.
“Who hit you?” I said, though I had an idea who did.
“I deserved it,” she answered softly. “I spoke disrespectfully to him.”
“Why? What is wrong? What happened?”
“He’s angry with me. I bragged about our plans to live in New York. I should have said nothing, but he was saying unkind things about you and I was mad. I should have said nothing. He won’t let me see you today. I’m sorry.”
“But it’s our last day!”
“I’m so very sorry,” Mariko said again, as though she was responsible for what was happening.
She was still standing on the threshold of her house and I was standing on the woven mat where the Inoues put their shoes. They never wore their shoes inside their quarters. None of the Japanese did. Chiyo’s were there by my feet and so were Mariko’s. Kenji’s were not.
