Butterfly's Shadow (31 page)

. . . ‘My grandmother was a picture-bride . . . she saw my father first time on Ellis Island. Before that, just photos; he proposed by letter. She was wearing a hat with flowers. She pulled out a flower and gave it him . . .’

. . . ‘My grandfather came from Osaka to Oregon. A farmer. He grew cabbage and squash. Never a day off in forty years . . .’

. . . ‘My father went to college. He studied science, mathematics. Masters, Ph.D . . . . My mother gave thanks he died before Pearl Harbor.’

. . . ‘My family has a shop –
had
a shop – we sold shoes. American shoes are too big for Japanese feet, we imported small sizes . . .’

. . . ‘We have fishing boat . . . No time to sell when internment came; we tie up boat in harbour . . .’

. . . ‘Before she came to America, my mother arranged the flowers every week in the Baptist church in Nagasaki—’

Nagasaki? Would she have known a girl called Cho-Cho who married an American sailor?

But the flower-arranger, Mrs Shioya’s mother, was part of a vanished past where everyone was long dead. Unlike Cho-Cho who lived on, unreachable. Unless she, too, was now a statistic.

Nancy had found a college in Massachusetts that would accept Joey; where he could continue his studies. She wrote to give him the news, ending with a happy flourish: ‘So as of now, you’re out of there!!’

Afterwards she realised she should have picked up from his letters the way he was thinking. His reply came as a shock.

‘Dear Nancy, it’s good of you to go to all that trouble, but I want to stick around and see what happens here. I guess camp is the place for us enemy aliens. I have to keep this short – there’s a concert tonight and we need to rehearse. Who’d have thought school flute lessons would pay off! Not that I have more than a few bars to play, but it’s tricky stuff: would you believe Charles Ives?’

Joey and the band came out of the canteen hut into a riot: internee coal workers demanding better wages had been fired. Docility exploded into rage, the air filled with flying bricks and insults. Mortified, Joey realised that while he and the band had been rehearsing a concert of American music inside the hut, men had been marching to a different beat outside.

Autumn ushered in a bitter season: dishes of Thanksgiving dinner lying untouched – ‘Thanksgiving? For what?’ Japanese festivals were celebrated without joy; Christmas an uneasy mixture of coloured lanterns and carol-singing. Santa Claus figures made of cheese and sticky rice, and decorated trees that looked neither Japanese nor altogether American. A bleak New Year.

*

Joey was on his bed, eyes closed, open book on his chest, when Ichir
threw open the door.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘I’m deep in the Mexican pueblo with Ruth Benedict.’

‘Tell her to get screwed.’

‘Ichi, they’re so
Japanese
. The culture of restraint—’

‘The whole camp’s buzzing.’ A baffled shake of the head.

‘There’s a loyalty questionnaire. I just read it. It’s garbage. Joey, these guys are nuts. They want us to swear
loyalty
? To a country that’s put us behind barbed wire. Does that make sense?’

‘They’re always paranoid—’

‘There are two special questions that need a yes to get you through. They want everyone to renounce Japanese citizenship. Who do they think they’re kidding? Some of the old people, that’s the
only
citizenship they have, the government never would allow them to become US citizens. It’s lose–lose: if they sign they’ll be stateless.

‘And they have to agree to renounce allegiance to the Emperor. People are totally bewildered, scared: it’s like they’ve been supporting the Emperor till now. Like when did you stop beating your wife. The old ones are in tears. All over camp, you can hear them crying. They’re lost, Joey, we’re all lost. What the fuck is going to become of us?’

Without waiting for an answer he slammed out of the hut. Joey got up and watched him walking away fast, shoulders hunched, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head from side to side, like a dog shaking off water.

Joey suspected this would turn out to be one of those camp myths, but it was genuine: ‘The loyalty questionnaire must be completed by all internees over 17 years of age.’ Men and women ranging from the resentful to the bewildered, some not even able to read English, were confronted by a long list of questions that must be answered, signed and witnessed without delay.

*

The admin office door was open but Joey waited outside, watching the slightly overweight lieutenant studying papers. Finally he looked up and indicated with a slow blink that he was available. He waited, jaws moving, gum shifting from side to side. Silently Joey dropped his documents on the desk. The lieutenant squinted at the papers, drew them towards him with the flat of his hand and glanced at them with a glazed, almost exhausted look. He glanced up, then back at the papers.

‘Okaay . . .’

Joey recognised the tone, a familiar symptom of suspicion. At the filing cabinet the lieutenant checked the papers against documents in a folder. The sight of an apparently all-American internee threw him. The officer found himself on the back foot and didn’t like the position.

He sat down across the desk, the swivel chair squeaking under heavy buttocks, and handed Joey a questionnaire, one of a pile stacked in a wire tray. Taking his time Joey studied each page carefully. He sensed the lieutenant’s growing impatience, the chair squeaking as he moved, his leg jiggling, fingers tapping the desktop as Joey read his way to the last page.

‘How d’you respond?’

‘For a start the questionnaire is crap. Would you expect anyone here in their right mind to say yes to this garbage?’

The lieutenant’s pudgy face slowly progressed from pink to a darkening crimson.

‘Watch your mouth, bud.’

‘Why?’ Joey asked pleasantly. ‘Is it because if I give the wrong responses you’ll lock me up in a stinking dump, lieutenant, with armed guards and maybe barbed wire to stop me breaking out?’

The officer’s voice was thick with held-in loathing.

‘A troublemaker like your fucking commie father. We know about Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. Pinko Pinkerton. The Washington riots. It’s all in the file.’

The unexpectedness of it rocked him. Dirt in the files about Ben? Ben the champ, the local hero, the patriotic sailor. But
of course Ben had also marched on the Capitol. With bums and degenerates.

‘Yeah. Right.’

Joey kept it carefully conversational. ‘You’ve got in the file that he served in the navy? And went to Washington with the vets, right, lieutenant? Vets who fought to save people like you, lieutenant, and then found themselves homeless? My old man was in Washington because of his brother. My uncle Charlie would have marched, but his bones were buried someplace in France. He was killed, but at least he was shot by the enemy. The vets who won the war, who went to Washington because they were starving, they were shot by you guys. Orders of General MacArthur. That’s what they call irony, lieutenant.’

Voice strangled with rage, the man said, ‘I’m putting you down as double-no.’

Joey said with quiet savagery, ‘You don’t put me down as anything. I haven’t signed yet. I asked you a question. You haven’t answered it. You can put down I’m thinking about it.’

‘You gotta respond!’

‘Fine. You have a deadline? Is there a closing date for this? Show me where it says I don’t get to think about it first if I want. In this great country of ours am I still allowed to do that?’

At the door, he paused. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Joey would sign the document, in due course. But pushing the lieutenant into apoplexy brought him a deep satisfaction.

Tule had become a dumping ground for dissident internees from other camps; a segregation centre. Each day brought new ways to show anger: the morning salute to the flag – ‘My Country ’tis of Thee’ – once sincere, now sung with bitterly ironic fervour. Anger lay like a minefield in the barracks, erupting in explosions of violence: Kazuo had seen one inmate, suspected of being an informer, beaten by his hut-mates; there were clashes with guards. And always, stories circulating.

‘Roosevelt’s reversed the policy.’

Joey looked up from his book.

‘What?’

‘Military service. We can volunteer.’

‘This is another rumour—’

‘No, it’s true.’

‘We’re not 4C enemy aliens any more? This has to be good news.’

‘You think?’

In the hut, late into the night, the others exchanged anxieties:

‘The whole thing could be a ploy.’

‘How, a ploy?’

‘To confuse us, set up guilt, fear, you name it.’

Joey lay, breathing evenly, sleep out of reach.

The trouble took various forms: meetings, disagreements of opinion, angry exchanges, unrest. A difference of opinion at a baseball game exploded into a riot, at first aimless, then vicious, as the soldiers intervened. The guards made creative use of baseball bats – ‘Hey, a ball game, and no balls needed!’. The crack of wood on skull lent a new dimension to the rules. Two strikes here and the player was not only out, but out for the count. In the mess hall there were overturned tables, smashed chairs and dishes; defiant slogans daubed on walls. An elderly man hurled himself at the barbed-wire fence in a silent declaration of despair. Ungentle guards pulled him free, tearing his clothing and flesh. Protest gatherings created mobs which spread into mass demonstrations. A fog of sour disaffection hung over the camp.

Then, weirdly, a counterpoint to the hostility, young men slowly began to come forward to sign up; some cynically, others in despair, volunteering for service to their country.

Ichir
said wearily, ‘They want to prove they’re true Americans. For “they” read “we”.’

The barber’s hut appeared to be empty. Joey paused in the doorway, and from behind the open doors of a cupboard, a voice called out questioningly.

‘Yes?’

‘I wanted a haircut, but I guess Shiro’s not around—’

‘I’ll do it.’

She came round the cupboard. Tiny, her black hair cut sharp and glossy as lacquer. Cool, unsmiling, she gestured Joey to a chair, swiftly tucked a towel around his shoulders, picked up comb and scissors and began snipping fast.

Joey was disconcerted: she could at least have asked him what sort of cut he wanted. He listened to the scissors snapping at his hair like the jaws of a hungry predator. Perhaps she was shy; perhaps he should take the initiative.

‘So, were you a hairdresser, before?’

She paused, regarding him in the mirror.

‘Do you always categorise people in this way?’

A voice as cool as her gaze. The delivery north California. Good at giving orders, he guessed.

‘Listen, I was just making conversation . . .’ Joey felt guilty. She had a right to be irritated, to resent him pushing her into the wrong pigeonhole. To keep things more general he wondered aloud if she had been at the movie show the night before.

She said, sharply, ‘I don’t like black and white movies.’ Snip.

Joey said, incredulous, ‘You mean you don’t like
any
black and white movies? But that’s most movies.’

‘Black and white movies are slow.’

‘
Slow?
’

‘Colour is more interesting.’ Snip.

He twisted round to confront her: ‘You don’t think
Citizen
Kane
is interesting?’

She had not seen
Citizen Kane
. Snip, snip.

Her skin was milk-white, eyes dark as prunes. He wondered why he was thinking of her like some kind of food display. Watching her pale hands hover around his head, steel blades flashing, he was about to ask if she had seen
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, at least it was in colour, but she might think he was treating her as a kid. Fatal error. Hard to assess her shape beneath the dark shirtwaister, but he saw she was slender, with narrow hips and long, graceful arms.

‘Okay,’ Joey said cautiously. ‘What about
The Maltese Falcon
? It’s black and white but it’s also a fantastic movie.’

She suddenly became furious: it was a
ridiculous
movie; the plot didn’t make sense and she couldn’t understand the ending.