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“I don't know,” he says when Karl enters. Karl sees the questionnaire forms spread out in front of him. “If I forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, aren't I saying that I used to
have
allegiance to him? Is it some kind of trick question?”

Hisao Takagawa has a shock of white hair on the top of his narrow head. For twenty years he owned and ran a clothing store on Fillmore Street. Now the store is shuttered and the inventory sold to competitors for a fraction of its value.

“For you,” Hisao goes on, “this is not so bad. You are a citizen, not even married to a Japanese. There's no chance they'll deport you.”

“
Ot
ō
san
,” Karl says, “they aren't going to deport you.”

Karl has always
been impatient with his parents' nervous self-defensiveness, their reluctance to trust non-­Japanese. Karl was born in California. His childhood memories are filled with San Francisco's bright and shifting light, its banks of silver fog and rows of pastel-colored houses. Their neighborhood was full of
Issei
and
Nissei
, speaking Japanese, eating the foods—
mikan
at new year,
sunamono
,
manju
—and playing the music of their old homeland. But he also remembers white people and black people and Chinese living only streets away.

Once or twice when he was a teenager, he was called
chink
by white men in the street, older men with heavy faces and clothes more worn than his. He ignored them, already he was interested in Communism, in the Party and its promise of a future where race and class and countries would be swept away. And where would this great change take place if not in America?

Hisao shrugs:
who
knows?
He clears his throat. “I have heard,” he says, “a rumor.”

“That I am going to answer
no
to questions 27 and 28.”

“Is it true?”

Karl nods and Hisao sits back and folds his hands over his knees. “Well,” he says. “Please think about your mother and me before you make your answers. That is all I ask.”

“
Ot
ō
san
, my decision doesn't have anything to do with you. You won't be punished for what I do. It doesn't work like that.”

“Is that right? How does it work if you know so much about it? Would you have thought that you could find yourself where you are today?”

Later that evening
Karl is eating dinner in the mess hall, when out of the corner of his eye he sees someone enter the room and come toward him. He looks over and sees it is Keo Sasaki, followed by a couple of other men whose names he does not know.

Mr. Sasaki owned a big dry-goods store in his old life. There is talk that he ran a bookmaking operation, too, but no one knows for sure if this is true. Since evacuation, he has become the self-appointed spokesman for the internees, and a delegate to the Japanese American Citizens League from the camp. The administrators talk to Keo Sasaki if they want to know what people in the camp are thinking. Karl has heard him say that the American Japanese are fortunate that the government brought them to the relocation centers for their own protection, that it has provided them with work and schools and housing at a time of national crisis.

Now he comes
to where Karl is sitting.

“Mr. Takagawa,” he says. “Would you walk outside with me?”

They go slowly,
making a circuit around the building. Mr. Sasaki takes cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coat and offers one to Karl who accepts it. He is not afraid of Keo Sasaki, he tells himself.

At last Mr. Sasaki says: “I heard something and I want to find out from you if it is true.”

“What did you hear?” Karl asks. He knows the answer perfectly well, but to admit that would be to confirm the suspicion.

“You are going to refuse to swear your allegiance to our country.” He takes a pull on his cigarette and exhales smoke.

“The way I answer those questions is no one's business but mine,” Karl says.

Mr. Sasaki sighs. “I wish,” he says, “that were true. I wish none of us had to answer any of these questions. We wouldn't be here at all. We'd be at home. Your father would be running his store, I would be running mine . . .

“Unfortunately, we are at war. Normal considerations have to be suspended. Think about this for a minute. We have said to the authorities here and to the War Relocation Office that we shouldn't be imprisoned because we are loyal Americans. How will it look if, when they ask us, some of our young men refuse to pledge their loyalty?

“Don't you want to be allowed to leave this place? Think about the welfare of your people.”

Karl feels the anger tighten in his face. “My people aren't only Japanese,” he says. “I act in solidarity with anyone who tries to do what is right when other people try to convince them to do what is easy.”

· · ·

Mr. Sasaki
stops walking. “Is that really what you think?” he says, wearily. “Have you looked around? I don't see very many of your non-Japanese brothers in this camp. I didn't see them protesting when we were sent away last year. On the contrary, I saw them lining up to buy your father's stock for nothing and live in your vacated apartment.”

His voice has risen in anger, but now he resumes walking at his slow, meditative pace. “I understand you are a man of principle,” he says. “Just remember that I am not the only one who knows what you mean to do. Other people might not be so tolerant, you know. People get angry, get frustrated and then who can say what could occur? I dislike the idea of anyone being hurt.”

Mr. Sasaki drops the butt of his cigarette onto the frozen ground where it rolls and makes a black dash on the frost. Then he turns and walks away without another word.

Karl goes back to
the mess hall to finish eating. No one asks him what Keo Sasaki said. Leigh takes May to get ready for bed and he stays at the table talking and smoking with a few men in the light and warmth.

As he is walking back to Building No. 147 he notices that he is being followed. There are three figures, maybe four walking behind him. Karl walks faster and so do they. He turns left down one of the rows of cabins. They turn left, too.

He stops and turns to face them. Now he counts five in all.

“What do you want?” he says loudly, hoping that people in the surrounding buildings will hear.

“Are you Karl Takagawa?” one figure asks.

“Yes,” he says. He stands up straight. “What do you want?”

The one who spoke approaches and Karl recognizes the young man, a skinny kid with slicked-back hair, though he does not know his name.

“We wanted to tell you,” the young man says, “that we are going to answer
no
. We've decided. Why should we go into the army now? We have to stand up for ourselves.”

Karl looks around at the others for the first time. They are all nodding and in the near-dark he can see that they are smiling. He laughs out loud with relief and claps the slick-haired leader on the back.

“Well done,” he says. “Well done. That's great. We'll show them.”

But later,
when Karl tells Leigh what Mr. Sasaki said to him, she sits down abruptly on their bed like someone has let go of the strings that were holding her upright.

“He's just a trumped-up old windbag,” Karl says. “It doesn't mean anything.”

Leigh says, “I heard that if you say
no
you might get sent away. To another camp. Is that true?”

“I don't know.”

“But you heard about it, too?”

“Yes. I heard about it.”

“And you didn't tell me?” He does not reply to this. Leigh looks away from him, and he can tell that she is trying not to cry.

That night
Karl cannot sleep. Eventually he gets out of bed and feels his way across the room. By touch he finds his coat and cigarettes. He opens the door and steps outside. The only lights are the arc lamps on the guard towers and over the main gate.

He sits on the front stoop and smokes. After a minute, he hears the door creak open behind him. May is standing there.

“I can't sleep,” she says. “I want to sit with you.”

“All right, just for a minute.” He opens one side of his coat and she curls against him.

“Daddy, why won't Doreen play with me?” May asks.

Oh, dear. Doreen is Keo Sasaki's niece. How can he explain this mess in terms a six-year-old can understand?

“Well,” he starts, “Do you think that you should do what is right even if other people don't like it?”

“Yes,” May says.

“So I made a decision that some people don't like.”

“I see,” May says. Her voice is sleepy. “I wish that Doreen would stop being mean to me.”

“She will,” he says, hoping he sounds like he is sure.

The next
day, the last before the forms are due, everyone is subdued.

When Karl comes back to change his shirt before supper, he finds Leigh sitting on the front steps of Building No. 147 looking distraught.

“I can't find May. She didn't come back from school with the other kids.”

He can tell that she's imagining the worst: an accident or some harm visited on May because of Karl. He goes to Leigh and takes her hand.

“Don't worry,” he says. “She can't be far. You stay in case she comes back here. I'll go and find her.”

He searches
among the cabins. He calls May's name. He asks any children he meets if they've seen her. He knocks on the doors of the cabins where her playmates' families sleep. No one has seen her.

It is already beginning to get darker and colder. What if she has fallen and hurt herself? What if she is hiding, scared because of something the other children said or did?

Some of the
people he asks come out to help him search. Hana Sumiyoshi puts on her husband's big overcoat since she does not have one of her own. Helen Nakamura, who works in the mess hall where they eat. The guys from his work detail, even the ex-plumber. Some of the children May plays with after school, some adults he doesn't know. Soon there is a big group of them hunting through the cabins altogether.

It feels like
some kind of parade, some kind of celebration, all of them out with flashlights and hurricane lamps that shine gold in the gathering blue-gray dark. Still there is no sign of May.

Finally,
a little boy tells him that he saw a girl and a boy going toward the main gate of the camp a short while before. Karl sets off in that direction.

As he comes in sight of the gate, he notices that both the sentries have left their posts, which is strange. He keeps going toward the edge of the camp, looking for some sign of the children. Then he sees where the sentries have gone. They are over where the little stream runs along the boundary fence, standing among the gray skeletons of bushes on its banks. It is almost completely dark now, but they are illuminated by the arc lamps that shine along the boundary fence to prevent escapes: two white men in mud-colored uniforms, long wool coats, wool hats under their helmets.

They are looking down at something in the ditch.

Karl is behind them, so he cannot see their faces, and they have not heard him approach; he is perhaps twenty-five feet from them, but the wind blows away the sound of his footsteps. He hesitates. He does not want to seem to have been sneaking up on them. They are armed, after all.

Then, while
he is deciding what to do, he sees one of the sentries nudge the other with his elbow:
hey, watch this
. From the holster on his belt, the man draws out his pistol. With a big exaggerated movement that uses his whole arm, he aims it at something in the stream bed in front of him, something Karl cannot see.

Karl stands rooted to the spot. His throat has gone dry. Is it an animal the man is aiming at? A tin can stuck in the ice? The man is still poised as if he's going to shoot, as if he's looking for just the right angle from which to fire.

After a little while, the other man seems to grow uncomfortable. He reaches over and pushes the barrel of the pistol down toward the ground. The first man laughs and holsters his gun. Then both men turn and walk back toward their posts at the main gate.

Karl, standing
in the dark, watches them come toward him. He thinks that at any moment they might see him. But the darkness is full now and they pass by about fifteen feet from him without knowing it.

When they are gone, he approaches the place where they had stood. He looks down toward the stream. And he sees, as he expected, as he hoped he would not, the children.

In the spilled
arc light, he can just make them out: May and a boy about her age. They are absorbed in looking at the great blue-white icicles that are hanging over the entrance to the culvert. They have noticed nothing.

· · ·

May looks around
when she hears his footsteps coming down the bank. Her eyes are wide in the dimming light. Karl grabs her by the hand, yanks her around to face him.

“Don't you ever, ever run off like that again,” he says. He takes both children by the hand and marches them up the bank and back across the snowfield to where they sleep.

Leigh sends the boy, Ken Ozu, back to his family and puts May to bed early as punishment. She cries herself to sleep and they sit there listening to her cry, talking in whispers.

“Where did she go?” Leigh asks.

“She was looking at the icicles.” Karl sees again the children at the culvert mouth, the guards. He takes a breath and when he lets it out, it is a sob.

Leigh looks
at him.

“What's wrong?” she asks.