When the Emperor Was Divine (10 page)

LATE AT NIGHT, in the barracks, we used to lie awake on our cots and discuss chocolate. We used to dream of milk shakes, and sodas, and toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We used to dream of home.
Did they miss us?
Were they talking about us? Had they even noticed we were
gone? Would they look at us funny when we came back because
of where we had been?
And so it seemed like a dream to be able to walk down to the corner store and buy a bar of candy and an ice-cold bottle of Coke. The girl behind the counter was older now, and prettier. She wore dark red lipstick and was swaying back and forth to a song on the radio whose words we did not yet know. When she saw us she turned down the music and stared.

“Coke's still a nickel,” she said softly.

On our way home we looked for the place on the sidewalk where we had once carved our initials but that place was no longer there. We drank our Coca-Colas. We ate our chocolates and tossed the wrappers into the wind. We plucked a handful of flowers from someone's front yard. We counted Okies on the street. We counted Negroes. We counted gold stars in our neighbors' front windows. At the corner we stopped and bought a copy of the
Gazette
for our mother, who had sworn off the papers long ago.
All that war news just wears out my eyes.

But now, now she could not get enough of the headlines.

Shirley Temple had just gotten
married
?

“Impossible!”

No nylon stockings in the stores until spring?

“If I'd known I never would have bothered to come back.”

And no two-way stretch girdles?

We saw her look down at her stomach in despair.

“Just suck it in!”

“What do you think I've been
doing
all these years?”

We tossed the flowers into her lap and ran back out onto the street.

THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY had sent each person home with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash. “It doesn't add up,” our mother had said. Three years. Five months. Twenty-five dollars. Why not thirtyfive, or forty? Why not one hundred? Why even bother at all? Twenty-five dollars, we later learned, was the same amount given to criminals on the day they were released from prison. With this money our mother bought us each one new pair of shoes a full size too large. “You'll grow into them,” she told us as we stuffed wads of tissue into the toes. She bought us new underthings, and washcloths, and a thick cotton mattress that we took turns sleeping on in the front room at the foot of the stairs until the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window. After the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window we dragged the mattress upstairs and slept in the room that faced the back of the house—the room with the words on the walls. Over the words our mother taped pictures of flowers torn from an old nursery calendar, and across the windows she hung some split rice-sack curtains so no one could see inside, and in the evening, when it began to grow dark, she wandered through the front rooms of the house turning off the lights one by one so no one would know we were home.

EVERY DAY, all around us, more and more men were coming home from the war. They were fathers and brothers and husbands. They were cousins and neighbors. They were sons. They arrived, by the thousands, on the huge battle-scarred ships that sailed into the bay. Some of them had seen combat on Okinawa and New Guinea. Some had fought on Guadalcanal. Some had made D-day landings in the Marshalls, on Saipan, Tinian, Luzon, and Leyte. Some had been found, more dead than alive, in prison camps in Manchuria and Ofuna at the end of the war.

They shoved bamboo splinters under our fingernails and
made us kneel for hours.

We had to stand at attention with our hands at our sides while
they beat us.

We were just numbers to them, mere slaves to the Emperor.
We didn't even have names. I was 326.
San byaku ni ju roku.

We had to make deep bows, even to the coolies and the rickshaw runners.

If we go easy on the Japs we're crazy.

Best day of my life? The day Harry dropped that beautiful
bomb.

There were victory parades in their honor, with horses and trumpets and great showers of confetti. Mayors on windy platforms stood up and gave speeches, and children in red, white, and blue waved the flag. Squadrons of returning B-29s swooped down out of the sky and flew overhead in perfect formation as down below, on the streets, the crowds roared and wept and welcomed the good men home.

We kept up with the stories in the papers.
More Rescued Prisoners Tell of Japan's Torture Camps. Some Forced to
Wear Metal Bits, Others Starved to Death. Trapped Yanks
Doused with Gasoline and Turned into Human Torches.
We listened to the interviews on the radio.
Tell me, soldier, has
it made a big di ference to you, losing your leg?
We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy.

We were guilty.

Just put it behind you.

No good.

Let it go.

A dangerous people.

You're free now.

Who could never be trusted again.

All you have to do is
behave.

On the street we tried to avoid our own reflections wherever we could. We turned away from shiny surfaces and storefront windows. We ignored the passing glances of strangers.
What kind of “ese” are you, Japanese or
Chinese?

AT SCHOOL our new teachers were kind to us, and the students in our classes polite, but at lunchtime they would not sit with us, or invite us to join in their games, and not a single one of our old friends from before— friends who had once shouted out to us,
Your house or
mine?
every afternoon, after school, and in whose backyards we had dug holes and built forts, friends whose mothers (tall, slender women in sparkling white kitchens) had invited us to stay for supper (“We'll call your mother”) and whose fathers, on clear nights, had shown us the stars (“Now stand still and look
up
!”), friends with whom we had gone skating, every winter, at IceLand, and whose birthdays (Jimmy Buchanan, May 26, Edison Wong, October 3, the Trudeau twins, Cora and Dora, June 29) we still remember, to this day—came up to us to say, “Welcome back,” or “Good to see you,” or even seemed to remember who we were.

Perhaps they were embarrassed—we had written to them
(hello, how are you, it's very hot here in the desert)
but only one person (Elizabeth, Elizabeth, where had she gone?) had bothered to write back.

Or maybe they were afraid. (Later, we would learn that the postman, Mr. DeNardo, had told them that anyone who wrote to us was guilty of helping the enemy. “Those people bombed Pearl Harbor! They deserved what they got.”)

Perhaps they had never expected us to come back and had put us out of their minds once and for all long ago. One day we were there and the next day, poof, our names had been crossed off the roll books, our desks and lockers, reassigned, we were gone.

And so we mostly kept to ourselves. We moved silently through the halls with our eyes fixed on some imaginary point far off in the distance. If there was whispering behind us—and there was—we did not hear it. If the other students called out to us unkindly—and they did, not often, but often enough—we did not hear them. In class we sat in the back where we hoped we would not be noticed.
(Keep your head down and don't cause
any trouble,
we'd been told, weeks before, in a mess hall lecture on “How to Behave in the Outside World.”
Speak
only English. Do not walk down the street in groups of more
than three, or gather in restaurants in groups of more than five.
Do not draw attention to yourselves in any way.)
We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we knew the answers. We followed the rules. We took tests. We wrote compositions.
The Happiest Day of My Life.
What I Did Over My Summer Vacation. What I Would Like to
Be When I Grow Up
(a fireman, a movie star, I'd like to be you!). We stared out the windows. From time to time we glanced at the clock (soon the bell would ring and it would be after school and we could go home). Always, we were polite.

We said yes and no and no problem.

We said thank you.

Go ahead.

After you.

Don't mention it.

Don't worry about it.

Don't even think about it.

When our teachers asked us if everything was all right we nodded our heads and said, yes, of course, everything was fine.

If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I'm sorry I touched your arm, I didn't mean to, it was an accident, I didn't see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk, I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake, I was standing too close, I wasn't watching where I was going, somebody pushed me from behind, I never wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I promise, I swear . . . ).

After school we gathered our books and walked home along the clean, sunlit streets, past the yellow fire hydrants and the bright green lawns now covered with leaves. Sometimes groups of boys would appear out of nowhere and circle us slowly on their bicycles without saying a word. Sometimes we heard whistling behind us but when we turned around there was nobody there. Sometimes one of us would suddenly stop on the sidewalk and point to a neighbor's front window. Wasn't that our mother's Electrolux Mrs. Leahy was pushing back and forth across her living room floor? Didn't the Gilroys' mohair sofa look awfully familiar? Hadn't we seen that rolltop desk in Mr. Thigpen's library somewhere before? One day we even thought we saw our father himself flapping his arms up and down like a stork in Mrs. Murphy's pale pink bedroom—what on earth was he doing over
there
?
—
but it was only Chang, the Murphys' new houseboy, plumping pillows.

AT NIGHT we often heard footsteps on the stairs. The sudden creaking of floorboards. Strange sounds coming from the kitchen. Somebody was opening the cupboard. Somebody was raiding the icebox. Somebody was whistling to the tune, “Let me straddle my old saddle beneath the western sky. . . .” Somebody was tapping, softly, at the back door (It's
him
!). We'd go out into the hall and see our mother standing in the darkness by the window in her thin cotton nightgown, peering out through a gap in the curtains. “Just keeping an eye on things,” she'd say. Or she would motion us over and point to the dark empty spot in our front yard. “Where's my rosebush?” she'd whisper.

During the daytime she spent hours scrubbing the layers of dirt off the floors. “Who
were
these people?” she asked us again and again. She dusted and swept and cooked. She washed the windows with lemon juice and vinegar and replaced the broken glass panes with tin squares. On sunny afternoons she went out into the backyard in her work gloves and her floppy straw hat and she raked up the fallen leaves into piles, which we jumped in and scattered once more to the wind. She cleared the weeds from the overgrown pathways. She pruned back the hedges. She tore out the rotting trellis from the middle of the garden, which had seeded itself and gone wild. Deep down in the underbrush, she found things. A doll's head. A lady's black silk stocking. A stone Buddha lying facedown in the dirt. “So
that's
where you were.” We lifted it for her gently, brushed off the fat belly, saw the enormous round head, uptilted, still laughing.

In the evening, as darkness fell and casseroles rose and men did or did not come home from the office, we often found her sitting on the high metal stool in the kitchen with her back to the window, slowly filing her nails.

“So quiet,” she'd say.

WE USED TO LIVE in the desert. We used to wake, every morning, to the blast of a siren. We used to stand in line for our meals three times a day. We used to stand in line for our mail. We used to stand in line to get coal. We used to stand in line whenever we had to shower or use the latrine. We used to hear the wind hissing day and night through the sagebrush. We used to hear coyotes. We used to hear every word spoken by our neighbors on the other side of the thin barrack wall.
Where's my razor, where's my comb, who took my toothpaste
. . .
?
We used to steal lumber from the lumber pile when the guards were not looking. We used to steal gum from the canteen. We used to place nails on the tire tracks left behind by the Jeeps that made the rounds at the end of the day. We used to go swimming in the irrigation ditch. We used to play marbles. We used to play hopscotch. We used to play war. I'll be MacArthur and you
be the enemy!
We used to try and imagine what it would be like when we finally returned home.

Our phone would ring off the hook. (“How
was
it?”)

Neighborhood ladies bearing angel food cakes would line up at our front door to welcome us back (“Yoo hoo, we know you're in there!”).

On Saturday afternoons we'd arrive at the picture show just as the lights were going down and make everyone stand up in their seats to let us pass by (“Excuse me, pardon me, pardon me . . .”).

On Sundays we'd spend all day in the park flying kites.

We would accept all invitations. Go everywhere. Do everything, to make up for all the years we had missed while we were away. Yes, the world would be ours once again: warm days, blue skies, the endless green lawns, cold frosted glasses of pink lemonade, bicycles skidding across the gravel, little white dogs on long leashes with their noses pressed hard to the ground, the streetlamps coming on every evening at dusk, in the distance the clang of the trolley cars, small voices crying out,
No, I
won't,
the sound of screen doors slamming, the quick patter of footsteps running across driveways, mothers with wet hands—Mrs. Myer, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Thomas Hale Cavanaugh—stomping out onto front porches and shouting,
Just wait 'til your father gets home!
BUT OF COURSE it did not happen like that. The days grew suddenly cool. The skies turned damp and gray. Children everywhere picked up their socks. They cleaned their rooms. Mr. Myer never came home (shot down on his eighth raid over Rabaul). Mr. Woodruff never came home (disappeared in Bataan during the first months of the war). Mr. Cavanaugh came home but he was not the same man—the man with the telescope who had once shown us the stars—as before.