When the Emperor Was Divine (4 page)

She called out for her mother.

Her mother reached out from her seat on the suitcase and put her hand on the girl's forehead and smoothed back her wet black hair and said, “Hush, baby,” and the girl, who still could not remember where she was, remembered that her mother had not called her baby for a long time, not since the summer White Dog had run away and not come home for a week. This was before White Dog had grown old and tired and hurt his leg on the lawn mower. This was when White Dog was still a noisy white dog that would bark at anything no matter how big that thing was. This was when the girl was still eight and her father had let her walk alone to the corner store on a Sunday with a handful of pennies while he stood on the front porch and watched. She had come home with a fat copy of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and they had sat in the kitchen drinking large glasses of steaming hot cocoa and reading the comics—first
Dick
Tracy
and
Moon Mullins
and then her favorite,
Invisible
Scarlet O'Neil—and nobody else in the house had been awake. Now she was eleven and she could not remember where she was. It was late at night and her mother was calling her baby and asking her if she was all right.

“Of course I'm all right,” said the girl. “I just want a glass of milk.” She reached out into the darkness and ran her fingers along the smooth siding of the train. “Where's White Dog?”

“We couldn't take him with us.”

“Where is he?”

“We left him at home. We're on the train.”

The girl sat up in her seat and grasped her mother's hand. “I dreamed about Papa,” she said. “He was wearing his fancy French shoes and we were in a boat going to Paris and he was singing that song again.” She began to hum because she could not remember the words.

“ ‘In the Mood,' ” her mother said.

“Yes, that's it, “ ‘In the Mood.' ”

“What kind of boat was it?” the boy whispered.

“A gondola.”

“Then you were in Venice.”

“All right,” said the girl, “let's just say that I was.” She pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert. The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage. The girl lifted the shade and pulled her brother to the window and pressed his face gently to the glass and when he saw the mustangs with their long legs and their flying manes and their sleek brown coats he let out a low moan that sounded like a cry of pain but was not. He watched the horses as they galloped toward the mountains and he said, very softly, “They are going away.” Then a soldier with a flashlight and a broom came walking down the aisle. The girl let the shade fall back against the glass and told the boy to return to his seat.

“Where's that brick?” asked the soldier. “Over here,” someone answered. The girl sat quietly listening to the soldier sweeping up the shards of broken glass. “Shades down,” she said to herself. “Shades down.” Then she closed her eyes and she slept.

SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT the train entered Utah. It crossed the barren stretch of the Great Salt Lake Desert and then the Great Salt Lake itself. The lake was dark and shallow and had no outlet to the sea. It was what it had always been—an ancient body of water where nothing ever sank—but the girl did not see it. She was sound asleep but even in her sleep the sound of the rippling water came to her. An hour later the train stopped at the station in Ogden for water and ice, and the girl, who was thirsty, still slept. She slept through Bountiful and Salt Lake City and Spanish Fork and did not open her eyes until the train arrived at Delta the next morning. When she woke she did not remember the sound of the rippling water but it was with her, without her knowing. The sound of the lake was inside of her. At Delta, armed soldiers with bayonets escorted them off the train and the girl climbed down the metal stairs one by one with her suitcase and stepped out onto solid ground. The air was still and warm and she could no longer hear the low moan of the engine or the clicking of the wheels against the iron rails.

She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “It's too bright.”

“It is unbearably bright,” said her mother.

“Keep walking, please,” said a soldier.

The boy said he was too tired to walk. His mother put down her bags and reached into her purse and gave him a piece of Chiclets gum she had been saving for weeks. He popped it into his mouth and then he followed his mother and sister between the double row of soldiers to the buses that had been waiting for them to arrive since before dawn.

They climbed onto a bus and the bus drove slowly down the shady streets of the town. They passed a courthouse and a hardware store and a diner full of hungry men eating breakfast before work. They ran through a yellow light and swerved to avoid hitting a stray dog. They passed block after block of white houses with wooden porches and neatly manicured lawns and then they were at the edge of the town. For several miles they drove past nothing but farms and alfalfa fields and the scenery was very pleasant. Then the bus turned onto a newly tarred road and drove in a straight line past the occasional clumps of greasewood and sage until it arrived at Topaz. At Topaz the bus stopped. The girl looked out the window and saw hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun. She saw telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. She saw soldiers. And everything she saw she saw through a cloud of fine white dust that had once been the bed of an ancient salt lake. The boy began to cough and the girl untied her scarf and shoved it into his hand and told him to hold it over his nose and mouth. He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl's hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert.

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE

In the beginning the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch. Above them blue skies. The hot midday sun. No trees. No shade. Birds.

It was 1942. Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father,
Oto-san.

For it was true, they all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted eyes. High cheekbones. Thick glasses. Thin lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable.

That was him, over there.

The little yellow man.

THREE TIMES A DAY the clanging of bells. Endless lines. The smell of liver drifting out across the black barrack roofs. The smell of catfish. From time to time, the smell of horse meat. On meatless days, the smell of beans. Inside the mess hall, the clatter of forks and spoons and knives. No chopsticks. An endless sea of bobbing black heads. Hundreds of mouths chewing. Slurping. Sucking. Swallowing. And over there, in the corner, beneath the flag, a familiar face.

The boy called out, “Papa,” and three men with thick metal-rimmed glasses looked up from their plates and said,
“Nan desu ka?”

What is it?

But the boy could not say what it was.

He lowered his head and skewered a small Vienna sausage. His mother reminded him, once again, not to shout out in public. And never to speak with his mouth full. Harry Yamaguchi tapped a spoon on a glass and announced that the head count would be taken on Monday evening. The boy's sister nudged him under the table, hard, with the scuffed toe of her Mary Jane. “Papa's gone,” she said.

THEY HAD BEEN ASSIGNED to a room in a barrack in a block not far from the fence. The boy. The girl. Their mother. Inside there were three iron cots and a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling. A table made out of cratewood. On top of a rough wooden shelf, an old Zenith radio they had brought with them on the train from California. A tin clock. A jar of paper flowers. A box of salt. Tacked to the wall beside a small window, a picture of Joe DiMaggio torn from a magazine. There was no running water and the toilets were a half block away.

Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio. Sometimes, in the darkness, he heard noises drifting from other rooms. The heavy thud of footsteps. The shuffling of cards. Over and over again, the creaking of springs. He heard a woman whispering, “Lower, lower,
there,
” and a man with a high voice singing,
“Auf wiederseh'n, sweetheart, auf wiederseh'n.”

Someone said, “Just say
sayonara,
Frank.”

Someone said,
“Bon soir!”

Someone said, “Please shut up, please.”

Someone else belched.

There was a window above the boy's bed, and outside were the stars and the moon and the endless rows of black barracks all lined up in the sand. In the distance, a wide empty field where nothing but sagebrush grew, then the fence and the high wooden towers. There was a guard in each tower, and he carried a machine gun and binoculars and at night he manned the searchlight. He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific.

ON THEIR FIRST DAY in the desert his mother had said, “Be careful.”

“Do not touch the barbed-wire fence,” she had said, “or talk to the guards in the towers.

“Do not stare at the sun.

“And remember, never say the Emperor's name out loud.”

The boy wore a blue baseball cap and he did not stare at the sun. He often wandered the firebreak with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking for seashells and old Indian arrowheads in the sand. Some days he saw rattlesnakes sleeping beneath the sagebrush. Some days he saw scorpions. Once he came across a horse skull bleached white by the sun. Another time, an old man in a red silk kimono with a tin pail in his hand who said he was going down to the river.

Whenever the boy walked past the shadow of a guard tower he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word.

But sometimes it slipped out anyway.

Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito.

He said it quietly. Quickly. He whispered it.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE into the desert he had slept with his head in his sister's lap and dreamed he was riding an enormous white horse by the sea. When he looked out toward the horizon he could see three black ships out on the water. The ships had sailed all the way over from the other side of the ocean. The Emperor himself had sent them. Their sails were white and square and filled with wind and their masts were straight and tall. He had watched as they slowly turned toward the shore. Then he was awake and the train was rocking from side to side and in the seat behind him a woman was quietly singing. It was dawn and his sister was sound asleep. She was wearing her yellow summer dress with the little white flowers because in the desert, where they were going, it would be summer a lot.

IT WAS NOT LIKE any desert he had read about in books. There were no palm trees here, no oases, no caravans of camels slowly winding across the dunes. There was only the wind and the dust and the hot burning sand.

In the afternoon the heat rose up from the ground in waves. The air above the barracks shimmered. It was ninety-five degrees out. One hundred. One hundred and ten. Old men sat outside on the long narrow benches, not talking, whittling away at pieces of wood as they waited for the hours to pass. The boy played marbles on the laundry room floor. He played Chinese checkers. He roamed through the barracks with the other boys in his block, playing cops and robbers and war.
Kill the Nazis! Kill the Japs!
On days when it was too hot to go out he sat in his room with a wet towel over his head and leafed through the pages of old
Life
magazines. He saw the bombed-out cities of Europe, and the Allied soldiers in Burma, fleeing to India through the hot steamy jungle. His sister lay on her cot for hours, staring, transfixed, at white majorette boots and men in their bathrobes in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. She wrote letters to her friends on the other side of the fence, telling them all she was having a good time.
Wish you were
here. Hope to hear from you soon.
Their mother darned socks by the window. She read. She made them paper kites with tails woven out of potato sack strings. She took a flower-arranging class. She learned to crochet— “It's something to do”—and for one week there were doilies under everything.

Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

“When the war is over,” the boy's mother told him, “we can pack up our things and go home.”

He asked her when she thought that might be. In a month maybe? Two months? A year, tops? She shook her head and looked out the window. Three young girls in dirty white frocks were playing ladies in the dust— “Oh, bother,” they cried out, and, “Hullo, have some tea?”—and in the distance there were ravens riding the updrafts. “There's no telling,” she said.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall by his bed lived a man and his wife and the wife's elderly mother, Mrs. Kato, who talked to herself night and day. She wore a pink flowered housedress, and tiny white slippers, and she carried a cane, and in the evening, after supper, the boy often saw her standing in her doorway with a small wicker suitcase, trying to remember the way home. Did she go left on Ward and then right on Grove? Or was it right on Ward and left on Grove? And when had they taken down all the street signs, anyway? Whose bright idea was
that
? Should she continue to wait for the bus? Or should she just start walking? And when she finally got there,
then
what?

“The daffodils,” the boy called out to her softly.

“Oh yes, of course. I must remember to plant the daffodils. And the fence still needs mending.”

She said she could hear her mother calling for her in the distance, but that lately her voice had begun to sound farther and farther away.

“I guess that's to be expected,” she said.

She said, “Oh, well,” and, “So it goes.”

She said, “There's something strange about this place, but I can't figure out what it is.”

She said, “Everyone here seems so serious.”

THE MAN SCRUBBING pots and pans in the mess hall had once been the sales manager of an import-export company in San Francisco. The janitor had owned a small nursery in El Cerrito. The cook had always been a cook.
A kitchen's a kitchen, it's all the same to me.
The waitress had worked as a live-in domestic for a wealthy family in Atherton.
The children still write to me every week
asking me when I'm going to come home.
The man standing in front of the latrines shouting out, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah,” had been a vagrant on the streets of Oakland.
That's him! The Hallelujah guy!
The old woman who did nothing but play bingo all day long had worked in the strawberry fields of Mt. Eden for twenty-five years without taking a single vacation.
Me happy, come here. Better than Mt. Eden. No cook, no work, just do laundry fine.

One evening as the boy's mother was hauling back a bucket of water from the washroom she ran into her former housekeeper, Mrs. Ueno. “When she saw me she grabbed the bucket right out of my hands and insisted upon carrying it home for me. ‘You'll hurt your back again,' she said. I tried to tell her that she no longer worked for me. ‘Mrs. Ueno,' I said, ‘here we're all equals,' but of course she wouldn't listen. When we got back to the barracks she set the bucket down by the front door and then she bowed and hurried off into the darkness. I didn't even get a chance to thank her.”

“Maybe you can thank her tomorrow,” said the boy.

“I don't even know where she
lives.
I don't even know what
day
it is.”

“It's Tuesday, Mama.”

AT NIGHT he woke up crying out, “Where am I?” Sometimes he felt a hand on his shoulder and it was his sister telling him it was all just a bad dream. “Go back to sleep, baby,” she'd whisper, and he would. Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes he heard the wind blowing through the sagebrush and he remembered he was in the desert but he could not remember how long he had been there, or why. Sometimes he worried he was there because he'd done something horribly, terribly wrong. But then when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him. It could be anything. Something he'd done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister's pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he'd done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him. Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling “Begin the Beguine” through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet. “Here it comes, champ,” his father would say, “one hobo egg sandwich.”

HIS SISTER HAD LONG SKINNY LEGS and thick black hair and wore a gold French watch that had once belonged to their father. Whenever she went out she covered her head with a wide-brimmed Panama hat so her face would not get too dark from the sun. “Nobody will look at you,” she said to the boy, “if your face is too dark.”

“Nobody's looking at me anyway,” he replied.

Late at night, after the lights had gone out, she told him things. Beyond the fence, she said, there was a dry riverbed and an abandoned smelter mine and at the edge of the desert there were jagged blue mountains that rose up into the sky. The mountains were farther away than they seemed. Everything was, in the desert. Everything except water. “Water,” she said, “is just a mirage.”

A mirage was not there at all.

The mountains were called Big Drum and Little Drum, Snake Ridge, the Rubies. The nearest town over was Delta.

In Delta, she said, you could buy oranges.

In Delta there were green leafy trees and blond boys on bikes and a hotel with a verandah where the waiters served ice-cold drinks with tiny paper umbrellas.

“What else?” asked the boy.

In Delta, she said, there was shade.

She told him about the ancient salt lake that had once covered all of Utah and parts of Nevada. This was thousands of years ago, she said, during the Ice Age. There were no fences then. And no names. No Utah. No Nevada. Just lots and lots of water. “And where we are now?”

“Yes?”

“Six hundred feet under.”

ALL NIGHT LONG he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lake floating above the floor of the desert. Its surface was calm and blue. Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming through his fingers and when he looked up through the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred million miles above his head.

In the morning he woke up longing for a glass of Coke. Just one, with lots of ice, and a straw. He'd sip it slowly. He'd make it last a long long time.

A day. A week. A year, even.

EVERY FEW DAYS the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, “From Papa, With Love.”