When the Emperor Was Divine (6 page)

You've been brought here for your own protection, they were told.

It was all in the interest of national security.

It was a matter of military necessity.

It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.

THE SCHOOL WAS OPENED in mid-October. Classes were held in an unheated barrack at the far end of Block 8 and in the morning it was sometimes so cold the boy could not feel his fingers or toes and his breath came out in small white puffs. Textbooks had to be shared, and paper and pencils were often in short supply.

Every morning, at Mountain View Elementary, he placed his hand over his heart and recited the pledge of allegiance. He sang “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” and “My country, 'tis of thee” and he shouted out “Here!” at the sound of his name. His teacher was Mrs. Delaney. She had short brown hair and smooth creamy skin and a husband named Hank who was a sergeant in the Marines. Every week he sent her a letter from the front lines in the Pacific. Once, he even sent her a grass skirt. “Now when am I ever going to wear a grass skirt?” she asked the class.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Or after recess.”

“Put it on right now!”

The first week of school they learned all about the
Nina
and the
Pinta
and the
Santa Maria,
and Squanto and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They wrote down the names of the states in neat cursive letters across lined sheets of paper. They played hangman and twenty questions. In the afternoon, during current events, they listened to Mrs. Delaney read out loud to them from the newspaper.
The First Lady is visiting the Queen in London.
The Russians are still holding in Stalingrad. The Japs are
massing on Guadalcanal.

“What about Burma?” the boy asked.

The situation in Burma, she told the class, was bleak.

LATE AT NIGHT he heard the sound of the door opening, and footsteps crossing the floor, and then his sister was suddenly there by the window, flipping her dress up high over her head.

“You asleep?”

“Just resting.” He could smell her hair, and the dust, and salt, and he knew she'd been out there, in the night, where it was dark.

She said, “Miss me?” She said, “Turn down the radio.” She said, “I won a nickel at bingo tonight. Tomorrow we'll go to the canteen and buy you a Coca-Cola.”

He said, “I'd like that. I'd like that a lot.”

She dropped down onto the cot next to his. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did tonight.”

“I wrote Papa a postcard.”

“What else?”

“Licked a stamp.”

“Do you know what bothers me most? I can't remember his face sometimes.”

“It was sort of round,” said the boy. Then he asked her if she wanted to listen to some music and she said yes—she always said yes—and he turned on the radio to the big band channel. They heard a trumpet and some drums and then Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Martha Tilton singing, “So many memories, sometimes I think I'll cry. . . .”

IN THE DREAM there was always a beautiful wooden door. The beautiful wooden door was very small—the size of a pillow, say, or an encyclopedia. Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see.

For the Emperor was holy and divine. A god.

You could not look him in the eye.

In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God.

Only something always went wrong. The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it. Or maybe a bell was ringing somewhere—somewhere in Nevada or Peleliu or maybe it was just some crazy gong bonging in Saipan—and the nights were growing colder, the sound of the scrabbling claws was fainter now, fainter than ever before, and it was October, he was miles from home, and his father was not there.

THEY HAD COME for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. “Grab your toothbrush,” they'd said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up, and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.

Come on. Come on. You're coming with us.

We just need to ask your husband a few questions.

Into the car, Papa-san.

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth's, he was sure of it.

Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

THE NEXT MORNING his sister had wandered through the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

“The edge of
my
bed,” their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy's uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor's army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. “From now on,” she said, “we're counting on our fingers.”

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. “No more rice balls,” she said. “And if anyone asks, you're Chinese.”

The boy had nodded. “Chinese,” he whispered. “I'm Chinese.”

“And I,” said the girl, “am the Queen of Spain.”

“In your dreams,” said the boy.

“In my dreams,” said the girl, “I'm the King.”

IN CHINA the men wore their hair in long black pig-tails and the ladies hobbled around on tiny broken feet. In China there were people so poor they had to feed their newborn babies to the dogs. In China they ate grass for breakfast and for lunch they ate cats.

And for dinner?

For dinner, in China, they ate dogs.

These were a few of the things the boy knew about China.

LATER, HE SAW CHINESE, real Chinese—Mr. Lee of Lee's Grocers and Don Wong who owned the laundry on Shattuck—on the street wearing buttons that said, I AM CHINESE, and CHINESE, PLEASE. Later, a man stopped him on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth's and said, “Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I'm a Jap!”

Just to set the record straight.

But by then the man was already gone.

Later, there were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m.

And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.

Later, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden.

Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY went up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.

ALL THROUGH OCTOBER the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.

A dust storm would blow for hours, and sometimes even days, and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it would stop, and for a few seconds the world was perfectly silent. Then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking, and from out of nowhere a flock of white birds would mysteriously appear in the sky.

THE FIRST SNOWS FELL, and then melted, and then there was rain. The alkaline earth could not absorb any water and the ground quickly turned to mud. Black puddles stood on the gravel paths and the schools were shut down for repairs.

There was nothing to do now and the days were long and empty. The boy marked them off one by one on the calendar with giant red X's. He practiced fancy tricks on the yo-yo: Around the World, Walk the Dog, the Turkish Army. He received a letter from his father written on thin lined sheets of paper.
Of
course
we have toothpaste
in Lordsburg. How else do you expect us to brush our teeth?
His father thanked him for the postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle. He said he was fine. Everything was fine. He was sure they would see each other one day soon. Be good to your mother, he wrote. Be patient.
And remember, it's better to bend than to break.

Not once did he mention the war.

HIS FATHER HAD PROMISED to show him the world. They'd go to Egypt, he'd said, and climb the Pyramids. They'd go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They'd see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they'd glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola.

“The moon above,” he sang, “is yours and mine. . . .”

THE DAY AFTER THE FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father's hair in the bathtub. He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—
no peeking,
was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone. “I should have taken it with me,” he said to himself. He worried that there were large messy people now living in his old room who played cards night and day and spilled sticky brown drinks all over the floor. He worried that the FBI had returned to the house to search one more time for contraband.
We forgot to check under the floorboards.
He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.

FROM TIME TO TIME they heard rumors of spies. Takizawa, people whispered, was a government informer. Possibly a Korean. Not to be trusted.
So be
careful what you say.
Yamaguchi had close ties to the administration. Ishimoto had been attacked late one night behind the latrines by three masked men carrying lead pipes.
They say he was providing the FBI with the names
of pro-Japan disloyals.

“WHAT DO I miss the most? The sound of the trees at night . . . also, chocolate.”

“And plums, Mama. You miss plums.”

“That's right, I miss plums. I'll
always
miss plums.”

“Maybe not always.”

“True, maybe not. There's something that's been bothering me, though.”

“What is it?”

“Did I leave the porch light on or off?”

“On.”

“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?”

“You always turned off the stove.”

“Did I?”

“Every time.”

“Did we even
have
a stove?”

“Of course we had a stove.”

“That's right. The Wedgewood. I used to be quite the cook once, you know.”

SLOWLY THE BOY SPUN the dial. He heard organ music playing on the Salt Lake City station. Then rhumba music. A swing band. An ad for Dr. Fisher's tablets for intestinal sluggishness. “Folks,” a man asked, “do you feel headachy and pepless in the morning?” “Nope,” said the boy. Then the news came on, and the Western Task Force was landing in Morocco, and the Central, at Oran, and in the Pacific Islands the American forces were dying all over the place.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he'd take a direct hit over Leyte and he'd have to eject. He'd float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he'd say, and then they'd shake hands.

NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she'd be bleeding. “It'll be
red,
” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete's foot—“He
showed
me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.