When the Emperor Was Divine (8 page)

THE WINTER SEEMED to last forever. There were outbreaks of flu and diarrhea and frequent shortages of coal. They had been assigned only two army blankets per person and at night the boy often fell asleep shivering. His hands were red and chapped from the cold. His throat was always sore. His sister left the barracks early in the morning and did not return until long after dark. She was always in a rush now. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. “Where are you going?” “Out.” She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair. One day he saw her standing in line at the mess hall in her Panama hat and she hardly seemed to recognize him at all.

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea—that was another time, a different year.

WHO WAS WINNING the war? Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. “Tell me when it's over,” she said.

On days when there was hot water she went to the laundry room and washed all their clothes on the wooden washboard. Otherwise she had no tasks. She did not apply for a job as a nurse's aide at the hospital, or as a timekeeper down on the project farm. The pay— sixteen dollars a month—was not worth it, she said. She did not give blood to the Red Cross or sit with the other mothers knitting wool socks and mufflers for the GIs who were fighting for freedom overseas.

Most days she did not leave the room at all.

She sat by the stove for hours, not talking. In her lap lay a half-finished letter. An unopened book. She wore a thick woolen scarf around her head to keep in the heat. A pair of baggy trousers. A heavy sweater. When the dinner bell rang she sat up with a start. “What is it?” she asked. “Who's there?” In her mind there were always men at the door.
We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
She would stare down at her hands in her lap, as though surprised to find them still there. “Sometimes I don't know if I'm awake or asleep.”

“You're awake,” the boy would tell her.

SHE SAID she no longer had any appetite. Food bored her. “Go ahead and eat without me,” she said. The boy brought back food for her from the mess hall—a plate full of beans, a mound of pickled cabbage—and pressed a fork into her hand. But before it had even reached her mouth she stopped and stared out the window. “What is it?” he asked her. “Tell me what you want. Do you want rice?”

She said she didn't want rice. She didn't want anything anymore. Not a thing.

But every once in a while she got a faraway look in her eyes and he knew she was thinking of some other place. A better place. “Just once,” she told him, “I'd like to look out the window and see the sea.”

ONE DAY she said she couldn't bear it anymore. The wind. The dust. The endless waiting. The couple next door constantly fighting. She hung a white sheet from a rope and called it a curtain and behind the white curtain she lay down on her cot and she closed her eyes and she slept. She dreamed. Of warm nights in Kagoshima and chirping bell crickets and red paper lanterns drifting one by one down the river. “I was a girl again. I was five years old and fishing for trout with my father.”

“What kind of fishing pole?” asked the boy. “Was it bamboo?”

For the first time in months he thought he saw her smile.

“Yes it was,” she said. “Bamboo. Bamboo.”

IN THE HOUSE where his mother was born there were rice paper windows and sliding wooden doors and tatami mats that lay side by side on the bare wooden floors. In the evening she would catch fireflies in the rice paddies and bring them home in a brown paper bag. All night long she would sit at her desk and practice writing Chinese characters by the fireflies' pale glowing light.

She said she'd had six older sisters and one younger brother who'd died of scarlet fever when he was four. “I still think of him every day,” she said. She said that once a year, on her birthday, her mother would make her rice with red azuki beans. “That was a treat,” she said, and then she grew quiet. She closed her eyes and lay very still on the cot. She lay there for a long long time, breathing slowly in and out until the boy could no longer tell if she was awake or asleep.

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE they had left for Tanforan he had helped her bury the silver in the garden beneath the statue of the fat laughing Buddha. It was spring, and the earth was black and damp and full of worms. He had watched them squirming in the moonlight.

“Hurry up,” his mother had said.

He had touched the worms with his shovel. Some of them he had cut in half. Then the moon disappeared and a light rain was falling and water was dripping down through the leaves and the branches and onto his mother's face.

But even before the rain, he remembered now, her face had been wet.

“WHEN I FIRST MET your father I wanted to be with him all the time.”

“I know what you mean.”

“If I was away from him for even five minutes, I'd start to miss him. I'd think,
He's never coming back. I'll
never see him again.
But after a while I stopped being so afraid. Things change.”

“I guess so.”

“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We'd just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. ‘Next time I will,' he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was,
Now he'll always be thirsty.
”

“They probably gave him a drink at the station.”

“I should have brought it to him.”

“You didn't know.”

“Even now, in my dreams, he's still searching for water.”

IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy thought he heard a sound. The steady thwack of a rope against dirt. He sat up and looked out the window and saw his sister jumping rope in the moonlight in her yellow summer dress. Her legs were long and thin. Her knees were scabbed. Her calves were pitted with scars from the sand and grit that blew night and day in the wind. She shouldn't be wearing dresses, he thought to himself.

He went out and stood to one side of the door in the darkness. She did not see him and continued to jump. First on one leg, then on the other, then with her arms crossing and uncrossing until the rope pulled up short on her shoe and she tripped. She stomped her foot once in the dirt and tossed down the rope. “You better come in now,” he said quietly. “You'll catch cold.”

She looked over at him. “How long have you been standing there?”

“A long time.”

“How did I look?”

“Good. You're a good jumper.”

“I'm terrible. I don't even deserve to hold the rope.”

He walked over to where she was standing and picked up the rope and looked at it. It was white and frayed. A piece of old clothesline she must have cut down from a pole. He imagined a line of white sheets sailing up into the air and out beyond the fence. “You better come in now,” he said again.

“I'm not here.”

He did not answer her.

“I'm a terrible jumper.”

“You're awful.”

“The worst.”

He held out the rope to her. “Take it,” he said.

She grabbed one end of the rope and with the other end held tightly in his hand he led her slowly back into the barracks.

IN THE MORNING she woke burning with fever. Their mother brought her a tin cup filled with water and told her to drink but the girl refused. She said she wasn't thirsty. “Nothing's passing through these lips,” she said. She pulled back the blanket and began to pick at a scab on her knee. The boy grabbed her wrist and said, “Don't.” She turned away and looked out the window. A woman in a pink bathrobe walked by carrying a chamberpot toward the latrines. “Where are we?” the girl asked. “What happened to all the trees? What country is this anyway?” She said she'd seen their father walking alone by the side of the road. “He was coming to take us away.” She looked down at her watch and asked how it had gotten to be so late. “It's six o'clock,” she said. “He should have been here by now.”

IN FEBRUARY a team of army recruiters arrived looking for volunteers, and the loyalty questionnaire was given to every man and woman over the age of seventeen.

Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United
States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

The man next door answered no and was sent away along with his wife and his wife's mother to join the other disloyals at Tule Lake. The following year they were repatriated to Japan on the U.S.S. Gripsholm.

Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States
of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or
all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form
of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other
foreign government, power or organization?

“What allegiance?” asked the boy's mother. She said she had nothing to forswear. She'd been in America for almost twenty years now. But she did not want to cause any trouble—“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”—or be labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan. “There's no future for us there. We're here. Your father's here. The most important thing is that we stay together.”

She answered yes.

They stayed.

Loyalty. Disloyalty. Allegiance. Obedience.

“Words,” she said, “it's all just words.”

INSIDE THE RUSTED PEACH TIN, a sudden burst of yellow.

The boy touched the petals with his finger again and again. “Gloria,” he whispered. It was March, and the nights were no longer so cold. The scorpions had become numerous again, and the earth was beginning to soften. The girl shoveled up spoonfuls of sand from beneath the barrack window but she could not find the tortoise. “He left without us,” she said.

Only the willow trees had not survived the winter. Their sap had not risen. Their branches were still bare. The girl broke off a twig and put it between her teeth. “Dead,” she said.

Secretly, the boy blamed himself.
I shouldn't have
plucked that leaf. . . .

He began taking long walks again, only alone now, without his sister. Beyond the fence he saw the dark shadows of the clouds floating across the sand. In the distance, the mountaintops still dotted with snow. Sometimes a jackrabbit crossed his path, or a stray dog hurried by carrying something dark and furry in its mouth. Horned toads leaped across the dry white stones. Lizards basked in the sun. And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon.

THERE WERE DAYS, after rain, when the air suddenly filled with the sharp tang of sage. His mother would rise up from her cot and go to the window and take a deep breath. “Unearthly,” she'd utter.

ON A WARM EVENING in April a man was shot dead by the barbed-wire fence. The guard who was on duty said the man had been trying to escape. He'd called out to him four times, the guard said, but the man had ignored him. Friends of the dead man said he had simply been taking his dog for a walk. He might not have heard the guard, they said, because he was hard of hearing. Or because of the wind. One man who had gone to the scene of the accident right after the shooting had noticed a rare and unusual flower on the other side of the fence. It was his belief that his friend had been reaching out to pick the flower when the shot had been fired.

At the funeral there were nearly two thousand people. The casket was strewn with hundreds of crepe-paper flowers. Hymns were sung. The body was blessed. Years later the boy would recall standing beside his mother at the service, wondering just what kind of flower it was the man had seen.

A rose? A tulip? A daffodil?

And if he
had
plucked it. Then what?

He imagined exploding ships, clouds of black smoke, hundreds of B-29s falling down in flames from the sky.
One false move, pal, and you're dead.

THE HEAT RETURNED. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky. The war did not end. In May the first group of army volunteers left the barracks for Fort Douglas, and a four-year-old girl in Block 31 was stricken with infantile paralysis. Several days later, the street signs appeared. Suddenly there was an Elm Street, a Willow Street, a Cottonwood Way. Alexandria Avenue ran from east to west past the administration offices. Greasewood Way led straight to the sewer pump. “It doesn't look like we'll be leaving here any time soon,” said the boy's mother.

“At least we know where we are,” said the girl.

Now he'll know where to find us,
thought the boy.

The days were long now, and filled with sun, and there had been no mail from Lordsburg for many weeks.

EVERY DAY SEEMED to pass more slowly than the day before. The boy spent hours pacing back and forth across the floor of his room. He counted his steps. He closed his eyes and recited the names of his old classmates whenever a dark ugly thought—
he's sick, he's dead,
he's been sent back to Japan
—tried to push its way into his head. He asked his mother when she thought the next letter from Lordsburg might arrive in the mail. Tomorrow, maybe? “Tomorrow's Sunday.” What about Monday? “I wouldn't count on it.” What if he stopped biting his nails and remembered to do everything the first time he was told? And said his prayers every night before bed? And ate all of his coleslaw even when it was touching the other food on his plate? “That might just do the trick.”