Snow Falling on Cedars (27 page)

The train stopped at a place called Mojave in the middle of an interminable, still desert. They were herded onto buses at eight-thirty in the morning, and the buses took them north over dusty roads for four hours to a place called Manzanar. Fujiko had imagined, shutting her eyes, that the sandstorm battering the bus was the rain of home. She’d dozed and awakened in time to see the barbed wire and the rows of dark barracks blurred by blowing dust. It was twelve-thirty, by her watch; they were just in time to stand in line for lunch. They ate standing up, from army mess kits, with their backs turned against the wind. Peanut butter, white bread, canned figs, and string beans; she could taste the dust in all of it.

They were given typhoid shots that first afternoon; they stood in line for them. They waited in the dust beside their luggage and then stood in line for dinner. In the evening the Imadas were assigned to Block 11, Barrack 4, and given a sixteen-by-twenty-foot room furnished with a bare lightbulb, a small Coleman oil heater, six CCC camp cots, six straw mattresses, and a dozen army blankets. Fujiko sat on the edge of a cot with cramps from the camp food and the typhoid shot gathering to a knot in her stomach. She sat with her coat on, holding herself, while her daughters beat flat the straw in the mattresses and lit the oil heater. Even with the heater she shivered beneath her blankets, still fully dressed in her clothes. By midnight she couldn’t wait any longer and, with three of her daughters who were feeling distressed too, stumbled out into the darkness of the desert in the direction of the block latrine. There was, astonishingly, a long line at midnight, fifty or more women and girls in heavy
coats with their backs braced against the wind. A woman up the line vomited heavily, and the smell was of the canned figs they’d all eaten. The woman apologized profusely in Japanese, and then another in the line vomited, and they were all silent again.

Inside they found a film of excrement on the floor and damp, stained tissue paper everywhere. All twelve toilets, six back-to-back pairs, were filled up near to overflowing. Women were using these toilets anyway, squatting over them in the semidarkness while a line of strangers watched and held their noses. Fujiko, when it was her turn, hung her head and emptied her bowels with her arms wrapped around her stomach. There was a trough to wash her hands in, but no soap.

That night dust and yellow sand blew through the knotholes in the walls and floor. By morning their blankets were covered with it. Fujiko’s pillow lay white where her head had been, but around it a layer of fine yellow grains had gathered. She felt it against her face and in her hair and on the inside of her mouth, too. It had been a cold night, and in the adjacent room a baby screamed behind a quarter-inch wall of pine board.

On their second day at Manzanar they were given a mop, a broom, and a bucket. The leader of their block – a man from Los Angeles dressed in a dusty overcoat who claimed to have been an attorney in his former life but who now stood unshaven with one shoe untied and with his wire-rimmed glasses skewed on his face – showed them the outdoor water tap. Fujiko and her daughters cleaned out the dust and did laundry in a gallon-size soup tin. While they were cleaning more dust and sand blew in to settle on the newly mopped pine boards. Hatsue went out into the desert wind and returned with a few scraps of tar paper she’d found blown up against a roll of barbed wire along a firebreak. They stuffed this around the doorjamb and fixed it over the knotholes with thumbtacks borrowed from the Fujitas.

There was no sense in talking to anyone about things. Everyone was in the same position. Everyone wandered like ghosts beneath the guard towers with the mountains looming
on either side of them. The bitter wind came down off the mountains and through the barbed wire and hurled the desert sand in their faces. The camp was only half-finished; there were not enough barracks to go around. Some people, on arriving, had to build their own in order to have a place to sleep. There were crowds everywhere, thousands of people in a square mile of desert scoured to dust by army bulldozers, and there was nowhere for a person to find solitude. The barracks all looked the same: on the second night, at one-thirty
A.M.,
a drunk man stood in the doorway of the Imadas’ room apologizing endlessly while the dust blew in; he’d lost his way, he said. Their room had no ceiling either, and it was possible to hear people squabbling in other barracks. There was a man who distilled his own wine three rooms down – he used mess hall rice and canned apricot juice – they heard him weeping late on their third night while his wife threatened him. On that same night the searchlights went on in the guard towers and swept across their single window. In the morning it turned out that one of the guards had become convinced of an escape in progress and had alerted the tower machine gunners. On the fourth night a young man in Barrack 17 shot his wife and then himself while they lay in bed together – somehow he had smuggled in a gun.
‘Shikata ga nai,’
people said. ‘It cannot be helped, it has to be.’

There was nowhere to put any clothing. They lived out of their suitcases and packing crates. The floor was cold beneath their feet, and they wore their dusty shoes until bedtime. By the end of the first week Fujiko had lost track of her daughters’ whereabouts altogether. Everybody had begun to look alike, dressed in surplus War Department clothing – pea coats, knit caps, canvas leggings, army earmuffs, and wool khaki pants. Only her two youngest ate with her; the other three ran with packs of young people and ate at other tables. She scolded them, and they listened politely and then went out again. The older girls left early and came back late, their clothes and hair full of dust. The camp was an enormous promenade of young people milling and walking in the fire lanes and huddling in the lee
of barracks. On her way to the washhouse one morning after breakfast Fujiko had seen her middle daughter – she was only fourteen – standing in a group that included four boys dressed nattily in Eisenhower coats. They were, she knew, Los Angeles boys; most people in the camp were from Los Angeles. The Los Angeles people were not very cordial and looked down on her for some inexplicable reason; she could not get a word in with them edgewise. Fujiko fell silent about everything, collapsed in on herself. She waited for a letter from Hisao to come, but a different letter came instead.

When Hatsue’s sister Sumiko saw the envelope with Ishmael’s false return address –
Journalism Class, San Piedro High School
– she did not resist her urge to tear it open. Sumiko had been a sophomore before her exile, and although she knew the envelope was Hatsue’s this mail remained irresistible. This mail was word from home.

Sumiko read the letter from Ishmael Chambers in front of the tarpaper YMCA building; she read it again, savoring the more astonishing phrases, out by the camp hog pens.

April 4, 1942

My Love
,

I still go to our cedar tree in the afternoons every day. I shut my eyes, waiting. I smell your smell and I dream of you and I ache for you to come home. Every moment I think of you and long to hold and feel you. Missing you is killing me. It’s like a part of me has gone away.

I’m lonely and miserable and think of you always and hope you will write me right away. Remember to use Kenny Yamashita’s name for a return address on the envelope so my parents won’t get too curious.

Everything here is horrible and sad and life is not worth living. I can only hope that you find some happiness during the time we have to be apart
–
some happiness of some kind, Hatsue. Myself I can only be miserable until you are in my arms again. I can’t
live without you, I know that now. After all these years that we’ve been together, I find you’re a part of me. Without you, I have nothing.

All My Love Forever,

Ishmael

After a half hour of walking and chinking and of reading Ishmael’s letter four more times, she took it regretfully to her mother. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I feel like a creep. But I have to show this to you.’

Her mother read Ishmael Chambers’s letter standing in the middle of the tar-paper hut with one hand on her forehead. While she read her lips moved rapidly, her eyes blinked severely and often. Finished, she sat down on the edge of a chair, dangled the letter in her hand for a moment, then sighed and took off her glasses. ‘Surely not,’ she said in Japanese.

She set the glasses in her lap wearily, placed the letter on top of them, and pressed against her eyes with both palms.

‘The neighborhood boy,’ she said to Sumiko. ‘The one who taught her how to swim.’

‘Ishmael Chambers,’ answered Sumiko. ‘You know who he is.’

‘Your sister has made a terrible mistake,’ said Fujiko. ‘One I hope you will never make.’

‘I never would,’ said Sumiko. ‘Anyway, it isn’t a mistake I could make in a place like this, is it?’

Fujiko picked up her glasses again and held them between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Sumi,’ she said. ‘Have you told anyone? Have you shown this letter to anyone?’

‘No,’ said Sumi. ‘Just you.’

‘You must promise something,’ said Fujiko. ‘You must promise not to tell this to anyone – don’t tell anyone about it. There’s enough gossip here without something like this. You must promise to keep your mouth closed and never tell this again. Do you understand me?’

‘All right. I promise,’ said Sumiko.

‘I’ll tell Hatsue I found the letter. You don’t have to take the blame.’

‘Okay,’ answered Sumiko. ‘Good.’

‘Go out now,’ said her mother. ‘Go and leave me alone.’

The girl went out to wander aimlessly. Fujiko perched her glasses on her nose once more and began to reread the letter. It was clear to her from the words in it that her daughter had been deeply entangled with this boy for a long time, for many years. It was evident that he had touched her body, that the two of them had been sexually intimate inside a hollow tree they’d used as a trysting place in the forest. Hatsue’s walks had been a ruse, just as Fujiko had suspected. Her daughter had returned with
Juki
tendrils in her hands and a wetness between her thighs.
Deceitful girl
, thought Fujiko.

She thought for a moment of her own romantic life, how she’d been wed to a man she’d never seen before and passed the first night of her life with him in a boardinghouse where the pages of
hakujin
magazines had been substituted for wallpaper. She had refused, on that first night, to let her husband touch her – Hisao was unclean, his hands were rough, he had no money but a few coins. He’d spent those first hours apologizing to Fujiko and explaining in detail his financial desperation, pleading with her to work beside him and underscoring his talents and better traits – he was ambitious, hardworking, didn’t gamble or drink, he had no bad habits and saved his money, but times were so hard, he needed someone at his side. He could understand, he said, having to earn her love, and he was willing to prove himself to her with time if she would agree to be patient. ‘Don’t even speak to me,’ she’d replied.

He’d slept in a chair that first night, and Fujiko had stayed awake pondering ways to extricate herself from this situation. She did not have enough money to buy a return ticket, and at any rate, she knew in her bones, she could not return to her family in Japan – her parents had sold her and paid a percentage to the deceitful
baishakunin
who had assured them that Hisao had amassed great wealth during his years in America. She stayed
awake growing angrier about this; by dawn she had begun to feel murderous.

In the morning Hisao stood at the foot of the bed and asked Fujiko if she’d slept well. ‘I’m not talking to you,’ she answered. ‘I’m going to write home for the money I need and go back as soon as I can.’

‘We’ll save together,’ pleaded Hisao. ‘We’ll go back together, if that’s what you want. We’ll – ’

‘What about your twelve acres of mountain land?’ Fujiko said to him angrily. ‘The
baishakunin
took me to see it – peach trees, persimmons, weeping willows, rock gardens. None of that turns out to be true.’

‘You’re right, it isn’t true,’ confessed Hisao. ‘I don’t have money – that’s correct. I’m a pauper and I work my fingers to the bone. The
baishakunin
lied to you, I’m sorry for that, but – ’

‘Don’t talk to me, please,’ said Fujiko. ‘I don’t want to be married to you.’

It had taken her three months to learn how to sleep with him. When she did she found that she had learned to love him, if love was the proper word to use, and it occurred to her then, sleeping in his arms, that love was nothing close to what she’d imagined as a girl growing up near Kure. It was less dramatic and far more practical than her girlhood had led her to believe. Fujiko had cried when her hymen broke, in part because sacrificing her virginity to Hisao’s need had not been what she had hoped for. But she was married now, and he was a steady sort of a man, and she grew, gradually, close to him. They’d been, already, through much hardship together, and he had never once complained.

Now she stood with this letter in her hand – a letter a
hakujin
boy had sent to her daughter about love inside a cedar tree, about his loneliness and misery and how horribly he missed her and how she should write to him with a false return address –
‘use Kenny Yamashita’s name,’
he’d written. She wondered if her daughter loved this boy or if she knew the first thing about love. It made sense to her now that Hatsue had been so silent and
morose – more silent and morose than her other daughters – since the day they left San Piedro. Everybody had been unhappy and Hatsue had used this, the general unhappiness had been convenient, but still she had sulked more than anyone; she’d been listless and had gone about her chores with the sluggishness of someone grieving. She missed her father, she said when asked; she missed San Piedro Island. But she did not say to anyone that she missed the
hakujin
boyfriend who had been her secret lover. The depth of her deceit became vivid to Fujiko, and she felt in herself a mother’s rage at the weight of this betrayal. The rage mingled with the general melancholy that had been growing in her steadily since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it was one of the rare times in Fujiko’s adult life when she felt inconsolable.