The Buddha in the Attic (8 page)

TRAITORS

T
he rumors began to reach us on the second day of the war.

THERE WAS TALK
of a list. Some people being taken away in the middle of the night. A banker who went to work and never came home. A barber who disappeared during his lunch break. A few fishermen who had gone missing. Here and there, a boardinghouse, raided. A business, seized. A newspaper shut down. But this was all happening somewhere else. In distant valleys and faraway towns. In the big city, where all the women wore high heels and lipstick and danced until late in the night. “Nothing to do with us,” we said. We were simple women who lived quietly and kept to ourselves. Our own husbands would be safe.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS
we stayed inside with our shades drawn and listened to the news of the war on the radio. We removed our names from our mailboxes. We brought in our shoes from the front porch. We did not send our children to school. At night we bolted our doors and spoke among ourselves in whispers. We closed our windows tight. Our husbands drank more than usual and stumbled early into bed. Our dogs fell asleep at our feet. No men came to our doors.

CAUTIOUSLY
, we began to emerge from our homes. It was December and our older daughters had already left to work as maids in distant towns and the days were quiet and still. The darkness fell early. We rose every morning before dawn in the countryside and went out into the vineyards and pruned back the grapevines. We pulled up carrots from the cold, damp earth. We cut celery. We bunched broccoli. We dug deep furrows into the soil to catch the rain when it fell. Hawks drifted down through the rows of trees in the almond orchards and at dusk we could hear the coyotes calling out to one another in the hills. In J-town we gathered every evening in each other’s kitchens and exchanged the latest news. Perhaps there had been a raid in the next county over. A town surrounded after dark. A dozen houses searched. Telephone wires had been cut. Desks overturned. Documents confiscated. A few more men crossed off the list. “Grab your toothbrush,” they were told, and that was it, they were never heard from again.

SOME SAID
that the men had been put on trains and sent far away, over the mountains, to the coldest part of the country. Some said they were enemy collaborators and would be deported within days. Some said they had been shot. Many of us dismissed the rumors as rumors but found ourselves spreading them—wildly, recklessly, and seemingly against our own will—nonetheless. Others of us refused to speak of the missing men by day but at night they came to us in our dreams. A few of us dreamed we were the missing men ourselves. One of us—Chizuko, who ran the kitchen at the Kearney Ranch and always liked to be prepared—packed a small suitcase for her husband and left it beside their front door. Inside was a toothbrush, a shaving kit, a bar of soap, a bar of chocolate—
his favorite
—and a clean change of clothes. These were the things she knew he would need to bring with him if his name came up next on the list. Always, though, there was the vague but nagging fear that she had left something out, some small but crucial item that, on some unknown date in some unknown court in the future, would serve as incontestable proof of her husband’s innocence. Only what, she asked herself, could that small item be? A Bible? A pair of reading glasses? A different kind of soap? Something more fragrant, perhaps? Something more manly?
I hear they arrested a Shinto priest in the valley for owning a toy bamboo flute
.

WHAT DID WE KNOW
, exactly, about the list? The list had been drawn up hastily, on the morning of the attack. The list had been drawn up more than one year ago. The list had been in existence for almost ten years. The list was divided into three categories: “known dangerous” (Category A), “potentially dangerous” (Category B), and “pro-Axis inclinations” (Category C). It was nearly impossible to get your name on the list. It was extremely easy to get your name on the list. Only people who belonged to our race were on the list. There were Germans and Italians on the list, but their names appeared toward the bottom. The list was written in indelible red ink. The list was typewritten on index cards. The list did not exist. The list existed, but only in the mind of the director of military intelligence, who was known for his perfect recall. The list was a figment of our imaginations. The list contained over five hundred names. The list contained over five thousand names. The list was endless. Every time an arrest was made another name was crossed off the list. Every time a name was crossed off the list a new name was added to it. New names were added to the list daily. Weekly. Hourly.

A FEW OF US
began receiving anonymous letters in the mail, informing us that our own husbands would be next.
I’d think about getting out of town if I were you
. Others reported that their husbands had been threatened by angry Filipino workers in the fields.
They came at him with their vegetable knives
. Hitomi, who had worked as a housekeeper at the Prince estate for more than ten years, was held up at gunpoint in broad daylight as she was heading back into town. Mitsuko went out one evening before supper to gather the eggs from her chickens and saw her laundry on fire on the line. And we knew this was only the beginning.

OVERNIGHT
, our neighbors began to look at us differently. Maybe it was the little girl down the road who no longer waved to us from her farmhouse window. Or the longtime customers who suddenly disappeared from our restaurants and stores. Or our mistress, Mrs. Trimble, who pulled us aside one morning as we were mopping her kitchen and whispered into our ear, “Did you know that the war was coming?” Club ladies began boycotting our fruit stands because they were afraid our produce might be tainted with arsenic. Insurance companies canceled our insurance. Banks froze our bank accounts. Milkmen stopped delivering milk to our doors. “Company orders,” one tearful milkman explained. Children took one look at us and ran away like frightened deer. Little old ladies clutched their purses and froze up on the sidewalk at the sight of our husbands and shouted out, “They’re here!” And even though our husbands had warned us—
They’re afraid
—still, we were unprepared. Suddenly, to find ourselves the enemy.

IT WAS ALL
, of course, because of the stories in the papers. They said that thousands of our men had sprung into action, with clockwork precision, the moment the attack on the island had begun. They said we had flooded the roads with our run-down trucks and jalopies. They said we had signaled to the enemy planes with flares from our fields. They said that the week before the attack several of our children had bragged to their classmates that “something big” was about to happen. They said that those same children, when questioned further by their teachers, had reported that their parents had celebrated the news of the attack for days.
They were shouting banzais
. They said that in the event of a second attack here on the mainland anyone whose name appeared on the list would more than likely rise up to assist the enemy. They said that our truck farmers were foot soldiers in a vast underground army.
They’ve got thousands of weapons down below in their vegetable cellars
. They said that our houseboys were intelligence agents in disguise. They said that our gardeners were all hiding shortwave radio transmitters in their garden hoses and when the Pacific zero hour struck we’d get busy at once. Burst dams. Burning oil fields. Bombed bridges. Blasted roads. Blocked tunnels. Poisoned reservoirs. And what was to stop one of us from walking into a crowded marketplace with a stick of dynamite tied to our waist?
Nothing
.

EVERY EVENING
, at dusk, we began burning our things: old bank statements and diaries, Buddhist family altars, wooden chopsticks, paper lanterns, photographs of our unsmiling relatives back home in the village in their strange country clothes.
I watched my brother’s face turn to ash and float up into the sky
. We set fire to our white silk wedding kimonos out of doors, in our apple orchards, in the furrows between the trees. We poured gasoline over our ceremonial dolls in metal trash cans in J-town back alleys. We got rid of anything that might suggest our husbands had enemy ties. Letters from our sisters.
East Neighbor’s son has run away with the umbrella maker’s wife
. Letters from our fathers.
The trains have been electrified and now whenever you go through a tunnel you do not get soot all over your face!
Letters from our mothers written to us on the day we’d left home.
I can still see your footprints in the mud down by the river
. And we wondered why we had insisted for so long on clinging to our strange, foreign ways.
We’ve made them hate us
.

THE NIGHTS GREW LONGER
, and colder, and every day we learned of a few more men who had been taken away. A produce distributor in the southland. A judo instructor. A silk importer. A shipping clerk in the city who was returning to his office from a late lunch.
Apprehended at the crosswalk while waiting for the light to turn green
. An onion grower in the Delta who was suspected of plotting to blow up the levee.
They found a box of stumping powder in his barn
. A travel agent. A language instructor. A lettuce farmer on the coast who was accused of using his flashlight to send signals to enemy ships out at sea.

CHIYOMI’S HUSBAND
began going to sleep with his clothes on, just in case tonight was the night. Because the most shameful thing, he had told her, would be to be taken away in his pajamas (Eiko’s husband had been taken away in his pajamas). Asako’s husband had become obsessed with his shoes.
He polishes them every night to a high shine and lines them up at the foot of the bed
. Yuriko’s husband, a traveling fertilizer salesman who had been less than faithful to her over the years, could only fall asleep now if she was right there by his side. “It’s a little late,” she said, “but what can you do? Once you marry, it’s for life.” Hatsumi’s husband whispered a quick prayer to the Buddha every night before climbing into bed. Some nights he even prayed to Jesus, because what if he was the one true god? Masumi’s husband suffered from nightmares. It was dark and all the streets had disappeared. The sea was rising. The sky was falling. He was trapped on an island. He was lost in a desert. He had misplaced his wallet and was late to catch a train. He saw his wife standing in a crowd and called out to her but she did not turn around.
All that man has ever given me is grief
.

THE FIRST HEAVY RAINS
blew down the last of the leaves from the trees and the days quickly lost their warmth. The shadows slowly lengthened. Our younger children went to school every morning and came home with stories. A girl had swallowed a penny at recess and almost died. Mr. Barnett was trying to grow a mustache again. Mrs. Trachtenberg was in a bad mood.
She’s having her monthly
. We spent long days in the orchards with our older sons and husbands, clipping twigs, pruning branches, lopping off the dead limbs that would not bear fruit in the summer or fall. We cooked and cleaned in the suburbs for the families we had been cooking and cleaning for for years. We did the things we had always done, but nothing felt the same. “Every little noise frightens me now,” said Onatsu. “A knock on the door. The ringing of a telephone. The barking of a dog. I am constantly listening for footsteps.” And whenever a strange car drove through the neighborhood her heart began to pound, for she was sure that her husband’s time had come. Sometimes, in her more confused moments, she imagined that it had already happened, and her husband was now gone, and she had to admit, she was almost relieved, for it was the waiting that was most difficult.

FOR THREE DAYS
a cold wind blew down from the mountains without stopping. Clouds of dust rose up from the fields and the bare branches of the trees thrashed against an empty gray sky. Gravestones toppled over in our cemeteries. Barn doors flew open. Tin roofs rattled. Favorite dogs ran away. A Chinese laundryman was found unconscious and bleeding on the waterfront and left behind for dead.
They mistook him for one of us
. A barn was set on fire in a remote inland valley and the stench of dead cattle lingered downwind for days.

AT NIGHT
we sat in our kitchens with our husbands as they pored over the day’s papers, scrutinizing every line, every word, for clues to our fate. We discussed the latest rumors.
I hear they’re putting us into work camps to grow food for the troops
. We turned on the radio and listened to the bulletins from the front. The news, of course, was not good. The enemy had sunk six more of our unsinkable battleships. The enemy’s planes had been sighted making test runs in our skies. The enemy’s submarines were coming closer and closer to our shores. The enemy was planning a combined attack on the coast from without and within and all alert, keen-eyed citizens were being asked to inform the authorities of any fifth columnists who might dwell in our midst. Because anyone, we were reminded, could be a spy. Your butler, your gardener, your florist, your maid.

AT THREE
in the morning one of our most prominent berry growers was dragged out of bed and escorted out his front door. He was the first of the men we knew to be taken away.
They’re only going after the wealthy farmers
, people said. The following evening a local field hand at the Spiegl Ranch was picked up in his muddy overalls while walking his dog by the reservoir and questioned for three days and three nights in a brightly lit room with no windows before being told he could go home. But when his wife drove down to the station to get him he had no idea who she was.
He thought I was an impostor who was trying to get him to talk
. The next day three women we knew in a nearby town came forward to report that their husbands, too, had been on the list. “They put him in a car,” one of them said, “and he was gone.” Two days later, one of our competitors—the only other rancher in the valley whose raisin grapes were even half as sweet as ours—was handcuffed to a chair in his kitchen for four hours while three men searched his house and then he was allowed to go free. His wife, people said, had served the men coffee and pie. And we all wanted to know: What kind of pie? Strawberry? Rhubarb? Lemon meringue? And how did the men take their coffee? With sugar or without?