But we were together.
Our barracks was a single room with six empty cots even though there were only four of us. They were made up with clean sheets and wool blankets. We all folded the blankets down to the foot of the bed. An evening breeze had stirred the air and had seemed to cool the room a bit. Just as we were about to climb into our beds, I saw a lobster-clawed scorpion dart from underneath my cot and scuttle across the room. I screamed and then began to cry great, angry sobs. It wasn’t just because of the scorpion; it was because of the long, hot journey and the desolate strangeness of this place and for everything that had been taken from me.
Mommi started to cry, too. Hers were the softer tears of regret, I think, because she could not kiss my woes away. Papa grabbed one of his shoes and tried to find the scorpion to smash it, but he couldn’t. Max sat on his cot with his knees drawn up to his chest, watching the scene wide-eyed. Unable to kill the scorpion, Papa finally dropped his shoe and tried to comfort me instead, but his well-meaning words sounded like gibberish. He led me to one of the other cots and, after thoroughly checking it underneath, urged me to lie down. He would stay awake, he said. All night if I wanted him to.
“I don’t want to be here! I want go home!” I cried, surely the unspoken cry of everyone who had been on the train and bus with us that day.
“I won’t let anything hurt you, Elise,” Papa exclaimed in as commanding and convincing a voice as I’d ever heard.
I slowly lay down on the second cot, willing him to be right.
I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, and I was afraid if I did, I would dream of scorpions crawling all over my body, stinging me with their dreadful tails and pinching me with their claws. But I did sleep. And I did not dream. Even my dreams, it seemed, had been taken from me.
9
The place where you live is not always your home. Sometimes where you live is just a place. Just four walls, a front door, a few chairs to sit in, and a bed in the back room with your nightgown folded under the pillow.
Even at fourteen I knew a kind of magic takes place when a house transforms itself into a home. It becomes a living, breathing thing, like a beloved old aunt or faithful retriever. There had been magic in the house in Davenport. Not so with the cottage with a view of the poultry barns. And not so now.
There would be magic at Crystal City, but it would not have anything to do with the house we lived in. Papa would tell me in the months to come that it’s your family, the people you love and who love you, that makes a house a home. As long as you are together with those people, a damp, dirty hovel can be home.
Those words, sincerely spoken, had been to cheer me, not to state truth. A hovel is never home. It can be a home, but it is not home. There is a difference.
As the four of us stood the next morning in front of the quarters that were to be our “home,” as the camp officials called it, I knew this place was going to be an address only. I didn’t really have a home anymore; that’s how I felt. I had my parents and I had Max, but that was it.
The larger housing units at Crystal City consisted of duplexes, triplexes, and some long buildings with four front doors, but they pretty much all looked alike except for whatever flowers the detainees had been able to keep alive in the scorching heat. In Davenport, our gray and white house was the only one like it on our street. Mrs. Brimley’s house was a yellow one-story with green trim, and the house next to hers had been white with black shutters, and stupid Stevie who had told the FBI my father knew how to make a bomb lived in a two-story house that was half brick, half white siding. The camp houses were all tar-papered clones of one another; it was yet another way we internees were to be daily reminded that we were all alike in the eyes of the government.
All the quarters had been built on little stilts, which, the housing official told us, was to keep the critters out. Critters, he said. Not deadly snakes and poisonous spiders and the like, but merely unwanted varmints of a certain sort.
Max found out later that first day from a boy named Hans that there was a bounty on black widow spiders. If you caught one in a jar and brought it to the dispensary, you’d be given a camp quarter for your time and trouble. The venom would then be extracted to use in producing the antivenin to the spider’s terrible bite. Mommi would forbid Max from catching the spiders, but he would do it anyway. The careful deception required to catch them was just as enjoyable as the catching itself and the reward. Max and Hans—who would become my brother’s best friend—would catch more than a dozen before the year ended.
Our place was the middle unit of a triplex, located on Arizona Street, just a few minutes’ walk from the German community center, and a stone’s throw from one of several laundry and bath facilities. Inside the house there was one large room, a bit smaller than the same space in the cottage in Davenport. In the one large room was a kitchen area with running water, a kerosene stove, and an icebox, and then a sitting area with a sofa, two chairs, a coffee table, a side table, and an empty bookshelf. All the furniture came with the house. My parents hung blankets from the rafters of the large room—all linens were provided—to make a sleeping area for themselves, giving Max and me the one bedroom to share. He and I also hung a blanket to give ourselves each a modicum of privacy. There was a toilet off the kitchen space but no bathtub or shower. The communal latrine and bathhouse were at the end of the street, and I would learn to hate walking to and from those showers with wet hair, as if I lived perennially at summer camp.
Our luggage was delivered to us within an hour of Papa getting our housing assignment. It did not take long to put away what we had brought. We left our winter coats in the suitcases and shoved them under our beds, wondering when we would use either again. The inside of our unit seemed to be new and I thought perhaps we were the first family to live in it, but then I found a little button in between the floorboards of my sleeping space. It was white and painted with tiny pink rosebuds. I showed it to Papa and he told me that there had been another German family in this house before us.
“Where they’d go?” I asked him.
He was putting his Sunday dress shoes under his trousers, which were now hanging on a rung that had been bolted to rafters via chains and then lowered to shoulder level. We had all hung our clothes on that rung. You could see it from the front door, a fact Mommi quietly despised from the first day until our last.
“They . . . they were allowed to leave,” Papa replied.
“How?” A rivulet of hope that we might not be forever forgotten in this desert wasteland zipped through me. “How did they leave?”
Papa stood up straight and put his hands on his hips, surveying his three pairs of shoes, placed neatly in a row, toes facing forward. “They . . . they, um . . . were sent home.”
Home, he said. That very word.
“Really? They went home?” I must have sounded too giddy. Or too hopeful. My father glanced at me cautiously and then looked away.
“Yes, but I don’t know anything else.” His words sounded limp, as though he did know more about how that family got to go home but something about it bothered him greatly.
I was quiet for a moment, wondering if it would be impertinent to say I could tell he knew more than he was telling me.
But then he announced the four of us would be going up to the camp market to purchase groceries for our kitchen. He couldn’t wait for Mommi’s J?gerschnitzel after six months of prison food. He laughed when he said this. So did Max. Mommi didn’t and neither did I.