We were never quite sure what Mr. Takahashi had done for a living in Peru. Papa thought he might have been in manufacturing of some kind and that he had been very well off. The man made no effort to learn English and appeared to be angry more than ashamed of what had happened to him and his family. In the weeks ahead, I would conclude that Mr. Takahashi was a Japanese sympathizer. He never seemed sad that lives had been lost and would continue to be lost because our nations were at war. I thought it was cruelly ironic that our residence, and therefore Mr. Takahashi’s, was on Arizona Street. There wasn’t a soul at the camp who didn’t know the USS Arizona had sunk into Pearl Harbor with hundreds of American sailors trapped inside, some of whom tapped on its hull for days before the water claimed them. As I saw it, Mr. Takahashi, who spent long hours sitting by himself on his doorstep, never wanted to look at the current situation straight in the eye, as the saying goes, even though it stared him in the face every sunrise when he looked at the street sign in front of our houses. I didn’t know what his wife and daughters thought of the war. They were polite to us and smiled and bowed, but we could not communicate with them.
Over the next few weeks our lives began to assume a structured existence that numbed the sting of our lost freedoms. Morning roll call took place every sunup, right after the raising of the American flag located just outside the fence. We’d stand outside our unit as uniformed guards tallied our number to make sure no one had done the unthinkable and attempted an escape during the night. Then we would head back inside for muesli and fruit doused in milk that was delivered fresh each morning by other internees. Laundry, chores, and any other physical activities were done before noon, then a cold lunch, and then reading or napping or card games in the afternoon, when the heat drove everyone to the shade of awnings or the darkness of drawn curtains. At sundown there would be another roll call, another accounting of the internees. In the evenings, we’d visit with other families or play board games, or write letters that we knew would be censored, or reminisce about happier times. Then we’d shake our sheets before crawling in between them to start the cycle all over again.
Papa was indeed picked up to teach science and chemistry at the German High School, and I went with him a few times to get his classroom ready. The classroom had been outfitted with desks made by fellow Germans at the camp’s woodshop, and study materials that had been improvised by the makeshift faculty, but there would be no experiments to prove to young minds how chemicals interacted. Substances of a volatile nature were not allowed. Papa would have to find other ways to teach high school students how the natural world worked. I would find the same was true—and then some—at the American school. Physics and chemistry weren’t taught at all since a laboratory for high school students was considered too dangerous to supply. Papa would later say this was ridiculous, considering the internees who worked at the camp butcher shop were supplied with a bone saw. I helped Papa paint a mural of the periodic table of elements along one wall of his classroom. We used six different colors of paint and included Popeye here and there—hanging off the letters, that kind of thing—to make it interesting. Papa was actually a very good artist. He drew Popeye perfectly.
Mommi found work at the sewing center, where everyone at the camp would bring their torn clothing to be mended and where new clothes could be made. I went with her on some of those hottest days because there was nothing else to do in the triplex except sweat. Mommi showed me how to repair a zipper, take in a pair of trousers, let out a seam, sew a baby bonnet.
We all lived for movie nights even though most of the films that were chosen for us I had already seen. We weren’t allowed war movies like Casablanca, which Colette and I had gone to see months ago and which we’d both adored. So many of the films coming out of Hollywood then were war themed, because it supposedly boosted national morale. But we weren’t allowed those movies at Crystal City, and it seemed all my favorite actors and actresses were in films about the war. The movies were projected on the back side of a two-story building, and we sat outside under the stars to watch them; that was the best part.
A few weeks after we’d settled in, Max and my father began joining Stefan at a former reservoir site where the pool was being constructed. An Italian internee who was also a civil engineer had suggested the pool to Mr. O’Rourke, the camp director. If the internees were willing to dig it, O’Rourke would supply the materials. The swamp-like reservoir had to be dredged first and the jungle of water hyacinths stripped. The internees doing the work found so many snakes in the murky water—some of them deadly—that their number could not be counted. Every day of the digging, snakes were rounded up and then thrown into a barrel. Then brave souls would kill and gut them and hand out the skins to whoever wanted them. Max came home with the skin of a water moccasin one day and asked if he could nail it to the exterior back wall of the triplex so that the sun could dry it out. Papa had already given his okay, so all he needed was Mommi’s thumbs-up. Upon seeing the skin, still red and moist with blood, Mommi ran to the toilet and threw up. Papa told him in a quiet voice that he could keep it.
On Sunday afternoons we would often go to the German café called the Vaterland for coffee—even on the hottest day—and Berliners, which are doughnuts filled with creamy custard. There were other German pastries available at the café, all of them prepared and served by German internees. There was also a German orchestra made up of talented musicians who in their previous lives had played at weddings and plays and concerts. Sometimes they played at the café and people sang songs in German that I didn’t know, but which made everyone smile and weep and laugh, all at the same time. I met other teenagers at the Vaterland, including a girl named Nell who was my age, and who had come to Crystal City in March from Ohio. Her mother was American, but her father still had his German citizenship and, worse, affiliations with notable German Americans in favor of Hitler’s agenda. Her father was not, she assured me, a follower of Hitler, but he had many friends who were.
She had a little brother like I did, and also a younger sister.
Sometimes Nell and I would sit together at the tiny camp library and look at back issues of Hollywood magazine. Or we’d walk to the digging site at the pool and she’d point out to me all the cute boys who went to the Federal High School, both German and Japanese. Or we’d watch our fathers and other men play soccer at twilight and listen to the buzzing of cicadas.
I could close my eyes at those moments and almost believe I was just an ordinary American teenager living in an ordinary little town that never asked much of you.
But then I’d feel a plastic coin in my pocket that only had value here, or I’d hear the bugle calling us to roll call, or I’d see the holstered gun of a guard and I’d be slammed back to reality, where I wasn’t an ordinary American teenager after all. I was a German teenager who didn’t speak German and had never been to Germany, who was now living thirty miles from the Mexican border.
I didn’t know that girl at all.
10
In the seven weeks before school started, I learned that even though Germany and Japan were allies in the war, in our camp there was nothing we had in common with each other except our predicament. The camp made Iowans, Californians, New Yorkers, and Peruvians either one or the other: German or Japanese. Only the youngest children seemed unable to see the delineation that supposedly had categorized us into two kinds of people and only two. It wasn’t uncommon to see preschool-aged children of both nationalities playing together on playground equipment in the cool of the day, but the older an internee was, the less you saw him or her interacting with anyone not of the same nationality. There were a few Italians in the camp, too, but people treated them like inhabitants of another planet, or as if they were invisible.
Nell told me it was this way in school, too. She was also attending the American high school despite opposition from many in the German camp community.
“We keep to our own pretty much,” she said on the day before classes were to begin. We were sitting on her front step eating rainbow snow cones with our knees drawn up to our chests so that no rogue fire ants could crawl up our ankles.
“Why?” I asked. “Do we have to? Are there fights?”
“No.” Nell had drawn out the word. “Well, there’ve been a few fights of course, but it’s mostly just because . . . I don’t know. It’s just easier. There aren’t that many of us compared to the Japanese. So. You know.”
She didn’t elaborate. Then she told me as she crunched on bits of ice that a number of the Japanese students at Federal High went to the Japanese school in the afternoons, leaving before the last period at the Federal School began.
“Their parents make them go,” she said. “So that if they get sent back to Japan, they won’t flunk out because they don’t know the language. Or how to write in their alphabet. Have you seen it? It’s not even letters.”
This was the first time I heard that families at Crystal City could get sent anywhere other than to the cities they had come from.
“Why would they get sent to Japan?” I asked.
“Because,” Nell replied, in a tone that suggested I should know the reason why.
But I didn’t know yet, so I just stared at her.