At school the next day I told Mariko what the leader of the German community was doing to people who didn’t like him, and that he wasn’t letting us shop for groceries in the marketplace.
“That’s not right,” she said, thoroughly annoyed on our behalf. “Your family can come to our house for dinner tonight. I’m going to ask.”
I told her not to, very sure my parents would be embarrassed that I had talked of our family troubles to Mariko and that she, in turn, told her parents.
But she told me it was silly to let pride keep us from eating. She apparently asked her mother the moment she stepped inside her house, because Chiyo and Mariko walked over to our triplex after school and asked Mommi if we might honor them with our presence at supper that night, wisely saying nothing about our predicament. Mommi accepted, although I could tell she was suspicious that I had said something.
Still, it was a wonderful evening. Maybe not for the parents so much; they seemed a little stiff around each other. And maybe not for Tomeo and Kaminari, who had to sit on the floor so that Mommi and Papa could have their chairs, although Mariko said people in Japan sit on the floor to eat all the time. But it was fun for Max and me.
Chiyo made okonomiyaki, which Mariko told us were pancakes made with whatever you had in the kitchen that needed to be used up. Inside the crispy pancakes were bits of roasted chicken and beans and cabbage and shredded carrot. They were topped with pickled ginger and flakes of dried seaweed. Max and I had never tasted seaweed before. We’d never seen the sea. We both liked its saltiness and verdant green color. We had bowls of rice, too, which we tried to eat with chopsticks. We weren’t very good at it. Everyone was laughing at us; we even were laughing at ourselves. Chiyo let us have forks.
When the meal was over, Papa and Mommi thanked them and we walked home.
I could’ve gone back to the Inoues’ every night for supper, but Papa was right in the end. Hasenburger relented and took people like Papa and Mommi off his naughty list. After a few days, we were allowed to shop at the marketplace again.
To this day I don’t know why O’Rourke and the other INS officials let Hasenburger, who stood opposed to American ideals, have that kind of sway over us. Perhaps they thought this was one little bit of freedom they could give us, the freedom for men like Hasenburger to oppose what he didn’t like, and the freedom for people like Papa to experience the effects of that opposition. We were not insulated from everything at the camp; that was for sure.
The next week, a few internees put together a Christmas program. There was beautiful German music and singing, and cookies and stollen. There was even wine to drink that internees had been allowed to make out of raisins, apples, boiled sugar water, and yeast cakes. On Christmas morning we opened presents we’d made for each other, and the Inoues came over for hot apple cider and gingery lebkuchen that Mommi made.
As 1943 came to a close, there was an odd sense of calm, at least for me. I knew the world was at war, and that we in the camp were caught up in the middle of it. We weren’t kept in complete darkness about what was happening in Europe and Africa and the Pacific. I knew battles were being fought and won, lives were being lost and lives were being saved. We didn’t have radios, letters from the outside were censored of war details, and no newspapers were brought in, but news of the war sometimes drifted inside via those internees who had visitors. We knew that in late July, just after we arrived here, there had been an Allied bombing raid on Hamburg, Germany, which swept up tens of thousands of German civilians into its resulting firestorm. We’d heard that fierce battles occurring in tiny islands in the Pacific between U.S. and Japanese forces were unbelievably bloody. We’d learned one hundred captured American troops had been executed by Japanese soldiers on some little patch of land in the ocean called Wake Island.
But I felt detached from all of this as we slipped into 1944, far away from all those places. I couldn’t think about the thousands upon thousands of German mothers and children, people just like Mommi and me and Max, who wore no military uniform, lying crushed and burned and dead beneath the ruins of Hamburg. I couldn’t think about it because I had no way to picture such a thing.
I could very easily picture two boys beating each other up in the schoolyard because I had seen that. I had also seen what happened when those boys tired of throwing punches or when a teacher saw them and broke it up. They stopped fighting. Everybody went home: the bruised and battered boys, the ring of spectators, the teacher. They all went home. The bloodied sand dried and then faded. The playground was a playground again.
I believed the New Year would bring an end to horrible scenarios that I’d no way of understanding because I wanted to believe it.
14
As the first few months of 1944 rolled out, Papa resigned himself to being in the minority of those who opposed the chosen spokesmen for the German community. When he stopped commenting to others that there were better ways to lead and better men to do the leading, he stopped getting backlash. But he was still getting flak from his fellow faculty at the German school and from the community leaders for keeping me in the Federal School. He had allowed Max to transfer to the German school after Christmas because Max’s best friend, Hans, went there. In the months we’d been at Crystal City, Max had picked up enough of the German language from Hans that he could already understand it fairly well.
“What’s the harm, Otto?” my mother had said when Max first asked, the day after Christmas. Papa had at first not been in favor of letting Max transfer. “What is so wrong with him going there?”
My parents were discussing this in their own sleeping area when Max and I were in our beds, supposedly sleeping. But you could hear every conversation in our quarters; the walls were that thin. You could hear the conversations of your neighbors, too.
“It’s not that it’s wrong,” Papa said. “It’s just the mind-set at the German school. They don’t think like Americans, Freda. They think like disgruntled Germans who’ve been treated unfairly.”
“Isn’t that what we all are?” Mommi muttered, in that way that people talk when they ask a question for which they don’t expect an answer.
But Papa answered her. “That is not what we are. We put in our papers to become citizens of the United States. We speak English. Our children speak English.”
“This isn’t about all that, Otto. It’s not about politics. It’s about our son. He’s just a boy who wants to go to the same school as his best friend,” Mommi said a moment later. “After all that’s being denied him, can’t we at least give him that?”
Mommi’s last plea must have worked, because the next day Papa told Max he could switch.
Max loved going to school now, much as I looked forward to it each day and the sense of normalcy it gave me. As spring approached there were nearly three thousand internees at the camp, even though in February six hundred from the German community, including Hasenburger, had left Crystal City, bound for Germany, in a deal brokered between the United States and Berlin. I still believed then that those who were repatriated had chosen it, so I was not concerned that so many German internees were suddenly gone. Their empty quarters were soon filled with new detainees. Our freshman class had ballooned; all the classes had. There were a few more German students attending, but we whites were still outnumbered ten to one by Japanese students. I was able to become friends with many of them because I was friends with Mariko, but she and I remained a bit of an anomaly. I saw no other close friendships like ours. Some looked at us with puzzlement, some with contempt, some with open admiration. But I didn’t care what the other students thought of us, even though six months earlier, my classmates’ opinion of me had greatly mattered. The lonely months before we left Davenport had left me doubting my worth; having a friend again was restoring to me a view of my value as a person.
Mariko turned fifteen in March, and I followed in April.