Two weeks later, Kaminari was also gone. With O’Rourke’s blessing, she’d petitioned to be released into the care of a group of local Quakers. Across the nation, the Quakers had opposed the internment of Japanese and German Americans and had been offering protection and assistance to internees. Kaminari knew no one outside of California, a state she wasn’t allowed to return to, so the Quakers negotiated an arrangement for her to enroll at an all-girls college in Chicago and live on campus.
Then Kenji wanted to pull Mariko from the Federal School and send her to the Japanese school, but Mariko and Chiyo were able to convince him that because of what Tomeo had chosen to do, and that because Mariko had been attending the American school for far more classes than the Japanese one, she would be ostracized, shamed, and belittled by the other students and their issei parents. He relented, but he seemed to slip into a shadowland after that. He spent all his time with the bees, sometimes wearing—instead of his protective gear—just a cotton T-shirt and khaki pants. It was as if he was daring the bees to sting his bare flesh. Or maybe he needed to be jabbed with something sharp and painful to be reminded that he still felt something.
One afternoon in mid-August, as Mariko and I were gathering our towels to leave the swimming pool, a group of Japanese girls out in the water began to cry out for help. The girls’ arms were linked, and they appeared to be trying to inch their way to the deep end, but their feet were slipping on the slick bottom. Across from them and beyond the safety cable that separated the deep end from the shallow, two other girls were struggling to keep their heads above water. A half second later their outstretched arms sank below the surface.
Clarity seemed to fall across everyone on the pool deck at the same time. The girls with linked arms had been trying to reach the two friends who had ventured out too far. Several adults now jumped into the pool, followed by two lifeguards. The water in the pool was like that of a lake. It was unchlorinated and kept from becoming stagnant and algae-ridden via a pump, but you couldn’t see below the surface of the water.
The hopeful rescuers surfaced and dove down again. And again. And again. Everyone else in the pool and out watched and prayed. The fourth time they surfaced, the two lifeguards each carried a limp body. The girls were laid onto towels on the warm cement. The lifeguards tried for many minutes to revive the girls, while around them, Japanese mothers clung to their own children and wept. When both lifeguards sat back on their knees and shook their heads, Mariko began to cry next to me. She knew thirteen-year-old Sachiko and eleven-year-old Aiko, Japanese Peruvians who were best friends and who lived near the Inoues, and who were now dead and lying just feet from us.
While other Japanese internees ran from the pool area to find the girls’ parents, camp officials arrived, all while a hundred or more of us just stood there in the blazing sun and stared unbelievingly at the bodies. Japanese women who had witnessed the girls being brought up from the water had left and then returned to the pool with hot bowls of rice to put on the girls’ bodies to keep them warm, not realizing camp officials had already pronounced them dead. Mr. O’Rourke arrived then, and he, too, cried over the girls.
We all cried.
The days that followed were oppressively hot, as though the desert was punishing us for having failed to save those girls. We sought physical relief at the swimming pool because it could be found there, but many days passed before I heard laughter again at the pool. And even then, the pool seemed different. It was no longer a welcoming, happy place, but just a place. It could be welcoming, and it could be dangerous. It could be both, sometimes on the same day. I hadn’t seen a dead body before that day. There had been a tragic accident at the camp a few months earlier when a little German boy from Honduras had been hit and killed by a camp truck. That, too, had been a horrible shock to me, and I was so sad for Edgar’s family, but I had not seen his lifeless body.
I could not get the image of those drowned Japanese girls out of my head. They had looked like they had been merely sleeping. But they weren’t. They were dead.
I was glad when school started up again in September, though the classrooms were broiling hot and sweat fell off our foreheads like raindrops onto our textbooks. I was glad to be back because there was a sense of forward motion at school. It was the only part of the camp where there was forward motion. There was progress there that I could feel, and it allowed me to think of the deaths of those girls as something that happened in the past. I was in tenth grade now, not ninth. I had moved past the sad time when they had died. Other things were moving forward, too, though I did not know it.
I didn’t know, for example—no one did—that on the last day of summer Kenji Inoue walked over to the camp administration building, went inside it, and filed for voluntary repatriation to Japan, as soon as it could be arranged.
I also did not know, as summer turned to autumn, that my father had had another appeal for his release denied, and that he’d been informed he would be repatriated with his family to Germany right after Christmas. My father hadn’t wanted to break this news to Max and me because he still hoped in the days that remained that he could somehow convince the American government that he was innocent and posed no threat.
Word had not reached us yet that France had just been liberated, nor that the Nazi war machine now lacked the strength to meet the opposition marching ever eastward toward it. The Allies were winning, gaining new ground every day, and Germany was losing. If my father had known back when he was at the camp in North Dakota that this was what the war would look like in the summer of 1944, he might not have requested that we all be reunited in Crystal City, because doing so had sealed our fate.
And yet . . . maybe he would have still asked for it.
Because the truth was, Mommi could not bear to be parted from him. When she and Max and I moved to that sad little cottage at the edge of Davenport, I saw that she could not. My mother needed to be rescued, war or no war. And because my papa loved her, that’s what he did.
15
When my sophomore year began in the fall of 1944, I’d developed a crush on a German American boy who’d arrived at the camp over the summer. His name was Gunther Hoeckels. He was sixteen, golden-haired, green-eyed, and as handsome as a movie star. He was well liked by the German student population and the teachers, too. His father was a lawyer who had many German clients, both here in America and overseas. He had three older sisters who were married and out of the house and therefore not subject to internment with their German-born parents. This was all I knew about Gunther personally. But I was in love with him nonetheless.
Mariko, who continued to receive letters at least twice a month from Charles, even though it had been more than two years since they had seen each other, was both happy for me that I was in love, and envious that the boy of my affections lived right there at the camp, two streets away. When she said she was jealous that I could talk to Gunther face-to-face anytime I wanted, I had to remind her that I hadn’t yet worked up enough courage to even approach him. Everything I knew about him I had heard from other people. I’d never had a serious crush on a boy before, and likewise no boy, that I was aware of, had had one on me. I was wholly unskilled in the art of romance, and I didn’t know what to do with my infatuation. I wasn’t even sure if Gunther was aware I existed. The numbers of students at the Federal High School were as high as they would ever be. Gunther was a junior—not even in my class. And he was beautiful. Every girl in the school could see that.
He surely had many admirers.
I told Mariko this.
“I wouldn’t let that stop me from saying hello to him,” she said. We were working on a set of math problems in class and whispering to each other when our teacher wasn’t looking.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Mariko stifled a laugh. “You don’t know how to say hello?”
“Not to him.”
“He’s human, Elise. He’s not a god. He probably gets gas from time to time, you know. I bet he even passes it.”
I burst out laughing, and our teacher, who was helping another student, looked over his shoulder and told me if I wanted to stay after school to practice my laughing, he would arrange it.
Mariko pretended like she’d had nothing to do with my little outburst. Her head was bent down over her paper, but a grin stretched from ear to ear. After the teacher had returned to helping the student, she glanced up at me.