I wanted to run headlong outside the gates, past the armed men on horseback.
I wanted to run and never stop.
It had taken me a year, but I was finally feeling like a normal teenager again. I’d come to Crystal City with nothing from my former life but a suitcase of clothes. I’d still had my family, but everything else that had been home to me—including all my friends—had been yanked out of my hands. But now? Now I had a best friend again. I was doing well in school. I was making plans for my future. I was happy.
It was all going to be taken away from me again.
I didn’t want to go to Germany. Not to live. And not now. Germany was the enemy. Germany was at war.
I didn’t even speak the language. I didn’t want to speak the language.
Everyone there would hate me because I was an American. In Germany, I would be the enemy.
And what about the bombings? We had heard about Hamburg. Were there other German cities the Allies had bombed? There was also whispered talk that Allied soldiers were now marching across France.
Perhaps that meant the war would be over soon, just as Papa had originally hoped, and our stay in Germany would be just an extended visit to Oma, something we’d been wanting to do as a family for a long time.
As the tears washed away the worst of my anger, I began to consider what I could do to endure this terrible situation. Perhaps I could survive, even carve out a measure of happiness, in Germany until I was eighteen. I could come back to America and join Mariko in Manhattan as we had planned, and we’d do what she’d said we’d do: find out what I was good at.
It was only two and half years until I turned eighteen. Just twenty-eight months. And really, what choice did I have? I would have to go with my family.
Papa knocked on my door, probably having heard my sobs subside, and asked if he could come in.
I didn’t answer; he opened the door anyway. He stepped inside and sat on the edge of my bed.
We sat quietly for a few moments.
“I don’t speak German,” I finally said, and he knew I was telling him how afraid I was of being alone again. Friendless. Hated, perhaps, in a land at war. There would be no friend like Mariko in Germany. I didn’t see how there could be.
“You speak some,” Papa said, easing his arm around me and pulling me to his chest. “And we have a few weeks before we go. Mommi and I will teach you as much as we can until then. Look how quickly Max picked it up.”
“Max has had a year with it,” I muttered.
“You will learn it more quickly than you think, Elise. Trust me. Your mother and I came to America not knowing a word of English and we learned it by living here. You will pick up the language. I promise you.”
I will only be there twenty-eight months, I was saying in my head. Twenty-eight months and then I’m going to New York with Mariko.
Papa had told Max and me many times how beautiful southwest Germany was. Rolling hills of spruce and maples, half-timbered houses with geraniums in all the windows, beautiful old villages with cobblestone streets and city-center fountains, and cathedrals and castles. And my Oma was there, the grandmother for whom I was named. I could spend the necessary months there and perhaps even enjoy them as I counted them off one by one until my eighteenth birthday, provided the war had not altered the state of Papa’s childhood home. This thought struck me hard at that moment, that there was a war going on, and we were going to be heading right into it.
“What about the bombs?” I asked. “What about what happened to Hamburg?”
“That’s four hundred miles away from where we’re going. Hamburg’s at the other end of the country.” He spoke his answer so quickly. It was as though he had asked himself this very question and therefore had the answer at the ready.
“But there are Allied soldiers marching across France. People are talking about it.”
“We’re not going to be in France. And Pforzheim isn’t a military town. It’s surely not a target.”
“But aren’t you and Mommi afraid of the war?” I asked.
This time, several seconds passed before he answered me. “Yes. A little. But we can’t stay here. We have to go.”
“And we’ll be safe there?”
More seconds of silence hung between us. “I have to believe we will be,” he finally said.
He looked into my eyes and I saw how tired he was. Of everything.
“I’ll go, but I’m coming back to America when I turn eighteen, Papa,” I said. “I’m not staying there. I know Germany is home for you and Mommi. But it’s not home for me.”
After a long moment Papa nodded. “Fair enough. Just . . . you don’t need to tell Mommi your plans right away, hm? Give it some time.”
“All right,” I said.
“That’s my girl,” Papa replied, thin relief in his voice.
* * *
? ? ?
I waited until after school the next day to tell Mariko. She sensed something was on my mind in our first-period class. When she asked what was wrong, I told her I had something to tell her but wanted to wait until after her last afternoon class at the Japanese school. We met up in the orange grove, and as we sat in the shade of one of the trees, I told her everything my parents had said, and everything that I’d said in return. I’d imagined Mariko would be angry, like I had been, but her eyes filled with tears of sad acceptance as I shared my news.
“My father wants us to go back to Japan,” she said when I was finished, and she wiped at her eyes with her fingertips. “He would have us leave tomorrow if they let him.”
“It’s not fair what is happening to us,” I said a moment later, as I realized Mariko and I would likely have been parted no matter what Papa had agreed to.
“No, it’s not.”
I sighed heavily, picked up a shriveled orb of decaying fruit, and tossed it. “I’m going to be alone again. No one is going to want to be friends with me. Not there.”
“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” Mariko offered.
I picked up another rotten orange and threw it. “Maybe.”
“Look. We’ll write to each other,” Mariko said encouragingly. “We can still be best friends. And we’ll meet up again in New York. When we’re eighteen, just like we planned. We’ll do it.”
“I counted the months. It’s nearly two and a half years until we’re eighteen.”
“The time will fly by.”
I was already missing her. “Will it?” I blinked back tears that were beginning to burn.
“I’m sure of it.”
“You promise you won’t forget me?” I said.
“Cross my heart.”
Mariko and I were quiet for a moment.
“Is it . . . dangerous where you are going?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Papa doesn’t think so. Germany is a big country.”
“But you’ll be careful anyway. Right?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know what it meant to be careful in war. I had a sudden vision of the drowning Japanese girls as they sank below the surface of the water in the pool. “Be careful,” all the mothers—including mine—had said the next day and the next and the next. What they were really saying was, “Stay out of the deep end. Don’t go where your feet can’t touch.” Did war have a deep end? Was there a place where your feet just couldn’t touch? I didn’t know.
We rose from the ground to begin walking back to our quarters for the evening roll call, musing not on what war was like, but rather on all the things we would do and see and eat on our first day in New York City—free and eighteen and finished with everything the world of our parents had laid upon us.
* * *
? ? ?
The next few weeks Mariko and I spent as much time together as her father would allow. Kenji had grown increasingly sullen and angry, and I think he was envious that my family was being allowed to repatriate when his wasn’t. Only Japanese diplomats were being deported back to Japan. The United States wasn’t brokering any deals with Tokyo to send able-bodied men and women home to them. The situation with Kenji became so bad that Mariko told me not to come over to her house anymore so that her father wouldn’t see us together. I wasn’t a good influence on Mariko; this was what Kenji thought. I was too Western. I was going to make of Mariko what Tomeo and Kaminari had become.
Christmas came and went, and the day of our departure grew ever nearer. My parents were not allowed to venture past our quarters, as they were not to have contact with anyone not likewise being repatriated, lest they be given messages or codes to take with them to Germany. On the day before we were to leave, however, Mariko and I planned to spend every moment of daylight together. When she wasn’t at my doorstep right after breakfast as we had arranged, I snuck over to her house. Mariko had asked me to stay away from her quarters, and I had done so, but this was our last day. She was late coming over to see me. Something was wrong.