“You don’t know anything for certain,” said Christian, watching his father cringe at his disrespectful tone. “Lange could go under. Martin could run it into the ground or find a way to take it from you forever. The war could rage on for five more years. Or we could all go to Germany and die as soon as we’re on land.”
“Let’s assume I know a little more than you,” said Franz. “And I know this: Your mother said she couldn’t live without her only son and that she would do anything to have you with her. Would you have wanted her to rot in Oklahoma? This was the only way to have us all together. Maybe you don’t understand, but you will when you have a family.”
“I understand,” said Christian, flatly. He had managed to push his anger down to a level that his father might tolerate, but he was still livid at his parents for mishandling the news. It was just another way of theirs to protect him; he who they believed still couldn’t handle the realities of the world at seventeen.
Franz nodded and offered no apology, instead saying, “This conversation should have happened after your mother was healthy again.”
A siren interrupted their argument. It was the signal for the count, which happened three times a day—morning, noon, and night—with every internee in the camp rushing to their houses to have their names checked off by guards. Christian and his father went outside, Franz explaining to the guard assigned to their row that Helene was in the hospital.
“We’ll check your story,” the guard replied without sympathy, moving on to their neighbors.
After the count, Christian left his father and tried to shake off some of the pain of the day. The baby was dead. He was going to have to move to Germany until the Americans decided to let him back in. And he knew that was an if, not a guarantee. He would have to experience the war firsthand. But for now, he had the very fresh memories of the hour he’d spent with Emi. That would have to be enough to carry him till tomorrow.
He took a roundabout way to the hospital, past the camp’s orchard of orange trees, letting the sweet aroma fill his lungs. A few Japanese men were back tending to the trees, finishing their shifts for the night, and Christian watched them prune the small branches for a few minutes. Quietly he observed the precision with which they worked. None of them wore gloves, instead letting their bare hands move the clippers slowly, diligently. Christian was surprised with their carefulness, their effort and apparent pride of work. They were essentially grooming their prison and Christian doubted he would have done the same. Already on his first day of dishwashing, he had barely scrubbed the bottles, just soaped and rinsed as fast as he could. Good enough to not get yelled at, said Kurt. He stayed a minute more, listening to the older men speaking Japanese and the younger men his age speaking English, and decided that the next day, he would put a little more care into washing milk bottles.
When he arrived at the hospital, a sympathetic nurse brought him to his mother’s room—unfortunately, still the same room Helene had been in when the baby died.
“Christian. You came back,” his mother said when he walked in, holding her arms out to him as if he were much younger. Her face was ashen, with a blue tint around her nose. She gave him a weak, closed-mouth smile and told him not to look so worried.
He sat on the floor next to the bed, reaching up to hold her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, squeezing her cold fingers. “I’m so sorry.”
She held on to his hand and cried. “You’re my only blood relative in our little family now,” she said. “I chose your father, but you are made from me. Flesh to flesh.”
Christian nodded as she started crying so loudly that a nurse came in to administer what Christian assumed was a sedative. He rested his head against her shoulder, bending backward until his spine hurt.
He hated seeing his mother’s face so lifeless. When he was younger, Christian used to sit quietly in his parents’ bedroom and watch his mother play the violin, her eyebrows moving up like a sunrise, every part of her full of life, animated. He had once overheard a conversation between his parents, his mother telling his father how much their little boy enjoyed her violin music, how musical he could be. She could tell by the way he would keep time with his little foot, banging it against the leg of the chair he sat in. She suggested that they buy him a violin and that she could teach him. That she’d enjoy it. But Franz wouldn’t hear of it.
“Too feminine,” he’d said. “This is America. He has to only do the things American boys do. Football and baseball and driving cars.”
“He’s eight,” Helene had replied, disappointment apparent in her voice.
Christian had still never played a note on the violin, but after the conversation, he had played football and baseball with more effort than ever before, and never missed a day of his mother’s violin practice, his foot keeping the beat even louder as he grew into a teenager.
After the quiet had gone on so long that it seemed to interfere, Helene looked down at Christian and asked, “Do you want to go to Germany with me? I know we didn’t talk about it when you came, but I assume you know all about it now. Maybe not telling you was a mistake. But you can’t fault me too much. I just wanted my son with me. But you do want to go, don’t you? Our family, together, no matter where or how?”
“Of course I do,” Christian answered, standing to kiss his mother’s cheek. “Together, no matter where or how.”
CHAPTER 10
CHRISTIAN LANGE
JUNE 1943
When the calendar flipped to June, a heat wave engulfed the camp that astonished even the Japanese from Southern California. It made life behind fences even harder to bear, with the only relief being the swimming pool, and that became so crowded after school and work hours that it was often body-to-body.
The next time Christian saw Emi was on a day like that. He had started to go to the pool every night after the evening roll call, but he never saw her and instead had to pretend to be reading the German books assigned to him in school. On his fourth visit, in mid-June, she was there, too.