She hadn’t thought of it before she let her mind wander back to Vienna, but Hani Hartmann looked quite a lot like Christian’s bereaved mother, Helene. They both had striking red hair—Helene’s straight and Hani’s a bit darker and curled—though Emi had never been sure if those curls, or the color, were natural or not. They had freckles that made intricate constellations on their arms and were both mothers to only one son. She hoped that Hani Hartmann had not spent the last few months covering her freckles with tears, as Helene was likely still doing as she sat by her window looking out at Crystal City.
There wasn’t, thought Emi, a soul with russet-colored freckles on the MS Gripsholm, except perhaps the captain, but Emi hadn’t seen him yet. He was busy navigating their immense vessel straight down the Atlantic coast toward South America.
Emi turned around at the railing and looked at the people on the deck with her instead of out at the ocean. They were all ethnically Japanese. Emi realized that she wasn’t used to that kind of homogeneity anymore. Even in the internment camps, the populations had been mixed. Now she was headed back to a country that was filled with Emikos and Keikos; there would be no Christian Langes or Leo Hartmanns. How strange, she thought to herself, to have been involved only with foreign men. Chiyo’s gossip down in the cabin was still eating at her, but if she could blame anyone, she thought, it should be her father. She hadn’t asked to be dragged all over the world. There were no Japanese boys for her to fall in love with in Vienna, and in that city, you had to fall in love with someone. It was too beautiful to waste, especially for the young.
Though the first night on board the Gripsholm went smoothly, despite the small cabin and the poor company, the water turned choppy as soon as dawn broke over the horizon on their second day at sea. The Swedish crew members came around to each little room handing the passengers big bars of chocolate, which they said had been reserved as a surprise for when they reached their halfway point in the voyage but were being handed out now instead, as they had rough days ahead. The passengers were advised not to eat the chocolate yet, to wait until the water was calm and there was less danger of seasickness, but Emi unwrapped hers and devoured every morsel in big, starving bites. She hoped the sugar would help settle her stomach, which was starting to feel like a mixing bowl. Emi was well-versed in seasickness from her many long boat trips, but some of the Nisei children, who had never traveled on a boat for such a distance or on one that size, did everything wrong, eating too much and staying in their cabins instead of going up to the deck to breathe the cold sea air.
The weather turned worse on the third and fourth days, and all Emi could hear for forty-eight hours was the sound of bathroom doors opening and closing, waves splashing against the ship like slaps in the face, and the collective groan of over a thousand green-faced people trying not to be sick. When the boat finally settled, on their fifth day at sea, it smelled of vomit, cleaning fluid, and chocolate bars, as Emi was not the only one who failed to heed the crew’s warning.
That night the dinner on board, which was eaten only by the hungry few, including the well-traveled Katos, was beef stew with the thick, Italian-style noodles that few of the Japanese were accustomed to eating. Emi wondered if they might all be sick again, but her stomach proved stronger than her confidence, which could not be said of Chiyo and Naoko. It took two weeks for them not to look green in the face.
It was during the third week at sea that the monotony of being trapped on a ship set in for Emi and her mother. The mornings and afternoons started to run into each other, then the days were hard to tell apart and whenever someone mentioned the day of the week, Emi was always surprised. Everything was blue when the sun was out—the sky, the water, the décor of the ship—and at night everything was black. Blue and black, blue and black, a two-colored world floating past her. Emi started to come up to deck less, choosing instead to sleep and rest the days away. Lying in her narrow bed with too many metal coils sticking in her back and not enough blankets, she thought often of Christian and what they’d shared in Crystal City. She wondered if Leo had had any indiscretions since he’d left Vienna. Had he also been desperate to find some joy in a difficult time?
The MS Gripsholm’s first stop on their eighty-three-day voyage was Rio de Janeiro, logistically a challenge for the understaffed Swedish crew, who had to bring on board nearly a hundred more people—Japanese who had been living in Brazil for years, sometimes generations—who would also be traded in India for American citizens. But despite that task, the crew informed the passengers the night before they docked in Brazil that they would be allowed to leave the ship, unsupervised, for several hours. And not only were they allowed to leave the ship and walk around the city, but they would all have time to go up Rio’s famed Sugarloaf Mountain by cable car, akin to flying for people who had spent more than a year behind fences.
Emi, thrilled at the prospect, leaned against her mother and said, “Freedom.” Together they stayed on deck, well positioned as the sprawling metropolis came into view. They looked down at the craggy coastline, the low houses that seemed to go on forever behind the tall apartment blocks lining the sparkling shore, the dots of palm trees and the white boats, which looked so small below them, and heard each other’s breathing slow down.
“Can you imagine?” said Keiko as the anchor dropped. “It took a world war, a year and a half of internment, and a long ride on a Swedish boat to allow us to see such a place.”
“It’s very pretty,” said Emi, smiling and pressing her hips into the railing, as she was apt to do. “But I don’t think it was worth it.”
“I don’t, either,” said Keiko, holding her daughter’s hand as she leaned out even farther.
When they were in the slow-moving cable car with the vibrant city beneath them and Rio’s iconic mountains in front of them, Keiko said, “Let’s appreciate being in a country that isn’t at war. Let’s remember every minute of this.”
“I’ll come back and see Rio under different circumstances one day,” said Emi when they stepped out of the cable car. “I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t doubt my daughter’s will, ever,” said Keiko. “I learned that a long time ago. You’re a stubborn child, but that’s not a bad trait in a modern young woman, especially one these days.”