He’d killed a man. He felt that for the rest of his life, everything would coil around that moment—before he’d stopped someone’s heartbeat, and after. Could you really fight for the Americans? Emi had asked. No, it turned out. He could barely fight at all.
That night, after they had advanced halfway across the island and taken hundreds of enemy lives, Sergeant Perko sat down near Christian and grabbed one of Jack’s hand-rolled cigarettes.
“Finally! Dead Japs,” he said. “I’ve been waiting a lifetime for today.” Perko pretended his hands were a gun and emptied an imaginary round into Christian’s face.
“What’s wrong with you, Lange?” he said as Christian grabbed his hand and pushed it down. “You got at least one kill. I saw that bastard go down. Let’s celebrate. Tomorrow we do it again,” he said, handing him a canteen. “Have some water. Pretend it’s beer.”
“I’m going to sleep,” said Christian, standing up and heading to his soggy sleeping bag, feeling that sleep would never come easily to him again.
As he lay awake, the only man in his tent, he pictured the Japanese soldier’s face. He could see it perfectly—young and terrified. Did he think about his parents before he’d died? About a girl? Or had he just prayed that Christian might miss? Did he feel any pain when the bullet entered his body? Christian started sweating under his regulation blanket and kicked it off. Trying to calm down, he reached inside his bag for his paper and wrote a letter to Inge, as he’d done many times since leaving Crystal City.
“Tell me only good things, little kraut,” he wrote. “I am feeling unwell.” He folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and addressed it to Texas. He didn’t know when he’d be able to send it, or if it would make it before the ship left for Germany, but it made him feel better to have written her name. Somewhere in the world, he told himself, there were children, alive and well.
He slid his left wrist under his pillow to hide the time and tried again to fall asleep. He wondered about Inge, about his parents, and where Emi was at that moment. Maybe she was working as a nurse for the Japanese after her training in Crystal City. He pictured her in a white uniform, like the one she wore in Texas, easing the suffering of others, just as she had done for him. But that made him jealous, the idea of her tending to wounded young men. Or maybe she was taking shelter from American bombardment, hiding in a basement with her mother. He hoped she had somewhere safe to go, where American bombs dropped by men like him couldn’t touch her. He hoped Emi thought about him, too. Just sometimes. He hoped she missed him and, despite what she was living through, that she was happy. He put his arms under his head, looked up at the peak of his tent, and lay awake for the rest of the night.
CHAPTER 29
EMI KATO
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1944
It was at the end of February, when Karuizawa was enveloped in a bitter cold—negative 15 degrees Celsius in the hills near Mount Asama—that Emi began to notice that Jiro Mori’s already fragile health was declining rapidly.
In the late afternoon, leading into dinner, Emi often sat with him in the small wood-paneled kitchen and they spoke about the war and the world. The world before the war was what Emi preferred to discuss, but inevitably, they would move on to the present war. She was intrigued by Jiro’s unwavering affection for America, a sentiment she had never quite developed.
“The Americans didn’t have such hate for us in the 1920s; there was intrigue, perhaps on par with what you experienced in your beloved Vienna,” Jiro explained on a particularly cold afternoon in early March. Though his body was frail, and his clothes closer to blankets than garments, he still had an elegance about him—a head of thick gray hair, expensive metal eyeglasses, and a refined way of speaking—that reminded Emi of the men currently in the diplomatic corps. “This country was devastated by the Kanto earthquake when I was there. But America—it was a country on fire,” he said, his limbs crossed for warmth. “Everyone was still rejoicing the end of the Great War and there was a film of happiness over everything. The Roaring Twenties they called it. And I loved driving those great big American cars. I found an illegal track south of Washington and would race the Italian embassy staff on Sundays—and beat them flat.” He and Emi were sitting in the kitchen, enjoying the coal in the iron stove that they had received in their monthly ration, but they only dared burn it by the handful.
“That sounds better than Catholic school and a series of internment camps,” said Emi.
They listened to the rhythmic tap of a Japanese green woodpecker that hovered around the Moris’ trees while eating their meager dinners as slowly as possible. Yuka Mori had forgone dinner, instead going into town with a neighbor to see if she couldn’t barter carrots for meat, a very unlikely prospect unless someone took pity on her. The Moris had just run out of the ham that Emi had brought from the German party—rationed to just a few bites a day—and it had whet a craving for sustenance that they were all trying to extinguish.
“I don’t know how you can say nice things about America now,” said Emi. “Now that they’re attacking us.”
“I don’t know that I’m saying nice things. I think I’m just expressing fond memories. A country can change. This country certainly has, don’t you think?” asked Jiro, coughing into his hand, unable to get the food down very easily.
“I suppose,” said Emi, offering Jiro water and taking a small bite of brown rice with an unidentifiable dried river fish cut on top. She had learned to eat slowly, to put fewer than ten grains of rice on her chopsticks and in her mouth at a time, all to make her food last. Perhaps it was having the rich German food and then going back to scraps, but Emi had started to feel real, painful hunger for the first time that month.
She had thought often about what Chiyo and Naoko Kuriyama had said to her on the boat to Japan. That the Katos’ money, their position, would make no difference in a country at war. In many ways they were right. Emi still wasn’t receiving mail from either Christian or Leo, and from what Claire Ohkawa had told her, they were likely not receiving her attempts at communication, either. When she mentioned that her father had been able to write to her in Texas, she suggested Emi send her letters from the foreign ministry in Tokyo, or through an embassy, where they’d have a better chance of making it onto foreign shores. Not wanting her father to read her letters, or know a thing about Christian, Emi instead asked Evgeni’s friend at the Soviet Embassy, housed in the Mampei Hotel, to help. Two letters were mailed to Christian and Leo, both devoid of any sentiment or words of war, but still, after almost two months, she had no response. That silence was as physically painful to her as a lack of food.