A Girl Like You: A Novel Part 21

A rusty blackbird sits on the branch of a dead pear tree, shrugging in the damp air as though it is pulling up the collar of a feathery coat. It looks as miserable as the mourners.

"It's so cold," Naomi complains, and Satomi takes off her scarf and wraps it around Naomi's head, tying it in a knot under her chin.

"Just like Tamura. Just like your mother," Naomi says.

The wind is in wicked flight now, whisking the dirt from the ground, covering their shoes, worming grit into their mouths. It hums through the cl.u.s.ter of stunted apple trees at the margin of the burial ground, creating a lament on the air.

"We must be quick," the priest says. "The storm is almost here."

Satomi looks toward the mountains and gauges by the way clouds have not yet settled on the peaks that it won't hit full force until nightfall.

"At least this is one 'dust devil' that she won't have to suffer," Eriko whispers to Satomi. "She hated them, didn't she?"

"Yes, but I think I hated them more for her. I don't care when they come now. I can't even be bothered to fight them anymore."

Later that day, outside the Buddhist workshop as the storm moves closer, people file past her the grieving daughter, bowing, not smiling.

"So many have come to say goodbye to her," Dr. Harper says. "I'm not surprised, Tamura was easy to love."

Cora is at her side despite Eriko's opinion that it is a bad idea.

"She is too young to understand, Satomi. She will only be confused."

Perhaps it is all too much for Cora, the solemnity of it, the distraction of the grown-ups. But she had wanted to come, would have felt excluded if she had not been allowed to share the day. And, since beginning her work at the orphanage, Satomi has realized that children understand so much more than adults give them credit for. From the age of four she thinks they have a hold on pretty much everything.

It disturbs her that she knows so few in the line. How have so many of the inmates come to know Tamura? They all seem to be claiming her as their own someone special.

"I worked with your mother. Did she never speak of me?"

"She had a fine singing voice."

"She had no enemies."

"Tamura Baker will be missed."

Satomi recognizes the white-haired woman who is crying. She is usually to be seen walking around the camp carrying a shabby cardboard suitcase as though she has just arrived. There had been speculation in the first year or two as to what she might have in the case. Money or medicine, had been a popular guess, until it had split open in the mess hall one day, and was shown to contain nothing more than a child's rattle and a pair of baby shoes.

"She must have lost her child," Tamura had guessed. "That's a grief there's no recovery from. Make sure you give her a greeting when you pa.s.s her, Satomi."

At least the old woman could cry for a lost friend, whereas she herself, the beloved child, seems incapable of it. What is wrong with her? Her eyes are as dry as her mouth, her blood is slow, her heart dull and cold.

She calmly acknowledges the mourners one by one, unaware of the trail of blood that is seeping from her clenched hands, tinting her dress brick-red, as her nails bite into her palms.

"Who is the man with the bloated face, Eriko?"

"I'm not sure. I've seen him around, though. Probably someone Tamura was kind to, someone who used her salves. Plenty of that sort here today, I should think."

Mr. and Mrs. Sano come. He's holding his wife's arm firmly in case she should wander off. Lately Mrs. Sano has taken to muttering out loud, flicking her hands around as though she is beset by bees. She goes missing for hours on end, so that strangers bring her home from her wanderings, from her setting up home in their barracks. She doesn't brush her hair anymore, and where once she wouldn't look you in the eye, now she stares at people with a child's unswerving gaze. Her mind may be wandering so that she hardly knows who she is, but Mr. Sano still takes his pleasure of her. These days, though, his is the only moaning to be heard through the wall.

"We have come to sign," he says. "We have no complaints of your mother as a neighbor, at least."

"He is well practiced in rudeness," Naomi says, not bothering to whisper.

A condolence book has been placed on a table at the entrance to the workshop. It has fifty signatures in it by noon and a line of people waiting to sign.

"We are like Pavlov's dogs," the old man who had exposed himself to her says. "Trained by habit to wait in line for everything."

Yumi is playing jacks with a group of girls in the grime at the old man's feet. They are wearing freshly laundered dresses under their jackets, the hems already covered in dirt. Despite a coating of dust, their dark hair gleams, and their olive black eyes s.h.i.+ne.

Hearing their chatter, Satomi is reminded of the schoolyard in Angelina, and memories of Lily are stirred. Haru's little sister has grown up while Satomi had been preoccupied with him. Under the stretched fabric of Yumi's dress her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are full, her hips rounding. She has already made out with at least two of the boys from the camp's softball team, and with her provocative stance she is the star of the baton-twirling troop. Haru, when he returns, will have his hands full keeping her in check.

"Go and play somewhere else," Eriko scolds, frowning at Yumi. "Have some respect."

"They only know how to live in the moment," Satomi says. "They are lucky; we lose the art of it as we grow."

But she feels herself that she can only live in the moment too. It's too hard to think of the future without Tamura in it. Grief has sapped her energy and she can't be bothered to wonder what she will do when freedom comes, except that she must somehow keep Cora in her future.

Like Aaron, Tamura now will only come to her in memory. There is no one left to share the recollections of her childhood with. Life is changed forever.

She has already been ordered to vacate their barrack, to leave the place that Tamura had made home. It has been allotted to Mr. and Mrs. Hamada. They have added a baby to their family of nine since coming to Manzanar, and are so overcrowded that in summer the older children prefer to sleep in the open underneath their barrack, despite that the rats run there. In winter, their human huddle keeps the warmth in, at least.

Mr. Hamada has turned their present barrack into a little palace with his carvings. Their door has a tree carved in relief on it, and lifelike birds perch on its branches. There is no doubt that he is a true artist.

The Sanos too have been told to move. They are to have the Hamadas' barrack so that the bigger family can occupy both theirs and Satomi's old homes. Mr. Sano is full of complaints. He goes about with his old tortoise face screwed up with anger, his eyes dark and hooded.

"They have no consideration at all. I will have to move everything myself, my wife is incapable of anything these days. My daughter-in-law might as well not exist, she is so unreliable, always off somewhere."

Mrs. Hamada avoids Mr. Sano, but she apologizes to Satomi. "I am so sorry, but what can we do? And the older children are so excited at having some s.p.a.ce to themselves. If it hadn't been us, someone else would have taken it from you."

"Don't worry about it, Mrs. Hamada, you are welcome. It can't be helped. It's only fair, after all."

"It is easy to tell that your mother lives in you, Satomi," Mrs. Hamada says, relieved that there isn't to be a fuss.

"You must stay with us or you'll be housed with strangers," Eriko insists. "You can have Haru's bed."

She can smell him on the blanket: soap and salt and something in the dry down that she couldn't have described but would have recognized anywhere. It's the tormenting essence of him.

She thinks of Aaron, who said that everything had its own peculiar smell, that he could tell what month it was simply by sniffing the air, it was the same for the time of day. He could smell fog before you could see it, smell the rare frosts that iced his fields before they arrived.

"What does fog smell like, Father?"

"It smells like the sea after a storm."

She hugs Haru's blanket to her, runs her fingers down the length of sacking that Eriko has left hanging. His books are piled neatly on the floor, a pencil as a bookmark in his yellowing copy of The Grapes of Wrath. She picks it up and starts to read where Haru has left off. He has underlined in pencil, migratory family, California.

When the time comes to leave the camp she will abandon Haru, let him go. For now, though, she burrows down with his books, his scent and his family nearby.

Since the superintendent has refused her permission to have Cora live with her, she spends most of her time at the orphanage.

"I can't blame them," she says to Eriko. "It's enough to take care of myself, let alone be responsible for a child. And I am a guest in your home, after all. But I so long to keep Cora with me."

She worries about what will happen to Cora when the war ends. There is talk that the children will be evacuated to places as far away as Alaska, to any orphanage, any family prepared to take them. They are little nomads who must make their homes over and over.

Dr. Harper has spirited away a letter he saw on the superintendent's desk as he was writing a report on a child with diphtheria. It was a request from a farmer in Oregon: "I'll take any boy strong enough to work on the land."

"Shameless!" he exclaimed to Satomi. "Well, at least I can save one boy from the horror of that."

The letter will add to his archive, which grows daily. He squirrels away papers, takes his forbidden photographs, lists a daily count of the rats that he sees in broad daylight, in the mess hall kitchens, the latrines, on the roofs of the barracks nibbling away at the peeling tar paper so that the rain gets through. He has a collection of objects that have touched him and will be a better aid to memory than facts and figures, he thinks. There is a necklace made from bark strung with string that an inmate left in the hospital, it's strangely sophisticated, he thinks. He keeps a discarded wooden geta shoe, a split tin plate. He has made sketches of the new hospital, and one of the library. They look impressive, and after all there must in any archive be balance.

As time pa.s.ses in Manzanar the seasons continue in much the same way they have done since Satomi first arrived. The camp's inmates suffer the same bitter winters, the same heat-logged summers, and the ever-present dust, always the dust. But the weather aside, even Satomi has to agree with Eriko, that over the last couple years conditions in the camp have improved.

Dr. Harper had been right. New latrines have been built, there are j.a.panese doctors in the hospital, and the inmates' health has stepped up a notch, as drug treatments are easier to come by. And now there's a barber shop, art cla.s.ses, a camp newspaper; there's tofu and soy sauce to be had in the mess halls.

A shallow sort of settling has taken over from the restlessness that was, in the first year of their confinement, the more usual mindset. There's still talk of freedom, but an end to the war seems a distant prospect, and the question of who will win it, not yet to be predicted.

Satomi and Cora are closer than ever.

"Like you and Tamura," Eriko says sentimentally to Satomi.

Cora has turned out to be a good pupil in her cla.s.ses, she's quick to pick up on things, and her skill at math calls Lily to Satomi's mind. But she is a fragile child, slow to trust, clinging to Satomi, jealous of sharing with her peers.

Haru has had leave only once, and then only for two days. He came to the camp, handsome in his uniform, bringing little gifts: violet scent for Satomi and Yumi, a sewing box for Eriko, and fleece-lined gloves for Naomi. He didn't walk out with Satomi, and she was never alone with him.

"He treats me like he does Yumi," she said to Eriko. "As though I am his sister."

"It's for the best, Satomi," Eriko said, not wanting to give Satomi false hope.

Haru had slept in his old bed while Satomi lay next to Yumi under her Indian blanket, unable to sleep at all. He is somewhere in Europe now, which distresses Eriko.

"Europe," she says, all concern. "What is there in Europe but war and the killing of our sons?"

"Will you take me to the new cinema?" Cora asks Satomi. "It cost ten cents and I don't even have one."

Since Cora first asked, they have never missed a show. They go together hand in hand, Haru's blanket under Satomi's arm for them to sit on in the damp sagebrush field where the screen is put up once a month. Cora's favorite is Flash Gordon. She loves the all-American boy, his unbelievably golden hair, the light that seems to s.h.i.+ne out of him. The Emperor Ming is a popular hate figure. Along with the other children, and brave in their company, Cora shouts at him scornfully. At night, though, curled under her bed, she dreams of him in her restless sleep; dreams of his cruel eyes, his long clawlike nails.

"Is he real?" she asks Satomi.

"No, he is a person made up to frighten us. Just make-believe."

Satomi marvels at how the children lose themselves in make-believe. Their imaginings seem more real to them than their actual lives.

The boys are American heroes, playing capture the flag, fighting to keep the enemy from the Stars and Stripes. The girls play house, feeding pretend meat loaf and ketchup to the cotton stuffed dolls, knitted for them by fine women like Naomi.

In the late afternoons Satomi walks from the orphanage with Cora to Eriko's, where the child spends an hour or so being spoiled. She plays with the girls in Sewer Alley, hopscotch and kick the can. It's favoring her, and against the rules, but the supervisors look the other way. Cora is a special child, after all, a little angel. Who would deny her Satomi's attention, some time of her own?

"You are only making it harder on yourself," Eriko says, fussing around the child, pinching her cheeks, pulling her socks up. "Your heart will break when the parting comes."

"I will write to her, Eriko. And I will visit when I can."

"It won't be as easy as you think, Satomi. They have no idea where the children will end up. And even if they did, I'd bet a dollar that there will be a rule prohibiting you from knowing."

Little Boy. Fat Man.

"Such names," Eriko says, tears streaming down her face as she bites her lips until they bleed. "To give bombs pet names as though they are family members."

Satomi shakes her head in disbelief. "Was America ever what we thought it to be?"

"It is the bully of the world," Naomi says regretfully.

They didn't need to hear the reports of the atomic bombings on Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki from the guards-the illegal radios in Manzanar spread the news quicker. But those who heard it by word of mouth thought it so exaggerated as to be more rumor than fact.

How could such a weapon exist? A weapon that could kill a hundred thousand in one go. How could a plane named Enola Gay, in honor of the pilot's mother, house a bomb so big that it could suck up and digest the earth till nothing remained but cinders? What mother would consider such a namesake an honor?

But when Emperor Hirohito's capitulation speech is put out over the Tannoy, they are convinced. They may never have heard his voice before, but there is no room for doubt.

"It could only be him," they say.

"Yes. It is a samurai's voice. Ancient, from the old world. Like your grandfather's grandfather might sound."

At first, not knowing the difference between atomic and normal destruction, people liken the devastation to that of Pearl Harbor.

"So the debt is paid," they say. "The score settled, honor restored."

Soon, though, the tales of a burning the like of which has never been seen, and of the annihilation of those sad islands where some of Manzanar's inmates have relatives, takes hold, and the reports become the stuff of Greek tragedy.

"They say it has cracked the earth's crust and will get us all in the end."

"There isn't a soul left, I hear."

"Even the children have gone."

"Even the ghosts."

In the privacy of their barracks some of those who have relatives on the burned up islands quietly sing the j.a.panese national anthem.

"Only out of respect," they a.s.sure each other. "In memory of Uncle Toru, of cousin Sakamoto."

Pearl Harbor has been revenged at last. The enemy has been crushed and there is talk of Manzanar closing. Two months pa.s.s before the official notice comes-the camp will close in November. Soon they will all be free.

"We need time to work out what it means to us," Naomi says with a quavering voice. "Just when we are settled, everything must change again."

"She is afraid to leave," Eriko says. "We are all a bit afraid, I guess. We don't even know if we will get our homes and businesses back. It's going to be a struggle."