Hiroshima in the Morning (27 page)

The night is dark, and me the only presence. Maybe all these visitations were nothing after all, figments and fractures in my memory. There will come a time when my mother will no longer recognize me, when I will sit beside
her bed, holding her hand. Will it matter if I’m there if she doesn’t know me? Or might it not matter who you are as long as you are there? Whose memory is important then, which identity?

My mother is standing in her darkened hallway, but now I can go to her. For this, I need only to feel. When I gather her in my arms, both of us are the same size, both of us shaking; I can whisper to her as she once did to comfort me. Is it her, or me, I am afraid of losing? Is it her last moment of perfect understanding that I’m afraid is already past us, or my own? I didn’t get to say how much I loved her—not then, in her tears, not when I could have summed it all up, given it force, pulled together every beat of my heart and given it back to her.

But I can hold her now, hold myself, our hands a lifeline that cannot be broken. I will keep her with me, long after she’s gone, because how can I survive without her?

SHE LOOKS LOST in the train station lobby, standing just past the turnstiles, rotating her entire body as if she cannot begin to decide where she should settle herself while she waits. Japanese women are small, but this one could not weigh more than ninety pounds. She cocks her head as I approach
and turns again: a wry smile, a stiff neck from the airplane, a strong embrace for a stranger. And then, birdlike, her shoulders tight and careful, she indicates that I should follow her.

“Reiko-chan,” she says. That smile. Those great big eyes, broad cheekbones. “How do you like Japan?”

We will spend all day together, Lily and I. She will be passionate and bossy, and will speak in a voice too soft for my tape recorder. She knows I have read her story, read it in an anthology before I met her and then read everything she sent me in the box on her experience at Tule Lake. She knows I’m not interested in that part of her life as much as what happened after, but life is life, and that is where her story begins.

 

THERE IS A CAMP in the California desert where the enemy aliens are being held. Nine thousand agitators, disloyals, identified, rounded up, shipped out, held without legal status, or benefit of the Geneva Convention, for the good, the safety, of our country. Nine thousand grandparents, babies, young women dying in childbirth because there’s no medical care in the camp.

This is not the kinder, gentler camps of my own family’s stories. The stakes are higher here. The world is darker.

This is Tule Lake.

Here is a father who said,
You took away our rights, our citizenship, our homes, and now we feel justified to say “no” when you try to draft us into your army.
Here is a young man, a seventeen-year-old brother, who, for no more reason than
that refusal to be drafted, is pulled out of bed in a dragnet, placed in the “bullpen,” left for days without food or shelter, beaten with bats, sticks, and rifles, leaving skin and matted hair and blood for the Caucasian women to clean up. He is left for a year in the “stockade,” he and hundreds of others, despite international protests from the Spanish consulate and the ACLU.

Picture a young woman, pregnant. She has two children, ages five and seven, and she’s just been released from the hospital after a tumor operation. American citizen, law-abiding. Take away her husband, kill off her mother-in-law. Hound her with illness, allergies, food poisoning, premature labor; give her new, five-pound infant double pneumonia. Deport her to Hiroshima, to the rubble where her father was killed by the atomic bomb and her mother was burned and hairless and very slowly dying. Pull her children away, in body and mind, so that in her older age, they do not speak.

“People always ask me about Tule Lake.”

 

TELL ME.

I want to hear about the transport ship that brought her back to Japan. I want to hear about the road home, the time spent in Hiroshima after the war. What was it like to find her mother in the ruins of the city, to be cast out by her own family when she arrived? I want to know how Lily survived, with so many lives imploding around her: her brother’s friends, her own, committing suicide because, how does one face these days, of betrayal, of no hope? I want to know
how long it took her to return to the US, how she finally regained her citizenship, how tortuous that route, and why she would bother after what America did to her. This was my original question for her: What do you do when you are rejected by two countries? How do you choose who to be? There is something else now, something briefly mentioned in her published story, that has taken on a sudden urgency: What happened, exactly, with her husband?

“At the time [when she returned to Hiroshima], my husband was in Nagasaki, and I guess he had already started a family or was living with someone else.”

 

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW of Lily’s story. It was her husband who asked to be “repatriated” to Japan, along with his parents, so she agreed to go along. After that, he was sent to a justice department camp, much like a prisoner of war camp, and although they exchanged a few highly censored letters, she never saw him again.

She had agreed to go to Japan with them, but she was ill. Her youngest child barely surviving. Lily’s mother-in-law died in the camps, afraid and screaming; she was carried, ashes in a box, strapped to Lily’s father-in-law’s chest until he too was taken, and Lily was alone. Then, without her own family, without her husband’s, she changed her mind.

Did her husband know that she would have refused to leave if she could have? After he and her father-in-law were moved to the other camp, Lily tried everything she could to stay in the country where she was born, but in the end, her country forced her to go. And when she and her three children
arrived in the ruins, after three years of separation, her husband was there and had already remarried.

Did they lose each other in the letters? Did they lose each other because of time? Was it the choices they had to make in different worlds, with no bridge between them? Lily was caught in a war; she lost her family in a war, fighting all the way without any idea of how to fight, or whom. Was it pain suffered, isolating, that was the final straw? Could it have been so simple?

“Oh, Reiko,” Lily tells me now after she has shared so many memories, “things happen. And that’s life.” You can fight, she says, and oh, she was a fighter!, but hoping the world will be any different is useless. It just makes things worse.

“I learned that the hard way.”

Lily smiles again—wry, twisted. She is eighty-five years old.

“You have to get away,” she says. “Move on. Of course, you have to do your best, do everything you can do, but in the end, you can’t change the world. Right? You can’t even change your husband!” She laughs. We are standing. Going now to meet her brother. “He left. After everything. So what is that? What is fair?”

THE DAYS ARE SHORTER now. The time between sunrise and sunset, my time in Japan—it’s getting harder to see the road, harder to know where we’re going. We wake up in the morning and move, packing the silence between us, sightseeing to save the marriage. Brian and I are living in a truce of exhaustion: it is undeclared; it is as soft as sorrow, and as lonely. I can feel the divide between us, our responses to the same experience sliding to the opposite ends of the scale, one A, one Z, and I can’t help but wonder if the scale we used has always been rigged, bowed to the middle, and what was once a cupped parabola sliding us into a tangled heap at its vertex is now upside down—a cruel joke with no common resting place except for one spot of impossible twinship. We are crossing through a plateau: every kind gesture is too slight for true pleasure; every frustration expected and overlooked. We are too tired for reaction, and leery of the time when we are not.

And what’s more, we are coming up on Christmas, wending our way through mountain roads in the snow and the night in a rented car with a map marked only in kanji.
Zutto massugu, soshite ni-ban me o migi
with some hand signals can usually get us where we’re going, although once, we were so lost in a valley that I leaped into the road to flag down the only passing car we’d seen in twenty minutes, and the driver obligingly led us poor foreigners through the
mountains to the highway, then turned around and continued on his own way.

Our way, on this last sightseeing tour of Japan, is to Hagi and Tsuwano, two historic castle towns northwest of Hiroshima, both of which have been recommended by friends as “little Kyotos.” Our only companions on this white day in Tsuwano are the fat carp in the canals on either side of the main street that barely bother to twitch at the specially purchased carp food we’re dropping on their heads, and, earlier this morning when we climbed to the top of the hill to the Taikodani Inari shrine, our footprints in the snow. We were the first pilgrims on this walk, the winding path up the hill to the shrine bridged by one thousand red toriis so close, in certain places, that the gates function as a tunnel not even the falling snow can penetrate. The quiet was profound, and more resounding than Dylan and Ian, based as it was on the red and white of our walk, the black and white of the samurai quarters below us, the green and white of the forest that eats its slow way into the castle ruins on the next hill. Besides the shrine and the husk of the castle, Tsuwano has temples, museums, paper artisans, steam locomotives, and even a Catholic church. What it lacks is public toilets.

“Finding a potty” has become a family obsession, and something of a conundrum since New York has no public bathrooms, while Japan’s are usually plentiful, clean, and furnished with at least one Western toilet (reliably found at the far end of the row) plus a vending machine for packets of tissue. It seems like a misprint, a problem with the story-teller, that our lives circle back on these bodily functions. So
when Ian “has to go” just as lunch arrives at our table at the small
udon-ya
that has no bathroom, gratitude oozes over my wet, tired shoulders when Brian stands up to take him. The proprietor points them to the train station just across the street. As Brian and Ian re-layer their sweaters, Dylan and I settle into our seats, taking in the wooden beams, the scruffy workmen on their lunch break, the simple painted bowls. He is merely happy to see noodles, and to drain his full glass of soda, while I find myself released to say yet another small goodbye in the series of leave-takings my life has become. I set my nose over the rich, plentiful heap of melting “mountain vegetables” in my soup, drawing it into me before it cools enough to eat, cradling the nutty, sour, slippery mouthfuls of tubers and greens I have come to love and may never taste again.

Dylan insisted he didn’t have to go to the bathroom with Brian and Ian, and, of course, minutes after they return, he changes his mind. I weigh his announcement against the seven minutes of udon that remain in my bowl and decide he can finish his food first. He wiggles. I notice, and wonder if it’s a bad idea.

This is a meal—that’s all it is: one meal I would love to eat from first to last bite uninterrupted. This is a test: if I can have this, maybe I can go back to who I was. I can be a mother. I have become stuck on this: the woman Brian wants is a mother, a member of his united, happy family, not a person who might be called away to do her job and may or may not come home for dinner. If this is simplistic, if this is flat out wrong, still, these are the labels I’m using to grapple
with the struggle between us. I believe that if I can agree to be this mother, my marriage and my family will be saved.

This is my focus as I pretend to ignore Dylan’s fidgeting, until I realize he has moved from not-at-all-interested-in-the-potty to not-at-all-interested-in-his-food. My test failed. My next two minutes would probably be better spent getting him into his coat and through one hundred yards of snow.

We dress and leave Brian to finish up and pay the bill.

The wind has picked up and is slanting the snow into my collar. I shove Dylan’s hat on his head and we dash hand in hand across the empty street to the public restroom beside the train station. It is equally vacant.