Rumors of Peace (4 page)

“White. White,” the voice said, “this is the all clear,” and a moment later the fire bell dinned. Peter turned on the overhead light, and it came into my frozen eyes like a summer morning.

D
EC.
24:

Wake Island Falls!

Christmas Eve was little. Even Dad's cigar smoke and the smell of roast pork were weak, as if a thinness had come into everything. The tree had only a few lights, to save on electricity, and that morning the blackout shades had arrived from Lasell's hardware, and we had them up, dark green, shiny, ugly. There were no Christmas packages from Denmark. We sang “Silent Night” around the piano, and Dad's and Mama's voices had a sound I couldn't place, as if they often wondered what was happening in their home country, and tonight they were wondering most. Opening the presents was nice, though not exciting the way it used to be. But I was happy just that we were still alive.

Christmas morning was crisp and icy, with frozen puddles in the driveway and white frost on the grass. In the cold, clear sky you could see barrage balloons hanging over the bay.

U
NDER COVER OF DARKNESS
, people had been throwing rocks through the windows of the Jap houses in the valley. The Japs had their own school out there that flew the flag of the rising sun (of course it had been taken down right away), and all the schoolhouse windows had been broken, too. But now in early January something happened closer to town and closer to my heart. In the outskirts of town lived a white chicken farmer and his Japanese wife. One day in broad daylight, while these two were away somewhere, vandals broke in and slashed the furniture and turned on all the faucets so that the place was flooded when the couple returned.

These vandals understood, but who backed them up with a firing squad? Even important people understood, because I now read the San Francisco papers when I was at the library and ran my finger under statements by governors, generals, and famous columnists:

                       
Why treat the Japs well here? They take the parking positions. They get ahead of you at the stamp line at the post office. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it. Personally, I hate the Japanese, and that goes for all of them.

and

                       
Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats.

and

                       
A Jap's a Jap! It makes no difference if he's an American or not.

These people understood, but no one listened. The Japs were given all the freedom they wanted to pull their net more tightly around us. Ignorance and blindness were all around me, even in my parents. When they exclaimed over the flooded house, I kept silent. And it seemed wrong that it should be this way, that I, a sixth grader, should be the one to understand. It turned things around, pulled the pattern of life out of kilter: my parents blind, and I miserably wise.

I pondered the facts I had gathered since Pearl Harbor. I knew now that our enemy had been scheming against us for years. Everyone, even my parents, talked about the Jap officers off the oil tankers who used to walk around town with cameras slung over their shoulders like tourists, taking snapshots of Shell, which were now in the hands of their Air Force. I remembered very clearly a little round-faced officer in black tunic and black cap who took a picture of me one summer when I was small, sitting in the schoolyard swing. I had smiled because he was so nice, bowing and beaming and wriggling his fingers. Now I and everyone else realized what these officers had been up to, with grins on their faces and death in their hearts. Only no one would shoot the Japs in the valley, who were just as murderous, with their wireless sets and rocket flares under their floorboards.

In this dark new year of 1942 Dad quit the job he had had as long as I remembered and went to work at Moore's Shipyard in Oakland, twenty miles away. He drove off in the old Ford before anyone else was awake, and returned after dark.

Mama joined a group of Red Cross women who met three afternoons a week to roll bandages for wounded soldiers.

Ezio threw away his knitted hat and replaced it with an army overseas cap he found on the street.

Downtown was a crowded place now, filled with soldiers wandering around between trains, with sailors from Mare Island and Port Chicago, with construction workers who were building a garrison by the creek. A lot of servicemen took a special liking to Ferry Street with its fourteen saloons crowded into three blocks, and sometimes you saw them staggering out in the rain and throwing up in the gutter. But most just bought picture postcards at Reed's stationery to send home or walked around looking at girls. They made wolf calls at Karla. One tossed me a dime and said to call him up in ten years. I pondered his idea that he would be alive in ten years. He was probably whistling in the dark; if I were a soldier, I would throw dimes everywhere if it made me feel better. Soldiers got killed. You saw them in
Life
magazine with their arms sticking up from the snow like iron or lying half covered by sand on littered beaches. That was what it meant to be a soldier.

I continued lying awake far into the night. My grades had slumped disastrously, and now Miss Bonder had a talk with my mother, who sat me down that evening with her and Dad, not for the first time. What was really wrong? they wanted to know. And it was proof of my long careful deception that they did not point a questioning finger at the war. After the understandable hysteria of my creek plunge, I had shown no more and no less concern with the war than anyone else my age. I collected tinfoil. I said optimistic things. And now I was even smart enough to bring a comic book to read under the lamp during air raid alerts. But I could not sleep at night, and my grades were failing.

My parents were unhappy, and I was unhappy for them. I promised myself that as soon as the siren was installed and I could sleep again, I would make it up to them by becoming a top student.

The great day arrived the end of January, with a sound the enormousness of which no one had ever imagined—a madly amplified cow's moo blasted first in the middle register, then in the bass, this pattern repeated nonstop for five minutes. With each alert, satisfied reports came pouring in from Pacheco, Port Chicago, and Port Costa—all six or seven miles away—that the blast could be heard as though from next door. But here in Mendoza people leaped from their chairs, dogs raced under
tables, babies screamed themselves into convulsions. Sheriff O'Toole was finally approached to lower the intensity, which he did with reluctance. Even so, the alarm remained a heart-jolting bellow which no one could possible snore through to his death, and I was finally able to fall asleep after only an hour or so of ingrained vigilance.

At school, in spite of my vow, I merely plodded back to my former mediocrity. Nor had my other vow been kept: my side of the bedroom remained as cluttered as ever. It seemed that the only real changes in life came from the outside and were forced on you. Like the war itself, or my classmates' sudden chatter about next fall and junior high school—a glamorous Spanish-style building I had no desire for, with its lawns that no one played on and its trees that no one climbed.

F
EB.
15:

Singapore Gives Up!

That same day I came across a picture in
Life
that I wanted badly. It was a picture from a Malayan town called Kuala Lumpur, and it showed a Jap soldier who had tried to crawl out of his tank and been burned to a crisp. His head stuck out of the turret, skull-like, and as though covered with tar or black molasses, a few wisps of singed hair hanging over the empty eye sockets. By expressing interest in a neighboring feature on palomino horses, I was able to have this issue for myself without raising suspicion. I kept it on a shelf with Andersen's fairy tales and my comic books, and each night before going to bed, I indulged myself in a long, fulfilling scrutiny of the incinerated skull.

F
EB.
24:

Santa Barbara Shelled!

It sent me to the bathroom with acute diarrhea. Afterward, as we sat listening to the radio news broadcast, I drew swift, detailed pictures of beheaded, limbless Japs bleeding from every pore, then quickly scribbled them out, in case anyone should look over my shoulder. The announcer's final words, making me sit back and swallow, were these: “The purpose of war is still to kill people, and it can still happen here just as it happened at Pearl Harbor.”

It came the next night. At one o'clock in the morning, to the shattering
blasts of the alarm, we hurried into the living room, pulling our bathrobes around us. No sooner had we turned on the radio and sat down to wait than the voice said, “Red. Red. This is the red signal. Go to your cellars. We repeat, this is the red signal. Go to your cellars immediately—”

“Well,” said Mama, standing up.

Peter clicked on his flashlight. As in a dream, we walked quietly through the dark house and out the back door. It was a cold, moonlit night. The wind whipped our bathrobes as we went along the back of the house to the cellar door. We waited while Peter groped with the latch. He seemed to take forever, but I felt no urgency, only a huge exhaustion, a sense of unreality. He swung the door open for us, and single file we descended the steep concrete steps as he stepped inside and closed the door above us. In the blackness someone bumped into the drum and sent it over with a crash.

Joining us with the flashlight, Peter beamed it on the old steel cot awaiting us. On its rusty springs lay a pile of emergency blankets covered with oilcloth. Below it stood an emergency chamber pot. The springs creaked as we sat down in a row. We spread the blankets across our laps. The beam of light went off.

I felt the wire springs pressing sharply into my buttocks. In my nostrils was a close, dank underground smell.

“It's like sitting on razor blades,” Karla whispered.

“It's just for a while,” Mama said, also in a whisper.

And Peter whispered, “It's just another drill.”

But I was sitting next to him and I could feel a muscle working in his thigh, as if his heel were moving nervously up and down.

We waited in silence. In my plaid slippers, my feet were already numbed by the chill of the concrete. I sat exhausted under Mama's arm, looking into the blackness before me.

At length we heard brief, official voices outside. Block wardens, talking on the corner.

“I wish Dad weren't out there,” Karla whispered.

And Peter whispered, “Come on, you know O'Toole's been dying to test the red alert.” But the muscle in his thigh was still working.

Time must have passed, but there was no sense of its passing. It
was part of the heavy stillness of this dark cave in the earth. Now and then someone moved a little with a creaking of springs, or there came a sudden chattering of teeth. But above all were the enormous black silence and the abiding quality of ears listening, and the sense of unreality.

When the drone of planes was heard, there was a collective turning of heads, like a delicate current in the darkness. Mama's arm gathered me slowly into her. The unreality faded. I felt drool fill my mouth, sliding out the corner. As the drone grew louder, it began reverberating under the soles of my slippers, in the wire springs of the cot, in the porcelain of my teeth, until it became a maddening roar directly overhead, and then the bombs were released, plummeting, and with an abrupt crushing up of my body I heard them whistling down, and everything ended in a shattering blast of white.

I was breathing, but with difficulty, crushed deep into something rough. Gradually it came to be the familiar roughness of Mama's terry-cloth robe. Her arm was like iron around me. It slowly relaxed as silence ebbed back. Everyone whispered at once.

“Were they our own?”

“They came so low!”

“I thought—”

The walls resounded with the blasts of the all clear, and numbly finding my face, I wiped the drool from my chin. Peter jumped up with a clang of released springs and pulled the string of the overhead bulb, illuminating the fallen drum, the damp cellar floor. These sights seemed, beyond all understanding, of great beauty and perfection. I watched Peter's blond hair fall brightly forward as he reached down to the drum. I looked at Mama, whose face was brilliantly clear and focused, as if under a magnifying glass.

“You were very good, Suse,” she said, still in a whisper, smoothing my hair back with a hand that trembled slightly.

A reply was in order. I must form words and speak them. It was a moment before they came. “I was cold, though.”

“Frozen stiff, you mean!” exclaimed Karla, shivering with pleasure.

Because now even the cold was beautiful. Outside, the wind felt clean and sweet; the pale moonlit yard gleamed. When we sat down to hot
Ovaltine in the kitchen, the night had turned cozy and festive. And when Dad safely rejoined us, saying that it had been an unfounded alert off the Golden Gate, I felt the good heavy hand of sleep on my lids.

But I jolted awake in the dark. The illumined drum was gone, the clean wind and cozy Ovaltine. All that remained was the whistling down of the bombs and the white shattering blast.

I
N
M
ARCH
the FBI broke into the Santa Cruz home of a Nisei couple and discovered sixty-nine crates of colored flares and signal rockets.

That night I gave a prayer. I had never prayed before and was not sure how to phrase the words of a prayer. I wanted to ask that the Japs in the valley be gotten rid of before they brought the bombers in. It must be clear, direct.

“Sheriff O'Toole,” I whispered, “shoot them in the morning.”

One cold, blustery afternoon I saw something in the post office that kindled my hopes. Alongside the “Be Prepared” and “Back the Attack” posters was a new one, “The Mask Is Off.” It showed a slimy-faced Jap with buckteeth removing a smiling mask with one hand, while clutching a dripping dagger in the other. Now even the solemn post office was in on it. Now something would happen.

On the morning of March 27 all Japanese Californians were given forty-eight hours in which to dispose of their homes and businesses. When they had done this, they were loaded onto trucks, buses, and trains and taken to detention camps.

I was outraged. They had stuffed their wireless sets in the false bottoms of suitcases and baby buggies. They would escape from the camps and spread into the countryside to work from there. It was a measly, pointless move. Those who tried to kill you should be killed.

I heard my parents talking in the living room.

“The shop went for almost nothing,” my dad said.

“It's hard to believe,” Mama said, knitting on a khaki muffler. “It's disgusting.”

They were referring to Mr. Nagai. I didn't want to think about Mr. Nagai. I pushed him deeper into my storeroom and went into my bedroom, where I took my
Life
from its shelf and studied the burned head with an enravished loathing. I had never shared my burned head with anyone, but tomorrow, even if he was too scatterbrained to appreciate it on the right level, I would show the picture to Ezio. I felt a great need, tonight, to share. I felt at sea, all alone now, with the empty, silent valley.

The next morning I brought the magazine to school, but it quickly vanished from my thoughts. Ezio was yelling to a group by the swings.

“Those bastards, I'll kill 'em!”

“Who?” I asked, squeezing up to him.

“We've got to get out of any military zones! And what's military here! That bunch of crummy barracks? I'm impressed! I'm impressed!”

“Get out?”

“Get out! Any Italians that don't have citizen papers, like my mother! We've got to go ten miles outside city limits! We've got to go to my uncle's in San Ramon—”

I stared at him. “How long?”

“For the whole war,” answered another Italian pupil, of whom several stood listening. They only seemed bewildered. None carried on like Ezio, who struck his thigh with his fist and yanked his overseas cap down.

“What do they think, we're a bunch of Japs? I
hate
Tojo! I hate Hitler! I hate Musso—”

Miss Bonder's tall pompadour passed through the crowd. “Ezio, please don't shout. It just makes things worse.”

“It doesn't either!” he yelled in her face.

“That's enough. Lower your voice.” And she turned to us, thinking for a moment before she spoke. “I know it's hard to understand, but in wartime things sometimes have to be done that seem unfair. All we can do is cooperate and do our best to end this war as soon as possible.”

They were a teacher's dry, empty words. It was Ezio who was real, furiously smoothing the sides of his overseas cap, standing on trembling legs as if he had just run ten miles and was ready to collapse.

It was, as Ezio said many times during the next month, the most stupid idea the government had ever had. Some of the Italians leaving town had sons in the armed services. Not only that, but those who worked in town, even at Shell, could get passes to go to their jobs. What sense did that make if the government was afraid they were going to plant a bomb by an oil tank? It was rottenness and stupidity, the whole country wasn't worth a nickle, let it rot. When Bataan fell, Ezio spoke of it with a contemptuous sneer, as if had he been consulted he might have spared us such a defeat, but at this point would have had to be begged to do so.

The day before his departure I told him I would come to his house in the morning to say good-bye.

“The hell you will. I don't want a bunch of jerks hanging around.”

He must have seen the hurt look in my eyes. He said sullenly, “You can say it now.”

I stood looking at him, not knowing how to phrase a farewell.

“Well. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” He crossed the street, not looking back.

But I spied on him the next morning, from the big date palm down the street from his house. In blue jeans, sport jacket, and no overseas cap, his face set in an expression of aloof efficiency, he was helping his uncle load the car. Suitcases were strapped to the roof; the back seat was piled high. Mrs. Pelegrino, a brown coat over her print dress, a kerchief around her head, was trying to keep Mario by her side.

“Mario go to Port Chicago!” he yelled, twisting and pulling. “Mario go to Port Chicago!”

“Shut up, sweetheart!” she cried. “You make Mama crazy!”

“
Andiamo
,” the uncle called, getting in behind the wheel. With a last glance over her shoulder, Mrs. Pelegrino climbed in and settled Mario on her lap. Ezio got in after her and slammed the door. Framed by the window, his flinty, lifted profile moved down the street, and he was gone.

Two days later the house was up for rent.