Snow Falling on Cedars

  ‘Let’s get married,’ he said again, and she understood what he meant. ‘I just … I want to marry you.’

  She made no move to stop him when he slid his hand inside her panties. Then he was peeling them down her legs, and she was still crying silently. He was kissing her and pulling his own pants to his knees, the tip of his hardness was against her skin now and his hands were cupped around her face. ‘Just say yes,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell me yes, tell me yes. Say yes to me. Say yes, oh God say yes.’

  ‘Ishmael,’ she whispered, and in that moment he pushed himself inside of her, all the way in, his hardness filling her entirely, and Hatsue knew with clarity that nothing about it was right. It came as an enormous shock to her, this knowledge, and at the same time it was something she had always known, something until now hidden. She pulled away from him – she pushed him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Ishmael. No, Ishmael. Never.’

  He pulled himself out, away. He was a decent boy, a kind boy, she knew that. He pulled his trousers up, buttoned them, and helped her back into her panties. Hatsue straightened her bra and clasped it again and buttoned up her dress. She put her coat on and then, sitting up, began meticulously to brush the moss from her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t right.’

  ‘It seemed right to me,’ answered Ishmael. ‘It seemed like getting married, like being married, like you and me were married. Like the only kind of wedding we could ever have.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hatsue, picking moss from her hair. ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy.’

  ‘I am unhappy. I’m miserable. You’re leaving tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I’m unhappy, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘I’m sick with it, I feel worse than I’ve ever felt. I don’t know anything anymore.’

  He walked her home, to the edge of her fields, where they stood for a moment behind a cedar tree. It was nearly dusk and a March stillness had seized everything – the trees, the rotting deadwood, the leafless vine maple, the stones littering the ground. ‘Good-bye,’ said Hatsue. ‘I’ll write.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Ishmael. ‘Stay here.’

  When she finally did leave it was well past dusk, and she walked out of the woods and into the open with the intention of not looking back again. But after ten steps she did so despite herself – it was too hard not to turn around. It was in her to say good-bye forever and tell him she would never see him again, to explain to him that she’d chosen to part because in his arms she felt unwhole. But she didn’t say it, that they had been too young, that they had not seen clearly, that they had allowed the forest and the beach to sweep them up, that all of it had been delusion all along, that she had not been who she was. Instead, unblinking, she looked at him, unable to hurt him in the way that was demanded and in some undefined way still loving what he was, his kindness, his seriousness, the goodness in his heart. He stood there, Ishmael, looking at her desperately, and that was the way she would remember him. Twelve years later she would still see him this way, standing at the edge of the strawberry fields beneath the cover of the silent cedars, a handsome boy with one arm outstretched, beckoning her to come back.

  15

  An army truck took Fujiko and her five daughters to the Amity Harbor ferry dock at seven o’clock on Monday morning, where a soldier gave them tags for their suitcases and coats. They waited among their bags in the cold while their hakujin neighbors stood staring at them where they were gathered on the dock between the soldiers. Fujiko saw Ilse Severensen there, leaning against the railing with her hands clasped in front of her; she waved at the Imadas as they passed by. Ilse, a Seattle transplant, had for ten years purchased strawberries from Fujiko and spoke to her as if she were a peasant whose role in life was to make island life pleasantly exotic for Ilse’s friends who visited from the city. Her kindness had always been condescending, and she had always paid a bit extra for her berries with the air of doling out charity. And so, on this morning, Fujiko could not meet her eyes or acknowledge her despite the fact that Ilse Severensen had waved and called out her name in a friendly way – Fujiko studied the ground instead; she kept her eyes cast down.

  At nine o’clock they were marched on board the Kehloken, with the white people gaping at them from the hill above, and Gordon Tanaka’s daughter – she was eight years old – fell on the dock and began to cry. Soon other people were crying, too, and from the hill came the voice of Antonio Dangaran, a Filipino man who had married Eleanor Kitano just two months before. ‘Eleanor!’ he shouted, and when she looked up he let go a bouquet of red roses, which sailed gently toward the water in the wind and landed in the waves below the dock pilings.

  They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp – the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine P.M. they were confined to their stalls; at ten p.m. they were made to turn out their lights, one bare bulb for each family. The cold in the stalls worked into their bones, and when it rained that night they moved their cots because of the leaks in the roof. The next morning, at six A.M., they slogged through mud to the transit camp mess hall and ate canned figs and white bread from pie tins and drank coffee out of tin cups. Through all of it Fujiko maintained her dignity, though she’d felt herself beginning to crack while relieving herself in front of other women. The contortions of her face as she moved her bowels deeply humiliated her. She hung her head as she sat on the toilet, ashamed of the noises her body made. The roof leaked in the latrine, too.

  After three days they boarded another train and began a languid crawl toward California. At night the MPs who roamed from car to car came through telling them to pull down their window shades, and they passed the dark hours twisting in their seats and exerting themselves not to complain. The train stopped and started and jolted them toward wakefulness, and there was a constant line at the door to the toilet. Many people had lost control of their bowels altogether as a result of eating in the Puyallup transit camp, including Fujiko. Her rectum burned as she sat in her train seat, her brain felt light and unmoored inside her skull, and a cold sweat beaded on her forehead. Fujiko did her best not to give in to her discomfort by speaking of it to her daughters. She did not want them to know that she was suffering inwardly and needed to lie down comfortably somewhere and sleep for a long time. For when she slept at all it was with her hearing tuned to the bluebottle flies always pestering her and to the crying of the Takami baby, who was three weeks old and had a fever. The wailing of this baby ate at her, and she rode with her fingers stuffed inside her ears, but this did not seem to change things. Her sympathy for the baby and for all of the Takamis began to slip as sleep evaded her, and she secretly began to wish for the baby’s death if such a thing could mean silence. And at the same time she hated herself for thinking this and fought against it while her anger grew at the fact that the baby could not just be flung from the window so that the rest of them might have some peace. Then, long past the point when she had told herself that she could not endure another moment, the baby would stop its tortured shrieking, Fujiko would calm herself and close her eyes, retreat with enormous relief toward sleep, and then the Takami baby would once again wail and shriek inconsolably.

  The train stopped at a place called Mojave in the middle of an interminable, still desert. They were herded onto buses at eight-thirty in the morning, and the buses took them north over dusty roads for four hours to a place called Manzanar. Fujiko had imagined, shutting her eyes, that the sandstorm battering the bus was the rain of home. She’d dozed and awakened in time to see the barbed wire and the rows of dark barracks blurred by blowing dust. It was twelve-thirty, by her watch; they were just in time to stand in line for lunch. They ate standing up, from army mess kits, with their backs turned against the wind. Peanut butter, white bread, canned figs, and string beans; she could taste the dust in all of it.

  They were given typhoid shots that first afternoon; they stood in line for them. They waited in the dust beside their luggage
and then stood in line for dinner. In the evening the Imadas were assigned to Block 11, Barrack 4, and given a sixteen-by-twenty-foot room furnished with a bare lightbulb, a small Coleman oil heater, six CCC camp cots, six straw mattresses, and a dozen army blankets. Fujiko sat on the edge of a cot with cramps from the camp food and the typhoid shot gathering to a knot in her stomach. She sat with her coat on, holding herself, while her daughters beat flat the straw in the mattresses and lit the oil heater. Even with the heater she shivered beneath her blankets, still fully dressed in her clothes. By midnight she couldn’t wait any longer and, with three of her daughters who were feeling distressed too, stumbled out into the darkness of the desert in the direction of the block latrine. There was, astonishingly, a long line at midnight, fifty or more women and girls in heavy coats with their backs braced against the wind. A woman up the line vomited heavily, and the smell was of the canned figs they’d all eaten. The woman apologized profusely in Japanese, and then another in the line vomited, and they were all silent again.

  Inside they found a film of excrement on the floor and damp, stained tissue paper everywhere. All twelve toilets, six back-to-back pairs, were filled up near to overflowing. Women were using these toilets anyway, squatting over them in the semidarkness while a line of strangers watched and held their noses. Fujiko, when it was her turn, hung her head and emptied her bowels with her arms wrapped around her stomach. There was a trough to wash her hands in, but no soap.

  That night dust and yellow sand blew through the knotholes in the walls and floor. By morning their blankets were covered with it. Fujiko’s pillow lay white where her head had been, but around it a layer of fine yellow grains had gathered. She felt it against her face and in her hair and on the inside of her mouth, too. It had been a cold night, and in the adjacent room a baby screamed behind a quarter-inch wall of pine board.

  On their second day at Manzanar they were given a mop, a broom, and a bucket. The leader of their block – a man from Los Angeles dressed in a dusty overcoat who claimed to have been an attorney in his former life but who now stood unshaven with one shoe untied and with his wire-rimmed glasses skewed on his face – showed them the outdoor water tap. Fujiko and her daughters cleaned out the dust and did laundry in a gallon-size soup tin. While they were cleaning more dust and sand blew in to settle on the newly mopped pine boards. Hatsue went out into the desert wind and returned with a few scraps of tar paper she’d found blown up against a roll of barbed wire along a firebreak. They stuffed this around the doorjamb and fixed it over the knotholes with thumbtacks borrowed from the Fujitas.

  There was no sense in talking to anyone about things. Everyone was in the same position. Everyone wandered like ghosts beneath the guard towers with the mountains looming on either side of them. The bitter wind came down off the mountains and through the barbed wire and hurled the desert sand in their faces. The camp was only half-finished; there were not enough barracks to go around. Some people, on arriving, had to build their own in order to have a place to sleep. There were crowds everywhere, thousands of people in a square mile of desert scoured to dust by army bulldozers, and there was nowhere for a person to find solitude. The barracks all looked the same: on the second night, at one-thirty A.M., a drunk man stood in the doorway of the Imadas’ room apologizing endlessly while the dust blew in; he’d lost his way, he said. Their room had no ceiling either, and it was possible to hear people squabbling in other barracks. There was a man who distilled his own wine three rooms down – he used mess hall rice and canned apricot juice – they heard him weeping late on their third night while his wife threatened him. On that same night the searchlights went on in the guard towers and swept across their single window. In the morning it turned out that one of the guards had become convinced of an escape in progress and had alerted the tower machine gunners. On the fourth night a young man in Barrack 17 shot his wife and then himself while they lay in bed together – somehow he had smuggled in a gun. ‘Shikata ga nai,’ people said. ‘It cannot be helped, it has to be.’

  There was nowhere to put any clothing. They lived out of their suitcases and packing crates. The floor was cold beneath their feet, and they wore their dusty shoes until bedtime. By the end of the first week Fujiko had lost track of her daughters’ whereabouts altogether. Everybody had begun to look alike, dressed in surplus War Department clothing – pea coats, knit caps, canvas leggings, army earmuffs, and wool khaki pants. Only her two youngest ate with her; the other three ran with packs of young people and ate at other tables. She scolded them, and they listened politely and then went out again. The older girls left early and came back late, their clothes and hair full of dust. The camp was an enormous promenade of young people milling and walking in the fire lanes and huddling in the lee of barracks. On her way to the washhouse one morning after breakfast Fujiko had seen her middle daughter – she was only fourteen – standing in a group that included four boys dressed nattily in Eisenhower coats. They were, she knew, Los Angeles boys; most people in the camp were from Los Angeles. The Los Angeles people were not very cordial and looked down on her for some inexplicable reason; she could not get a word in with them edgewise. Fujiko fell silent about everything, collapsed in on herself. She waited for a letter from Hisao to come, but a different letter came instead.

  When Hatsue’s sister Sumiko saw the envelope with Ishmael’s false return address – Journalism Class, San Piedro High School – she did not resist her urge to tear it open. Sumiko had been a sophomore before her exile, and although she knew the envelope was Hatsue’s this mail remained irresistible. This mail was word from home.

  Sumiko read the letter from Ishmael Chambers in front of the tarpaper YMCA building; she read it again, savoring the more astonishing phrases, out by the camp hog pens.

  April 4, 1942

  My Love,

  I still go to our cedar tree in the afternoons every day. I shut my eyes, waiting. I smell your smell and I dream of you and I ache for you to come home. Every moment I think of you and long to hold and feel you. Missing you is killing me. It’s like a part of me has gone away.

  I’m lonely and miserable and think of you always and hope you will write me right away. Remember to use Kenny Yamashita’s name for a return address on the envelope so my parents won’t get too curious.

  Everything here is horrible and sad and life is not worth living. I can only hope that you find some happiness during the time we have to be apart – some happiness of some kind, Hatsue. Myself I can only be miserable until you are in my arms again. I can’t live without you, I know that now. After all these years that we’ve been together, I find you’re a part of me. Without you, I have nothing.

  All My Love Forever,

  Ishmael

  After a half hour of walking and chinking and of reading Ishmael’s letter four more times, she took it regretfully to her mother. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I feel like a creep. But I have to show this to you.’

  Her mother read Ishmael Chambers’s letter standing in the middle of the tar-paper hut with one hand on her forehead. While she read her lips moved rapidly, her eyes blinked severely and often. Finished, she sat down on the edge of a chair, dangled the letter in her hand for a moment, then sighed and took off her glasses. ‘Surely not,’ she said in Japanese.

  She set the glasses in her lap wearily, placed the letter on top of them, and pressed against her eyes with both palms.

  ‘The neighborhood boy,’ she said to Sumiko. ‘The one who taught her how to swim.’

  ‘Ishmael Chambers,’ answered Sumiko. ‘You know who he is.’

  ‘Your sister has made a terrible mistake,’ said Fujiko. ‘One I hope you will never make.’

  ‘I never would,’ said Sumiko. ‘Anyway, it isn’t a mistake I could make in a place like this, is it?’

  Fujiko picked up her glasses again and held them between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Sumi,’ she said. ‘Have you told anyone? Have you shown this letter to anyone?’

  ‘No,’ said Sumi.
‘Just you.’

  ‘You must promise something,’ said Fujiko. ‘You must promise not to tell this to anyone – don’t tell anyone about it. There’s enough gossip here without something like this. You must promise to keep your mouth closed and never tell this again. Do you understand me?’

  ‘All right. I promise,’ said Sumiko.

  ‘I’ll tell Hatsue I found the letter. You don’t have to take the blame.’

  ‘Okay,’ answered Sumiko. ‘Good.’

  ‘Go out now,’ said her mother. ‘Go and leave me alone.’

  The girl went out to wander aimlessly. Fujiko perched her glasses on her nose once more and began to reread the letter. It was clear to her from the words in it that her daughter had been deeply entangled with this boy for a long time, for many years. It was evident that he had touched her body, that the two of them had been sexually intimate inside a hollow tree they’d used as a trysting place in the forest. Hatsue’s walks had been a ruse, just as Fujiko had suspected. Her daughter had returned with Juki tendrils in her hands and a wetness between her thighs. Deceitful girl, thought Fujiko.

  She thought for a moment of her own romantic life, how she’d been wed to a man she’d never seen before and passed the first night of her life with him in a boardinghouse where the pages of hakujin magazines had been substituted for wallpaper. She had refused, on that first night, to let her husband touch her – Hisao was unclean, his hands were rough, he had no money but a few coins. He’d spent those first hours apologizing to Fujiko and explaining in detail his financial desperation, pleading with her to work beside him and underscoring his talents and better traits – he was ambitious, hardworking, didn’t gamble or drink, he had no bad habits and saved his money, but times were so hard, he needed someone at his side. He could understand, he said, having to earn her love, and he was willing to prove himself to her with time if she would agree to be patient. ‘Don’t even speak to me,’ she’d replied.