“You have enjoyed Manzanar, Mama?”
“Well, it is strange, but I have. After your father died, I couldn’t imagine making a life of my own, having friends. Now our friends will help you after I have gone. Eriko is like a mother to you already.”
“Nobody but you will ever be like a mother to me.”
Eriko has stopped going to work. Every morning she boils water and gently washes Tamura’s wasted body, she brushes her hair tenderly and brings her sweet pears and miso from their favorite mess hall, which Tamura has no appetite for. Her heart seems to shatter over and over at the sight of Tamura’s smile, at the effort her dear neighbor still puts into their friendship.
“Try a little sip, Tamura,” she encourages. “Just one little sip, for me.”
Over time their neighborliness has turned to friendship, their friendship to love. They have become like loving sisters. Eriko is already grieving for the loss that is to come.
Tamura is not afraid. She thinks of Aaron and hopes that she will see him soon. He would be at odds with her for thinking it, but there is nothing to be done about that, she can’t make herself believe in oblivion. And Satomi will rally, what else can the young do? She is strong and full of life. And even though Haru will not come for her, something tells her that her daughter will prosper. She is ready to go, worn out with the fight against the inch-by-inch drowning. She is longing not to come up for air.
“You have the choice of burial or cremation,” Dr. Harper says, the words ringing brutally in his ears, sickening as the cracking of bones, so that he shudders and shakes his head as though to dismiss them. He should feel embarrassed for loving Tamura, he thinks, but he can’t regret it. He has loved her in a way his wife would have thought of as betrayal, although no word of his had ever communicated that love, which he is certain Tamura did not return.
“It’s up to you, Satomi,” Eriko says. “It’s you who must decide.”
“Yes, of course we will do as you want, Satomi. I was her doctor, but we never spoke of it. Of such arrangements, I mean.”
“She would have thought it bad manners to burden you, Dr. Harper. You are not an easy man to talk to about such intimate things.”
It’s not the truth, but in the moment she wants to hurt where she can, to off-load the terrible pain she is feeling.
“I did my best, Satomi, and you know, whatever small things we spoke about, your mother and I found pleasure in those conversations.”
“I’m sorry, so sorry, Dr. Harper.” She is ashamed. “I know that you did. My mother always said that you do your job honorably.”
“Did she? Did she say that?”
He hopes that it’s the truth, that he has been honorable with all of his imprisoned patients. His job, which started out as something patriotic he could do for his country, has become a burden to him. He is amazed now that he ever could have thought it would be anything else. Manzanar has knocked that idealism, and much more, out of him. It’s a pointless place, a place to feel shame for. Thousands of people incarcerated in a monument to stupidity. And the time, money, and effort spent on things that don’t work, that never have from the start. He feels only disgust at the cruelty of crushing people together as though they are livestock, not to mention the ridiculous business of guarding people who don’t attempt escape. Food in, trash out, diseased sewers, schools without desks, orphans being guarded at play, lines to be able to eat, to wash, to shit, it is all a horrible, inhuman nonsense.
If there are such things as Japanese spies in his country, then it is the camps that have made them. Dissent has germinated behind the barbed wire and under the guns. And what is it that America is fighting for anyway, if not for liberty, and the freedom of its citizens? Along with that of its inmates, Manzanar has stolen a portion of his life too, robbed him of his pride in being an American.
“Here, Satomi.” He sighs. “Your mother’s death certificate is ready. You must sign in two places, there and there. Her ashes can be sent home, if that is what you want.”
As though to soothe him, to steady his trembling hand, Satomi touches it lightly as she takes the pen from him.
“We will bury my mother here, Dr. Harper, at Manzanar, close to her friends and neighbors. Angelina is not our home anymore. I have heard that there are strangers in our house, that our land has been given to them.”
“I’m sure that you will get it back. War is tough on everyone, but every war has its end, and this one will be no different. We are getting on top of it.”
“I don’t care anymore. I wanted my mother to live to see it. I wanted to walk arm in arm with her from Manzanar, although she would have been sad to leave you all.”
“At least you had the good fortune to have Tamura as your mother. What a stroke of luck, Satomi. What a start in life.”
The past tense hurts. She has already overtaken Tamura, left her behind. She couldn’t keep Tamura in the world, although on the night of her death she had held her in her arms in an attempt to transfer her own warmth, the life in her, to her mother.
“Don’t leave me, Mama. Please don’t go.”
Tamura had lifted her hand to Satomi’s cheek. Satomi, kissing it, had taken up the other one, kissing that too. Her mother’s hands, rough from sewing the camouflage nets, from pulling sagebrush up by the roots, were nothing like the ones that she remembered from her childhood. She liked them better now somehow. The calluses and torn skin mapped Tamura’s more independent existence, showed even in her failing that she had lived a muscular life.
“Listen to me, Satomi. Obey me this one last time.”
She had to bend close to hear Tamura’s words.
“Once you leave Manzanar, don’t ever come back. Whatever they do with my body, I will not be here. I will be with your father somewhere, perhaps. And never think of the life you might have had if we had never come here. Make a better one.”
Hearing more the cadence, the familiar rhythm, rather than the reason the words conveyed, Satomi was all pain. She was lost to everything except the idea of drawing into herself the sound of Tamura’s voice, which had accompanied her her whole life. She feared the time was coming when it would be lost to her, when she might forget it.
“Take my little bird, Satomi,” Tamura said. “Keep the little titmouse for luck. It is such a pretty thing, the most precious object I have. And, my sweet daughter, don’t feed your anger anymore, you only nourish your own enemy.”
The weight of Eriko Okihiro’s hefty arm across Satomi’s shoulders is causing an ache, but there is comfort to be had in her solidity, in the heat that emanates from her ample body.
So this is what being without Tamura is like. It’s being homeless despite having a bed to sleep in, it’s not caring if the sun shines, it’s feeling nothing when the mountains turn from blue to mauve in the blink of an eye, it’s being orphaned.
“You mustn’t sleep alone tonight, Satomi. Stay with us, we would be happy to have you.”
“I’m not afraid, Eriko, and there are things I must do.”
She will clean their barrack, take down the silk robe and wash it with the rose bath crystals that Lawson has brought at her request. Surely Tamura will forgive her that. Rose oil would have been better, but it wasn’t to be had.
“No such thing in Lone Pine,” Lawson told her, shaking his head. “Nearest thing I could get to it was this.”
It takes three washes to reveal the colors of the robe, to bring back to life the butterflies and the dark little moths. Only in the final rinse does the cheap scent of the bath crystals waft up the merest trace of rose. Still, it is the scent of Tamura. It catches at the back of her throat and suddenly she is doubled up on the floor moaning, her head buried deep in the wet folds.
“Oh, Mama, I can’t bear it.”
Naomi hears her cries and, breaking her daughter’s rules, she calls through the wall.
“I am coming, Satomi.”
“No, don’t, Naomi. I am fine, and I must finish here.”
A
picture of Tamura wearing the robe comes to her; she is sitting on the floor by Aaron’s chair, teaching her the words for the tea ceremony.
“Wa, for harmony; kei, for respect; sei, for purity; jaku, for tranquillity.
“It’s a good day, Satomi, when you can feel all of these things and know that you have spent the hours well.”
Tamura had been torn between the centuries, just as she has been torn between her two races. Satomi Baker, the very name says it all.
“Who am I?” she sobs. “Who am I without you, Mother?”
When the robe is dry she folds it carefully and takes it with her to relieve Eriko, who is sitting by Tamura’s coffin in the morgue so that her friend will not be alone in such a place.
In death’s stillness Tamura is wearing the dress she had worn on the day that they had left their farm. A modern American dress, as she would have wanted. With the robe folded neatly at her feet, her hands crossed, the paper money that Eriko has placed by her side so that she might pay the toll to cross the River of the Three Hells, she is returned to something of her old beauty. Satomi bends to kiss her, she must take her leave, but she is afraid to feel Tamura’s cold lips on her own and can’t move.
“We have to close the lid now, honey.” says Dr. Harper’s nurse with a pitying smile. She pushes Satomi toward Eriko, who is crying.
“Oh, Tamura,” Eriko sobs as the lid goes down. “My dear, dear friend.”
Dr. Harper wrote to Ralph to tell him of Tamura’s death, and a letter comes to Satomi by return from him. It is a sweet letter, full of Ralph’s humanity, his optimism for her.
Haru has written too, a formal letter of condolence. He can’t get leave to be at Tamura’s funeral. He wants her to know that he had admired and loved her mother.
She is grateful that she is not able to differentiate the pain of losing him from her grief for Tamura, which leaves no space to distinguish one ache from another. The loss of Haru, which had cut so deeply, seems such a tiny thing now in comparison to the loss of Tamura.
“Did he say anything else?” Eriko asks.
“I think that he may have, but a page is missing and the censor’s pen has been at it.”
“The contraband check is getting worse,” Eriko says. “I’ve had pages of other people’s letters mixed up with mine more than once lately.”
Satomi doesn’t tell Eriko that Haru had written that they were lucky to be safe in Manzanar; that the inmates of the camp have no idea of what people on the outside are suffering. Europe is being destroyed and we are lucky to be American, he says.
Well, she doesn’t feel lucky. She and Haru will never agree on what being an American means.
“It is very annoying,” Naomi says, tutting. “Perhaps what they blacked out was important. It’s too bad.”
“He sent you all his love, of course, and his good wishes to me.”
“Oh, Satomi,” Eriko says with a sigh.
“Would he have wanted me if I were entirely Japanese, do you think, Eriko?”
“Perhaps, but it isn’t about being Japanese, is it? It’s about love, and you can’t summon that at will no matter what your race.”
“I think it’s about not being what people want you to be, Eriko. I was never the person that Haru wanted me to be. Even the Japanese part of me is not compliant enough for him!”
The wind is getting up as Tamura is put in the ground. Strings of origami brought to honor her blow about like ribbons at a carnival, getting caught in tree limbs and in the mourners’ hair.
Tamura’s allotted plot is just a few yards from the little consoling tower.
“It’s a good spot,” Naomi says. “You couldn’t ask for better.”
“It’s very dry,” the Buddhist priest remarks. “You must remember to bring water in your offerings.”
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 cluster 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 pass 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 ne
ighbor, 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 shine.
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 breasts 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.