Butterfly's Shadow (26 page)

One by one, huts were filled. No squabbling, no pushing; tradition dictated that young deferred to old. Larger families took the bigger rooms, six or eight squeezed into a cramped living space, possessions piled against walls or stored under narrow army cots. No running water. In each room a pot bellied, wood-burning stove stood centre floor, steel stovepipe piercing the roof. No one was deceived into thinking this was a temporary holding place: a shoddy box without curtains, rugs or furniture was now home.

On the first day Joey carried his tin plate to the mess hall and lined up with the rest at the counter. An elderly couple ahead of him stared with dismay at grey American meat and potatoes. They moved on, to the next dish.

‘What is this?’

‘Spam sushi.’

‘Ah!’

‘It’s a Hawaiian specialty.’

‘Ah!’

They examined a dish of overcooked and pallid vegetables. Moved on.

They accepted a spoonful of rice and found somewhere to sit. Tasted. Exchanged glances.

‘Undercooked,’ she whispered. ‘Burnt,’ he said. They nibbled the bread.

The young ones in the line were equally unhappy. ‘What happened to the burgers?’

‘The hot dogs?’

The mess hall guards watched, baffled: what was the problem with these people? Some of the best Japanese cooks in Portland had volunteered for the kitchen. What more did they want?

The army delivered B-rations, cans by the crateload, blocks of cured meat, sacks of beans, rice, flour, sugar. The internees lined up. The garbage bins overflowed.

Waiting in line became a part of daily life. Joey fell into line for the mess hall, the post room, the wash house and the toilet.

Stepping out of the hut door after lights out, heading for the latrine block, he was picked up by a blinding beam: the searchlight from one of the watchtowers. It followed him to the latrines, and back to his hut, like a stage spotlight following the star. Without doors, or division stalls, there could be no privacy beyond the basic male and female separation.

Dear Nancy
, he began – a letter that, like many others, remained in his head, unwritten –
I’m in limbo, surrounded by people I wouldn’t spend time with and whose state of mind I can’t understand. I hate the way they look – I mean the way they look at the guards: their smiling, bowing eagerness to be agreeable. Why should anyone be agreeable here? This is a place of wickedness and we should bang our tin plates on the table, rattle our cutlery, hurl rocks. I’m surprised they allow us knives to cut up our food, dangerous enemy aliens that we are. I’m thinking: I should organise a protest march, but who would take part? To the guards I’m one of the enemy shiftily disguised to look like an American. To the inmates I’m a puzzle, probably a spy . . .

Writing letters in his head helped, to a point. Real letters were more difficult. Long ago, Joey had read and reread his father’s letters from Washington, those scraps scribbled in odd moments from the vets’ encampment on the bank of the Anacostia. The determined cheerfulness and circumscribed subject matter had rung false to him. But now he understood and saw those letters differently, he could decode them, now that he found himself faced with writing home.

He skimmed over everyday matters: the weather, ‘
changeable
’; the way people were settling in, ‘
surprisingly well
’; the food, ‘
home-cooking it ain’t
’. None of this bore much resemblance to the truth. The weather was enervating, the food disgusting, the old people dazed and helpless, the young angry. He made no mention of the sirens that blasted them awake in the morning; of quiet, hopeless weeping, of snores or squabbles from the adjoining rooms. Nothing about sickness or death, nor of the ever-watchful eye of the searchlight. He saw that there was a convention to the writing of letters home: you did not moan on the page and you tried to find ways to cheer up the reader. When Nancy’s letters arrived, strewn with little jokes, drawings, and a line or two from a favourite poem, he became aware that she too was obeying the rules. ‘Well,
we had the rose festival, as usual . . .’ She described the patriotic floral banners carried through the streets. ‘But no parade of automobiles smothered in blooms this year.’ She did not mention the shortage of gas, so the letter reached him uncensored.

Others were less adept at navigating the rules: sometimes letters were delivered with lines blacked out, or scissored from the page. Parcels were searched insensitively.

Ahead of Joe, collecting her mail, a woman asked, politely, ‘Why have you slashed this garment please?’

‘Checking for contraband, smuggled items.’

‘What can be smuggled in the hem of a skirt?’

‘Who’s to know? That’s the point, lady.’

One day Mrs Yamada, the young wife from the next room asked Joey, diffidently, ‘For what reason are you here?’

‘My mother comes from Nagasaki.’
Comes, not came: she’s still there. Isn’t she?

Mrs Yamada studies him closely, trying to find some visible confirmation of his words.

‘Her name is Cho-Cho.’

‘Ah. A beautiful name. How does she write it?’

How does she write it? The question is incomprehensible.

‘I’m sorry . . .’

She smiles again. ‘There are different ways of writing names. The characters –’ She sees his confusion and moves on, tactfully.

‘So. Beautiful name, symbolic of transformation. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. There are many stories about butterflies. Mostly sad.’

He recalls his childhood name, the word his mother sometimes used when she called to him. He speaks it aloud – ‘
Kanashimi
’ – and Mrs Yamada repeats the word and nods, smiling: ‘Ah. It means “sorrow”. Also “trouble”.’

He had been well named, then.

Later, she confides that her marriage to Mr Yamada had
taken place two days before they had to leave their home for internment.

‘This is our honeymoon.’

Ichir
became exasperated by Joey’s refusal to join in, be part of the group.

‘Lighten up, man, or you’ll go crazy in here. You laugh or you lose it.’

He helped set up a loudspeaker system in the canteen. Someone magicked in a jukebox. The young crowded in, clustered, relaxing to the familiar beat: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James and his new singer, Frankie Sinatra.

But Joey obstinately remained outside the stream of camp life. Stranded in an interior exile he used observation as a tool: for him this was not imprisonment, it was extreme fieldwork. Malinowski urged the study of primitive institutions as living, functioning realities; he had looked at sea-washed shores, yam gardens and complex kinship laws; here the exotic was set in a mundane bleakness. Inside the bare huts Joey noted colourful posters and hand-painted pictures being pinned to walls.

A truck pulled in at the gate loaded with scrap timber which vanished before nightfall. In the next few days, glancing through windows as he passed, he saw the rough planks reinvented as bookshelves, dressers, frames to be draped with cloth as room dividers. Curtains were soon improvised to prevent guards or curious outsiders like Joey from looking in.

From the sidelines he saw how a social order was established – committees, hierarchies. The helpers and the helped. Where there were children, there was a schoolroom and teachers, albeit without desks or chairs. Where there were sickbeds, nurses. Project farm workers needed? Four hundred volunteered. Maintenance men? Another four hundred. Construction workers, garbage disposers, janitors, firemen, transport drivers. Round the barracks optimistic women planted shrubs, hedges, and flower beds to soften the stark environment.
Old men slowly created a Japanese garden in a shadowy corner, carrying rocks, gravel, a stunted tree, watering obsessively to encourage moss.

Fifteen thousand people, bobbing rudderless on a sea of anxiety and fear determined to build a viable social structure by recreating within the confines of the barbed-wire fences a simulacrum of a normal world.

As the others organised their days, improved their surroundings, watered flowers, grew herbs, Joey found himself maddened by their docility, their acceptance of injustice, the way they bowed and smiled; the way they listened, dark eyes intent behind their heavy glasses. He was not one of them, not part of this keep busy, keep despair at bay movement. Perversely, he was irritated by their skill and speed and ingenuity; he did not accept the nothing-to-be-done-about-it fatalism of
Shikata ga na
– one of the few phrases he had learned to translate.

But inside the cramped, comfortless hut, barriers slowly dissolved. Kazuo was training to be an accountant and had been preparing for an exam when the Defense Command Order was pinned to the wall in his office; Taro’s family had arranged for him to marry a rich girl in Tokyo, when Pearl Harbor changed their plans; now parents and younger siblings occupied a hut further down the row.

‘They’re not happy; they wanted me to squeeze in there with them, where they could keep an eye on me.’

Kazuo punched the air. ‘Man, this is your break for independence! Freedom!’

Combing his hair in the hut mirror, Ichir
paused to admire his reflection: an all-American dude, cool and sardonic – perfect. Ruefully he confessed his love of things American: the language, music, clothes, movies and, closest to his heart, the classic comics – ‘Batman! Superman! Captain America! I love those guys. I was planning to suggest a Japanese superhero for Marvel. Not any more, I guess.’

Conversations as closely harmonised as a barbershop quartet swung the four through personal biography, thwarted aspirations and shared anxieties. Gradually reticence slipped away and Joey could speak of his mother without embarrassment, could allow himself to wonder aloud what might be happening in Nagasaki: the town had docks and factories, inviting bombs. At night, after lights out, the murmured voices hung in the air, helping him into sleep.

Though even here he had spasms of uncertainty, wondering if the others, when he was absent, shifted into a different key, to a place where he could not follow them.

Deracinated, he felt at home nowhere – and certainly not in a tar-paper hut in a dust bowl. Most evenings he lay on the narrow bed, reading, tilting the book to catch the weak light of the overhead bulb, dwelling on exchange systems, solicitary gifts, wave-pattern navigation, magic necklaces, the sexual mores of remote peoples; the role of a father. It was difficult for tribal reasons for a father to give a gift to his son; what he passed on were intangibles: magic and dance. Assets that no one could take away. What would Ben have passed on to him, Joey pondered, had he survived? What precious, intangible paternal gifts would he now be cherishing?

What would those ethnographers have made of this community, this closed society? Almost certainly they would have integrated, tried to learn the language, investigated ceremonials and social customs. Joey could not do the same – or rather, he chose not to. He gazed into the darkness that lay behind his eyelids, and absented himself. The people he observed were no more than figures in a landscape. He himself, sealed in his bell jar, could not have been heard even had he called for help. And again that emptiness loomed, a chill place where warmth and comfort should have been. A shoulder to cry on, though Joey never cried.

He spent daylight hours in the open air, pacing the camp perimeter, gazing out over the flat land to the turtle-shaped
hump of hill on the horizon. He was edgily aware of the watchtower looming above the barbed wire, the machine gun swinging lazily as the guard moved – but there was little personal risk that he’d get shot: blond haired, in his open-neck shirt he could have been an off-duty guard. Between pacing he made drawings: birds in flight or feeding; insects creating supply routes . . . When some of the women constructed a chicken-run in the compound, he sketched the strutting fowls, colouring his drawings with paint from the camp schoolroom.

Ichir
studied Joey’s rough drawing of an aggressive rooster, nodding approvingly: ‘Hey man, you’re an artist.’