The War Outside Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Monica Hesse

  Cover art © 2018 Kid-ethic Mark Swan

  Cover: (woman with bicycle) © Collaboration JS/Arcangel Images; (other woman) © LDWYTN/Shutterstock.com; (red dress) © Rekha Garton/Arcangel Images; (field) © Bogdan Khmelnytskyi/Shutterstock.com; (barbed wire) © Cherngchay Donkhuntod/Shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Marcie Lawrence

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: September 2018

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hesse, Monica, author.

  Title: The war outside / Monica Hesse.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2018. | Summary: Teens Haruko, a Japanese American, and Margot, a German American, form a life-changing friendship as everything around them starts falling apart in the Crystal City family internment camp during World War II.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018005733| ISBN 9780316316699 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316316705 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316445238 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Crystal City Internment Camp (Crystal City, Tex.)—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Crystal City Internment Camp (Crystal City, Tex.)—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945—Fiction. | German Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1941–1948—Fiction. | Concentration camps—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—United States—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H52 War 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005733

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-31669-9 (hardcover), 978-0-316-31670-5 (ebook)

  E3-20180728-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  HARUKO

  MARGOT

  ONE: HARUKO

  TWO: MARGOT

  THREE: MARGOT

  FOUR: HARUKO

  MARGOT

  FIVE: HARUKO

  SIX: MARGOT

  SEVEN: MARGOT

  EIGHT: HARUKO

  NINE: HARUKO

  HARUKO

  MARGOT

  TEN: MARGOT

  ELEVEN: MARGOT

  TWELVE: MARGOT

  THIRTEEN: HARUKO

  HARUKO

  FOURTEEN: MARGOT

  FIFTEEN: MARGOT

  SIXTEEN: HARUKO

  SEVENTEEN: HARUKO

  EIGHTEEN: MARGOT

  NINETEEN: MARGOT

  MARGOT

  TWENTY: HARUKO

  TWENTY-ONE: MARGOT

  TWENTY-TWO: MARGOT

  TWENTY-THREE: HARUKO

  HARUKO

  MARGOT

  TWENTY-FOUR: MARGOT

  TWENTY-FIVE: HARUKO

  MARGOT

  TWENTY-SIX: HARUKO

  TWENTY-SEVEN: MARGOT

  TWENTY-EIGHT: HARUKO

  TWENTY-NINE: MARGOT

  A NOTE ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For my strong Iowa grandmothers, Coral and Marjorie

  HARUKO

  Of all the things that happened there, in that place full of enemies and dust and spies and sadness; of all the things Margot said to me—the calculations that sounded like friendship, the casual shattering of my life—out of all those things, I am grateful for only one: that I never loved her. If I had loved her I couldn’t bear any of it, and so I am grateful for this lack of love, this one remaining thing I can bear. Because even if it’s a terrible thing to have, if I didn’t have that, I’d have nothing.

  MARGOT

  If Haruko said that, she was lying.

  She did love me. I loved her too.

  ONE

  HARUKO

  “I WISH WE WERE ALL HOME NOW,” TOSHIKO WHISPERS, AS IF I’LL have a different response than I had the last time she said the same thing. She pokes my side to get my attention, which she knows I hate. But I stay serene because it’s part of our unspoken pact, my sister and me, that we’re polite because we’re too afraid to be anything else. And because we promised our mother.

  “Your little sister is not your enemy,” Mama told me the last time Toshiko and I argued, which was the first time I learned about Texas. “I know that,” I said meaningfully, and then I didn’t say anything else because I didn’t want to talk about who the real enemy was.

  Now my mother sits across from us, wedged beside our stack of suitcases, keeping her back straight so her hat doesn’t get crushed against the seat of the Pullman car. Her eyes are closed. I can’t tell whether she’s sleeping or train-sick, a kind of sick I didn’t know existed until we got on the train and people started making retching sounds into the paper bags provided by the guards patrolling the aisles. For more than a thousand miles now, that hat has been pinned to my mother’s head. Everything else in the car is wilted: her dress, my dress, my sister’s entire body, pressing against mine as I decide not to respond to her last statement. Instead I lean my forehead against the window. Brown grass. Brown dirt. Dirty horses, ridden by men with bandannas over their noses across land that is unbearably flat.

  The last time I saw Denver, the sky was clear enough to see all the way to the tops of the mountains.

  “Haruko.” Toshiko pokes my side again, below the rib cage.

  “Helen,” I correct her.

  She rolls her eyes. “Everyone here is Japanese. They can pronounce your real name.”

  I will myself to keep looking out the window instead of glaring at Toshiko. “My friends call me Helen.”

  “About five people ever called you Helen.”

  We’re becoming testy at the edges, not just my sister and me but the whole train, exhausted by three days of politeness and stale sandwiches. My head is pulsing with the screaming rhythm of the train’s motion. It aches in my jaw, in my teeth; my nostrils are filled with oil and smoke. I cover my nose and try to take fewer breaths.

  “Helen.” Poke, poke. “Can I look at the letter again?”

  I want to tell her no, not because I’m trying to provoke her but because I hate the letter. My mother has heard Toshiko’s question, though, and opened one watchful eye to make sure I do what I’m asked. She loves the letter; they both love the letter.

  The letter has an official stamp and a return address explaining the people who sent it are from the Department of Justice of the United States of America. I take it out of my handbag and hand it to Toshiko, who unfolds it reverentially. What does she think will happen if she tears it? They won
’t let us in? The whole point of the letter is that they won’t let us out.

  Dear Mrs. Tanaka,

  You are informed that your application for reunion at a family internment facility with your husband, Ichiro Tanaka, has been approved. Please be informed that the only individuals accommodated through this agreement are Mrs. Setsu Tanaka (age 44), Miss Haruko Tanaka (age 17), and Miss Toshiko Tanaka (age 12). Arrangements will be made for such a reunion at Crystal City, Texas.

  Crystal City. We are going to a place called Crystal City. I’d put faith in the name at first, because it leads you to believe you are going somewhere beautiful. A place where there might be a reason to pack nice things. My best dress. My new handbag. My bottle of Tabu perfume.

  The train has other families on it, and we’ve gotten to know some of them.

  Mrs. Ginoza and her little daughter, from Los Angeles. Old Mrs. Yamaguchi from Santa Cruz. Families with stories that sound exactly like each other’s except for a few details. My mother still politely listens to everyone else’s even though she must know by now how they will end: And then we got on this train.

  We were sitting down to dinner; the FBI men didn’t let him finish the meal.

  They said it was because we were hiding Japanese correspondence. But it was letters from my mother-in-law that we saved in a hope chest. How could that be hiding?

  We knew an attorney, but he said there was nothing he could do; it’s all legal. President Roosevelt issued a proclamation.

  Even now, I can hear my mother retelling our own story to the bride across the aisle, the one whose husband was taken two days after their wedding.

  “They came on a Saturday morning when Ichiro was still at work and they sat in my kitchen until he came home,” Mama is saying. “They wouldn’t let me telephone him, in case I used a code to tell him to stay away. We had to wait for hours; my husband was staying late to help a guest arrange a hiking tour. He was always staying late to take care of things. The men said he was using his job to pass information between guests traveling overseas.”

  She leaves so much out of this story. She leaves out the fact that the Albany, where my father was a night clerk, was the nicest hotel in the city. That some of the guests were Japanese, but most of them were white, and they liked my father, and sometimes brought us gifts from places they’d traveled. Paper fans from Paris, a snow globe from New York City. She leaves out the fact that the governor came in once, and that my brother sold his secretary an orange soda in the hotel’s pharmacy, and I gave her the straw to drink it with. Governor Carr’s secretary told me I had lovely American dimples, and Kenichi and I spent the next week elaborately reenacting this scene as we mopped the floors at the end of the day. “Am-er-ican dimples are fine, I suppose, if they’re all you can get,” Ken would say. “Though I prefer my dimples to come from France.”

  Somewhere in the telling of this, when we imitated the secretary we started giving her a posh accent that she didn’t actually have. “Did I say American dimples? Heavens, I meant American pimples.” Nobody else thought it was as funny. Nobody else ever thought our things were as funny as we did.

  On the day the agents came to our apartment, I wasn’t helping out at the soda fountain. Ken had left to become an American war hero by then. Papa and Mama didn’t want me to work there alone.

  What I was doing was putting on my volleyball uniform because I was going to meet some of the other Nisei girls from the California Street church. My mother called me out of the bedroom to translate for her; I still had rollers in half my hair. It took a while for me to figure out how to explain what the men wanted. Some of the terms I didn’t have translations for. What is subterfuge? I asked one of the agents, who thought I was being cheeky.

  When my mother tells the story, what she leaves out is my whole life.

  A little while after the letter from the government arrived, a separate one came from my father, addressed to my mother but written to all of us—in English, I was sure whoever monitored his mail had insisted it be in English, so I had to be the one to read it out loud. There is a beauty salon, he wrote. A grocer’s. They are building an American school and a swimming pool: one hundred yards in diameter with a diving platform! People can have jobs, for extra money, but everyone receives housing, and tokens for food and clothing, whether they have jobs or not. You will like it.

  The least my father could have done would have been to refuse harder, to tell my mother he forbade us from coming to Texas. Instead when she insisted we were coming, we got cheerful snippets that sounded like a vacationer’s postcards, with exclamation points that my father would have called vulgar if I’d used them myself: So many Japanese people! Movies shown for free in the community center! Haruko, tell your mother that the hospital is looking for volunteers, and also that some of the women have started a tofu factory, right in camp!

  This is how my father tried to make us excited about the barren desert of Texas. A tofu factory.

  I did tell my mother about the hospital, and I watched her light up. My mother, who graduated from the Tokyo Women’s Medical Professional School, who never officially became a doctor because instead she moved to America to marry the stranger-son of a family friend, and who never became fluent in English, and who instead made it her profession to worry about the length of my volleyball uniform.

  Personally I would worry about a place that allowed a woman twenty years out of medical school to volunteer as a doctor, but my mother lit up and so I said nothing. Serene.

  Toshiko jabs me with her elbow. The train has slowed and the brakes are creaking. “I think we’re stopping,” she whispers to me. “I think we’re picking up more people.”

  “Maintenance break,” I whisper back. “Window shades.”

  If it were an actual station, the guards would have told us to pull down the window shades. They do that at every stop, though they haven’t said whether it’s because they don’t want us to be able to see where we are, or because they don’t want people in the towns to see us.

  But no, it turns out this time Toshiko and I are both wrong. The train car has stopped, fully stopped, without anyone making us pull down the window shades and without any new people standing outside waiting to board. The train is finally quiet, and the quiet is heaven. We all press our faces against the hot glass and nobody yells at us.

  The short, pale guard walks the aisles, counting our heads, murmuring the numbers under his breath. When it’s clear he has the number of people he’s supposed to have, he tells us to line up. Keep orderly, no need to rush, leave the suitcases, someone will bring them.

  I feel the shove of the heat as soon as the train door opens. It can be hot in Colorado sometimes, but this is hot like putting your face in front of an oven. It feels unnatural and stagnant and rolls thick into the train. I watch as every person ahead of me pauses at the door, swaying against the force of the heat, before they step down.

  We’re at a station. Or, really, more of a stop because there’s no station building, just a sort of gazebo: rusty beams supporting a metal roof with a bench in the middle of the open space. A hanging sign: CRYSTAL CITY.

  After we’ve all finally gotten off the train and been counted again, there’s confusion. A bus was supposed to be here to take us to the camp, but apparently it’s broken down in the heat and now we’re stranded. The man who delivers this news, a Caucasian man in a suit with sweat at his temples, is apologetic about this “development.” He keeps telling us that if we’re willing to be a little patient and wait—

  If we’re willing to be a little patient and wait, I translate for my mother.

  “Then another bus will come,” the man says. He has thinning hair and a round face; he’s tall and blocky looking. I can tell that he’s a boss of some kind. He has a clipboard; other people who look like employees scurry over and whisper things while he makes notes.

  Then another bus will come.

  Here’s what’s around us: A post office with an American flag. A tiny weat
hered restaurant. A boardinghouse I wouldn’t want to stay in. Low one-story houses, standing far apart from one another. In Denver we lived on the upper floor of a duplex. In Denver you were never more than a flight of stairs away from borrowing a needle or a tin of shoe polish.

  While I’ve been orienting myself, other passengers have been talking. The more vocal ones, like Mrs. Ginoza, who persevered in asking for extra water for her daughter while my mother told Toshiko and me to swallow our own spit, have decided they don’t want to wait for the bus. Somehow it’s been decided we’ll walk to camp: What’s one more mile after the thousand we’ve already traveled?

  The sweaty Caucasian man doesn’t like the way it looks to have a bunch of tired women and children marching in their best traveling clothes, but we’re already doing it. Mrs. Ginoza has spotted a sign so we follow her out of the tiny town, which has no glass buildings, nothing resembling crystal. Past some fields, which the man says are spinach. “Crystal City is the Spinach Capital of the World” is actually what he says, like he can regain control of the situation if he pretends it was his idea to be a walking tour guide. “We’re very famous for our spinach here; we have a statue of Popeye the Sailor,” he says, and I’m almost embarrassed for him. The sun is directly overhead and my dress is damp with sweat, first under my arms, and then as we walk farther, all of it, clinging to my legs and my waist.

  And then, when my tongue is so swollen from thirst that there is no more spit to swallow, we’re standing fifty yards from a gate. Behind it, a swarm of faces, the reason we’re all here to begin with.

  Our fathers and husbands crane their necks. They must have been told we were coming; a few hold up a welcome banner. Vaguely, through the sweat pouring down my face, I am aware of a brass band playing, and even more vaguely I see that it, too, must be part of our welcome ceremony.

  At first I think my tired eyes are playing tricks on me, but it’s true: A few of the men in the background have light hair and Caucasian features. German prisoners. Something else Papa told me about the camp. We’ll share our space with Nazis.