Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

Jane hated him much more than she did someone like Yosh Nakayama. Smiling Sammy didn’t remember or care that he was supposed to be an American. If the Russians or the Ethiopians or the Argentines had invaded Hawaii, he would have sucked up to them, too.

“… Egypt…” “… outside of Alexandria…” “… Montgomery…” Jane got tantalizing bits of conversation from the table on the other side of her. She tried to listen without paying obvious attention.

Somebody over there either had an outlawed radio or knew someone else who had one. News that wasn’t Japanese propaganda did circulate in spite of everything the occupiers could do to stop it.

She swore under her breath. They were talking in low voices, and she couldn’t hear as much as she wanted. What was going on outside of Alexandria? Had the Germans broken through at last? Or had Montgomery somehow held them? She couldn’t make it out.

She looked back toward the pans and kettles where the cooks had fixed the evening slop. She hoped for dessert, even though she knew what it would be. If this nightmare ever ended, she’d taken a savage oath never to touch rice pudding again for the rest of her life. Hawaii still had sugar, and it had some rice. Boil them together till they were something close to glue, and there was a treat that counted as one only because there were no others.

Jane looked down at her arms. Every time she did, she thought she was a little skinnier than before. How long could that go on before nothing was left of her, or of anyone else? Not forever, and she knew it too well. And so she didn’t despise even the sweetish library paste that went by the name of rice pudding. Calories were calories, wherever they came from.

But the cooks gave no sign of having any dessert at all to dish out today. She swore again, not quite so softly. She was so tired of being hungry all the time. And she was just so tired…

Had it been less than a year ago that she’d walked into a restaurant and ordered a T-bone too big to finish? She hadn’t thought anything of it. She hadn’t even asked for a bag to take home the leftovers. Christ, what a fool I was! Had she eaten beef since the Japs occupied Wahiawa? She didn’t think so.

She carried her plate and silverware to the dishwashers. Everyone took turns at that. One of the women was saying something to another one when she walked over to them. They both clammed up before she could hear what it was. They started again when she walked off and got too far away to make out what they were saying.

Her stomach knotted, and for once it wasn’t the wretched food. Were they gossiping about her? About somebody she knew, somebody they knew she knew? About whatever was happening outside of Alexandria?

Whatever it was, she’d never know. They didn’t trust her enough to let her in on it. Before the war, she’d talked with her third-graders about the difference between freedom and dictatorship. She’d talked about it, yeah, but she hadn’t understood it. The difference lay in what people said to one another, and in what they didn’t say when other people might hear. It lay in trust.

And trust, in Wahiawa, was as dead as comfortable American rule over Hawaii. If the United States came back, if the Stars and Stripes once again flew over the school and the post office and Schofield Barracks, would that trust return? How could it, once it was so badly broken?

But if it didn’t, would the islands ever really be free again?

FLETCH ARMITAGE WAS SICK OF DIGGING. He would have been sick of digging even if he weren’t doing it on starvation rations. He looked like a skeleton with callused hands. The Japs didn’t care. If he got too weak to dig, they wouldn’t put him in the infirmary till his strength came back. They’d just knock him over the head, the way you would with a dog that got hit by a car. Then they’d give his shovel to somebody else, and use that poor, miserable bastard up, too.

And why not? As far as they were concerned, prisoners were fair game. They had tens of thousands of them. If they worked POWs to death, they wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about plots and escape attempts. Skeletons with callused hands didn’t have the energy or the strength to try anything drastic. All the energy they had was focused on staying alive, and they had to put all their strength into the work. If they didn’t, the Japanese noncoms who lorded it over them made them pay.

This was going to be a gun emplacement. It was nicely sited: on the south side of a low hill, to make it harder to spot from the north-the probable direction of any invasion-but there’d be an observer at the top of the hill to guide the firing. He’d be hard to spot, too, especially once they got done camouflaging his position; running a phone line between the one place and the other would be easy as pie. Fletch had a thoroughly professional appreciation of what the Japs were doing right here.

He didn’t appreciate having to work on it. Making him do that went dead against the Geneva Convention. The Japs were proud that they hadn’t signed it. Anybody who complained on that particular score caught hell-or even more hell than anybody else caught.

Odds were the phone line the Japs used to link the top of the hill and the gun emplacement would be captured American equipment. They were using as much of what they’d grabbed here as they could.

And they were fortifying Oahu to a fare-thee-well. The United States had put a lot of men, a lot of equipment, and a lot of ships in Hawaii. Having done that, the Americans smugly decided no one would have the nerve to attack them here. And look what that got us, Fletch thought, turning another shovelful of earth.

The Japs labored under no such illusions. They knew the USA wanted Hawaii back. If the Americans managed to land, they would have to fight their way south an inch at a time, through works their own countrymen had made. Every time Fletch stuck his shovel in the ground, he gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

He didn’t like feeling like a traitor. He didn’t know what he could do about it, though. If he didn’t do what the Japs told him to, they would kill him. It wouldn’t be as neat or quick as knocking him over the head, either. They would make him suffer so nobody else got frisky ideas.

“Isogi!” the closest Jap noncom shouted. Like everybody else who heard him, Fletch worked faster for a while. He didn’t look back to see if the bandy-legged bugger was yelling at him in particular, he just sped up. Looking back suggested to the Japs that you had a guilty conscience. It gave them an excuse to wallop you, as if they needed much in the way of excuses.

Ten minutes later, Fletch did look back over his shoulder. The Jap was standing there spraddle-legged, his back to the POWs, taking a leak. Fletch promptly eased off. He wasn’t the only one who did.

One of the fellows in his shooting squad was a tall, sandy-haired guy from Mississippi named Clyde Newcomb. “Lord almighty,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with his filthy sleeve. “Now I know what bein’ a nigger in the cotton fields feels like.”

Fletch dug out another shovelful of dirt and flung it aside. “I do believe I’d sell my soul to be a nigger in a cotton field right now,” he said, “as long as it was a cotton field on the mainland.”

“Well, yeah, far as the work goes, I would, too,” Newcomb said. “I wouldn’t ask more’n about a dime for it, neither. But that’s not what I meant. Nobody ever treated me like a goddamn nigger till I stacked my Springfield and surrendered. We ain’t nothin’ but dirt to the Japs, an’ low-grade dirt at that.”

“So you Southern guys treated niggers like dirt?” Fletch didn’t care much one way or the other, but anything you could talk about helped make time go by, and that was all to the good.