Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Would you like some lemonade?” Mrs. Sundberg asked.

“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble,” he said. He didn’t suppose it would be. Factories had gone right on making sugar even after anybody with a brain in his head could see they weren’t going to be able to ship it to the mainland. And, while you could cook with lemons and use their juice, eating them as fruit took real determination.

The lemonade was perfect: sweet and tart and cold. Kenzo had taken only a couple of sips before Elsie walked into the front room. “Hi!” he said.

“Hi, Ken.” She smiled.

“You look nice,” Kenzo said. She was wearing a sun dress, but not one that was too revealing. Part of him was sorry. The rest, the sensible part, wasn’t: why borrow trouble with leering soldiers or, worse, with soldiers who wanted to do more than leer? He sniffed. “You smell nice, too.” She’d put on some kind of cologne. He could smell it in spite of the Vitalis he’d used on his own hair.

Elsie wrinkled her nose at him. “As long as I don’t smell like old fish, I’d smell nice to you.”

Since she was right, he grinned back at her. “Shall we go?” he said. Elsie nodded. He drained the glass of lemonade and set it down on a doily to make sure it didn’t leave a ring on the furniture. “Thanks very much,” he told Mrs. Sundberg.

“You’re welcome, Ken,” she answered. “I hope you have a nice time.” If her voice held the thinnest edge of worry, he could pretend he didn’t notice.

Little spatters of rain were coming down when he and Elsie stepped outside. They both ignored it, confident it would let up in a few minutes-and it did. Some adman had no doubt got a bonus for coining the phrase “liquid sunshine.” Advertising for tourists or not, though, it held a lot of truth. The sun hadn’t stopped shining while the rain fell, and it was warm and more refreshing than annoying.

Elsie looked up at the sky as the clouds drifted away. “If I’d just had a permanent, I’d be mad,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t think you can get a permanent here any more, so I don’t have to worry about that.”

“I hadn’t even thought about it,” Kenzo confessed.

“Men.” Elsie condemned half the human race. She laughed again while she did it.

“Hey!” Kenzo played at being more wounded than he really was. “Most of what I’ve been worrying about lately is fish. They don’t care about permanents. The rest is trying to keep Dad from… you know.” He didn’t want to say turning into a quisling, even if that was what it amounted to.

“Nothing you can do about that. You can’t live his life for him,” Elsie said. “I’m just glad you don’t think that way yourself.”

“Nope. I’m an American.” But Kenzo looked around to make sure nobody overheard him before he said it. He trusted Elsie-and he was sure she was on the same side as he was. Some stranger? A stranger, Japanese or advantage-seeking haole, was liable to report him to the occupiers. He didn’t like having to be careful that way, but he didn’t see that he had any choice, either.

“I should hope so.” Elsie spoke in a low voice, and she looked around, too. She made an unhappy face. “It’s like living in France or Russia or something and worrying about the Nazis listening all the time.”

“It’s just like that,” Kenzo said. His father’s homeland was on the same side as Adolf Hitler. If that wasn’t enough to give Dad a hint… But Hitler had got a much better press in the Japanese papers his father read than he did in the English-language press. What can you do? he thought.

The closest theater was showing a Gary Cooper Western. What can you do? Kenzo thought again. He gave the ticket-seller two quarters. The theater had long since run out of tickets. Kenzo and Elsie extended their hands. The fellow stamped PAID on the backs of them. They showed the stamps to the man who would have taken tickets if they’d had any. He stood aside and let them through.

Gone from the snack bar were the familiar odors of hot dogs and popcorn. All it sold were lemonade and salted macadamia nuts-another local specialty. Kenzo got some for Elsie and him. They cost more than admission had.

Japanese sailors had taken a lot of the best seats. Kenzo and Elsie sat down near the back of the theater. They wanted to draw as little notice as they could. When they started to eat their snacks, they discovered that macadamia nuts were a lot noisier to chew than popcorn. Crunching, they grinned at each other.

No coming attractions filled the screen when the house lights went down. Theaters on Oahu swapped films back and forth among themselves, but even they didn’t think their audiences would get too excited about it. Instead, the projectionist went straight into the newsreel.

That was a Japanese production. It seemed to have American models, but watching it was like looking in a mirror: everything was backwards. The Allies were the bad guys, the armed forces of the Axis the heroes. To blaring, triumphal music, Japanese soldiers advanced in China and Burma. Japanese bombers knocked the stuffing out of towns in Australia and Ceylon. They also pounded a British aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. “ Banzai! ” the sailors shouted as flames and smoke swallowed the carrier.

Somehow-by submarine? — the Jap newsreel makers had also got hold of some German footage. Men in coal-scuttle helmets dashed forward with artillery support on the Russian front. More German soldiers led bedraggled Englishmen into captivity in North Africa. And U-boats sent ship after ship to the bottom off the East Coast of the USA. Those sinking freighters drew more “ Banzai! ”s from the Japanese sailors, who no doubt had a professional appreciation of their allies’ murderous competence.

By the time the newsreel got done, only a Pollyanna would have given a nickel for the Allies’ chances. “It’s all propaganda,” Kenzo whispered to Elsie. She nodded, but she was blinking rapidly, trying to hold back tears.

Then the Western came on. That was a merciful relief. You knew Gary Cooper would drive off the Indians, save the pretty girl, and live happily ever after. The movie had no subtitles, but the Japanese sailors didn’t need any help figuring out what was going on.

They made a noisy audience. Before the war, ushers would have thrown anybody that raucous right out of the theater. Obviously, nobody was going to try throwing the sailors out. Kenzo expected them to root for the Apaches or Comanches or whatever the Indians were supposed to be. But they didn’t-they were all for tall, fair, white-skinned Gary Cooper. “Shoot the savages!” they called. “Kill them all!” Cooper earned as many “ Banzai! ”s as the German U-boat captains had.

Elsie couldn’t understand the sailors. She did frown when they made an especially loud racket, but that was all. After a while, Kenzo reached out and took her hand. She squeezed his, and squeezed it again whenever the Japanese sailors got uproarious.

“Let’s leave before the lights come up,” he said as the six-shooter epic drew to a close.

When they went out into the lobby, Kenzo wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. Half a dozen soldiers with the Japanese Army’s star on their caps were buying lemonade and macadamia nuts there. But he managed to get Elsie outside before their eyes lit on her.

Both of them blinked against the bright sunshine. “Thank you, Ken,” Elsie said. “It was nice to get out of the house for something besides trying to find enough to eat.”

“Can we do it again?” Kenzo asked, and he felt like jumping in the air when she nodded. He steered her away from the theater, away from trouble. As they started back toward her house, he asked, “Is it really so bad?”