Julie Otsuka - When the Emperor Was Divine

When the war is over, our mother had said.

As we tried to fall asleep in that white stucco house we could not stop thinking of the stories we had heard about the people who had come back before us. One man’s house had been doused with gasoline and set on fire while his family lay sleeping inside. Another man’s shed had been dynamited. There had been shootings in the valley, and gravestone defacings, and unannounced visitors knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

Nice to see you again, neighbor. How long do you plan on staying in town?

There aren’t any jobs here. I’d think about moving on if I were you.

People around here have got plans for you.

Plans, we wondered. What kinds of plans?

For what seemed like hours we lay awake beneath the blankets in our very best clothes—“We will not be caught dead in our pajamas,” our mother had said— waiting for the sound of gunfire, or a sharp rap on the door, but all we heard was the wind in the trees and the passing of cars outside on the street and finally, toward dawn, the familiar sound of our mother snoring.

WE WERE FREE NOW, free to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we pleased. There were no more armed guards, no more searchlights, no more barbed-wire fences. Our mother went out to the market and brought back the first fresh pears we had eaten in years. She brought back eggs, and rice, and many cans of beans. When our ration books arrived, she told us, she would buy us fresh meat. She dug up the silver she had buried in the garden before we had left and she set the card table for three. The knives were still sharp. The forks and spoons had not lost their shine. As we sat down in our chairs she reminded us to eat slowly, with our mouths closed and our heads held high above our plates. “Don’t shovel, ” she said.

But we could not help ourselves. We were hungry. We were ravenous. We ate quickly, greedily, as though we were still in the mess hall barracks, where whoever finished first got seconds and slow eaters were left behind to make do with only one serving.

Later on, in the evening, we turned on the radio and heard one of the same programs we had listened to before the war— The Green Hornet— and it was as if we had never been away at all. Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. “Where were you?” they’d ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, “Hey.” We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

THE TOWN SEEMED much the same as before. Grove Street was still Grove, and Tyler Street still Tyler. The pharmacy was still there at the end of the block, only now it had a new sign. The mornings were still foggy. The parks were still green. Swings still hung down from the trees (swings will always hang down from the trees) and children—well fed, laughing, with their heads tossed back into the wind—still swung. The girls on the streets still wore black Mary Janes. Their mothers still wore black pumps. The old man in the rumpled gray fedora was still standing at the corner calling out for his lost dog, Isadora, who had run away long long ago. Perhaps he is standing there still.

In the windows of the houses on our block we saw the faces of our old friends and neighbors: the Gilroys and the Myers, the Leahys, the Wongs, the two elderly Miss O’Gradys, from whose yard not a single tossed ball had ever been returned. They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning, to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn’t know). None of them waved.

They’re afraid, our mother had said.

Keep on walking.

Hold your head up.

Whatever you do, don’t look back.

Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us. Or they nodded in passing and said, “Gorgeous day,” as though we had not been away at all. Once in a while someone would stop and ask our mother where we had been—“Haven’t seen you for a while,” that person might say, or “It’s been ages ”—and our mother simply lifted her head and smiled and replied, “Oh, away.”

For it was true. We had gone away and now we were back but our father had yet to come join us. In his letters he said he would be released any day now, any day. But when that day would be he could not say for sure. It could be tomorrow, or two weeks from tomorrow. It could be in six months.

Would he know who we were when he stepped off the train? (We were older now, and darker, from all the years in the sun. We had grown.)

What would he be wearing?

Would he have any hair left?

What would his first words be? (I’d like to… I’d love a… You don’t know how I’ve…)

And was it true, what we’d heard? (Disloyal… a traitor… a great fan of the Emperor’s.)

LATE AT NIGHT, in the barracks, we used to lie awake on our cots and discuss chocolate. We used to dream of milk shakes, and sodas, and toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We used to dream of home. Did they miss us? Were they talking about us? Had they even noticed we were gone? Would they look at us funny when we came back because of where we had been? And so it seemed like a dream to be able to walk down to the corner store and buy a bar of candy and an ice-cold bottle of Coke. The girl behind the counter was older now, and prettier. She wore dark red lipstick and was swaying back and forth to a song on the radio whose words we did not yet know. When she saw us she turned down the music and stared.

“Coke’s still a nickel,” she said softly.

On our way home we looked for the place on the sidewalk where we had once carved our initials but that place was no longer there. We drank our Coca-Colas. We ate our chocolates and tossed the wrappers into the wind. We plucked a handful of flowers from someone’s front yard. We counted Okies on the street. We counted Negroes. We counted gold stars in our neighbors’ front windows. At the corner we stopped and bought a copy of the Gazette for our mother, who had sworn off the papers long ago. All that war news just wears out my eyes.

But now, now she could not get enough of the headlines.

Shirley Temple had just gotten married ?

“Impossible!”

No nylon stockings in the stores until spring?

“If I’d known I never would have bothered to come back.”

And no two-way stretch girdles?

We saw her look down at her stomach in despair.

“Just suck it in!”

“What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?”

We tossed the flowers into her lap and ran back out onto the street.

THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY had sent each person home with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash. “It doesn’t add up,” our mother had said. Three years. Five months. Twenty-five dollars. Why not thirtyfive, or forty? Why not one hundred? Why even bother at all? Twenty-five dollars, we later learned, was the same amount given to criminals on the day they were released from prison. With this money our mother bought us each one new pair of shoes a full size too large. “You’ll grow into them,” she told us as we stuffed wads of tissue into the toes. She bought us new underthings, and washcloths, and a thick cotton mattress that we took turns sleeping on in the front room at the foot of the stairs until the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window. After the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window we dragged the mattress upstairs and slept in the room that faced the back of the house—the room with the words on the walls. Over the words our mother taped pictures of flowers torn from an old nursery calendar, and across the windows she hung some split rice-sack curtains so no one could see inside, and in the evening, when it began to grow dark, she wandered through the front rooms of the house turning off the lights one by one so no one would know we were home.