Julie Otsuka - When the Emperor Was Divine

With the money she earned our mother bought new lace curtains for the windows that faced out onto the street. She polished the rusty brass knocker. She set out a welcome mat on the steps by the front door. Little by little, she accumulated things. One of her employers gave her a set of dishes and a camel’s hair coat that looked as though it had never been worn. Someone else gave her two silver candlesticks, which she took to the pawnshop the very next day. At the Salvation Army she bought us our own dressers and beds and from that day on we each slept alone—our mother, downstairs, in the bedroom she had once shared with our father, and the two of us, by ourselves, in our old rooms upstairs.

THE TELEGRAM WAS DELIVERED on a foggy wet morning in December. Leaving Santa Fe Friday. Arrive Sunday, 3 p.m. Love, Papa.

For the next several days we did nothing but wait for the hours to pass. We went to school. We came home. We stared at the clock. He’s in Albuquerque now. He’s in Flagsta f. He’s crossing the Mojave…. Our mother cleaned and she cooked. She carried the telegram with her, in her pocket, wherever she went—to work, to the post office, to the market to buy bread. Sometimes, in the middle of supper, she pulled it out and examined it under the light just to make sure that the words were still there, or that they had not mysteriously rearranged themselves, while she was not looking, into some other message.

“What if it’s not real?” she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?

It’s real, we told her. No joke.

ON SUNDAY, near dusk, our father’s train pulled into the station. A light rain was falling and the windows of the train were streaked with water and soot and all we could see on the other side of the glass were dark shapes moving. Then the train came to a stop and a small stooped man carrying an old cardboard suitcase stepped out of the last car. His face was lined with wrinkles. His suit was faded and worn. His head was bare. He moved slowly, carefully, with the aid of a cane, a cane we had never seen before. Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father’s return, for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do. We did not run up to him. We did not wave our hands wildly back and forth and shout out Over here! to him. And when our mother pushed us gently, but firmly, from behind, and whispered, Go to him, all we could do was stare down at our shoes, unable to move. Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place. That’s not him, we said to our mother, That’s not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us.

He put down his suitcase and looked at her.

“Did you… ” she said.

“Every day,” he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him.

OUR FATHER, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years. He wore bright white dentures, and he’d lost the last of his hair. Whenever we put our arms around him we could feel his ribs through the cloth of his shirt. He did not draw for us, or sing songs for us in his wobbly, off-key voice. He did not read us stories. On Sunday afternoons, when we were bored and could think of nothing to do, he did not tie pieces of bent tin onto twigs and put on shadow plays for us from behind hanging white sheets. He did not make us stilts.

Of course, our mother was quick to point out, we were too old now for stilts, too old to be read to, too old for shadow plays from behind hanging white sheets.

Yes, yes, yes, we replied, and too old to laugh!

He never said a word to us about the years he’d been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. He never mentioned his loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit. He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? (Was he even there at all?) We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

IN THE BEGINNING he wandered slowly from one room to the next, picking up objects and looking at them in bewilderment and then putting them back down again. “I don’t recognize a thing,” we heard him whisper. In the afternoon he lay down on the couch and let himself drift off into sleep only to awaken, moments later, with a start, not knowing where he was. He sat up and shouted out our names and we came running. “What is it?” we asked him. “What’s wrong?” He needed to see us, he said. He needed to see our faces. Otherwise he would never know if he was really awake. On the train, he told us later, he had dreamed again and again that he’d fallen asleep and missed his stop.

He wore the same loose baggy trousers every day and was convinced that someone was watching the house. He did not like to use the telephone— You never know who might be listening —or to eat out in public. He rarely spoke to anyone unless he was spoken to first. Why go looking for trouble? He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.

They just don’t like us. That’s just the way it is.

Never tell them more than you have to.

And don’t think, for a minute, that they’re your friend.

Little things—the barking of a neighbor’s dog, a misplaced pen, an unanticipated delay of any sort—could send him into a rage. One afternoon, after a long wait at the bank, he pushed his way to the front of the line and began pounding on the floor with his cane. “I don’t have all day!” he cried out. We turned away and pretended not to know him. None of the other customers in line said a word. “You think they care?” he shouted at us as we slowly made our way toward the door. We covered our ears with our hands and kept on walking.

HE NEVER WENT BACK to work. The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to. Nobody else would hire him: he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. And so he stayed at home, day after day, poring over the newspaper with a magnifying glass and scribbling down words in a little blue notebook. Sometimes he went out into the yard and watered the grass, or he swept off the front porch. And every afternoon, when we came home from school, he fixed us a snack: jelly and crackers, or a plate full of apples carefully peeled and sliced.

He always seemed happy to see us. “So tell me the news,” he called out to us the moment we walked through the door. We sat with him in the kitchen and talked about school. The weather. The neighbors. The same things we’d talked about before the war. Nothing more. He leaned forward in his chair as though he were listening but no matter what we said— a moth flew into Miss Campbell’s ear during dictation, Donald Harzbecker has been grounded for life —his response was the same. “Is that so?”