A Castle in Brooklyn(59)

“And though we never had that family, we have always loved the home, or maybe just the dream of it. And we did have some good years here, only I wish we’d had more. My husband is gone now ten years.” She turned to the woman beside her. “Florrie, is it ten years already?” Her friend nodded, began as if to say something, then stopped. Esther glanced around the room as if noticing all that was in it for the first time.

“There was a time when I wanted to leave. I wanted to give it all up. The home was just too much trouble, too big for just the two of us. But now, the longer I’ve lived here, the harder it has become to part with it. Anyway, that’s why I’ve decided to rent and not just sell it. One of my brothers is insisting I take a small place near him in Boca Raton in one of those retirement communities. But I just can’t. I’m not ready to give up the home. After all, it had been Jacob’s dream when he came to the US from Poland, when he survived the war.”

Riku flinched. “Your husband—he was a survivor?”

“Well, yes.”

He could no longer help himself.

“I too. I, too, am a survivor.”

He saw the two women exchange glances, but neither spoke.

“I, too, am a survivor,” he repeated, then sensing their confusion, continued.

“No, not from Poland, of course, but a survivor from the camps right here in the US.”

“But that’s impossible, there weren’t any camps—” began Florrie, but this time it was Esther who interrupted her.

“Florrie—he’s Japanese,” she whispered as if Riku were not present in the room. “We imprisoned the Japanese.”

Riku shifted his body in the recliner.

“Yes, that’s right. I was only five years old, but still to this day I remember it.”

He lifted his eyes to look at them once again, taking in their pale, lined faces; their eyes, alert, waiting. He wondered if they were sisters.

“My parents were born in Nagasaki, Japan, the place that was bombed, the city of all that awful destruction. But they were on US soil by the thirties, well before the war, a newly married couple. I don’t think they even visited the few family members they had left behind. Of course, once the war began, that was impossible.”

Riku sighed, kept his eyes down, scanning the palms of his hands as if reading the words he spoke.

“But I, well, I was born in the US. An American citizen, one hundred percent. Still, one can’t escape appearances. And in that I am Japanese. So, yes, they saw my parents, and including me, a child of only five years, as their enemy. So after Pearl Harbor, the dreadful attack, they locked us up, even me, barely out of diapers! Does that sound like America to you?”

The women shook their heads sympathetically. As Riku sat silently, the memories floated before his eyes as if they had happened yesterday.

The smells. That was what he remembered the most. Horse manure on wood under the sheets of linoleum, all topped with layers of dirt, the corpses of insects. Over three years sleeping on top of it all, on those army cots. He never could get used to it. He never did. It was all so different from the sweet scents of his parents’ fruit store—the oranges, lemons, the cherries like the best wine, which all came to be one with the air. He remembered it all.

Riku could never get used to the stench, just as he could not get used to the barbed wire along the top of the fence, the machine guns pointed at them during the daylight hours as they counted the minutes till sleep during the blackness of night. The name of their new residence, not a home, never that, had been burned into his mind: the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California. But he was born here, here in this country. A true American citizen.

During that time, he recalled, his father’s hands were idle. His father, who had never missed a day of work in his life, would sit brooding, for what else does one do when hope is lost? His mother, a gentle soul, at least had comfort in the few friends she had made, other young women who would stare at their children each day, wondering about the promise of America, wondering what their lives would be like when it was all over. All the adults thought the children were too young to notice how radically their lives had been transformed. But even they could sense the change, as they went to makeshift schools taught by educated Japanese women and their visiting white neighbors, when they played ball in the mud outdoors with the barbed wire surrounding them, breathing the air that seemed to grow more stale each day.

After those years, Riku and his parents were freed, freed from their prison, able to go back to their homes. But the problem was, they no longer had homes or a livelihood to go back to. Their fruit store, all that sweetness, was gone, and in its place: a bicycle shop. Their home, the place where Riku had been born, wasn’t theirs anymore. A white family, one he didn’t recognize, a true American family, now lived there. When they returned, they felt not just the shock of coming back for the next few days or a month, but years, as the years of their imprisonment had changed their lives and the lives of over ten thousand like them forever. They had become different people.

Their imprisonment had caused them to lose something that they had always taken for granted. He still wasn’t the same. The stress of trying to rebuild had become too much for his father, something Riku never realized until many years later. Less than a year after the family was freed, he died of a heart attack, leaving Riku to be raised by his mother, who worked in a grocery store just like the family had once owned. But he could tell that she was changed too. The lightness she always had in her steps, her easy laughter, the merriment that shone in her eyes, her smile, was gone.