The Japanese Lover(33)

Every Monday Boyd began a letter to her, and went on adding paragraphs each day, drawn from The Art of Writing Love Letters, a manual in fashion among soldiers who had come back from the war and had left girlfriends scattered around the world. On Friday, he would post the letter. Every second Saturday, this methodical man set himself the task of telephoning Megumi, although this did not always work out; on Sundays he went to the racetrack to bet. He lacked the real gambler’s irresistible compulsion, and the vagaries of fortune made him nervous and affected his stomach ulcer, but soon he had discovered he was lucky with horses, and used his winnings to supplement the pittance he earned. In the evening he studied mechanics, as his plan was to leave the armed forces and open a garage in Hawaii. He thought that would be the best place to settle, because it had a large Japanese population, which had been spared the indignity of internment even though Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place there. In his letters, Boyd tried to convince Megumi of the advantages of Hawaii, where they would be able to raise children with less racial hatred, but children were the last thing on her mind. Megumi maintained a slow but tenacious correspondence with a couple of Chinese doctors to discover how she could study Oriental medicine, as the Western kind was denied her. She quickly learned that here too, the facts of being a woman and being of Japanese origin were insurmountable obstacles, just as her mentor Frank Delillo had warned her.

At the age of fourteen, Ichimei started going to secondary school. Since Takao was paralyzed by melancholy and Heideko could speak no more than a few words of English, Megumi had to be her brother’s guardian. On the day she went to enroll him, she thought Ichimei was bound to feel at home, because the building was as ugly and the surroundings as barren as at Topaz. The school principal, Miss Brody, received them. She had spent the war years trying to convince politicians and public opinion that children from Japanese families had just as much right to education as all Americans. She had collected thousands of books to send to the concentration camps. Ichimei had bound several of them, and remembered them perfectly because each one had an inscription by Miss Brody on the title page. He imagined his benefactor as being like the fairy godmother in Cinderella but found himself confronted by a woman built like a tank, with a woodcutter’s arms and the voice of a town crier.

“My brother is behind with his studies. He’s not good at reading or writing, or arithmetic,” an embarrassed Megumi told her.

“What are you good at then, Ichimei?” Miss Brody asked him directly.

“Drawing and planting,” whispered Ichimei, without raising his eyes from the tips of his shoes.

“Perfect! That’s exactly what we need here!” Miss Brody exclaimed.

For the first week, the other children bombarded Ichimei with the insults against his race that were common during the war but that he had never heard at Topaz. He did not know either that the Japanese were more hated than the Germans, and he had not seen the comics where they were portrayed as degenerate and ruthless. He accepted the jibes with his usual placidity, but the first time a bully laid a finger on him, he threw him through the air with a judo move he had learned from his father—the same one he had used years earlier to show Nathaniel what martial arts were capable of. He was sent to the principal’s room to be punished. “Well done, Ichimei,” was her only comment. After that crucial feat, he was able to go through the four years of schooling without ever being attacked again.





February 16, 2005

I went to Prescott, Arizona, to see Miss Brody. It was her ninety-fifth birthday, and many of her ex-pupils gathered to celebrate. She is doing very well for her age, and recognized me as soon as she saw me. Just imagine! How many children passed through her hands? How can she possibly remember them all? She recalled that I painted the posters for the school parties, and that on Sundays I worked in her garden. I was a dreadful student, but she always gave me good grades. Thanks to Miss Brody I’m not completely illiterate and can write to you now, my dear friend.

This week that we have not been able to meet has been an eternity. The rain and cold have made it especially sad. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find any gardenias to send you. Please call me.

Ichi





BOSTON


During the first year of her separation from Ichimei, Alma lived in anticipation of his letters, but as time went by she grew accustomed to her friend’s silence, just as she had done to that of her parents and brother. Her aunt and uncle did their best to protect her from the bad news from Europe, in particular about the fate of the Jews. Whenever Alma asked about her family, she was told such outlandish stories that the war sounded more like something out of the legends of King Arthur she had read with Ichimei in the garden pergola. According to her aunt Lillian, the lack of any correspondence was due to problems with the mail system in Poland, and in the case of her brother, Samuel, because of security measures in England. She told Alma he was carrying out vital missions for the Royal Air Force that were both dangerous and secret, and so had to remain in strict anonymity. Why should she tell her niece that her brother had been shot down with his plane in France? Isaac stuck pins in a map to show Alma how the Allied forces were advancing or retreating but did not have the heart to tell her the truth about her parents. Ever since the Mendels had been stripped of their possessions and forced into the terrible Warsaw ghetto, he had received no news of them. He sent large sums of money to organizations trying to help the people in the ghetto and knew that the number of Jews deported by the Nazis between July and September 1942 had reached more than two hundred and fifty thousand. He also knew about the thousands who died every day of starvation and illnesses. The wire-topped wall separating the ghetto from the rest of the city was not completely impermeable, for some food and medicine could be smuggled in, and the horrific photos of children dying of hunger could get out, so there were some means of communicating. If none of the methods he had employed to locate Alma’s parents had met with any success, and if Samuel’s plane had crashed, it was reasonable to assume that all three were dead, but until there was irrefutable proof, Isaac intended to spare his niece all that pain.