Allegiance (27 page)

I turn back to Clara. There is a special kind of sorrow that comes from getting what you want and realizing afterward just how low and mean it is. I have worked hard to break something, and now that I see the aching vulnerability in its ruins I feel an irretrievable loss. I remember Pearson's stories of Stalingrad and think this is what the Panzer crews must have felt when they drew past the wrecked guns and saw they'd been fighting girls. I am comparing myself to Nazi shock troops, but at the moment that feels about right.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

Clara's voice is recovering volume. “Why did you bring me here? A joke for your friends? A lesson for me, to show me how much I don't belong?”

“They're not my friends.”

Yellow lights kindle in her eyes. “So?” I am getting a sense of the phrase “spitting mad” in all its original vigor. “What was it then?”

Disastrously, I decide to be honest. “You have this superior air.”

Clara is almost incoherent with rage. “Of course,” she says. “Of course, I
must think I am better than you. Why wouldn't I, with my homemade dress and my German parents?”

“Then why did you act all mysterious? Why not tell me where you live?”

“I am living,” says Clara, “at the Y.” Her words are clipped and precise. “The rents are too high in this city.” I look at her in silence for a moment. She continues in the same tone. “Would you like to know more about the dress?”

“That's okay,” I say.

Clara ignores my words. “I made a dress because I could not buy one,” she says. “And I wanted to feel pretty. Because I was fool enough to want to be pretty for you.”

“You're beautiful,” I say.

“And you are very stupid or very mean.” She dabs at one eye, collecting herself. “You are certainly the dumbest genius I have ever met. Do you have even the slightest idea of what the world is like for someone who isn't you?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Then we are not so dissimilar after all.”

“No?”

“No. I am sorry, too. Sorry I ever spoke to you. I could tell what you were the first second I saw you, and I should have known better.”

“That's not fair.”

“Fair?” Her voice is loud and high enough to peel a few spectators away from the Pearson-Richards wrestling match. “If there is one thing I wish for you, it is that someday you learn how little you know about what is not fair.”

She turns and starts walking away. “I'll get your coat,” I say, but she doesn't stop or even slow. Her only reaction, in fact, is a loud “Ha!” which sounds at first like a laugh, but as I think about it later could well have been a sob.

MAIN JUSTICE IS
hollow. In the center of the building lies the Great Court, a city block in size, with scattered bushes, three cherry trees, and the raised aluminum bowl of a large fountain. Three floors up, my office window looks the other way, out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, but I can step from my desk and walk a full circuit inside. I pass Edward Ennis and the other employees of the Alien Enemy Control Unit: John Burling, pale and nervous; Nanette Dembitz, a distant cousin of former Justice Louis Brandeis. As on every floor, murals run along the walls. Our series is called
The Search for Truth
, and it canvasses methods of resolving doubt.
Brute Force, Ordeal, Tradition
. There are twenty or so, keeping pace with me as I walk in circles.
Superstition, False Witness, Magic
. They progress and improve with each step.
Intuition, Reason, Science
.

The walking helps me think. It helps ease the sting of my memories of Clara, too. She is innocent, and I treated her shabbily, and she despises me, as she should. Still, at least I have established that she is not involved. But now the circuit completes itself. I am back to
Brute Force
. Back to the beginning. Do I try again with Hall? Pursue Bendetsen? I pass the open doors of offices. Ennis, Burling, Nanette. Unknown toilers of the Antitrust Division.
Superstition, False Witness, Magic
. The
Science
mural shows a figure examining fingerprints. Perhaps something will come from the FBI labs.

• • • • 

But it does not. “We have no match, Mr. Harrison,” says Clyde Tolson. I immerse myself in the work of Alien Enemies. More cases are headed to the Supreme Court. Fred Korematsu, arrested in San Leandro; Mitsuye Endo, suing for release from the Tule Lake camp. “Get me the facts,” Ennis says again. Records pile in stacks on my desk. I pore through the pages. From time to time I take out Gressman's files and study his diagrams, the names inked in red. They still make no sense to me. I play squash with John Hall; I chat with Felix Frankfurter. And then one day Francis Biddle is at my door.

It is May, and spring's whisper is growing to the drone of summer. Biddle wears a linen suit and a pale green tie. “Cash,” he says. “A moment.”

He does not sit on my desk like Black, or even take the chair opposite. Instead he stands and looks out the window. I stand, too. “I believe that the government will lose these cases,” he says softly.

“Why?”

Biddle turns back to me with a smile. His comb-over is no longer a cap, but a band across the top of his head, with empty skin in front and behind. “No aspersion on you, of course. But our position may not be as strong as some might like.”

“You were against evacuation, weren't you?”

The smile drains away. I remember Rowe's notes, imagine Biddle with his face turned to the floor, not meeting Rowe's eyes. “We are defending the legality of the relocation,” he says. “Not everyone agreed with it at the time. There are some in government now who would like to see an immediate release.”

I nod. The Marines are in New Guinea. It is hard to see what military necessity justifies keeping the detainees from their homes.

“But the President believes we should not act before the election. That gives us six months to prepare for the return.”

“Prepare?”

Biddle sighs. “There is substantial opposition to the idea that these people are coming back. They are viewed as disloyal. Most are not, of course. But in truth there is a real pro-Japanese element in the camps now. Tule Lake in particular. It must be dealt with before we can think of a general release. If disloyals return to the coast, they will be attacked, and the loyal Americans along with them.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Some congressmen want to strip citizenship from everyone who gave a ‘no' answer on the loyalty questionnaire,” Biddle says. “I opposed that idea. Congress will pass a law providing for the voluntary renunciation of citizenship. If the disloyals renounce, we can remove them to enemy alien camps and eventually repatriate them to Japan. The western states will be more willing to accept the return of the others once we've sorted them.”

It seems reasonable enough. “Okay,” I say.

“Someone will have to explain renunciation to the Japanese,” Biddle continues. “The Relocation Authority has people in place for that, but they obviously didn't do a very good job with the questionnaire. Two hundred should have refused the oath, not nine thousand. Once that law is passed, you're going to Tule Lake. Air Priority One.”

• • • • 

As I think about it, I like the idea. In Washington all my paths have reached dead ends. I am learning nothing from Ennis or Hall; Frankfurter has discovered nothing on the Court. But there may be answers in the camps.

It takes another month for the renunciation law to emerge from Congress and gain the President's signature. In the East, the island-hopping continues. In the West, our troops enter Europe. On June 4 the Allies take Rome. The Nisei combat team, the 442nd Regiment, is part of the assault, fighting its way out of the Anzio beachhead. Orders halt it ten miles south of the city. White faces will be first along the Appian Way.

Two days later the real second front opens on the beaches of Normandy. Now the war in Europe is won too, the Allies on the western shore and a red dawn rising in the East. With his forces scrambling to defend France, there is no way Hitler can hold against the weight of the Russians. It is just a matter of time.

FDR signs Public Law 405 on July 1. True to his word, Biddle has me on the next flight to Sacramento, displacing a civilian. The DC-3's propellers chew the air, swallowing miles. We are seventeen hours in the air with three stops to refuel, from one dark coast to another across a glowing land.

Tule Lake is almost a full day's drive north from Sacramento, only four
miles from the Oregon border. An Army jeep picks me up. “Going to see the Japs, sir?” my driver asks. A tag on his khaki shirt identifies him as PFC Rosen.

“You don't need to call me ‘sir,' ” I say. “What's your name?”

“Andrew, sir,” he says, and smiles. “Sorry, but that's what they taught us. If you're worth a driver, you're worth a ‘sir.' ” He offers me a stick of gum and pops one in his mouth. I look at his thick-muscled arms on the steering wheel; I notice the spots of stubble on his chin, the beginnings of sideburns, the bare pink cheeks between. Nineteen, maybe.

He takes us north on Highway 99, heading for Chico. Sweat prickles under my collar and down my back. “I didn't know it was so hot here,” I say. “Isn't California supposed to be mild?”

“You're asking the wrong guy, sir,” Rosen says. “I'm from the East.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Linwood. It's in Jersey. Down near Atlantic City. You?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Oh, we're practically neighbors.”

“Practically,” I say. He looks so young to me. I have experienced the feeling before, of course. The child whose size and experience loom large to a five- year-old is small and vulnerable from the vantage point of ten. But I expected that this would stop at some point, that eventually I would attain the absolute perspective. It does not stop; everything remains relative, and my reference point keeps shifting. It is hard for me to accept that Andrew Rosen is old enough to drive, much less hold a gun. I shudder to think how young he and his ilk must seem to the old men who make the real decisions.

Near Burney we stop to eat at a roadside diner. The sun is setting behind mountains to the west, and when we emerge it is dark. Stars burn overhead with the intensity I associate with Northeast Harbor and remoter Maine, though I realize now they belong to all dark places equally, or not to the Earth at all. From the road I can see the distant lights of towns, almost indistinguishable from the stars above. Unbounded blackness on every side, pierced here and there by pinpoint twinkles: America the limitless.

Then we come to the camp.

Route 139 goes up a rise and turns west as it nears Oregon. A view opens
up before us, a dark congregation of buildings encircled by lights. When we reach the main gate I can make them out as guard towers linked by cyclone fencing. Searchlights wander along the perimeter, and now and then a beam transfixes a desert creature, whose eyes cast back its light. Inside the gate we register at the provost marshal's office and are admitted to the administrative section. A military policeman shows me and Rosen to our lodgings.

“Colony's over there,” he says, gesturing. I see another dark fence, the expanse of a firebreak, and row upon row of black tarpapered buildings glinting in the moonlight. My room has blond wood furniture from Sears Roebuck, upholstered for some reason with a pattern of cowboys and Indians. A photograph of FDR gazes benignly from above the desk. “Director'll see you in the morning,” the soldier says.

“What time?” I ask.

He laughs. “Don't worry; you'll be up.”

• • • • 

I wake the next morning to the notes of a bugle. Reveille, I think, but the tune is unfamiliar. Unintelligible shouts and chanting carry through the wall. I stumble to the window and raise the blind. In the firebreak behind the fence, lines of Japanese men in white pants and sweatshirts conduct calisthenics. Their heads are shaved bare or down to a military stubble; most wear headbands emblazoned with the rising sun.

I jump back involuntarily. The men continue to drill. I can make out the shouts now, even if I cannot understand the words. “
Wash-sho
,” they cry, raising their arms in the air. They march in columns three or four abreast. “
Wash-sho!”
Behind them are the black rows of barracks, then a level, dusty plain and hazed mountains on the horizon. The rise from which I first saw the camp is a small hill. Beyond it, unglimpsed in the night, is a sandstone butte incandescent in the dawn. It is a foreign land, so different from the electric cities of the East.

I watch for some minutes, then dress and begin to review my papers. The chanting outside goes on for another half hour. A deep silence follows, broken by the occasional rumble of engines. The camp is still mostly asleep. After a moment I become aware of a lone voice singing. A soprano. At first I
think it a phonograph, but there is no accompaniment. I step out of my barrack apartment and walk to the fence. Farther across the firebreak, looking not into the administration section of the camp but out at the trackless plain, a Nisei girl stands. Her back is to me; I can see only a dark skirt, a white shirt, black hair in curls. She is singing a Puccini aria, one of the few I can recognize.
Un Bel Di
.

“Hear the national anthem this morning?” The voice startles me. I turn to face Raymond Best, the Tule Lake project director. He is in his fifties, I guess, with a high forehead and short, dark hair graying at the temples. He is wearing the pants from a windowpane-checked tan suit and a tie, but no jacket.

“That's what that was?” I ask.

“Not ours, of course. I swear I'm getting to know theirs just as well. Five-thirty every morning. They do it as close as they can get to the administrative buildings.”