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Karl thinks to himself: Now that we have you and your family locked up in a camp in the middle of nowhere, will you swear allegiance to the state that put them there? How about serving in our armed forces while your parents, wives and children are in jail for doing absolutely nothing? How does that strike you? From inside his chest, where the anger and disappointment have taken up permanent residence, come answers clear and certain. Will he serve? Will he swear allegiance? No and no. The government can take its privilege and go to hell.
Karl arrived in the camp five months before, in September 1942. All Japanese had been ordered to leave the western coastal states. He accompanied his parents, leaving his wife and daughter, exempt from banishment, behind in San Francisco. He thought he might not see them until the war was over.
But Leigh followed him a few weeks later. During their one phone call after the evacuation, as it was called, Karl tried to tell her not to come. She and May should stay in the city. Their friends in the Party would give her money until she found a job. In wartime San Francisco there were jobs even for women, even for Reds.
Instead of countering what he said, Leigh simply asked: “Which books do you want me to bring?”
When he saw her step off the bus, holding May on her hip, he was seized with such emotion that for some minutes he found it difficult to speak.
They sleep in Building No. 147, a cabin with unfinished walls and a tar-papered roof. They share its one room with Karl’s parents and another family, the Shinedas. They’ve hung a sheet across the middle of the room for privacy. Mrs. Shineda is a nosy gossip, so this barrier seems insufficient but it is better than nothing.
They have two beds, and Karl built a table and chairs from scrap lumber begged from the camp authorities. At night, the wind comes through the gaps in the walls. It wakes up May, who sleeps between them. They have tried to fill the cracks with newspaper but it seems as if no matter how many crevices they stop, the wind always finds a new way in.
The evening after the questionnaires are handed out, Karl tells Leigh that he’s going to answer no to the last two questions. His parents are still at the mess hall eating dinner. May is playing outside with other children who sleep nearby.
Leigh listens to him quietly.
“What do you think will happen if you answer no?” she asks when he’s finished speaking.
“I don’t know,” he says. “All I know is that I can’t just pledge allegiance and say I’ll go into the army. Not after this.”
Leigh thinks about this for a minute.
“I think you’re right,” she says. “The one thing that they can’t take from you unless you let them is your conscience.”
Leigh is a slight woman who is often mistaken for younger than her age; if you didn’t know her you might think that she was weak and tractable.
“It’s so stupid,” she says. “You were ready to go before they sent us here.”
This is true. During the months before evacuation, they had many conversations about Karl joining up. He’d wanted to do the right thing, to fight against the Fascists. He would probably be in the army now, except that he was sent here, to this camp, instead.
He reaches over to take Leigh’s hand and they sit for a minute like this, looking at each other in the growing gloom.
Then, from behind the bed sheet curtain that divides the room comes the sound of footsteps. Karl looks over and sees, in the gap beneath the curtain, a pair of feet.
Mrs. Shineda has been on her side of the room the whole time they were talking. She has heard everything they said.
Mrs. Shineda’s feet go over to the door and wiggle out of their house slippers. At the door, where the sheet ends and there’s a gap, she looks toward them, bows slightly and smiles. Itte kimasu, she says. I go and I return. Then she steps out into the dusk.
“Oh, well,” Leigh says. “People were bound to find out soon enough.”
But Karl does not like it.
A Japanese expression comes into his head, one that he dislikes for being fatalistic: shikata ga nai. There’s nothing to be done. It was what his mother said when they were ordered from their home. It was what his father said when he had to close his store and lay off his employees.
And now Karl will have to sit here while the news of his decision goes out into the world. Shikata ga nai.
The next morning, Karl is with his work detail.
Their group has been assigned to construct more sleeping cabins so each family in the camp can eventually have its own. In December there were riots over the crowding and the bad food and since then the administrators have embarked on an improvement plan. They employ internees for wages to make the camp more habitable.
Like Karl, who was a schoolteacher, the other men did different things before. One was a plumber, one worked in a cannery, one used to be a fisherman. Although it is against camp rules, they speak to one another in Japanese. In the cold air, their breath plumes. They talk about the questionnaire.
“I’m just going to answer the way they want,” the ex-plumber says. He hammers down tarpaper at one corner of a roof, while the ex-fisherman holds his ladder steady. “Yes and yes. What else can we do?”
The others murmur in assent. Then the ex-plumber looks over to where Karl and the ex — cannery worker are kneeling on a tarpaulin, attaching hinges to a door. “Hey, Takagawa,” he says. “I heard that you are going to say no and no. Is that true?”
“That’s right,” Karl says. He doesn’t look up from the work he’s doing, just keeps screwing in the hinges.
“Why?” the ex-plumber asks.
“Because I don’t think it is right to force us to say we are loyal, or to make us go into the army when our families are here.”
“You aren’t loyal?” the ex-plumber asks.
“The point isn’t whether I’m loyal or not,” Karl says. “The point is they don’t have the right to ask me. They are treating us like criminals when we’ve done nothing wrong.”
The ex-plumber opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something else, but then he shuts it again and just rolls his eyes.
The ex-fisherman shakes his head. He says: “I heard that if you say no to either question, they send you away. To a camp in Washington State.”
“We’re already in a camp,” Karl says.
“That place is worse. Like a real prison. I mean, no hot water, prison rations. No movies, no sports teams. And no families allowed, just men.”
“How do you know so much about it?” the ex — cannery worker asks.
“One of my cousins from Seattle got sent to that place for running away to go home and see his girl. I heard about it from my uncle. It’s called Tule Lake.”
Karl feels like he should say something, but what? It doesn’t matter what the consequences are, he’s made his choice. But he thinks that he won’t mention this conversation to Leigh. No reason to worry her any more than he already has.
Near the end of their work shift, when the other two men are out of earshot, the ex — cannery worker, whose name is Fred Nakamura, turns to Karl and says quietly: “I wish I had the guts to do what you are doing,” and Karl feels a surge of unexpected pride.
When Karl comes back from work that afternoon, he finds his father sitting at the table in Building No. 147.
“I don’t know,” he says when Karl enters. Karl sees the questionnaire forms spread out in front of him. “If I forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, aren’t I saying that I used to have allegiance to him? Is it some kind of trick question?”