Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [82]
Dear Nancy, he began – a letter that, like many others, remained in his head, unwritten – I’m in limbo, surrounded by people I wouldn’t spend time with and whose state of mind I can’t understand. I hate the way they look – I mean the way they look at the guards: their smiling, bowing eagerness to be agreeable. Why should anyone be agreeable here? This is a place of wickedness and we should bang our tin plates on the table, rattle our cutlery, hurl rocks. I’m surprised they allow us knives to cut up our food, dangerous enemy aliens that we are. I’m thinking: I should organise a protest march, but who would take part? To the guards I’m one of the enemy shiftily disguised to look like an American. To the inmates I’m a puzzle, probably a spy . . .
Writing letters in his head helped, to a point. Real letters were more difficult. Long ago, Joey had read and reread his father’s letters from Washington, those scraps scribbled in odd moments from the vets’ encampment on the bank of the Anacostia. The determined cheerfulness and circumscribed subject matter had rung false to him. But now he understood and saw those letters differently, he could decode them, now that he found himself faced with writing home.
He skimmed over everyday matters: the weather, ‘changeable’; the way people were settling in, ‘surprisingly well’; the food, ‘home-cooking it ain’t’. None of this bore much resemblance to the truth. The weather was enervating, the food disgusting, the old people dazed and helpless, the young angry. He made no mention of the sirens that blasted them awake in the morning; of quiet, hopeless weeping, of snores or squabbles from the adjoining rooms. Nothing about sickness or death, nor of the ever-watchful eye of the searchlight. He saw that there was a convention to the writing of letters home: you did not moan on the page and you tried to find ways to cheer up the reader. When Nancy’s letters arrived, strewn with little jokes, drawings, and a line or two from a favourite poem, he became aware that she too was obeying the rules. ‘Well, we had the rose festival, as usual . . .’ She described the patriotic floral banners carried through the streets. ‘But no parade of automobiles smothered in blooms this year.’ She did not mention the shortage of gas, so the letter reached him uncensored.
Others were less adept at navigating the rules: sometimes letters were delivered with lines blacked out, or scissored from the page. Parcels were searched insensitively.
Ahead of Joe, collecting her mail, a woman asked, politely, ‘Why have you slashed this garment please?’
‘Checking for contraband, smuggled items.’
‘What can be smuggled in the hem of a skirt?’
‘Who’s to know? That’s the point, lady.’
One day Mrs Yamada, the young wife from the next room asked Joey, diffidently, ‘For what reason are you here?’
‘My mother comes from Nagasaki.’ Comes, not came: she’s still there. Isn’t she?
Mrs Yamada studies him closely, trying to find some visible confirmation of his words.
‘Her name is Cho-Cho.’
‘Ah. A beautiful name. How does she write it?’
How does she write it? The question is incomprehensible.
‘I’m sorry . . .’
She smiles again. ‘There are different ways of writing names. The characters –’ She sees his confusion and moves on, tactfully.
‘So. Beautiful name, symbolic of transformation. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. There are many stories about butterflies. Mostly sad.’
He recalls his childhood name, the word his mother sometimes used when she called to him. He speaks it aloud – ‘Kanashimi’ – and Mrs Yamada repeats the word and nods, smiling: ‘Ah. It means “sorrow”. Also “trouble”.’
He had been well named, then.
Later, she confides that her marriage to Mr Yamada had taken place two days before they had to leave their home for internment.
‘This is our honeymoon.’
Ichir became exasperated by Joey’s refusal to join