Free When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Page B

and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he’d say, and then they’d shake hands.
    NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. “It’ll be
red,
” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot—“He
showed
me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.
    â€œWhat did it look like?” the boy asked.
    â€œYou don’t want to know.”
    â€œYes I do.”
    She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.
    The boy said, “I know.”
    One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall.
    â€œI’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul. Night after night he had lain awake waiting to hear the sound of the scrabbling claws but all he had heard was the banging of a loose door in the wind.
    She placed the tortoise in the bottom of the hole and filled up the hole with sand and then she shoved the spoon deep down into the earth. “We’ll dig him up in the spring,” she said. “We’ll resurrect him.”
    HE WAS THERE, above his mother’s cot. Jesus. In color. Four inches by six. A picture postcard someone had once sent to her from the Louvre. Jesus had bright blue eyes and a kind but mysterious smile.
    â€œJust like the
Mona Lisa
’s,” said the girl.
    The boy thought He looked more like Mrs. Delaney, only with longer hair and a halo.
    Jesus’ eyes were filled with a secret and flickering joy. With rapture. He’d died once—“for you,” said his mother, “for your sins”—and then he’d risen.
    The girl said, “Mmm.” She said, “That’s divine.”
    LATE AT NIGHT, in the darkness, he could hear his mother praying. “Our father, Who art in heaven . . .”
    And in the morning, at sunrise, coming from the other side of the wall, the sound of the man next door chanting. “
Kokyo ni taishite keirei
.”
    Salute to the Imperial Palace.
    NOW WHENEVER HE THOUGHT of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. “My daddy’s an outlaw,” he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.
    He’d be thinking these things, and then the image would suddenly float up before him: his father, in his bathrobe and slippers, being led away across the lawn.
Into the car, Papa-san.
    HE’LL BE BACK any day now. Any day.
    Just say he went away on a trip.
    Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing.
    Stay inside.
    Don’t leave the house.
    Travel only in the daytime.
    Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese.
    Do not congregate in one place.
    When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing.
    Remember, you’re in America.
    Greet him in the American way by shaking his