All through their first year at Topaz, Ichimei often used to send Alma his drawings, but after that they became less frequent, because the censors couldn’t keep up and had to restrict the evacuees’ correspondence. Alma jealously kept those sketches, which provided the best glimpse into this stage of the Fukudas’ lives: the family huddled in one of the barracks; children doing homework kneeling on the ground with benches for desks; lines of people outside the latrines; men playing cards; women washing clothes in huge tubs. The prisoners’ cameras had been confiscated, and the few who managed to hide theirs were unable to develop the negatives. The only permitted photographs were optimistic ones that showed not only the humane treatment the prisoners received but the relaxed, cheerful atmosphere in the camp: kids playing baseball, adolescents dancing to the latest crazes, everybody singing the national anthem while the flag was raised every morning; on no account were the barbed-wire fences, the watchtowers, or the armed guards to be shown. One of the American soldiers eventually took a snapshot of the Fukuda family. His name was Boyd Anderson, and he had fallen in love with Megumi, whom he saw for the first time at the hospital, where she worked as a volunteer and where he had gone after cutting his hand opening a can of corned beef.
Boyd was twenty-three years old. He was tall and pale looking like his Swedish ancestors, with a straightforward, friendly character that made him one of the few whites to gain the evacuees’ confidence. A girlfriend was waiting impatiently for him in Los Angeles, but when he saw Megumi in her white volunteer’s uniform, his heart was taken. She cleaned the wound, the doctor inserted nine stitches, and she bandaged it with professional skill without once looking him in the face, while Boyd stared at her so bedazzled that he didn’t feel the slightest pain. From that day on he hovered around her discreetly, partly because he did not want to abuse his position of authority, but above all because any mixing of the races was forbidden for the whites and was repugnant to the Japanese. Thanks to her moonlike face and the delicacy with which she moved through the world, Megumi could have had any of the most sought-after young men at Topaz, but she felt the same forbidden attraction for the guard, and also struggled with the monstrosity of racism, praying to the heavens that the war would come to an end and her family return to San Francisco so that she could tear this sinful temptation from her soul. For his part, Boyd prayed the war would never end.
On the Fourth of July there was an Independence Day celebration, just as there had been six months earlier for the New Year. On that occasion the event had been a failure, because the camp was still not properly finished, and the Japanese had not yet become resigned to the fact that they were prisoners. In July 1943, however, the evacuees tried their hardest to show their patriotism and the Americans their goodwill, despite the dust storms and the heat, which seemed to bother even the lizards. Everyone mingled cheerfully amidst the barbecues, bunting, cakes, and even beer for the men, who for once were able to avoid the dreadful liquor made clandestinely from fermented tinned peaches. Boyd was among those detailed to photograph the occasion in order to silence those ill-intentioned journalists who denounced what they saw as the inhumane treatment meted out to the Japanese-Americans. He took advantage of his assignment to ask the Fukudas to pose for him. Afterward, he gave a copy to Takao and surreptitiously passed another to Megumi, while he enlarged his own and cut out the figure of Megumi from the family group. This photo was with him for the rest of his life: he kept it protected in plastic inside his wallet and was buried with it fifty-two years later. In the family portrait, the Fukudas are standing in front of a squat black building: Takao has slumped shoulders and a dour expression, Heideko is small and defiant, James is in half profile and sullen looking, Megumi shows all the splendor of her eighteen years, and the skinny eleven-year-old Ichimei stands there with his mop of unruly hair and scabs on his knees.
In this photograph, the only one of the family at Topaz, Charles is missing. That year Takao and Heideko’s eldest son had enlisted, because he considered it his duty, not in order to escape from confinement, an accusation some young men opposed to conscription made of these volunteers. He became part of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up exclusively of nisei. Ichimei sent Alma a drawing of his brother standing at attention before the flag, with a couple of lines of writing that weren’t censored, explaining he had no room on the sheet of paper to show the other seventeen young men in uniform who were off to war. Ichimei was so talented that in just a few strokes he succeeded in capturing Charles’s expression of extreme pride, a pride that went back to the distant past, to the earlier generations of samurai in his family who went into battle convinced they would not return, ready never to surrender and to die with honor, a conviction that gave them superhuman courage. When, as he always did, Isaac examined the drawing, he pointed out to Alma the irony that those young men were willing to risk their lives defending the interests of a country that was holding their families in concentration camps.
The day James Fukuda turned seventeen, he was led away between two armed soldiers. His family was given no explanation, but Takao and Heideko had anticipated this calamity, as their second son had been difficult since birth and a continual problem after their internment. Like the rest of the evacuees, the Fukuda family had accepted their situation with philosophical resignation, but James and some other nisei had protested constantly, first by breaking the rules at every opportunity and later by encouraging revolt. At first, Takao and Heideko put this down to the boy’s explosive nature, then to the waywardness of adolescence, and finally to a poor choice of friends. The camp warden had warned them several times that he would not tolerate James’s behavior. He put him in a cell for fighting, insubordination, and minor damage to federal property, but none of this justified his being taken away to prison. Apart from the dissent of some adolescent nisei like James, the atmosphere at Topaz was one of complete calm. There were never any serious disturbances, the worst being the strikes and protests that took place when a sentry killed one old man who had got too close to the fence and didn’t hear the order to stop. The warden always took James’s youth into consideration and allowed himself to be swayed by the discreet maneuvers Boyd Anderson undertook in the boy’s defense.
The government had sent a questionnaire to which the only correct answers were yes. All evacuees aged seventeen and over had to answer them. Among the leading questions, they were asked to be loyal to the United States, fight wherever they were sent—in the army in the case of men, and in the auxiliary forces for women—and to renounce their allegiance to the emperor of Japan. For issei like Takao, this meant giving up their nationality without having the right to become American, but almost all of them complied. The only ones who refused to sign, because they were American and felt insulted, were a few young nisei. They were nicknamed the No-Nos, and were regarded as dangerous by the government and rejected by the Japanese community, who from time immemorial had detested scandal. James was one of these No-Nos. Deeply ashamed when his son was arrested, his father shut himself in the barracks room assigned to his family and only left it to use the communal latrine. Ichimei would take him his food and then stand in line a second time to get himself something to eat. Heideko and Megumi, who also suffered from the trouble James had caused, tried to continue their lives as normal, heads held high despite the nasty rumors or disapproving looks from their own people and harassment by the camp authorities. The Fukudas, Ichimei included, were interrogated on several occasions, but thanks to Boyd, who had been promoted and protected them as best he could, they were never really threatened.
“What’s going to happen to my brother?” Megumi asked Anderson.
“I don’t know, Megumi. They could have sent him to Tule Lake in California, or Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is in charge of that. I guess he won’t be released until the war is over.”
“People here say that the No-Nos are going to be shot as spies . . .”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Megumi.”
Takao was completely changed by his son’s arrest. During the first few months at Topaz he had taken part in the community and filled the empty hours growing vegetables and making furniture from the wooden crates they got from the camp kitchen. When there was no more space in their cramped barrack room, Heideko encouraged him to make things for other families. He asked permission to teach the children judo, but this was denied; the camp commander was afraid he might give his pupils subversive ideas and put his soldiers’ security at risk. Takao continued practicing in secret with his own children. He lived in anticipation of their release: he counted the days, weeks, and months, crossing them off on the calendar. He thought constantly of his ill-fated dream of setting up a plant nursery with Isaac, of the money he had saved and lost, of the house he had been paying for over many years, which had now been repossessed. Decades of effort, hard work, and fulfilling his obligations, only to find himself imprisoned behind a barbed-wire fence like a criminal, he would say bitterly. He was not sociable. The crush of people, the inevitable lines, the noise, the lack of privacy all irritated him.
Heideko on the other hand blossomed at Topaz. Compared to other Japanese women, she was a disobedient wife who confronted her husband arms akimbo, and yet she had lived her life devoted to her family and to the laborious toil of agriculture, without the slightest suspicion that the spirit of activism lay dormant within her. In the concentration camp she had no time for despair or boredom; she spent her days resolving other people’s problems and struggling with the authorities to obtain the apparently impossible. Her children were captive and secure behind the fence; she had no need to watch over them since eight thousand pairs of eyes and a detachment of the armed forces were doing that for her. Her chief worry was making sure that Takao didn’t collapse completely; she was running out of ideas for what he could do to keep busy and not have time to think. Her husband had grown old: the ten years’ age difference between them was very noticeable now. The forced proximity of life in the barracks had put a stop to the passion that had previously rubbed the rough edges off living together: for him, affection had turned into exasperation, and for her, into impatience. Out of a sense of shame toward the children, who shared the same room, they tried to avoid contact in the narrow bed, which meant that the easy relationship they’d once enjoyed gradually withered. Takao took refuge in rancor, whereas Heideko discovered her vocation for service and leadership.
Megumi had received three marriage proposals in less than two years, and no one understood why she had rejected them, except for Ichimei, who was the intermediary between his sister and Boyd. Megumi wanted two things in life: to become a doctor and to marry Boyd, in that order. She finished secondary school effortlessly at Topaz and graduated with honors, but higher education was beyond her reach. A few universities back east did accept a small number of students of Japanese origin, chosen from among the most brilliant in the concentration camps, and these lucky ones could get financial help from the government, but James’s arrest was a black mark against the Fukudas, and so Megumi did not have that option. Nor could she leave her family; with Charles absent, she felt responsible for her younger brother and her parents. So she worked in the hospital alongside the doctors and nurses who had been recruited from among the prisoners. Her mentor was a white doctor by the name of Frank Delillo. He was in his fifties; stank of sweat, tobacco, and whisky; and was a complete failure in his private life but a competent and selfless doctor. He took Megumi under his wing from the very first day, when she appeared at the hospital in her pleated skirt and starched white blouse to offer her services as an apprentice. They were both recent arrivals at Topaz. Megumi began by emptying bedpans and cleaning up, but showed such willingness and ability that Delillo soon appointed her his assistant.
“Once this war is over, I’m going to study medicine,” she told him.
“That could take longer than you think, Megumi. It’s going to be hard for you to become a doctor: you are not only a woman, but a Japanese one.”
“I’m an American, the same as you,” she retorted.
“Have it your own way. Stick close to me and you’ll learn something at least.”
Megumi took him literally. She clung to Delillo and ended up sewing cuts, setting bones, treating burns, and helping at births—nothing more complicated than that, as the most serious cases were sent to the hospitals in Delta or Salt Lake City. Although her work kept her busy ten hours a day, some nights she managed to get together for a while with Boyd, thanks to the protection of Frank Delillo, who apart from Ichimei was the only one in on their secret. Despite the risks, the lovers enjoyed two years of clandestine meetings, with luck on their side. The desert was so barren there were no hiding places, but the young nisei found ingenious ways to avoid their parents’ supervision and prying eyes. Megumi however could not hope to do so, because Boyd’s helmet and rifle made it impossible for him to burrow like a rabbit among the sparse bushes available. The headquarters and living quarters of the whites, where they might have found a nest, were at some distance from the camp. She would never have gained access had it not been for Delillo’s divine intervention. Not only did he obtain a pass for her to get through the checkpoints, he also conveniently absented himself from his room. There, in the midst of the disorder and dirt in which Delillo lived, with ashtrays full of cigarette butts and empty bottles scattered around, Megumi lost her virginity and Boyd found heaven.
Ichimei’s passion for gardening, inculcated by his father, became even more intense at Topaz. From the outset, many of the evacuees who had earned a living in agriculture before the war set themselves to grow vegetables, undeterred by the desolate landscape and harsh climate. They watered by hand, counting each drop, and in summer protected the plants with paper tents, and with bonfires in the depths of winter. Thanks to their care, they managed to get the grudging desert to produce vegetables and fruit. There was never any lack of food in the canteens—the evacuees could fill their plates and come back for more—but without the determination of the gardeners they would have had only canned food to eat. Nothing healthy grows in a tin, they used to say. Ichimei attended the school classes and spent the rest of the time in the vegetable plots. He was soon known by the nickname “Green Fingers,” because everything he touched germinated and grew. At night, after lining up twice for food, once for his father and a second time for himself, he would carefully bind the storybooks and school texts sent by distant teachers for the little nisei. He was a polite, thoughtful boy, who could spend hours in one spot, staring at the purple mountains against the clear blue sky, lost in his own thoughts and emotions. It was said of him that he had a monk’s vocation, and that in Japan he would have been a novice in a Zen monastery. Although the Oomoto faith discouraged proselytizing, Takao surreptitiously preached his religion to Heideko and his children, but Ichimei was the only one who practiced it with fervor, because it fit in with his character and with the concept of life that he had had since childhood. He followed Oomoto with his father and an issei couple from another hut. There were Buddhist and several Christian services in the camp, but they were the only ones devoted to Oomoto. Heideko accompanied them occasionally, but without any great conviction; Charles and James had never been interested in their father’s beliefs, while Megumi, to Takao’s horror and Heideko’s astonishment, converted to Christianity. She put this down to a premonitory dream she had in which Jesus appeared to her.
“How do you know it was Jesus?” a furious Takao demanded to know.
“Who else goes around wearing a crown of thorns?” she replied. She had to go to religion classes given by the Presbyterian pastor, followed by a short private confirmation ceremony attended only by Ichimei, out of curiosity, and Boyd, profoundly moved by this proof of her love. Naturally the pastor surmised that her conversion owed more to the guard than to Christianity, but he did not object. He gave them his blessing, wondering in which corner of the universe this couple would be able to find shelter.