When the Emperor Was Divine: List 4

Tonight they would be sleeping in hostels and churches and on cots at the YMCA.

Empty boxes were scattered across the floor, and on top of the windowsill, lined up in a neat row, stood the remnants of some long-ago game of Monopoly: a pair of white dice, a tiny red hotel, the smallest green wooden house in the world.

Water had seeped through a crack in the ceiling and on the walls there were brown stains and words scrawled in red ink that made us turn away.

Without thinking, we had configured ourselves exactly as we had in that long narrow room during the war: our mother in the far corner, away from the windows, the two of us lying head to toe along the wall on the opposite side of the room.

One man's house had been doused with gasoline and set on fire while his family lay sleeping inside.

There had been shootings in the valley, and gravestone defacings, and unannounced visitors knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

We were hungry. We were ravenous. We ate quickly, greedily, as though we were still in the mess hall barracks, where whoever finished first got seconds and slow eaters were left behind to make do with only one serving.

Somebody was whistling to the tune, “Let me straddle my old saddle beneath the western sky....”

She pruned back the hedges.

She tore out the rotting trellis from the middle of the garden, which had seeded itself and gone wild.

We used to go swimming in the irrigation ditch.

...every evening at dusk, in the distance the clang of the trolley cars, small voices crying out, No, I won't, the sound of screen doors slamming, the quick patter of footsteps running across driveways, mothers with wet hands—Mrs. Myer, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Thomas Hale Cavanaugh—stomping out onto front porches and shouting, Just wait 'til your father gets home!

Don't throw away that rubber band. That tin can. That drop of fat. That sliver of soap.

At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined.

She strung up clotheslines across the backyard and whenever we looked out the window we could see the private undergarments of people we did not know—the lonely shipping heir, the jovial bachelor doctor, the glamorous war widow whose young husband had died on Omaha Beach (“Introduce her to them!” we’d suggested to our mother as she hung up their things side by side, to which she had replied, “It’s too soon”)—floating ghostlike between the bare black branches of the trees.

She strung up clotheslines across the backyard and whenever we looked out the window we could see the private undergarments of people we did not know—the lonely shipping heir, the jovial bachelor doctor, the glamorous war widow whose young husband had died on Omaha Beach (“Introduce her to them!” we’d suggested to our mother as she hung up their things side by side, to which she had replied, “It’s too soon”)—floating ghostlike between the bare black branches of the trees.

Little by little, she accumulated things.

He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government?

In the beginning he wandered slowly from one room to the next, picking up objects and looking at them in bewilderment and then putting them back down again. “I don’t recognize a thing,” we heard him whisper.

Little things—the barking of a neighbor’s dog, a misplaced pen, an unanticipated delay of any sort—could send him into a rage.

The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to.

And so he stayed at home, day after day, poring over the newspaper with a magnifying glass and scribbling down words in a little blue notebook.

It is possible he was troubled by something he’d read in the paper earlier that morning—Lend Lease Diapers Used as Turbans by African Sheikhs! or Jap Emperor Repudiates Own Divinity!—and he’d had about as much news as he could take for one day.

It is possible he was troubled by something he’d read in the paper earlier that morning—Lend Lease Diapers Used as Turbans by African Sheikhs! or Jap Emperor Repudiates Own Divinity!—and he’d had about as much news as he could take for one day.

Birdsong grew faster, and shriller, and the chill slowly lifted from the air.

She moved briskly and did not complain.

In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper—Might as well get the day over with—but he slept poorly and woke often from the same recurring dream: It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence.

Purple hyacinths and narcissus came up in the garden, and tall stalks of mint, and every evening, at dusk, we wandered out into the yard and watched the starlings gathering in the trees.

I gave that same enemy your defense maps for free. The Boeing assembly plant is here. The oil refinery, there.

I sent him aerial photographs of your major coastal cities.

I cut arrow-shaped swaths through my tomato fields to guide him to his next target.

A joiner. Member of the Elks. The Kiwanis. The Rotary. The local Chamber of Commerce.

I'm your florist. I'm your grocer. I'm your porter. I'm your waiter.

I’m the one you dream of all night long—we’re marching ten abreast down Main Street.

I’m your nightmare—we’re bivouacking tonight on your newly mowed front lawn.

I’m the saboteur in the shrubs.

Freeze my assets. Seize my crops.

Search my office. Ransack my house.

Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud. Put it down in writing—is nervous in conversation, always laughs loudly at the wrong time, never laughs at all—and I’ll sign on the dotted line. Is treacherous and cunning, is ruthless, is cruel.

Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud. Put it down in writing—is nervous in conversation, always laughs loudly at the wrong time, never laughs at all—and I’ll sign on the dotted line. Is treacherous and cunning, is ruthless, is cruel.