Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley Page B

you think it is right that you should go free after having turned against your country so?”
    â€œI haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “I’ve turned against no one. Circumstances caused me to do what I did. Any other course would have cost me my life.”
    I had said, already, more than I wanted to, more than I’d told myself I would when I arrived. Most of my acquaintances were dead. Who would care what happened to me?
    The colonel looked back and forth, his face all haughty from my listlessness, my lack of remorse.
    â€œWhat would your family think, Mr. Maki, if they knew what you’ve done?”
    From what I could gather my father had lost his land and my uncle his grocery store a few months before they’d enlisted. My mother and brothers and younger cousins waited for them in a makeshift prison, somewhere in the desert, east of where the farm had been.
    â€œThey are all scattered,” I said. “Victims of the war.”
    The colonel seemed to tire of me but cleared his throat and asked, “Are you a communist, Mr. Maki? Have you ever been?”
    â€œI am not a communist. I don’t care,” I said.

    The colonel stood and stretched his legs but let me stay standing before him. Finally he asked, “Do you swear that everything you have said is true?”
    â€œDo you mean today?” I asked him.
    He was irritated by my insolence but there were many others waiting so he let me go, keeping with him my American citizenship, invisible though it was. When I turned toward the small and silent audience the first face I saw was Milo’s, and he was smiling.
    â€œYou did well, Daddy,” he said, as we were leaving by the back door. He held by its broken strings a toy guitar I’d given him and trailed it slowly along the lockers that lined the hall.
    Â 
    JIMMY AND KAZUKO WERE MARRIED AND I WAS BEST MAN. Jimmy and I had never talked about my feelings for the woman he would wed but he knew, and I kept thinking I saw a soft smile of satisfaction crossing his lips. They were married at the end of November, 1941, when the mood in the city was one of caution. Crowds stood in front of public bill boards where the daily newspapers were pinned up, and though my reading was slow, I could read the characters for America in the headlines, and knew there were embargoes. I saw the steaming face of Admiral Yamamoto, and read the word war .
    Jimmy and Kazuko stood in the same Buddhist temple where I’d received my wound. There were others waiting; it was a day of weddings. As soon as the ceremony was done we left by the side door and walked through the garden just as we had on the day of the cat. All of Kazuko’s family was there; her tea ceremony teacher was the only other outside guest. The weather was cold and the sky was high and clear. People smiled at us, mothers pointing out the formal kimono, one child crying when she saw the powder-white face of the bride.
    On the day of Pearl Harbor, on that Sunday when the sailors and civilians of Hawaii were turning their heads skyward, it was Monday in Tokyo and I was on my way to the public bath. Since
the wedding the week before, I’d been living alone, though the building which housed me held hundreds of students, boys from the countryside, up to Tokyo for an education. Jimmy and Kazuko had taken the back room of her mother’s house. It was a small room, but big enough for them to unfold their futon and lie together, big enough for them to fold into each other in my imagination and make me miserable.
    The public bath was three city blocks away by Los Angeles standards, though the road that got me there was small and snakelike, winding near the rice merchant’s, past a few neighborhood restaurants and bars. I was taking the walk calmly, keeping the married Kazuko out of my mind, when I noticed that the streets were more active than usual, that even some of the students from where I lived were