Land of Dreams: A Novel (27 page)

The sign for Manzanar might easily have been missed, if it weren’t in the middle of such nothingness. A dirt track rutted out by the wide wheels of army tanks veered off to the right. I got out of the car, put on my sunhat and started walking toward this place, as it gradually emerged from the haze like a mirage. As I got closer I saw long wooden huts, lined up in neat rows that seemed to go on forever. It was inconceivable somehow that such a place could exist in a civilized world; strange to think that beyond the fence were thousands of people living, sleeping and eating in wooden huts—in the middle of a desert. John and I had lived in a remote spot in Ireland, miles from the nearest town; but there was shelter, and trees, and water, and land to graze animals and grow things. That people would be made to live in such a bleak, barren place was beyond me.

As I was walking toward the place, it seemed to move farther away, and I realized that I ought to have followed the tire tracks and driven in. However, as I walked, my instincts were urging me to keep moving forward—I did not want to turn my back on the place. I had a strange feeling of foreboding, as if I was being watched. I did not see the barbed-wire fence until it stopped me in my tracks and I was nearly on top of it. Rising above it, on either side of me, were two security lookout towers. Inside one was a solider with his gun trained on me.

I had reached Independence, the last town before Manzanar, around midday and had stopped for gas and a large breakfast of bacon, eggs, coffee and toasted muffins. I had been surprised by how hungry I was, although it was now almost lunchtime and I had been driving, more or less solidly, for four hours in the increasingly searing heat. The diner had a phone booth and so I had tried to telephone Stan, but was unable to get hold of him. Now that I was here I realized how ridiculous it had been to expect him to contact anyone about getting me into Manzanar at such short notice.

“Do you have a phone book?” I had asked the woman at the counter.

“Who you looking for?” she said. “Only five folk or so got a phone around here, and I got everyone’s number in my head.”

Small towns are the same the world over
, I thought. Always some nosy woman wanting to stick her nose into your business, although by the look of this dusty little outpost, I’d say there was precious little entertainment other than strangers breezing into town.

To hell with it
, I thought.

“I am heading for Manzanar,” I said, “and I wanted to call ahead to let them know I am coming.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed in an instant. Shock and suspicion: I had made her day.

“You work there?” she asked, bold as brass. “You don’t
look
like you work there.”

“I am visiting a friend,” I said, “who is staying there.”

Her eyes flashed wide again.

“Ain’t no friend of yours or mine up there, girl,” an old man further along the bar called out. “Full of wicked Japs—
spies
all of them. The kids too; I seen them pass by in trucks. Slanty-eyed gremlins sure put a curse on this town. You wanna be careful going up there . . .”

“Shut it, Bill,” the woman snapped.

She wrote a number on a piece of paper and, before handing it to me, said by way of explanation, “My cousin Marlene works out in the canteen. She says the Japs are all right in the main—they keep themselves quiet.” Then, as I took it, she held on to it and tugged slightly, adding, “Although
I
say quiet’s not always a good thing—quiet can mean crafty.”

I snatched the scrap of paper from her hand and smiled a sarcastic smile, gratefully noting that I had enough coins in my hand not to have to ask her for change.

Her eyes followed me across the room and I knew she was listening to every word I said. I got through to the Manzanar exchange and, when I told the young woman that I wanted to speak to the person in charge, she put me through to a man who was very taken aback when I explained that I wanted access to visit a friend.

“Are you of Japanese origin?” he asked straight out.

“No,” I said, trying to hold on to my patience, “actually I’m Irish.”

“Are you a Japanese sympathizer?”

Oh God! What was
that
supposed to mean?

I decided just to bite my tongue and appeal to his sense of decency.

“I am just worried about my friend and want to see that she is all right.”

“I can assure you, ma’am, that the conditions at Manzanar are perfectly—”

“Nonetheless,” I asserted, “I would prefer to see for myself.” Then I spelled out Suri’s full name and told him that I would be there in less than an hour to see her.

“I am afraid that won’t be possible, Miss . . .”

“Hogan.”

“Miss Hogan—you see, this is a military facility and there is a protocol that we must follow. If you would like to write to—”

“Nonetheless . . . ,” I said again. My heart was thumping. I knew this was completely outside the normal run of things and I was playing with fire, but I was going to Manzanar anyway. I was going to see Suri, and that was that. “. . . I shall be there in less than one hour, which should be time enough for you to tell my friend to expect me. Thank you.” And I hung up the phone, paid my bill, thanked the woman for her help, got in the truck and drove off.

Now I was here, standing on the wrong side of a barbed-wire fence, with a young man pointing his gun in my direction. I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. I was angry. At pointless wars; at stupidity; at the suffering of innocent people.

So I shouted up at the security tower, “You can put that thing down, for a start!”

He shouted something back. I couldn’t hear what it was, so I moved forward, but as I did so he hoisted the rifle and pointed it directly at my head. Instinctively I raised my hands as I had seen people do in the movies. I suddenly felt very frightened. The boy holding it was probably no more than a child; the gun could go off by accident and I was out here in the middle of nowhere, on my own. Anything could happen.

I stood still like that for a moment, with my hands raised, until I saw two uniformed guards walk toward me. They signaled for me to follow them to a door in the fence, then as I reached it they asked, “Are you Eileen Hogan?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t remember giving the man on the phone my full name. “I am here to see Suri Cohen? My friend. I called earlier and—”

“Come with us, please, ma’am,” he cut me off.

At last,
I thought,
they are taking me to see Suri.

“Are you taking me to see my friend?”

“Just come with us, ma’am,” the taller one repeated. The two of them were flanking me tightly on either side. Both guards were carrying guns, which hung loosely at their sides, although I could see that they had tight hold of them, nonetheless.

We walked past dozens of identical, basic, long wooden huts until we came to one with two American flags hanging ostentatiously from its small doorway.

“Please step inside, ma’am.”

I didn’t like the bossy, slightly officious tone in this man’s voice.

“Would you please tell me when I am going to see my friend?”

“Please step inside the building, ma’am.”

“There is no need to be so rude,” I asserted, “if you would just tell me . . .”

The other, younger guard tapped the small of my back with the butt of his rifle. Could he really have done that? Taken such an outrageous liberty with my person?

I was about to lambast him when I heard Suri’s voice from inside the hut.

“Ellie?”

At last—mission accomplished. The sound of her voice gave me such a sense of relief; this was certainly a frightening and daunting place, but now that I had come here and seen for myself, at least I could offer my friend some comfort in knowing that there was someone here to help fight her cause.

I ran up the steps and into the hut. Suri was standing at the center of it, red-faced with tears. She had obviously been through some terrible ordeal. There were two female guards in there—severe, stone-faced women, one in each corner of the room. The male guards followed me in and flanked the open door behind me. That was four people “guarding” two innocent women. Ridiculous!

“Could we have some privacy, please?” I told them more than asked. Somebody around here had to stand up to these bullying bureaucrats!

Not one of them either moved or made a reply. I would have made my point more strongly except that Suri looked fit to collapse with emotion.

“Suri, what have they done to you?” I asked, reaching my arms out to comfort her.

All four guards moved in to stop me, but I would have carried on toward my friend if Suri had not screamed at me, “They haven’t done anything, you stupid bitch—it’s
you
!”

Her face was contorted with rage.

“Have you any idea what it took for me to get into the same camp, the same quarters, as my in-laws? Have you any idea how much time and begging and groveling I had to do, to persuade the authorities to let me come here and look after an old couple who are not considered my blood? Almost a year, including the time it took to persuade Jackson that it was the right time to let me come—almost one year of them in here on their own, and now they have separated us again, and all because of you.
You
come in and screw it all up for me. In one day? What the
hell
were you thinking, Ellie—you stupid,
stupid
woman. I can’t even say your name. Get her out of here . . .”

The older guard said, “We just need to ask you both a few questions about your association.”

This time it was Suri who flew at him.

“Can’t you see what’s going on here? There are no questions to answer. This woman has
nothing
to do with me. I know her vaguely through my husband’s work and, as far as I am aware, she is not a spy, but she is certainly no friend or ‘associate’ of mine. She is just some stupid do-gooder, with nothing better to do than come out here and make trouble—certainly
not
at my invitation, nor at the invitation of any member of my family. Now please, please, can we just forget this ever happened and let me go back to my family?”

“I’m afraid we still have to question you separately.”

“Please,” she said, “really this has nothing to do with me . . .”

Suri was taken from the room by the two female guards, sobbing with genuine distress and screaming profanities at me on the way out.

I was so shocked that I barely knew what to say to the two guards as they sat me on a chair in the center of the room in front of the simple wooden desk and began to question me about Suri. I just answered them accurately. There was nothing to hide. She was adopted, of Japanese descent; widowed, and the old couple were her in-laws. Her husband was an American-Jewish musician, whom I knew vaguely through another friend—and they took down Stan’s name. Suri was not, as far as I was aware, connected to any Japanese organization, nor had she ever traveled to Japan in her adult life, not that I was aware; although, I asserted, I did not know her that well. I had no Japanese blood in me whatsoever and had neither proper reason nor motivation for being here, aside from an overwhelming desire to “help” Suri, who neither needed nor wanted my help.

By the end of their half-hour interrogation it was clear to them—and to me—that I was exactly what Suri had said I was: a stupid, interfering woman who could not mind her own business.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX

I cried a lot on the way home, stopping the truck and howling into the darkening day. I was glad of the wilderness and for the fact that I was, for these few hours at least, utterly alone. I could barely face myself, let alone another human being. I felt so stupid; so utterly humiliated by my own foolishness. I had destroyed Suri’s well-laid plan—and the welfare of those two old people—by being rash and willful and inconceivably stupid, not to mention arrogant and ignorant. What had I been thinking?

I briefly tried to pass the blame by wondering
why
nobody had stopped me, but then—everyone had tried. Stan had told me not to go, and so had Bridie. Both had failed because of who I was: a pigheaded do-gooder who refused to mind her own business and determinedly bulldozed every bit of common sense that tried to stand in my way.

The rising sense of my own stupid failure kept overwhelming me. I would drive a few miles, then have to stop the truck and weep away the frustration at what I had done.

On one such stop I got out of the truck to get some water from the back. As I stood drinking from the warm glass bottle, the sun—already low in the sky—disappeared from my view behind a large rock in the middle distance. The perfect pink globe appeared to be eerily nearby, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch it. It was impossible to guess at distances here; a tree that appeared to be only a few yards away might be a mile’s walk. Context was everything—a vast mysterious trick of light and dust. Los Angeles had been built on land like this. People had come to make movies here, building fake cities because they were cheaper than real cities and because the light was good. Then the fake city became a real city; they put up tall buildings, defied the relentless sun with their irrigation engineering and built dams as high as mountains. They transplanted fancy trees and fancy people out here, and made things that didn’t belong in the desert, like lawns and movies and money. These invaders filled the barren desert with life, defying nature, defying God. The dry, red domain in front of me was the land they could not tame. Mighty rocks driven up from the Earth’s core seemed to have been stopped in their tracks by the heat of this unmerciful sun. This was an empty landscape of dry scrub, the scenery shifting with the wind, creating an ever-changing hilly landscape and bringing dead sand to peculiar life. Miraculous trees and strange, deadly cacti peppered the terrain—greenery out of dust, at God’s mighty whim.

Standing by my truck, waiting for the sun to reappear from behind its rock, I realized that, for all my problems and whether I liked it or not, I was in the presence of God. Not the religious rule maker I had obeyed as a child, or the betraying joker who had taken the men I loved, twice abandoning me to fate before I realized I had to take charge of my own life; but God the Creator—for the landscape here was beyond human imagining. On Fire Island I had loved the sea, its hushed musings whispering on the shoreline, the soft white sand between my toes comforting me—the silence made me feel at one with myself. The solitude that I felt here in this landscape held no comfort or peace. The silence out here was suffocating and seemed to have the numb throb of death about it. The sun pulled around the side of the rock, rolling low and slow across the horizon, until it disappeared completely and all but plunged me suddenly into darkness. I felt cold and alone. I suddenly had only an urgent need to be back home with Bridie and my boys.