Now we’re on another streetcar. This isn’t the one to take us back to the embassy—but the one to see the trees!
Soon we walk the path beside the Meguro River and look down at the high walls along both sides. Fewer people stroll here than at last year’s festival, though it’s just as beautiful. Most of the cherry trees are in bloom. A wind comes in off the water, and petals drop; it rains velvety pink. The river surface is instantly awash in pink. Carolina skips ahead, her hands out to each side, palms upward. Papà and I stand on a bridge, and the pink accumulates in our hair.
Carolina runs back to us. “The shop up there sells seafoam candy.”
Seafoam candy is like the lovely mix of beaten egg whites and sugar that birthday cakes are made of in Italy. It comes in different colors and shapes. Papà nods, so I go up to the shop. There’s a man on a chair behind the candy counter, dozing.
I give a formal greeting in my gentlest voice.
The man stands up and turns. His face opens in surprise. He’s so thin, his cheekbones look like they might pierce his skin. “From your voice, I thought you were a Japanese girl. You sound like you come from Tokyo.”
I beam at him.
Carolina chooses white candies shaped like mice. I choose pink ones shaped like cherry blossoms. Papà surprises me. He picks a candy—just one, but even one sweet is unusual for him—green and shaped like a giant teardrop.
“Come back at night,” says the candy vendor. “See the lanterns lit up. It’s even more beautiful then.”
On the way home, I eat my candies slowly, so they’ll last the whole way. I ask Papà, “Do you think they have any idea how much trouble they make for you?”
Papà smiles. He doesn’t ask who, and I’m glad. I don’t want to say bad things about Pessa in front of Carolina, though I’m pretty sure she isn’t listening. The seafoam candies take all her attention. She’s licking them, the best way to make them last. “It’s my job, Simona. I love my job. I make people happy with food. But…” Papà’s voice lowers on that last word. “I’ll save some dried salted roe for us.” His tone is conspiratorial. “We can put it between thin slices of raw white radish—and garlic bulb stems. That’s how the Japanese eat it.”
As we get closer to the embassy, we see a boy swing a bamboo pole with a string on it toward a tree. The tip of the string hits a bird. The bird falls, struggling against the string. Something sticky must hold the bird fast.
The boy rips the string away and stuffs the squawking bird into a bulging cloth bag. He has other birds in there.
Carolina runs up to him. “Set them free!”
The boy looks at her as though she’s crazy. “Everybody needs soup.”
Carolina’s mouth drops open.
My face burns. He’s as thin as the man who sold us the seafoam candy.
I have two seafoam candies left. I hand them to the boy.
He stares, as though he doesn’t know what they are. What good is candy? I might as well have put two stones on his palm. But I have nothing else to give.
Carolina looks at me. She has one candy left; she’s been so good about making them last. She adds her candy to the boy’s palm. “Lick them,” she says. “Slowly.”
We walk on.
Papà pats Carolina on the head. “I’ll tell Nonna about you two in the next letter. She’ll be proud.”
We step inside the embassy to find an envelope from Nonna, almost as though Papà’s words made it appear. It’s my turn to open it. The tissue paper inside is rolled. We go to the table and unroll carefully. Seeds appear. Zucchini, melon, spinach, parsley, beets, carrots. Seeds and seeds.
Carolina and I immediately set about preparing a kitchen garden. Over in one corner of the embassy grounds there are two piles, one of dirt, one of rocks. The ambassador bought them to build a rock garden for his wife. But Pessa doesn’t want one. Carolina and I lug the rocks to the side yard and arrange them in a square. This garden will be even larger than Nonna’s.
In the gardener’s storage space we find buckets and hedge clippers. No shovel. But, oh! There’s the perfect tool. “A zappa,” I say happily, calling the hoe by its Italian name. Nonna always says that’s all a gardener really needs.
“A kuwa,” says Carolina, the Japanese name.
I didn’t know that word. Sometimes I wonder if Carolina speaks Japanese better than Italian these days. In Nonna’s last letter she begged us to speak Italian to each other, to remember who we are, and to come back soon. It’s been nearly two years here, and she guesses how much we’ve changed.
We fill the center of our square from the pile of dirt. It mounds up beautifully, just like a garden in Italy. Hitomi comes out into the yard and nods approval. She makes me think of my teachers; they say vegetable gardens are the best way to be patriotic.
In this moment, we are the best kind of Japanese girls.
21 APRIL 1942, TOKYO, JAPAN
I stand in the side yard and watch the canary cage in the upstairs window. A shadow passes. Once. Twice. Now the person comes to the cage and stays. Pessa. She feeds the bird from her palm.
“Come on.” Carolina kicks the side of my shoe. “I don’t want to go to school any more than you do. But we have to.”
Since when did she become so grown-up?
She goes out the gate of the embassy ahead of me. We walk slowly. Other children on the street go slowly, too. It’s Tuesday, the twenty-first of April. Three days ago, American planes bombed Tokyo. Their machine guns strafed in wide swaths. They destroyed factories and warehouses.
But that wasn’t the worst.
They came right before noon. Most children had gone home, since Saturday school is a half day. But some stayed to help clean classrooms. A child at Mizumoto Primary School was killed. A child at Waseda Middle School was killed. Those schools used to seem far away from the Minato ward, where our embassy is. Now they seem close.
Adults died, too. But it’s those children that everyone talks about. Children, killed in their schools.
Yesterday our teachers told us not to be afraid. Japan is strong. America is weak. Otherwise America would not have targeted schools. We must come to school without fail, to keep Japan strong. Everyone counts on us. They said it over and over. They made us repeat it after them.
We stomped around the room singing military marches. We sang about the goodness of the emperor and the divine origins of Japan, about admirable Japanese mothers sending their sons off to war so bravely, about Mount Fuji and New Year’s Day customs and village festivals, everything we love, right down to pounding rice cakes. We sang about how Japan outshines all other countries.