Carolina and Botan stand up and hold hands. I stand beside them. In Japan, holding hands is considered babyish for eight-year-olds like me. I’m tense all the time, trying to figure out how things work here. The three of us just look at Hitomi. It’s chilly outside, and our jackets are thin. The boy’s jacket looks thin, too. Old and shabby.
“Play. All of you. Together.” Hitomi bows again.
She’s trying to be kind, talking to us slowly and using few words. That’s how she talks to the ambassador’s wife. The ambassador’s wife hates Japan and refuses to speak a word of Japanese. We’re not like her. I don’t know how to tell Hitomi to talk normal without my seeming impolite, though—and in Japan nothing is worse than a child being impolite to an adult.
We all know what to do: bow. Hitomi goes back inside.
The boy is barely taller than Carolina, but he seems older. I smile at him. Naoki. I say a sentence I think I know how to say perfectly: “Do you go to school?”
“It’s Sunday,” says Naoki solemnly.
I almost laugh. He can’t be that old, after all. “Want to play with us?” A second perfect sentence.
He looks at the scattered wooden pieces. “You can’t play Daruma Otoshi on this ground. It’s too—” He points to the pebbles, and I nod.
Botan picks up the pieces and puts them back into the bag.
“My mother is smart,” says Naoki to me. “But she said something odd. So you must explain.”
Hitomi is his mother? She’s at the embassy every day all week. So who looks out for Naoki?
Naoki tilts his head. “Did your sister really have a birthday?”
“Yesterday,” says Carolina. “Seven December.”
“It’s stupid to have a birthday in December. And it’s stupid to have a party.”
Carolina’s eyes go big and liquid. I move to stand beside her.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“Six,” says Carolina.
“That’s not special,” says Naoki. “When you turn seven, it will be special. In the middle of November you’ll visit the shrines and get to tie your kimono with a waist sash instead of a cord.”
Really? I love kimonos—those beautiful robes. If Carolina gets one, I want one, too.
Carolina rubs her nose with the back of her hand, but her eyes stay on Naoki.
“You should know that,” he says. “Any first grader knows that.”
Carolina is not in first grade. She would have been among the youngest in her class here, and not knowing the language would have made her too vulnerable. So Papà is keeping her home till the start of the new school year, in April. I move closer still. My arm presses against hers.
“What games do you know?” says Naoki.
“My favorite is ‘old home,’ ” says Carolina.
“How do you play?”
“We sleep in that tree.” Carolina points.
“You can’t sleep in a tree.”
“We lie back like this.” Carolina throws her arms out to both sides. Lella dangles from her left hand. “We sleep high up, like in Italy. Not like here, on the floor.”
“You’ll fall. Foreigners are stupid.”
“It’s just pretend,” says Botan.
Naoki looks at me. “Can you climb high?”
I shake my head. I’m not about to say anything more in front of this boy unless I am absolutely sure I can say it perfectly.
Naoki twists his mouth. “Is that the only game you know?”
“What do you want to play?” asks Botan.
“I can fold paper in the air without using tools.” Naoki glances at me. “Go get your best colored folding paper.”
He’s talking about origami. Everyone at school is an expert at folding paper.
“We don’t have colored paper,” says Carolina.
Naoki looks astonished. But his face lights up. “Then we’ll play navy. Pretend you’re on a ship. Japan has the best navy in the world. I’ll serve on a ship someday.”
“We came here on a ship,” says Carolina. “But our grandmother stayed behind. She’s old. Nonna writes to us. And we write back. Well, I draw pictures. But that’s just as good. The letters take weeks and weeks to get back and forth, though. We got a letter just a few days ago. When we send ours tomorrow, we won’t get an answer from her for over a month.” Carolina pauses. “I miss her.”
“Sometimes I miss my grandmother.” Naoki looks away. “I missed her a lot last night.”
“Where—” Carolina begins.
That’s enough. “Basta,” I say to Carolina in Italian. “Don’t ask anything else.”
Naoki glances at me. His face is pinched. “So…what was the ship like?”
“Big,” says Carolina. “Loud.”
Remembering that ship makes me feel seasick.
Naoki smiles. “I know more about ships than you do. My uncle’s in the navy. So I’m in charge in this game. I’m the navy! You’re the enemy!”
“No,” I yelp. “We’re friends.”
“Enemies are more fun.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to be the enemy.” At school the girls stand and watch the boys over the wall. The boys run at each other with sticks, shouting, “Kill the Chinese.”
Carolina looks at Botan. A silent message must pass between them, because Botan says, “We’ll play with you.”
“But first I have to put Lella away. She doesn’t like playing navy.” Carolina runs inside.
When she’s back, Naoki says, “Good. Go hide behind that bush.”
The girls run off. I’m too cold to play anyway. I go inside and wander through the halls. The kitchen radio is on, blasting the news in Japanese. Above the radio noise, I hear Papà speaking Japanese in his halting way. I peek. Papà is short and thin, like me, but when he talks, he seems big and strong, and everyone listens. He’s telling the kitchen servants to chop vegetables finer. None of his sentences are right, but they understand, because his hands fly through the air, showing exactly how to do everything. I’m guessing dinner will start with minestrone.
I retreat into the hall. On a mat in a side room lie two stacks of colorful square cloths with fancy designs. I pick one up. A furoshiki, one of the first Japanese words I ever learned. Hatsu taught Carolina and me how to wind the sides of a furoshiki up the handle of a basket and make a fancy knot at the top. She taught me to fold a furoshiki into a perfect holder for chopsticks. The ambassador and his wife always use forks, like in Italy. But when Japanese guests come, chopsticks appear.