Read Online When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka - Free Book Online Page B

the afternoon, during current events, they listened to Mrs. Delaney read out loud to them from the newspaper.
The First Lady is visiting the Queen in London.
The Russians are still holding in Stalingrad. The Japs are
massing on Guadalcanal.
    â€œWhat about Burma?” the boy asked.
    The situation in Burma, she told the class, was bleak.
    LATE AT NIGHT he heard the sound of the door opening, and footsteps crossing the floor, and then his sister was suddenly there by the window, flipping her dress up high over her head.
    â€œYou asleep?”
    â€œJust resting.” He could smell her hair, and the dust, and salt, and he knew she’d been out there, in the night, where it was dark.
    She said, “Miss me?” She said, “Turn down the radio.” She said, “I won a nickel at bingo tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go to the canteen and buy you a Coca-Cola.”
    He said, “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”
    She dropped down onto the cot next to his. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did tonight.”
    â€œI wrote Papa a postcard.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œLicked a stamp.”
    â€œDo you know what bothers me most? I can’t remember his face sometimes.”
    â€œIt was sort of round,” said the boy. Then he asked her if she wanted to listen to some music and she said yes—she always said yes—and he turned on the radio to the big band channel. They heard a trumpet and some drums and then Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Martha Tilton singing, “So many memories, sometimes I think I’ll cry. . . .”
    IN THE DREAM there was always a beautiful wooden door. The beautiful wooden door was very small—the size of a pillow, say, or an encyclopedia. Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see.
    For the Emperor was holy and divine. A god.
    You could not look him in the eye.
    In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God.
    Only something always went wrong. The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it. Or maybe a bell was ringing somewhere—somewhere in Nevada or Peleliu or maybe it was just some crazy gong bonging in Saipan—and the nights were growing colder, the sound of the scrabbling claws was fainter now, fainter than ever before, and it was October, he was miles from home, and his father was not there.
    THEY HAD COME for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. “Grab your toothbrush,” they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up, and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.
    He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.
    Grab your toothbrush.
    Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.
    We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
    Into the car, Papa-san.
    Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth’s, he was sure of it.
    Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.
    THE NEXT MORNING his sister had wandered through the house looking for the last place