When the Emperor Was Divine Read online

  The bird fluffed his wings and danced from side to side on his perch. “Baaaak,” he said.

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” said the girl.

  “Take off your hat,” said the bird.

  The girl sat down and the woman gave her a glass of cold barley water and a long silver spoon. The girl licked the spoon and stared at her reflection. Her head was upside down. She dipped the spoon into the sugar bowl.

  “Is there anything wrong with my face?” she asked.

  “Why?” said the woman.

  “People were staring.”

  “Come over here,” said the woman.

  The girl stood up and walked over to her mother.

  “Let me look at you.”

  “You took down the mirrors,” the girl said.

  “I had to. I had to put them away.”

  “Tell me how I look.”

  The woman ran her hands across the girl’s face. “You look fine,” she said. “You have a fine nose.”

  “What else?” asked the girl.

  “You have a fine set of teeth.”

  “Teeth don’t count.”

  “Teeth are essential.”

  The woman began to rub the girl’s shoulders. She told the girl to lean back and close her eyes and then she pressed her fingers deep into the girl’s neck until she felt her begin to relax. “If there was something wrong with my face,” the girl asked, “would you tell me?”

  “Turn around,” the woman said.

  The girl turned around.

  “Now look at me.”

  The girl looked at her.

  “You have the most beautiful face I have ever seen.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  The boy turned on the radio. The weatherman was giving the forecast for the next day. He was predicting rain and cooler temperatures. “Sit down and drink your water,” the boy said to his sister. “Don’t forget to take your umbrella tomorrow,” said the weatherman.

  The girl sat down. She drank her barley water and began to tell the woman all about coniferous trees. Most of them were evergreens but some were just shrubs. Not all of them had cones. Some of them, like the yew, only had seedpods.

  “That’s good to know,” said the woman. Then she stood up and told the girl it was time to practice the piano for Thursday’s lesson.

  “Do I have to?”

  The woman thought for a moment. “No,” she said, “only if you want to.”

  “Tell me I have to.”

  “I can’t.”

  The girl went out to the living room and sat down on the piano bench. “The metronome’s gone,” she called out.

  “Just count to yourself then,” said the woman.

  “... THREE, FIVE, SEVEN...” The girl put down her knife and paused. They were eating supper at the table. Outside it was dusk. The sky was dark purple and a breeze was blowing in off the bay. Hundreds of jays were twittering madly in the Greers’ magnolia tree next door. A drop of rain fell on the ledge above the kitchen sink and the woman stood up and closed the window.

  “Eleven, thirteen,” said the girl. She was practicing her prime numbers for Monday’s test.

  “Sixteen?” said the boy.

  “No,” said the girl. “Sixteen’s got a square root.”

  “I forgot,” said the boy. He picked up a drumstick and began to eat.

  “You never knew,” said the girl.

  “Forty-one,” said the boy. “Eighty-six.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Twelve,” he added.

  The girl looked at him. Then she turned to her mother. “There’s something wrong with this chicken,” she said. “It’s too tough.” She put down her fork. “I can’t swallow another bite.”

  “Don’t, then,” said the woman.

  “I’ll eat it,” said the boy. He plucked a wing from his sister’s plate and put it into his mouth. He ate the whole thing. Then he spit out the bones and asked his mother where they were going the next day.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said.

  The girl stood up and left the table. She sat down at the piano and began to play a piece by Debussy from memory. “Golliwogg’s Cake Walk.” The melody was slow and simple. She had played it at a recital the summer before. Her father had sat in the front row of the audience and when she was finished he had clapped and clapped. She played the piece all the way through without missing a note. When she began to play it a second time the boy got up and went to his room and began to pack.

  The first thing he put inside of his suitcase was his baseball glove. He slipped it into the large pocket with the red satin lining. The pocket bulged. He threw in his clothes and tried to close the lid but the suitcase was very full. He sat on top of it and the lid sank down slowly. Suddenly he stood up again. The lid sprang open. There was something he had forgotten. He went to the closet in the hall and brought back his polka-dotted umbrella. He held it out at arm’s length and shook his head sadly. The umbrella was too long. There was no way it would fit inside the suitcase.

  THE WOMAN STOOD ALONE in the kitchen, washing her hands. The children had gone to bed and the house was quiet. The pipes were still hot from the day and the water from the faucet was warm. She could hear thunder in the distance—thunder and, from somewhere far off in the night, the faint wail of a siren. She looked out the window above the sink. The sky was still clear and she could see a full moon through the branches of the maple tree. The maple was a sapling with delicate leaves that turned bright red in the fall. Her husband had planted it for her four summers ago. She turned off the tap and looked around for the dish towel but it was not there. She had already packed the towels. They were in the suitcase by the door in the hall.

  She dried her hands on the front of her dress and went to the birdcage. She lifted off the green cloth and undid the wire clasp on the door. “Come on out,” she said. The bird stepped cautiously onto her hand and looked at her. “It’s only me,” she said. The bird blinked. His eyes were black and bulbous. They had no center.

  “Get over here,” he said, “get over here now.” He sounded just like her husband. If she closed her eyes she could easily imagine that her husband was right there in the room with her.

  The woman did not close her eyes. She knew exactly where her husband was. He was sleeping on a cot—a cot or maybe a bunk bed—somewhere in a tent at Fort Sam Houston where the weather was always fine. She pictured him lying there with one arm flung across his eyes and then she kissed the top of the bird’s head.

  “I am right here,” she said. “I am right here, right now.”

  She gave the bird a sunflower seed and he cracked the shell open in his beak. “Get over here,” he said again.

  She opened the window and set the bird out on the ledge.

  “You’re all right,” the bird said.

  She stroked the underside of his chin and he closed his eyes. “Silly bird,” she whispered. She closed the window and locked it. Now the bird was outside on the other side of the glass. He tapped the pane three times with his claw and said something but she did not know what it was. She could not hear him anymore.

  She rapped back.

  “Go,” she said. The bird flapped his wings and flew up into the maple tree. She grabbed the broom from behind the stove and went outside and shook the branches of the tree. A spray of water fell from the leaves. “Go,” she shouted. “Get on out of here.”

  The bird spread his wings and flew off into the night.

  She went back inside the kitchen and took out a bottle of plum wine from beneath the sink. Without the bird in the cage, the house felt empty. She sat down on the floor and put the bottle to her lips. She swallowed once and looked at the place on the wall where The Gleaners had hung. The white rectangle was glowing in the moonlight. She stood up and traced around its edges with her finger and began to laugh—quietly at first, but soon her shoulders were heaving and she was gasping for breath. She put down the bottle and waited
for the laughter to stop but it would not, it kept on coming until finally the tears were running down her cheeks. She picked up the bottle again and drank. The wine was dark and sweet. She had made it herself last fall. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her mouth. Her lips left a dark stain on the cloth. She put the cork back into the bottle and pushed it in as far as it would go. “La donna è mobile,” she sang to herself as she went down the stairs to the basement. She hid the bottle behind the old rusted furnace where no one would ever find it.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy crawled into her bed and asked her, over and over again, “What is that funny noise? What is that funny noise?”

  The woman smoothed down his black hair. “Rain,” she whispered.

  The boy understood. He fell asleep at once. The thunder had come and gone and except for the sound of the rain the house was now quiet. The woman lay awake worrying about the leaky roof. Her husband had meant to fix it but he never had. She got up and placed a tin bucket on the floor to catch the water. She felt better after she did that. She climbed back into bed beside the boy and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. He was chewing in his sleep and she wondered if he was hungry. Then she remembered the candy in her purse. The caramels. She had forgotten about the caramels. What would Joe Lundy say? He would tell her she was wearing a nice red dress. He would tell her not to worry about it. She knew that. She closed her eyes. She would give the caramels to the children in the morning. That was what she would do. She whispered a silent prayer to herself and drifted off to sleep as the water dripped steadily into the bucket. The boy shrugged off the blanket and rolled up against the wall where it was cool. In a few hours he and the girl and their mother would wake up and go to the Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way. Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go to wherever it was they had to go.

  TRAIN

  The train moved slowly inland. Somewhere along the western edge of upper Nevada it passed a lone white house with a lawn and two tall cottonwood trees with a hammock between them gently swaying in the breeze. A small dog lay sleeping on its side in the shade of the trees. A man in a straw hat was trimming hedges. The hedges were very round. They were perfect green spheres. Someone—maybe that same man or maybe that same man’s gardener— had planted flowers inside of a red wagon next to the mailbox. In front of a wooden picket fence was a victory garden and a hand-painted sign that said FOR SALE. Behind the house was the dry bed of a lake and beyond the lake there was nothing but the scorched white earth of the desert stretching all the way to the edge of the horizon. On the map the lake was called Intermittent. Intermittent Lake. Because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. It all depended on the rain.

  “I don’t see it,” said the girl. It was September of 1942 and her face was pressed up against the dusty window of the train. She was eleven and her hair was black and straight and tied back in a ponytail with an old pink ribbon. Her dress was pale yellow with wide puffy sleeves and a hem that was beginning to unravel. Pinned to her collar was an identification number and around her throat she wore a faded silk scarf. Her shoes were Mary Janes. They had not been polished since the spring.

  “See what?” asked her brother. He was eight years old and his number was the same as the girl’s.

  The girl did not answer. The lake had been dry for two years but she did not know that. She had never seen the desert before and although she had been a good but not outstanding student who had learned the meanings of many words she had yet to learn the meaning of the word intermittent. She looked down again at the map to make sure the lake was really supposed to be there. It was.

  Without lifting her eyes from the map she stuck out her hand. “Lemon, please,” she said. Her mother leaned over and dropped a lemon into the girl’s palm. The girl stood up and opened the window and tossed the lemon out into the desert. It soared through the air and hit a gnarled trunk of blackened sage as the white house grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The girl had once been the star pitcher of a softball team and she knew how to throw.

  “Don’t lose that arm,” her mother said under her breath.

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” said the girl. She put the map away in the suitcase beneath her seat and sat down. An old woman walked by, swaying slightly from side to side, and the girl smelled something damp and musty that reminded her of rotting leaves. It was the smell of fine, old silk. The girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes but she could not get comfortable. The seats were hard and stiff and she had not slept since they had left California the night before. The girl had always lived in California—first in Berkeley, in a white stucco house on a wide street not far from the sea, and then, for the last four and a half months, in the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack south of San Francisco—but now she was going to Utah to live in the desert. The train was old and slow and had not been used in years. Broken gas lamps hung from the walls and the locomotive was fueled by a coal-burning boiler. Some of the passengers were sick from the uneven rocking of the cars and the crowded compartments smelled of vomit and sweat and, very faintly, of oranges. The soldiers had left a crate full of lemons and oranges on the floor of the car earlier that morning. The girl loved oranges—she had not eaten a fresh orange in months—but she could not think of eating one now. The train lurched forward and she leaned over and put her head between her knees.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” she said.

  Her mother gave her a brown paper bag and the girl opened it up and began to heave. Her brother reached into the pocket of his trousers and gave her a tissue. She crumpled it in her fist as her mother slowly rubbed her back. “Don’t touch me,” said the girl. “I want to be sick by myself.”

  “That’s impossible,” said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away.

  TOWARD NOON the train passed through a town south of Winnemucca. The shadows fell close to the buildings and the sky above was bright and clear. The girl saw a large sign on the side of a water tower that said BUY U.S. WAR BONDS EVERY PAYDAY. She saw advertisements for Old Schenley Whiskey and The American Melody Hour. They were still in Nevada and it was still Sunday. Somewhere in the distance church bells were ringing, and the streets were filled with people in their Sunday clothes walking home from the morning service. Three young girls in white dresses whirled by beneath matching white parasols. A boy in a blue suit pulled a slingshot out of his jacket and took careful aim at three blackbirds up high on a wire. Closer to the edge of town, a man and a woman were riding their bicycles across a bridge and the girl wondered if they were together or if they just happened to be on the bridge at the same time. The woman wore dark sunglasses and short yellow pants that showed her ankles and she did not look like she had been to church. She was laughing, and her hair was loose and red and blowing behind her in the wind. The girl leaned out the window and shouted, “Hey!” but the woman did not hear her, she was too far away, she was coasting down the far side of the bridge and the man was pedaling right behind her.

  The train blew its whistle and the girl felt a hand press down on her shoulder. She pulled her head back into the car and looked up into the face of a soldier. He was a young man with light brown hair that bristled out from under the edge of his cap. Beneath his right eye there was a dark mole and she could not stop staring at it. Then she looked at his eyes and she could not stop staring at them either. The soldier had very nice eyes. They were dark green and looking right at her. “Miss,” he said, “shades down, shades down.” His voice was soft and low and he did not smile but she knew that he would if he could. She did not know how she knew this but she did.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She pulled down the shade and the man and the woman on the bridge were gone. They were together, she decided.

  As the soldier made his way down the aisle calling out, “Shades down, shades down,” in his deep, melodi
c bass, she chimed in with him softly under her breath. And then, in a voice that was not soft at all, she called out, “Sir!” She had not meant to call out “sir” but the word had come out anyway. “Sir!” she said again. She could not help herself. “Sir sir sir!”

  The soldier did not hear her.

  As she leaned back in her seat the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her in Japanese. His face was deeply tanned and his neck was thick with wrinkles from many years in the sun. One of his hands was missing two fingers. The girl shook her head and said she was sorry, she only spoke English.

  “So so so,” said the man. He turned away and pulled down the shade and the car grew a little darker.

  When the soldier reached the end of the car he touched the gun on his hip, lightly, with his right hand, to make sure it was still there, and she thought of how he had touched her shoulder the same way—lightly, and with that same hand—and she hoped he would come back again. Then the last shade went down and the darkness was complete and she could not see the soldier at all. Now she could not see anyone at all and no one outside the train could see her. There were the people inside the train and the people outside the train and in between them there were the shades. A man walking alongside the tracks would just see a train with black windows passing by in the middle of the day. He would think, There goes the train, and then he would not think about the train again. He would think about other things. What was for supper, maybe, or who was winning the war. She knew it was better this way. The last time they had passed through a city with the shades up someone had thrown a rock through one of the windows.

  The train slowed and crossed a wooden trestle over the dry bed of a river and then there were no more towns by the tracks, there was only the highway, and it was all right to raise up the shades. The girl pulled on the string at the bottom of the shade and the car flooded with sun.

  “Do you think we’ll see horses?” her brother asked her.

  “I don’t know,” said the girl. Then she remembered the mustangs she had read about in National Geographic. The Spaniards had brought them over hundreds of years ago and now there were thousands of horses just roaming around, wild. Every autumn they came down from the hills to graze on the high desert plains. If a cowboy needed a new horse all he had to do was go out into the desert and get himself one. It was as simple as that. She imagined a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him in a cloud of hot swirling dust.