The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Author:Julie Otsuka
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Cultural Heritage, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 0307700003
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2011-08-22T22:00:00+00:00

TRAITORS

The rumors began to reach us on the second day of the war.

THERE WAS TALK of a list. Some people being taken away in the middle of the night. A banker who went to work and never came home. A barber who disappeared during his lunch break. A few fishermen who had gone missing. Here and there, a boardinghouse, raided. A business, seized. A newspaper shut down. But this was all happening somewhere else. In distant valleys and faraway towns. In the big city, where all the women wore high heels and lipstick and danced until late in the night. “Nothing to do with us,” we said. We were simple women who lived quietly and kept to ourselves. Our own husbands would be safe.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS we stayed inside with our shades drawn and listened to the news of the war on the radio. We removed our names from our mailboxes. We brought in our shoes from the front porch. We did not send our children to school. At night we bolted our doors and spoke among ourselves in whispers. We closed our windows tight. Our husbands drank more than usual and stumbled early into bed. Our dogs fell asleep at our feet. No men came to our doors.

CAUTIOUSLY, we began to emerge from our homes. It was December and our older daughters had already left to work as maids in distant towns and the days were quiet and still. The darkness fell early. We rose every morning before dawn in the countryside and went out into the vineyards and pruned back the grapevines. We pulled up carrots from the cold, damp earth. We cut celery. We bunched broccoli. We dug deep furrows into the soil to catch the rain when it fell. Hawks drifted down through the rows of trees in the almond orchards and at dusk we could hear the coyotes calling out to one another in the hills. In J-town we gathered every evening in each other’s kitchens and exchanged the latest news. Perhaps there had been a raid in the next county over. A town surrounded after dark. A dozen houses searched. Telephone wires had been cut. Desks overturned. Documents confiscated. A few more men crossed off the list. “Grab your toothbrush,” they were told, and that was it, they were never heard from again.

SOME SAID that the men had been put on trains and sent far away, over the mountains, to the coldest part of the country. Some said they were enemy collaborators and would be deported within days. Some said they had been shot. Many of us dismissed the rumors as rumors but found ourselves spreading them—wildly, recklessly, and seemingly against our own will—nonetheless. Others of us refused to speak of the missing men by day but at night they came to us in our dreams. A few of us dreamed we were the missing men ourselves. One of us—Chizuko, who ran the kitchen at the Kearney Ranch and always liked to be prepared—packed a small suitcase for her husband and left it beside their front door.

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