Again Kimiko’s unsmiling nod. Gaman, her own mother would have called it, that quiet suffering which was, Kimiko had been taught and now knew as intimately as she knew anything about herself, simply the way of life, so woven into its fabric that it was part of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, especially, she thought now, for a woman bound inextricably to the lives of men.

The families had broken into small clusters, each only a few meters from the other. Of the groups that ranged about in the gravel, some were comprised strictly of those of Japanese ancestry, others included a white man or woman or couple standing as part of the circle, the Issei and Nisei and Sansei dressed in coats and ties if men and in clean, sensible traveling clothes if women, the whites more often in overalls or work shirts or simple dresses, so it seemed some odd meeting between Asian businessmen and white farmers, a bitter and perhaps even ironic play on the reality of the scene.

She was not looking at them, though, not at the clusters of men and women, young and old, white and Japanese, but instead at the image of her own son, stark and bright in his button shirt and jeans, the Wilson children—not really children anymore, in all actuality—standing near him, the trio huddling in the same close cabal that they had built and maintained all their lives. In May of 1942 he was not yet twenty years old. There would be a darkness to his nature when he returned from the war, a darkness that I would come to imagine as a black flower blooming over him during those nights in the Vosges forest when the blood of his friends and companions ran in streams down the steep mud of the brush-tangled mountainsides. (Or maybe that was how I had come to imagine myself, the black flower my own, the sucking mud, the biting ants, the bomb craters along the Rach Gia filling with water and with blood.)