Mikage’s Escape
Mikage met Axel on the beach in Santa Cruz, California. He noticed her watching him, as he strutted, jumped and dove playing volleyball. He approached her with his tan, lean body dusted with sand. He appeared god-like with his blond hair sifting the bright sun as he walked. He shuffled over to her, and softly asked her all the usual questions in a formal, courteous way, his intense blue eyes hardly blinking. His German accent was crisp, and he sometimes scrambled his syntax and pronounced certain words in foreign ways. Since Mikage was proficient in German, she correctly guessed that his dialect was from Southern Germany. He had a nice, self-deprecating manner, and laughed often as he talked. He suggested a meeting on the following Friday evening and she suggested her parents’ restaurant in Capitola. She had been raised to be wary of strangers, so the restaurant would be a safe place.
Mikage’s parents had been interned in 1942 to a “War Relocations Camp” following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Because of their Japanese ancestry, the U.S. Government removed them from their home and restaurant business in San Francisco, even though they were American citizens. Mikage was born in the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in the northwestern corner of Wyoming in 1944. She, along with over 10,000 other Japanese Americans, lived in this internment camp sixty miles east of Yellowstone Park until the center closed in 1945. Her parents returned to the Bay Area, and started their business again.
During their first dinner, Axel told his story methodically: how his father , an SS Officer, had mysteriously disappeared after World War II, how his mother had raised him in a small village in Southern Germany on the Bodensee (“the sea at the bottom”). He was the only child, and one of just a few children in Moos am Bodensee. He was a good student, and graduated from Universitat Konstanz with a degree in Economics. After working two years for a small automotive electronics company near Radolfzell, he applied for and later graduated from the MBA Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After a brief stint with McKinsey & Company as a business analyst, he returned to Germany, and rapidly progressed to be general manager of an optical firm based in Konstanz. He had recently returned to the Bay Area for his first eligible six-week vacation.
At Axel’s invitation, Mikage briefly described her childhood after the internment camp, growing up near the Mission District in San Francisco, and, along with her two younger sisters, helping out in the family business. When she was a teenager, her parents moved out to Capitola, and opened a new restaurant there, a few blocks from the ocean. She was unusually tall, and played basketball through school. She studied languages at San Jose State, and was fluent in English, Japanese, French, German, and Spanish. She taught high school German in Santa Cruz.
She was attracted to Axel, but she knew from the beginning that Axel was a strange character. He showed up at the restaurant with a written agenda that detailed what he wanted to cover. Mikage liked to be organized, but this was a bit too much like a business meeting. At the end of the evening, they shook hands, and she told him that she would like to see him again, but no more agendas. Her parents were highly impressed with Axel, because of his formality and good manners.
For the next three years, Mikage and Axel dated, taking turns flying back and forth between the States and Germany. Axel’s mother flew over for their wedding, and after a three-day honeymoon in Vancouver, Mikage moved with Axel to Germany. They had a small apartment across from a church in the center of Konstanz. One evening fifteen years later, she explained to Victoria what had happened to her marriage. Over a bottle of wine, Mikage spilled her tale for the first time.
“Axel used to call me ‘Sweetie Pie’ and he never stopped using the German pronounciation of “w” so it always sounded like ‘Sveetie Pie.’ He wounded me so much with that way of calling to me. I hated it, especially when we were having our weekly Saturday morning scheduled sex. I remember Axel hovering over me, plowing inside me, detecting which lover he had been with during the week by his movements--the slow, deep thrusts were thanks to Doris, the shallow, fast ones thanks to Renate. I felt like I was so dirty, making love with the bodies of other women mixed up with him.
While I was thinking these thoughts, he would announce his impending explosion: ‘Sveetie Pie, I will be coming soon,’ as if giving a weather report.
One morning, as I lay flat on my back fulfilling what Axel called his ‘marital obligation,’ I could see my sweet parakeet, Gino, circling near the ceiling as he prepared his weekly dive bomb attack on Axel. Gino was jealous of this weekend intruder on our peaceful, quiet life together. Gino swiftly landed on Axel’s back, swooping down in perfect timing before the big event, pecking at Axel, scolding him, fluttering its little wings. ‘Mine God, I will twist his head off!’ Axel yelled.
It was all too much at once. I just started yelling back at him. Gino was shaking. I was shaking. I told him that I hated him for keeping me caged like a bird, for living in this little town where the shops are open just a few hours a day, where the church bells across the street ring so loudly every fifteen minutes, that I dreaded the silence of waiting for the new chimes to ring. I told him that I felt tormented like an animal in a cage, that I felt compelled to ring like the bells to do his laundry, iron his shirts, clean the house, fix his meals, go to dinner just to translate for business guests, give him sex. I felt like a bell that no one listened to, mechanically compelled to perform with perfecrt precision. I was becoming deadened and dull. I feared someday I would not even ring as the bells rang. With his superiority complex and my inferiority complex, we were locked in tight like male and female plumbing fixtures.
A few weeks after this incident, it was May on the Bodensee, and the poplars were blooming and swaying tall over the lake. You could see Switzerland from the German side of the lake, and the bells ringing from there in the distance were clear and pleasing.
The sound moved over the quiet water lightly and softly, and with a resonance that disappeared into a dreamy silence. I was still very unhappy, but the ongoing suffering was becoming a familiar part of me, and way deep within, I found a little tune that I could play each day that was mine. I felt like there was a part of me like a small bell--solid and still, shiny like a stone. Even though I knew Axel would resist, I had a private dream of opening up a small wine pub in the village, where I could serve the good Japanese food that my parents taught me to prepare. The kitchen smells from the nearby Gasthaus Gottfried always triggered these thoughts.
During this first week in May, when the tourists started to reappear, Axel suggested that we go sailing in the little red sail boat we kept near the center of Konstanz. I could see the German boats crossing to the Swiss side for picnics, and the Swiss coming ashore along the German side. It was a sunny, festive day, and we pushed off in the direction of Mainau, the “‘flower island.’ The lake was filled with meltwater from the Alps, visible as a backdrop to the gray, icy water that lapped against the peeling paint of our boat. As we slacked into shore, thousands of flowers bloomed everywhere--pansies, daisies, forget-me-nots, wallflowers, tulips, rhododendrums, and peonies, all patterned in carefully-tended beds.
People were visiting the Orchid Show in the Palm House, little boys and girls played with toy boats, and shrieked when their hands or feet touched the cold waters. Older people walked in orderly fashion on the footpaths with their caps and walking sticks. Everyone seemed to be walking in one direction, circling the island from right to left. Axel and I spread a blanket on the lawn, and I brought a basket from the boat with my California rolls and a bottle of Riesling and some local Himbeergeist, made with strong spirits and fresh, ripe rasberries. I placed the schnaps in the water nearby, because Axel liked it frigid.
I asked Axel if he would like some more California rolls, especially since he had consumed a half bottle of the wine on an empty stomach (he never ate breakfast). He said, ‘Yes, Mikage, but more wine also--this hot sun makes me thirsty.’ He finished the bottle while offerring his usual criticism of my preference for tea. He further criticized me, ‘You should have brought beer. This is a day for beer, not wine; but, of course, my pretty American wife is too refined for beer. Beer is for Germans, right?’
As the morning turned into afternoon, Axel began to criticize everything and everyone around him--judging the flowers, the gardeners, the men, women, and children who passed by. When he tired of this, he asked for the schnaps, and began drinking it out of his wine glass rather than the small decorative sipping glasses that I had bought at Meersburg. He was mean at all times, but no more so than when he was drunk.
When we returned to the apartment, the churchgoers from the cathedral across the street were strolling back to their homes. The sound of the church bells seemed jarring to me. Sunday afternoon was the only unplanned part of our week, and Axel began fidgeting, as if the rest of the day was a barren desert that he had to cross on foot. He always seemed like a pink hamster spinning on a wheel. Then Axel looked up at the top of our curtain rod, and said, ‘There’s that damned bird.’ Gino was perched there, its little bird heart thumping, its eyes fixed on Axel. ‘Mikage, why don’t you keep that bird caged?’
‘He is in a cage,’ I replied. The cage is this apartment, and he’s free to roam around it, and breathe and eat and sleep and shit just like us.’
Axel began to swat at Gino with his tennis racquet. I said, ‘Axel, stop!’ Gino thrashed and darted up and down in the high-ceilinged sitting room, frantically looking for safety. Gino made matters worse by shitting on Axel’s forehead.
‘I will kill the shit-faced dumb bird,’ Axel screamed. I vomitted. Axel was unaware that I had vomitted.
As a little girl in the internment camp, I would sit by a wood fire outdoors to get away from our crowded quarters. Every once in awhile, the stacked logs would shift and fall into the center of the firepit. There was smoke at first, and then a flame would burst and give out intense heat. That’s what happened to me. I knew with clarity that our marriage had caved in, and that I had to save Gino.
I knew what to do. Axel kept a loaded Lugar in a wooden box in our dresser. I walked into the bedroom, removed the gun, and returned just as Axel batted Gino to the floor. Axel was about to stomp on Gino, when I fired the gun into our walnut display case of colored wine goblets.
As the bells continued to ring, the shards of glass formed a bright mosaic on the white marble floor. Axel’s face reddened with rage, turned pink then white. With his eyes bloodshot from drinking, he looked like an albino rat. For no good reason, I fired the gun a second time into the center of his framed Stanford diploma, and a third time into the cuckoo clock with the obnoxious little bird that kept popping out to frighten Gino.
Axel fainted in a heap on the floor, and Gino flew out a small crack in the window. I checked into the guest house down the street, and for three days, I circled the neighborhood until I found Gino. Then together, we flew home to California. Gino died a few years later. The divorce was simple, because I wanted nothing but my freedom. I resumed teaching German at the high school in Santa Cruz, then followed a boyfriend to West Michigan. I dumped him within six months. So, now you know my life story.”
“Mikage, we’ve been friends for two years, and you haven’t told me about your past. I love you, and feel so sad that you’ve had such a difficult time. You know you can talk to me about anything, anytime.”
“This is the first time I’ve felt like talking about it,” Mikage replied. “So now you know why I say men are pigs.”
“Well, not all men are pigs, but there’s a bunch of them out there,” Victoria said.
“Someday, if I fall in love, I’ll have to drop the phrase, but it will be some time...it will be some time.”
The two women looked at the menu, and ordered the pan-seared walleye.
