The Far Side of the Sky

by Daniel Kalla

  “It is not valuable,” Esther rushed to explain. “The painter is a friend. It has sentimental value. Nothing more.”

  The official stared at Ernst’s charcoal sketch. It depicted an emaciated woman, her flat chest criss-crossed with scars, sitting in an empty bathtub with an unlit cigarette clamped between her teeth. Ernst had never explained its meaning, but the raw angst on the woman’s face had always moved Franz.

  “Worthless degenerate filth,” the official huffed as he carelessly rerolled it. Rather than return the sketch, he tossed it into a large wooden box at his feet. Esther opened her mouth to protest but said nothing.

  The inspector dug through Franz’s bag and pulled out the leather case holding the surgical tools. He spread it open, picked up a bronze-handled needle driver and studied it in the light. “Explain these,” he said.

  “I am a surgeon,” Franz said. “These are my tools.”

  The man continued to play with the equipment, clicking clamps open and closed, before eventually losing interest. He stuffed them back into the pouch and haphazardly tossed the case into the box at his feet.

  “I need those!” Franz exclaimed.

  “They are the Reich’s property now.”

  Franz felt as though he had just been stripped naked. “But why? They have no value to anyone but me.”

  The inspector shrugged. “Jews are not allowed to board trains carrying weapons.”

  Franz’s jaw fell open. “Weapons?”

  “If you would prefer not to part with your tools, you could just as easily stay here with them.”

  Esther nudged Franz gently in the ribs. “Yes, of course,” he muttered. “I understand, sir. Thank you.”

  Defeated, Franz did not bother to utter a word of protest when the official pulled his camera from the bag and confiscated it, too.

  After reassembling their belongings, the Adlers climbed aboard the rear car of the train, claiming two benches facing each other near the luggage rack. Franz’s pulse did not begin to settle until he felt the train vibrate under his feet and rattle away from the Südbahnhof. Hannah laid her head on his shoulder and, moments later, the gentle rocking of the car lulled her to sleep.

  Esther, wide awake, stared at her brother-in-law. “When will we tell her?”

  “Once we are settled in Shanghai.”

  Esther’s lip began to tremble, but Franz couldn’t tell if she was closer to laughter or tears. “My God, Franz. We’re actually going to China, aren’t we?”

  He forced a smile. “Just as we always planned,” he joked.

  “Your brother always did want to visit Asia. He even suggested Bombay for our honeymoon.”

  “India? Karl?”

  “He loved those Rudyard Kipling stories.” She sighed. “Such a hopeless romantic.”

  “So why didn’t you go?”

  “I convinced him the skiing was better at Innsbruck.”

  Franz’s smile evolved into another yawn. With the train’s hypnotic motion, he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He had hardly slept in four days and welcomed the enveloping drowsiness. Esther was saying something to him, but her words sounded as though spoken under water. Moments later, his chin dropped to his chest and her voice disappeared altogether.

  “Franz!”

  “Not now,” he murmured, wondering why Hilde was shaking his shoulder so roughly. “Franz!” Esther cried.

  He opened his eyes, disoriented by the flashlight’s beam that swung through the compartment. “Where are we?” He wiped his lip as Hannah stirred to life beside him.

  “Maglern. The Austrian side of the border,” Esther whispered urgently. “They say all Jews have to get off here!”

  “Who says?”

  She pointed toward the light source. “Border guards. The SS.”

  “Not again,” Franz muttered to himself. “Not when we’re so close.”

  Esther guided the sleepy Hannah off the train, while Franz made two trips to lug all the bags into the small terminal. Fear gripped him as he heard their train chug away without them.

  Inside the terminal, they faced another line and a new official: a broad-shouldered man wearing the dreaded black SS uniform. By the time the Adlers reached the desk, Franz’s nerves were raw, and he saw that Esther was also struggling to maintain her calm. The guard had hollow cheeks and a scar that ran from the corner of his left eye toward his ear. His open-mouthed smile was more disconcerting than the scowls Franz had come to expect from the SS.

  “Papers, please,” the guard said with insincere politeness.

  They handed over their documents.

  “We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” the guard said with another ugly smile. “But you Jews are notoriously sneaky at smuggling valuables out of the country. This is your final opportunity. Do you have anything you would like to declare?”

  Franz hesitated, waiting to hear Esther’s response. “No, sir,” she said forcefully.

  “Us neither,” Franz said.

  “So be it,” the Nazi sighed.

  Franz barely breathed as he watched the man search the suitcases far more diligently than the inspector at the Südbahnhof had. At one point, the guard pulled a hunting knife from his belt and, without a word of explanation, sliced open the lining of Esther’s trunk. He dug his hand inside, searching for hidden compartments.

  Franz exhaled as the guard shut the last of their suitcases. But his relief was short-lived. The Nazi turned to Hannah. “Little girl, your doll, please.”

  Hannah glanced up at Franz with huge eyes. “Papa?”

  Before Franz could respond, the official snatched Schweizer Fräulein from Hannah’s arms. He dug the knife’s blade into the seam along the doll’s back.

  “Papa, no!” Hannah squealed.

  “Please, sir,” Esther pleaded. “She has had that doll since she was a baby.”

  The SS official looked directly at Hannah. “I’m sorry, little one,” he said with a crocodilian grin. “I have no choice. There’s no level your parents would not stoop to.”

  “You can see that no one has touched the stitching—” Franz began, but it was too late.

  The man jabbed his blade farther into the doll’s back and ripped open the seam. Stuffing popped out. Hannah clutched her face and moaned. The official shot Franz a can’t-be-helped shrug. Listening to Hannah’s plaintive sobs, Franz trembled with rage. He had to fight the urge to gouge the Nazi’s eyes.

  Franz was still so preoccupied with his daughter’s distress that he numbly endured the humiliating strip search he had to submit to in the men’s room. But his worry skyrocketed again when Hannah and Esther failed to emerge from the restroom where the female guard was searching them.

  Franz paced up and down in front of the bathroom. After twelve agonizing minutes, the door finally opened and the guard walked out, followed by Esther, who had an arm around Hannah. His sister-in-law’s expression was blank but her eyes reassured him that the guard had not found anything.

  Hannah broke free of Esther and hurried over to Franz, holding out her disfigured doll for him to see. “Papa, she’s dead!” she cried. “The man killed her.”

  Franz knelt down to his daughter’s level. “No, liebchen,” he murmured. “She is not dead at all. We will fix her better than new.” “You can’t,” Hannah said miserably.

  “It’s what I do, Hannah.” He wiped the tears away from her face with his thumb and index finger. “I am a doctor. I sew people together.”

  “But they took away all your tools,” she pointed out, her voice stronger.

  “No matter.” He smiled. “I will find new tools. You’ll see.” She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. “Oh, Papa.”

  They sat on their luggage in the chilly station waiting for the next train to Trieste—the milk runner, so-called because it stopped at every village it passed to drop off dairy products. Hours passed before the old train finally chugged into the station. The cars were more cramped than on the express train, but Franz manag
ed to stack their bags and find two seats together.

  The train lurched away from the station and slowly gathered speed. Hannah snoozed on Franz’s lap. After ten or fifteen minutes of travelling through the darkness, a man up front stood and shouted, “We have just crossed the border into Italy!”

  Spontaneous cheers erupted among the trainload of mainly Jewish passengers. Couples kissed each other and families hugged. Someone began singing the Yiddish folk song “Hobn Mir a Nigndl.” Others joined in, and soon the singing reached a raucous pitch.

  The song was one of the ditties Franz’s mother used to sing in her sweet contralto while ironing shirts. Though he remembered only a few words, he hummed along with the tune.

  Franz looked over at Esther. She was staring out the window at the pitch-blackness. Her shoulders shook and her head bobbed. He squeezed her hand. She turned to him with tears streaming down her cheeks. Pain and loss were etched into her features. “Karl is really gone,” she choked out. “How can that be?”

  II

  CHAPTER 9

  NOVEMBER 12, 1938, SHANGHAI

  All of this to cross a bridge that would hardly span a rice paddy. Mah Soon Yi sighed. But her chest still tightened the moment she set foot onto the Garden Bridge’s walkway.

  Rifle slung loosely over his shoulder, a soldier leaned against the side of the guard hut that was built onto the walkway. Soon Yi recognized him as American by his deportment alone. Her pulse slowed with relief even though she knew it didn’t really matter who—the Fourth American Marines, the British Seaforth Highlanders or the Shanghai Volunteer Corp—guarded the south end of the Garden Bridge. The problem stood fifteen yards to the north, where the opposing guards were always Japanese.

  The baby-faced Marine turned to Soon Yi with a toothy grin. Despite the soldier’s encouraging nod, Soon Yi hesitated in front of his hut. “Long as you don’t forget to bow, ma’am,” he said with a wink, “you’ll be just fine.”

  Soon Yi—or Sunny, as her mother had nicknamed her—knew the drill only too well, but she still smiled at the young soldier’s kindness. “I will remember to bow, thank you.”

  Sunny felt comfortable around Americans. They rarely carried the Old World airs or prejudices that clung so tightly to the French and British Shanghailanders and even many of the native Shanghainese. Half American by birth, Sunny had attended the prestigious Shanghai American School, but she had never left Asia, and her American mother had died when Sunny was only eight years old.

  The Marine repositioned his rifle over the front of his chest. He tilted his head toward his Japanese counterpart across the bridge. “I’ll keep a close watch on that one,” he said.

  Sunny nodded her gratitude, despite the emptiness of the promise. For months, the guards on the southern end had stood by helplessly as Japanese soldiers inflicted vicious physical and verbal abuse on unlucky Chinese pedestrians, whose offences ranged from improper eye contact to not having bowed long or deep enough to the new masters of Shanghai. At the hospital the week before, Sunny had cared for a man dying from an infected bayonet wound incurred at the same checkpoint; apparently, he had flashed a grin that had been perceived as a smirk.

  The International Settlement’s soldiers were powerless to intervene. They were under orders not to, for fear of inciting an international incident. The political balance in Shanghai teetered more precariously than ever. And Sunny knew that once she stepped beyond the guard hut, the Marine could offer her no real protection.

  Cars rattled past her on their way over the Garden Bridge. The steel double-truss bridge marked the city’s geographical centre, spanning Soochow Creek where it intersected the Whangpoo River. Shanghai was built along the west bank of the Whangpoo as it snaked southward in a lazy S-shape. The Garden Bridge connected Shanghai’s most vital districts: the International Settlement and the French Concession to the south of Soochow Creek, and Hongkew to the north. To Sunny, the bridge also spanned the divide between West and East, providing a link between the skyscraper-crowned International Settlement and the traditional charm of Hongkew. Or at least it had before the bombs began to fall.

  Up until the previous autumn, Sunny had enjoyed crossing the Garden Bridge, often lingering to peer down at the junks and sampans crowding Soochow Creek. She had once worked at the Shanghai General Hospital in Hongkew, whose streets and lanes were as familiar to her as the medical texts lining her father’s library. But since the short bridge had come to represent an armed border within the city, she avoided Hongkew whenever possible. At twenty-four, Sunny was worldly enough to recognize the threat the Japanese soldiers posed, especially when drunk. She had already attended enough Chinese women and girls with unwanted pregnancies, vaginal tears, broken limbs and other traumas to know that the leers from Japanese soldiers were anything but harmless.

  But today Sunny had no choice; her friend needed her. So she tucked her bag over her shoulder, clamped her arms to her sides and stepped forward. Keeping her head bowed and her gaze low, she approached the Japanese guard hut and stopped ten or so feet before it. An infantryman—wearing a classic khaki uniform, brimmed and pointed cap and leather puttees covering his pants below the knees—stood erect outside his hut. He held his bayoneted rifle across his chest at the ready, as though he expected the bored American Marine to spring an ambush at any moment.

  Legs straight, Sunny bowed fully forward at the waist in the Japanese manner. She felt the eyes of the soldier on her, but he said nothing. Two long minutes passed. Her hamstrings stiffened and her back began to ache, yet the soldier remained silent. Another minute went by. You beast! You’re even more sadistic than the others!

  Uncharacteristic anger simmered inside Sunny. As a Chinese city built and still partly ruled by Europeans, Shanghai was home to thousands of Eurasians. But unlike other ethnicities, as mixed bloods, they could never be born into a community of their own. Sunny was long accustomed to the sense of being a perpetual outsider even, to a certain extent, within her own Chinese family. She managed to ignore most of the bigotry she faced, but this shameful ritual—having to kowtow before the Japanese soldiers while Caucasians walked past unmolested—infuriated her.

  Finally, the guard grunted as though scolding a disobedient dog. Without glancing in his direction, Sunny straightened up, squared her shoulders and made her way off the bridge and onto Broadway, Hongkew’s busiest thoroughfare, which hugged the west bank of the Whangpoo.

  The previous summer, the Japanese had terrorized Hongkew with indiscriminate aerial bombardment and brutal house-to-house street fighting. Sunny was fortunate to live in the French Concession, on the “safe side” to the south of Soochow Creek, but images of the hospitalized victims—people burned beyond recognition, children blinded by flying glass and the endless stream of bloodied and broken bodies—were imprinted on her brain. After the Chinese government had capitulated and the gunfire and explosions had lessened from constant to intermittent, life had returned to a semblance of normality for the almost one million, mainly Shanghainese, still crammed inside the borough.

  Sunny slipped through the throngs of people on the street. The usual street kitchens, beggars and vendors lined the sidewalk, their noisy peddling merging with the rest of the street’s cacophony. Hongkew’s shops, bars, temples and brothels continued to thrive after the invasion, albeit now under the unblinking eye of the Japanese military. Its presence was constant and palpable in the form of marching soldiers, sentries and, most feared, the Kempeitai—the military policemen who wore white armbands. Sunny had only glimpsed the Kempeitai from a distance and hoped to never get any closer. She had heard enough horror stories to know that a visit from the men in the white armbands was synonymous with internment, torture and, as often as not, death.

  Keeping her canvas bag tucked close to her side, Sunny wove her way seven or eight blocks through the hordes of bustling humanity and turned north. Approaching the busy intersection of Kung Ping and Tong Shan Roads, she slowed to pass an open bazaar. As commonplace as st
reet markets were throughout Shanghai, especially in Hongkew, Sunny had never seen one like this. The vendors were all formally dressed European men in trench coats or furs worn over suits. Most wore hats and leather gloves as they stood on the sidewalk selling an array of second-hand clothing, jewellery, watches and even typewriters. The men ranged in appearance from young and spry to old and decrepit. None were nearly as aggressive as Chinese street merchants. Some stood forlornly behind their own booths, while others clustered in small groups and chatted quietly among themselves. Their dazed and lost expressions reminded Sunny of the shipwreck survivors she had read about in an old novel.

  Slowing to study a brass fob watch that might interest her father, Sunny overheard the two vendors behind the table conversing in German. She assumed the men must be part of the contingent of Jewish refugees who had descended upon the city. She had seen the ships in the harbour unloading their human cargo but had not yet met any of them.

  While Sunny examined the watch, the two men spoke freely, never suspecting that she might understand German. The slender man, who had a long, distinguished face, was trying to reassure his shorter companion. “What else could you possibly do, Isaac?” he asked. “Miriam does not want the children to go hungry any more than you do.”

  The other man shook his head miserably. “But her wedding ring? It has been in the family for over sixty years. Miriam’s grandmother wore that same ring, Albert.”

  “It was a decent price, Isaac. The money will go far.”

  “Still, how can I go home to my Miriam now?”

  Albert laid his hand on Isaac’s shoulder. “You did what you had to.”

  But Isaac was inconsolable. “I wish we had just stayed in Berlin.”

  Isaac glanced in Sunny’s direction and met her gaze. Embarrassed to be caught eavesdropping, Sunny broke off the eye contact and hurried away. But even as she crossed the intersection, the naked despair in Isaac’s eyes lingered in her memory.