by Daniel Kalla
“My stepmother, Sunny, is looking after him right now. She says they will find him a suitable home but—” Hannah took another quick glance around her. “I think she wants to keep him.”
Herschel nodded understandingly. “I have a little brother. They can drive you crazy.”
Hannah hadn’t even considered it. She would actually have a baby brother, or half-brother, at least. It seemed surreal. Her own mother had died from an infection only days after her birth. For her first eight years of life, Hannah had lived alone with her father. As a younger child, she used to pretend that her beloved rag doll, Schweizer Fräulein, was her little sister. As foreign as the idea of a brother now seemed, it also excited her.
Herschel cleared his throat. “Are you hungry, Hannah?”
Hannah squeezed his wrist a little tighter and laughed. “Who isn’t, around here?”
“Yes, of course. I mean …” Herschel blushed deeper. He dug his free hand into his pocket and opened his palm to show her two coins, both Japanese military yens. “A few of us have worked the last two weeks for Rabbi Hiltmann, cleaning the synagogue. Painting a little too.”
“You should save your money, Herschel. Your family must need it.”
“Zeyde took the other three coins,” he said, referring to his grandfather.
Hannah liked Herschel’s paternal grandparents. She knew he and his brother had accompanied them to Shanghai on one of the last ocean liners to leave Italy for the Orient in the summer of 1939. His parents had been scheduled to follow within a month, but the outbreak of war in Europe had blocked their departure, leaving them stranded in Berlin. Herschel never spoke of his parents, and Sunny had only learned their fate from a classmate who had known the family in Berlin.
“Zeyde told me I could keep these. He said I earned them.” Herschel pointed to a bamboo stall where an old woman stood cooking at a stove. Hannah had loitered near the same stand before just to inhale the delectable aroma. “I think I would really enjoy some of those dumplings.”
Hannah’s mouth watered at the prospect. “They’re not kosher, Herschel.” Her father had never kept their home kosher, but she wasn’t sure if the same was true for Herschel. “They’re probably made with pork.”
Herschel gently laid his other hand on the top of hers. “I won’t tell, if you won’t.”
She laughed. And, for the first time since Freddy Herzberg, someone set butterflies loose inside her chest.
CHAPTER 4
Ernst Muhler nonchalantly waved his yellow-stained fingers around the room, a lazy tail of smoke following behind. “Personally, I would have opted for a cheerful throw rug.” He shrugged. “But no doubt a baby will brighten up the room too.”
Sunny bit back a smile; the cheekiness was typical of her flamboyant friend. “This is only temporary, Ernst. Until we can find a safe home for him.”
His eyes twinkled. “Ah, temporary, naturally. What was I thinking?” He pointed to the couch where, only hours earlier, Feng Wei had given birth to the baby. Esther now held the infant to her breast, discreetly tucked under a blanket, while Jakob sprawled out next to her fast asleep, his head in her lap. “That sight could melt a statue’s heart, couldn’t it?” Ernst said.
Sunny felt her own heart melting. She felt a glimmer of something else too—a sense of inadequacy. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn’t help herself. She wished she could provide for the child, instead of watching helplessly while another woman nursed him.
Esther viewed Ernst plaintively. “Ernst, my Simon …”
“A thousand apologies, Essie. Sometimes, I forget that my sole purpose here is as your mailman,” he said in an amused tone as he dug his free hand into his pocket and extracted a crumpled envelope. “Another letter from your beloved.”
“Oh.” Esther brought a finger to her lips. Her husband, Simon Lehrer, was an American Jew who had been swept up in the Japanese wave of internments of Allied citizens. He had been a prisoner in one of the camps before escaping to be nearer to his family, and now lived in hiding with Ernst on the other side of the city.
It had been more than a year since Simon had gone underground, but he was still considered a saviour among the refugees. He had arrived in Shanghai in 1937, allegedly to avoid the obligation of running his family’s furniture business in New York, but he had quickly fallen into a far more responsible role, running the city’s major charitable organization, the Committee for Assistance of European Refugees. With a compassion that was matched only by his energy level, Simon had spearheaded the building of the refugee hospital while helping to find food and housing for the penniless German Jews who had arrived at the harbour by the boatload almost daily in the late 1930s. It was in this capacity that Simon had first met the Adlers, and Esther.
Simon had also introduced Sunny to Franz and the refugee hospital, changing her life completely and forever. To say she felt indebted to the easygoing New Yorker would have been a massive understatement. Sunny was heartsick to see Simon and Esther separated by Ghoya’s cruel order. Ghoya had banned the entire family, including Esther, from leaving the ghetto. Simon could only see his son whenever Sunny—who wasn’t confined to the ghetto like the German refugees—had time to sneak Jakob out to Ernst’s flat, where Simon lived. Ironically, Ernst was actually the more wanted fugitive of the two men. Sunny could still see in her mind his haunting oil paintings of the rape and murder victims of the Nanking Massacre. They had enraged the Japanese authorities and sent Ernst fleeing to the countryside. Since returning to Shanghai, he had chosen to hide in plain sight. He lived in an enclave known as Germantown, behind wild whorls of hair, a beard and the assumed name of Gustav Klimper, a cheeky homage to the great Viennese painter Gustav Klimt. He made a living selling his non-controversial paintings, mainly German landscapes that he disdained as conformist and unoriginal. Every few weeks, along with Simon’s letters, Ernst brought the family a bag of groceries or rice. And, unbeknownst to Franz, who was too proud to accept anything he viewed as charity, Ernst was slipping Esther the few dollars he could spare, which she pretended to earn through sales of her knitting.
Esther’s eyes lit up at the sight of the letter in his hand, but she nodded to the baby below the blanket. “In a minute or two, Ernst. Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Tell me, how he is?”
“The man is lovesick, Essie.” Ernst sighed. “Speaks of you day and night. Frankly, it’s a little tiresome.”
“Ach, you talk such nonsense.” Esther looked down to conceal her happy smile and the sudden colour in her cheeks.
Ernst lit another cigarette. “Where, I ask you, is a man like that for me?”
“In that mountain village, waiting,” Sunny reassured. “Just where you left him.” She had always liked Shan, whom Ernst had met soon after arriving in Shanghai. The two men had fled the city together after the scandal of Ernst’s Nanking paintings.
“Why would Shan wait for me? After the way I absconded without so much as a goodbye.”
“You did it for Charlie,” Sunny said. In the countryside, Ernst and Shan had met Charlie, a charismatic Resistance leader and the youngest general in the Communist army. After Charlie had been shot through the leg, Ernst had taken the risk of dragging him to the city for medical attention at the refugee hospital. “Charlie was dying from that infected wound. You sacrificed everything to get him here.”
“God only knows what has happened to that village or my poor Shan without Charlie. It’s hard to believe that any of them might still be alive.”
Esther shook her head vigorously. “You can’t talk that way, Ernst. You must have faith.”
He grimaced. “Oh, Essie, life has given me precious little reason for faith. And your people even less so. How do you Jews possibly sustain it?”
Esther repositioned the baby and adjusted the blanket. “Karl used to say that it takes no effort to believe during good times. That only in the worst of times can one demonstrate true faith.”
Sunny had never known Franz’s you
nger brother, Karl, but she still felt a kind of closeness to the man who had been Esther’s first husband. “Karl paid for his faith with his life. What those monsters did to him …” Ernst shook his head in disgust. “Besides, he was a better man than I could ever hope to be.”
“Nonsense, Ernst,” Esther said with a gentle laugh. “You are a good man. And a brave one too. Looking after my Simon the way you do. You, an Austrian goy, who has always been a friend to—”
Esther was silenced by the unexpected opening of the door. Franz entered, his face ghostly pale and his hair dishevelled. Dirt marks criss-crossed the pant legs of his only suit. But it was his halting movement, and the way he kept his right arm clamped to his chest, that drew Sunny’s attention. She hurried over and tried to wrap him in a hug but stopped when he gasped in pain. “What have they done to you, Franz?”
“My rib. It’s broken.”
“Oh, darling.” Sunny lightly ran her fingers over his jacket. Just her touch caused Franz to wince and lean away. Then she noticed the bruising on his jaw and moved her hand up to carefully explore it. “And this?”
“It’s nothing, Sunny.” He pulled her hand from his face. “Only the chest.”
Ernst marched over to the door. “Was it the Kempeitai?”
“No, not the military police. Just regular soldiers.” Franz looked from Ernst to Sunny and then down to the floor. “After all these years, they have shut us down.”
“The hospital?” Sunny took his left hand in her right and caressed his knuckles. “Tell me.”
Franz described the raid, ending with the decree being pinned to the entrance.
“Why, Franz?” she asked. “Why would they do this?”
“Ghoya,” he grunted. “He can’t let us have anything.”
“That horrid little man,” Esther spat. The Japanese bureaucrat had kept her and Simon apart for the past six months by forbidding her an exit pass, but she was only one of thousands of refugees who had come to despise the man, who referred to himself as the “King of the Jews.”
“Now what, Franz?” Sunny asked.
Franz freed his hand from Sunny’s. “I am going to go see him.”
“Ghoya?” Ernst frowned. “Not that I have ever been the epitome of caution or care but, Franz, do you really think that’s wise?”
Franz turned on Ernst angrily, catching himself when he felt a stab of pain in his chest. “My patients are all over the hostel. Most of them suffering on the floor like stray cats. No medicine. No operating theatre. No supplies. What am I supposed to do for them, for God’s sake?”
Ernst held up his hand as though the answer were obvious. “What the rest of us do. Accept it. Turn a blind eye. Look after yourself. And forget about everyone else.”
Franz was about to respond when the baby, turning from Esther’s chest, uttered a high-pitched gurgle. Something stirred inside Sunny, but she resisted the urge to go to him.
Franz looked over just as the baby’s head emerged from beneath the blanket. Confused, he turned back to Sunny for an explanation.
“You remember Hannah’s friend? The neighbour girl, Feng Wei?”
Franz squinted at her in disbelief. “The baby is Feng Wei’s?”
“He was, yes.” Sunny explained what had happened. Franz said nothing, but his impassive expression cut her to the bone. She felt she could read his mind: How can we bring another baby into our overcrowded home? Another mouth to feed.
Too hurt to even meet his gaze, she turned to Esther with her arms outstretched. “Let me burp him, Essie.”
As she took the boy in her arms, it occurred to her that he still didn’t have a name. Inhaling his sweet scent and feeling the warmth of his cheek against hers, she realized that she would never be able to let him go.
CHAPTER 5
The narrow corridor inside the Bureau of Stateless Refugee Affairs reeked of stale wool and sweat, a smell that Franz had come to associate with the futility and despair of the ghetto. Two or three of the other refugees in the queue shot him withering glances as he sidled past, but the rest appeared indifferent. Years in Shanghai living under Japanese occupation had eroded their sense of entitlement or even fairness. Most of the refugees just seemed resigned.
Most in the line were young or middle-aged men, but a few women and stooped old men were interspersed among them. They would have been queued for hours, ever since the curfew had lifted in the morning. They had come to beg Ghoya for one of the precious exit passes, which, for many, would determine whether or not their families would go hungry that day. Everyone knew that Ghoya relished his position as sole arbiter of the passes. He played the role like a lion trainer at the circus, with as much showmanship and cruelty.
Ghoya’s high-pitched voice—more screech than shout—emerged from the open door at the end of the hallway. One young man standing near Franz flinched, but few others showed much of a reaction. They were accustomed to Ghoya’s mood swings, which were as erratic as the Shanghai winds in typhoon season.
A young woman bolted out of the office, clutching her face and running with her head down. Before Franz could move out of the way, she slammed into him, launching another thunderclap of pain through his chest. The woman looked up at him with terrified eyes, angry welts on both cheeks. Franz recognized her as a former patient. Sunny had delivered her baby via an urgent Caesarian section several months earlier. He remembered how fragile the woman had seemed, both physically and emotionally. “Frau Kornfeld?”
“Ah, Dr. Adler, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry.”
Franz caught his breath. “It’s fine,” he said, trying to conceal his pain. “Are you all right?”
“I only came for my husband’s pass because of his fever. He couldn’t get out of bed,” she mumbled, seeming in shock as she rubbed at one of her cheeks. “Mr. Ghoya, he said Felix was a coward for sending his wife. He slapped me so hard. Twice. And he told me that we could starve like the rest of the rats.”
“Mr. Ghoya, he is prone to exaggerate,” Franz said half-heartedly. “Tomorrow he will probably forget it altogether.”
“You think so, Dr. Adler?” she asked, desperate for reassurance. “Felix, he sells wood carvings at the wharf. Without the passes, there will be no food. The baby …”
Franz nodded sympathetically, but her predicament was so commonplace that it had lost the capacity to move him. Besides, her mention of the baby reminded him of the infant in his own home. He could see how attached Sunny had already become to him. She desperately wanted a child. She deserved one. But not now, of all times.
“Tomorrow will be a different story, Frau Kornfeld,” he said distractedly. “You will see.”
“Yes. No doubt. Thank you, Dr. Adler,” she said as she squeezed past him.
Franz shouldered his way down to the end of the hallway, giving rise to a few more half-hearted protests from those at the front of the line. Reaching the doorway, he peered into the office. Ghoya sat behind his desk, wearing the pinstriped suit he considered his uniform. His oversized head bobbed from side to side, a smile creasing his pockmarked face. “Yes, yes, Herr Friedmann,” he was saying in his reedy, almost accent-free German. “Bring me more of that schnitzel your wife makes, and the ink on your exit pass will never dry.”
Ghoya looked over to the door and noticed Franz. “Go, go, Herr Friedmann. Leave me now.” He waved at the door, beckoning Franz. “Ah, Dr. Adler. It has been too long. Too long indeed.”
Franz shared an empathetic glance with Friedmann as they passed, then bowed his head deeply and said, “Good day, Mr. Ghoya.”
“And a good day to you, Dr. Adler,” Ghoya said merrily without rising from his seat. “What brings you to my office? Not to request a pass, I hope. I could never grant you one of those.” His smile faded and he shook his head grimly. “Not after your daughter was caught smuggling those cigarettes into the Designated Area. Such a foolish thing to do. A serious crime too. You were most fortunate I was so very lenient with you two.” He
tut-tutted. “Too soft. I’m always too soft on you people.”
The skin on Franz’s back crawled at the memory of the public flogging he had endured as punishment. “Yes, Mr. Ghoya, you were most benevolent.”
Ghoya shrugged disinterestedly. “What brings you to me today?”
“It’s the hospital, Mr. Ghoya.”
Ghoya squinted, pretending he didn’t have a clue what Franz was referring to. Then he snapped his fingers. “Yes, yes. Your hospital for the Jews. What about it?”
Franz shifted from foot to foot. “The soldiers, they closed it. There was a decree.”
“Ah, yes, the decree.” Ghoya laughed, clearly enjoying his deranged game. “That was my order. Yes, yes. I closed your hospital.”
“Mr. Ghoya, the hospital cared for refugees who were ill. Who had nowhere else to turn. We were not expecting any help—”
Ghoya held up a hand to silence him. “You remember last autumn, when our leaders were ambushed by the cowardly Underground?”
Franz thought of the two colonels and admiral who had been rushed to the refugee hospital after being gravely wounded in a nearby Resistance surprise attack. “Yes …”
“Did your hospital save our brave leaders then?”
No, we didn’t. And for good reason. In the case of Colonel Tanaka, the sadistic former chief of the Kempeitai, Franz’s own scalpel had finished the job begun by the assassin’s blade. “Those men were gravely ill, Mr. Ghoya. We did what we could, but it’s such a basic hospital,” Franz said, resisting the urge to speak his mind.
“It’s a terrible hospital,” Ghoya said dismissively.
“It’s all we have in—”
Ghoya brushed away Franz’s concerns with a sweep of his hand. “We will use the building for something else. Perhaps storage? I will think of something.” Before Franz could respond, Ghoya went on. “I would hate to see your medical skills go to waste, Dr. Alder.”
Franz stiffened.