by Lois Ruby
I’d wounded him. “No, no, I love it!”
“It is the artist’s job to see what is not there,” he said.
Then I was insulted. So, it was confirmed: I was just as ugly as I suspected.
Dovid Ruzevich played in my mind all that day and half the night. Every scrap of warmth or food or news had to be shared with my friends, of course, but Dovid was an indulgence that was mine alone, better than ice cream. The next morning, even before Erich was awake, I quickly dressed, stole past Tanya’s door, and returned to the café.
“So early?” Mr. Bauman teased. “Sit. You’re my first customer, so for you I have fresh tea leaves. Someone else can enjoy the leftovers.” He poured steamy water over dry, fragrant jasmine leaves. I watched them swell and drift lazily through the yellowing water. Ah, luxury! I pulled the cup to my face, inhaling the heady aroma.
The door opened, and there was Dovid, in the same clothes despite the gathering heat and with just a hint of stubble on his cheeks, as if he’d been in such a hurry to get to me that he hadn’t bothered to shave. My face flushed, and I quickly lowered the teacup. He sat down across from me. Mr. Bauman gave me an encouraging nod as he brought us a second cup of hot water. I spooned tea leaves into Dovid’s cup, already mourning the loss.
And so during our last week of freedom, I began coaxing his story out of him. It’s what refugees did; it’s how we stayed sane. I spoke no Yiddish, or even Polish, but his English had improved enormously, as if he’d been practicing. With an English girl?
“The last time we were together, you told me you’re alive because of soccer and some other word I don’t know.”
“Yes, Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat.”
“What?! Tell me everything.”
“Be patient,” he teased. “So …” Dovid started slowly, then began racing through the worst of the story, waving his sketching pencil like a baton. “We are millions of Jews in Poland in nineteen thirty-nine. One minute we are under Russian occupation; the next, under German control. Suddenly in our own homeland we are not welcome.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you?” He looked at me crossly. “But you are here with your family.”
“That should make me feel guilty?” I immediately regretted the words.
“Not guilty. Lucky,” he said with a sigh, then jumped up and began pacing the empty café. Mr. Bauman discreetly stepped into his back room and pulled the threadbare curtain. “Nearly every Polish Jew is gone, or crowded into ghettos. The lucky ones, they escape to Russian Lithuania, with Germany pounding at their door.” From the windows: “In Lithuania we cannot live, either, but what choice do we have?”
My tangle of hair was escaping the red ribbon I’d worn for Dovid.
“There we are, trapped in Lithuania,” Dovid said, “maybe ten thousand of us. The Russians do not understand why we want to leave, and the Germans, they do not yet have Lithuania, thank God.”
“Why did you want to leave, Dovid?”
“Why? Because survival is better than death.” His words were slow, careful. “Who knows what is the right thing to do? The Russians say we are crazy to want to leave, and since we are crazy, what will they do to us? They will send us to Siberia for the cure.”
“The cure meaning what? Exile?”
“If we live long enough. Death in the frozen land otherwise.”
“And I thought we were miserable here in the damp winters? Human beings can’t survive in temperatures like that, can they?”
“Outside, not for more than a few minutes at a time. So night and day we Polish Jews argue—is it better to try to leave? The Russians call this treason. For treason also they will send us to Siberia. Or is it more dangerous to stay in Lithuania and take a chance Hitler will not find us?”
I felt my chest tighten, and to cover up, I scooped some of the tea leaves back into my own cup and got up to pour hot water onto the soggy leaves. I returned to the table, and Dovid went on with his tale as if I’d not even moved.
“If we can scratch together the money, and I can sneak it into the Soviet Intourist office, and if the Russian official does not steal the money and send me anyway to Siberia—”
Just then Erich burst into the café. He always arrived like a freight train rumbling into the station. “Thought I would find you here.” He jumped back, startled to see Dovid and me with our heads leaning toward one another across the table, nearly touching, and my finger hooked through the handle of Dovid’s teacup. Such an intimate picture we must have painted, like the sophisticated man and woman who’d captivated me in that café so long ago—but younger, hungrier.
Erich glared at Dovid. “Come, Ilse, we have work to do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1943
Erich and I ducked into the doorway of Ping Low’s Apothecary, and he pulled out another letter on the familiar creamy stationery.
May 12, 1943
Mr. Wang Choi Sing
International Agriculture Cooperative
Shanghai, China
Dear Sir,
I trust my name is known to you, as my late husband maintained vast farmlands in our home province of Hunan. He has recently joined the ancestors, and I am left a widow in my declining years.
An associate of my husband’s has assured me that we might jointly prosper in the enterprise of producing sunflower honey. I, myself, shall not soil my hands with such labors, but those in my employ are loyal trustees. Thus, I should like to order a Shanghai Beehive sent to me immediately at my Foochow Road address for careful perusal. If we are satisfied, we shall increase the order to our mutual advantage.
As my resources are diminishing, I remind you that time, as always, is of the essence. I shall expect the package by Saturday, latest.
Cordially yours,
MADAME LIANG
“Translate?” I said to Erich.
“I have your instructions.” He stuffed the envelope under his shirt. “This letter is the go-ahead that says now’s the time to REACT. You’re to tail a woman called Beehive.”
“But, why?” I asked Erich as we walked back to our apartment.
“For once, can’t you just do as you’re told without a bunch of questions?”
“Okay, but I won’t even know what to look for unless I know why they want me to follow her.”
“No more questions until we get home. The streets have ears.” So like Erich, suspicious of everyone and everything.
It was a week before we’d have to move, and Mother was in Hongkew still scouting out a place for us to live. At home, Father practiced in his studio-closet. Erich leaned close to me in case Father should stop playing. “She’s a REACTor, but they suspect she’s also an informer. I don’t know any more, so don’t ask.”
“Double-crossing us?”
“Don’t look so shocked. You can’t trust anyone.”
“Not even you?”
“You can trust me.” He handed me a scrap of paper. “Her address. She has a REACT assignment on Saturday, eleven o’clock. Follow her. Get as close as you can, until you’re her second skin, but don’t let her know you’re on to her. Understand?”
“But I—”
“Understand?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, but I didn’t really get it.
Saturday morning. I needed courage for the REACT mission ahead, or so I told myself as I slid into the chair at the table I’d shared with Dovid. I hoped he wasn’t religious, that he wasn’t at the synagogue this Sabbath morning.
Saturday or not, maybe he was as eager to see me as I was him because a minute later he arrived, as if he’d been watching for me from the corner.
“Good morning, Dovid!” I got up to bring him a cup of hot water, transferred my tea leaves to his cup, and we continued right where we’d left off. That’s how anxious we refugees in China were to tell our stories of home.
“So, it is nineteen forty. As I said, I take the money to buy an exit visa and a ticket for the train to Vladivostok. But this I can d
o only if I have an end visa. Somewhere to go.”
“Our problem, too. I wanted to go to America.” I clunked my elbow on the table. “But here we are.”
He was impatient with the interruption. I promised myself that I’d be quiet and let him pour his whole story out.
“Yes, yes, everybody’s problem. So we cannot get an exit visa unless we have an end visa. This is where Chiune Sugihara comes into the story. He is with the Japanese consulate in Lithuania.” A smile spread across Dovid’s lovely face. I wanted to jump up and touch the half-moons of his cheeks and his chin, which quivered ever so slightly.
“This man Sugihara,” Dovid continued, “he sees what is ahead for the Jews of Europe, and he begins issuing Japanese exit visas. I am already on the train, doomed. I cannot stay, but I have nowhere to go. Ilse, I tell you, a miracle. The angel stamps my visa through the window just as the train is pulling out of the station.”
“Oh, Dovid.” I felt everything—the despair, the hope, the train clacking along the tracks. Then the little bell on Mr. Bauman’s door jingled, and there stood Erich—again.
“Have a seat,” I said with a sigh. Erich took my cup to slurp the last of my tea. I heard Mother’s scolding voice ringing in my head: You were raised without manners?
“Dovid is telling me how he came to be in Shanghai. We were just getting to the good part.”
A hint of a smile softened Dovid’s face, and then it clouded again. I suppose he was thinking of being the big brother to his own sisters—dead, no doubt.
Erich asked brusquely, “So, how’d you escape Hitler?” That was our Erich—right to the point.
“Chiune Sugihara,” I said importantly.
“Who?”
Dovid explained and set the scene all over again for Erich.
The excitement in Dovid’s voice made my heart swim in a pool of warmth. “It is chaos that day, my friends. Picture it. People swarming the train to get on. Arms waving visas out the window to catch Sugihara’s eye. The whistle howls. Then the train slowly builds into a chug-a-chug-a-chug, and there is Sugihara, running and stamping visas waving out the window until he can no longer keep up with the train.”
“But visas to where?” Erich asked.
Dovid’s smile fell behind his eyes like a setting sun. “Well, that is the problem.”
“Ach, everybody’s problem,” Erich muttered.
“We are luckier than some. We grasp in our hands exit visas to Curaçao.”
Even Erich, who knew everything, didn’t know where Curaçao was.
“An island in the Caribbean Sea, south,” Dovid explained. “Near the tip of Venezuela. Sea breezes all year around.”
Here, it was May, and summer was already roaring toward us. It had rained all night, all morning, and the rain had turned the air to sludge. Dovid and I had sweat beading on our faces. Waving palms and sea breezes sounded glorious.
“I never get to Curaçao. It is only a trick to get us out of Lithuania.”
Erich caught on. “So, that diplomat—”
“Sugihara,” I supplied.
“Yes, so that guy could issue your exit visas. Clever scheme,” Erich said, admiration clear in his voice. “How many got out this way, twenty? Thirty?”
“Two thousand,” Dovid boasted.
“Impressive. Where did you go if not to Curaçao?”
Dovid was enjoying this parceling out of information a tiny bite at a time. “We had Japanese visas, you see. We went to Kobe, Japan. Where else?”
“You took a boat from Lithuania to Kobe?” I asked.
Dovid and Erich both laughed, at my expense. Erich said, “My sister has no head for geography. She thinks America’s around the corner from Brazil.”
“Do not!” I pouted. “Don’t stop telling the story just because my brother’s so rude.”
Now Erich was deeply engrossed. He straddled his chair, facing Dovid. He looked so comfortable with his arms hugging the chairback. A girl would never be allowed to sit that way, and then I became aware of my elbows on the table—which Mother never allowed—and I pulled my arms down to my lap. “Go on, Dovid, please, we’re dying to hear the rest.”
By then even Mr. Bauman and three free-loading patrons were hanging on every word as well.
“All of us pile into the Trans-Siberian train. Through the Ural Mountains and across Russia. Until you spend eleven days on a train, you do not understand how big Russia is.” He stretched his arms as wide as they’d go. “The first long stop is Manchuria. Happy surprise to find Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews there.”
“So far north? In Manchuria?” Erich asked.
“Twenty-five years already. So, finally we reach Vladivostok, and we are loaded onto open cargo barges. Forty hours we travel this way. Don’t tell anybody, but I am seasick all the way down the coast of Korea, into the port of Kobe.”
“Japan,” Erich said with contempt. “I wouldn’t have gotten off the boat.”
“No? In Kobe we are treated very well, but we are a—curious—to the gentle Japanese people.”
“Gentle?” I asked. Gentle certainly didn’t fit the Japanese who occupied Shanghai. We’d heard shocking rumors of the tortures in the Bridge House Prison, where the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police, ruled supreme, and of the massacre of thousands of Chinese in Nanking. “Gentle?” I asked again.
Dovid said, “No matter what you see, remember, the Japanese people—not the soldiers, not the secret police, but the people—they are kind, gentle souls.”
“I’ve seen no evidence of that,” Erich said, tapping a spoon furiously on the table.
“Then I hope you will soon, my friends. Our days in Kobe stretch into peaceful months. Gladly we would stay there. I draw a hundred sketches of the beautiful Japanese countryside. Very … mystery. On large pieces of paper, not on these foolish scraps.”
Dovid’s look was dreamy, far-off, but he snapped back to the present. “We cannot stay in Japan. Nowhere to go. Summer ends, nineteen forty-one, we come here. Thank God for Shanghai.” At that, he looked right into my face. Thanking God for me? I’m quite sure I turned purple.
A stranger came into the café. We stopped talking to eye the well-dressed man. By well-dressed, I mean no holes or mismatched socks or plaids with stripes, and shoes that still faintly remembered a shine. Wordlessly, he bumped Erich, who shot out of his seat and left the café. The man followed. I watched them talking outside, the stranger waving his hands in anger, and Erich pulling at the skin around his thumb. Obviously, this wasn’t a warm, friendly meeting. The man darted across the street between rickshaws and bicycles, even leaping over the front fender of a car. Erich, visibly shaken, came back into the café and said, “My sister and I have a job to do. Come, Ilse, we have a date with a cranky old dowager.”
Outside, he hurriedly told me, “Beehive. It’s all moved up, ten o’clock instead of eleven. Be careful, Ilse.” Erich jerked his shoulder in the direction the stranger had gone. “He thinks Beehive might be on to us, and her friends are not known for mercy.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1943
This was a job for an expert, which I wasn’t yet, so once on the street I looked for Liu. Wouldn’t you know it—just when I needed him most, he wasn’t in sight. I did something I swore I’d never do. I whistled Liu’s toneless tune, and he appeared out of nowhere with something green and wiggly hanging from wooden chopsticks. I couldn’t tell whether it was animal or vegetable, edible or fish bait. He popped the foul thing in his mouth and gulped it down.
I said, “We have to go to Foochow Road to find a lady called Beehive, okay?” He nodded eagerly and pulled out his knife to show me he was ready for serious business. The sun glinted off the knife as our busybody downstairs-neighbor passed by.
“He’s a fishmonger,” I quickly told Mr. Shulweiss. “Guts fish for his father.” I motioned for him to hide the knife, which went into his belt along with the blackened chopsticks. As soon as Mr. Shulweiss was out of earshot, Liu said, “No fat
her. No mother.”
“Well, you must have had one of each at some point.” He cocked his head, processing my words. For a second I thought he didn’t understand my English, but then I realized he’d caught the words, all right. He just couldn’t capture any memory of a mother or father. “Who do you belong to, Liu?” No recognition. “Who are your people?”
He mimicked a common American expression: “Me, myself, and I. We all three.” He hurried along on feet of tanned hide, and I could barely keep up with him. I tapped him on the shoulder, and he spun around with enough force to knock me off balance. His eyes blazed until he realized it was only me.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. Just curious about you, that’s all.”
He grinned—his customary expression when he was satisfied with himself. He poked two fingers at his eyes. “Open in sunshine one day long time ago.” He turned a stained hand up, with a ropy scar healed across the palm. One finger looked like someone had bitten the tip off years earlier. Thumping each finger on his chest, he said, “Five.”
“Five o’clock? Five days, what? Oh, you mean you have no memory before you were five years old?”
He didn’t quite understand, but he nodded and pointed to the dark hole of the sewer on the street corner. “Water whoosh past me down there. I climb up to the street by the Bund.” He spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders in a that’s all gesture. “No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda.” Yes, the standard cry of Shanghai street boys. “Okay, missy, now we do business.”
He quickened his pace, with me nearly trotting behind him, and somehow led me right to the Foochow Road address. We waited and watched, though his feet were tapping and dancing every second. For a rest, he waved his toes, with their yellow nails curled over the tips.
Eventually, Beehive backed out of her door. I pointed to the prey, since I’d seen her photo, and Liu, the pro, caught on right away.
Beehive was tall, even for a westerner, with legs about twice as long as Liu’s. She took giant steps up Foochow to the Bund, at the corner of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The wretched Japanese had taken away the elegant lions I loved that used to guard the bank, and I wished I could once again rub their smooth brass feet for good luck because I had no idea what I was doing tailing this woman. And what if she got on a tram? There was no money in my pocket, and only holes in Liu’s.