by Lois Ruby
We watched the spinach shrink into the pan and boil down to a limp black saucerful of seaweed.
“At home,” Mother said forlornly, “I would make a fresh spinach salad with sweet onions and hard-cooked eggs. We would chew and crunch for twenty minutes.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Shpann. I wish I could have brought string beans. They don’t cook down so much.”
“No, no, Tanya. Please don’t think me ungrateful.” Mother made an apology, offering a quick pat on the cat’s back. “I’m just … nostalgic. This morning we move to Hongkew—who knows?”
Moishe nodded in agreement.
Father had hired two pedicabs to carry all our goods except our thin mattresses and our table and chairs, which needed a costly truck. The bed frames we had to leave behind for the Chinese family who’d be moving in. Mother, Father, and I walked the two miles to our new home, while Erich bicycled beside the pedicabs to keep an eye on our things.
Tanya and her mother traveled in style, compliments of the Japanese soldier of the week. He’d borrowed a flatbed truck to move their belongings, and Tanya and her mother rode into Hongkew in the back of the truck, cushioned by their mattresses.
The pedicab drivers dumped all our things on Houshan Road, in front of an entire audience of neighbors. Erich and I hurried it all up narrow stairs to our apartment. Apartment? Room. It was beyond my worst expectations. Its one window, barely a foot square, was painted shut and darkened with about a hundred years’ worth of grit. “At least it won’t be drafty in the winter,” I said, and ducked the pillow Erich flung at me.
Our so-called apartment was about fourteen feet square.
“Moth-er!” I wailed. How on earth would we get three mattresses in there and still have space to plant our feet on the floor? Mother paced off the room and told Father where to pound nails into the bumpy ceiling so she could hang sheets to make rooms out of the one room. The bathroom was down the hall, on our floor. That was a plus. And yes, there was a western toilet that mercifully flushed. But my heart dropped when I realized there was no bathtub—only a deep, rough cement basin suitable for doing laundry, although I couldn’t guess how we’d manage that, since the one spigot dribbled only cold water.
It’s not as bad as Dovid’s dormitory, I kept reminding myself. Not as bad.
And far better than Tanya’s place. Erich and I helped them move into a dark square of a room with peeling plaster walls and warped floorboards crusted with filth. You could even see the imprint of Chinese vegetables in the wood, as though they’d fossilized there. Moishe took one look at this horror and ran off for good.
Back in our own apartment that was palatial by comparison, Erich said, “Moishe’s someone’s steak dinner tonight. Medium rare, very tender, purr-fect.”
“You heartless creature!” I scolded.
“Come on, you hate that cat as much as I do.”
We heard voices on the other side of the wall, which was only a thin sheet of plywood that separated us from our neighbors. They were whispering to one another in Japanese.
Suddenly Erich’s good humor evaporated, and he turned hard. “Japs live there?”
“Shoosh,” I warned.
The neighbors turned out to be a sweet older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kawashima. They’d been in Shanghai since way before the occupation because Mr. K had worked for the Shanghai Municipal Council as a Japanese translator until his retirement. Mrs. K knew a little German and a lot more English. That first night she told us what it used to be like in Hongkew before the Japanese bombing in 1937.
“Oh, such a nice market,” she said. “Countrymen come with their finest. We have cabbage, artichoke, mango, pomegranate, lemon. Chicken, pheasant, squab. Fresh fish—tuna, shad, mackerel. Big tank slosh with water from the sea, squid and shrimp swimming in. You pick the best. Cheap, too. Not like now,” she said with a deep sigh.
The good thing about having wafer-thin mattresses and no bed frames was that we could roll our beds up and stand them in a corner like smoke stacks during the day so we’d have room to move around. Mother learned to cook on an old-fashioned Chinese stove that burned coal briquettes by watching the Chinese cooks in their portable kitchens all over Hongkew. The smoke from their briquettes hung in the air like low clouds. They sold their hot dishes to people on the street, who clicked their chopsticks in appreciation, but Mother didn’t quite have the knack yet, and our food had an odd undertaste.
“We’re being slowly poisoned by our own mother,” Erich said with a wink. It was meant as a joke, but Mother was in no laughing mood. She gave Erich one of her famous fingernail-flickings to the cheek. It didn’t amount to much with her swollen joints. Her chipped, split nails made little of a thumping impact. He just laughed, which riled her even more.
All morning we watched the barbed wire go up. The gates of the ghetto were still open for another week. At night I lay awake for hours, so close to Mother and Father and Erich that I could pick out their separate breathing patterns. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of doors slamming shut, echoing for miles around. And of Dovid.
On May 18, 1943, signs went up at all the Hongkew exits: STATELESS REFUGEES PROHIBITED WITHOUT PERMISSION, and then the Japanese closed the gates. There was no resounding echo, as in my dream. In the din of activity on the Hongkew streets, we barely heard a clatter. I expected my heart to leap into my throat as I watched the bar slide across the gate nearest our apartment. I expected a resonating clang, but there was only a faint click of the lock, and I simply felt numb.
We needed passes to leave Hongkew. Erich was beyond school age, but I had one more year at the Kadoorie School, which entitled me to a day pass beginning a half hour before school started and ending an hour after school let out. That left no time for any REACT assignments, although I knew Erich was sneaking out of Hongkew and slipping home at odd hours. Mother stopped asking questions in exchange for the meager money Erich earned for the family kitty.
I had to learn the pass system, which meant cozying up to a man named Kanoh Ghoya, who called himself King of the Jews.
Tanya had already enjoyed the pleasure of a chat with the horrid little toad. “He comes up to my shoulder. My mother says he’s like a lawn ornament, but ugly. My word, as ugly as a fat tuchas, this man is! Wait until you meet him.”
I could wait. And I hoped he wouldn’t become Mrs. Mogelevsky’s new Friday visitor.
There in the ghetto, we Jewish girls and boys had all sorts of discussions about how to handle Ghoya. People who’d had dealings with him, to get clearance to go to a funeral or a job interview or a doctor’s appointment, reported that sometimes he issued three-month passes when you’d only asked for a day, and other times he slammed his hands on the desk and refused even an hour’s pass. The “king,” they said, was known to jump up on his desk to slap the face of anyone who irritated him.
I gathered what ammunition I could before daring to face Ghoya because I knew someday I was going to feel desperate to get beyond the gates to roam through Shanghai like a free person. Besides, REACT needed me. At least I hoped it did.
Mrs. Kawashima told me that the Chinese had a saying in Shanghai, maskee! It meant, “never mind, don’t worry, things will get better.” Winter will melt into spring, summer will ease into fall. As Mrs. K said, “When summer heat make you itch like you have flea, you say ‘maskee!’ Don’t worry. Soon be cold again and flea will die.” She was so full of good cheer; but as Erich reminded us, the Chinese and Japanese in Hongkew didn’t have to show passes, just the Jews.
In June the rainy season hit us again, but at least our apartment was watertight. The streets, though, were ankle-deep in filthy water. Underground sewers were an unknown luxury in the Hongkew section of the city. The streets doubled as sewers. Chinese children splashed in the water as if all of the neighborhood were one big swimming pool. Slogging through it to get to school was a nightmare. My galoshes filled up with slimy scum water, and each step was like lifting weights. Steam rose from the water as the hot wea
ther began to set in. Imagine the smell.
So, there was good news and bad news. The good news was, school would be out soon and I could look for a job. The bad news was, the day that school let out for the summer, I’d lose my pass.
Maskee! I kept telling myself. It would get better. When? How long before we all gave in to the gloom, even me, even Mrs. Kawashima?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1943
Once we were pent up in the ghetto, changes came rapidly, and they weren’t all for the worse, either. We all had jobs to do, not that we got paid for any of them. Hour by hour, our job was to survive to the next meal. Day by day, our job was to keep from dying of heat prostration—until winter, when the challenge would be to keep our fingers and toes from snapping off like twigs. Week by week, our job was to lift up our sagging spirits with culture and activity, and to rebuild our rickety, dreary surroundings into a place fit for living and working and dreaming. Well, dreaming, that was tougher. We were planted in practicality.
Tanya and I sauntered around our neighborhood to check daily progress, and there was a lot. Put a bunch of enterprising people together, with too much time on their hands, and it’s amazing what pops up.
“It’s almost as good as a Hollywood movie,” Tanya gushed as we watched a bombed-out building slowly being transformed into something humans could actually live in. “What do you think, they put flush toilets in there?”
“Oh, of course,” I answered indignantly, remembering how in Vienna, Erich and I used to share a bathroom with a deep marble tub and gold faucets. “I just hope no one tries to jam their plumbing.”
“Now, why would anyone do such an idiotic thing?” Tanya asked.
Bigmouth, me.
But she didn’t expect an answer. She looked into every alley, up every fire escape, to find Moishe. “My poor, lonesome kitty-cat.”
I tried to comfort her. “Maybe he’s found a home on the outside and is eating well.” There were enough rats in Hongkew for Moishe to have a six-course banquet every day.
Tanya stopped and turned around to face me. “You never liked my cat, did you?”
“I did, I thought he was beautiful, fluffy … No, not really.”
“He didn’t like you, either. He only loved me.”
“I’m sorry, Tanya. I know you miss Moishe.” I took her hand, and we walked some more, our thoughts punctuated by the constant hammering all around us.
“They’re gone,” Tanya said. “My mother’s Japanese soldiers. Now we’re even poorer than you are.”
I squeezed her hand; there was nothing to say.
Some of our ghetto streets were looking more and more like European neighborhoods, especially Little Vienna, with its shops and open-air cafés. Herr Bauman struggled to stay open, but he could no longer keep pouring free tea water. Doctors and dentists and lawyers opened offices upstairs from Little Vienna’s shops, sharing space with one another by the hour so each could do a little business, make a bit of money, eat now and then. The watch repairman downstairs rented the space two hours a week so his customers could pick up his handiwork.
Newspapers on the outside called us “efficient” and “resourceful.” We called ourselves hungry—for food and for culture.
So, we had newspapers and radio programs in a variety of languages. We could go to a restaurant or club such as the Roofgarden, and the heart-thumping American-style jazz would overflow the walls so we could listen outside. We couldn’t afford to go inside these clubs, of course. Only the few wealthy among us, or people from beyond the ghetto, or the black marketeers could do that. One rare night, Erich joined the crowd with us outside the Roofgarden Café. Tanya and I danced on the sidewalk—our own version of the jitterbug—until we were soaked with sweat. Then we three sat on the curb and talked about what we missed most.
“Me, I crave things to crunch, like fried potatoes,” I mused.
Erich said, “Meat. The kind that needs lots of chewing down to the bone. I’d suck the marrow out of the bone.”
Tanya’s eyes swam: “A bowl of custard and berries, so sweet that for a week I’ve got a toothache.”
We yammered endlessly about fresh peaches and plums. Leafy salads, tart and oily with vinaigrette. Waxy, cold white asparagus on a bed of red-tipped lettuce—while at our apartment we peeled off mildewed leaves and chopped moldy stubs off vegetables to salvage the inner cores that the rot hadn’t reached yet.
In a short time our ghetto boasted Yiddish theater. At first, Father and The Violin stayed busy, but without pay. Also, we had lots and lots of sports. The Chaufoong Road Home had a huge soccer field, and we watched the matches for free. People with a little money bet on them.
Dovid and I were walking along Yangztepoo Road, hand in hand, when I asked, “Why don’t you go to Chaufoong Road and play soccer? You said you were the best goalie Saint Ignatz School ever had.”
Dovid stopped to glare at me. “I told you about that day, Ilse, remember? My last soccer game, my parents, my sisters. Do you think—”
“Do you think that kicking the ball around a field will make your family disappear all over again? Stop punishing yourself, Dovid. Have some fun.”
“I sketch,” he said by way of defense.
“What fun!”
“So? What do you do for fun?” he asked.
That required some thought. Finally I came up with a paltry something. “Tanya and I hang out on the curb outside the jazz clubs lots of evenings. We jitterbug and imagine that we’re gobbling huge platefuls of food like the rich people inside.”
“This is fun?” Dovid asked.
“Better than drinking lukewarm tea made with three-day-old tea leaves at Mr. Bauman’s,” I retorted. He reached for my hand; I pulled it away. “Erich’s right: There’s no place for chocolates or love in wartime.”
He flinched at the word love. How stupid of me.
“I can’t stay here any longer,” he began.
Now I’d scared him off. “You have a pass?”
“I refuse to curry Ghoya’s favor. No pass. I’m … disappearing.”
Tears clouded my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I will find a way to go into the interior. China’s a vast country. I can get lost. Tibet, I may go there. The landscape is mystical, good for sketching.”
“But why, Dovid?”
“Why? Why? Because! Nothing keeps me here.”
“Me?”
“There’s no future here for us.”
“But the war will end someday. Soon, I believe.”
“And then what?”
No one knew. America was a faint hope, or maybe we could go to Argentina, where Mother’s brother lived. Argentina—it seemed worlds away.
“You see? You have no answer,” Dovid said, tauntingly. “You will grow up.”
“Dovid! I’m nearly fifteen. That’s old, for wartime.”
We stopped at a flinty bench. An old couple made way for us, maybe seeing in us the young lovers they’d once been. Young lovers, hah! We were in the middle of an ugly fight. We whispered, and it wasn’t easy to argue in a whisper.
I made a brave effort, anyway. “How selfish can you be, leaving this way?”
“And I thought selfishness was your gift alone.”
“That’s cruel, Dovid, and you know it.”
“You say anything on your mind. No thought for other people’s feelings.”
“As if you have any!”
The old couple struggled to their feet and left us to our battle.
Dovid’s voice rose to a whiny level I’d never heard before. “Do you think I like living in a bombed-out tenement like I do, without so much as a hook to hang my coat on? Where is my self-respect? Gone. But I suppose it’s what I deserve.”
“Yes, because you let the Nazis take your family. It’s all your fault for playing soccer when they came to your village, right? Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. It’s not attractive.”
“What do you know, Ilse? You have led a charmed life
, in the shelter of a mother and father and brother.”
“Charmed? Look at me, Dovid, look. I’m in tatters, my hair is leeched straw, my nose runs constantly, I’m hollowed out. Charmed? I should say so.” Also, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d caused a throbbing in my temples that would gather into a fierce headache before the night was over.
“Here, I’m useless. Maybe I can do something for our people somewhere else.”
“Just what do you think you could do? You’re no Sugihara!” I shot back—a mean, low blow that I regretted the minute it was out of my mouth.
Dovid jumped to his feet and stood in front of me. “Let’s stop this. We’re saying things that hurt. It is our last time together. Tomorrow I go.”
I nodded, swallowing hot anger. “Will I ever hear from you again?”
He held my face, brushing tears off each cheek with his rough thumbs. “I will find you,” he promised, “if we are both alive at the end of the war.” We walked back to Houshan Road in silence, close, but not touching. He left me at the shadowy door of our building. “Be selfish, it is okay,” he advised. “You will need to watch out for yourself, to survive.” And he was gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1943–1944
I cried myself to sleep for several nights, but I had to do it silently. There was no such thing as privacy in our apartment, and I didn’t want Mother and Father to know about Dovid. He was the only possession I refused to share, even if he was gone. Those memories were mine alone to hoard.
We heard more and more horror stories about Ghoya, who had absolute control over our comings and goings. In July, Mr. Shaum, an old man in our building, pleaded with Ghoya for a pass to visit his wife’s grave on the yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. He caught Ghoya at a bad time—and was sentenced to a week of house arrest in his airless room on the fifth floor. When a foul odor seeped from under his door, Erich and another boy in the building broke the door down and carried Mr. Shaum’s decaying body to the local cemetery. A week later, Ghoya forced a pregnant woman to kneel in his office for an hour while he stared at her and shouted, “No more Jews! Too crowded!”