by Lois Ruby
Once they were gone, Father fished me out of my corner. “You heard?”
“Every word. Thank you, thank you, Father.”
“Ilse, my daughter,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “Believe me, I have higher hopes for my grandchildren than Shlomo. The boy does not look at all musical.”
“My thoughts exactly, Father.” Well, not exactly.
Then Father said, “When the day comes, Daughter, you will choose your own husband, and I trust you will choose wisely. Look how well your mother did.” His weathered face crinkled in a smile that made my heart flood with love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1944
I walked around the International Settlement, absorbing the sights and sounds and smells. I caught glimpses of Liu here and there, negotiating a variety of schemes, and once nabbed him by the back of his shirt.
“Have work to do, missy,” he said, squirming away from me. “Important job for big lady on Bubbling Well Road.”
“Wait. Have you eaten today?” The customary, polite Chinese greeting.
He tapped the ground with his crusty boot toe and thrust out his skinny belly with the knife tucked into his waist. “Liu don’t eat much,” he said jovially, as though starvation were a badge of honor.
Survival, war was all about survival. I thought about Dovid. Somehow his giving me permission to be selfish for my own survival freed me to be curiously generous.
I reached into my pocket for a thin coin. So what if I went without lunch? I was used to hunger gnawing at my belly. I offered the coin to Liu.
“No no no no no no no!” he said. “Beggar! Not Liu! I work job. You got job for me, missy?”
“Not today.”
He shrugged his sharp-boned shoulders. “Okay,” and he scampered away in search of a paying customer.
In the Old City, I watched a group of artisans carve ivory and jade into incredibly intricate tiny figures. A few steps away, professional letter writers enticed customers with chants that I could only guess at: “Your mother in the provinces wants to hear from you one last time before she closes her eyes to join the ancestors.” “If your sweetheart doesn’t get a letter, she’ll marry Wang from the glassworks.” “There is an inheritance waiting, you only have to write and ask for it.”
I walked through the street market and marveled at the wild fowl in bamboo cages, their feathers snowing all around me. A woman who looked like she’d been alive for centuries tucked a skinny live chicken under her arms, trapping its wings. She hailed a rickshaw boy, who already had a customer, but he lowered the shaft to the ground anyway so the woman could tie the chicken to the bar of the rickshaw. The barefooted boy lifted the rickshaw and trotted with the chicken flapping up and down and protesting noisily. The passenger plugged his ears as the chicken screeched, “Quawk! Quawk!”
The woman tried to hold the chicken in place, plodding as best she could alongside the rickshaw. But the poor old thing hobbled on bound feet in threadbare silk slippers no bigger than a baby’s shoes. I wanted to help, but how? Help the chicken? Help the rickshaw runner? Help the old woman with the broken feet? I inched closer until the woman took notice of me. She shouted something to the boy, who dropped the rickshaw bars with a resounding clatter and stared at me. The woman, her face as creased as a walnut, gawked at my crowd-stopping nest of red hair. She smiled, not a tooth in her head. Even the chicken stopped flailing and peered at me as if he’d never seen a redhead, either.
Four years in China, and I was still every inch a foreigner.
Back in Hongkew that evening, I couldn’t wait to get Erich alone to tell him about my day. We’d set up a chessboard on the curb, and while he studied his moves, I described the junks and sampans in Soochow Creek as though he’d never seen them before.
“The houseboats are jammed together, square and brown, with planks from one boat to another, so people can cross over. Each boat has a different gigantic eye painted on either side of the bow. Without those eyes, the boat couldn’t see where it was going. That’s what they say.”
“Superstitious,” Erich muttered.
“But there’s such life on those houseboats, Erich, whole families. Some of those people never leave the boats their whole lives, can you imagine?”
“I imagine I’ll be in this ghetto my whole life.”
“I refuse to let you think that way, Erich.”
He made a move on the chessboard. I could already see I was doomed in this game. He picked at the raw skin on his thumb, his particular nervous habit. We all had them. Mine was twirling dry strands of my hair. I’d once had more hair than I could corral into a tam, but now it stuck out like a scarecrow’s thin straw.
“Any more from the jolly world of houseboats?” Erich prompted.
“There was a sort of funeral.” He looked up. Funerals, his cup of tea. “Lots of chanting and wailing, and the children on the boat stood quietly by. Then they slid it into the water.”
“Slid what?” he asked, his eyes back on the board.
“The body, wrapped half in bamboo, half in tattered sails. He’ll float toward the Yangtze, I suppose.”
“Like we will someday, wrapped in our holey bedsheets.”
“No, Erich,” I told him firmly. “When the war’s over, we’ll go home to Vienna.” Lying, even to myself.
Erich had no room in his heart for delusion. “Not possible.”
“To America, then.”
“Bah.”
“To America. Do you hear me?”
Tanya and I lay on my thin mattress with our legs straight up the wall to absorb a bit of its coolness when we heard something teasing the apartment door as if it were a snare drum.
“Too hot. I can’t move,” I moaned to Tanya. “You go.”
I rolled over to see who was at the door. Kneeling at Tanya’s feet was the yeshiva boy, Shlomo Liebovitz. He jumped up just as Tanya squatted down to see who he was, but then she got up and he squatted. Up and down a few more times, as if they were on a calliope.
Tanya and I burst out laughing as Shlomo pressed himself against the far wall, lowering his eyes, of course. He wasn’t supposed to be in the company of single young women without a chaperone, and the poor boy looked like we’d hexed him.
“Why are you here, Shlomo?” I asked.
His eyes were on the wall, as he pointed to a jar of something reddish purple at Tanya’s feet.
“Borscht!” Tanya cried, snatching it up.
I came closer, watching that ugly liquid slosh in the jar. “What is that?”
“Soup, cold beet soup,” Shlomo stammered while searching for the battered English words to state his mission at my door: “I bring betrothal gift for my beshert.” He daringly shot a glance my way, blushed the color of the soup, then lowered his woeful eyes.
Tanya said in Yiddish, “I could love a man who brings borscht.”
He brightened at the sound of his own language and subtly shifted his head from me to Tanya.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Reb Liebovitz. I am Tanya Mogelevsky, from Vinnytsia.” She turned shy, hugging the borscht jar.
Shlomo backed toward the stairs, then ran. We watched him clutch the banister as he rounded each landing, his black coat flaring behind him like a cape.
From the bottom his Yiddish words echoed throughout the house, and Tanya translated: “I shall have Reb Chaim call on your father tomorrow, Miss Mogelevsky!”
It was no longer a rumor. Fact: All enemy nationals would be sent to internment camps, even members of our Shanghai Volunteer Corps, even its Jewish members. British, Americans, Dutch, and other people who’d lived in comfort in Shanghai would soon have to give up their homes and their businesses and their work and freedom, and live behind barbed wire. We Jews in the ghetto, at least we could get passes to come and go occasionally. They would be locked in for the duration of the war, however long that took. There’d be guard towers. Escapees would be shot.
“This is horrible, Mother. Can they do that?”
&nb
sp; “The monsters can do anything they please,” Mother said.
The Japanese had prodded us into our rat-infested square-mile ghetto like cattle into a barn. We had to lick their boots for the slightest privilege. They’d all but starved us. Word trickled down to us that the Kempetai brutalized political prisoners, and the luckier ones got sentenced to the Ward Road Jail, where they would most likely die of typhus. And there was the despicable Ghoya.
Even through all that, I hadn’t hated our captors as bitterly as Erich did, or the others in the Underground. Sure, the Japanese infuriated me, and I blamed them for the hunger that plagued me every minute of the day. Still, safely tucked in with my family, I thought of all those cloak-and-dagger REACT assignments—outsmarting our Japanese captors and brazenly flirting with danger—as adventures to enliven the wartime doldrums. As long as I didn’t get caught.
But this—locking up American citizens—this was more than I could forgive. I loved all things American. Clear and simple, Japan was an enemy of America. Reason enough to hate them. Despite the gentle Kawashimas next door, and Dovid’s reminder that the people were good, that only the soldiers were evil brutes, a new revulsion for the Japanese rose in me like bitter bile. Suddenly I longed for another REACT assignment, a vital one that I could carry out with a righteous vengeance.
It came during my month’s pass out of Hongkew. Erich walked me briskly to the Baikal Cemetery, where we could talk without being heard.
“The dead have no ears,” he said. We sat on a granite bench, surrounded by crumbling headstones. “REACT knows you have a narrow window of freedom for two more weeks. They want to send you by train to Hangchow.”
A year before, I’d have protested. Send a western girl not yet sixteen alone on a train to a strange Chinese city? Maybe some other girl, not me. But with my new searing hatred for the Japanese brutes, I’d risk anything to get back at them.
“You’re to pose as a tutor for a rich Chinese family. Madame Liang has hired you to teach German and English to her twelve-year-old granddaughter. Spring Jade would like to study in England someday. Of course, you’ll fail miserably as a tutor and will come right back to Shanghai.”
“You don’t have much confidence in me. What if Spring Jade adores me?”
“She doesn’t know you like I do,” Erich teased. “Anyway, this isn’t a joke. You’ll be carrying vital information for Free China, and you’ll have to get back to Shanghai as quickly as possible, before anyone wises up. I don’t know any more. Don’t say a word about this, especially not to your blabbermouth friend, Tanya.”
“She’s so head over heels for that yeshiva boy that she hasn’t got time for me. She’s even stopped searching for that horrible cat of hers. But what will I tell Mother and Father?”
“Think of something.”
“I’ll say I’m staying at Tanya’s house for a few days, a little holiday while her mother’s away.”
“Away where? Off with her Japanese lover?”
“No more soldiers, Tanya told me. Anyway, Mother doesn’t ask questions these days.”
“Just be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. I’ll give you the details when I get them.” He glanced left and right, to be sure a gravedigger wasn’t listening. In the distance we heard hired Chinese mourners keening and tearing at their clothes, their hair. It was a way to make a living.
“This assignment could be dangerous, Ilse. Are you sure you want to do it?”
I nodded. What a great motivator hatred is! Walking toward the ghetto gates partway with me, Erich suddenly peeled away and vanished, leaving me alone to seethe about the inhumane way the Japanese were treating members of the Allied nations. We refugees were stateless, we had no political power, and no other country wanted us, so of course the Japanese could push us around. As well as the English and the Dutch. But who would guess that American citizens could be locked away so easily? I was sure Americans could never be so barbaric as their enemy. Why? I kept asking myself. Why can’t the Japanese behave more like Americans?
Well, I’d soon enough do my small part to get even. I whispered, “Spring Jade, here I come!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1944
Why was it taking so long for my REACT assignment to come through? Each day I asked Erich, “Where’s my letter from Madame Liang?” I waited, twirling strands of my hair until it was so snarled that I couldn’t get a brush through it. I didn’t care how I looked now that Dovid was gone.
One day in early June, word spread through the house: A Japanese soldier was on his way up the stairs! We were terrified. Mother and I scurried around like mice, stuffing into the rolled-up mattresses anything that might look the least bit suspicious or anything of value that might catch the eye of the marauding soldier. One by one, doors opened as his boot steps passed each apartment. Relieved, those lucky neighbors watched to see where he was heading; who was his victim?
He went directly to the Kawashimas’ apartment. We heard the whole exchange through the plywood wall, although we didn’t understand more than a couple of words. The tone was clear, though: It was a friendly visit, and also a hurried one. I watched the soldier back out of the Kawashimas’ apartment, with much bowing and smiling on both sides of the doorway; but he looked nervous, and he bounded down the stairs so fast that our neighbors didn’t even have a chance to slam their doors.
A few minutes later, Mrs. K came over with a letter from America. Since American mail couldn’t get through to occupied China, her cousin had sent the letter to a friend in Switzerland with instructions to forward it to a Kawashima cousin in Tokyo, whose neighbor was that soldier who’d put such a scare in us. He’d been home on leave because his wife had just had a baby. Now back in Shanghai, the soldier violated all military regulations, and at huge risk to himself as well as his wife and new son, he personally hand-delivered the letter to Mrs. K.
Her husband wasn’t home, and she was nervous about opening the envelope alone. We always expected terrible news. Mother and I huddled around her while she read the letter. Suddenly her face drained of color as she mumbled in Japanese.
Mother put her hand on our neighbor’s arm. “What is it, Mrs. Kawashima?”
The woman slapped the blue letter against her chest. “My cousin Tamiko and her family, they are all remove to a camp, a few year ago already. Home, strawberry farm, all gone. All Japanese in America, this has happen. I do not understand. All their life they live in California, United States. Never live in the old country. And now, barbed wire all around.”
“Like us,” Mother said gently, as though she expected this catastrophe.
But I was shocked. In America such things happened? My America? It was just a mistake in the translation. Had to be, I told myself. But the horrible truth seeped in through the cracks in my armor.
Still awaiting my assignment to Hangchow, I wandered through the teeming streets full of vendors and cooks. One ancient, black-robed man tapped his cloth shoe on a treadle and waved a drill at passersby. It looked like it was left over from the Inquisition. His sign, in both Chinese and English, read: DENTAL WORK, VERY CHEAP. Even Chang, the beggar, steered clear of the dentist!
Hsu Chen was the professional letter writer in our neighborhood. I’d passed his bamboo stool a million times, and it was always occupied. But that day when I felt so despondent over America’s betrayal of my trust, the stool happened to be vacant, and Mr. Hsu beckoned to me.
“What is your heart’s song?” he asked in perfect English. “My calling, you see, is to write letters for people who cannot write themselves. With reverent words I help them sing their heart’s song. Times past, I wrote these letters on beautiful, handmade rice paper. Times past.”
“Business is always booming at your table, Mr. Hsu. No matter how poor people are, they always have a fen for a letter.”
“Ah, but now my stool is waiting. Please, sit down. I will teach you.”
The first character he taught me was jên, patience. “I have watched you pass
here many times. Perhaps patience is difficult for you?”
How did he know?
He showed me what each stroke of the character means. “You see, young lady? Jên has a knife over its heart, symbolizing that it is unwise to provoke a person’s patience. It is also unwise to lose one’s patience.”
He guided my unsure hand through the air and a dozen times dry across his table before he allowed me to dip the brush in the black ink he’d just ground and moistened on the inkstone. I was impatient to see my bold and beautiful handiwork on paper, even if the paper were only smudged Chinese newsprint, and not the lovely rice paper Mr. Hsu remembered so fondly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Erich rushing toward our building with a new suitcase. That could mean only one thing. I jumped to my feet. “I’ll come back another day, Mr. Hsu. I’ll be patient till then.”
Erich had the orders and supplies for my REACT assignment. Mother and Father were out of the apartment—a lucky break—and I dressed behind my curtain while Erich quickly filled in the details. Pulling back the curtain, I tapped a wide-brimmed white straw hat onto the crown of my head.
My ever-sensitive brother blurted, “It wouldn’t hurt you to comb your hair.”
When I finally got the comb through my snarls, I twirled around for his approval.
Erich’s catcall-whistle made me feel pretty for the first time in ages, and with a pang I remembered Dovid’s drawing in which I’d looked healthy and beautiful. Where was Dovid?
My fancy clothes, plus the ones in my satchel, and the books and toys that were supposed to be for Spring Jade, were all compliments of American Underground resistance money. The fake passport in the patent leather bag was pure Jewish artistry, and it looked like the real thing if you didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass. I was Margaret Loeffler, citizen of Danzig, Germany. A letter from Madame Liang of Hangchow nestled in the bag, also. It was written in India ink on her familiar, thick, creamy paper: