by Lois Ruby
That night he didn’t come home at all, the first night he’d stayed away since Mother left. Father searched for him, but it was hopeless in the dark streets and crush of people in Hongkew. Besides, he’d probably fled the ghetto and could have been anywhere in the vast city.
We wrestled through sleepless nights. Father, Tanya, and I searched for Erich four full days. Our nerves were wound as tight as the strings of The Violin, and there was no sign of him anywhere.
Liu, yes, he’d find Erich for us!
Winter and summer, Liu was dressed just the same—in shorts and a knit shirt buttoned to the neck, no jacket—but now there was something new, a pair of combat boots at least three sizes too big. These he proudly displayed, showing me how he’d stuffed them with newspaper to take up the miles of space his feet didn’t occupy. What drunken soldier had he stolen them from? I clucked over his boots the way we might have admired someone’s new Mercedes in Vienna, and when I had him quite buttered up, I pulled out a photo of Erich. “Have you seen this one today?”
“Elder brother,” he said. His intelligent eyes bored into the photo.
“Can you find him for me?”
Liu grinned at me. “Can do, missy, can do, can do, can do!”
But it was the one thing Liu couldn’t do.
Not knowing where else to turn, we left the ghetto. Father and I talked Ghoya into a pass on the pretense of his playing a concert. We bent to the wind and walked all the way to the Beth Aharon shul to see the rebbe. Inside, it was blessedly warm and dark and velvety-quiet except for the muffled chanting of the students in the next room.
The old man listened patiently to our story, stroking his beard. His lively eyes reflected Father’s worry. “Reb Shpann, my boys are free to walk the streets; they study as they walk. Each pound of the pavement drives deeper into their heads the words, they shouldn’t forget a single one. You have maybe a picture of your son?”
Father handed him the photograph, already five years old but the best we had.
“My boys will look low and high, Reb Shpann. As the Holy Book says, ‘If you save one life, it is as if you saved the world.’”
Three more days dragged by with no word.
A dozen times a day I asked at all the cafés, the homes, the shops, the soccer fields. No one could remember seeing Erich in at least a week. Fear began to grow into a hard rope knot in my stomach.
Desperate, I took a giant risk and tapped the code at the door of the godown where REACT met. Gerhardt opened the door a crack, recognized me, and slammed it again. I banged ferociously until he gave up and grudgingly let me slip in the door rather than risk a ruckus that would bring Japanese soldiers to the godown.
“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have come, but it’s about Erich. He’s gone missing.”
Rolf came up behind Gerhardt. “Probably went under the bridge.”
“Not drowned!” I cried.
“Nah. Just an expression. Means he got out. Without a pass. Just melted into the throng out there. Pftt.” He swirled his finger upward, implying that Erich had just billowed up like chimney smoke and vanished in the crystal air. “Or maybe they’ve got him in one of the jails. He’ll turn up, one way or another.”
Meaning alive, or dead.
Eight days passed. My nerves were unraveling like an old wool sweater, and it didn’t help that The Violin screeched hour after hour. People down in the lane kept looking up to see where the suffering cats were being tortured. The urge was overwhelming to tear The Violin out of Father’s arms and smash it against the windowsill. In desperation I turned to Mrs. Kawashima, the closest thing I had to a mother those days.
“It’s Erich,” I wailed, my hot tears soaking her blouse. “Nearly two weeks he’s been missing. I don’t know what to do!”
She listened and gently stroked my shoulder. “My husband has friend, very important person, from when Mr. Kawashima is translator. I will ask my husband if he can make careful question.”
“Oh, would you?”
Her smile was warm, but her face was serious. “We must do in the Oriental way. Not march forward and ask too much, too soon, you understand? Very delicate.”
And so we invited Mr. and Mrs. Kawashima to share our skimpy supper of half-rotten vegetables and potatoes cut so thin you could see daylight through them. Although the Kawashimas were just as poor as we were, somehow they managed to bring a fat orange—the only fresh fruit safe to eat because of its thick skin. We tore the orange into wedges. Mr. and Mrs. K ate their portions behind the cover of their hands, then daintily plucked the pulp out of their teeth with an ivory toothpick, in the Japanese style. Father and I just slurped and sucked, all the way to the bitter rinds.
After the formality of supper, Father bowed and got down to business. “Kawashima-san, forgive me for asking this of you, but is there anything you can do about my son, Erich? He’s disappeared on the outside, with no pass and no papers.”
My heart stopped, waiting for Mr. K’s answer.
He picked a morsel of orange off his shirt. “Permit me to talk to the assistant deputy director of Sanitation.”
“Oh, Mr. Kawashima, what on earth could Sanitation do?” I asked rudely. Father flashed me a disapproving look.
But this was man-to-man business, and Mr. K bowed toward Father. “My friend knows someone whose cousin is a regimental organizer in the Pao Chia, at the Hongkew gates. My friend’s friend’s cousin will study the situation, Shpann-san.”
“We are enjoy your music,” Mrs. K said. “So much prettier than noise outside.”
Four more days crawled by, and finally Mr. K came with the news that his Sanitation friend’s cousin had found Erich!
“Is he in danger, Kawashima-san?” Father asked.
“Little is known, Shpann-san. My sources are uncertain just where your son is. Maybe it is not good.” His look suggested something far worse than his words did. “It is possible to get further information.” Mr. K hesitated, and Mrs. K gravely nodded her encouragement. “I am grieved to tell you, Shpann-san, but there must be an exchange of money.”
It seemed a bribe was necessary to oil the machinery if any progress was to be made.
“Please, Father,” I begged, beyond all shame.
Father didn’t even hesitate. He thrust The Violin into Mr. K’s hands. “Take it. It is a worthless piece of lumber to me now, not enough wood even to burn for fuel.”
Mr. K soberly cradled Father’s Violin. Bowing deeply, he backed out of our apartment in silence.
CHAPTER THIRTY
1945
Two days passed before we had any word.
“Shpann-san,” Mr. Kawashima murmured, “I am sad to bring unhappy news.”
Mrs. Kawashima clasped a paper-thin lilac handkerchief to her lips, signaling us to expect the worst.
“He is a political prisoner. Ward Road Jail,” Mr. K said soberly.
I reeled, sinking into a chair. Everyone knew that two weeks in that dreadful place spelled death by typhus.
“What should we do, Kawashima-san?” Father asked, grasping my arm. His fingers were brittle and bony. I didn’t think they could even hold a bow anymore.
“There is hope,” Mr. K assured us. “On Wednesdays, sometimes the guards turn one eye away and allow family to bring food. Middle of the week, not many deliveries. Also, this saves money, you see. Very efficient.” He glanced at Mrs. K, and she gazed off into the distance. “However, they will expect a small payment.”
“But we have no money!” I cried, “and nothing left to sell.”
“Ah, there is a solution. They know how it is with Shanghai people. Westerners, no money. Japanese, no money. Chinese, no money. But the day guard at Erich-san’s cellblock has a … I believe American expression is sweet tooth.”
Mrs. K snickered nervously behind her handkerchief.
“Sweet candy is very hard to find,” Mr. K said. “He will bend rules for peppermints.”
“And where are we to get peppermints in the middle
of a war?” Father asked, his voice dripping with irony.
“I know, Father!”
Mr. K looked me over shrewdly, but kindly. “I see your daughter knows that the man Ghoya likes very much peppermints. He imports them from Harrod’s, in London, somehow, I am told.”
“I’ll ask him for some,” I said with confidence, remembering how he’d said, “I like redheaded girls.”
Mr. K gave me another of his penetrating looks. “The man Ghoya does not welcome you to visit political prisoners. However, westerners can be very clever,” Mr. K said, his mild voice full of craft.
After two hours of freezing in the stingy sunlight, I was finally next in line at Ghoya’s office. Even outside the door it was clear that he was in a foul mood. His shouts came from all over the room while he circled his prey. When the door opened, a man staggered out, pale as parchment and no pass in hand.
“Next!” Ghoya shrieked. His secretary, one of our people, prodded me into the office with an apologetic sigh.
Ghoya was perched on the corner of his desk, with one bare foot tickling the floor. His odd, M-shaped mustache—like Hitler’s, in fact—was also like a misplaced third eyebrow, and when he smiled, his eyes nearly disappeared. “A long time I haven’t seen you, Redheaded Girl. Your eye is better?”
“Yes, sir.”
The room was overheated, and Ghoya had two fans going to cool himself. Heating and cooling, both—what a greedy pig he was, with his hair fluttering in the wind of the fans as though he were lolling on a beach some windswept afternoon. The desk rocked on uneven legs when he shifted his weight, sending the fishbowl of peppermints tottering behind him. I was mesmerized by those candies and almost saw red and white stripes across Ghoya’s homely face.
“What can the King of the Jews do for you today, ha? You want to go out? Meet a special boy, ha?”
I had my lies all planned out. “No, sir. It’s my mother I want to see.” This disappointed him, romantic lizard that he was. “She’s in one of your excellent civil assembly centers, sir, the one in Chaipei.”
“Yes, yes, we take good care.”
“I’m sure, sir. And you generously allow one visit each month, too. I would dearly love to see my mother next Wednesday, sir.”
“I can do this for you! What can you do for Ghoya?”
“Very little, I’m afraid, sir.”
His eyes roved over me until bile rose in my throat. He hopped off the desk and circled my waist with his fat little hands. I might have been cast in bronze, so still I stood.
Ghoya said, “Skin and bone. Ghoya likes lotta meat on a girl.” He dropped his hands in obvious revulsion, turned around, and stamped a pass for me. Red on white.
The peppermints. “You, you’re too generous,” I stammered, finally letting blood flow to my arms and legs again. “Oh, I’m ashamed to ask you one more favor. You see, my mother adores peppermints. She’d think so highly of you if she knew you’d sent two or three along with me. A special gift from you, I’d be sure to tell her.”
“I import from London. Very expensive!” He wrapped his little arms around the fishbowl in a gesture that said, Mine! You can’t have any! “We play a game, okay, Redheaded Girl?”
“Sir?”
“I shake candy bowl. Any fall out, you can take to your Jewish mama, okay?”
He tossed the bowl up above his head. Half a dozen wrapped candies sailed through the air before he caught the bowl. I scuttled to gather them all up, and while I was on the floor at his feet he dumped the entire bowl. Peppermint candy pelted me like hail.
“Ha-ha-ha!” His cackle was the sorriest excuse for laughter I’d ever heard.
I made sure to grab my pass before I left with a burglar’s booty of candies stuffed in my pockets, my shoes, my waistband, even under my ponytail. All the way down the hall I heard his diabolical “Ha-ha-ha!” and pitied the next person in line.
At Ward Road Jail, in the cool of the morning on Wednesday, I clutched the meager bundle of food I’d scraped together by shamelessly distracting the Chinese owner of a sparse fruit stand on Housan Road. I’d pointed to the sky, wailing, “American bombers! Take cover!” and as the man tented his hand over his eyes to search the sky two puckered oranges sank into my pocket.
Oh, the glorious packages we used to get! Those American cigarettes would be such choice bribes for Japanese guards or a welcome diversion for the prisoners.
The concrete walls of Ward Road Jail loomed gray and forbidding, and made me feel like a hamster in a gigantic cage. At seven o’clock I waited inside the walls to be let into Erich’s cellblock. I’d already been patted down for contraband by a guard whose lingering hands repulsed me. He and Ghoya were cut from the same slimy cloth.
He tore open the rag that bundled the food. His face lit up at the sight of the peppermints, which he handled with such tenderness you’d have thought he was caressing a newborn. Spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. “Not good for prisoners,” he mewled, pocketing the candies.
Another guard led me past one cellblock after another, each cell crammed full of people. I gagged on the stench of air saturated with the rankest of human odors. The chill penetrated my bones.
In Erich’s dark cell, about twenty Chinese and westerners hunched together on the concrete floor. My eyes pierced the darkness, and I made out a few women who occupied a back corner. On their knees in a circle, they formed a human curtain while one of them used a toilet built into the floor. The rest of the prisoners pretended not to notice, or no longer cared.
Nor did anyone seem to notice me standing there. It was as though they’d lost the will to move, since moving meant giving up their little plot of land—a wall to lean against, a clean patch of floor, a narrow swath to stretch out their legs, the broad back of a neighbor for support. Some of them could be dead already and still propped up. My head swam with the putrid odors and the sight of this desperate clinging to life that was less than life.
It took a while to spot Erich in the crowded cell. He and another foreigner, backed against one another, were rolling their shoulders in unison, in a pitiful attempt to exercise their stiff bodies.
“Erich,” I whispered.
The suspicious eyes of a few men, trapped animals, darted about; but mostly people just ignored me. When Erich spotted me, he rolled to his knees, clearing a path toward me with his head. Someone else moved right into Erich’s spot against his partner’s back.
“Ilse? My God.” His voice was little more than a wheeze.
I knelt to his level and thrust the oranges, the bread, a precious piece of crisp duck fat, between the narrow bars. Suddenly every starving dog picked up the scent, growled, and ripped the food out of Erich’s hands. A man bit into one of the oranges, rind and all. The duck fat disappeared into the cave of an old man’s mouth. I thought about Chinese fishermen who put rings around the necks of diving cormorants so the birds couldn’t swallow the fish. I wanted to reach in and dig that duck fat out of the man’s throat because he was old, his days were numbered. Erich desperately needed the nourishment.
I passed the Thermos of boiled water to him and stuffed a bag of tea leaves and three peppermints I’d hidden in my hair into his ragged pocket. “I’ll get you out!” I hissed, squeezing his limp hand. “Please, Erich, don’t lose hope. Promise me. Promise me!”
He nodded. His eyes were dark, sunken pools.
I wondered if the others would kill him for the peppermints.
Outside the prison walls, an old woman’s tiny body shuddered with her dry, hacking cough as she pummeled a guard with a dead pigeon, dooming him and all his ancestors with vile Chinese curses. Whatever she was saying, I completely agreed.
U.S. air raids were getting more and more common. Sirens wailed, and we dashed for shelter wherever we could. Some ran to the Ward Road Jail and the protection of its high concrete walls, but I would rather have been blown to bits than take comfort in such a horrid place.
Tanya and my other school friends waved handkerchie
fs and cheered at every B-17 bomber that soared overhead. Each plane convinced us that the war would be over soon and America would win. Americans had always won. But would Erich live to see it happen?
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1945
“Redheaded Girl! So soon I see you again? You go out too much. Get in trouble too much. Where you want to go now?” Ghoya sat behind his gunmetal gray desk, which hadn’t a single paper on it. Even the peppermint fishbowl was gone.
“Sir, please allow me to come right to the point. It’s about my brother. He’s in the Ward Road Jail.”
“What he did?”
“Nothing, sir. It’s a terrible mistake.”
Ghoya jumped to his feet and pounded his desk. “No mistake! No mistake!”
“I understand, sir, but I beg you to listen to me.” I stood at the foot of his desk, nearly choking on these words: “You are the King of the Jews. I implore you to be generous, like your own emperor, Hirohito. A monarch takes care of his people, sir.”
He sat down again, leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head and his feet propped up on the desk. He didn’t look a bit regal. “What you want this time?”
“Please, sir, my brother is my family’s only sustenance. As you know, my mother is gone to an internment camp.”
“A camp? We don’t have camp!”
“You’re correct, as always, sir. I mean a civil assembly center, as a guest of the Japanese government. My father is a musician and isn’t well. He can’t find work. I only have two hours work a week. There are very few jobs in the ghetto.”
“Ghetto? We don’t have ghetto!”
“Forgive me. In Hongkew, sir. We’ve been taking one meal a day in a home. It’s barely enough to keep some flesh on our bones. My brother has a job, sir. We all depend on his modest income. He’s a delivery boy.”