by Lois Ruby
Crooking my finger, I lured him over. During the years of our strange friendship I’d picked up some Chinese, and he’d picked up a lot more English, especially from American soldiers.
“Hallo, what’s up, missy?”
“Liu, this week we leave Shanghai. Sunday, two o’clock our ship sails.”
“Yeah, yeah, we go to America!”
“Not we. Me, with my family.”
“What for do I stay here, missy?”
“This is where you belong. Your life’s here.”
“No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda!”
I inched Peaches toward him. “You want this?”
He circled the bike like a man about to buy a new automobile. He picked some gravel out of the tire, tugged at the grinding chain, spun the tired pedals. “Old bike. Not worth two cents.”
“I’m not selling it. I’m giving it to you.”
Liu slowly raised his head to stare at me, his mop of hair hanging in his eyes. “For no money?”
“Free. You almost stole it once. Now it’s yours, if you want it.”
He turned his back to me and stuffed his hands into his waistband. Crusty elbows jutted out. Suddenly I saw what was going on. No one had ever given him such a grand gift, and he didn’t know how to handle it.
“Liu? Look at me.” He turned his head like a suspicious cat, like Moishe used to, peering at me over his shoulder. “You take the bike.” I rolled it toward him, wrapped his hands around the handlebars. “Now, you say, ‘xie xie, thank you,’ and you ride away. Here, climb on.”
He shook his head, hair flying, and refused to get on the bike. We argued back and forth until I realized that this crook who knew his way around every swindle in Shanghai, and who’d probably left a body or two bloating in the Whangpoo, didn’t know how to ride a bike!
I stabbed at his arm until he swung his leg over the bike and dropped down onto its ripped seat while I balanced the handlebars. One foot on each pedal, he began spinning them fiendishly.
“Goes nowhere!” he complained.
“That’s because the kickstand’s down. See?” I lifted it and continued to support the handlebars until he caught his balance. Well, I should have known—he was a born tightrope walker. Two tumbles, and he conquered the bicycle and rode off into the wind, yelling, “Bye-bye, missy, so long.”
We searched Mother’s and Father’s faces for a clue as to how it had all gone in Hangchow.
“And?” I asked.
“So?” Erich asked.
Father cleared his throat for an announcement, and I braced myself for the worst—Father in China, us six thousand miles away in a new life.
Mother stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder, as if they were posing for a formal photograph. Father said, “Your mother must teach me English before we arrive in Santa Rosa. I do not want to sound like a foreigner and embarrass all of you.”
I rushed toward him and threw my arms around him. Erich, with his usual reserve, said, “Excellent.”
Mother had tears in her eyes. “So, let us begin with the alphabet, Jakob. Say after me, a, b, c, d, e …”
Tanya’s wedding had been scheduled for October, but she hurried the plans along so I wouldn’t miss the big day. Mr. Bauman’s entire café had to be made kosher under Reb Chaim’s supervision. Tanya and I shrank from the blasting heat of the blowtorch as we helped the rebbe scorch Mr. Bauman’s oven.
Proudly Tanya said, “Everything will be prepared according to strict Orthodox dietary laws. Also our home!”
Reb Chaim actually took his black coat off and rolled up his starched shirtsleeves to kasher the kitchen. His arms were covered in black hair, darker even than his beard.
Our job finished, Tanya ran to the butcher shop for a slab of brisket for the wedding dinner, and I stayed to clean up. The rebbe rolled his sleeves down over his furry arms, and I said, “Reb Chaim, something’s on my mind. May I ask you a question?”
“Ah, the young lady with a mind of her own. Your father warned me! Yes, ask, ask.”
“I’m happy that Tanya is Shlomo’s beshert,” and I’m not, but I didn’t add this.
“So, if you are happy, why are you looking so sad?”
“I wondered, are we allowed to celebrate when so many of our people are dead in Europe? Their bodies are barely cold, Reb Chaim.” My eyes filled with tears. To our horror more and more details were reaching us. Camps had been liberated: Dachau, … Auschwitz. We were seeing pictures of walking skeletons. The numbers of the dead were in the millions. All those bones.
Reb Chaim buttoned his sleeves and tugged at his beard before he looked me in the face sternly, his glasses lopsided on his nose. “The Holy One, blessed be He, commands that we rejoice with bride and groom, and so we rejoice.”
I nodded, vowing to try.
“Even if our hearts are breaking,” the rebbe added.
The magnificent red hat with the peacock feather was long gone from the milliner’s window, so Tanya had to settle for my plain straw hat from the Hangchow trip, and also my yellow suit, which her mother altered to fit Tanya. She’d plumped up again on food Shlomo brought her from the yeshiva. Erich watched her duck-waddle and said, “She’s got hips for bearing. They’ll probably have fourteen snively little Shlomos.”
The wedding! The day after my seventeenth birthday and two nights before we were to sail for America, everyone we knew jammed into Mr. Bauman’s café, where Dovid and I had spent so many hours. How long ago? Two years.
Men on one side, women on the other, we flocked around the chuppah, the wedding canopy, behind Tanya and Shlomo, stepping back to allow room for Tanya to make the customary seven circles around her groom.
“May you soon bring many children into the shelter of your love,” Reb Chaim said.
Tanya played the modest bride with fluttering eyelashes and hands clasped at her waist, but Shlomo strutted through his wedding as though he’d invented the role of bridegroom for a Hollywood movie. A klezmer trio played sweetly mournful tunes for the wedding ceremony, and raucous ones as soon as Reb Chaim officially pronounced Tanya and Shlomo husband and wife. Shlomo stomped the wedding glass to bits, and we all shouted, “Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” Mr. Bauman smiled generously, although I think it was his very last glass.
There was wild dancing, men with men, women with women, and a cake, which Mr. Schmaltzer baked in Mr. Bauman’s kosher kitchen. Although the cake turned out smaller than Tanya’s grand vision, it was the best we could do with our whole community’s combined rations of eggs and flour and butter and sugar, and every guest had a bite.
Nothing so robust, so noisy, so messy, so purely joyful, so European, had happened in our Chinese ghetto for eons.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
1945
The hardest thing about leaving Shanghai was saying goodbye to Tanya. She tore herself away from her new husband to spend the last hours with me. Well, he was already studying like a fiend, anyway, two days after their wedding. Tanya and I walked the streets of Shanghai with our arms locked. Me, a teenager on her way to America, and Tanya, already a married woman!
“Well?” I asked, curious about her wedding night. She wouldn’t tell me a thing, when there was so much I needed to know. All I got out of her was, “My Shlomo, such a gentleman he is,” and she quickly changed the subject: “Oh, how I will miss you.” She stopped to hug me again and again.
“You’ve been my dearest friend in the world.” My voice sounded creamy with tears.
“Except for Dovid Ruzevich,” she teased.
Him. I hadn’t stopped thinking about him, but in my heart I knew our paths would never cross again. “Oh, he was only a childhood crush.”
Tanya pushed me just far enough away so she could see my tear-streaked face. “Don’t say that, Ilse. He was your first love, which makes him unforgettable. Look for his face in America. You’ll meet again, you’ll see, and so will we. Another two months, we’ll be settled in Canada, Shlomo and I, so you’ll come to visit us. Canada�
�s just up the street from America.”
We strolled along the Bund. The harbor was filling with merchant ships once again, no longer just the Japanese warships. My palm was tented to shade my eyes, and I glanced across the Whangpoo River over at Pootung, with its low, seedy warehouses and burned-out factories.
Tanya said, “We’ll miss this awful place when our stomachs are full and we’re sleeping on feather beds so high you need a stool to climb up.”
“Miss China? No.”
“Oh, admit it, Ilse.”
“Never!”
But as we walked through the streets—both the grand concourse of the Bund and the dark back alleys—I thought a lot about what I was leaving. All the years I’d lived in Shanghai, six plus two months, I’d been a westerner in the East, a redheaded, pale-faced foreigner among millions of natives who belonged where I didn’t. I’d always thought of China as a way station, a place to park our bodies until we could get home, wherever home turned out to be. And now …
If I should go back to China as an adult, I wondered, would I find it frozen in time, just as it looked when I was leaving, just as it’s looked for a hundred years, a thousand years?
The street markets with the eels and monkeys and frogs and wild, wing-flapping fowl and storm clouds of swarming flies.
The rickshaw pullers dripping sweat, napping between runs with their coolie hats pulled over their faces.
The Buddhist pagodas carving out long, thin swaths of the sky, and the old-fashioned buildings with their eaves curled upward like gigantic pixie toes.
The apothecaries promising cures in a thousand ginger jars, boxes, vials, tubes, and cellophane bags brimming with mysterious, dried brown herbs and powdered parts of exotic animals.
Street kitchens where live sea urchins and shrimp finally give up their fight in a giant pan sizzling over hot coals. Roasting gingko nuts. The sugary sweet potatoes. Clackety chopsticks.
And the people, millions and millions of them walking, bicycling, pulling and pushing weighted loads, all owning their space so surely that they never collided with one another. In six years I’d never learned that trick.
Ghoya. Hunger and cold. Bayoneted guards, passes, armbands, blackouts, bombs. Night soil. REACT.
Mr. Hsu, the letter writer. Reb Chaim and Mr. Bauman. The Kawashimas.
All of it, good and bad, a safe haven for the duration of the war. Otherwise we’d be dead.
“Yes, I’ll miss China,” I told Tanya with a deep sigh. We swung our arms and skipped down the Bund, and the Chinese stared at us carefree, show-offy foreigners, as they always had. “But I’m ready to go.”
The dinky room suddenly looked huge with all our things gone. We gave Erich’s mattress to Chang, so the beggar wouldn’t have to sleep on the bare street any longer.
I made one last visit to Mr. Hsu’s table.
“Have you come to visit your heart’s song?” he asked.
“My heart’s song is silent,” I told him, thinking of Dovid.
“A young lady has many songs in her life. With patience you learn to sing them.”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I’ve never quite gotten the knack of patience, Mr. Hsu.”
“This does not surprise me.” The old gentleman smiled warmly. “I will not see you again in this world, but we will remember one another, will we not? I give you something to take with you to America.” He brushed some beautiful characters on a piece of yellowed paper. “It is an ancient proverb to remind you that we are not so far apart.” He chanted it to me, moving my fingers over each character, and translated: “‘The way is one, the winds blow together.’”
And then, after six endless years, it was suddenly time to leave China. Mrs. Kawashima soaked two handkerchiefs with tears. She clung to Mr. K’s arm at the dock, both of them dwarfed by the giant ship that would glide us across the ocean. “Maybe someday we go to America,” Mr. K said, giving us his new, lopsided smile.
Mother and Father thanked them for all their kindnesses. “For taking care of my children while I was away,” Mother said, hugging Mrs. Kawashima.
Father bowed. “Kawashima-san, I cannot thank you properly for the gift of my violin.”
Mr. K bowed toward Father and petted The Violin’s case as if it were a patient dog waiting at Father’s feet. “My honor to know you, Shpann-san.” Both men bowed again, and Father quickly ushered Mother aboard the ship. They’d never been comfortable with farewells.
Erich was already aboard, waving to me from the deck and shouting into the wind, “Come on, you’ll miss the boat, Ilse!”
Mrs. Kawashima tucked a round bundle under my arm, proud of her new prosperity to afford a whole loaf of crusty white bread. “Take for a bite if you get hungry,” she said through her tears. “See? I tell you long time ago, maskee! Everything turn out all right.”
“I’ll never forget you, Mrs. Kawashima.” I kissed both her cheeks and started up the gangplank. There were hordes of people everywhere, and the ship’s whistle warning that we’d be pulling up anchor soon.
One familiar voice cut through the throng. “Wait, missy, wait for me!” I spun around, and there was Liu parting the crowd. He rode Peaches like a unicycle, with his arms straight up in the air, just as I’d seen once in a circus. He tried to pedal up the gangplank, but a white-uniformed crewman blocked Liu’s path. I watched a ferocious argument between the two and made my way down to the dock to rescue the crewman from Liu’s badgering and the loss of his wallet.
“Liu, what are you doing here?” The crewman backed away, clearly relieved.
“We go to America,” Liu said merrily.
“I go. You don’t have a ticket.”
He waved an envelope. Did he have a ticket after all? Was he planning to go with us to set up his con artist enterprise in America! Was America ready for the likes of Liu?
The envelope was gray and crumpled and sweat-stained. “Somebody give this to me for you, missy. Long time ago.”
“Who?”
Liu shrugged his shoulders, motioning someone tall, sad-eyed. What an actor! “He told me, when missy leave China, give her.” Still straddling Peaches, the combat boots he’d finally grown into flat on the ground, Liu said, “Good trip to America, missy. I watch out for Shanghai till you come back home and whistle.”
Home. This city was as much home as anywhere, yet never home.
“Bye-bye, missy, so long,” Liu called to me, saluting like an American soldier as he stormed his way through the crowd on Peaches.
I scurried up the gangplank seconds before the crew pulled it up into the belly of the ship.
Most of the passengers were on the deck watching as we sailed out of port. The voices on the shore called out: “Bon voyage!” “Auf Wiedersehen!” “Sayonara!” “Zàijiàn!” But it was the silence and solitude I craved, not the farewell party, so I locked myself in my cabin. Beside my bed was a crystal pitcher of pure, cold water, so clear that I could read the clock on the other side of the room through the water and glass, even in the late-afternoon shadows.
Liu’s envelope looked like something salvaged from the trash, which was Liu’s home, of course. Clutching the envelope, I lay down on crisp white sheets that transported me to a distant memory of Vienna—sticky, wet starch and Mother’s hot iron sizzling on a sheet still damp from the clothesline. Clean, everything in my cabin was clean and clear and quiet.
I turned the splotched envelope front and back. No writing on it. Liu said someone had given it to him for me, but the one thing I knew for sure about Liu was that you couldn’t believe most of what he said. Maybe he was embarrassed to admit that it was really from himself. I tried to imagine what might be inside. Certainly not a farewell letter, since Liu couldn’t read or write a word, not even his own name in his own language, and anyway, a goodbye letter would be too sentimental for hard-boiled Liu. And it wouldn’t be money, since he had none, although I suspected he had a cache of booty stashed away under a pylon somewhere, and one day he’d be rich as a warlord, gr
owing fat on sweetmeats and hundred-year-old eggs.
Liu, yes, I’d even miss the conniving bandit.
I opened the envelope, and out slid a rough sheet of sketch paper. Charcoal from the face side had bled through. My trembling hands unfolded the paper with my heart racing in anticipation. And there it was—a delicate sketch of a short bridge that dipped and rose gracefully like a harp. Smudges of black represented a Japanese couple strolling arm-in-arm across the bridge, suspended above gently rolling waters. In neat block letters the artist had captioned the sketch:
Kobe, Springtime
D.R. 1943
The motors churned, and the ship’s whistle signaled that we were pulling out of port. Soon Shanghai would be a dot on the far horizon. So much behind. So much ahead. Maskee!
Author’s Note
When I was five in 1947, I lived on a Caribbean island. The Dominican Republic—for its own self-serving reasons—was one of the few countries that opened its borders to Holocaust survivors without passports and without quotas or restrictions. My mother, then a young widow, worked for the American embassy as a translator for the Jewish refugees who poured into that country. She met a Polish man who had survived Hitler by escaping to Shanghai. Now he needed an American wife so he could immigrate to the United States. In an act of enormous generosity and faith, my mother married the man—and divorced him within weeks, according to their agreement. He never lived with us, and I have no idea what became of him once he settled in America.
Since then I’ve had a simmering curiosity about the Jewish experience in Shanghai. What was it like for European Jews to live in so alien a place as China? How did it feel to be stateless? To know that your homeland would never welcome you home again? To wonder where on earth was your home? And if the Japanese were aligned with Hitler, why did they shelter some twenty thousand Jews in their midst?
Years ago my husband and I went to Shanghai to capture details for this book. We visited a site dedicated to the “stateless Jews of Europe,” in a lovely new park greening the ghetto of Hongkew (now spelled Hongkou). With tears running down our faces, we stood in front of that granite monument and read the words engraved in English, Hebrew, and Chinese. Around us stood a respectful half circle of elderly Chinese people who must have been puzzled by the reactions of such sentimental foreigners. This book, Shanghai Shadows, began to take form that day, and it has been with me every day since.