by Karen White
“How old are you?” David’s questions came rapid-fire now, like a journalist or policeman interrogating a suspect.
How old? In other circumstances, the question would have been routine. “Nineteen,” Ella replied, a beat too quickly.
She looked reflexively over her shoulder and smelled the burning incense in the back of the shop where the man had made her papers. The forgery had been a good one, worth the precious gold coin Mama had paid for it. The immigration officer in San Francisco had scarcely looked at the documents before stamping her passport and handing it back. “You don’t look Chinese,” he had quipped instead, laughing at his own joke. The trick had worked, but her secret was still there, lingering, waiting to be discovered.
Ella watched David’s face, wondering if he believed her. Though her hair was rolled in the grown-up way Mama had shown her, Ella was undeniably petite, and her thin, sparrowlike frame made it difficult to pass for her actual age, much less three years older.
“Nineteen,” he repeated evenly. There was a part of her that wanted to trust him and tell him the truth. Secrets shared were so much less of a burden. But she did not dare. “You look younger.” She blushed, silently pleased at what otherwise would have been a compliment. He was looking at her admiringly, and for the first time, she did not mind the attention. Then her stomach twisted. Looking younger meant she could not pass for the age on her papers, and that she would not be able to stay. She held her breath, wondering if he would push the matter.
When he did not, she changed the subject. “Where do you live now?”
“Home?” He cocked his head. “I’m not sure where that is anymore. I’ve been staying at the Y while I earn my way. It’s a community center,” he added, before she could ask. “They have a dormitory with a lot of beds. I teach drawing classes at night there to earn my keep. I’m an artist.” So that explained the elegant fingers and keen, observant gaze. “Or at least I was. I studied painting at Charles University. My work was beginning to be shown in the major galleries,” he added, in a frank way that kept him from sounding too boastful.
“After the war started, I spent two years sleeping in the forest, helping the underground document what the Germans were doing and trying to get word out to the west. Then I came back to find everything I knew gone.” A chill ran through Ella. “Later, I was arrested as a political prisoner. I was lucky,” he said, though the way he pronounced the word suggested anything but. “I survived the camps because I was strong enough to work.” There was a thinness about him still that spoke volumes about the starvation he had endured. A deep, pale line ran from the collar of his shirt to his ear, and she wondered if there were other scars, ones she could not see.
Ella raised the glass bottle of soda, cool beneath her palm. She took a sip, and the unfamiliar fizz tickled her nose deliciously, causing her to sneeze. Sticky cola spilled over the rim onto her chin. David extended a napkin. Then, seeing that her hands were not free, he dabbed at her mouth in a way that was both too familiar and just right.
“I’m twenty-four now. I was just a boy when the war started.” She nodded. Six years was a lifetime. They had grown up knowing war instead of school and dances and the usual things. But life happened alongside the fighting. How might her own world have been different if the war had not been?
“Were you glad to come to America?” he asked, steering the conversation back to her. Ella considered the question. She had not wanted to come alone. It was not just the length or danger of the journey, but Papa’s temper, which was as quick and unpredictable as his laugh. Mama had a way of defusing his anger and cajoling him into a better mood, and she had shielded Ella from blows on more than one occasion. Ella did not relish facing Papa’s wrath on her own, and the awful memories, which had faded with the years, had come back into sharp focus during the long nights crossing on the ocean liner.
She had not liked their confining life in China, either, though. Jobs for women had been scarce and prospects for marriage still scarcer. Like Tom Schwartzer, whom Mama was always pushing Ella to invite around. Anywhere else he would have been considered ugly and awkward, but in Shanghai’s Jewish community he was a prize. So Ella had welcomed the chance to leave. But saying farewell to Mama and Joseph on the pier had been heartbreaking. Ella had not considered whether or not she could do it—she was a practical sort, putting one foot in front of the other, peeling her brother from around her legs and trying not to hear his cries as she boarded.
Those first few minutes on the deck of the ship had been the hardest. However, when land slipped from sight and only the wind blowing her hair remained, Ella felt free in a way she never quite had before. Guilt enveloped her then—how could she feel good leaving those she loved behind?
“I had to come for my mother and Joseph—he’s five.” There was a note of defensiveness to her voice.
“And what about you? What do you want for yourself?” Ella had not thought about it much. Just the doing, of getting here and finding Papa so they could bring the others over and finally be together as a family, was enough. “Each of us must find his or her own path. It’s like this book I just read.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a book with The Fountainhead emblazoned upon the cover. “Would you like to read it? I’m finished.”
Ella eyed the book. She had managed to fit just one in her bag, a Mark Twain novel that a missionary had left behind at the bakery years earlier. She had reread it on her journey until the binding had fallen apart. At the train station in San Francisco, she’d looked longingly at the bookseller’s stand, not daring to spend the money. She desperately wanted to take David’s book, but she would have no way to return it, and she hardly knew him well enough to accept a gift. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “It will be good for your English. You should try listening to the radio as well. Some of the programs are a bit fast to follow, but something simple like Little Orphan Annie, or soap operas like The Guiding Light. The women seem to like those.” Which women? she wanted to ask. But it was none of her business. He held out the book to her. “Here.”
“Oh.” She noticed then the gold band on his right ring finger. “You’re married.” Disappointment tugged at her.
“Yes. That is, I was.” There was a slight shake to his voice. “I had been away for months with the underground. One day, I came back to find my wife and son, Emil—he was two—gone.” His tone was even and unemotional, as though telling a story reported in the newspaper, not his own. Ella felt guilty for having spoken to David of another child, her brother Joseph, but she had not known about his son. “I searched for them without success until I was arrested. After the war, I returned to Prague, hoping that they had gone back and were looking for me. I learned that Ava had been taken to Auschwitz and died there. But Emil, I could not find. Ava never would have let him go, so I can only assume . . .”
“I’m sorry . . .” Ella fumbled, unable to grasp the magnitude of his grief, vaster than anything she had ever encountered. Her guilt rose again. There were two types of Jews, it seemed—those who had suffered in Europe and those who had not.
David cleared his throat. “Thank you. There’s nothing to be done. It’s surreal, though, to go from that to this.” He gestured with his hand at the scene around them where passersby milled, eating peanuts and other snacks with post-rationing abandon, making their way toward leisurely weekend plans. “People here, they didn’t know.”
“In China, either,” she hastened to add. News of the war had come to Shanghai first at a trickle, bits about Hitler’s march across Czechoslovakia and Poland. Later, as the refugees came, news poured in, but it was still fragmented. Everyone knew of someone who had been arrested, but not personally, and so the stories took on the air of a novel. It had been easy to try and, if not dismiss the rumors, at least limit them somehow. To claim that those taken were political activists, troublemakers—not like us. Like trying to say someone who died from illne
ss had gotten sick because they had not taken care of themselves, an attempt to distance and deny.
One day there was word of a transport of Jewish children that were coming to Shanghai, escaping without their parents from the situation that was undeniably worsening. The principal, Madam Boudreau, made preparations, squeezing extra desks into each classroom. On the morning the children were scheduled to arrive, the students went down to the harbor with welcome signs and balloons and waited for hours. Ella had felt giddy imagining the new friends who might arrive, and the adventures they might share. But the ship did not come that day or the next. Eventually the desks were moved or used to stack books.
Only later would they learn the true extent of the devastation, villages burned to the ground, innocent women and children slaughtered. No one outside of Europe seemed to have known how far spread the killing had been. There had been signs, though, hadn’t there, in China, as well as here? Even the Jews had not wanted to admit such things could possibly be in the era of radio and movies and cars.
David held up his hand. “I should take my ring off. I just wasn’t ready.”
“There’s no rush,” she chimed in quickly.
“I lost others: my mother, my sister.” David ticked them off methodically on his fingers, his grief a faucet that, once opened, could not be easily shut again. He paused expectantly, waiting for her to share her own losses. But Ella had nothing to offer. She lost no one in the war, a notion that would surely be inconceivable to him. It might have been her family, too, if they had fled Stalin’s Russia west instead of east. Many times over the years, Ella had gazed longingly at the fashion magazines and wished that she had been in Paris or Milan. But exile to strange, dusty Asia had proven a gift, the difference between life and death.
He blinked, clearing the sadness from his eyes. “You are going to family?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, grateful to have something to answer this time. “My father.” She handed him the piece of paper with the address.
“Hmm . . . Brooklyn. That’s lucky—you can take the bus straight from here.” Ella exhaled slightly. “Where does he work?”
She looked down, fidgeting with her cuffs. “I’m not sure.” An element of uncertainty crept into her voice. Papa did not know she was coming. They had always planned it, of course—he would go ahead and send for the others. In the beginning, his letters had been so bright, talking of plentiful work and full shelves in the grocery stores. But details of his actual life were vague. Papa had come to America when a group of visas had opened up for railway workers, claiming experience on the Trans-Manchurian line to Harbin. In reality, manual labor was foreign to him. He was a musician and a bootlegger, a vagabond who played lively tunes at bar mitzvahs and weddings, but had never been able to hold down a sensible job. The bakery in Shanghai was his in name only. It was Mama who got up before dawn to make the bread, then dress and sell it behind the counter.
Papa’s correspondence had dwindled, and it had been more than six months since he had last written. Meanwhile, things were getting worse in Shanghai, the distinctions between the refugee Jews and those who were permanent residents mattering less and less. She realized this when the grocer from whom they had bought food for years would no longer serve her. Even though she had lived among the Chinese her whole life, they still considered her a foreigner—and a Jew first. So when she saw a notice of an additional quota of visas, she had registered for one, and boarded the ship less than a week later without writing. She hadn’t the money for a phone call; she had thought about sending a telegram but decided against it. But that was okay, wasn’t it? After all, she was family. She hesitated now, wondering.
Her back straightened. She did not, of course, intend to be a burden. She would get a job and earn her keep, though doing what, she wasn’t exactly sure. Education in China still followed the old model, training women to be wives and mothers and not much else. But she knew how to do things from watching Mama—knitting and baking and taking care of children.
David handed the paper back to her. “I didn’t have anyone here. They wanted to send me west right away, but I persuaded the man at customs to let me work in New York for a bit. He gave me papers to work for a few months, just enough to earn my fare. But my papers are about to expire and I’ve made enough, so I’m going.”
Ella’s heart seemed to skip a beat, though she was not sure why. “Where?”
“The Midwest, Missouri or Nebraska.” Ella cocked her head—she had just come through the West, and could recall nothing but wide, desolate prairies stretching endlessly in either direction out the train window. “New York is too crowded. There’s opportunity out west, though. Kansas City will be my first stop, and if not I’ll keep going until I find the place. I’ll know when it’s right.” He spoke with the confidence of a man who had nothing left to lose.
“What will you do?”
He shrugged. “I’m strong. I’ll find work, and maybe someday I’ll earn a living as an artist. Dreams are fine but you have to be willing to work for them.”
“Will there be Jews?”
“That’s an odd question coming from someone who has spent her whole life in China.” The words sounded like a rebuke, and Ella’s cheeks burned as though she had been slapped. She started to tell him that there were Jews in China. The community had been small, to be sure, when they lived in Harbin in the early years. It had been there, though, and had grown, especially once the refugees flooded Shanghai.
Ella looked up and saw the twinkle in David’s eyes and knew that he had been teasing her. She chuckled. It was odd to laugh so easily with this near-stranger, but it felt good, too, after the weeks of solitude. Then he shrugged earnestly. “Someone has to be the first to go. If people knew us, maybe it would not be so easy to let these things happen.” He was talking about the killing in Europe. She wanted to point out that people there had let the Nazis massacre their Jewish neighbors after living side by side for centuries.
“Anyway, other Jews don’t matter so much to me. I’m not a religious man,” he added. “I left God on that killing field at Birkenau. I believe in things I can see and touch, in the ability of man to make a difference for better or worse.” His words unfurled like a wide landscape. Then the corners of his mouth fell. “Or maybe my not believing is a form of self-defense.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If there is a God, he will surely demand an accounting from me. I was involved in political causes at great danger to my family.”
“David, you were off fighting for what you believed in.” It was suddenly as if he was in a deep hole, and she was trying with her words to reach him.
“I was selfish.” He dropped his voice, as though not wanting the passersby to hear. “The night before I returned to the city, I was celebrating with the men over a small skirmish in which we had beaten some Germans. The next morning I came home to find everyone gone. The Gestapo had come looking for me and arrested all of the residents of our street. They shot a dozen men—whether they resisted or it was simply in reprisal for the dead Germans or refusing to disclose my whereabouts, I don’t know. The destruction was fresh—you could still smell the blood through the smoke. If I had come a day earlier . . .” He buried his head in his hands. “It’s my fault they are gone.”
“No!” Ella searched for words to comfort him. “You couldn’t have known.” His family had died because they were Jews, and the Germans killed Jews. But the remorse would always be with him.
“I never should have left them,” he lamented.
“The work you did . . . you had to try and help.” David did not seem like one who could fight and kill. But he had stood up, in his own way. She placed her hand on his shoulder.
A moment later he looked up and cleared his throat. “I never told anyone that before,” he mused. “I wonder why I’m telling you now.” She saw then the deep lines in his cheeks, the way in which his
features must have hardened over time. But there was a light in his eyes, and an undeniable energy about him.
“How do you do it?” she asked. “How do you keep going after all of the pain?”
“Because I’m alive. To lie down would be an affront to my family.”
A young woman in a pilot’s uniform strode past, neat and self-assured. “It must be nice to have purpose like that,” Ella said wistfully. She admired, too, the woman’s sleek bob with bangs beneath her cap.
“Purpose? You’ve just come halfway around the world by yourself. I’d say you have that.”
She flushed slightly. “I . . .” A loud thudding sounded behind them, causing both to jump. Ella spun to see a pile of crates that had fallen from a delivery truck idling at the curb. When she turned back, David sat frozen, shoulders hunched defensively. She understood then all that he had suffered, and the damage that persisted despite his determination to press on. She wanted to put her arms around him, but she did not dare. “It’s all right,” she soothed.
His face relaxed. “There are some things,” he said, “that are hard to let go. But I’m here now—a fresh start for all.”
“Do you mind it much, being alone?” The question came out more intrusive than Ella intended, for she did not want to remind him of his pain. But she was curious; for her, solitude was an odd, temporary state, to be remedied when her family was back together. For David, it had become the norm.
“I suppose it might bother me, if I allowed myself to think about it.” Ella had thought about it every night as she lay on the hard wood flat of the ship among five other girls, listening to the bow creak and the wake lap up against the wood. She imagined creeping into Mama’s bed, pressing against her for comfort as she and Joseph so often had after Papa had left. “We are all alone,” he added. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, Ella shivered. “I’m used to it now.” Did he mean it, or was he simply determined not to get hurt again, or to love anyone if it meant losing them?