“But you don’t smoke.”
“I traded with another prisoner.”
“What did you give him?”
“Vodka. I stole it from the guards.”
Sergei began to laugh, which hurt his gut. He clutched his stomach.
“I couldn’t let them kill you.”
“I’m just grateful the guard considers me as worthless as a few cigarettes,” said Sergei.
PART THREE
Spring 1906
EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: SAN FRANCISCO IN RUINS
Death and destruction have been the fate of San Francisco. Shaken by a tremor at 5:13 o’clock yesterday morning, lasting 48 seconds, and scourged by flames that raged diametrically in all directions, the city is a mass of smouldering ruins.
—The Call, Thursday, April 19, 1906
15
The shaking of the bed awakened Rachel. After plummeting to the floor, she tried to stand, but the ground shook her to her knees. Beside her, Marty cried out, a sharp, ear-splitting scream that knotted Rachel’s insides. She crawled toward him. Several books fell from the chest of drawers between their cots, one hitting her on the head. Shouts and babies’ squeals were quickly overtaken by banging and crashing sounds.
“We have to get out of here,” yelled Jacob. He and Nucia had also been thrown to the floor and were crawling to the door of their flat.
“What’s happening?” Rachel shouted. On her hands and knees, she reached Marty and wrapped her arm around his waist. A bump had already sprouted on his forehead from his fall. The walls trembled like birch trees caught in a gale.
“The house is going to fall down,” cried Marty. Though he shouted, his voice sounded like a whisper amid the commotion.
Rachel and Marty scrambled into the hallway after Jacob and Nucia. It was jammed with tenants attempting to get down the narrow staircase. Most, like Rachel and Marty, were on their hands and knees.
“What is happening?” asked a woman.
“It’s an earthquake,” someone yelled.
“We’re doomed,” cried another woman directly in front of Rachel.
Nucia and Jacob were nowhere in sight. Rachel called out to them but there was no response. She inhaled deeply, struggling for air in the cramped space. The floor seemed to slide from under her. She and Marty tumbled forward, onto their faces. Rachel reached for the railing above the stairs and pulled herself and Marty to their feet so that they could descend. When they were about halfway down, the shaking stopped and a murmur of relief rippled through the stairwell.
Then the lights went out. New panic ensued, with vicious pushing and shoving to reach the main level.
“Nucia, Jacob!” Rachel called again.
“I’m scared, Rachel,” cried Marty.
Rachel pulled him forward in the darkness. The shaking started again, tossing them down the stairs onto a buxom woman. Then it stopped as abruptly as it began.
Stumbling outside into the darkness, Rachel scoured the area for Jacob and Nucia. Bricks and mortar fell as buildings toppled around them.
“Nucia, Jacob!” screamed Rachel.
“Over here.”
Rachel pivoted around in the direction of Jacob’s voice. He and Nucia stood near a family with three small children who sobbed as they clung to their parents’ legs. Rachel and Nucia ran to one another and embraced. Marty leapt into Jacob’s arms and held on tightly.
The thunderous rumbling seemed to be coming from all directions. Down the street, the Wells Fargo Bank crumbled as easily as a biscuit, crushing people who were standing below. A big boom. A nearby dry goods store came crashing down, its falling bricks injuring some and killing others. Across the street, two men emerged from a boarding house carrying a mattress with a woman and her newborn baby on top. New life triumphed over catastrophe.
Rachel heard a loud crash and wheeled around. Their building had caved in. Their flat was now a pile of rubble. Standing beside Rachel, Nucia wept at the sight.
Rachel could not turn away from the remains of the building where they’d just begun to establish roots in this new world. She waited for tears to fall but none came. She waited for her heart to break. Instead, she felt nothing.
A deafening thud. A large cornice fell and crushed a man as if he were an insect. Her legs buckling, Rachel stumbled down the street to get away from the sight of her ruined home and the broken bodies scattered on the ground. Nucia and Jacob, still holding Marty, trailed after Rachel. The street had sunk in places to depths of three or four feet. Heaps of wreckage appeared, some as high as five feet. The streetcar tracks were bent and twisted out of shape, and electric wires were strewn in all directions like giant spools of thread, uncoiled and dropped at random.
One storefront had fallen into the street, creating a mound of bricks and mortar. The three remaining walls resembled the set of a stage play, an unrehearsed tragedy. Farther along, wagons had fallen over. The horses, still in harness, lay dead on their sides. Black smoke clouded the air like heavy fog.
Beneath fractured street pavement, gas lines had been smashed. Fires ignited, one after the other, as these gas lines exploded. Firemen watched, helpless. The water main lines had also been destroyed, leaving firefighters with no water to impede the inferno. Flames rose higher, spreading from one building to another. At the Windsor Hotel at Fifth and Market Streets, a fire had started, trapping three men on the roof.
“They’ll be burned alive!” a woman cried out.
Somebody do something!” shouted another.
A man carried a ladder to the side of the building where the fire had not yet reached. He scrambled up the rungs, but the heat and flames were too intense for him to get to the roof.
The crowd swelled, and the air was clotted with smoke and terror. A military officer came upon the scene, observed for a moment, and conferred with his soldiers. The soldiers nodded somberly, formed a line in front of the building, pointed their rifles directly at the men, and fired. The men fell and vanished through the roof, into the blaze that now raged higher than the building.
People cried out in horror as the men were shot. Feeling sick, Rachel pressed through the mass of people until she had gone past a few more burning buildings. A brown-and-white dog ran in front of her, barking hysterically.
In the next block, another man lay pinned down beneath the burning ruins, begging for a merciful end. Rachel looked away as a police officer took out his gun.
Reminded of the massacre in Kishinev, where policemen had hurt and even killed Jews, Rachel retreated, afraid to look, afraid to make a sound, afraid to be noticed.
Flames swept across Market Street, igniting building after building. The pavement cracked. A drove of longhorn steers that had escaped from slaughterhouses near the waterfront, rushed down the street toward Rachel. They vanished, one by one, before they reached her. Rachel ran to the spot where they’d disappeared. A giant fissure, created by the earthquake, had swallowed the cattle whole.
Rachel fell to her knees.
All around her, people prayed and cried for help. Rachel crouched over until her hands touched the ground.
How can the earth cause such damage? All the innocent people, the homes and shops gone in minutes. Where do we go from here? How can we start over again? I feel as if we’re cursed, as if we’ll never find a safe place to live.
⚓ ⚓ ⚓
Rachel, Nucia, and Jacob, carrying Marty on his shoulders, stumbled west toward Alamo Square, away from the area south of Market Street that had been flattened by the earthquake. Marty coughed repeatedly as smoke particles filled his small lungs. Jacob took the boy off his shoulders and held him until his coughing eased.
Rachel recognized her own anxiety mirrored in other people’s expressions. Even under a layer of ashes, the terror was unmistakable. She squinted to see if she knew anyone, but individual features were impossible to discern. Even Nucia looked un
like herself, her usually neat hair askew, her face covered with soot.
Another ear-splitting gas explosion. It was as if they were right in the middle of a fiery war. It had been six hours since the first violent tremors rocked the earth.
Finding a small spot on the sloping grass at Alamo Square, Rachel sat beside Marty. Tears had diluted the filth on his small face, forming squiggly lines down his cheeks. Rachel drew him to her and squeezed him tight.
“Rachel?” he asked, with solemn eyes. His breathing sounded raspy and he seemed to inhale with a great amount of difficulty.
“Yes.” With her thumb, Rachel tried to wipe off the dirt on his forehead, but smudged it more.
“Where will we go now?”
Rachel hesitated. She knew that Marty wanted to hear that they would be going back to Shanghai or even Russia. For a second, Rachel also wanted to run back to where at least the earth stood still. What if there is another earthquake, and one after that? How can we set down roots in a place where the ground cracks and fires blaze for hours?
“I can’t say,” she began, eyeing Nucia and Jacob for help.
Jacob cast an apologetic look at Marty, opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut.
“We’re together, and we’re safe,” said Nucia.
“That’s right,” Rachel added.
“I don’t want to stay here,” said Marty. “The shaking scares me and it’s hard to breathe.”
Rachel ran her fingers through his hair and stared at the smoke and flames rising over the streets below. On the far right, the dome of the new city hall vanished in a swirl of smoke.
As the day wore on, people continued to arrive at the square, lugging their possessions in trunks. Some had brought their pets, birds in cages, cats and dogs.
In the late afternoon, cadets from the University of California, Berkeley, and Oakland arrived with wagons carrying buckets of water. A boyish-looking cadet offered water to Rachel. She took the cup and handed it to Marty who drank thirstily. The cadet refilled the cup and handed it back to Rachel. She poured it down her throat. It tasted gloriously cold. She tried to dip the cup in the water again but the soldier gently took it from her.
“Only one per person,” he told her. “Water mains are broken, so there’s a limited supply.” He handed the cup to Nucia who eagerly dunked it in the water and gulped it down.
“If there’s no water, how are you going to put out all the fires?” asked Jacob.
“We’re detonating blocks of buildings to keep the fire from spreading,” the cadet explained.
“You’re blowing up buildings?” asked Jacob.
The cadet glanced over his shoulder as if he were afraid of being heard. “That’s right, with dynamite, but if you ask me, I think it’s a mistake.”
“Why?” asked Rachel.
The cadet took the cup from Jacob. “I have to move on.” He tipped his hat at Rachel and continued to a new group of people nearby.
“That explains some of the blasts we’ve been hearing,” said Jacob.
“I don’t understand how blowing up buildings will stop the fires,” said Rachel.
“By clearing buildings, they’re hoping to get rid of wood and any other materials that would fuel the fire,” said Jacob. He paused. “But I agree with that soldier. Dynamite could end up making the flames grow bigger and stronger.”
⚓ ⚓ ⚓
Afternoon retreated to nightfall. Though the quaking had stopped a long time ago, the fires had not subsided. It was as bright as day. Rachel’s stomach growled. No one had eaten since the previous evening. She wondered when they would have food again and tried to think about something else. But the crackling sound of flames and the constant booming made this impossible.
“How do we know the fires won’t come here?” asked Marty, struggling for air.
“We don’t know,” answered Rachel. She felt the rattling in his small chest as he pressed against her.
Around the square, people lay crushed together like rocks on a riverbed. Voices in prayer spoke faintly but steadily.
“I think they’ll be using dynamite all night,” said Jacob.
The clip-clop of horses sounded nearby. A group of firefighters fell from the wagon that had carried them from the fires to the square. Soldiers handed buckets of water to the exhausted men.
“Water,” croaked Rachel. Her hand reached out toward the firefighters.
“They’re not giving it to us,” said Nucia. “The men fighting fires need it more.”
“But Marty, his breathing,” said Rachel. “He needs water.”
Jacob’s shoulders lowered. “There’s nothing we can do now. It’s not safe to leave the square. Try to get some sleep. We’ll find water and food in the morning.”
Food. Rachel’s stomach growled so loudly she looked around to see if anyone had heard. Marty snuggled in between her and Nucia. Blasts continued in the distance, and flames kept the sky from getting dark.
Rachel rested her head on the ground and listened to Marty struggle for air. Just when she thought he needed to be in the hospital, he fell asleep, his breathing evening out slightly. Rachel exhaled. An old man lying near her began to snore. His rhythmic, heavy breathing eventually lulled Rachel into a restless sleep.
She dreamt she was back on the ship, heading to Shanghai, then on the train, rolling through Russia toward Kishinev. She imagined herself traveling backwards, without stopping, without speaking, without hearing. But when she arrived in Kishinev, nothing remained of her former life. No houses, no roads, no shops, no schools. Even the River Byk, where she’d last seen Mikhail before he’d been brutally stabbed to death, had dried up as if it had never existed at all. She crouched down and picked up the soil where the river had run. It was red and had a metallic smell. Like blood.
Rachel’s eyelids shot open. For a moment, she forgot what had happened. The smell of smoke and the sounds of dynamite blasting through the city brought back the unimaginable events of the previous day. She swallowed. Her throat ached with dryness and dust thickened the morning air like flakes of snow.
She glanced at Marty, still asleep, his face blemished with dirt, his breathing croaky and uneven.
Nucia rose and yawned, stretching her arms out. Rachel gazed past her sister. Jacob was missing.
“When I awoke, he was gone,” said Nucia, before Rachel could ask about Jacob.
Rachel hugged her knees to her chest. “I don’t want to leave San Francisco. No matter how hard it is to rebuild our lives here, I want to stay. I’m tired of traveling.”
“But what if the earth shakes again?” asked Marty, his voice hoarse and rasping. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.
“The fires are still blazing,” said Nucia. “The whole city could burn down.”
“Hopefully, that won’t happen,” said Jacob as he appeared with a bucket of water in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. “Firefighters have been battling the flames all night.”
He offered the water to Nucia.
Marty grabbed the loaf of bread.
“Not so fast,” said Jacob. “Women first.”
Marty pouted. He handed the loaf to Nucia.
Jacob sat down, stretching his legs out. “I couldn’t sleep so I went with a group of cadets to help. We pumped water from an old cistern.”
“But you don’t know anything about firefighting,” said Nucia. “You could have been hurt.”
“I was careful. And the firemen needed all the help they could get. They were actually pumping sewer water onto flames, and throwing wine and vinegar at the fire.” He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a small vial. “A firefighter gave me some vinegar for Marty’s cough. Gargling with it may help.” Jacob handed the vial to the boy.
Marty sniffed the clear liquid and made a face.
“Try it,” s
aid Nucia.
Marty emptied the vial into his throat and gargled. He spat out the vinegar and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ugh,” he sneered. “That’s rotten.”
“It will be worth it if you stop coughing,” said Rachel.
Marty drank some water, swished it around in his mouth to get rid of the vinegar, and spat it out.
“Everything south of Market Street is gone,” Jacob told them. “Synagogues, the Benevolent Society building, the Home for the Aged, even the Haas Brothers store.”
Nucia buried her head in her hands.
Rachel’s bottom lip quivered. She broke off a piece of bread and thrust it in her mouth. She chewed but could not get it down her parched throat. Marty passed her the bucket and she poured some water down her throat, loosening the dried ball of bread until it dislodged.
“Don’t be so fast,” said Jacob. “Eat slowly.”
Rachel nodded and broke off another piece of bread.
“There is no more after this,” cautioned Jacob. “This is all the soldiers have for each family.”
Rachel chewed her bread slowly and watched the flames. Jacob told them that one fire had started by accident while a woman was cooking breakfast for her family. Other fires had been started by people who wanted to collect fire insurance money on their homes, because they were not eligible for earthquake insurance.
“They set fire to their own homes?” asked Rachel.
Jacob nodded. “And those fires started other ones.”
For two more days, the fires raged, destroying entire streets, rows of houses, and shops. More people descended upon Alamo Square. Children, separated from their families, wandered through the mass of people, whimpering softly or crying loudly. Marty coughed more violently each day.
After three days, the flames sputtered to an end. Rain began to fall on the fourth morning, too late to make a difference. Rachel lifted her face to the sky and let the water wash away the soot. She had been wearing her nightdress since the earthquake began.
A troop of cadets, their uniforms soiled and wrinkled, marched along Fulton Street, in the direction of the Ferry Building. They were returning to Oakland.
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