Shanghai Shadows (14 page)

In a short time our ghetto boasted Yiddish theater. At first, Father and The Violin stayed busy, but without pay. Also, we had lots and lots of sports. The Chaufoong Road Home had a huge soccer field, and we watched the matches for free. People with a little money bet on them.

Dovid and I were walking along Yangztepoo Road, hand in hand, when I asked, “Why don't you go to Chaufoong Road and play soccer? You said you were the best goalie Saint Ignatz School ever had.”

Dovid stopped to glare at me. “I told you about that day, Ilse, remember? My last soccer game, my parents, my sisters. Do you think—”

“Do
you
think that kicking the ball around a field will make your family disappear all over again? Stop punishing yourself, Dovid. Have some fun.”

“I sketch,” he said by way of defense.

“What fun!”

“So? What do
you
do for fun?” he asked.

That required some thought. Finally I came up with a paltry something. “Tanya and I hang out on the curb outside the jazz clubs lots of evenings. We jitterbug and imagine that we're gobbling huge platefuls of food like the rich people inside.”

“This is fun?” Dovid asked.

“Better than drinking lukewarm tea made with three-day-old tea leaves at Mr. Bauman's,” I retorted. He reached for my hand; I pulled it away. “Erich's right: There's no place for chocolates or love in wartime.”

He flinched at the word
love
. How stupid of me.

“I can't stay here any longer,” he began.

Now I'd scared him off. “You have a pass?”

“I refuse to curry Ghoya's favor. No pass. I'm … disappearing.”

Tears clouded my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I will find a way to go into the interior. China's a vast country. I can get lost. Tibet, I may go there. The landscape is mystical, good for sketching.”

“But why, Dovid?”

“Why? Why? Because! Nothing keeps me here.”

“Me?”

“There's no future here for us.”

“But the war will end someday. Soon, I believe.”

“And then what?”

No one knew. America was a faint hope, or maybe we could go to Argentina, where Mother's brother lived. Argentina—it seemed worlds away.

“You see? You have no answer,” Dovid said, tauntingly. “You will grow up.”

“Dovid! I'm nearly fifteen. That's old, for wartime.”

We stopped at a flinty bench. An old couple made way for us, maybe seeing in us the young lovers they'd once been. Young lovers, hah! We were in the middle of an ugly fight. We whispered, and it wasn't easy to argue in a whisper.

I made a brave effort, anyway. “How selfish can you be, leaving this way?”

“And I thought selfishness was your gift alone.”

“That's cruel, Dovid, and you know it.”

“You say anything on your mind. No thought for other people's feelings.”

“As if you have any!”

The old couple struggled to their feet and left us to our battle.

Dovid's voice rose to a whiny level I'd never heard before. “Do you think I
like
living in a bombed-out tenement like I do, without so much as a hook to hang my coat on? Where is my self-respect? Gone. But I suppose it's what I deserve.”

“Yes, because you let the Nazis take your family. It's all your fault for playing soccer when they came to your village, right? Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. It's not attractive.”

“What do you know, Ilse? You have led a charmed life, in the shelter of a mother and father and brother.”

“Charmed? Look at me, Dovid, look. I'm in tatters, my hair is leeched straw, my nose runs constantly, I'm hollowed out. Charmed? I should say so.” Also, I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing that he'd caused a throbbing in my temples that would gather into a fierce headache before the night was over.

“Here, I'm useless. Maybe I can do something for our people somewhere else.”

“Just what do you think
you
could do? You're no Sugihara!” I shot back—a mean, low blow that I regretted the minute it was out of my mouth.

Dovid jumped to his feet and stood in front of me. “Let's stop this. We're saying things that hurt. It is our last time together. Tomorrow I go.”

I nodded, swallowing hot anger. “Will I ever hear from you again?”

He held my face, brushing tears off each cheek with his rough thumbs. “I will find you,” he promised, “if we are both alive at the end of the war.” We walked back to Houshan Road in silence, close, but not touching. He left me at the shadowy door of our building. “Be selfish, it is okay,” he advised. “You will need to watch out for yourself, to survive.” And he was gone.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

1943–1944

I cried myself to sleep for several nights, but I had to do it silently. There was no such thing as privacy in our apartment, and I didn't want Mother and Father to know about Dovid. He was the only possession I refused to share, even if he was gone. Those memories were mine alone to hoard.

We heard more and more horror stories about Ghoya, who had absolute control over our comings and goings. In July, Mr. Shaum, an old man in our building, pleaded with Ghoya for a pass to visit his wife's grave on the
yahrzeit
, the anniversary of her death. He caught Ghoya at a bad time—and was sentenced to a week of house arrest in his airless room on the fifth floor. When a foul odor seeped from under his door, Erich and another boy in the building broke the door down and carried Mr. Shaum's decaying body to the local cemetery. A week later, Ghoya forced a pregnant woman to kneel in his office for an hour while he stared at her and shouted, “No more Jews! Too crowded!”

But with school out and no chance of a job, I longed to see things outside the ghetto walls, so I began thinking of schemes to charm Ghoya. Erich had tried it the week before, and that turned out to be a disaster. He told me the sorry story as we were killing time. So much time on our hands.

Chang, the beggar whose territory was our lane, waited for us to pass, palm outstretched. Erich gave him the usual two grains of rice. To me he said, “Ghoya was in a rat-foul mood.”

“When
isn't
he?”

“Worse than usual. Maybe he'd just eaten some spoiled sushi, or his wife had spent all his yen at the Race Course.”

“The toad is married? So, what lie did you feed him?”

“I told him, ‘I have to see Song Lingyu at the docks. He promised me a job,' which isn't true, but if I could get there and convince Song Lingyu to write a letter, that's all I'd need.”

“Would a letter from Madame Liang help?”

“Are you crazy? Anyway, Song Lingyu wouldn't have to hire me or pay me, just write the letter confirming that he had a job for me, and that would get me a work pass out of Hongkew.”

“Ghoya wasn't buying it, right?”

We passed the table where Mr. Hsu ran his letter-writing business. He wore the long black gown and black skull cap typical of old China. An impatient line formed by his table, some people fanning themselves with blue envelopes to read, and others chomping to get their letters written.

“Man, Ilse, you should have seen the Little King.” That was our nickname for Ghoya. “He shouted, ‘Song Lingyu! Ghoya don't like Song Lingyu!' He started jumping up and down and calling me names in half a dozen languages. I tried to keep a straight face, but it was hilarious watching him dance around like Rumpelstiltskin. I couldn't help it, I started laughing and couldn't stop, couldn't even catch my breath.”

“Oh, Erich! What happened?”

“Well, you do
not
laugh at this asinine little gnome.” My brother did his best to hold in howls of laughter; they exploded, anyway. Mr. Hsu looked up from his calligraphy, and all his customers stared at us loud westerners.

“No, you don't laugh at the Little King,” I said, biting my lip. “Okay, so he didn't give you the pass?”

“Worse. He put me on probation. I think he knows I'm the one who found Mr. Shaum. It's a warning to me. I can't apply for another pass for twelve weeks. But I have ways of getting out, and incidentally, I will personally strangle you if you try sneaking out yourself. Don't be stupid like I am.”

“Dovid got out,” I said.

Erich registered only mild surprise. Maybe he already knew. “Lucky man.”

“I'll never see him again. What about me? I'm the one that's grieving.” I put my hands on my hips, elbows jutting out in indignation. “Erich Shpann, don't you
dare
think about leaving me alone with Mother and Father. We'd never see you again. God only knows where Dovid's gotten to, or if he's still alive.”

“Lucky man,” Erich repeated, and I wondered if he meant lucky because he'd escaped or lucky because he was dead—which I refused to believe.

Father had very little paying work. The chamber quartet had disbanded. He still had two or three willing students but nowhere to teach them. Days passed and The Violin stayed in its case, propped on top of our rolled-up mattresses. Maybe Father would take it out and rub a little oil onto its belly, maybe tighten its strings; but he stopped playing, even at the free concerts. Instead, he sat by the hour in cafés grousing with other fathers who had no work. From Tanya I'd learned the Yiddish word
mensch
, man, but it meant more than that. It meant a real, full, functioning, righteous human being. I could hardly stand Father's swimming in self-pity, and I'm ashamed to say, there were days when I just wanted to shout at my father: Be a mensch!

Not that Reb Chaim, the head of the Mirrer Yeshiva, was the perfect example of Jewish manhood, I quickly learned. He came to our house one afternoon while Mother was at Mr. Schmaltzer's bakery. Although it was hot enough to burn your feet on the sidewalk, the rebbe wore a long black coat and a fur-trimmed black hat that covered his ears and floated on the edges of his bushy sideburns. He must have been sweltering, especially inside our airless little apartment. We'd scrubbed the window and pried it open, but you'd think it was an insult to its reputation to let a breeze waft in.

Father asked me to leave while he talked to the rebbe. I listened at the door, of course. After all, I was practically a trained spy, thanks to REACT—which hadn't used me at all since I'd been in the ghetto.

Reb Chaim's mission was almost too horrible to contemplate. He led a whole tribe of pimply, pious student scholars—future rabbis, no less! And they were all, as he said to Father, “in need of virtuous wives.” One had his eye on me. “His name is Shlomo Leibovitz. From very good stock,” Reb Chaim told him, as though Father were shopping for cattle. “But your lovely daughter—what is her name?”

“Ilse.” It sounded musical on Father's lips.

“This is a Jewish name?”

“In Austria, yes,” Father replied.

“Austria, ah,” Reb Chaim said dismissively. “Reb Shpann, you've studied the holy books?” Fortunately, he didn't wait for an answer, because Father was far from a scholar. “Ah, then you know that when the Holy One,
baruch hashem
, blessed be His Name, when He made the world, at the same time He matched all future brides and grooms. So your daughter, Ilse, maybe she meets Shlomo Liebovitz, and she doesn't feel a spark. Not a problem. She can take her pick of a dozen of my boys, every one brilliant, I say with humility.”

Take my pick? I'd sooner jump in Soochow Creek. Father must have heard me groan outside the thin wall. He opened the door then and silently shook his finger at me, motioning me to go away so he could talk to the rebbe.

I waited in the lane until Reb Chaim left, then dashed upstairs to beg my father to be reasonable.

“Father, if you said yes, I'll never forgive you. Never!” I shouted. I heard things go silent in the Kawashima apartment. It was their way of pretending they weren't home when we had a family squabble. Calming down, I whispered, “Please don't make me marry one of those rabbis. All they do is study, study, study. Please, anything. I'll take up The Violin again. I'll practice twelve hours a day. What did you tell him?”

Father wrinkled his forehead and gazed up at the ceiling. Oh, God, he'd promised me to one of those horrid boys; I was sure of it!

Then Father smiled mischievously. “‘Reb Chaim,' I said—”

“Yes? Yes?”

“I told him ‘Thank you, my family is honored, but my Ilse makes up her own mind who she's going to marry.'”

I leaped to my feet and hugged Father. It had been a long time between hugs.

“Violin lessons again, daughter? We can begin at once,” he teased.

The really odd thing was, Mother believed I should consider marrying one of those deathly students. “The yeshiva boys eat well, they have a nice roof over their heads—outside the ghetto, I might mention. They have winter coats, fur hats. They're good boys, smart. Don't thumb your nose at such things.”

“But they're going to be rabbis!” I protested. “Besides, I'm only fifteen. Look at me, Mother. Do I look like a rabbi's wife, really?” I made a face that brought laughter to Mother's eyes, as she said, “Still, it's not a bad prospect for a Jewish girl in China. We
are
Jews, I remind you.”

We were Jews, all right—especially to Hitler—but religion was a different matter. In Vienna we weren't at all religious, and during our four years in Shanghai we'd only been to the synagogue once, on Pearl Harbor Day. Since we'd been penned in Hongkew, though, Mother had begun blessing Sabbath candles in halting Hebrew and talking about how we, too, should learn the Hebrew prayers of our ancestors. This religious awakening seemed to be happening all over the ghetto, and maybe it was comforting to some people in our dire circumstances, but marry a rabbi? That was going too far!

Tanya and I window-shopped along Chusan Avenue. We'd heard that the milliner had an exotic, new red hat in the window, perched on a blank-faced wooden head that someone forgot to give eyes and a nose and a mouth.