Shanghai Shadows (2 page)

“Home,” Erich said grimly as Mother's face fell.

Not mine. I squared my shoulders and scuttled up the steps to give that brass pineapple a resounding thunk. We waited for someone to open the door. And waited. I glanced at Mother's watch. It had been her mother's, a piece of Swiss workmanship so elegant that it hummed softly and never lost a minute. But already moisture beaded under the glass, and Mother had to shake the watch to clear the fog. One thirty. It was still yesterday in Austria, or was it tomorrow?

Mother opened the red door and put her shoes back on. We four huffed up the stairs, pushing and pulling our bundles and The Violin. The whole trip would have been lots easier if The Violin had sprouted its own legs. At the second landing a door was opened by a girl around my age, holding a white winter muff of a cat. The cat narrowed its eyes and swished its tail across the girl's face.

“Don't mind Moishe,” the girl said. “He's nervous around strangers.” She spoke in Yiddish, but it was enough like German that I could understand her. She looked our family over and whispered something to the white fur. If the cat didn't like the looks of us, would we have to find another house?

There were cartons stacked to the ceiling beside her door. Mother wrinkled her nose in disgust when a cockroach skittered out from under the boxes.

“
Voden
?” the girl said over the top of Moishe's fur, meaning, “What else would you expect in a place like this?” The cat made a snarling sound and leaped out of her arms in pursuit of the gigantic bug. Lunch?

This was not a promising greeting! But then the girl smiled and said, “
Bruchim haboim
, welcome to you all. I am Tanya Mogelevsky. Here I live with my mother, only we two.”

I said in German, “My name's Ilse Shpann. We're new here.”

“I think she can tell,” Erich said, nudging me up the stairs with his satchel.

“Shall I knock on your door after we get settled?” I called back to Tanya, and she nodded.

On the third floor I snapped the key out of Mother's palm and unlocked the door to our apartment. Before us spread a large, sunny room, rounded at one end like a wedding cake, with carved cherubs framing the ceiling.

Mother held her gloves to her cheek. “Oh, Jakob, it's lovely, no?”

Father nodded, not convincingly. There wasn't a stick of furniture in the airless room. Father and Erich opened all the windows, which helped a little.

Three doors were spaced evenly along the wall, the one opposite the wedding cake. “Many doors, a good sign,” Mother said. Her heels clacked across the shiny hardwood floor until she reached the first door, which led to a closet. “Very good, we shall have where to hang our clothes.” Mother hurried to the next door, which opened into another closet, a little bigger. The third door, the same. “So many closets? Where are the other rooms?” Mother asked.

I liked the closet with the small octagon window that let in a lacy pattern of light. But Erich tossed his hat into that room. Spreading his arms from wall to wall, he announced, “I hereby claim this space as mine because I'm the oldest.”

Hah! He was thirteen, with just a hint of orange fuzz above his lip, and those two years over me gave him privileges. Anyway, the space wasn't large enough for Mother and Father's bed; none of the closets were. And now it seemed clear that my room was to be a stuffy shoe box without so much as a square of a window for daylight.

“Moth-
er
,” I wailed.

Father's hand weighed heavily on my shoulder. “We shall make this our home until we can find more commodious quarters.” He set The Violin down in the third cubicle, his studio. Such a fancy name for a windowless wardrobe no bigger than one of our water closets in Vienna.

Erich unbuckled his satchel and began piling clothes and books on the floor of his room. “This is the best we can expect as stateless refugees.”

Mother snapped, “We are not refugees, and we are not stateless. We are Austrians temporarily living in China.”

“Yes, yes, my dear.” Father humored her, but he added under his breath, “We left our home, our work, our photographs, our savings—”

“And Pookie. I'm lonesome for Pookie, aren't you?”

Erich snarled, “Did you really think we could take her on the train through the Brenner Pass and trot her halfway across Italy to the harbor? A
dog
? We barely got past the checkpoints ourselves.”

“But I love Pookie!”

“Children, please,” Mother said. She waved her arms to encompass our home, with its windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and our three impressive closets. “Tell me, is this not a splendid, sun-filled apartment? Three beds, a nice little table, a few chairs, that's all we'll need.” I saw her mind churning with possibilities, and then she said sternly, “Remember, children, we left Austria of our own free will.”

“Ach.” Father slapped his thigh. “Free will, indeed. What else could we do with Hitler's bloodhounds right behind us?”

Mother was riled. I knew because she was telling Erich and me the things she meant for Father's ears. “We
chose
this city, children.”

“This is the only place in the world that would let us in without a visa,” Erich reminded her.

Mother looked as though she might flick his chin with her fingernails—her favorite means of letting us know who was boss—but instead, she shed her suit jacket and ran a gloved finger over the dusty windowsill. “We must always choose the country that is our home. What is important, children, is that we have a solid roof over our heads, and we are all together.”

“What is important,” Father said quietly, “is that we're alive.”

CHAPTER TWO

1939

Father bartered for mattresses, a table and chairs, and a two-burner cookstove, while Mother dusted every inch of our apartment and washed the walls and floors with lukewarm water, since there hadn't been time to buy soap, and anyway, the house had no hot-water heater.

I unpacked my clothes and a few pots and dishes, some books and sheet music, Grandmother's kiddush cup, a clock—the sum total of our treasures from Vienna. Erich went to scout out places to buy food and such necessities as toilet paper, soap, and tooth powder, plus a bamboo basket to carry all our supplies back and forth to the water closet—a community bathroom in the hall where there was always a line. I soon learned to queue up way before I needed to, just in case the urge should overcome me.

The first time I ventured out into the crowded hall, I found Tanya sitting on the top step of the second floor. Moishe gave me his unfriendly gaze. One yellow eye, one brown.

“Why are you sitting out here?” I asked Tanya.

“My mother has company.”

“When my father's violin students start coming, I'll be spending half my life on these stairs.”

“It's only on Friday,” Tanya said, stroking Moishe, who was more fur than flesh.

“Your mother teaches on Friday?”

Moishe jumped off Tanya's lap, and Tanya propped her elbows on her knees. “Teaches? I guess you could say that. One student, every Friday at two o'clock. But not the same one every week.”

I heard muffled sounds coming from the apartment. “What's she teach? Voice? She's a singer?” Just then the door opened, and out came a man who was either Chinese or Japanese, I couldn't tell which, except that the uniform suggested that he was a Japanese soldier. Tanya and I both jumped to our feet as he rumbled down the steps two at a time, clearly in a hurry to get back on duty.

“Class is over,” Tanya said with a sigh.

Soon our apartment swelled with music. Father lined his studio walls with quilts to muffle the sound, which poured out under the door anyway. Each day he said, “Don't worry, children. I'll play with an orchestra soon enough.”

“Don't count your chickens,” Mother said.

Every third refugee was a musician or a conductor or composer, and did they have work? Of course not. All the violin chairs were already filled in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and the music conservatory and the finest universities.

“Each one has another violinist or two greedily hovering in the shadows, rosin ready. Mostly Russians,” Father said with a sneer. Obviously, Austrian musicians were the best in the world, or Mozart and Beethoven wouldn't have spent so much of their lives in Vienna. Viennese doctors, too, and bakers and cobblers. Just about everything from Austria was better than whatever came out of Hungary and Poland and Russia.

Discouragement was beginning to line Father's ruddy face and cloud his eyes. He took in a few students and made Erich and me continue our lessons on The Violin, the only instrument we'd been able to spirit out of Austria. Our parents liked to think of us as a musical family. Mother played the piano. Father, of course, was a virtuoso, famous all over Austria. But Erich and I—well, Father's consolation for having such tin-eared children was that he'd never have to compete with us if a seat opened up in a Shanghai symphony.

Within a few days of our arrival, we began to notice swarms of other foreigners, and that helped us feel more at home.

Mother said, “So many from eastern Europe. No class.” She glared over the top of her glasses at the noisy Czech and Polish refugees on the streets. But I felt sorry for them because Germany had invaded their countries, and war was now raging in Europe.

Also there were French and Dutch and British and Americans on the streets of Shanghai. A most curious sight were the yeshiva boys, pale as paste in their long black coats and fur-trimmed hats, with earlocks that fell to their shoulders in curlicues. They walked two by two, never looking at anyone else on the street, talking to one another and waving their hands as though they were always in an argument.

“Make a face; see if they notice you,” Tanya said. “They're not allowed to look at girls, much less touch.”

“What are they saying?”

“They're Torah learners. Arguing about Bible passages. They study all day and half the night.” The pair passed, making a wide half-circle around us. “Did you notice the tall one with the ring of milk over his lip? He's cute.”

“Oh, Tanya, be serious. They look like undertakers.”

“But I have heard that their rebbe is looking for wives for those boys. Are you interested?”

“
Never!
”

Lots of other eastern Europeans clogged the streets of Shanghai. A bunch of White Russians who'd escaped the Communists years ago had set up their own neighborhood, Little Moscow, in the French Concession, but Mother wouldn't let us go there because the White Russians hated Jews. Everyone seemed to.

Oh, but good Jewish Russians lived in Shanghai, also, and some of them were refugees like us. Others had been in China for forty or fifty years and were now settled in Shanghai, the “City by the Sea.” Well, it was hardly a sea, if you ask me. We had the smelly Soochow Creek that streamed off the Whangpoo River, which itself was a fat, ugly sister of the Yangtze farther north. I never saw the Yangtze, but I knew it was huge. “Like an ocean,” I said to Erich once, and he jabbed me with a spoon and said, “Crack open a geography book if you think that caramel-colored mess is like an ocean.”

“Well, close,” I insisted.

“Best you can say for the Yangtze is that it floods a lot,” Erich grumbled. What a grouch, my brother!

Mother, who'd never worked a day in her whole thirty-seven years, found a job behind the counter of a Viennese bakery. Father was shamed, but what could we do? We had to eat
something
. We wouldn't get rich on Mother's pay, but at least she brought home fluffy loaves of bread, and every Sunday, a creamy napoleon or a thick wedge of linzer torte, which we divided and devoured even before dinner. Dinner, hah! We could finish it in two minutes or less, as there was nothing that involved actual chewing.

Across the Garden Bridge from where we lived sprawled Hongkew district, which smoldered under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were swarming all over China, but they couldn't get their hands on our International Settlement or the French Concession in Shanghai, so we were safe.

The first time Erich and Tanya and I crossed the bridge, I sucked in my breath at the sight of the Japanese sentry guarding the entrance to Hongkew. He stood at attention, as if he had a broomstick stuck in his trousers. His rifle had a bayonet fixed at the end of it, and I was sure he meant to run it through us.

We girls clutched Erich's arm. I said, “I thought we'd left such things behind with the Nazis.”

“Shhh, just look straight ahead and walk briskly,” Erich whispered as we crossed over into Hongkew.

“I've been in Shanghai months already,” Tanya said, “but I never had the nerve to come over here.”

No wonder. The streets were bursting with people—mostly Chinese and Japanese, and some poor German and Austrian refugees who couldn't afford even the hatbox we lived in. We stumbled over rubble in the streets, left from when the Japanese had bombed Hongkew two years earlier. Some of the bombed-out shells were already rebuilt, and how I loved reading their shop signs in German! There were shoemakers and sausage shops, a stationer, a hatmaker, a haberdasher, lots of cafés, a meat market, and even a kosher butcher, although we Shpanns didn't observe the Jewish dietary laws, and anyway, we couldn't afford meat.

In the dense Chinese section of Hongkew, beggars filled the streets. “Don't stare,” Tanya whispered, staring at the men and children with oozing sores and empty eye sockets and stumps where hands and feet ought to be.

“How do you suppose they got that way?”

“Don't ask,” Erich muttered, and I imagined the worst: Wretched birth defects or Japanese bombs, or worse yet, diseases like leprosy that made fingers and toes chip off like dry bark.

Smelly garbage lined the curbs. “I'm sure glad we don't live over here.” I kept shaking my head as street peddlers slid tin pots, needles and thread, rubber shoes, and nubby blue fabric under my nose.