Shanghai Shadows (21 page)

Your devoted wife and mother, Frieda

We read the letter aloud to Father. He said little, but slipped it under his pillow until he thought we were fast asleep. I peeked from behind my curtain and found him reading the letter again and again by the sliver of moonlight our miserly window allowed.

Mother's next letter was odd. She left out spaces between some of the words:

Dears shoemaker here tuesday. Water from outside
.

Sick needs. Books dock bulbs visit I per month come
.

Families here, 3 babies our hope. You forgive me? Need badly
.

Priests monks nuns. Many countries, but few jews. 2 lady friends comfort life saver. Winter long cold. Blanket coat gloves
?

Ilse school Kawashimas? Erich peaches making$? Enough to eat
?

Jakob
?

A waiting letter. Much needed. Love to all
.

Wife mother Frieda

For someone who loved language and careful diction, she'd made a mess of this.

“She's probably losing her mind in that camp,” Erich said.

Swaddled in our blankets, our teeth chattering, we pored over this letter, trying to decipher it and read between the lines. We gave Father the gist of our translation. “Mother's doing okay, she's got some lady friends who are a comfort to her, plus three babies who provide hope for the future. But she's desperate to hear from us and worries about whether Erich's getting enough work so we're not starving to death.”

I didn't mean for this to hurt Father, but I saw by the look on his gaunt face that it did. Quickly, I pointed to the second line of Mother's letter. “See this? We think this means we're allowed to visit her once a month. I'll go to the International Red Cross tomorrow to find out how. Oh, and Mother says there are things they need in the camp—medicines, blankets, books, lightbulbs, a clock. Maybe we can bring them when we visit.”

“We will have to sell something to buy them,” Father said, eyes closed. “What have we left to sell?”

Behind Father's back Erich mouthed, “A violin,” but aloud he said, “People are there from a lot of countries, which means they must have gotten some new internees because the last letter said they were mostly Americans. A bunch of Catholics, but not many Jews.”

“And she asks if we've forgiven her, Father.” I pointed to his name in the letter.

Father ran his finger over the poignant extravagance of that one word, that whole lonely paragraph in the jungle of run-together fragments: “
Jakob
?”

“I don't get the first part, though,” I said. “What does she mean by shoemakerheretuesday. Waterfromoutside?”

Erich scribbled out the jumble of words in the margin of a newspaper, moving the various parts around. I looked over his shoulder. The meaning kept eluding both of us. Suddenly I jumped up. “I see it now! She's telling us how to get something inside the camp. A shoemaker goes to the camp on Tuesdays, and Chinese water carriers go in, too. If we can get to them, we can send her things she needs, at least letters to lift her spirits. Sure. That's it. I'll get right on it.”

“How?” Father asked, and Erich jumped in. “I have connections.”

“I'm afraid to ask,” Father murmured. He gathered up his coat and gloves. “I'm going for a walk.” He glanced back to make sure The Violin would be safe alone with us.

As his footsteps echoed on the stairs I asked, “How come REACT hasn't given me a new assignment, Erich?”

“How should I know? You think they tell me anything?”

“Maybe I muddled the trip to Hangchow.”

“No, no, Ilse. It went better than expected. Gerhardt just doesn't want to put you in any further danger.” He looked away, avoiding my eyes.

“Erich Shpann! You've told them to leave me alone, haven't you? And you're still working for them. Why shouldn't I?”

“You've done too much already, Ilse. And the stakes are getting higher.”

“You had no business speaking for me, Erich.”

“For you? Nah. For me. I got you into this. I couldn't live with myself if you got caught. It's worse for women in those Japanese prisons, believe me. I've heard plenty. You're still not out of the woods, Ilse. Keep your eyes open.”

“You, too,” I murmured.

“I'm always careful, don't worry.”

But I knew he was taking unimaginable risks every day.

The mystery of Mother's strange letter was solved. An International Red Cross worker told us that the Japanese imposed new rules, just in case they hadn't been quite inhospitable enough to their honored guests. Now a letter couldn't exceed twenty-five words, and each word was censored. Unbelievable—some fiend actually sat in a heated office and counted every word on every letter going in and out of that camp.

My face was burned by the wind, but the coat and hat and gloves staved off the freezing dampness as I waited for Mr. Hsu, the letter writer, to finish with his customer. The anxious man sat on the bamboo stool, twisting his hat and stamping his unstockinged feet against the threat of frostbite. I watched Mr. Hsu start the letter three different times, carefully laying each mistake into a bamboo basket tied to his table.

When the man left with his letter, calm and satisfied, I climbed onto Mr. Hsu's stool, enviously eyeing the sheets of clean newsprint with only two or three characters on each. I had a hundred purposes for that paper. I reached into the basket.

“Ah-ah. Not trash, young miss. See this sign?” He tapped the note on the basket, written in a flourish of Chinese characters I hadn't yet learned. “Please allow me to translate. ‘You must respect paper with written words.'”

“Yes, yes, but are you going to let it go to waste?”

“Not to waste. My brother-in-law Chao goes all over the city collecting such papers. It is an ancient custom, a respect for scholarship. When he has a goodly pile, he burns them respectfully. We have a saying: ‘He who rescues a thousand characters from being trodden under a heavy foot adds a year to his life.'”

“That's lovely, Mr. Hsu.” Lovely or not, I couldn't help coveting that glorious, underused white paper that could become letters to Mother, sheet music for Father's compositions, kindling, or even stuffing for our holey shoes. He saw me eyeing the paper, and handed me a crisp, clean sheet to take home.

“Thank you, Mr. Hsu. You can't imagine what this means to me. May I ask you a question?”

Mr. Hsu waved behind me. “No one waiting. Please, ask.”

“How can I contact the coolie who pushes the water cart into the Chaipei internment camp?”

Mr. Hsu carefully considered his spoken words as much as his written ones. He took a long time to answer. “Why must you know this?”

“My mother's there.”

“I am so sorry, young miss, so sorry indeed.”

“And she needs, well they all need, some medicines and food and books. You're a letter writer, Mr. Hsu. You can appreciate this. We are only allowed to send her one twenty-five-word letter a month. What can we possibly say in only twenty-five words?”

“Much, if the words are well chosen. But I understand.” He scanned the gray sky in an arc. I noticed a few ice crystals on his beard, around his pink mouth. He stayed silent a long time, in the midst of the noise and confusion and clanging of the streets. I crawled into the tunnel of his silence, taking comfort there. Maybe shivering in the air heavy with the sleet of Shanghai, he was transported to Australia, where he told me he'd gone to university in the early 1900s. It was summer there while we shivered; maybe he warmed himself with the memory.

Finally completing his arc of the sky, his eyes settled on me again. “Come back in one week. Chao will have the answer.”

There was so little in our apartment, and nothing of value to sell for Mother's supplies. Except books. I snatched up all of Mother's English textbooks, the atlas, and our German novels, including the one the underground had given me for my Hangchow trip. I'd read
The Magic Mountain
three times already; enough was enough.

The Lion Bookshop was empty when I slammed the bundle of books down on the counter. “You can have them all for ten dollars American.”

Mr. Blau made a halfhearted effort to bargain with me, but Germans just don't have the stomach for haggling, and in the end, I left with a ten-dollar bill.

Next I wrote Mother a letter, covering every inch of Mr. Hsu's paper with breezy banter and jokes and poems and stick-figure cartoons and every scrap of news I could dredge up. I planned to smuggle it in with the supplies, pleased at the image of her taking an entire evening to read it. I hoped she'd believe I'd forgiven her for her deception. I hadn't, not entirely, but what did it matter at this point?

Then all I could do was wait, with the money and letter ready to go, until Mr. Hsu's brother-in-law had the information for me.

That night the apartment seemed darker than usual, and forbidding. The Kawashimas had gone to bed. God only knew where Erich was, and Father was probably propped up in a booth at a Viennese café, pouring the fifth cup of water over his lifeless tea leaves. I was utterly alone.

I huddled on my mattress, wrapped in a coat and three blankets—mine, Erich's, and Father's. My feet were jammed into two pairs of Molly O'Toole's wool socks that were thick and prickly with years' worth of darning thread in every which color. No, they were Michael O'Halloran's socks, not Molly O'Toole's.

And just as my head dropped to my shoulder I was jarred awake by the first relentless wail of air-raid sirens.

Father hurried home to me with the news: “American bombs have fallen.”

“Oh, Father!”

He grabbed my bundled shoulders and danced me around the room. “No, no, Daughter, this is good news! Americans, our liberators!”

“Yes?”

“That is, if they don't kill us first.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

1944–1945

Chao, Mr. Hsu's brother-in-law, staked out the Chaipei camp so we'd know just when the water carrier would be there. Erich forged a letter to Miss Hartwich, the headmistress of my school, saying I had an appointment with an eye doctor. “Ilse does not see things clearly,” Erich wrote, for his own amusement. He signed Father's name to the letter.

To leave the ghetto, I had to get permission from Ghoya, the King of the Jews. I dabbed a bit of Mother's old lipstick over my eyelid and rubbed it until it was puffy. In Ghoya's office, I squinted and winked piteously and said, “Pinkeye. It's very contagious, sir. I must get to an eye doctor, a specialist.” That got his attention. He wrote a pass and dropped it on the floor so he wouldn't have to come close to my sickly eye.

With the pass in hand, I met up with Liu outside the Hongkew gates, and we hitchhiked to Chaipei. Liu whistled for a friend so we could ride part way, bouncing on bags of rice in his rickety wagon.

“Is he a relative?” I asked Liu.

“Uncle, cousin, brother.” He pressed two fingers together. “We work like this.” That meant Liu would be sharing a cut of his portion for this enterprise.

I'd converted the ten dollars from the sale of Mother's books into a five and five ones—seven dollars for Mother, and the rest for traveling, bartering, and bribery.

Liu negotiated with the water coolie in rapid-fire sparks of language. I didn't catch a single word between these two ace con men, but suddenly Liu snatched three dollars out of my hand and waved it under the nose of the coolie, then stuck the money in his own waistband next to the knife. The deal, as well as I could figure out, was that the waterman was to deliver my envelope with the name Molly O'Toole on it. Inside was my letter and seven American dollars. He'd get a dollar just for taking the envelope into the camp. If he succeeded in getting it to an American camp leader and it wasn't intercepted by a Japanese guard, he'd get the second dollar. It was all on the honor system. Liu trusted him—honor among thieves—so what choice did I have?

We waited behind some trees, Liu chattering away in Chinese. Whatever he was saying, the boy was a natural-born storyteller.

Twenty minutes later, the man came back with a grin on his face and his palm out for the second dollar.

Liu explained, “He gave to a Jesus man, missy. Good as gold.”

On the way into the kitchen, the water carrier had wheeled his cart in front of the preacher, slipping the envelope into the man's pocket so smoothly that only a twinkle in the preacher's eye revealed that he'd received it. Liu's rendition of a twinkle looked like he had a cinder in his eye, but I got the general idea.

Now the water carrier pocketed the second dollar. Liu, of course, kept the last dollar. Success for all!

The night gathered around us, nearly warm and not as humid as usual, promising better times. There hadn't been streetlights for ages, and even the dim lights in the houses across the lane were gone because of blackout curtains for the air raids. American air strikes were stepping up and getting ever closer. The Allies aimed at crippling Japanese shipping lanes and supplies and arms. We shielded our eyes from blinding flashes in the night and woke to keening sirens. Buildings shook. If we were outside, we ran for shelter in a doorway. We lived at sea level, so no underground shelters protected us.

Inside our building, the impact propelled us across the room, and the bombs loosened ceiling plaster and shattered windows. Another reason to be grateful for our puny little window. It was too compact to break.

How strange—despite the constant fear, our lives were improving a bit because relief had begun to trickle into the ghetto. Laura Margolies, the American social worker, had pressured her country to use neutral Switzerland as a go-between. So finally, the Joint Distribution Committee could send money where we needed it desperately. Meat, of course, was still a distant memory, but Mr. Schmaltzer fired up his ovens on Tuesdays and Fridays to bake a few beautiful breads again. He hired me for two hours a week to replace Mother. There was still very little sugar or butter, so no cakes or sweet rolls appeared on our shelves; but the aroma of baking bread and the sight of those golden and mahogany loaves raised my spirits and mellowed my anger at Mother.