Shanghai Shadows (23 page)

“Sir?”

“I shake candy bowl. Any fall out, you can take to your Jewish mama, okay?”

He tossed the bowl up above his head. Half a dozen wrapped candies sailed through the air before he caught the bowl. I scuttled to gather them all up, and while I was on the floor at his feet he dumped the entire bowl. Peppermint candy pelted me like hail.

“Ha-ha-ha!” His cackle was the sorriest excuse for laughter I'd ever heard.

I made sure to grab my pass before I left with a burglar's booty of candies stuffed in my pockets, my shoes, my waistband, even under my ponytail. All the way down the hall I heard his diabolical “Ha-ha-ha!” and pitied the next person in line.

At Ward Road Jail, in the cool of the morning on Wednesday, I clutched the meager bundle of food I'd scraped together by shamelessly distracting the Chinese owner of a sparse fruit stand on Housan Road. I'd pointed to the sky, wailing, “American bombers! Take cover!” and as the man tented his hand over his eyes to search the sky two puckered oranges sank into my pocket.

Oh, the glorious packages we used to get! Those American cigarettes would be such choice bribes for Japanese guards or a welcome diversion for the prisoners.

The concrete walls of Ward Road Jail loomed gray and forbidding, and made me feel like a hamster in a gigantic cage. At seven o'clock I waited inside the walls to be let into Erich's cellblock. I'd already been patted down for contraband by a guard whose lingering hands repulsed me. He and Ghoya were cut from the same slimy cloth.

He tore open the rag that bundled the food. His face lit up at the sight of the peppermints, which he handled with such tenderness you'd have thought he was caressing a newborn. Spittle formed at the corner of his mouth. “Not good for prisoners,” he mewled, pocketing the candies.

Another guard led me past one cellblock after another, each cell crammed full of people. I gagged on the stench of air saturated with the rankest of human odors. The chill penetrated my bones.

In Erich's dark cell, about twenty Chinese and westerners hunched together on the concrete floor. My eyes pierced the darkness, and I made out a few women who occupied a back corner. On their knees in a circle, they formed a human curtain while one of them used a toilet built into the floor. The rest of the prisoners pretended not to notice, or no longer cared.

Nor did anyone seem to notice me standing there. It was as though they'd lost the will to move, since moving meant giving up their little plot of land—a wall to lean against, a clean patch of floor, a narrow swath to stretch out their legs, the broad back of a neighbor for support. Some of them could be dead already and still propped up. My head swam with the putrid odors and the sight of this desperate clinging to life that was less than life.

It took a while to spot Erich in the crowded cell. He and another foreigner, backed against one another, were rolling their shoulders in unison, in a pitiful attempt to exercise their stiff bodies.

“Erich,” I whispered.

The suspicious eyes of a few men, trapped animals, darted about; but mostly people just ignored me. When Erich spotted me, he rolled to his knees, clearing a path toward me with his head. Someone else moved right into Erich's spot against his partner's back.

“Ilse? My God.” His voice was little more than a wheeze.

I knelt to his level and thrust the oranges, the bread, a precious piece of crisp duck fat, between the narrow bars. Suddenly every starving dog picked up the scent, growled, and ripped the food out of Erich's hands. A man bit into one of the oranges, rind and all. The duck fat disappeared into the cave of an old man's mouth. I thought about Chinese fishermen who put rings around the necks of diving cormorants so the birds couldn't swallow the fish. I wanted to reach in and dig that duck fat out of the man's throat because he was old, his days were numbered. Erich desperately needed the nourishment.

I passed the Thermos of boiled water to him and stuffed a bag of tea leaves and three peppermints I'd hidden in my hair into his ragged pocket. “I'll get you out!” I hissed, squeezing his limp hand. “Please, Erich, don't lose hope. Promise me. Promise me!”

He nodded. His eyes were dark, sunken pools.

I wondered if the others would kill him for the peppermints.

Outside the prison walls, an old woman's tiny body shuddered with her dry, hacking cough as she pummeled a guard with a dead pigeon, dooming him and all his ancestors with vile Chinese curses. Whatever she was saying, I completely agreed.

U.S. air raids were getting more and more common. Sirens wailed, and we dashed for shelter wherever we could. Some ran to the Ward Road Jail and the protection of its high concrete walls, but I would rather have been blown to bits than take comfort in such a horrid place.

Tanya and my other school friends waved handkerchiefs and cheered at every B-17 bomber that soared overhead. Each plane convinced us that the war would be over soon and America would win. Americans had
always
won. But would Erich live to see it happen?

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

1945

“Redheaded Girl! So soon I see you again? You go out too much. Get in trouble too much. Where you want to go now?” Ghoya sat behind his gunmetal gray desk, which hadn't a single paper on it. Even the peppermint fishbowl was gone.

“Sir, please allow me to come right to the point. It's about my brother. He's in the Ward Road Jail.”

“What he did?”

“Nothing, sir. It's a terrible mistake.”

Ghoya jumped to his feet and pounded his desk. “No mistake! No mistake!”

“I understand, sir, but I beg you to listen to me.” I stood at the foot of his desk, nearly choking on these words: “You are the King of the Jews. I implore you to be generous, like your own emperor, Hirohito. A monarch takes care of his people, sir.”

He sat down again, leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head and his feet propped up on the desk. He didn't look a bit regal. “What you want this time?”

“Please, sir, my brother is my family's only sustenance. As you know, my mother is gone to an internment camp.”

“A
camp
? We don't have camp!”

“You're correct, as always, sir. I mean a civil assembly center, as a guest of the Japanese government. My father is a musician and isn't well. He can't find work. I only have two hours work a week. There are very few jobs in the ghetto.”

“
Ghetto
? We don't have ghetto!”

“Forgive me. In Hongkew, sir. We've been taking one meal a day in a home. It's barely enough to keep some flesh on our bones. My brother has a job, sir. We all depend on his modest income. He's a delivery boy.”

“Good. A boy with ambition. Like me, myself.”

“Yes, sir. But my brother won't survive much longer in Ward Road. I saw him yesterday.”

“Yesterday? Yesterday you visit your Jewish mama. She like peppermint from Harrods? Very expensive.”

“Oh, yes, sir, more than you can imagine. After I left Chaipei, I went to see my brother, Erich, in Ward Road Jail. He's skin and bones, desperately in need of a bath and some meaty, hot soup. His spirit is nearly broken. I've heard that typhus spreads through the jail like fire.”

“Ah, yes, typhus only in China. Dirty here. Not in Japan. Clean as a whistle in Japan.”

Nowhere, I was getting nowhere with him.

“What your brother's name?”

I raised my head—still a chance?—and swallowed dry. “Erich Shpann, sir.”

“Erich Shpann! Ghoya not like Erich Shpann!”

I felt the color drain from my face. Erich was the one who'd found and buried Mr. Shaum after Ghoya had placed him under house arrest. Word got around in the ghetto. Ghoya remembered, and now maybe I'd condemned my own brother to death.

I sighed so deeply that my spongy lungs whistled. “May I go, sir?”

Ghoya's arm shot out like Hitler's, pointing to the door. I knocked for the secretary to let me out.

In my whole life I had never felt so absolutely drained of hope as I did at that moment backing out of Ghoya's office.

I ran home to our empty apartment and buried my face in my pillow that had given up half its feathers and its linen cover years before. Hours passed. I suppose I slept, or else my daydreams were horribly vivid—all those prisoners, the dank and stench of Ward Road, Erich's raspy voice—when I awoke to a sound like fingernails or claws scraping on our door. Was Moishe back? I opened the door, expecting to shoo the cat away—and found Erich heaped on the floor.

“Erich! Good God, how did you get here?” No answer came from the ragged lump on my doorstep.
Dead
? I gently pushed his eyelids up and saw faint signs of blue-eyed movement. Not dead! “Soup, you need soup. We have some on the hot plate.”

He nodded with barely a dipping of his jutted chin. I spoon-fed him a little watery potato soup, tilting his head back to pour it down his throat. It gurgled in his gullet, but after three spoonfuls, his eyes widened with gratitude.

It took every ounce of my energy to drag him down to the water closet and wrangle him into a few inches of cold water in the concrete tub. His rat-gnawed clothes peeled away like dead skin. Erich crouched in the tub, and I washed him with a sliver of soap I'd hidden just for this day. I think we were both embarrassed—Mother had always stressed modesty. But what could we do?

A neighbor ran to fetch Father at the café, and he returned just in time to help me lift Erich out of the washtub. Father burned Erich's lice-infested clothes in the tub and buried the ashes.

Back in our apartment, Erich lay curled on his mattress, wrapped in a sheet, face to the wall. How I missed Mother, who would know just what to do to bring Erich around.

Father said, “Let him be, Ilse. He needs to recover in his mind from that terrible place.”

I awakened, thinking we were in an earthquake. I yanked the curtain away that separated Erich's bed from my own. His whole body was wracked with shivers.

“Father!”

He bolted up in his bed. “What! What!”

“Erich. Look at him.”

Father came close, fear in his distant eyes. He touched Erich's forehead. “The boy's burning up.”

Erich's eyes were small black buttons crying out to us from deep within his red, swollen face. I ran for Mrs. Kawashima. One look at Erich, and her normally calm eyes blazed with fear also.

“We wash and wash him, make him cool,” she whispered. “Nothing else to do.”

I grabbed a basin and ran for water, sloshing it all the way back to our apartment. We began stroking Erich's arms, his neck, his face, his chest, with rags soaked in cold water and some alcohol that Mrs. Kawashima had hoarded from before the war. I placed aspirins far back in his throat and forced them down with a mouthful of water.

Erich thrashed around. Father held him down while I soothed him with memories of our childhood days in Vienna. “Remember the carousel, Erich, both of us on the same zebra? And I pushed you off when I reached out to catch the brass ring? You were so mad at me! Pookie, remember Pookie? The time she climbed inside Mother's piano? Oh, Erich! Think of peaches, how they ripped away from the pit when we bit into them. We used to see who could spit the peach pit the farthest, remember? You always won. Can you taste Mother's peach cobbler floating in cream?” Eventually I lulled him to sleep with our memories, and Mrs. K went on washing and washing him for hours. She hadn't slept more than an hour or two in days.

Then dark red eruptions appeared on Erich's chest, and the diagnosis was confirmed: typhus. Jail fever.

“Carried from one person in the cell to the next by lice,” Doctor Stolz explained out in our hall. “Many do not survive, I'm afraid.”

I staggered to the wall. Never before did I truly believe that either my brother or I would die before our parents.

Doctor Stolz gently clasped my arm, checked my pulse, probed the glands in my neck, then tried to reassure Father and me. “The boy is young, otherwise sturdy, and you are good caretakers. He has slightly better than a fifty-fifty chance.”

“Those are terrible odds,” I protested, and the doctor sadly nodded.

Father didn't like the odds any more than I did, but he said, “Pull yourself together, Daughter, for Erich's sake.”

We composed ourselves and went back to the apartment to relieve Mrs. K.

Father said, “It'll take a couple of weeks, Son, but you'll be well after that, I promise you.”

What good was such an empty promise?

Erich's fever dipped and spiked and dipped for two weeks. At its peak he ranted madly, yelling German gibberish, as though he'd gone back to baby talk, and those were the times that scared me most. I held his head and spooned rice gruel or potato soup into his mouth, or weak tea. His shoulders were sharp blades; I could count his ribs, which felt thin enough to snap like kindling. I slept for minutes at a time because I was sure that he needed me night and day.

I wasn't even seventeen? Impossible. I felt like an old woman. My only comfort was that Dovid would not see me like this—wispy-haired, staggering on swollen feet, plagued with tremors and headaches, and all hollowed out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

1945

Suddenly one morning, Erich sat up and announced, “The fever's broken.”

I pressed my palm to his head, his ears, his arms. Gone the hot, clammy skin.

“I'm hungry,” Erich said, surprising even himself.

“Well, aren't we all.” I handed him a stale heel of bread I'd been saving for him, and he devoured it in seconds, licking the crumbs from his palm. He swung his legs off the mattress and tried to raise himself to a standing position.

Father rushed to his side. “Slowly, Son. You're not ready yet.”

Erich flopped back down, sweating from the exertion. Tears of relief swelled in my eyes. He'd beaten the odds; he'd survived typhus. We'd
all
live to see the end of this war. Mother, too? Who knew?