Shanghai Shadows (26 page)

I wondered,
Should I say anything to Erich
? I did: “Truth is, I'm a little bit scared to leave Shanghai. Aren't you?”

He shrugged, refusing to admit his own fears. Or had staring down the corridor of death in that jail cell scared away all his fears?

“Six years we've been here, Erich. A third of our lives.”

“And,
jeepers creepers
, haven't they been a barrel of laughs?”

Outside, the brisk autumn breeze blew away the memory of the bitter cold and sizzling heat and moldy rain we'd lived through all those years. I pedaled Peaches, hearing her gears grind painfully. As usual, Liu materialized when I whistled. How many other people was he always on call for, or were there a half-dozen identical Lius scattered around Shanghai?

His impish little-boy grin of six years ago had given way to a slack-jawed lankiness. The sure-footed trot I used to have trouble keeping up with had turned into a swagger, and his face had finally grown to fit his huge eyes, but his teeth were still a mess. I suspected that he'd graduated from the knife to a gun, but I didn't want to know for sure.

Crooking my finger, I lured him over. During the years of our strange friendship I'd picked up some Chinese, and he'd picked up a lot more English, especially from American soldiers.

“Hallo, what's up, missy?”

“Liu, this week we leave Shanghai. Sunday, two o'clock our ship sails.”

“Yeah, yeah, we go to America!”

“Not
we
. Me, with my family.”

“What for do I stay here, missy?”

“This is where you belong. Your life's here.”

“No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda!”

I inched Peaches toward him. “You want this?”

He circled the bike like a man about to buy a new automobile. He picked some gravel out of the tire, tugged at the grinding chain, spun the tired pedals. “Old bike. Not worth two cents.”

“I'm not selling it. I'm giving it to you.”

Liu slowly raised his head to stare at me, his mop of hair hanging in his eyes. “For no money?”

“Free. You almost stole it once. Now it's yours, if you want it.”

He turned his back to me and stuffed his hands into his waistband. Crusty elbows jutted out. Suddenly I saw what was going on. No one had ever given him such a grand gift, and he didn't know how to handle it.

“Liu? Look at me.” He turned his head like a suspicious cat, like Moishe used to, peering at me over his shoulder. “You take the bike.” I rolled it toward him, wrapped his hands around the handlebars. “Now, you say,
‘xie xie
, thank you,' and you ride away. Here, climb on.”

He shook his head, hair flying, and refused to get on the bike. We argued back and forth until I realized that this crook who knew his way around every swindle in Shanghai, and who'd probably left a body or two bloating in the Whangpoo, didn't know how to ride a bike!

I stabbed at his arm until he swung his leg over the bike and dropped down onto its ripped seat while I balanced the handlebars. One foot on each pedal, he began spinning them fiendishly.

“Goes nowhere!” he complained.

“That's because the kickstand's down. See?” I lifted it and continued to support the handlebars until he caught his balance. Well, I should have known—he was a born tightrope walker. Two tumbles, and he conquered the bicycle and rode off into the wind, yelling, “Bye-bye, missy, so long.”

We searched Mother's and Father's faces for a clue as to how it had all gone in Hangchow.

“And?” I asked.

“So?” Erich asked.

Father cleared his throat for an announcement, and I braced myself for the worst—Father in China, us six thousand miles away in a new life.

Mother stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder, as if they were posing for a formal photograph. Father said, “Your mother must teach me English before we arrive in Santa Rosa. I do not want to sound like a foreigner and embarrass all of you.”

I rushed toward him and threw my arms around him. Erich, with his usual reserve, said, “Excellent.”

Mother had tears in her eyes. “So, let us begin with the alphabet, Jakob. Say after me,
a, b, c, d, e …
”

Tanya's wedding had been scheduled for October, but she hurried the plans along so I wouldn't miss the big day. Mr. Bauman's entire café had to be made kosher under Reb Chaim's supervision. Tanya and I shrank from the blasting heat of the blowtorch as we helped the rebbe scorch Mr. Bauman's oven.

Proudly Tanya said, “Everything will be prepared according to strict Orthodox dietary laws. Also our home!”

Reb Chaim actually took his black coat off and rolled up his starched shirtsleeves to
kasher
the kitchen. His arms were covered in black hair, darker even than his beard.

Our job finished, Tanya ran to the butcher shop for a slab of brisket for the wedding dinner, and I stayed to clean up. The rebbe rolled his sleeves down over his furry arms, and I said, “Reb Chaim, something's on my mind. May I ask you a question?”

“Ah, the young lady with a mind of her own. Your father warned me! Yes, ask, ask.”

“I'm happy that Tanya is Shlomo's
beshert
,”
and I'm not
, but I didn't add this.

“So, if you are happy, why are you looking so sad?”

“I wondered, are we allowed to celebrate when so many of our people are dead in Europe? Their bodies are barely cold, Reb Chaim.” My eyes filled with tears. To our horror more and more details were reaching us. Camps had been liberated: Dachau, … Auschwitz. We were seeing pictures of walking skeletons. The numbers of the dead were in the millions. All those bones.

Reb Chaim buttoned his sleeves and tugged at his beard before he looked me in the face sternly, his glasses lopsided on his nose. “The Holy One, blessed be He, commands that we rejoice with bride and groom, and so we rejoice.”

I nodded, vowing to try.

“Even if our hearts are breaking,” the rebbe added.

The magnificent red hat with the peacock feather was long gone from the milliner's window, so Tanya had to settle for my plain straw hat from the Hangchow trip, and also my yellow suit, which her mother altered to fit Tanya. She'd plumped up again on food Shlomo brought her from the yeshiva. Erich watched her duck-waddle and said, “She's got hips for bearing. They'll probably have fourteen snively little Shlomos.”

The wedding! The day after my seventeenth birthday and two nights before we were to sail for America, everyone we knew jammed into Mr. Bauman's café, where Dovid and I had spent so many hours. How long ago? Two years.

Men on one side, women on the other, we flocked around the chuppah, the wedding canopy, behind Tanya and Shlomo, stepping back to allow room for Tanya to make the customary seven circles around her groom.

“May you soon bring many children into the shelter of your love,” Reb Chaim said.

Tanya played the modest bride with fluttering eyelashes and hands clasped at her waist, but Shlomo strutted through his wedding as though he'd invented the role of bridegroom for a Hollywood movie. A klezmer trio played sweetly mournful tunes for the wedding ceremony, and raucous ones as soon as Reb Chaim officially pronounced Tanya and Shlomo husband and wife. Shlomo stomped the wedding glass to bits, and we all shouted, “Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” Mr. Bauman smiled generously, although I think it was his very last glass.

There was wild dancing, men with men, women with women, and a cake, which Mr. Schmaltzer baked in Mr. Bauman's kosher kitchen. Although the cake turned out smaller than Tanya's grand vision, it was the best we could do with our whole community's combined rations of eggs and flour and butter and sugar, and every guest had a bite.

Nothing so robust, so noisy, so messy, so purely joyful, so European, had happened in our Chinese ghetto for eons.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

1945

The hardest thing about leaving Shanghai was saying goodbye to Tanya. She tore herself away from her new husband to spend the last hours with me. Well, he was already studying like a fiend, anyway, two days after their wedding. Tanya and I walked the streets of Shanghai with our arms locked. Me, a teenager on her way to America, and Tanya, already a married woman!

“Well?” I asked, curious about her wedding night. She wouldn't tell me a thing, when there was so much I needed to know. All I got out of her was, “My Shlomo, such a gentleman he is,” and she quickly changed the subject: “Oh, how I will miss you.” She stopped to hug me again and again.

“You've been my dearest friend in the world.” My voice sounded creamy with tears.

“Except for Dovid Ruzevich,” she teased.

Him. I hadn't stopped thinking about him, but in my heart I knew our paths would never cross again. “Oh, he was only a childhood crush.”

Tanya pushed me just far enough away so she could see my tear-streaked face. “Don't say that, Ilse. He was your first love, which makes him unforgettable. Look for his face in America. You'll meet again, you'll see, and so will
we
. Another two months, we'll be settled in Canada, Shlomo and I, so you'll come to visit us. Canada's just up the street from America.”

We strolled along the Bund. The harbor was filling with merchant ships once again, no longer just the Japanese warships. My palm was tented to shade my eyes, and I glanced across the Whangpoo River over at Pootung, with its low, seedy warehouses and burned-out factories.

Tanya said, “We'll miss this awful place when our stomachs are full and we're sleeping on feather beds so high you need a stool to climb up.”

“Miss China? No.”

“Oh, admit it, Ilse.”

“Never!”

But as we walked through the streets—both the grand concourse of the Bund and the dark back alleys—I thought a lot about what I was leaving. All the years I'd lived in Shanghai, six plus two months, I'd been a westerner in the East, a redheaded, pale-faced foreigner among millions of natives who belonged where I didn't. I'd always thought of China as a way station, a place to park our bodies until we could get
home
, wherever home turned out to be. And now …

If I should go back to China as an adult, I wondered, would I find it frozen in time, just as it looked when I was leaving, just as it's looked for a hundred years, a thousand years?

The street markets with the eels and monkeys and frogs and wild, wing-flapping fowl and storm clouds of swarming flies.

The rickshaw pullers dripping sweat, napping between runs with their coolie hats pulled over their faces.

The Buddhist pagodas carving out long, thin swaths of the sky, and the old-fashioned buildings with their eaves curled upward like gigantic pixie toes.

The apothecaries promising cures in a thousand ginger jars, boxes, vials, tubes, and cellophane bags brimming with mysterious, dried brown herbs and powdered parts of exotic animals.

Street kitchens where live sea urchins and shrimp finally give up their fight in a giant pan sizzling over hot coals. Roasting gingko nuts. The sugary sweet potatoes. Clackety chopsticks.

And the people, millions and millions of them walking, bicycling, pulling and pushing weighted loads, all owning their space so surely that they never collided with one another. In six years I'd never learned that trick.

Ghoya. Hunger and cold. Bayoneted guards, passes, armbands, blackouts, bombs. Night soil. REACT.

Mr. Hsu, the letter writer. Reb Chaim and Mr. Bauman. The Kawashimas.

All of it, good and bad, a safe haven for the duration of the war. Otherwise we'd be dead.

“Yes, I'll miss China,” I told Tanya with a deep sigh. We swung our arms and skipped down the Bund, and the Chinese stared at us carefree, show-offy foreigners, as they always had. “But I'm ready to go.”

The dinky room suddenly looked huge with all our things gone. We gave Erich's mattress to Chang, so the beggar wouldn't have to sleep on the bare street any longer.

I made one last visit to Mr. Hsu's table.

“Have you come to visit your heart's song?” he asked.

“My heart's song is silent,” I told him, thinking of Dovid.

“A young lady has many songs in her life. With patience you learn to sing them.”

“Yes, but I'm afraid I've never quite gotten the knack of patience, Mr. Hsu.”

“This does not surprise me.” The old gentleman smiled warmly. “I will not see you again in this world, but we will remember one another, will we not? I give you something to take with you to America.” He brushed some beautiful characters on a piece of yellowed paper. “It is an ancient proverb to remind you that we are not so far apart.” He chanted it to me, moving my fingers over each character, and translated: “‘The way is one, the winds blow together.'”

And then, after six endless years, it was suddenly time to leave China. Mrs. Kawashima soaked two handkerchiefs with tears. She clung to Mr. K's arm at the dock, both of them dwarfed by the giant ship that would glide us across the ocean. “Maybe someday we go to America,” Mr. K said, giving us his new, lopsided smile.

Mother and Father thanked them for all their kindnesses. “For taking care of my children while I was away,” Mother said, hugging Mrs. Kawashima.

Father bowed. “Kawashima-san, I cannot thank you properly for the gift of my violin.”

Mr. K bowed toward Father and petted The Violin's case as if it were a patient dog waiting at Father's feet. “My honor to know you, Shpann-san.” Both men bowed again, and Father quickly ushered Mother aboard the ship. They'd never been comfortable with farewells.

Erich was already aboard, waving to me from the deck and shouting into the wind, “Come on, you'll miss the boat, Ilse!”

Mrs. Kawashima tucked a round bundle under my arm, proud of her new prosperity to afford a whole loaf of crusty white bread. “Take for a bite if you get hungry,” she said through her tears. “See? I tell you long time ago,
maskee!
Everything turn out all right.”