Shanghai Shadows (5 page)

I studied the black-and-white charcoal drawing upside down—trees, a few houses with smoke swirling out of the chimneys, a gentle hill in the distance with smudges that could have been goats. No people.

“Lovely. And where did this come from?” Mother asked.

“I draw myself. My village in Poland, after they take my family.”

Tears sprang to my eyes.

Mother propped the drawing up on the bookcase behind her. “Come next Wednesday,” she said. “Ilse, show Dovid to the door.”

My arm brushed his as I opened the door to a blast of hall air even colder than in our apartment. “Stay warm out there,” I murmured.

He smiled. Crinkly half circles on his cheeks enchanted me, but I also saw that his lips were badly chapped. “I am used to Polish winters,” he said, tipping his cap to Mother.

Once he was gone, the apartment felt even colder. Mother lay on her bed cradling her sore hands. Gently, I slid them into my white muff.

The next morning, December 8, I was jolted out of bed by the sound of explosions. We rushed into the hall.

“They bombed Pearl Harbor! They bombed Pearl Harbor!” everyone was shouting. “Thousands of Americans dead!”

Details were hard to pin down, but we learned that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which was in the American territory of Hawaii. Now they'd bombed a British gunboat in our harbor.

Then we joined the rest of the house huddled around Mr. Shulweiss's shortwave. The static cleared every few seconds, so we heard the shaky voice of the announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that the war in the Pacific has begun.”

America was in the war.

Suddenly, it was not just Hongkew under Japanese occupation but all of Shanghai, including us in the once-safe foreign settlements. We poured back into the frosty streets. I saw Liu hiding behind a garbage bin. I didn't know if he was watching for pickpocket prey or whether he was just as scared as the rest of us hounding one another for information on how our lives were going to turn.

I cried bitter tears, lost in the horde of frightened people. Father was stunned, and Mother had to rush off to the bakery, so Erich tried to comfort me awkwardly. I shrugged him off. Why, I don't know. Maybe it was because of his smug look that said,
I warned you all; you didn't listen
.

Asian countries all around us were reeling under Japan's atrocities. If before Pearl Harbor we were hungry,
after
Pearl Harbor we would surely be starving. In weeks we would feel the effects of the war in the Pacific right where it hurt us Jewish refugees most. Once the United States had declared war on Japan, and days later the Germans had declared war on the United States, we'd get no more American movies, no more packages from Molly O'Toole. All American money for the refugee settlement, all Red Cross money, all Hebrew Immigrant Aid money, would be cut off cold.

That night after we found out about Pearl Harbor, Erich didn't come home. Mother and Father were frantic, and I was no help. I pictured him pierced through by a Japanese bayonet or drowned in the Whangpoo. Then something clicked for me. Those men at the Little Vienna Café who'd recognized Erich and turned away—maybe they were some of the Resistance fighters Erich had hinted about. And my brother was working with them.

They were the ones who'd given Erich the bicycle. I was sure of it now. What had only been talk—talk among Erich's friends in Vienna—was turning into dangerous action in Shanghai. Who they all were, where they headquartered, I didn't know, but that night I vowed to find out.

CHAPTER SIX

1941–1942

“Where were you the whole night?” Mother patted Erich's face, his arms, his chest, to make sure he was all in one piece. “We were worried sick, your father and I.”

“With friends,” Erich said, slipping out from under Mother's probing hands and eyes.

Father was practicing. The Violin was one string short, and he was making do. The music vibrated a filling in my back tooth.

“Who are these friends?” Mother asked, closing Father's studio door.

“You don't know them.”

“You spend too much time with them,” Mother said sternly.

“They use the time well,” he retorted. He'd gotten very sassy with Mother in that new deep voice he so eagerly showcased for us.

Her back was to Erich as she stirred a pot of soup. “Where do you go every day with these people?”

“Here, there.”

“Where?”

Ilse to the rescue: “He plays soccer, Mother.”

Mother's spoon scraped lazily across the pot. “You play soccer all night? And the bicycle—”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

“So many hours, and I don't know where you are?” She turned around and offered Erich a spoonful of the potato-and-leek soup—a peace offering.

He shook his head. “I go to meetings.”

“Meetings, Erich?”

“What do you think, everyone sits around like you do waiting for the Japanese to take over every corner of the city?” He paced the room, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “Some people act, Mother. Action.”

Mother pulled her shoulders together in resolution. She handed me a Thermos and some bamboo chips, which we used as currency at the hot-water shop. “Go down and get us boiled water for tea.”

She was getting rid of me so they could talk, as if I was a child and Erich wasn't. I looked at my brother closely. His shoulders were broader, his waist narrower. There were rusty shadows on his cheeks. A wave of fear scuttled through me as Erich tore out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

I snapped up the Thermos and bamboo chips, followed him and sensed somebody following
me
. I looked over my shoulder, and there was Liu, a half block behind. What did he want from me? He knew I had no food to share with him, no money.

Three boys I'd never seen before waited for Erich at the corner of Kinchow Road and Baikal. He must have known they were waiting; that was why he'd picked the fight with Mother—so he could bolt from the house.

He fell right into step with the boys, all of them walking so fast that I needed three steps to each of theirs just to keep them in sight.

At the gate of the Baikal Cemetery, one of the boys gave a lit smoke to Erich. The tallest one snuffed his out with his bare fingers and tossed the stub of it over the fence into the cemetery. Then, as if on a signal, all four of them turned around and walked back down Baikal Road, laughing and punching each other and generally acting like obnoxious boys. I ducked into Ah Ching's Bird Shop, where it was dark and jammed with cages and fluttering wings.

“You don't buy a bird, you don't stay in my shop,” Ah Ching growled, and his mynahs and canaries cackled in agreement.

Finally the boys passed the store, and I raced up the street to keep a respectable distance between us.

At Yangtzepoo Road the tall boy dangled a key around his neck and bent toward the lock of a godown, one of the decrepit warehouses along the docks of the Whangpoo. The four of them disappeared into the building. The door slammed shut; all the windows were boarded up. I listened at the door, but not a sound escaped the building. Was this one of the
meetings
Erich talked about? Just what were they discussing so quietly in there? I held my breath and listened more closely. Nothing.

Straddling a wide stone bench next to the godown, I waited. For what?

Liu darted in and out between the godowns, clearly hunting for something—dropped coins, maybe, or food. Each time he appeared, he studied me and once got close enough that I snapped, “Why are you always following me?”

“Whistle, I come to you, missy,” he replied.

“I didn't whistle.”

“I come anyway!”

I groaned, and he got the hint, disappearing into an alleyway just as the door of the godown opened. My first instinct: hide. In wartime Shanghai the impulse was always to sneak, to lie, to make yourself invisible. I jumped off the bench and crouched under it, hidden by the great lion's claw legs.

The men were in their twenties, blond hair cropped short, smooth-cheeked, and crisply turned out in pressed khaki shirts and trousers. Whispering in German and shifting from foot to foot with their trousers tucked into their high boots, they looked so much like Nazi soldiers that for a moment my heart stopped. I tightened myself into a smaller target and studied them.

They weren't Nazis at all! They were two of the men we'd seen at the café. Before I could scuttle out from under the bench, the short, stocky one spotted me.

“Look here, there's a rat in the sewer,” he said to the other man, who yanked me out from under the bench.

I struggled up from the dirt and landed on the stone seat.

“Why are you spying on us?” he growled

“I'm not spying, I'm …”

“Just hiding under a bench. And you speak the mother tongue? Who sent you?”

“Nobody. I was just following someone, no one you know, really, just a friend, just exploring,” I stammered.

“What do you want me to do with her, Gerhardt?” the shorter man asked, his beefy hands pressing on my shoulders.

I looked up at the one he'd called Gerhardt, whose eyes narrowed into tight slits, but there was a hint of a smile around his lips. “Get rid of her. I don't care, Rolf. Throw her in the river, feed her to the pelicans. Just make sure she remembers not to come sniffing around here ever again.” He disappeared inside the warehouse, slamming the door.

So, Rolf was left with me.
Get rid of her
; Gerhardt's words echoed in my head, but I sensed that this man had no idea what to do with me.

“On your feet, girl,” he commanded, not too convincingly.

I jumped up, hoping I could dart around him, but he was a wall between me and fresh air. My feet couldn't get me anywhere. Would words? “I'm Ilse, Erich Shpann's sister.”

“You're
what
?” He shoved me back down on the stone bench with a punishing thud. “The idiot brought you here?”

“No, not really. I followed him. That is, I sort of guessed where he was going.” There was no way he'd buy this lie, but I forged on. “My mother sent me to find him. She's feverish, burning up, and she needs him to come home right away.”

He seemed to consider this. Maybe he had a heart after all, or a mother.

“Our mother will be so upset if I don't bring him before she dies.” I sounded whiney, even to my own ears, so I swallowed and boldly asked, “What does my brother do inside that warehouse? What's so top secret here?”

“None of your business,” he growled, “and if you have half as much sense as your brother, you'll forget where
here
is.”

Did I dare take a chance? I stared right into his cold, blue eyes and said, “I know you're all in the Underground resistance.”

The color drained from his cheeks. He hoisted me up by my elbows; my feet swung off the ground in front of him. Now my heart thudded; what business did I have nosing around in this mess?

He shook me. “I can haul you over to the river in about three giant steps. You a good swimmer?” Suddenly he was pulling me across the road to the river bank, my legs flying behind me. I looked down at rushing water that was deep and clogged and stinking with garbage and the morning's chamber pots. I really didn't expect that he'd throw me in, but I kept thinking,
Mother will kill me if I drown in this filthy water
.

He still gripped me by my elbows. My shoulders ached; every muscle in my middle stretched into tight ropes. If I relaxed my body I could maybe drop, shimmy down and roll away from him on the grassy bank—or maybe I'd plunge right into the brackish water. My bones jiggly with fear, I closed my eyes to the rushing water below. And whistled. Beethoven's Fifth.

Rolf seemed startled. Then out of nowhere Liu appeared and shouted at the man's back, “I have a knife, boss!”

Rolf dropped me right at the edge of the riverbank and put his hands up. I scrambled away. Liu waved the knife, motioning for Rolf to run.

“Don't ever come around here again,” the coward shouted from a safe distance, as Liu slipped the knife back into his belt.

“I don't know what he would have done if you hadn't shown up,” I said breathlessly. Liu grinned and put his hand out. “I have nothing to give you.” I tapped his grubby palm.

“You owe me next time you whistle and I come.”

He walked me as far as the Garden Bridge, guarded by a Japanese soldier, but he went no farther. Chinese people crossing the bridge usually felt the blow of a boot, or spittle on the back of their necks, or worse, if they didn't bow to the guards, and Liu didn't seem like the bowing sort.

We westerners were virtually invisible to the soldiers. Of course, running could attract the guard's attention, and as I sprinted across the bridge, waving to Liu on the other side, I thought,
I didn't survive nearly floating in a putrid river just to be shot in the back by a Japanese guard
.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1942

I was terrified that something would happen to Erich hanging around with men like that. All through January and February I followed him to the warehouse, watching him tie Peaches to a post outside and tap a sort of Morse code on the metal door. Three knocks, pause, two knocks, pause, four quick taps. Usually the door opened a crack, and Erich slid in like a shadow.

Boldly creeping closer one day, I heard voices inside. They were arguing, shouting, but because of the street noise, I couldn't make out the words. I barreled an empty paint drum over to one of the boarded-up windows.

What if they caught me again? Had to take the risk. I glanced over at the rushing river across the road, took a deep, fortifying breath, and climbed onto the paint drum to peek between the window slats.

Gerhardt and Rolf were there. Erich sprawled on an overstuffed chair in the corner, surrounded by two of his cigarette-smoking friends.