CHAPTER FIVE

1941

One Sunday afternoon, bored to death, I coaxed Erich into taking a walk in Hongkew. We trudged through the streets of the Chinese section, but as soon as we rounded the corner on Chusan Road, you’d have thought we were in Austria.

A sign in a window said, LITTLE VIENNA CAFÉ. We hovered around the doorway. Erich’s eyes were drawn to three young men hunched in a tight circle. Though my brother had no ear for music, he could hear things only dogs could pick up. I only caught fragments of the whispered conversation, even though it was in German.

“Midnight …” “Moral obligation …”

“What’s so interesting about those guys?”

Erich shushed me. One of them glanced up, and I could swear he recognized Erich. His eyes shifted away instantly, and Erich turned his back.

I was more intrigued by a smartly dressed couple at the next table. Their knees touched under the table, which thrilled me, but not half as much as the white starched tablecloth, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were on the ship bound for Shanghai. I stood close enough to feel the cool cloth brush my knees.

Though the air crackled with cold, the woman looked cozy in her red suit and shimmery silk stockings, with just a wool shawl draped over her shoulders. Suddenly I wasn’t thirteen, I was twenty-five, sophisticated, cool and composed, like she was. I took a closer look at the man across from her. He was dashingly handsome and worthy of this lady and me, both of us so genteel, with our ebony cigarette holder in the ashtray, smoke curling upward in a lazy spiral.

The man was eating ice cream. In winter. In occupied China! I held my breath as he spooned soft mounds into his mouth, and I stared at the coated spoon as it slid off his tongue. Never mind the woman; just then I was the man, mustache and all.

No doubt I was drooling on him, which was why he looked up at me and offered his cup of ice cream and a clean silver spoon. I grabbed them and let that beautiful, thick, frozen cream glide luxuriously down my dry throat.

Surely this was heaven. I’d have licked the cup clean if I’d thought Erich wouldn’t blab the news to Mother.

“Thank you,” I whispered, placing the empty cup and spoon on the table.

If only I had a job, then I could buy ice cream whenever I wanted it. But jobs were scarcer than blond hair in China, and even Mother had been cut back to ten hours a week at the bakery. Of course, no one would hire a girl my age, but Erich was promised four hours a week as a delivery boy—if he could only scrounge up a bicycle.

Somehow Erich came home with a rusty specimen of a bicycle that guzzled oil, but at least its wheels spun. “I’m calling the bike Peaches,” he announced proudly.

“That’s a ridiculous name,” I muttered.

“Ridiculous? Why? Peaches are what I miss most from home. Now I’ll have peaches every day.”

How on earth could my brother get such a treasure? The suspicion in Mother’s face mirrored my own, but we’d learned to simply be grateful for every windfall.

Indoors was nearly as cold as outside, and Mother could barely grasp the pages of her English grammar book when Dovid came for his lesson. I watched him lean across the table and turn each page for her.

In frustration she slammed the book shut and said, “Forget nouns and verbs. Today we will work on vocabulary, also comprehension. So, Dovid, please, you must tell us your story. Everyone in Shanghai has a story. Ilse, come to the table. We will have an English conversation.”

I eagerly leaped off Mother’s bed and slid onto a chair across from Dovid. My hands were warm inside the white furry muff Mother had traded for a loaf of Mr. Schmaltzer’s bread too burned to sell. It was how he’d paid her that day.

Dovid cleared his throat. “Where to begin? Poland, we are Polish, my family.”

Though I knew that, I felt the familiar pang of disappointment: better if he’d been Austrian. Mother would approve of a boyfriend from Austria. But, I reminded myself, Europeans are Europeans in this sea of Chinese. And besides, he isn’t my boyfriend.

“Your parents?” Mother asked.

He shook his head, unsettling a nest of dark curls that he brushed away. “Who knows?” He searched for each word and haltingly told us, “Also my sisters … twins, Shayna and Beyla. German soldiers come. Take them away.”

Mother asked gently, “How did you find out, Dovid?”

“A neighbor, not Jewish.”

Mother supplied the word, “A gentile, yes, what did he do?”

“He put his own family in danger to tell me. Also to let me sleep in his …”

“House? Barn? Shop?”

“Where chazers live.”

“Ah, pigsty,” Mother said.

“Pigsty, yes. Two nights while I think what to do, where to go. In the end, I alone go out from Poland.”

“Without your family?” I cried.

“Worse things there are,” he said brusquely.

Mother nodded. “You expressed yourself very well. That is enough for today.”

Dovid started to get up, then slid a paper out of the back of his book. “For you, Mrs. Shpann.”

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.