CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1943

“So, Erich? Beehive was a double agent?”

“So, Ilse? Dovid is your boyfriend?”

“None of your business,” I huffed. “I want to know what happened with Beehive.”

“They keep me in the dark,” Erich admitted. “Gerhardt and Rolf don’t completely trust me. Or anyone. This much I know. There was a man watching you and Beehive.”

“Yeah, we saw him. Liu tripped him in the park to get him off Beehive’s trail.”

“He what?” Erich pounded the table; forks jumped. “Not smart. Do you realize what could have happened to you?”

“Like what?” But I didn’t want to hear.

“The Japanese Kempetai picked the man up and dragged him through the park. This morning his broken body was tossed out of Bridge House Prison.”

“Alive?” I asked tremulously.

“Dead.”

“Oh! Which side was he on?”

“Ours, the good guys.”

“My God, Erich.”

“Right, if there is such a thing as God in this hellhole.”

“Shhh, here comes Mother.” My hands shook as Mother’s weary footsteps echoed in the hall. I opened the door, and she brushed past me, looking as worn down as a rickshaw puller and entirely defeated. She collapsed on her bed with her wrist over her forehead. “We have a place to move to on Houshan Road.”

Erich and I bombarded her with questions. How many rooms? Plumbing? How many flights up? Windows? Neighbors?

Mother’s voice was thin and wobbly. “One room, half the size of this one. No closets. Third floor walk-up. Plumbing.”

“What kind of plumbing?” I asked. “Western toilets? Because I will not squat on the floor of a Chinese toilet.”

“It has a western water closet on each floor,” Mother said almost in a whisper, which made me wonder what she wasn’t telling us.

The dead man’s shattered body—I knew that’s what Erich was thinking about, me too, but we couldn’t let on to Mother, so we jabbered about the apartment in Hongkew.

Erich, the practical one, asked, “How much?”

“Too much. We can’t afford it. All the way home I’ve thought about what we can sell. My winter coat, also your father’s. Summer’s coming. And my mother’s silver kiddush cup should fetch some good money.”

“Oh, Mother, no!”

Her voice gathered strength and turned hard. “We will sell everything we can except your bicycle, Erich, which you need for work, and The Violin.”

I sighed. “The apartment, has it got a stove?” Mother shook her head. “Heating?” No, again. “Is it sunny?”

Mother exploded. “Sunshine? You want sunshine? And maybe also sour cream for your potatoes?”

We hadn’t tasted sour cream since Vienna.

“Forget the sour cream. Even a plain boiled potato would be a miracle,” Erich grumbled. “I hate the Japanese. Hate them with all my mortal being.”

Mother snorted, a most unladylike sound for her. “Such a waste of energy. Use it to find boxes. We move on Friday morning.”

“So soon, Mother?” I cried. “We have a whole week left on the outside.”

“You think we make our own decisions these days? The Chinese family living there now on Houshan Road, they’re moving in here on Friday afternoon. A mother, a father, six children, and a grandfather. Hah!” Mother suddenly burst into brittle-edged laughter mixed with tears. “Look at this place. To them it will be a palace.”

It didn’t take long to learn that there were worse places than our new apartment in Hongkew. Our school started a community service project to cheer us as we faced life in the ghetto. We adopted one of the “homes,” the barracks that were room and board for the poorest souls among us westerners. Each pair of girls got a mop, a bucket of soapy water, a scrub brush, and a supply of rags to clean the walls and floors and windows on the inside. At the same time, the boys would wash the outside windows and whitewash the exterior walls of the rundown shell of a building.

The men who lived in the home were gone for the morning, working, or more likely scrounging for work, so the dormitory and dining room were empty for our whirlwind spic-and-span operation. Six pairs of us marched into the building like soldiers, with our mops over our shoulders as rifles and our buckets as drums. Tanya and I were a team. Our bucket clattered to the linoleum floor and echoed through the cavernous dormitory, where sixty beds were lined up along the walls with about a foot between them. There wasn’t so much as a shelf over each bed to hold a person’s treasures or a nail to hang a change of clothes on. The sheets were nubby canvas, the blankets scratchy gray wool, and we counted only three pllows in the whole room.

As hard as I scrubbed, my mind kept drifting to the bearlike man in the park. I imagined his massive heap of broken bones, his battered face, in the street outside Bridge House. And then, God forgive me, I wondered who’d gotten the man’s coat and hat, his leather shoes …

Tanya and I must have changed the wash water a hundred times. We were on our hands and knees on either side of the twelfth bed, scrubbing the floor under it. Tanya whispered to me in the dark shadows under the bed, “Pray we never come to this, Ilse.”

“Never!” I vowed. My back ached, and I rose up on my knees for a mighty stretch. That’s when I noticed some charcoal sketches tacked to the wall over the next bed. The corners of the drawings were curled, and when I flattened the first one, the work was unmistakable.

“Tanya, come here!”

“What?” She slid across the floor on her knees, retying the kerchief that held her curls back. “What’s so important?”

“This is where Dovid lives.” I pointed to the sketches. “I’ve seen drawings like these. This one on top? His village in Poland. And this one is Kobe, Japan.”

Tanya sank to her knees again. “Your Dovid lives in this hovel?”

“We have to get out of here before he comes back. He’ll be so embarrassed.” I spread my palm to the dismal room the color of oatmeal, the depressing rows of gray beds, the walls blank and dingy except for the relief of these sketches.

Tanya nodded. “Anyway, I can’t scrub one more millimeter of floor. Already my skin’s peeling.”

We wrung out our rags, grabbed our pail and mop, and headed for the door, but not fast enough. Men were beginning to stream into the building for lunch, and suddenly, there was Dovid.

“Hide!” I whispered to Tanya, and we ducked behind a reception desk, hoping Dovid wouldn’t notice our mop and bucket sticking out of the cave. I crawled out just far enough to watch him march down the row and flop on his own bed. Rusty springs creaked in protest. He kicked off each shoe and caught it, stuffing both under his head for a pillow. The whole picture was so desolate, so lonely, that I wanted to run right over and comfort him, take him home with me. But that would have hurt him worse. I reached behind me for Tanya to follow, and we silently crawled to the exit, to the surprise of the boys whitewashing outside.

The following afternoon I met Dovid at Mr. Bauman’s café to tell him where we’d be living in Hongkew.

“Very close to me,” he said with some glee in his eyes. “I live in the Kinchow Road Home.” To my surprise he asked, “Want to see my castle?”

“I haven’t much time. We’re packing to move tomorrow.” Excuses. But he looked so disappointed. “Okay, if we hurry.”

We ran through the streets and stopped in front of the ramshackle building, improved only slightly by the whitewashing.

“Do not fall over in shock,” Dovid said. “It was never rebuilt since the bombing in 1937.”

“Ah, but that’s only the outside,” I assured him, faking optimism.

“Inside it is worse. You will see.” He led me into the dormitory I’d scrubbed only yesterday. Since it was late in the day, men and boys of all ages sprawled on their cots, staring at the ceiling. Such odor from so many bodies in one room! I tried not to breathe through my nose. The snores of some of the men bounced off the bare walls. I thought of Mother’s rule: Unless you’re feverish and half delirious, you are not to fritter away precious time sleeping during the day. Yet what else had these men to do?

“You must guess which place is mine,” Dovid said playfully.

I lied. “They’re all alike. How could I pick yours out?” I pretended to scan the empty cots with their grim gray blankets until I came to the charcoal sketches tacked to the wall above his bed, the bottom corners curled up as if struggling for release. The work was so obviously Dovid’s, with bold lines defining space on the page, and the spidery lines and black smudges, and then the startlingly precise detail captured in intricate pencil strokes.

“They’re breathtaking, Dovid.” We sat on his bed; where else was there to sit?

The blanket was woolly, itchy on the back of my legs. Some of the men stared at us. An awkward silence fell between us, and it passed through my mind that Mother wouldn’t approve of my sitting on a gentleman’s bed, even with at least twelve chaperones watching our every move. I slid to my feet. “I really have to get home. There’s so much to do before we move tomorrow.”

“Yes, I understand,” Dovid murmured. Our footsteps resounded in the dormitory, and one of the men flipped over on his cot and shouted, “Have a heart. Can’t you see I’m trying to get some sleep?”

Outside, Dovid took my hand as we crossed an intersection. My hand was sweaty, and his felt dry as ash, but we fit together neatly, as though I’d been born with my hand in his.